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Bear Enthusiast posted:All of this sounds great but in practice it just means I have half the table on their phones while the other half gets to do interesting things, then vice versa. I've always felt like this was either me needing to push them towards the same overall goals, or just better time management to keep everyone engaged and not waiting too long between getting to do something. Is there some delicate balance I'm missing here, and if so any advice on said balance? I've only played in Ilor's games but generally speaking, any PC in AW can upset the whole apple cart in short order with a bold move. If you can't manage to at least politely fake interest in what the other PCs are doing, it's just rude. I generally have my laptop open all the time because I take session logs, and I still go a very long time without alt-tabbing to email or Facebook.
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Jan 22, 2016 02:31
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What're opinions on The Regiment and it's billion subdivisions? AFAICS it's not been worked on for a couple of years now, so I figured someone must've had a go.
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Jan 22, 2016 02:53
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I'll chime in that certain stories only work outside the Team-of-Adventurers dynamic. It's very hard to tell stories that are like TV dramas with inter-protagonist deception, stunning betrayals and unlikely hookups (that become stunning betrayals). Agreed that once people start shooting each other, it better be toward the end of the campaign.
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Jan 22, 2016 03:13
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One thing my players can't get the hang of is how the story sort of is made up on the fly, they're more used to a dnd style tavern opening where you mull around until plot hooks happen. On my end I feel like I'm getting the system down pretty well but it's hard to understand what they aren't getting about the system.
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Jan 22, 2016 04:13
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BlackIronHeart posted:Don't forget to take commercial breaks. Imagine this. This absolutely works for me! Regularly shifting focus really helps everyone be engaged. My players still also seem to be in the same location, and we play AW more scene-like than you would a traditional adventuring party RPG. I also find that PVP doesn't often resort to all out animosity. Personalities will clash, but then a few rolls get things moving onward, with some resolution. Seize by Force is a double edged sword, and if your PCs want to fight, you are giving me, the GM a lot of power in that conflict. So please, do go ahead, and give me those 7-9 and 6- rolls where I get to mess with your stuff! I and my group like to treat our AW characters like stolen cars Iwe're joyriding around the apocalypse in. We want to get them dented up and see how they handle. If they crash and burn, We just steal another more. It's also worth mentioning that apocalypse world as written isn't everyone's style of play, and that's cool! Find a balance or a game that works for your group, and use it. Golden Bee posted:I'll chime in that certain stories only work outside the Team-of-Adventurers dynamic. It's very hard to tell stories that are like TV dramas with inter-protagonist deception, stunning betrayals and unlikely hookups (that become stunning betrayals). I find the games that work best for the inter-party conflict drama style game is one where the characters are all closely tied to a central community or location, where they're living in each others' pockets and trying to get by, or get one over the other guy. Then you just let your scarcities ratchet that desperation up as stuff runs out and those countdown creep closer to midnight. madadric fucked around with this message at 05:39 on Jan 22, 2016 |
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Jan 22, 2016 05:30
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Banana Man posted:One thing my players can't get the hang of is how the story sort of is made up on the fly, they're more used to a dnd style tavern opening where you mull around until plot hooks happen. Yeah, this can be tricky. If you're used to games where the GM is author, having the ability to write your own stuff into the narrative all of a sudden is hard to get used to.
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Jan 22, 2016 11:49
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Banana Man posted:dnd style tavern opening where you mull around until plot hooks happen. I have a hard time imagining anyone actually enjoying this style, it's so weird and contrived. "We better just do our own thing until the DM leaves the tiniest trace of a clue to a plot hook and then follow that to the exclusion of everything else because we want to play the thing he wrote down"
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Jan 22, 2016 11:59
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Boing posted:I have a hard time imagining anyone actually enjoying this style, it's so weird and contrived. "We better just do our own thing until the DM leaves the tiniest trace of a clue to a plot hook and then follow that to the exclusion of everything else because we want to play the thing he wrote down" If you're used to the GM writing good stuff, why wouldn't you? Besides, it's classic heroic journey: you need the call to adventure to come first.
