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I've been working on my first Dungeon World class for a little bit. I've got the starting moves worked out for the most part, now it's just filling in the advanced moves and some starting things (gear, the other patron choices). For now, behold... The Voidtouched! The feel of the class is supposed to be otherwordly. This is someone who has been touched by forces unknown to most mortals. Whether that someone is a thrall to their patron or trying to fight against it is up to the player in question. Any thoughts or suggestions are appreciated!
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Dec 30, 2013 06:40
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| # ? Jun 3, 2024 09:36 |
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Like so many people, I ran my group through the Heart of the Minotaur, and with my group's bard being such a terrible person, things took their natural course and he's now a minotaur. My initial thought was, "you walked up to a prostrate beast begging for mercy and stabbed him in the throat for money, gently caress you sir!" But later I tried to think of creative ways to keep him around in a way that is fun, but also has consequences, without making him the focus of the game. Maybe something like a cursed minotaur racial move, where he can hulk out but has to pass a death check after. Does anybody have good stories about cursed characters and how it played out?
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Dec 30, 2013 18:07
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I've never heard of that module, but I'm now considering it because I have a player who is already a minotaur.
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Dec 30, 2013 22:34
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Glazius posted:From there, one thing led to another and, well, here we are. Needs a whole raft of names but other than that I'm satisfied with things, though feedback is appreciated. This playbook is amazing. My wife immediately loved it (reading over my shoulder after seeing the font) and lamented that it wasn't available before our current campaign was underway, though she might end up exchanging her Bard class for a Prince who plays pipes. I'm thinking about rolling up a 90's punk Prince(ss) for the DW PbP that's recruiting right now. The font and playbook symbol really nail the feel of the class in such a unique way.
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Dec 31, 2013 05:54
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Inverse World backers should check their inboxes.
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Dec 31, 2013 05:56
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Rulebook Heavily posted:Inverse World backers should check their inboxes. Do you have any idea when Inverse World's going to be available to non-backers?
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Dec 31, 2013 06:41
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Not a clue, although the PDF will need a pass or two to be finalized completely before that happens. gnome7 has the reins on that.
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Dec 31, 2013 06:46
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Bigup DJ posted:Do you have any idea when Inverse World's going to be available to non-backers? The main thing holding it up now is a couple of art pieces I really want done. I have literally had two artists' machinery explode on me during this project and it is awful. (One lost her tablet, the other lost her entire hard drive). So, "eventually" is the best I can say, but I hope it isn't too much longer. The artist who did the cover says he'll be available to do a piece next week, so here's hoping he fills in one of those.
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Dec 31, 2013 08:01
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EnjoiThePureTrip posted:This playbook is amazing. Well, thanks. Let me know how it plays, if it seems a bit too tightly focused or whatever. I think there's enough variety in it but it also seems like it's got a few more "move chains" than most playbooks.
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Dec 31, 2013 08:43
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gnome7 posted:The main thing holding it up now is a couple of art pieces I really want done. I have literally had two artists' machinery explode on me during this project and it is awful. (One lost her tablet, the other lost her entire hard drive). How would you prefer those people with semi-final pdf copies to contact you regarding typos/unclear passages?
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Dec 31, 2013 10:02
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Under the vegetable posted:I've never heard of that module, but I'm now considering it because I have a player who is already a minotaur. I picked it up from http://campaignwiki.org/wiki/DungeonMaps/One_Page_Dungeon_Contest_2011, and it ran pretty well with my group of first-time Dungeon Worlders! It's likely to go very differently if your party are comfortable with the idea that a minotaur might be an intelligent, reasonable being (the big twist at the end is that the minotaur you think is the antagonist is just the innocent victim of a curse, and you've already hacked your way through the goblins who are the real villains). If you still want this to happen, it's easy enough to swap out 'minotaur' for 'gorgon' or 'werewolf' or 'double vampire'.
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Dec 31, 2013 12:05
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Kai Tave posted:How would you prefer those people with semi-final pdf copies to contact you regarding typos/unclear passages? Please leave a comment in the Kickstarter update, or if you cannot for some reason, make a post about it on the Google+ thread for IW, found here: https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/114703833012992038789
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Dec 31, 2013 14:07
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So as I'm going through the book I have what may be a dumb but non-typo related question. The Walker's advanced move No Trespassing lets the player gain and spend hold to do sneaky, ambush-y things to someone moving through an area they've prepared before hand, but on results of 9- the GM also gains hold. What does the GM spend this on? The same things as the player? The move is a little unclear unless there's something in the Dungeon World book about GMs spending hold that I just don't remember.
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Jan 1, 2014 05:57
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Kai Tave posted:So as I'm going through the book I have what may be a dumb but non-typo related question. The Walker's advanced move No Trespassing lets the player gain and spend hold to do sneaky, ambush-y things to someone moving through an area they've prepared before hand, but on results of 9- the GM also gains hold. What does the GM spend this on? The same things as the player? The move is a little unclear unless there's something in the Dungeon World book about GMs spending hold that I just don't remember. The GM spends the hold on the same options the player does for that move, yes. I will be clearer about this. The idea is that some of the Walker's allies stumble into the traps he laid by mistake, or some of their enemies use the traps against them.
