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Ilor: Feb 2, 2008; That's a crit.

Agreed.

# ¿ Sep 9, 2015 21:45

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# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 13:56

Ilor: Feb 2, 2008; That's a crit.

What comes out of the fog that rolls in in the wee hours of the morning?

# ¿ Sep 17, 2015 16:17

Ilor: Feb 2, 2008; That's a crit.

Mister Olympus posted:

Playbooks: The Leg, The Arm, The Torso, The Add-On

"...and I'll form the head!"

# ¿ Oct 17, 2015 04:37

Ilor: Feb 2, 2008; That's a crit.

MANIFEST DESTINY posted:

These games are supposed to be party based, and the story that forms ought to be about how each characters individual aim aligned them with the others.

Actually, this is pretty explicitly NOT the case with Apocalypse World. Orthogonal or outright competing agendas are often the norm. You start out more or less on the same side, but you don't have to stay that way. The story is about how the characters do (or don't) work together and the resulting situations in which they collectively find themselves. I find "party-based" AW play kind of boring, really, because the PCs typically make MUCH better adversaries than the NPCs (again, by design).

Note that this is markedly different from "everybody off doing their own thing," because yeah, that sucks. But avoiding PvP? Why, when PvP produces some of the most compelling stories?

And when I say "PvP," let's be clear that there is a spectrum here. You don't have to be shooting someone in the head to be engaged in PvP. Hell, seduce or manipulate is PvP. The point is, if everyone is "working together cooperatively to accomplish a mutually shared goal," you're missing out on a lot of the really interesting stuff that makes AW really shine. ALL of the characters should have their own agendas. When those agendas align, the characters work together; but the MC should be looking for ways to set those agendas in opposition, because then the story is truly in the players' hands and not the MC's.

# ¿ Jan 20, 2016 22:30

Ilor: Feb 2, 2008; That's a crit.

MANIFEST DESTINY posted:

I agree that narratively, yes players in opposition can make for interesting story, but when it gets past the point of arguing over direction and approach and into mechanic-invoking opposition I don't feel that the game handles it well enough.

Are you kidding? AW handles it better than most games because the mechanics are specifically designed to avoid taking away player agency (e.g. go aggro and seduce or manipulate). It has mechanics that specifically help address metagaming player vs. character knowledge (e.g. read a person) and give a mechanical advantage to the latter over the former (as in, "yeah, I know you're lying, but if I can score at least a 7 to read you, my character will know it too, and knowing it gives me a tangible +1 bonus").

MANIFEST DESTINY posted:

Maybe its my players or my own inexperience with it but it just seems like opposing actions happening on a -6 works great when its players vs the world, but when its player vs player it can devolve into a bad game of cops and robbers.

This is only true if you are letting the players dictate the outcome of their opponent's failed roll. Don't ever ever ever do that (as that is you abdicating your role as the MC).

MANIFEST DESTINY posted:

Or even worse in my opinion, it can devolve into a divided group that causes tons of downtime for players as you're off dealing with one or two people's poo poo that doesn't apply to them. Down time for a player is my biggest pet peeve, and that may be why I'm so concerned with maintaining teamwork.

This may be a preferences thing, but if the story is such that the characters' agendas are working at cross-purposes (or even at odds), I find it keeps everyone at the table engaged even if their character isn't "on screen," simply because everyone's going, "Oh, poo poo, what's gonna happen next and how am I gonna deal with the fallout?" This is doubly true if you're soliciting world-building or setting-framing details from the table-at-large.

MANIFEST DESTINY posted:

I do feel like there's still a ton of opposition between players in my group, but only in opinion. They love to debate the best possible course of action until they're blue in the face, so sometimes I have to start narrating things in real time just to get them to settle on a decision. Its really what is most interesting about the game, the absurd solutions they come up with that are born from compromise between really different personalities. We've been running lately a sci-fi PBTA-based game that I developed for them, which really ramps up the teamwork aspect because they're a starship crew cut off from home surrounded by alien civilizations that they discover one by one. Nothing out there is truly their friend, so its teamwork through necessity and it works well for them. Last session, they were paralyzed by inaction because they heard the alien race they just ran into considers bipedal animals as vermin, they debated a million ways to get away or fight until they eventually formulated an elaborate plan to pass off the ship's pet dog as their captain and all the humans as the dog's crew of slaves. Go team!

