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I made these monster playbooks a while ago and I noticed they weren't in the OP. I planned on writing an adventure supplement with them but never got around to it. I'm still pretty proud of the design, especially the Horde, and I'd be happy to see them put up. Djinn DTRPG Link Pixie DTRPG Observer DTRPG Horde DTRPG ShadowCat DTRPG Ogre DTRPG
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Jan 10, 2015 11:48
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Babe Magnet posted:
I'm running this as PbP now, if you were interested before but didn't want to do live games.
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Jan 10, 2015 18:36
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Babe Magnet posted:I'm running this as PbP now, if you were interested before but didn't want to do live games. I'm out right now but if by the time I get home you still have slots open I'll give it a shot. I've never done a PbP before though.
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Jan 10, 2015 18:54
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Neither have I, so it'll be a learning experience for both of us. Hopefully it won't suck!!! There's still like 4 slots open, I'll reserve one for you if the thread picks up suddenly.
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Jan 10, 2015 19:01
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Pbp owns. The only downside is it can be slow. Just layer on lots of detail on posts (players should do this too) and if something seems weird or off, always ask questions. This is gonna be cool
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Jan 10, 2015 20:28
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Mr. Prokosch posted:I made these monster playbooks a while ago and I noticed they weren't in the OP. I planned on writing an adventure supplement with them but never got around to it. I'm still pretty proud of the design, especially the Horde, and I'd be happy to see them put up. I've been using the shadowcat/displacer beast one, it's been a lot of fun; Concealment/No Image are everything I wanted in a stealth class. Horde looked neat but haven't had a chance to try it really.
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Jan 10, 2015 21:04
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Babe Magnet posted:Neither have I, so it'll be a learning experience for both of us. Hopefully it won't suck!!! Looks like you filled up while I was out.
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Jan 11, 2015 00:10
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There's one more spot, I think I'll be running six. I forgot about your post in this thread, I'll go ahead and add you to the CURRENT PLAYERS section. Make a character in the thread so I have something to reference and link to! E: Try and do it soon, even if you have to just throw up a placeholder with a name Babe Magnet fucked around with this message at 00:40 on Jan 11, 2015 |
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Jan 11, 2015 00:31
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So we had our second session of Dungeon World last night and my players had spectacularly bad rolls and made some potentially fun decisions. My initial idea was to have them become allies with the hobos of Hobopolis (where the homeless of the city live and organize) but then they decided to kill a homeless guy while in the sewers and his buddy escaped while swearing they have made an enemy of Hobopolis. So now I get to stat up some homeless with character levels as ongoing baddies. Other fun tidbits: A couple failed spout lore rolls determined that gelatinous cubes love to eat cats and that snickerdoodles are like catnip to them. The Necromancer is the worst necromancer ever and shouldn't be allowed to summon things. She lost control of a summon again. The Battlemaster broke his third bowstring.
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Jan 12, 2015 02:13
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Len posted:So we had our second session of Dungeon World last night and my players had spectacularly bad rolls and made some potentially fun decisions. My initial idea was to have them become allies with the hobos of Hobopolis (where the homeless of the city live and organize) but then they decided to kill a homeless guy while in the sewers and his buddy escaped while swearing they have made an enemy of Hobopolis. So now I get to stat up some homeless with character levels as ongoing baddies. Call it Hobotown, but have everyone pronounce it "Ho-bo-ton."
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Jan 12, 2015 03:56
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I did a well-intentioned scan of the OP and didn't find anything but I'm sure it exists: I want a tool that will help me manage The Fiction. Something where I can draw a map and fill in landmarks, cities, terrain, etc., and then have notes about that thing. I'm hoping for basically something like Google Earth but for turbovirgins. I'm pretty sure that I've heard people talk about worldbuilding tools/software, any recommendations?
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Jan 13, 2015 03:39
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Generic Octopus posted:I've been using the shadowcat/displacer beast one, it's been a lot of fun; Concealment/No Image are everything I wanted in a stealth class. Horde looked neat but haven't had a chance to try it really. Awesome! Glad you liked the way I handled stealth.
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Jan 13, 2015 08:29
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Sharzak posted:I did a well-intentioned scan of the OP and didn't find anything but I'm sure it exists: I want a tool that will help me manage The Fiction. Something where I can draw a map and fill in landmarks, cities, terrain, etc., and then have notes about that thing. I'm hoping for basically something like Google Earth but for turbovirgins. I'm pretty sure that I've heard people talk about worldbuilding tools/software, any recommendations? This would be pretty neat. That way I could keep track of the random names I give NPCs like Bobo the house servant or Sir Cola the deceased brother of Sir Charles who allowed himself to be sacrificed to bring a chaos monster into existence. Slightly related: does a table exist for random effects for reading from a human flesh covered book with dry blood writing? The party looted that at the end of the last adventure and decided to never read any of it until poo poo has squarely hit the fan. Then they're going to pull out Plan B and just open to a random page and read it out loud.
