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Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

Halloween Jack posted:

Monsterhearts is IMO the leanest, meanest implementation of the engine.

That's part of the reason most 3rd-party material for MH is so weak; it really doesn't accommodate really specific or really fiddly add-ons without a powerful theme.

Yeah, that's really it. Core MH is so tightly designed that most third-party content for it just fails to stand up on the mechanical level, even before you get into other issues ("too niche/too broad," "has some really weird/disruptive mechanical gimmick," "forgets to have the skin be an adolescence metaphor as well as a monster," and so on). I feel like MH gets written off a lot because of its genre, which isn't everyone's cup of tea, but it's as well-written a PbtA as any out there.

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Toph Bei Fong
Feb 29, 2008



I say the following as someone who loves Monsterhearts. It's one of my favorite games.

The tight focus is the best and worst thing about it. It's a social game, for better or for worse.

Almost the entire game runs off of Hot and Cold. Because of the power of the social moves, and because all the social moves run off of these two stats, they're important pretty much regardless of whatever playbook you're running. This over balances playbooks that have bonuses to one or both of these.

The Volatile stat may as well not exist for 90% of games, because of how reluctant most PCs are to attack other PCs. For what's ostensibly a player vs player game, it usually turns into teams of players vs NPCs pretty quick. As fun as it might be to play, for example, a werewolf whose stated goal is to kill the other PCs, you end up feeling bad OOC killing your friend's characters. Or it takes the game in abusive directions that, not without good reason, most people are trying to get away from.

Dark ends up occupying an odd niche because you could theoretically never use it and just keep making up your own ideas and assumptions, which may or may not be just as interesting as what the GM came up with.

It's a fun game I enjoy playing, but I can admit where it has its shortcomings.

spectralent
Oct 1, 2014

Me and the boys poppin' down to the shops

Heliotrope posted:

There actually is a thing about Bigfoot smelling bad, oddly enough. But it also adds to making the Sasquatch an outsider - not only are they awkward and weird, but they start smelling when they sweat. It also makes it so that people will interact with the Sasquatch even if they don't want to. The Sasquatch is really good at being in the background and potentially not doing much, but Musk makes it so that people will start interacting with them because of something the character can't really control.

Yeah, but, again, it makes it an entire playbook where the mandatory deal is a lack of deodorant. Like, the thing you mentioned is fine, but, it's kind of a weird deal, especially when all the other stuff in it is so flexible. "You can be any playbook you want as long as it's sweaty hobo man".


Toph Bei Fong posted:

I say the following as someone who loves Monsterhearts. It's one of my favorite games.

The tight focus is the best and worst thing about it. It's a social game, for better or for worse.

Almost the entire game runs off of Hot and Cold. Because of the power of the social moves, and because all the social moves run off of these two stats, they're important pretty much regardless of whatever playbook you're running. This over balances playbooks that have bonuses to one or both of these.

The Volatile stat may as well not exist for 90% of games, because of how reluctant most PCs are to attack other PCs. For what's ostensibly a player vs player game, it usually turns into teams of players vs NPCs pretty quick. As fun as it might be to play, for example, a werewolf whose stated goal is to kill the other PCs, you end up feeling bad OOC killing your friend's characters. Or it takes the game in abusive directions that, not without good reason, most people are trying to get away from.

Dark ends up occupying an odd niche because you could theoretically never use it and just keep making up your own ideas and assumptions, which may or may not be just as interesting as what the GM came up with.

It's a fun game I enjoy playing, but I can admit where it has its shortcomings.

Yeah, I definitely found, running MH, people only really used volatile for moves that use it. We had someone with a volatile focus but it basically immediately hit the "well, this is just unpleasant" thing.

Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

Toph Bei Fong posted:

I say the following as someone who loves Monsterhearts. It's one of my favorite games.

The tight focus is the best and worst thing about it. It's a social game, for better or for worse.

Almost the entire game runs off of Hot and Cold. Because of the power of the social moves, and because all the social moves run off of these two stats, they're important pretty much regardless of whatever playbook you're running. This over balances playbooks that have bonuses to one or both of these.