Yeah, that's not really opposition. And having run games like that (my Shadowrun games especially, where players would hash out plans and contingencies for hours if not prodded to action), it just gets tiring and boring to me after a while. Like, "oh, look, another predictable disagreement between Action Jackson and Dr. Paranoiac."

It sounds like your game is heavily exploration-based, and that's cool. A lot of people like the "discovery of the unknown" thing in RPGs, and that can be a lot of fun with a group of like-minded people. But a number of times I've encountered games like this, they were just an excuse that GMs used to parade the players through a series of set-piece "look at how clever my setting is!" sessions, where the players had little or no input into the direction of the story.

What happens if a member of the crew decides that a particular alien civilization is pretty rad and wants to be a part of it? Or thinks it is completely intolerable and it's worth aborting the (presumably long and winding and uncertain) trip home in order to stand and fight against it by whatever means necessary?

# ¿ Jan 21, 2016 03:31

Ilor: Feb 2, 2008; That's a crit.

Yeah, manipulate in particular is PvP gold. I love the way that move is structured.

# ¿ Jan 22, 2016 00:06

Ilor: Feb 2, 2008; That's a crit.

Doodmons posted:

There's a hell of a lot of PBtA hacks out there now and the big failing of most of them is that their authors didn't really understand the game.

^^^ This.

At conventions, I run a re-skin of AW set in Columbia Games' Harn setting, specifically in Orbaal. It is the fictional equivalent of the early Danelaw, with fractious and unruly Vikings having come to conquer and oppress the locals. It's medieval fantasy, but it explicitly keeps the themes of scarcity, isolation, paranoia, violence, and social instability. And it works because it's not about making a "party of plucky adventurers." Almost every time I've run it, it has moved into hilarious and awesome PvP territory, which is fantastic.

# ¿ Jan 23, 2016 01:12

Ilor: Feb 2, 2008; That's a crit.

BlackIronHeart posted:

Appropriately to the topic, a new character joined Ilor's campaign tonight. Within 3 hours of play, the character had 3 debilities and was at 9 o'clock after getting into fights with 2 other PCs. One of the most fun sessions yet!

And the best part is that he is already plotting more hilarious fuckery, with which all of the other players are pretty much enthusiastically on board.

# ¿ Jan 25, 2016 06:31

Ilor: Feb 2, 2008; That's a crit.

Jesus loving Christ. :cripes:

# ¿ Jan 25, 2016 15:34

Ilor: Feb 2, 2008; That's a crit.

Hiro Protagonist posted:

I have a come to a conclusion: I hate powered by the apocalypse games. Specifically, I hate the idea of moves. It makes role-playing into a purely mechanical thing in my experiences. If I want my character to be friendly with another character, but they fail there roll, I am forced to hate them. Similarly, the consequences being chosen by players makes me wonder why it even bothers with a GM. No one in real life can really control the consequences of their actions, so choosing the exact way I want things to go takes me out of the game. In a way, and players have far too little power over their characters, and for too much power over the world.

This is not to say I think that I think that players helping to define the world is bad; but I think it goes way too far.

However, I feel that I should try to make sure if it's as bad as I believe. Do you guys have this problem?

In no particular order:

The players help you define the world as much or as little as you let them. AW encourages you to "ask provocative questions and build on the answers," but that doesn't have to include ceding total creative control to the players. John Harper wrote a really good article about "Crossing the Line" that talks about the balance of creative details and its effect towards "making the world feel real."