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Jan 13, 2015 15:09
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Sharzak posted:I did a well-intentioned scan of the OP and didn't find anything but I'm sure it exists: I want a tool that will help me manage The Fiction. Something where I can draw a map and fill in landmarks, cities, terrain, etc., and then have notes about that thing. I'm hoping for basically something like Google Earth but for turbovirgins. I'm pretty sure that I've heard people talk about worldbuilding tools/software, any recommendations? I just use OneNote, but it's far from ideal (I didn't exactly scan maps into it or anything). I like it because I can have a bunch of tabs and pages within one document and it's easy to hop back and forth between the "world details" tab (where I note all the world details that either I or one of the players throws in as we play) and the "important NPCs" tab and the "fronts" tab which has pages for each adventure front along the way. You could really do the same with friggin' NotePad if you're willing to have multiple windows open, though, so it's not like it's a specialized tool. A specialized tool would be incredible, though, and I would probably buy it. Give me something with a decent map maker (I don't need anything as robust as Campaign Cartogapher, just something to help me sketch and color in) where I can place cities, towns, dungeons, caves, and other landmarks and then have them serve as links I can click on to bring up my notes about those places. Maybe even have a way to tag some notes as "GM notes" and others as public and then have a way to share the map so players can look at it and refresh their memories about places they've been and things they've learned.
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Jan 13, 2015 16:33
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I just use Evernote.
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Jan 13, 2015 16:45
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Evil Mastermind posted:I just use Evernote. I had a question about Inverse World's vehicle rules, specifically damage, Stress, and the interaction with the Ignores Armour tag - like if you get the Legendary Storm Ship upgrade. The way I'm reading this indicates that any successful hit from the weapon will do a point of stress, based on how Piercing just reduces the amount of damage required to do a point of stress. Ignores Armor is just piercing x infinity, so would that reduce the amount of damage required to do stress to 0?
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Jan 13, 2015 18:27
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Doodmons posted:I had a question about Inverse World's vehicle rules, specifically damage, Stress, and the interaction with the Ignores Armour tag - like if you get the Legendary Storm Ship upgrade. The way I'm reading this indicates that any successful hit from the weapon will do a point of stress, based on how Piercing just reduces the amount of damage required to do a point of stress. Ignores Armor is just piercing x infinity, so would that reduce the amount of damage required to do stress to 0? Piercing and Ignores Armor are not the same keyword for the purposes of vehicles actually. If you're hitting a vehicle using an attack with the Ignores Armor keyword, you still need to do 10 damage to cause stress. Only Piercing helps - a big ol' fireball shot by a Wizard still needs to do 10 damage to actually damage a vehicle. However, the Ignores Armor keyword DOES mean that the vehicle will not protect anyone inside it from the blast - the vehicle's defenses do not work, meaning anyone inside the biplane that just got put inside a fireball will not be feeling very good, even if the plane gets through mostly unscathed. At least, RAW, that's how it works right now. Making a giant fireball automatically deal 1 damage to any vehicles it hits sounds completely reasonable to me, so feel free to rule it that way instead on a case-by-case basis. One of the things you can rule as DM is that sometimes some things are just really good at hurting vehicles.
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Jan 13, 2015 19:31
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gnome7 posted:Piercing and Ignores Armor are not the same keyword for the purposes of vehicles actually. If you're hitting a vehicle using an attack with the Ignores Armor keyword, you still need to do 10 damage to cause stress. Only Piercing helps - a big ol' fireball shot by a Wizard still needs to do 10 damage to actually damage a vehicle. So the lightning guns on a storm ship eradicate the whole crew of the ships they blast? Yeesh, that's pretty painful. Don't gently caress with lightning ships, yo.
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Jan 13, 2015 20:07
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Doodmons posted:So the lightning guns on a storm ship eradicate the whole crew of the ships they blast? Yeesh, that's pretty painful. Don't gently caress with lightning ships, yo. Well the lightning cannons don't hit everyone, they still need to be aimed. But they can blast anyone on the ship right through the walls, yes.