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Jan 22, 2016 12:01
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This is one of the great strengths of AW as a PbP system - it's no problem to have a player isolated from the rest of the group for up to an entire session, if that's where the narrative is taken them. Sure, it's probably good to get them on track to cross paths with another PC at the start of the next session, but it's certainly not a killer to let people stay apart.
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Jan 22, 2016 16:32
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Boing posted:This is great advice. But I worry that this sort of approach leads to everyone playing their own little minigames independently of each other, and not really working as a team as if they were part of a DW-style adventuring party. Is that just one of the risks inherent in going AW-style? Considering that's largely the point of Apocalypse World, yes, it will lead to everyone not working as a D&D adventuring party. The reason Apocalypse World, Urban Shadows and Monsterhearts are considered by PBtA purists to be the strongest versions of PBtA in comparison to, say, Dungeon World and Monster of the Week is that Apocalypse World was designed from the ground up to be a TV show where everyone is their own strong, independent character who, because this is the apocalypse, doesn't have m/any friends and probably doesn't even trust anyone. The literal most dangerous and world-changing thing in AW is a group of PCs working together. You're meant to have wildly different goals and worldviews and expected to have to put those aside if you want to work together - directly contrasting the implicit assumption of D&D that the crafty, subtle Wizard, the brash, dangerous Fighter and the cautious, paranoid Rogue have already put their own personal foibles aside to better function as a team. In AW, the game wants the Brainer to treat agreeing not to brain-rape the people in the Chopper's gang to feel like a sacrifice rather than something you've automatically agreed not to do as part of a social contract that lets you get along with the Gunlugger. The Brainer's all about that brain-rape, it's basically all you have going for you and if you agree not to do it then your main source of power just vanished. Unlike in conventional party-based RPGs which usually allow characters to have a broad base that they build their speciality on top of - a useful part of being a team: it lets you have your "role" but means you can still contribute if your time to shine hasn't come up, encouraging you to continue working with the team when there are, for example, no traps to disarm. In AW, you have no gameplay available to you beyond basic "doing stuff" that isn't your playbook's schtick. The Brainer can't branch out of being a brain-rapist because the party really needs a mechanic now, so he's got to solve all of his problems with brain-rape. The Gunlugger's got nothing to do but kill, the Skinner has no options but to try and make everyone love him. Often, these singular drives are not compatible and that's where the gameplay begins. Playbooks like the Hardholder further complicate matters because their overriding desire for gameplay is really unusual for an RPG: they desperately want to keep everything on an even keel and don't want the boat rocked. If the MC rules that their hardhold is all messed up at the start of the session, their life is terrible. Most of the other playbooks largely want to gently caress things up so that they get to use their moves and have fun, and in fact the book explicitly calls this out: playbooks like the Gunlugger and Angel have nothing to do if things are all quiet. Your out of character job in the game if you're playing one of those playbooks is to make every situation descend into a bloodbath so that your character is needed. As much as the Hardholder totally wants to hire the Angel and the Gunlugger for his hardhold, their presence makes his life really difficult and "interesting." Every time I have MCed Apocalypse World it has inexorably descended into PVP and that's completely intentional. The bare minimum is that the situation should inexorably descend into one where two or more PCs are working at complete cross purposes, have incompatible goals, don't like each other and tolerate the other for the greater good. If you try and play happy families, the game will fight you. This is completely intentional. Monsterhearts and Urban Shadows are good because they didn't stray too far from this formula and didn't change the rules that much. Dungeon World and Monster of the Week didn't change the rules that much but tried to completely rewrite the fundamental conceit of gameplay. They work as games, and I've run and played an awful lot more Dungeon World than I have Apocalypse World, but there's a tension there where you and the game and trying to strain away from what the core rules have been set up to do. Moves are player facing to put all the power into the player's hands - scenes with competing players are like