As for controlling the consequences of your own actions, you don't. Especially on a miss, the MC/GM is going to take that opportunity to make with the bloody fingerprints. And even on a hit, you are usually faced with choices. Those options you didn't choose represent the things in the situation that you can't control. A good example is seize by force - on a 7-9 you get to pick two options. Awesome, I can really gently caress these guys up! But if I do, then I can't both a) keep myself from getting hosed up, and b) keep them from killing the NPC I'm trying to save. So I am forced to make a choice, to prioritize what is important to me. And that's what the choices represent - your priorities in the moment. Choosing "suffer little harm" might mean ducking for cover. "inflicting terrible harm" might mean burning through ammunition like it's going out of style. You know it might bite you in the rear end later, but you make the conscious choice to do it because right here, right now, it will get the job done. AW isn't a "one shot, one roll" kind of a game, so your choices help to describe the kinds of actions you take over the course of the conflict.

Finally, be careful lumping all PbtA games together. There are some really good ones out there, but an awful lot of it is crap. The PbtA engine does a couple of things really well, but unless a hack plays well to those strengths, it's just another ruleset.

# ¿ Feb 27, 2016 22:36

Ilor: Feb 2, 2008; That's a crit.

Dungeon World definitely falls in the "meh" category for me. It's novel for what it is (an attempt to get grognards who will only play D&D to try something different), but the kludgy D&D crunchiness it incorporates makes it way less hot and awesome than AW itself.

# ¿ Feb 27, 2016 23:58

Ilor: Feb 2, 2008; That's a crit.

Demon_Corsair posted:

Are there any good fantasy hacks out there? The D&D stats and rolling damage and replacing the harm clocks with standard HP never sat well with me.

Honestly, you can pretty much use AW as-is for fantasy. You can re-skin the playbooks with very few changes, and simply assign damage and tags to weapons or armor as you see fit. I do it to run Viking-themed games using the HarnWorld setting. If any of you Goon nerds are coming to GenCon and want to try it, I'll run it for you so you can see how it works.

# ¿ Mar 17, 2016 22:49

Ilor: Feb 2, 2008; That's a crit.

I did a similar thing for the Viking-themed games I ran at GenCon. Most of the playbooks port across more or less as-is, with very few modifications necessary. The one that needed the most work was the Driver. I thought about just making it someone on an awesome horse, but thematically I went with a boat. Which is all well and fine unless you never go to sea. So to balance this, the "Viking" is a little bit Driver and a little bit Chopper - he's got a boat and a small gang of unruly dudes. At sea, he is typically their undisputed leader. Once they hit shore, though, they tend to get their own ideas of how poo poo should go. This gives the playbook plenty to do on land and juxtaposes nicely with the Bandit (Chopper), whose gang is typically larger and mounted.

One of the ones that turned out the coolest was actually a re-work of the Macaluso; it's a Sharp-based playbook called "The Urchins" where you're actually playing a bunch of little kids. My regular players liked it so much that it's made several appearances in our standard AW games.

Other than that, just use different weapons and you're good to go. The AW rules themselves work great in a fantasy setting.

If people are interested in this re-skin, let me know and I'll find somewhere to host the playbooks.

# ¿ Jul 12, 2016 14:04

Ilor: Feb 2, 2008; That's a crit.

Because getting close to people emotionally has consequences in a post-apocalyptic world.

People have sex. The fact that other games completely gloss over the complications between characters that arise out of intimacy means that they're leaving juicy set-up for conflicts and hijinks on the table. AW really shines when the PCs are working at cross purposes and there is conflict between them.

# ¿ Oct 10, 2016 22:49

Ilor: Feb 2, 2008; That's a crit.

Your analogy is flawed; You can drink water by yourself. Sharing intimacy with someone requires another person.

# ¿ Oct 11, 2016 03:03

Ilor: Feb 2, 2008; That's a crit.

Biomute posted:

People gently caress, it's a fact.