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Jan 13, 2015 21:31
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I started DMing a game over the weekend with some of my coworkers and I really like how everything is coming together. It's a crew with no PnP experience to speak of, but they got right into the swing of things. It worked out great for me, since we got ~3.5 hours of game out of about an hour of prep and character creation. My favorite part is how flexible party composition can be. I just threw down some playbooks and had people pick out what they thought would be cool. We ended up with a Ranger, a Survivor, and a Dragon Mage. I crowd-sourced the setting and the major drive of the campaign during character creation, so they established that they were all exploring a frontier and they wanted to bring in a lost colony of some sort. From there they did a great job of making up backstories and hooking the party together. The big picture view we had going in to the session was that Jax the Cursed (Dragon Mage) was a former ranger under Elowin (Ranger) who is being slowly consumed by the lingering spirit of a dragon after ransacking it's hoard. Madame Ginger (Survivor) was the sole survivor of a huge fire that wiped out her brothel and the town it was in. Jax was one of the patrons of said brothel. From there, Madame Ginger put together an expedition to the north to claim a rich source of magic gems, strong-arming Jax (muscle) and Elowin (guide) into her revenge plot. We haven't quite nailed down the specifics, but they're essentially magic batteries. Very valuable, very dangerous in the wrong hands. Everyone in the party has different motives for what they want with the gems when they get there. Ginger wants to harness their power to get revenge on her lover, who started the fire. Jax wants to use them for fun and profit. Elowin just wants them kept out of the wrong hands. Most of the first session was spent on their travel to where the colony supposed was. I wasn't sure how long to stretch it out, but it worked out pretty well to have them arrive at the end of the session. We started out camped in the middle of a canyon where they hashed out some of the above details and got a chance for some back-and-forth. When things were slowing down, I had a pack of kobolds ambush them - they mowed through them pretty quickly. Notable moments included Jax incinerating a group of kobolds and cutting off their reinforcements with a wall of fire, Elowin shooting arrows out of the air before placing one right between the eyes of the shocked kobold sniper, and Madame Ginger leaping through the flames to shatter a kobold's skull with a haymaker. Elowin finished combat by sniping a fleeing kobold at ludicrous range and - of course - nailing it in the head. From there, they decided to quickly break camp since some Discern Realities and Spout Lore rolls established that Kobolds are cowardly creatures who rarely go far from the main colony. We decided party roles for Undertaking a Perilous Journey to the north. Elowin succeeded at scouting (being an elf), Jax did OK trailblazing, but Ginger failed the Quartermaster roll. Naturally, they found that a lot of their food had spoiled and they'd need to secure new supplies before proceeding much further. Elowin had spotted an abandoned outpost nearby, so they detoured over there to scavenge for supplies. When they got there, they saw that something had trashed the place and killed the inhabitants some time ago. They decided it had been a large animal of some sort - at this point, I started statting out the upcoming encounter. They poked around, making note of how something had torn through the metal gate and started checking out the cellar for supplies. There were all sorts of things down there fairly well preserved, so they started gathering supplies for the journey. At this point, Elowin and her wolf were getting a bad vibe, so they went outside to keep watch. After some tense stalking around, they saw a dire bear coming towards the outpost. Elowin shouts down that they need to get the supplies and get out. She ran up to the second story while Jax and Ginger came upstairs. Jax channeled the power of his curse and nailed it - but the bear was going to be on them before he could finish. Elowin was raining arrows on it, her wolf jumping down and savaging the bear's back. Ginger had ran upstairs and jumped onto it with her knife. Jax then went crazy with dragon powers - savaging it with huge claws and slamming it around with a tail - while everyone else piled on it's back and started stabbing things. After it went down, they backed off and lured it under a large piece of crumbling masonry. Elowin got bodychecked across the courtyard, but Ginger stopped it from finishing her by grabbing it's head and essentially putting it into a headlock. Jax finished it by using his last bit of power to strike the masonry with his tail and crush the bear as it collapsed. The party dismembered the bear for various trophies - a claw for Elowin, a tooth for Ginger, and a large section of hide for Jax. I let them pick a free 2-5 move and had them justify how the fight had helped them develop a new technique or power. They spent the night and restocked their supplies before leaving the outpost. From there we swapped into a montage, setting up and resolving challenges with each character. They eventually reached the supposed lost colony, cresting a hill to see a bustling city frozen in time. Everyone worked together to notice that there was a very clear division between stopped/not stopped time and did some quick experimentation via chucking small animals into it to see what would happen. Eventually they decided that they needed to go into it to get answers, so they jumped through the barrier - and the session ended. Definitely a fun time, I'm looking forward to next Saturday when we figure out just what's going on with that colony.