The Volatile stat may as well not exist for 90% of games, because of how reluctant most PCs are to attack other PCs. For what's ostensibly a player vs player game, it usually turns into teams of players vs NPCs pretty quick. As fun as it might be to play, for example, a werewolf whose stated goal is to kill the other PCs, you end up feeling bad OOC killing your friend's characters. Or it takes the game in abusive directions that, not without good reason, most people are trying to get away from.

Dark ends up occupying an odd niche because you could theoretically never use it and just keep making up your own ideas and assumptions, which may or may not be just as interesting as what the GM came up with.

It's a fun game I enjoy playing, but I can admit where it has its shortcomings.

I agree with you that the Hot/Cold vs. Vol/Dark stat utility discrepancy is probably the biggest mechanical issue with core MH, especially when it comes to highlights. A Vol highlight is objectively way harder to hit in game than a Hot or Cold highlight, just by virtue of the consequences in the fiction, and Dark highlights are usually going to require a Gaze roll, which aren't table-interactive. (I do think Gaze gets plenty of use at the table, but Dark's definitely still more niche than Hot and Cold.) I almost wonder if Volatile and Dark were written around expectations that the game would be played more Buffy-style, with lots of magic and combat? I mean, the Chosen exists to fuel that sort of game, even if SA meta pretty much never plays it.

On the subject of highlights and the Sasquatch: one of the redeeming features of Musk is that it gives the Sasquatch a way to hit Vol highlights without turning the scene violent. It would be kind of nice if more high-Vol playbooks had "roll Vol for something that isn't murdering" moves.

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003
I WILL CUT OFF BOTH OF MY ARMS BEFORE I VOTE FOR ANYONE THAT IS MORE POPULAR THAN BERNIE!!!!!
MH's single biggest weakness IMO is the way gaze Into the abyss is written. It's the game's only investigative Basic Move in a game based a lot around who knows what (especially about what other characters are thinking and feeling). The lack of read a sitch in MH forms a big difference from AW.

The Abyss was originally much more of A Thing in MH, but it got trimmed down. What that leaves us with is a move that's the game's closest thing to read a sitch (though it can't be used on the spur of the moment), but the way it's written leads people to think that it's mostly about magickal weirdness. Here's some quotes from Avery Alder which is way less awkward to type than McDaldno on the subject.

Edit: Also wth are you kids doing with your Volatile that it's the murder move? I played a vengeful loving Ghoul and managed to use lash out physically plenty of times without it meaning murder. You use Cold to shut someone down when the teacher is watching and lash out to put them in their place when the teacher's not watching.

I mean okay I beat up a cop and smashed that bitch's face into her own vanity mirror but Jesus, you can put someone in a locker without carving them up first

Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 01:58 on Mar 14, 2017

spectralent
Oct 1, 2014

Me and the boys poppin' down to the shops
IME everyone's constantly gazing because it's easy to fit into doing anything and is a shot at free condition clears.

malkav11
Aug 7, 2009

Halloween Jack posted:

I mean okay I beat up a cop and smashed that bitch's face into her own vanity mirror but Jesus, you can put someone in a locker without carving them up first

Wait, since when?

Alaois
Feb 7, 2012

Monsterhearts is poo poo and the Sprawl isn't balanced very well

Heliotrope
Aug 17, 2007

You're fucking subhuman

Toph Bei Fong posted:

Almost the entire game runs off of Hot and Cold. Because of the power of the social moves, and because all the social moves run off of these two stats, they're important pretty much regardless of whatever playbook you're running. This over balances playbooks that have bonuses to one or both of these.

My experience is that a lot of players will focus on Hot, because Turn On is the most obvious way of getting Strings. But playbooks that don't have high social stats usually have their own ways of dealing with that, and that's something that people new to the system might miss.

Toph Bei Fong posted:

The Volatile stat may as well not exist for 90% of games, because of how reluctant most PCs are to attack other PCs. For what's ostensibly a player vs player game, it usually turns into teams of players vs NPCs pretty quick. As fun as it might be to play, for example, a werewolf whose stated goal is to kill the other PCs, you end up feeling bad OOC killing your friend's characters. Or it takes the game in abusive directions that, not without good reason, most people are trying to get away from.