...pretty much sums it up. Why not use that to drive the conflicts central to the story? Your game doesn't have to be "50 Shades of Grey: The Rapening" in order to use the sex moves. Given how prominently sex plays into literature - and you don't have to Game of Thrones, as even classic literature (go read War and Peace fer chrissakes and tell me that the whole thing between Boris and Natalya or Andrei and his wife isn't about sex) delves into the topic - I honestly don't understand why people get so wrapped around the axle about this in an RPG, especially one that explicitly places the PCs in positions of tension to create interesting stories.

# ¿ Oct 11, 2016 20:18

Ilor: Feb 2, 2008; That's a crit.

Sort of like Godwin's Law, but more well-read?

But it's not just western lit; people in East Asia gently caress (and write stories about it) too.

# ¿ Oct 12, 2016 05:46

Ilor: Feb 2, 2008; That's a crit.

madadric posted:

The thing I love (absolutely love) about PBTA is that by giving the GM the structure it does, it puts a lot of the load of figuring out what happens next into the system, which frees the GM up to be more improvisational. I prep nothing when I run Dungeon World or Apocalypse World, and minimal amounts for other PBTA games depending on how well i know their systems/genres.

madadric posted:

I can do a one shot of DW with no prep, but the best part is, I get to be as surprised about what happens as the players. Allowing the rules to do their job will give you an experience that you would never have had without them.

^^^ This, a thousand times this. When I run PBTA games at cons, I literally have no idea what's going to happen. I have no "plot" going in, and in true AW games I don't even make any initial decisions about the setting, instead working with the players to create it collaboratively out of thin air. It has produced some seriously loving rad sessions.

# ¿ Oct 12, 2016 17:59

Ilor: Feb 2, 2008; That's a crit.

FrozenGoldfishGod posted:

Here's an odd question: what breaks if you invert the threat clock? It starts at "poo poo's on fire, yo" and as you make the world better/safer/slightly less hosed, it decreases, revealing either more things that need fixing/dealing with, or things that'll try to undo your progress.

Nothing breaks, but I don't think your inversion is really necessary. That is to say, "the world" doesn't necessarily need a countdown clock for its status. Rather, the various Fronts within that world all have their own countdown clocks where appropriate. So whether or not you can get the water purifier fixed may have little/nothing to do with when the Datsun Cannibals attack your town. Or maybe it will, because they're raiding you for water. Similarly, if Marley is going to make a play to take over the hold's bustling market, that is likely to be completely independent of whatever else may or may not be going on in the world.

In other words, rather than having some master clock that "reveals new threats," just have those threats out there revealing themselves whenever and however seems appropriate. Their own clocks will tell you how everything works. And if the PCs don't fix or deal with or unfuck the world and all these Fronts start progressing simultaneously, well, I guess their lives are going to be seriously "not boring" now, aren't they?

# ¿ Jan 12, 2017 21:10

Ilor: Feb 2, 2008; That's a crit.

Covok posted:

How does that sound to everyone, if I ever get around to making this more than just an idea?

The baked-in end condition (find the cure or the world goes to hell in a hand-basket) is interesting, but I wonder if it's too constraining? I also wonder if the well-defined world leads to a decrease in replayability; one of the strengths of AW, for instance, is that no two apocalypses are the same. We've run a bunch of AW games now and they've all been radically different.

# ¿ Feb 27, 2017 21:01

Ilor: Feb 2, 2008; That's a crit.

But that's my point - the world is our world, only with (possibly monstrously out-of-control) super-heroes. Contrast this with AW, where the setting can be pretty much whatever you want, and where any one of a million different apocalypses have ended civilization. We've done AW on a space station. Or Dungeon World, where the sky's the limit in terms of interesting fantasy settings. Because your game has a baked-in end condition, if you want people to play it more than once, it needs to have some thought given to replayability, and one of the key facets to replayability is variation in setting or theme.

I'm not saying your concept isn't cool or interesting, just that I'm not sure I'd ever play it more than once.

# ¿ Feb 27, 2017 21:56

Ilor: Feb 2, 2008; That's a crit.