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Jan 13, 2015 22:40
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For my current Dungeon World game (and any future ones) I'm strongly considering ditching the stat and modifier scheme for stats. As far as I have ever run into, Constitution is the only stat that ever uses its top number, and that's just for HP. My plan is to have players assign +2, +1, +1, 0, 0, and -1 to their stats, then increase any stat by +1 on odd-numbered levels. That'll produce, at most, two +3 stats and one +2 stat by level 10, which can be accomplished with the default stat system already (two points into your 16, three into your 15, and three of the remaining four into your 13), but does rob you of a potential +1, so maybe throwing in one last +1 at level 10 as a capstone is a good idea. One difference is that it makes it less "painful" to increase a stat from 0 to +1 (because it only requires one stat point instead of potentially four). For HP, I'm thinking your class's base HP + 10 + three times your CON. So if you're the Fighter and you have +2 CON, that gives you 26 HP, which is where you'd be with the default system if you were a Fighter with 16 (+2) Constitution. That breaks down a bit at the extremes--when you hit +3 CON, you'll have one more HP than you would if you had 18 (+3), and if you're at -1 CON, you have one fewer HP than you would if you were at 8 (-1), but I think it's a decent compromise. If nothing else, I'd never have to explain to a new player why there are two numbers there again, right? But I've only been GMing Dungeon World for a few months now, so if there's some unforeseen way this'll blow the system's math wide open, I absolutely want to know.
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Jan 15, 2015 22:51
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gnome7 posted:Well the lightning cannons don't hit everyone, they still need to be aimed. But they can blast anyone on the ship right through the walls, yes. Man, it's so great to watch the weird intricacies and outre situations that a system you wrote can handle without clogging itself up in minutiae in action. This is just a nice logical sequence of "X to Y to Z" and electricity damaging everyone on board even has a "oh yeah that's neat" fictional aspect to it.
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Jan 15, 2015 23:00
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Harrow posted:For my current Dungeon World game (and any future ones) I'm strongly considering ditching the stat and modifier scheme for stats. As far as I have ever run into, Constitution is the only stat that ever uses its top number, and that's just for HP. This is how Apocalypse World does it, isn't it? Dungeon World added the base stats
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Jan 15, 2015 23:15
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100 HOGS AGREE posted:This is how Apocalypse World does it, isn't it? Dungeon World added the base stats It is, but Apocalypse World also grants +1s to stats as an advancement you can take in lieu of taking another move from your playbook and limits which stats you can reach +3 in based on your playbook. Dungeon World does it a bit differently, giving you stats in addition to new moves and letting you increase any stat you want.
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Jan 15, 2015 23:29
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Going to have an interesting session today. Long story short, last session, the crew of The Best Ship in the Galaxy went to the burned-up home planet of their main antagonist, a time mage named Zaaya who is erasing the people she holds responsible for her planet's destruction from history in hopes of undoing its destruction (and breaking causality in the process), to visit an underground library that might hold the secrets of time magic so they can learn how to counter what she does. In the underground library, they fought books of magic that had come alive and flew around like birds of prey. Then, they ran into some faeries who've been stranded there since the planet burned because their faerie circle burned as well, and the group's Fae naturally offered to help them go home. Unfortunately, the group's Assassin saw the hostility the faeries were showing--the desperation of being stranded on a burned-up rock for over a hundred years does things even to a faerie's mind--and shot one of them. I wasn't really sure in the moment how the faeries would react. They're not very good in a fight--if they fought back, they'd just get slaughtered. Then I remembered what our Fae usually does and made up a curse. So, Thistle, the self-proclaimed prince of the House of Thistle, cursed them to "be stuck on this planet forever." Nobody was really sure what to do, especially because even after they talked things out with Thistle he had no idea himself how to break the curse, because he hadn't taken the time to specify. So the captain off-handedly made a wish: "I wish this curse could be broken." The Fae immediately got to use her last Boon on the Wish move and chose that the wish would "give him what he needs" and "not cause any immediate unpleasant side-effects." A book fell down from a high shelf, landed on the captain's head, then fell to the floor and, improbably enough, opened to a page about how to break the curse. It'll take three things: a book about faeries (difficult to find, because, for the most part, people don't believe faeries exist), a piece of fae wood (possible, from the remnants of the faeries' broken faerie circle), and "an act of true heroism." In the week between then and now, I've been trying to think of acts of heroism they could do. And I think I got it. See, there's one other thing: the Assassin also heard Zaaya's heartbeat from down in this library (he had tasted her blood), though he also faintly heard it elsewhere in the galaxy. (He guessed that there were multiple time-displaced copies of her, and he's right, but he doesn't know he's right yet.) So they're going to run into Zaaya, all right. But she's not the Zaaya they know. This is a young Zaaya, still a young, idealistic elf, from before her planet was destroyed, whose early experiments in time magic rocketed her forward a hundred years to this very strange library that she has no idea is on her own planet. She's just about to use magic to get back home when she gets attacked by a book golem, and this is the state the group will find her in. So, dilemma: do you kill the young, innocent Zaaya before she can become a murderer, or do you save her from the golem and let her return home? If they save her, that's an act of true heroism, and the curse will be broken. If they kill her, let her die, or otherwise interfere with her ability to return to her own time, that's an act of pragmatism, and oh, boy, the temporal ramifications. They'll resolve the threat of Zaaya and save the lives of her future targets, but, well, undoing the undoing of time is going to cause some issues. They'll get to leave the planet because their reason for going there in the first place will be gone from time. The curse gets broken by never having been placed at all. It helps that we've already established the party's brains are "acclimating" to time rewinding and changing around them all the time, so they can remember things that others can't. For example, they're able to paradoxically remember some of the people Zaaya has erased from time, even though "objectively" those people never existed at all. It'll be a pretty big swerve, going from chasing down the villain they've been chasing since sesson 1 back in August to most of their adventures involving them cleaning up their own temporal mess. I rather like this villain, but I almost hope they take that option (and some of them will definitely lobby for it--this is not a party of heroes) because part of me really loves GMing when things go entirely sideways. Harrow fucked around with this message at 15:34 on Jan 18, 2015 |
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Jan 18, 2015 15:30
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I don't know about your players, but my very first thought was "explain the situation to young idealistic Zaaya and convince her to help the party stop her future self, gain a hireling with the Time Magic skill" 
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Jan 18, 2015 18:09
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Kellsterik posted:I don't know about your players, but my very first thought was "explain the situation to young idealistic Zaaya and convince her to help the party stop her future self, gain a hireling with the Time Magic skill" That's some Bill and Ted poo poo. This deffo needs to happen. Also, I'd count turning the villain good as a heroic act wrt breaking the curse.