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Jan 1, 2014 13:19
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Something else that caught my eye that didn't exactly seem like a typo but I thought I might bring to your attention anyway is that when I was looking over the section on vehicle weapons it seemed to me that ballistae would actually be better at causing Stress to things like ships than cannons even though the flavor text for both entries seems to suggest that cannons are the premiere anti-ship weapons and that ballistae can be dangerous to ships but only if the operator is very skilled. The ballista does 1d10 damage and has piercing 4. If I'm remembering the rules correctly that piercing 4 means the ballista only needs to roll a 6 or better in order to inflict a point of Stress as piercing reduces the amount of damage you need to reach that threshold (yep, as per the rules on page 199). That means that a ballista has a 50% chance (rolling 6 or better on 1d10) of inflicting Stress on a vehicle. Cannons do 2d6 with no piercing, so they have to roll a 10 or better in order to inflict Stress. Now I am admittedly very, very bad at running probabilities much to my chagrin but if I have my math right (and someone please correct me if I am wrong) the odds of rolling a 10+ on 2d6 with no modifiers is a little over 16%, which basically means less than one cannon volley in five will be enough to knock some Stress out of a ship as opposed to the ballista's one shot in two. Something about that seems rather off to me. I know *World isn't a super math-oriented game but it struck me as the sort of thing that you guys might be interested in looking into.
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Jan 1, 2014 16:25
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Kai Tave posted:Something else that caught my eye that didn't exactly seem like a typo but I thought I might bring to your attention anyway is that when I was looking over the section on vehicle weapons it seemed to me that ballistae would actually be better at causing Stress to things like ships than cannons even though the flavor text for both entries seems to suggest that cannons are the premiere anti-ship weapons and that ballistae can be dangerous to ships but only if the operator is very skilled. At a guess I'd say "amazing weapons in the hands of a crack shot" is referring to the fact that ballistae don't have the Mounted tag, which means you Volley with the shooter's DEX instead of the vehicle's Control. You're right though that math-wise, 1d10 piercing-4 is way better than 2d6 by itself. Easy fix would be to buff cannon damage, but my gut reaction would be to expand the benefit you get from having more cannon on the ship--maybe your cannon do an extra +1 damage per pair, and when you get 5 pair you also get the volley benefit? Really it depends on whether you want acquiring more/bigger cannon to be a part of having an airship or whether you want people to just write "cannon 2d6" on their sheets and be done with it. One more ship combat suggestion: I'd consider adding a little something to the vehicle damage move for when you hit but inflict less than 10 points of damage. Like Kai pointed out, with cannon you've got about a 16% chance of dealing 10+ damage, which translates to about an 84% chance of your hits doing effectively nothing. I'm not sure what that little something should be, but even some kind of reinforcement of the fictional positioning of "you just raked these poor devils with a broadside" would be nice. PS I freaking love the Captain and can't wait to play one.
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Jan 1, 2014 17:39
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Good points, both! How does this look for a fix: Cannons posted:Cannons
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Jan 1, 2014 22:28
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That looks good. You probably wouldn't want to up the cannons' base damage because the two options Captains have for raising the damage put the odds of dealing stress around 62-64 percent, so making them too much more powerful would run the risk of making them too strong. I would perhaps consider knocking the ballista down to piercing 3 as well...that leaves you with a 40% chance to inflict stress which is still pretty solid but a 60% chance to simply bounce and do nothing, so it's more of a weighted choice whether you want to take the chance or not in a battle. Greater odds of inflicting stress than a single cannon, but greater odds of nothing happening at all. Making this change means that there's the prospect of ships flying around with more penalties than Stress taken. You can repair this sort of "minor damage" using Jury-Rig, but if you're going to do this you might want to consider adding somewhere (perhaps under the Jury-Rig move itself) that a ship that docks at a port and undergoes repairs can pay [X] coin per penalty to have them fixed directly, the same way you can repair Stress for 50 coin a pop. ( Kai Tave fucked around with this message at 02:49 on Jan 2, 2014 |
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Jan 2, 2014 02:22
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gnome7 posted:Good points, both! How does this look for a fix: That's a nice buff for cannon, but I'd change the phrasing to "when a vehicle takes between 1 and 9 points of damage" to eliminate edge cases of zero damage due to armor. I still wonder about the vehicle damage system in general, though. I kinda feel like a system wherein you can roll a success and yet not have any real mechanical effect on the fiction runs counter to PbtA philosophy. It feels a bit like D&D3E's "roll to confirm critical hits rule." Fiction first and say what the fiction dictates and all, but rolling a 10 on Volley but a 1 on damage with a ballista (or a catapult or a Greek fire projector or whatever other ship weapon you might come up with) rubs me the wrong way. Fake edit: I almost suggested modifying the vehicle damage move to "When a vehicle takes less than 10 points of damage from a single attack, it takes -1 forward." Then my morning coffee kicked in and reminded me that NPCs don't roll dice. But something small like that so all your successes feel like successes would be nice. Kai Tave posted:That looks good. You probably wouldn't want to up the cannons' base damage because the two options Captains have for raising the damage put the odds of dealing stress around 62-64 percent, so making them too much more powerful would run the risk of making them too strong. These are both good points. quote:Making this change means that there's the prospect of ships flying around with more penalties than Stress taken. You can repair this sort of "minor damage" using Jury-Rig, but if you're going to do this you might want to consider adding somewhere (perhaps under the Jury-Rig move itself) that a ship that docks at a port and undergoes repairs can pay [X] coin per penalty to have them fixed directly, the same way you can repair Stress for 50 coin a pop. I'd definitely add this move anyways--looking at the rules again, it looks like the only current way to actually fo real repair a vehicle is with the Captain's "Captain's Share" move. Also, with this change you'll probably want to address what happens when a ship marks off all the options in the Damage Report move. My guess would be the ship's destroyed or completely disabled and ripe for boarding. That gives cannon another nice balance point against ballistae: You've got smaller odds of scoring a quick, flashy victory, but you're pretty much guaranteed to wreck anything you go up against eventually.