Covok posted:

Also, no worries, while I am disagreeing with you currently, I am not trying to say you're wrong. Well, what I mean is, this is productive discussion on the merits of a design decision. I'm not annoyed you have a differing opinion, I welcome that since it allows me to think outside myself on the issue.

Oh, no, I didn't take your post as argumentative at all. You raise an interesting point, and it's a helpful basis for discussion. Unfortunately, I have no direct experience with Masks (I'm not really big into the whole super-hero genre in general), so I'm afraid it isn't as impactful. But for me, one of the real draws of AW/DW is the world-building aspect of it. Yet I fully recognize that that's not everybody's bag, and in that sense having someone else do the heavy-lifting of making the base setting interesting and engaging is a good thing.

The "win condition" thing is interesting, and I think you could use it to really add dramatic tension to the game as it progresses. That's cool, kind of like an ever-present Front in AW. The trick is going to be in structuring it to produce the results you want (i.e. designing its triggers and effects).

# ¿ Feb 27, 2017 23:10

Ilor: Feb 2, 2008; That's a crit.

Covok posted:

You may be right nothing forces you to play as the designers intended setting-wise and, to be honest, that is true of AW and DW as well (Mr. Prokosch has pointed out many times how you can do a western in AW without changing a thing).

Word. I run viking-themed medieval fantasy scenarios using AW directly by doing no more than filing the serial numbers off the basic playbooks.

Covok posted:

I also do question if PbtA really needs to be able to be so much considering one of its powers as a game engine is its desire to focus in on themes, motifs, and atmosphere and try to codify that in rules, in comparison to most games that try to codify probability and physics.

I guess its something to be mindful of, if I go forward. To consider if this feels too constraining (especially the win condition idea/lose condition idea) or if it's alright. It's worth noting a lot of games do limit characters options either explicitly or implicitly.

It's not that I think you shouldn't do it; I'm just pointing out that the more specificity you give to the setting and the overall plot arc of the game (through its end-condition mechanics), the less interesting the game will be from a replayability standpoint. The first play-through may be rad as gently caress, but once you've cured the disease will you really want to do it again just to maybe try a different playbook?

Now you could say that all adventures are just reskinned versions of the Hero's Journey (and at some level you'd be right), but variation in setting can have huge ramifications in how the game feels in play. AW proper has only 4 thematic ideas: civilization has fallen, the psychic maelstrom is a thing, scarcity defines the fundamental human condition, and violence has consequences. But those ideas are ridiculously broad. There's nothing indicating that the civilization that fell was anything like our own (although this tends to be generally assumed), the psychic maelstrom is left up to the players to define, and the scarcities could literally be anything.

# ¿ Feb 28, 2017 02:02

Ilor: Feb 2, 2008; That's a crit.

The maelstrom is the spirit world and/or the inscrutable workings of the gods, man. It's casting runes and reading sheep entrails and poo poo. It's awesome.

# ¿ Feb 28, 2017 12:39

Ilor: Feb 2, 2008; That's a crit.

I agree, but then again, does Night Witches have an end-game mechanic written into it like what's being proposed here? It's the combination of the two things (tight theme/setting, baked-in campaign progression/end condition) that I raise as a possible issue.

And who knows, maybe it won't be a big deal. God knows I've repeated "cure 4 diseases" enough times playing Pandemic, so maybe replayability won't be an issue. I'm just raising it as something to think about.

# ¿ Feb 28, 2017 16:25

Ilor: Feb 2, 2008; That's a crit.

Yeah, I'm gonna agree with admanb; Dungeon World is a great "gateway drug" for introducing people who only know D&D to story-based games, but in terms of its adherence to the central principles of the PbtA system, it's kind of a train wreck. It brings in enough of the cruft of D&D to piss off the hardcore story people, but loses enough of the simulationist aspects to piss off the hardcore D&D people.

# ¿ Mar 13, 2017 20:49

Ilor: Feb 2, 2008; That's a crit.