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Jan 18, 2015 20:27
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Kellsterik posted:I don't know about your players, but my very first thought was "explain the situation to young idealistic Zaaya and convince her to help the party stop her future self, gain a hireling with the Time Magic skill" Error 404 posted:That's some Bill and Ted poo poo. This deffo needs to happen. Mad respect if they do that. It would still undo all of the things she'd done in her future, and cause some time fuckery, but then they'd have a time mage hireling to help fix it!
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Jan 18, 2015 21:33
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Harrow posted:
I'm doing stats very similar for Broken World based on play testing feedback. So I'd say it's worthwhile if you've independently come to the same conclusion.
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Jan 18, 2015 21:46
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Yeah in the brief time I was working on my Sci-Fi reskin on DW, I ended up going that route too. The 8-18 of the base stats just seems like meaningless bookkeeping when the modifiers are the only real important parts.
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Jan 18, 2015 21:52
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Harrow posted:Mad respect if they do that. It would still undo all of the things she'd done in her future, and cause some time fuckery, but then they'd have a time mage hireling to help fix it! OR, maybe this already happened and it's not going to change anything and the party has to do something with her later to actually change the past.
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Jan 18, 2015 22:06
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100 HOGS AGREE posted:OR, maybe this already happened and it's not going to change anything and the party has to do something with her later to actually change the past. Ah, I like that a lot, actually. I'd definitely think the players will seriously deserve a reward if they actually think to recruit the lady who's done such awful things to them (in her future), so I'd want to make it an unambiguously positive thing.
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Jan 18, 2015 23:46
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GM'd my first session and it was a huge success! Thanks to the OP of this thread for selling me on the game and all the posters who gave valuable advice. It was almost awkwardly smooth--we hammered out a few character details and then all of a sudden three people who had never played a pnp were doing kickass action sequences and really feeling like heroes. I forgot all about the recommended GM moves and was all ready to beat myself up for it when I realized looking back on the session that's all I had been doing the whole time, subconsciously or whatever I guess. this is what I imagined DND to be like when I first heard sbout it. For the envelope, I told each player what it said in broad strokes and asked questions like "the letter makes a reference to something you did in your past that you thought was forgotten. What was it?" and everyone really loved that and ran away with it, so thanks everyone who told me to recruit them to help with stuff like that. What are the rules for possessions not specifically outlined in Gear? As far as houses, horses, stuff like that. One of the players is from a Mongolish tribe and wanted to have a horse. I told him it wasn't quite fair to sveryone else and that I'd do a little research but for now his horse was stolen last week.
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Jan 19, 2015 22:48
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Sharzak posted:GM'd my first session and it was a huge success! Thanks to the OP of this thread for selling me on the game and all the posters who gave valuable advice. It was almost awkwardly smooth--we hammered out a few character details and then all of a sudden three people who had never played a pnp were doing kickass action sequences and really feeling like heroes. I forgot all about the recommended GM moves and was all ready to beat myself up for it when I realized looking back on the session that's all I had been doing the whole time, subconsciously or whatever I guess. this is what I imagined DND to be like when I first heard sbout it. Since it was stolen, I'd say once he gets it back he's earned it- there's rules for horses in the base rules even so no need to look far, it fits the character concept, shouldn't be an issue.