It sounds like that might be an issue with your group. I've played in many games either as a character with high Volatile or around characters who use it and that's never been a problem. Aside from the fact that not every fight is to the death, you also have 2 ways to avoid death each session - and getting to the point where you're going to die a third time is really rare.

Toph Bei Fong posted:

Dark ends up occupying an odd niche because you could theoretically never use it and just keep making up your own ideas and assumptions, which may or may not be just as interesting as what the GM came up with.

The thing is that Gazes give you information that you can't really get from other basic moves. So if a vampire overlord has rolled into town, you'll probably need to Gaze if you want to know what's up with them or what they might be planning. Guessing isn't really going to help you there.

Antivehicular posted:

I agree with you that the Hot/Cold vs. Vol/Dark stat utility discrepancy is probably the biggest mechanical issue with core MH, especially when it comes to highlights. A Vol highlight is objectively way harder to hit in game than a Hot or Cold highlight, just by virtue of the consequences in the fiction, and Dark highlights are usually going to require a Gaze roll, which aren't table-interactive. (I do think Gaze gets plenty of use at the table, but Dark's definitely still more niche than Hot and Cold.) I almost wonder if Volatile and Dark were written around expectations that the game would be played more Buffy-style, with lots of magic and combat? I mean, the Chosen exists to fuel that sort of game, even if SA meta pretty much never plays it.

I think this is a bit of an issue for characters with low Volatile at the beginning of games, but if a skin has high Volatile then that's something you're supposed to do more often. The principal of "Treat your NPCs like stolen cars" is supposed to make it so that there's "constant drama, constant sex, constant violence, and constant chaos," so it's not just games with a Chosen that should have a lot of violence come up. Avery is even removing the Chosen from the core Skins in the second edition.

Antivehicular posted:

On the subject of highlights and the Sasquatch: one of the redeeming features of Musk is that it gives the Sasquatch a way to hit Vol highlights without turning the scene violent. It would be kind of nice if more high-Vol playbooks had "roll Vol for something that isn't murdering" moves.

It works for the Sasquatch because they're supposed to be more silent and hidden, so them having Volatile-linked abilities not about punching people works. I can't really say the same for the rest of the high Volatile skins.

Zurui
Apr 20, 2005
Even now...



I love Monsterhearts but having twice played a Mortal who was trying to investigate monsters (which is an explicitly supported mode of play), Gaze is really terrible for investigating as written. There are just entire pieces of the genre that are unsupported by the book.

Wrestlepig
Feb 25, 2011

my mum says im cool

Toilet Rascal
I think Monsterhearts wants investigation to be driven by interacting with other characters and learning from people rather than detectiving. I think the Act Under Fire equivalent does that stuff more in 2e, though I don't have it on hand, so it's an avenue of play that's getting opened up.

xiw
Sep 25, 2011

i wake up at night
night action madness nightmares
maybe i am scum

Cpig Haiku contest 2020 winner
Monsterhearts just isn't that great a game for teams of PCs working together - better to go play monster of the week in that case. Every good game of MH I've had has been focused around conflict within the PC group, and every bad game of it has been PCs vs NPCs.

It really helps if people are treating it more like Fiasco and actively plotting their own characters' downfall and playing to lose though

GodFish
Oct 10, 2012

We're your first, last, and only line of defense. We live in secret. We exist in shadow.

And we dress in black.
In my experience PCs tend to pair off to fight each other, more than anything else.

Golden Bee
Dec 24, 2009

I came here to chew bubblegum and quote 'They Live', and I'm... at an impasse.

admanb posted:

Pretty much no one is gonna say Dungeon World. It's fine as D&D+PbtA, but the D&D stat system plus any-stat Defy Danger is arguably the worst thing ever done in a popular PbtA hack.

I would say Apocalypse World 2e, Monsterhearts, The Sprawl, World Wide Wrestling.

I'd put Masks above WWWRPG (even tho I wrote an expansion!). WWWRPG requires the players to want to tell the same story concretely; it's very easy and unrewarding to go full PVP. I think you have to set player expectations very clearly that keeping your job is a priority as much as entertaining the fans and 'winning'.