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Jan 2, 2014 17:10
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Countblanc posted:Worldly Concerns is a super cool way to do multiclassing, and now I never want to see a normal multiclass feat ever again. Missed this on the first go-round, but yeah, I was proud of that. It's something you might want to do once for a class; the Princess is intended to be very multiclass-friendly since the concept of a ruler can kind of overlap any other class in headspace. Worldly Concerns is also, explicitly, done with a playbook no one else is using, so the Princess benny doesn't end up somehow doing somebody's class better than they do it. I could see "starting move with a twist" mechanics for classes like the Paladin and the Ranger, which have a narrower "splash radius", that went without that restriction and just did the starting move different, instead of necessarily better.
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Jan 2, 2014 17:50
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GimpInBlack posted:I'd definitely add this move anyways--looking at the rules again, it looks like the only current way to actually fo real repair a vehicle is with the Captain's "Captain's Share" move. Well as I mentioned at the tail end of my post there are repair kits, which for 35 coin can no-fooling repair up to 2 points of stress. Which makes the "Captain's Share" move seem kind of strange since it's 50 coin to fix a single stress. Hey so moving away from picking nits with Inverse World for a moment, you know what's always a great idea? Making homebrew for games you haven't yet had a chance to play. That always works out super-great, which is why I decided to go ahead and start work on a new playbook. Someone, I can't remember who it was, asked if there was a Vampire playbook for Dungeon World. Well, there's a Vampire compendium class that Okasvi did but a quick search through the index shows that nobody has posted a full-fledged L1-10 Vampire playbook, so I thought I'd go ahead and give it a shot bearing in mind a lot of the feedback I got from my first attempt to make a playbook and also after reading over Inverse World several several times and soaking it all in. Here is my extremely rough first draft of the core playbook and its starting moves that god willing I actually remembered to set to public access this time. One of the big inspirations for this playbook was the Golem which I'm sure shows in the way the Aspects are set up. Shun the Light is basically a placeholder for now, something I stuck down there to get it out of my head and on paper, but I'm not super-sold on the idea of a move that's basically a penalty with no real way to use it to your advantage. For the moment I'm in need of sleep so it's going up as-is. I could always simply discard it entirely, but even if Dracula could walk around in the daylight it didn't leave him at his best and I'd like to find a non-lovely way to say "hey vampires, you should probably not be out in the daylight if you can help it."
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Jan 2, 2014 18:59
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My knee-jerk answer is to make vampirea really, really powerful, but only in darkness. +1 ongoing, increased damage die, roll an additional d6 and drop the lowest...the penalty for daytime is just being stuck with normal vampire stats and moves, as opposed to Child of the Night abilities.
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Jan 2, 2014 19:18
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Kai Tave posted:Well as I mentioned at the tail end of my post there are repair kits, which for 35 coin can no-fooling repair up to 2 points of stress. Which makes the "Captain's Share" move seem kind of strange since it's 50 coin to fix a single stress. It was one of the people in the X-Crawl Dungeon World thread in The Game Room, because they wanted to app the most 90's Vampire.
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Jan 2, 2014 19:48
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Kai Tave posted:Here is my extremely rough first draft of the core playbook and its starting moves that god willing I actually remembered to set to public access this time. One of the big inspirations for this playbook was the Golem which I'm sure shows in the way the Aspects are set up. The first thing that pops out at me is that the Darkest Curse aspect seems really strong compared to the other two, but maybe I'm overvaluing how much combat dice matter. Maybe you could have Shun the Light be a consequence on Need to Feed? "You expose yourself to the light. Take -1 ongoing until you can cover yourself again" or something like that. You could also say it's a possible consequence for regular Hack and Slash. I do like Captain Walker's suggestion too. I also don't like the grammar in the consequences for Need to Feed, but that might just be a nitpicky thing. Having to do the mental gymnastics of "okay, if I choose this one, then this DOESN'T happen" seems a little off to me. All in all, though, the class looks like fun! I'm interested in seeing what advanced moves you come up with for it.