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Jan 20, 2015 01:09
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Hello everyone. Today I bring you a thing. A thing all about having a cool monster buddy! Who may or may not ruin your life... but that's okay! They still love you! And that is what counts! The Bonded version 3 The bonded, as I said is all about having a cool Monster to do things with. It's undergone some pretty heavy re-writes since version 2, which in a lot of respects punished the player for doing any of the cool stuff. That was sort of a bad design on my part. However, things are a little less painful now. The core theme of the playbook is that Monsters are weird and can turn your house into a forest by accident. Monsters are fuelled by Imagination, the bonded gathers this together, letting their Monster emerge from their dormant state to play/make friends/turn that one guy inside out/seriously gently caress that one guy. Imagination can also be spent to give quick boosts to the Monster, making it stronger, smarter, or even resist its Urge to turn that one guy inside out. All monster struggle with their Urge. A powerful emotion that can get the best of them at times, always for the worst. This is mostly because Monsters are horrible creatures from beyond the limit of human understanding and- oh-god-why-did-we-let-it-bond-with-little-Timmy!? Monster design is a lot more open this time around, with traits and moves being selected, not from a list, but by making them up yourself. A good example would be this fine upstanding fellow. Rags, the Monster for Sammi, his Bonded. quote:Rags - The Ragman Players now describe their Monster's abilities through tags and moves, and these are rolled with the Monster's stats (some of the advanced moves are as well). Monsters are still pretty much immortal, but all of them have a weakness of some kind that limits them. I'm looking for feedback on the advanced moves, and any suggestions on how to improve the Monster's mechanics, I'm pretty happy with the starting moves thought.
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Jan 20, 2015 22:25
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The new Monster section does feel a lot better now, although I feel like three separate categories of traits/things is excessive. Is there a need to specify what non-supernatural things the monster can do? I think it could be boiled down to just traits, the way the monster is; and moves, the major things it can do. Another thing that has been bothering me is the Monster Weakness. Is having it a good idea? One player having one very specific handicap seems a bit clumsy. Consider it in play. Either the GM constantly puts your weakness in your way, which is just plain unenjoyable, or it comes up only very rarely, in which case it is just taking space on your character sheet most of the time. The Monster's urge seems like a better way for introducing complications. Speaking of which, rolling 10+ to have the Monster resist it's urge gives you bonus Imagination. This is just my opinion but that strikes me as a bad idea. Getting something extra from rolling well there frames the Urge as a source of goodies rather than a problem. Personally I'd make it 10+: All goes well 7-9: minor complication 6-: the Monster totally gives into it's urge. You could maybe have an advance that gives you extra Imagination if the Monster falls into it's urge? Also the Monsterious Acts move, I'm not sure its a good idea to let the player to roll to resist the urge if they pick the second option. You've already got the third option that will probably lead to a Defy Danger roll, so Monsterious Acts could at worst require three separate rolls. Kind of bothersome. I'd change the second option to "Your Monster's actions get warped by it's urge." I'd also like to give my impressions on some of the advances. Blood of my Keeper: Too many items on that list, feels really bloated. Also, having this at the end of a three advance chain seems like a bad idea. Why not spread the things here into other advances? Citizen of the Weld: The last option is confusing. Doesn't the first option already imply that you don't get lost? Monster Spotter: Implies that other Bonded are common enough in the setting for this to be useful. I'd change this into some more generic monster knowledge. Maybe you could add an option to Discern Realities: "How can I make this monster do what I want?" Quiet Whispers: How is this different from having "reads minds" written in your Monster sheet? My Monster is Bigger...: Having a rule for an antagonist written into the playbook doesn't sit well with me. If you want for this to have an downside you could say it makes the Monster easier to detect, leaving the details undefined. Something, Something, Something, Teamwork!: Too wordy right now. Is the -1 for the urge roll necessary? Guardian Protector: This one has unique flavour. Its probably my favourite, but I see a lot to improve in the execution. Ditch the requirement for you to have a bond with the guardian. Dragging some random, unwilling person around sounds fun. Also, getting bigger numbers is boring. I'd rewrite the advance as: "When someone promises to help you, you can make them your Guardian Protector. You can only have one such protector at a time. When you find yourself in danger you can have your Guardian Protector suffer in your stead, dragging them to you through Wyrd Weld if necessary." I'm not sure if the bleed through effect upon teleporting the guardian is necessary, could be. Changing this advance would also open a way to fix another issue I have with the playbook, The Pact of Protection, which feels clumsy. I'd change it into: "You start with the Guardian Protector advanced move. Your Monster also always counts as your Guardian Protector in addition to any other one you may have." Then again, there should be some downside for the Monster if you make it take a hit aimed at you. Maybe force it into dormant state if you do so? You could also have a 6-10 advance that allows you to have as many guardians as you can sucker into promising to protect you. The Power of the Wyrd: This is pretty much a ritual type move. I'd take the layout from that, having a list of complications the GM can decide from. Sharp Wit: The first option: No need for that -1, NPCs don't roll dice. The third option: I'd remove the +1 as well. That's just extra bookkeeping. Literally hurting people by badmouthing them is awesome enough already. Suppressing the Corruption I'd add something more than just negating side effects from Imagination use. That's not that interesting, its just making things not happen. This is a lvl.6+ advance. Its supposed to be big stuff. Maybe replace this with something like: "The harmful effects of the Wyrd/magic will never directly focus on you."