arguments where everyone is holding a loaded gun - you're not safe because that guy you're arguing with has the narrative power to declare changes to the scene. I'm not going to claim standard skill checks don't do this on some level because they do, but there's an obvious difference between somebody declaring that they're going to attack the other player, initiative being declared and combat beginning and what happens in Urban Shadows where somebody can declare they're going for their gun, roll Unleash, get a 12+ and end the combat as it starts without the other player being able to do a drat thing about it. In PBtA you're just not safe around other players. PBtA totally can be rewritten to be friendly to a party based game on a fundamental level, but I don't think anybody's done it yet and I think it would end up looking very different to Apocalypse World. Look at Fellowship for a good example of this. It's really hard to actually do PvP in Fellowship and the whole thing is set up to foster a good party relationship because it pits the group against somebody else: The GM is also the player of the Overlord and they have as much narrative power as the other players. It hides PBtA's tendency towards PvP by beginning the game with the premise that PvP has already begun and sanctions all PvP as long as it's between the Fellowship and the Overlord. Doing anything else requires you to fight the rules. I'd like to think I'm not a PBtA snob and I certainly am not sneering at Manifest Destiny for looking at AW, going "that's not what I want" and writing their own PBtA that lets them and their group play the game they want to play. I'm just saying it's a good job they did that because by the sounds of it if they'd reskinned Apocalypse World the game would have fallen apart as everyone tried desperately not to do what the rules wanted them to. There's a hell of a lot of PBtA hacks out there now and the big failing of most of them is that their authors didn't really understand the game. They looked at AW, went "that works" and based their rules on AW's while not thinking about the big difference between their game and AW. Whether it was intentional or not, US and MH hew very closely to what AW plays like and so don't stumble over that single, very important step.
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Jan 22, 2016 17:39
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spectralent posted:Yeah, this can be tricky. If you're used to games where the GM is author, having the ability to write your own stuff into the narrative all of a sudden is hard to get used to. I'd play Fiasco with such a group. Every scene is collaborative; you either control the opening or the ending, but not both. It gives you SOME creative freedom and pushes you to always care about the story, even when you're off-screen or playing an NPC. The only unwritten rule for Fiasco that I use is "In event of conflict between two characters, the end result should be worse for both." If two people have a gun fight, the one who wings the other should be caught on security camera. The tradeoff of this is it requires players to be Diabolical Bastards or Luckless, Idiotic Ingenues, which is a tradeoff I'll always take.
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Jan 22, 2016 17:53
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Doodmons posted:words a very strong post.
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Jan 22, 2016 18:03
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This is part of why I'm wondering if PBtA is the right choice for a magical girl game. But I've already done some work. I suppose it's very likely to head down a similar direction to Fellowship. I did have some cool archetype stuff, so it feels like a shame to trash it all.
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Jan 22, 2016 20:30
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PBtA is a perfect choice for a magical girl game as long as that magical girl game is taking most of its cues from Madoka.
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Jan 22, 2016 20:41
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That certainly gets to the heart of what makes AW tick. I think it comes from the same root as how the game falls apart if no-one is rolling <10; the game is built to create self-sustaining tension by moves creating more problems or opportunities for the instigator and the other players. Just as too-high stats can force resolution of problems without any new problems to take up the tension, a PC group too united and outwards-facing can remove threats too easily, as only other PCs really have the ability to face down a PC's skillset. (It's one of the most frustrating things about publishing games that at a certain point you have to say a game is good enough and walk away from it - I have a nagging feeling that Legacy falls afoul of this and could do with a refocusing of the playbooks and moves to create a bit more tension between characters and between families, but at this point I have other designs that are more demanding of my attention.)