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Jan 2, 2014 21:20
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Damage dice do matter, but on the other hand if someone wants to spend their character resources towards essentially turning themselves into a vampiric Fighter I don't know if that's something to be concerned over. If it is too much I can look into replacing it with something else. My concern is that a straight damage die upgrade might be too boring. Re: Need to Feed, I know I've seen other moves use that type of wording before. I chose it here because I wanted to emphasize that vampiric feeding is a thing that's full of potential consequence and danger, both for the victim and the vampire themselves, and I felt the wording helped drive home the mindset of carefully choosing which thing(s) you don't want to happen...and in so doing letting the others slip by. In a battle situation you probably don't care about doing your damage to whatever you're feeding from so that's a gimme, but then it's a question of whether you're more concerned with the victim struggling dangerously or being left vulnerable. In a non-combat situation, say at the local village where you've decided to feed from one of the locals, now you may be more concerned about dealing your damage if you don't want to leave corpses lying around...but if you roll that 7-9 are you willing to be left vulnerable and have a struggling victim on your hands? Maybe they could survive it if you roll low enough... Re: Shun the Light. Giving the Vampire a bunch of bonuses in the darkness is one way to go but I'm not necessarily convinced it's a good idea to give a playbook easy access to some sort of always on +1 or something, that's the kind of thing that's usually a 6-10 move (and may even become one), but right from the start I'm less sure. Turning it into a possible consequence of failure that the GM can choose from whenever the player rolls low on other moves is something worth considering, though. Something else that I was kicking around were certain advanced moves that could only be performed outside of the daylight...from what I recall Dracula could go around in the day but his powers were somewhat diminished.
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Jan 3, 2014 02:49
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5 sessions in, and dear god is the damage aspect a pain in the rear end when characters builds towards it. On the other hand they've spent almost ALL their advanced moves so far getting damage moves so at least I know what to expect from here on out from the Templar (level 4) and Slayer (level 5) (god drat does the Templar turn into a sun searing, white hot, hit-him-and-take-damage tank). It has been fun throwing challenges at them that aren't combat related but they do have fun just slaughtering stuff for their time to shine.
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Jan 3, 2014 05:23
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A playbook isn't much use without some advanced moves to go with it, so here's my second draft of the Vampire, complete with an assortment of advanced moves from 2-10 (though not a complete set). In addition I revised Shun the Light and replaced it with Telltale Signs, a starting move which allows you to choose two tells or weaknesses that your particular vampire suffers from, ranging from weakness in sunlight to casting no reflection. Thanks go to Boing whose quite nice Slayer playbook I shamelessly stole an advanced move from because I love it so. edit; after a further five hours work or so, the playbook has been further updated with a complete selection of both 2-5 and 6-10 advance moves, ten apiece, as well as bonds. Some further tweaks and changes were made here and there but no major revisions yet. Please shower me in your feedback and tell me all the things I hosed up. Kai Tave fucked around with this message at 12:21 on Jan 3, 2014 |
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Jan 3, 2014 07:24
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I wrote this before your second draft came out so I've only covered your core moves! Honestly it's mostly about power stats - stuff like your Vampire's Instinct.Kai Tave posted:Here is my extremely rough first draft of the core playbook and its starting moves that god willing I actually remembered to set to public access this time. One of the big inspirations for this playbook was the Golem which I'm sure shows in the way the Aspects are set up. This is great! Consider including Legacy of Kain-style weird mutant vampires. It might also be interesting if you designed an alternate set of backgrounds revolving around what you feed on - blood, souls, emotions, flesh. In regards to your background - the Aspects - I've always thought the "background determines Power stat" thing narrowed your design space. This is partly because you can't include many stat-dependent moves - if you include moves which use the same stat as one of your backgrounds' Power stats, that background is going to be favoured over the others. If you include moves which use a stat which isn't covered by one of your backgrounds' Power stats, it's going to be less powerful because it's using one of your mediocre stats. For instance, if Inverse World's Golem had a bunch of moves which rolled+strength, people would tend towards the background which made strength their Power stat because then they could roll+strength for most or all of their moves. If the Golem had a move which used Charisma it would tend to be less powerful than the Golem's other moves simply because it's using a stat which isn't one of their main stats - in most cases it will be using a smaller bonus because someone playing a Golem is going to put fewer points into Charisma. As a result, the playbook's pushed away from moves which interact with the 6 core stats. This locks you out from basic move-enhancers for the most part - the only basic move which uses every stat is Defy Danger, so that's the only basic move your Power stat can interact with reliably. That's why you've got Inverse World's Ultimate _____ moves. The only other venue you've got for interacting with basic moves is moves which say "roll+Power instead of what you usually roll for Basic Move." The other problem with Power stat-dependent moves is they've got to cater to every available Power stat in such a way that the move would still make sense, and then they've got to refer back to the themes of your Power stat. I think