---
I'm playing a Sasquatch in a game w/ a Witch, (a retired ghoul), A Mortal, A Selkie and a Daemon. And the Sasq is a great skin for shyness and being a self-perpetuating loser. But the moves aren't all equally good; I feel "Negatives" is too specific [are you really going to make evidence disappear more than once a campaign?], and "Long Fuse" is heartbreaking.

quote:

When you or someone wrapped in your arms would take harm, you may negate that harm. If you do so, name
something that you hold dear - if you don't destroy that something later, do yourself the harm then.

But then you get things like Understanding:

quote:

When you hold someone close, gain a String on them.

It's unfair to call the Sasquatch a stinky hobo class. Reread Musk:

quote:

You have a distinct smell, unpleasant to some, intriguing to others.
When you sweat in the presence of other people, roll with volatile.
...
On a 7-9, the MC gives you a String on someone there, and that character
gives you a Condition, delivered in the most appropriate way.

You are shy, clingy and bullied, with potential self-harm issues. That's just as good as core things like the Ghost (unable to process trauma) or the Witch (power without community.)

spectralent
Oct 1, 2014

Me and the boys poppin' down to the shops

Golden Bee posted:

I'm playing a Sasquatch in a game w/ a Witch, (a retired ghoul), A Mortal, A Selkie and a Daemon. And the Sasq is a great skin for shyness and being a self-perpetuating loser. But the moves aren't all equally good; I feel "Negatives" is too specific [are you really going to make evidence disappear more than once a campaign?], and "Long Fuse" is heartbreaking.

It's one of those moves that's better on other classes. Specifically, Infernals with Unknowable. You might get into legal trouble if you keep punching everyone for no reason, but if you can make evidence disappear it's a solved problem! (And if people want to kill you for being a lunatic, Short Rest For The Wicked)

admanb
Jun 18, 2014

Golden Bee posted:

I'd put Masks above WWWRPG (even tho I wrote an expansion!). WWWRPG requires the players to want to tell the same story concretely; it's very easy and unrewarding to go full PVP. I think you have to set player expectations very clearly that keeping your job is a priority as much as entertaining the fans and 'winning'.

I'm not going to argue with you, but I would say that someone designing a PbtA should read WWWRPG precisely because of how bound it is to the story it wants to tell.

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003
I WILL CUT OFF BOTH OF MY ARMS BEFORE I VOTE FOR ANYONE THAT IS MORE POPULAR THAN BERNIE!!!!!
WWWRPG is a head-scratcher for me at times, like how Real represents both your ability to shoot on someone, i.e. really fight, and your ability to shoot on the mic, i.e. break kayfabe.

Heliotrope
Aug 17, 2007

You're fucking subhuman

Golden Bee posted:

I'm playing a Sasquatch in a game w/ a Witch, (a retired ghoul), A Mortal, A Selkie and a Daemon. And the Sasq is a great skin for shyness and being a self-perpetuating loser. But the moves aren't all equally good; I feel "Negatives" is too specific [are you really going to make evidence disappear more than once a campaign?], and "Long Fuse" is heartbreaking.

You can also use it to remove memories of yourself from people that don't have Strings on you. But I have seen a Sasquatch use it multiple times in a game I've played, and it doesn't seem like something that would be limited - in a Monsterhearts game you're likely to keep doing stuff that would get you trouble if you get caught. It also has an interesting synergy with Icebreaker, since you can find out stuff about people and make them forget that they told you and how awkward you are.

Capfalcon
Apr 6, 2012

No Boots on the Ground,
Puny Mortals!

Halloween Jack posted:

WWWRPG is a head-scratcher for me at times, like how Real represents both your ability to shoot on someone, i.e. really fight, and your ability to shoot on the mic, i.e. break kayfabe.

Disclaimer: I haven't read WWWRPG.

However, it makes sense in the way Apoc World stats make sense. It's not representing how tough or strong you are. It's about representing how good you are at going off script and/or forcing people to deal with you.

Also, I've never been fond of the sasquatch's theme, if only because there's not a lot of monster there. All the other monsters are mostly humanish, but with something horribly, horribly transgressive that they're hiding. They're either undead, wild things with no place in a human world, or literal witches. Chosen and Queens are in a weird space, admittedly. However, I'm willing to give them a pass because both of them being pretty iconic for supernatural teen drama. In addition, the Chosen usually has a lot to hide, and the Queen can be a monster if they want.