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Jan 22, 2016 20:53
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I think PbtA can do parties working together just fine. Apocalypse World can't, it's not built for it. But if you rework the core of the game enough, you can easily achieve that style of gameplay. Fellowship is one of my favorite rpgs, if not my #1 favorite at this point. It works where things like Dungeon World fail because it recognizes the strengths of the Apocalypse World system on a structural level, and knows how to tweak those for the genre it's trying to tell stories in. Dungeon World is a weak hack because it doesn't change enough of Apocalypse World to support it's stories about a ragtag team of adventurer's crawling through dungeons and saving the world. Fellowship from the ground up is built to support its stories about a ragtag team of heroes joining together to defeat an evil Overlord and save the world.
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Jan 22, 2016 21:51
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Doodmons posted:There's a hell of a lot of PBtA hacks out there now and the big failing of most of them is that their authors didn't really understand the game. At conventions, I run a re-skin of AW set in Columbia Games' Harn setting, specifically in Orbaal. It is the fictional equivalent of the early Danelaw, with fractious and unruly Vikings having come to conquer and oppress the locals. It's medieval fantasy, but it explicitly keeps the themes of scarcity, isolation, paranoia, violence, and social instability. And it works because it's not about making a "party of plucky adventurers." Almost every time I've run it, it has moved into hilarious and awesome PvP territory, which is fantastic.
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Jan 23, 2016 01:12
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Would people say The Regiment passes the "understood the game" test?
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Jan 23, 2016 01:16
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spectralent posted:Would people say The Regiment passes the "understood the game" test? Yes and No. It plays on the scarcity of AW and paranoiac 'war is hell' theme, but its mechanics are way too crunchy imo.
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Jan 23, 2016 01:38
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The main issue I can see is that it's going to naturally encourage teamwork; you're the squad after all, not the protagonists, who all have different goals. Even if you have different reasons for joining up and aims out of service, the present goal is "finish the mission and ideally don't die"...
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Jan 23, 2016 01:46
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Kaja Rainbow posted:This is part of why I'm wondering if PBtA is the right choice for a magical girl game. But I've already done some work. I suppose it's very likely to head down a similar direction to Fellowship. I did have some cool archetype stuff, so it feels like a shame to trash it all. Take a look at Magical Fury/Magical Burst. Fury, more than Burst, is like a weird fusion of a Japanese RPG and a PbTA game. It's a little uneven, but we had a lot of fun with it when we played. Edit: A link might help!
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Jan 23, 2016 02:24
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I'm aware of those games. I was working on something more cooperative. Fellowship seems to point the way forward but I might look into another engine.
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Jan 23, 2016 02:41
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Honestly I think people are overstating the 'Good hacks spiral out into a tangle of messy relationships and you're not doing it right if you use the engine for cooperative play' thing. Like, as long as the moves and agendas and principles you set up support the way you want the game to work and how the fiction plays out, you're probably good. A bad hack is one that looks at the engine and just kind lazily renames things instead of taking the time to figure that poo poo out. On the other hand, "There's a whole lot of magical girls and they're all rivals competing over a limited resource and while they may be allies this week, next time maybe not, oh, and you're sure the Princess likes the same person as you, what are you gonna do?" is basically a staple sub-genre and could easily support a more purist take on the system if you want to go that route. But I am poking at a couple of dumb Fellowship hacks myself so. unseenlibrarian fucked around with this message at 07:42 on Jan 23, 2016 |
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Jan 23, 2016 07:00
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I think you'd probably want a limited PvP thing if you were doing non-madoka magical girls; AW full-PvP tends to encourage a level of mean that's out of character for the usual kid-friendly cartoon. Like, you have personality conflicts sometimes but the moral of the story is always something like "friends should support each other" or "communication is important", and not "it's super rude that Sparkle Queen Kate thinks she can just expect the Ice Witch to not freeze her minions to death all the time, she should get back at her".
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Jan 23, 2016 13:35
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You know, on a reread of Fellowship, it actually has a lot of rules to support player character conflict. It has rules for breaking Bonds and the Halfling can get an adventurer's contract to win arguments with party members. Overlords are also able to be played as subtle manipulators, tearing the party up. It encourages friendship and teamwork because removing all a characters bonds takes them out of the game as good as killing them, but the game absolutely wants you to play around the margins of that.