the end result here is that your moves are either going to be working within a very narrow design space or they're not going to make sense with the stats that they're using. I mean look at your move Blood Begets Power - if I'm using that with the Infernal Bargain backgrounds, I'm rolling+Int to be strong and go fast. If I've picked Darkest Curse, I'm rolling+Str to use Blood Magic. Aside from not making sense, there's a risk that your Power stat's going to turn into a boring do-everything stat if all your rolled moves use it - keep in mind what I said about stat-dependent moves which use the same stat as one of your backgrounds, too. That being said I think Power stats are an interesting way to represent a kind of 7th, playbook-specific stat and I can't think of a better way to get outside the 6 stat paradigm without a huge rewrite of the game's basic mechanics. I think one solution to the problems I've outlined above would be to reduce the scope of the playbook's core moves and include a small compendium class with each background so you can take advantage of stat-specific moves - not exclusively of course, but if you can't think of any stat-specific moves for a background you'd have to ask why the background's using that stat in the first place. In that vein (!!) you should consider what it means that Need to Feed uses your Power stat. Like I said, your power stat's always going to be your best stat so the Vampire's going to succeed at feeding far more often than not. Ask yourself if that's what you want. If it's not, you could always consider making it a roll+nothing move - you don't see it very often but I don't think there's anything wrong with doing that. You could even rig up an alternate modifier scheme - take +1 for every option on the list you can tick off - "• Is it dark? • Are they expecting it? • Is their blood rich and nourishing?" Consider replacing the 3-Blood, 2 picks, 2-1, 1-0 structure with a straight 2-Blood for every result. It might also be interesting if you included some alternative feeding styles, or maybe just left it to the fiction - maybe change the narrative trigger from "sink your fangs into another living creature to drink deep of their lifesblood" to something like "feed on another creature" and let your players narrate what they want. If you want to represent a specific kind of vampire, think about focusing the class on 2 stats - more and the class can end up a bit diffuse and weak, less and you've got a do-everything stat for all your rolled moves. I think the 6 core stats have their own themes in the same way as the Power stats do - they're a little more abstract, but I think you can bring them out. Honestly though, it's very hard to narrow vampires down to one or two stats because they're so diverse! I've been thinking for a while that you could design a playbook which is just the core moves with a bundle of compendium classes but I'm sure that's not a new idea. You wouldn't have to narrow the class down to a couple of stats then! Just include some statless generic moves in the core and go with that background class idea I outlined earlier. Blood Sorcerer? Necromorph? Elder? Beast? Maybe you could write up some WoD-style Disciplines as if they were compendium classes? Anyway, I hope this has helped!
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Jan 4, 2014 01:18
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PerniciousKnid posted:Like so many people, I ran my group through the Heart of the Minotaur, and with my group's bard being such a terrible person, things took their natural course and he's now a minotaur. My initial thought was, "you walked up to a prostrate beast begging for mercy and stabbed him in the throat for money, gently caress you sir!" But later I tried to think of creative ways to keep him around in a way that is fun, but also has consequences, without making him the focus of the game. Maybe something like a cursed minotaur racial move, where he can hulk out but has to pass a death check after. Nope, I've run it several times now and every game turns into a failure cascade as the new minotaur goes into a bloodrage, gets killed by someone else, then another, repeat until party wipe. Just as intended. Of course I've only run it as a one shot. I've never seen someone actually show mercy to halt the curse.
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Jan 4, 2014 01:36
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@Bigup DJ: It's definitely a lot to think about, and thanks for all the feedback. Like you pointed out, I went for "flexible core stats" because vampires in fiction are very diverse despite having some basic similarities...some are charming seducers, some are feral monsters, some are imperious tyrants...and rather than either narrow things down to one or two approaches based on attributes I wanted to let people sort of build their own vampire. At least that was the intention. This does mean that as a result you can have Strong vampires using their strength to power blood magic or Intelligent vampires burning blood for incredible strength, but I'm honestly pretty okay with that. Perhaps its all the D&D4E I've played but using the different attributes to do "non-sensical" things (hit someone with Charisma, taunt someone with Strength, etc.) is something that I'm accustomed to by now. Maybe that's not supposed to be as much of a thing in Dungeon World, which I freely admit I haven't actually gotten to play outside a short-lived PbP here, but that was sort of my attitude going into it...yeah, some vampires may take moves that seem unusual given their background aspects, but if the player does that then the GM is perfectly within their rights to say "Okay, so tell me how this works." Re: Need to Feed. My intent here is that vampires are going to be spending blood frequently, either on powers or simply because every time you mark rations your reserves go down by one, so having a greater chance of success on a feeding roll is fine with me especially considering that even on a 10+ (without an advance move) that you'll still have to pick one consequence. And it's only a matter of time before you roll a 9- and things get even more hairy than that. I will admit that in all of this I never stopped to consider alternate food sources like souls or emotions, so that's definitely something for me to think about. I like blood because it's iconic, but if all else fails I could definitely see including some advice on reflavoring things towards a different end.