But, Sasquatches have to hide the terrifying secret of... smelling weird? They're the skin that's encouraged to hide, but I'm not really sure what they're hiding. They're just shy, which doesn't really make much of a monster to me.

Capfalcon fucked around with this message at 22:19 on Mar 14, 2017

The Lore Bear
Jan 21, 2014

I don't know what to put here. Guys? GUYS?!
That's generally how I read it. It's better than tossing real fighting into Work (which then means Work is really, really good) or tossing going off script into Look, and definitely better than adding another stat to split the two. There's enough moves to pick up to change how you use the basic moves, so in play, it rarely comes up if you want to play someone who's a traditional shooter sort or a wildcard promo sort.

Wrestlepig
Feb 25, 2011

my mum says im cool

Toilet Rascal

Halloween Jack posted:

WWWRPG is a head-scratcher for me at times, like how Real represents both your ability to shoot on someone, i.e. really fight, and your ability to shoot on the mic, i.e. break kayfabe.

The shoot isn't about actual fighting skill, the roll is about whether the audience likes it and if it pisses off anyone backstage.

Covok
May 27, 2013

Yet where is that woman now? Tell me, in what heave does she reside? None of them. Because no God bothered to listen or care. If that is what you think it means to be a God, then you and all your teachings are welcome to do as that poor women did. And vanish from these realms forever.
I just found Farflung: Sci-Fi Role-Play After Dark from an ad on DTRPG. If this game turns out to be good, it will be the only good thing from having to use internet explorer on my work computer (long story that I probably legally can't divulge). So, anyway, is this game any good?

Golden Bee
Dec 24, 2009

I came here to chew bubblegum and quote 'They Live', and I'm... at an impasse.

thelazyblank posted:

That's generally how I read it. It's better than tossing real fighting into Work (which then means Work is really, really good) or tossing going off script into Look, and definitely better than adding another stat to split the two. There's enough moves to pick up to change how you use the basic moves, so in play, it rarely comes up if you want to play someone who's a traditional shooter sort or a wildcard promo sort.

Power is the dump stat. In my games I rename it Force, to represent Scott Steinering your way thru backstage politics. (The man got a World Title run b/c everyone was legit scared of him.)

Tevery Best
Oct 11, 2013

Hewlo Furriend
Please don't make me run a WWW game

my first character was a +3 Power -3 Work Giant named Stran Ogromnay who was from SOVIET RUSSIA* (the story was set in present day, originally there was no explanation) and later on had a backstory revealed where he travelled to Afghanistan to find the bones of his dead father who was killed by a CIA agent, who was then revealed to have been THE CHESSMASTER (chess-themed villain of the promotion) who time-travelled to do that for reasons

and backstage he still had probably the most serious character development of any character I've ever played in any game

WWW kicks so much rear end it's not even funny

*actually was a classical philology graduate from rural Minnesota who was way too much into bodybuilding at university and could not find a real job after graduation, so he decided to sign up for wrasslin'

spectralent
Oct 1, 2014

Me and the boys poppin' down to the shops
Do you guys directly show backstage or leave it implicated?

Tevery Best
Oct 11, 2013

Hewlo Furriend
Depends? Usually there's at least some moments explaining stuff from the backstage perspective, but how much you actually engage with it is up to you. I had a big backstory about being the last wrestler from the original promotion and having a lot of respect and trust from the management and trying to use this to position myself as essentially a representative of the wrestlers to help others resolve conflicts with the upstairs (think The Undertaker), so understandably it was a big deal for me, and from what I gather the expansion book had a lot of stuff for behind-the-scenes drama thrown in, which means that this is definitely a legitimate focus for the game.

But you can run WWW as just the on-camera product just as well, with everyone never leaving kayfabe and whatever conflicts develop naturally being treated as scripted and written ahead of time. It's fully up to you.

EDIT: I think it's part of the wrestling experience that breaking kayfabe may be fully within kayfabe

Lichtenstein
May 31, 2012

It'll make sense, eventually.

spectralent posted:

Do you guys directly show backstage or leave it implicated?