I'll second starting the first session with the PCs in the middle of a poo poo-show in media res and going from there - it's usually comedy gold. "Whom are you killing right now, and why?" or "Hey, so why are the cops chasing you right now?" or "Why is <established NPC> so pissed off at you right now?" or "Right, so that heist you're about to describe to me? How is it going pear-shaped?" or "Whom are you in the process of loving when armed goons bust in through your front door?" The key is to immediately create a situation that can't be ignored. Bonus points if you can rope in multiple PCs at once, and props if you solicit a tidbit of input from each involved player. This produces instant buy-in on the part of the players.

In this regard, Urban Shadows is loving aces because of its beginning-of-session move. This move explicitly asks players what rumors or conflicts they've heard about looming on the horizon, which is a great way to figure out what interests them. And it's virtually guaranteed that someone's going to miss the roll, which gives you a great way to start a session. That's exactly how the opening session of our (gaslight London) Urban Shadows game started - the Fae player's beginning of session move mentioned a new group of Demon Hunters from "the colonies" arriving in London and causing trouble. But he missed the roll, so it turns out these Pennsylvania Quaker motherfuckers were kinda fuzzy (and not overly discerning in any case) about the difference between faeries and demons. They jumped the Fae and the Aware as they were on their way back from a clandestine visit to the British Museum to look at interesting paranormal artifacts. The ensuing combat was a comedy of errors that nicely set the tone for the evening.

# ¿ Jun 21, 2017 22:55

Ilor: Feb 2, 2008; That's a crit.

Monster of the Week has "when you investigate a mystery..." as one of its core moves. The results are understandably monster-centric, but there's no reason you couldn't use the same idea.

# ¿ Jun 21, 2017 23:44

Ilor: Feb 2, 2008; That's a crit.

lessavini posted:

He even rolled dice for monsters to hit. XD

Wow. This verges on criminally stupid.

Why can't people just read the book?

# ¿ Jun 22, 2017 22:36

Ilor: Feb 2, 2008; That's a crit.

"loving voodoo magic, mon."

# ¿ Aug 1, 2017 22:12

Ilor: Feb 2, 2008; That's a crit.

Paging Flavivirus. Flavivirus, Please report to the thread.

I have a couple of questions concerning Legacy (which we've just started playing). First things first, I want to preface this with the fact that I'm working with 1st Edition Legacy here - I haven't seen the new stuff yet. That stated, here we go:

OK, so I've read through the complete PDF now (since I'm playing and not GMing I started with just the playbooks) and I feel like this game could really benefit a "How the gently caress do you actually play this game?" section. There's lots of interesting insight given for the various family and character playbooks, but absolutely NO direction whatsoever given with respect to when you are playing at the character level and when you're playing at the family level (e.g. when are certain moves appropriate?).

The general advice is that the 2-8 sessions should be about dealing with the central problem/conflict of that particular age, but there's no advice given as to how to break that down into discrete chunks and how to face those to families/characters.

With my GM hat on, this leaves me with precious little direction as to how to structure a session. In a "traditional" character-based game, this is easy - set up a conflict, construct a scene, throw in some characters, watch sparks fly. Then you wind it down, use the outcome to set up the next conflict, rinse, repeat. As purveyor and arbiter of fiction, your main jobs are to dress the scene (what it looks like, sounds like, smells like, how it feels), to describe the NPCs (who they are, what they're doing, what might motivate them, what they really want), and to incorporate the results of the various characters' actions (follow the existing fiction to establish new stuff in that fiction).

But I feel like this is a LOT harder in the case of things happening at "family scale." I'm sort of struggling to think of a good way to frame a "family" scene in a way that is as provocative and immediate as a character scene, and maybe that's the problem - maybe actions at family scale don't really break down into "scenes" at all. I mean, even the triggers for various moves like read the wind talk about sending people out for days. The conditions for building things or changing things about the world have timescales in weeks and months, and I feel like it's hard to turn that into compelling role-playing. It almost feels more like something you'd find in a board game.