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Jan 4, 2014 01:50
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I think letting players have flexible core stats for what they power, explaining "how" they're doing the thing they're doing is even more core in Dungeon World/PbtA games than 4e.
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Jan 4, 2014 02:27
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Bigup DJ posted:In regards to your background - the Aspects - I've always thought the "background determines Power stat" thing narrowed your design space. This is partly because you can't include many stat-dependent moves - if you include moves which use the same stat as one of your backgrounds' Power stats, that background is going to be favoured over the others. If you include moves which use a stat which isn't covered by one of your backgrounds' Power stats, it's going to be less powerful because it's using one of your mediocre stats. For instance, if Inverse World's Golem had a bunch of moves which rolled+strength, people would tend towards the background which made strength their Power stat because then they could roll+strength for most or all of their moves. If the Golem had a move which used Charisma it would tend to be less powerful than the Golem's other moves simply because it's using a stat which isn't one of their main stats - in most cases it will be using a smaller bonus because someone playing a Golem is going to put fewer points into Charisma. Indeed, technically the Rainlord gets Dexterity as a secondary stat as is for at least one of their moves--they get a move that lets them Volley with stuff inside them, and that uses Dexterity. Not only that, but their multiclass moves have a 1 level penalty to moves not based on mobility or Dexterity (not that it matters much, just means you can't take such moves immediately at level 5). I could've easily just invested in Constitution instead if I wanted a more tanky Rainlord, and that has nothing to do with the fact that it's another Power stat. I didn't pick that Power stat, thus it being an alternative Power stat is irrelevant. As an example, let's say your Golem takes Strength as their Power stat. There's nothing stopping them from taking the Charisma based move and having a 15 in Charisma. That's only one level away from a +2 modifier. EDIT: Fenarisk posted:I think letting players have flexible core stats for what they power, explaining "how" they're doing the thing they're doing is even more core in Dungeon World/PbtA games than 4e. Kaja Rainbow fucked around with this message at 02:57 on Jan 4, 2014 |
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Jan 4, 2014 02:55
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Those are all points I thought about while I was at work. Most *World playbooks tend to focus around a single stat anyway, with maybe a little branching off into a secondary, but most playbooks are going to give you very clear signals that you should be putting a +2 in THIS STAT RIGHT HERE THANKS, but afterwards you can focus on whatever else you like. Also, this way each "type" of vampire is going to be good with at least one other highly appropriate move...Intelligent vampires will be good at Spouting Lore, Strong vampires good at Hacking and Slashing, and Charismatic vampires will be good at Parlay. After that they can choose where the rest of their stats lie. Also in the case of both the Rending Claws monstrous aspect and the sword you can pick up as part of your starting gear I gave both of those the Precise tag in case, for example, someone wanted to make an Intelligence-based vampire but sideline in Dexterity instead of Strength. Basically I tried to be accommodating about stat allocations where possible.
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Jan 4, 2014 08:18
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Kaja Rainbow posted:Power stats. You're absolutely right, actually. Thanks for responding! I'll have to think about this some more - I do like Power stats more than when I wrote that last post, though. I think stat substitution moves are fine, but there's a risk you can turn one of your stats into a do-everything stat - like The Juggernaut does with Sharp. Sharp does the job of three stats and the drawbacks aren't enough to justify that. Stat substitution moves become a problem when their scope is too broad and when your playbook has too many of them. The latter's a function of the former - the problem here is doing too much with one stat. The Fighter can Parley with Strength, but only when they're using threats. If they could use Strength for Parley no matter what the move wouldn't be very fair and more importantly it wouldn't make any sense - you've got to have a good fictional justification for why your stat can do something unusual. Fiction first! Look at the Vampire's 'What is a Man?' Let's say I've picked Darkest Curse as my background - how do I get from Strength to reading minds? What's the fictional justification there? This is what I meant when I said playbooks which use a Power stat are constrained by the fact that all the moves which use it have to make sense with all the stats you can pick as your Power stat. The drawbacks associated with these moves - costs, conditions and so on - are another factor. The question of drawbacks goes back to the question of fictional sense too, but I think it's less significant than the question of scope. My problem with Power stats is that they increase the risk that one of your stat's going to end up doing the work of most of your stats. It's not inherent in the mechanics or anything, it just makes it a little easier to slip into. The power stat eases the process of fictional justification needed to get from one stat to another by acting as a mediator. The Vampire can intimidate people, be strong, be fast, do magic, command monsters, turn into a monster and learn peoples' secrets with one stat. The Vampire is a cool, evocative class but I think it does too many jobs too well. I think doing magic with constitution or fighting with wisdom is really cool, but doing magic, fighting, spouting lore and chatting people up with one stat would be a bit much. The problem of scope goes back to the problem of fictional justification - characters who can do everything without fail aren't very compelling. They don't make fictional sense - not to me, anyway. Bigup DJ fucked around with this message at 11:15 on Jan 4, 2014 |
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Jan 4, 2014 11:11