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Jan 20, 2015 23:00
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I have some thoughts... Overall, you need to condense and simplify. You go way overboard thinking about the mechanics of the Monster, and there's not enough there to clarify what specific archetype a Bonded represents. I had given some earlier notes about them being "child with a monster friend" (since this class is based on Monsters & Other Childish Things), and I think you could go even harder in that direction. Anyways, notes on what's on the page: - The way it's written, I never, ever want to trigger the bolded part of My Closest Friend. On a miss, I don't get to do anything cool with my monster, and I don't know for how long! I'll pretty much always be using The Power Of Imagination and spending a point to wake the monster up instead, because that ensures SOMETHING gets to happen. I think you should fix this by making it a given that the monster can awaken and act when the player wants it to. You might consider rolling TPOI into MCF and rewording it as, "When you awaken your monster, roll +Gather. On a 10+, hold 3 Imagination. On a 7-9, hold 2 Imagination. On a miss, hold 1 Imagination, but your monster is sluggish and slower to act than you would like." I do like the consequences for spending/losing Imagination, but having it also trigger on gaining Imagination seems like overkill. - Feel The Burn is strange to me. Using the new terminology of 'burn', especially in a trigger, feels wrong. The trigger should be something done by the fictional character, not by the player looking at the sheet. A rewording might be, "When you use your imagination to help your Monster, spend Imagination 1-for-1 for the following effects..." But FTB feels like it could also be rolled into TPOI. Like so (including the change I suggested above): "When you awaken your monster, roll +Gather. On a 10+, hold 3 Imagination. On a 7-9, hold 2 Imagination. On a miss, hold 1 Imagination, but your monster is sluggish and slower to act than you would like. You may spend Imagination 1-for-1 for the following effects: [effects list here] When you spend or lose Imagination, pick one: [consequences list here]" - The Monster page is confusing. "Pick supernatural traits equal to Wyrd +1" is confusing, since the only other instance of 'Wyrd' I have is picking a statline with 'Wyrd+X' in it already. So you've got people thinking, 'Wyrd+3+1? I don't get it...' Does that make sense? I know I suggested doing it this way in the first place, but I'm starting to think that the Ranger-esque stats for the Monster are not the way to go. All you should really need is monster moves - defining supernatural traits and non-supernatural talents is just more mechanics than are required. Traits and talents should be defined fictionally as part of the player's concept, but mechanically I feel like starting with three monster moves would do the trick. You'd just want to be very clear about how to write a good monster move, and give examples of offensive moves (Rip them to shreds), defensive moves (Hide inside my tough shell), and utility moves (Fly high above everything). And note that the monster moves imply traits - "Rip them to shreds" implies sharp claws, strength, and speed. "Fly high above everything" implies wings or some other flying ability. And then you'd probably want a trigger to be, "When you compel your Monster to use one of its moves, roll+Imagination." - Regarding Urge/Weakness - I think they're both good ideas to have in there. But Monsters shouldn't be immortal! That takes away a lot of the drama and stakes that make Dungeon World so exciting to me. Just make it so that if the Monster dies, so does the Bonded, and vice-versa. And give the Bonded a move where they get a bonus to the Last Breath roll if they're by their Monster's side when it approaches death's door.
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Jan 20, 2015 23:41
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Harrow posted:My plan is to have players assign +2, +1, +1, 0, 0, and -1 to their stats, then increase any stat by +1 on odd-numbered levels. That'll produce, at most, two +3 stats and one +2 stat by level 10, which can be accomplished with the default stat system already (two points into your 16, three into your 15, and three of the remaining four into your 13), but does rob you of a potential +1, so maybe throwing in one last +1 at level 10 as a capstone is a good idea. One difference is that it makes it less "painful" to increase a stat from 0 to +1 (because it only requires one stat point instead of potentially four). Hey, Harrow, I was wondering why do the increases on odd levels and then give them a bonus +1 at level 10? This gives them 5 increases total at 3, 5, 7, 9, and 10, Why not do Even numbers instead? This way players don't have to wait 2 levels to get that first +1, but they still get 5 bonuses and the last two are not waiting till the very end of the character's career. At 2, 4, 6, 8, and 10 they still get 5 bonuses, the only concern would be increasing their +2 to a +3 one level earlier (normally level 3), but as a trade off the players that want two +2's get them normally. (IE increasing the 15 to 16 at level 2.) Were there other complications that I didn't think of that made you decide on odd levels?