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Jan 24, 2016 03:27
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Appropriately to the topic, a new character joined Ilor's campaign tonight. Within 3 hours of play, the character had 3 debilities and was at 9 o'clock after getting into fights with 2 other PCs. One of the most fun sessions yet!
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Jan 25, 2016 03:47
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Oh hey, vince is talking about AW2.0 being ready for kickstarter soon.
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Jan 25, 2016 03:55
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Error 404 posted:Oh hey, vince is talking about AW2.0 being ready for kickstarter soon. 
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Jan 25, 2016 03:57
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BlackIronHeart posted:Appropriately to the topic, a new character joined Ilor's campaign tonight. Within 3 hours of play, the character had 3 debilities and was at 9 o'clock after getting into fights with 2 other PCs. One of the most fun sessions yet!
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Jan 25, 2016 06:31
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I often play without plotting hilarious fuckery, but when I do, I know I'm playing wrong.
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Jan 25, 2016 07:25
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Jesus loving Christ. 
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Jan 25, 2016 15:34
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So....yeah. That happened.
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Jan 25, 2016 16:04
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It's a profitable niche that has shown that its fans can go to incredible lengths to cram the thing they like everywhere. It's not really surprising. I wonder how it is from a design standpoint.
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Jan 25, 2016 16:06
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Funny thing is that this isn't the first one I've ever seen. My friend linked me to one and did the same horrified shock joke to one he found while on GitP a while back. That said, this was to be expected. I mean, it's no surprise.
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Jan 25, 2016 16:09
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"A storytelling adventure game about magical ponies, and their fight against the forces of darkness of the Starless Night. For young women and their friends." This is a strange way to put it.
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Jan 25, 2016 16:14
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paradoxGentleman posted:"A storytelling adventure game about magical ponies, and their fight against the forces of darkness of the Starless Night. For young women and their friends." If I had to take a guess, he was trying to avoid saying it was a game for little girls by saying it was for young women. Like saying it's action figures, not toys, ya know?
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Jan 25, 2016 16:18
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Covok posted:If I had to take a guess, he was trying to avoid saying it was a game for little girls by saying it was for young women. Like saying it's action figures, not toys, ya know? I suppose. If they actually pulled off a PBTA aimed at and ideal for that particular age group, it'd be noteworthy; but I get the feeling that this is aimed more at the adult fans than the younger ones, if nothing else because former are more likely to find it than the latter.
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Jan 25, 2016 16:23
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paradoxGentleman posted:I suppose. If they actually pulled off a PBTA aimed at and ideal for that particular age group, it'd be noteworthy; but I get the feeling that this is aimed more at the adult fans than the younger ones, if nothing else because former are more likely to find it than the latter. A game that tried to go for that "little kid's show innocent/moral play" would be interesting in PbtA, but it might not mesh out due to the aforementioned "every playbook having a different focus" in most PbtA titles. Unless it did it in a "we're all different and this is how we resolve/respect those differences" kind of way. Would prefer if it weren't tied to the pony franchise due to the toxic fanbase. Golden Sky Stories, for the most part, probably hits that niche well-enough, for now. Also, there are a few other roleplaying games made for kids in mind, by the by, if that's what you're looking for in a game.
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Jan 25, 2016 16:30
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Covok posted:Golden Sky Stories, for the most part, probably hits that niche well-enough, for now. Also, there are a few other roleplaying games made for kids in mind, by the by, if that's what you're looking for in a game. Well it's not really something I'm personally interested in, I'm just sort of glad that it exists 
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Jan 25, 2016 16:38
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I know the guy. He doesn't like the toxic fanbase. Anyways he invited me to playtest this thing. I said I barely know anything about MLP and he said that was good for playtesting. I will report back about how it goes. Edit: also, Golden Sky Stories is great. Kaja Rainbow fucked around with this message at 16:56 on Jan 25, 2016 |
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Jan 25, 2016 16:52
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