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Yeah, it's possible to have too many stat substitution moves. Vincent Baker's main explanation for his reasons for giving them was that they allow people to be good at one aspect of a stat but not others. Good at one-off threats/violence (Go Aggro) but not full out prolonged conflicts (Seize by Force) for example. Act Under Fire's just a basic handy move, it's used for many things. And he wants people to use Open Your Brain so he gives them as many opportunities to do so as he can--it's why there's so many stat substitutions for Open Your Brain in the core book. However, the pitfalls quickly begin to make themselves felt, particularly when your stat subsitutions're so broad. One of my favorite stat substitutions allows the PC to open their brain while in combat--such thematic restrictions're interesting. And the Weird substitutions make sense for the playbooks they're in but if you take too many it can get pretty ridiculous how much of an uberstat Weird becomes. (And the Juggernaut definitely has too many stat substitution moves for one playbook.) However, the real problem isn't any individual number but how many you can take on one character. Houseruling a limit of two stat substitutions on any PC actually might not be a terrible idea for Apocalypse World. For the Vampire, it might actually be a good idea to keep the power stat thing but have particular moves hardwired to use a specific stat. To avoid biasing things toward one particular background, have an equal number for every Power stat. As a quick offhand example, one Cha move for mesmerizing people, one Int move for blood magic, and one Str move for brute strength. But as long as it's not excessive, cross-stat abilities can be interesting (using your terrifying strength to compel obedience from animals or hijacking their minds with Int). Worth some thought, I guess. Kaja Rainbow fucked around with this message at 12:34 on Jan 4, 2014 |
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Jan 4, 2014 12:32
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Bigup DJ posted:Look at the Vampire's 'What is a Man?' Let's say I've picked Darkest Curse as my background - how do I get from Strength to reading minds? What's the fictional justification there? The fictional justification as I see it is "vampires do a lot of weird poo poo, there are a gazillion kinds of vampires and weird vampire abilities throughout fiction and gaming, not all of them are always going to be thematically in lockstep." Vampires are crazy monsters that drink blood and turn into bats and wolves and mist and can't cross running water and hate garlic and have to stop and count mustard seeds and burn in the sun except when they don't, and maybe they're horrific monsters or maybe they're suave seducers, or maybe they're an alien virus, and that's not even getting into the many international variations on the theme. I dunno man, I mean not to be flip about it but this really does sound a lot like "but I don't understand how the Bard attacks with Charisma." The thing is, if a player can't conceive of a fictional jusification for his monstrous, bestial vampire to be able to sniff out the dark secrets lurking within someone's heart through supernatural predator's instinct (hey, there you go) then they have a plethora of other moves to choose from that they may hopefully find more satisfying in that regard. I didn't really feel like making a playbook where moves were either spread out over three different stats or where I lopped off one branch of possible options in order to narrow the focus beyond where I felt it needed to be narrowed. quote:The Vampire is a cool, evocative class but I think it does too many jobs too well. One of the things I tried to avoid doing was giving the Vampire unfettered access to straight stat-swap stuff. A strength-based Vampire can discern someone's dark secrets, okay, but if his Charisma is in the toilet then he may still suck at Parley. They can pick up The Beast Within and be super-scary, though that comes with potential drawbacks of its own (like anyone you use it on immediately knowing HEY poo poo THIS GUY IS A VAMPIRE RIGHT HERE). These are things you can do that are definitely outside the usual "Strength = hitting things" wheelhouse but ultimately they aren't a foolproof way for a bestial vampire to simply bulldoze his way through things which the GM will call for him to Parlay for or Charisma-based Defy Danger or something. Similarly with the various blood magic options the Vampire is way, way more limited in scope than, say, a Mage. Okay, maybe that's a bad example since Gnome is breaking the Mage apart into a bunch of different classes, but the Vampire's version of Ritual is extremely limited in the sorts of effects it can produce and Blood Magic is, at best, a short-duration collection of four useful but narrow abilities. So is this doing too much stuff too well? I mean it's possible, I'm not a Dungeon World expert designer or anything, but I went into this playbook aware of the potential pitfalls and tried, where I could, to make sure that most of the Vampire's moves had limitations or drawbacks that kept them from simply being Some Other Playbook+. Kaja Rainbow posted:For the Vampire, it might actually be a good idea to keep the power stat thing but have particular moves hardwired to use a specific stat. To avoid biasing things toward one particular background, have an equal number for every Power stat. As a quick offhand example, one Cha move for mesmerizing people, one Int move for blood magic, and one Str move for brute strength. But as long as it's not excessive, cross-stat abilities can be interesting (using your terrifying strength to compel obedience from animals or hijacking their minds with Int). Worth some thought, I guess. I flirted with that idea at first, but I decided (for this draft anyway) that it would be more fun to simply let someone pick whatever cool vampiric power they wanted and not feel kind of shafted because they thought it'd be neat if their monstrous vampire knew your darkest secrets or the suave creature of the night dabbled in blood magic. I could still go back and do it that way I suppose but I'm not really sold on the necessity of it yet. Kai Tave fucked around with this message at 13:02 on Jan 4, 2014 |
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Jan 4, 2014 12:59
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That's a decent point about designing them to have specific focuses and limits. I did mention that as a good mechanism for stat substitutions. And speaking from my DW experiences the basic moves're the ones that get used the most anyways. Class moves still get decent amounts of use, but basic moves're the meat and bones of the game, which makes moves that enhance them particularly powerful.