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Jan 21, 2015 03:15
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Teonis posted:Hey, Harrow, I was wondering why do the increases on odd levels and then give them a bonus +1 at level 10? This gives them 5 increases total at 3, 5, 7, 9, and 10, Why not do Even numbers instead? This way players don't have to wait 2 levels to get that first +1, but they still get 5 bonuses and the last two are not waiting till the very end of the character's career. At 2, 4, 6, 8, and 10 they still get 5 bonuses, the only concern would be increasing their +2 to a +3 one level earlier (normally level 3), but as a trade off the players that want two +2's get them normally. (IE increasing the 15 to 16 at level 2.) Nah, that's pretty much my whole reasoning. For some reason I got it into my head that getting a potential +3 stat a level early was a bad thing, but really it probably doesn't matter at all, and doing it at even levels just makes it easier to understand and keep track of.
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Jan 21, 2015 17:45
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Wow, this is some pretty good feedback so far, I'll respond to what I've got here, but any more for any more?quote:Monster Bits: I think what I'm going to do is cut the Monster traits down to just moves and maybe stats. That'll then mean that the Strange Mutations and Curious Alterations gain you new Monster moves. Meaning that a player who gets all of them and the Monster advances will end with seven Monster moves. That should cover a pretty wide variety of powers, plus make for an easy way to rate the relative power of a Monster. I agree that the current Monster rules are a bit confusing. Though I want to move away from rolling Imagination as a stat, because if you're also spending points of it to power the Monster, then you get the issue where you're never really sure when to take the point (before or after the roll) without adding in a lot of excessive words. I'll definitely consider rolling Power of Imagination into My Closest Friend move, and tie the waking the Monster to Gathering the Wyrd. For me, having the Monster be un-killable makes it more likely that the player will throw the Monster into danger, Plus it reinforces the unnaturalness of the thing you're bound too. What I am thinking about is adding a "Your Monster takes a hit for you" option to the Feel the Burn move, the explanation being that in taking that hit it has bled some power or been weakened, hence why it costs a point of imagination to do. From there make it so encountering the Monster's weakness banishes it into dormancy completely until a short rest can be had. This would probably be a little better than giving the Monster a HP and armour value. That said, I do like the idea of the Monster helping the Bonded back from deaths door. Changing the Urge so it's something you can't resist makes it a better option. Though I'm wondering if I should still have a roll to calm the Monster back down. After all, trying to calm a rampaging monster could be rather amusing in and of itself. But then we're faced with the same risk of having one roll lead to 2-3 rolls. quote:Advanced move bits: Ohh, some interesting suggestions in here. Any that I don't respond to, its because its already something I've done. Blood of my Keeper: Yep, bloated, I'm ether going to cut the options by two, or cut the move completely. Citizen of the Weld: I sort of see what you mean, it's basically trying to say 'you don't arrive immediately.' But its perticular wording made more sense before I edited the excess out. I'll re-word it to make more sense Monster Spotter: Might swap this out for some of the other suggested advancements. Ether this or Blood of my Keeper. If I do keep it, I'll play around with the options. Quiet Whispers: A good point, worked better when I didn't have the option to have the Monster as a mind reader. Will probably replace My Monster is Bigger...: But if I remove it, its a advancement to basically make numbers bigger. Which I'm trying to avoid doing too much of. In my opinion there needs to be some kind of narrative aspect to the increase in power. However, the way the move is phrased currently, the attention is only antagonistic. I could re-phrase it to make it more ambiguous and leave it open to potentially be something positive, but really that should be an advancement thing in its own right. Something, Something, Something, Teamwork!: Currently cut down the word count. Quick summery - work together to get +thing, even if you succeed something goes hilariously or dangerously wrong. Guardian Protector: I really like this suggestion, its pretty evil, and I love the advanced version idea. Given I'm thinking of making 'monster takes a blow for you' a Feel the Burn option, I'm pretty sure I can make the Pact of Protection how to get that option. Though doing that to a bunch of sucke-um, "gallant heroes" is great. Sharp Wit: Good suggestions. I'll take away the -1 & +1 and have it as is. Suppressing the Corruption: Interesting idea, plenty of potential for it to cause chaos. Could be fun. quote:Starting move bits: As I've said, I think I'll tie those two things together, It'll cut down on extra rolls too. Which'll make stuff flow better. Overall good suggestions. I'll start working out how to implement these. I'll post the results once its done for the next round of feedback. That said, if anyone has any further suggestions I'm all ears.
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Jan 21, 2015 20:44
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