And if family stuff doesn't break down into scenes, that then circles back to the question of "when do we do family stuff in any given session?" After our first session, I made the assertion that I think scenes in Legacy are going to have to be much more discrete (in the sense of in, out, done) because the time scale between events is so wildly variable. Family moves aren't even really appropriate at character scale and vice versa. I feel like there's interesting potential to Legacy, but also feel like it might be kind of an effort-intensive balancing act on the part of the MC to come off as other-than-somewhat-disjointed. I think it'll be cool once we "get it," but we clearly don't "get it" yet.

So what advice would you give to folks who have scads of experience with other PbtA games (Vincent opined at GenCon that I've probably run/played more AW than he has at this point) but who are struggling to wrap their brains around the nuances of Legacy?

# ¿ Sep 22, 2017 16:30

Ilor: Feb 2, 2008; That's a crit.

By the way, I just listened to the Legacy: Life Among the Ruins v2 show you did on the +1 Forward podcast in search of further clarity, but the neither the discussion nor the playthrough really addressed the questions we're having (and that's no dig, our issues are pretty in-the-weeds).

One thing I did think was awesome, though: when we decided to give Legacy a try, our thoughts also went straight to using The Quiet Year as a starting point, which we did as our "Session 0." It's cool to hear that that was one of your inspirations for additions to the v2 version of the game.

# ¿ Sep 22, 2017 21:04

Ilor: Feb 2, 2008; That's a crit.

Righteous! I'll greedily dig through the materials you linked and I look forward to your non-phone-post response!

# ¿ Sep 22, 2017 22:13

Ilor: Feb 2, 2008; That's a crit.

Cool, I between this and the blog posts things will flow more smoothly. Our session is tonight, so I'll let you know how it goes.

# ¿ Sep 24, 2017 15:25

Ilor: Feb 2, 2008; That's a crit.

Zoro posted:

I never understood copying classes across PBTA. The best way, imo, to make a playbook is rewatch/read your favorite series in the genre, group similar characters, and make playbooks that emulate the elements if that shared group.

It depends on the genre-jump, really. Some things are more or less universal - there's almost always going to be some kind of damage-dealing bad-rear end (a la the Gunlugger) across any genre, for instance. So moves like "Bloodcrazed" and even "NOT TO BE hosed WITH" port smoothly pretty much as-is. The difference comes in when you're trying to enforce a particular, specific feel to the genre that has elements that aren't shared by any other genre.

But even then, there's often a lot of overlap. You could run a Prohibition-era noir game in which the Maestro'D and the Skinner were right at home, for example.

I run a lot of one-shots and convention games in a medieval fantasy setting, and for those I barely even bother filing the serial numbers off the base AW playbooks, and I use the AW rules exactly as-is (are?). There are a few unique or interesting twists (the Macaluso gets some tweaks to become the Urchins, for instance), but the post-apocalyptic genre elements of scarcity, violence, isolation, and paranoia/superstition are pretty handily applicable to a gritty, low-fantasy setting.

It all depends on the feeling you're trying to capture.

# ¿ Oct 2, 2017 19:51

Ilor: Feb 2, 2008; That's a crit.

Just be aware that Urban Shadows' Debt mechanic incurs a fair amount of book-keeping. There's no analog for "barter" in that system, so if you want someone to do something for you, you either offer or cash in a Debt. This means it behooves you to be owed debts by every goddamned person in the setting, including NPCs, because it's often the best way to get poo poo done. But we found that after a few sessions it became onerous, especially when you consider that the session opening move often simultaneously introduces a new NPC and gives you each a point of Debt on each other.

# ¿ Oct 3, 2017 15:16

Ilor: Feb 2, 2008; That's a crit.

Japan has some very specific and odd cultural touchstones that may be completely alien and non-intuitive to your players. If that's what you're going for, cool enough, full speed ahead. If for people unfamiliar with Japanese culture, it'll be a little hard to really dig into. You'll find the same problem with fictional cities.