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Jan 4, 2014 13:14
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Part of the issue here, I think, is simply that Dungeon World uses the six traditional D&D stats and the six traditional D&D stats are kind of a pain in the rear end to work around sometimes (a lot of the time). Vampires are strong and tough and agile and charismatic and many of them are portrayed as intelligent and going by D&D's definition of "Wisdom" most of them would be "Wise" as well. So where does that leave you if you want to make a straight-up Vampire playbook? What gets emphasized and what gets set aside or de-emphasized or cut? There's nothing wrong with the idea of making a playbook about being a vampire that's more narrowly focused, mechanically or thematically, it just wasn't what I was interested in doing with it since I think part of what's fun about vampires, from a gaming standpoint, is they've become a very flexible sort of monster while retaining a baseline of shared traits and themes. White Wolf has more kinds of vampires with more kinds of weird powers than any one person knows what to do with. Dracula in the Castlevania games teleports and throws fireballs and gives grandiose speeches before turning into a giant monster, meanwhile his son is a shapeshifting swordsman sorcerer. Don't even get me started on Raziel and Kain. That stuff's fun. So when I got the bug to hash out this playbook the fact that I'd recently proofread over Inverse World, and thus had the Golem fresh in my mind, suggested to me that there was a way to go ahead and incorporate a lot of this stuff without turning it into a mish-mash of multiple stats and incompatibility.
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Jan 4, 2014 14:51
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Yeah, with more approach-based stats, statting up vampires would be easier. Give them moves keyed off Aggressive and Slick or whatever equivalents an alternative hack would use, and you're mostly good. Not necessarily the best examples of alternative stats but that's just to give an idea of what it'd be like. The intellectual stuff can more easily be themed with an aggressive or slick take in my quick and dirty example than they can be with "I have high strength/whatever".
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Jan 4, 2014 15:15
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The *World hack contest a few months back and recent FATEchat in the chat thread really made it "click" for me how much a new set of stats/approaches can really do for your game. So, issues I've identified with my playbook so far: -Is the damage set too high? I know that d10 is the high benchmark for DW playbooks and that a lot of people have recommended that it not be the sort of thing that's handed out to everyone. That said I like having Vampires be dangerous, even the sort that aren't the brutal and bestial sort (d8) while those that are are even more fearsome (d10), but I'm not married to giving Strength-based vamps a d10 damage die, I just can't really come up with something else I like. -Dark Metamorphosis is kinda worse than Druid shapeshifting. This literally just occurred to me and I went "aw gently caress," but there it is. Any vampire can use a multiclass move to take Druidic shapeshifting and turn into sharks or bears or whatever the hell else lives in their land or whose essence they've studied and welp. I kind of tend to not think about the core DW playbooks as much as I probably should even though that's a bad habit to fall into. Like, Druid shapeshifting takes a +Wis roll but even on a 6- you never don't shift shape, and you get the ability to spend hold on animal moves though that does revert you back to normal if you've spent all your hold. So what do I do with this? The easy solution is "gently caress it, chuck the move" but vampires have to be able to turn into bats and wolves and I won't hear otherwise, so okay, what then? I could much more strictly limit what multiclass moves vampires can take but I'm kinda not sold on that either since I feel like MC moves ought to give you that bit of flexibility if you want it. Find something to add to Dark Metamorphosis itself? Maybe, if I can think of something that's not too unwieldy and that feels right for it. I suppose one advantage is that it gives a Vampire some shapeshifting capability even if they spend their MC moves on something else, but that seems like a sketchy selling point. I suppose this could apply to Diabolic Tutor and something like the Mage's Ritual move as well, but at that point I begin to wonder just how much you ought to concern yourself with something "this other playbook has a move that, strictly speaking, is like this one but better/broader/whatever." Because you could probably apply that to a lot of moves across various playbooks, I don't know. -I'm going back and forth on whether a 12+ on Apex Predator should let you duck out of all the potential consequences or not, because I like the idea that every time a vampire feeds, even if he rolls really well, there's (almost) always going to be a risk associated with it. Maybe just leaving it as "on a 12+ you hold 4-blood" is good enough, though it feels a bit boring move-wise especially for a 6-10 move. -On a similar note, I'm also considering whether the 6- on Blood Begets Power would be better if it fully depleted your blood reserves, thus giving the move a bit more bite (so to speak) on the failing side of things. I mean, if you roll 6- you're gripped by the sudden urge to gorge anyway, and it gives the move more of a feel of a thing that can rage out of your control and leave you drained and weak (and force you to feed, always hungry). Kai Tave fucked around with this message at 15:42 on Jan 4, 2014 |
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Jan 4, 2014 15:37
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