That said, we had a lot of fun playing an Urban Shadows game set in gaslight-era London. In particular it made the Fae and the Wizards (with all their goofy "Right and Proper Esoteric Order of the Adjective Noun" hermetic old-boy clubs) feel right at home. But I think that worked because there is a ton of literary and cinematic material for that time/place with which most of the players were familiar.

# ¿ Oct 4, 2017 02:18

Ilor: Feb 2, 2008; That's a crit.

Honestly, the best ways to handle generic "puzzle" stuff in PbtA games are to either a) not do it and focus instead on the action, or b) handle it with a custom move that abstracts the time taken and presents immediate choices to the players. Like say there's an old reactor that's powering the "temporal stabilizer," which is presumably doing something important. Unfortunately, something has gone terribly wrong, and the reactor is beginning to melt down - the "experts" give it a matter of days before it explodes. The reactor core is protected by an "entangled quantum manifold," which prevents easy access. This tremendously complicated bit of left-over pre-Fall tech is like one of those sliding-pieces puzzles, except it's not entirely clear that it adheres to what we ordinarily think of as laws of space and time. So:

When you attempt to disentangle the quantum manifold protecting the reactor core, roll+weird. On a hit, you have successfully disabled it and gained access to the reactor. Additionally, on a 7-9, pick one, on a 10+ all three:
* You prevent the chain reaction from accelerating to meltdown in a matter of hours.
* You prevent an immediate tachyon discharge (4-harm ap loud area).
* You avoid overloading the temporal stabilizer.
On a miss, you have somehow managed to violate the laws of causality; immediately re-do the Hx portion of character creation for all characters present, with the proviso that no one can take the same relationships they took previously. The quantum manifold is disabled - allowing access to the reactor core - and while you're all still alive, poo poo just got weird.

The other really good way to handle puzzles is to give the Savvyhead something to do in his or her workspace (i.e. "when you go into your workspace to get to the bottom of some poo poo...") or make your wizard go to his or her place of power (a la Dungeon World), as the rules for these interactions are far more open-ended. They allow the "puzzle solver" characters to shine and give the MC loads of options for what it's gonna cost to overcome this obstacle.

# ¿ Nov 21, 2017 02:40

Ilor: Feb 2, 2008; That's a crit.

Halloween Jack posted:

By the by, is there any reason not to port the clarification of combat-related moves from AW2e directly into The Sprawl and other PbtA games where that would make sense?

So long as your group has a common understanding of what it means to be "in battle," I don't see why not. There was a big discussion on the AW forums about these changes (specifically to seize by force, where a failure still allows you to pick an option and does not tell you to "prepare for the worst" like all of the basic moves), and Vincent explained that his motive for shuffling these moves around and putting them into their own category was in part to "move their consequences off into the snowball." The implication was that by triggering one of the battle moves, that meant that the character was now "in battle," presumably a dangerous place where bad poo poo happens.

Because the old peripheral battle moves (and the battle clock) were jettisoned, their "automatic harm per tick" mechanism went with them. My take-away from this change was that this was encouragement to me to be more aggressive with the moves I'm making as MC when the PCs are "in battle." If you're not taking a base of 3-harm every tick after 9:00 on the (now removed) battle clock, I'm way more likely to put you in a spot or inflict harm as established whenever it's my turn to talk. Fighting is dangerous and unpredictable.

This isn't articulated very clearly in the AW2E rules, but that thread was a really interesting discussion.

# ¿ Dec 7, 2017 02:06

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# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 13:56

Ilor: Feb 2, 2008; That's a crit.

Comrade Gorbash posted:

I still feel like the Operator could have been reworked to focus more on the crew as opposed to the jobs. There's not really a good playbook for running, say, a small salvage crew in AW.

I agree, and have been kicking around ideas for how to do this. It would need a whole raft of new playbook moves, though, as most of the good ones got rolled into the Driver.

# ¿ Dec 7, 2017 20:04

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