As the GM of that campaign: shown directly backstage, though in truth, it keeps being interrupted by crazy in-ring poo poo.

My general idea was Lucha Underground-style backstage vignettes + making sure to give folks some time for locker room talk whenever opportunity for drama arised.

The expansion has an awesome mini-expansion inside that is basically a bunch of * World style moves for various non-kayfabe slice of life, ranging from selling your dignity at conventions, through long car trip talks and visits back at the dysfunctional home, all the way to memesters hijacking your twitter feed. It is awesome.

quote:

But you can run WWW as just the on-camera product just as well, with everyone never leaving kayfabe and whatever conflicts develop naturally being treated as scripted and written ahead of time. It's fully up to you.

Yeah, it's very flexible in terms of style, with perhaps the one limitation being the "combat" itself won't ever be treated too seriously in this system.

Lichtenstein
May 31, 2012

It'll make sense, eventually.
The same mini-expansion also suggest something akin to Dungeon World's Defy Danger, recontextualizing the stats to real-life applications, which honestly is quite nice for how lame usually the multi-stat moves are in these games.

Golden Bee
Dec 24, 2009

I came here to chew bubblegum and quote 'They Live', and I'm... at an impasse.

Lichtenstein posted:

The same mini-expansion also suggest something akin to Dungeon World's Defy Danger, recontextualizing the stats to real-life applications, which honestly is quite nice for how lame usually the multi-stat moves are in these games.
Completely coincidentally, we had a foreigner in my last game, a German named LICHKTEN STEIN.

I'm really happy with the descriptions Nate & I came up with, for example:

quote:

WORK is your skill at wrestling, but also your dedication to the craft. Use Work when focusing on the career of wrestling, explaining to loved ones what it means to you, keeping kayfabe, and maintaining a (semi-)healthy lifestyle between matches.
Those with high Work scores are defined by technical excellence and the longevity of their careers.

Also, in the Traveling section, a suggested plotline:

quote:

On the way to a show in Scotland, the entire federation is caught in a magical fog. Turns out Brigadoon really, really likes wrestling.

Golden Bee fucked around with this message at 00:48 on Mar 16, 2017

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003
I WILL CUT OFF BOTH OF MY ARMS BEFORE I VOTE FOR ANYONE THAT IS MORE POPULAR THAN BERNIE!!!!!
We discussed this a little in the F&F thread; I was confused about the Stats in WWW because it seemed like Work was useless (I'm working off the free stuff they were distributing off a blog or something before the official release). You could also use Power or Look to wrestle, and Work doesn't do anything but wrestle, so I was confused as to why you want Work.

Other posters in that thread said that fictionally, you should be using Work to wrestle the vast majority of the time. That surprised me; based on the descriptions I figured that guys like the Big Show used Power for most of what they do (showing off their raw size and power) and guys like Hogan used Look for most of what they do (long standoffs, mugging for the camera, posing, a limited arsenal of showy moves).

I'm also endlessly confused by the places where the Moves seem to cross between backstage and kayfabe, like how Heels can override Creative's booking.

Golden Bee
Dec 24, 2009

I came here to chew bubblegum and quote 'They Live', and I'm... at an impasse.
The book goes into it a lot, but:

The Big Show has used his technical chops like, twice. If Daniel Bryan challenged him to a submission match, he'd look dumb.

TBS has great +Work sometimes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjHpnoCag-g

Tevery Best
Oct 11, 2013

Hewlo Furriend

Halloween Jack posted:

We discussed this a little in the F&F thread; I was confused about the Stats in WWW because it seemed like Work was useless (I'm working off the free stuff they were distributing off a blog or something before the official release). You could also use Power or Look to wrestle, and Work doesn't do anything but wrestle, so I was confused as to why you want Work.

Other posters in that thread said that fictionally, you should be using Work to wrestle the vast majority of the time. That surprised me; based on the descriptions I figured that guys like the Big Show used Power for most of what they do (showing off their raw size and power) and guys like Hogan used Look for most of what they do (long standoffs, mugging for the camera, posing, a limited arsenal of showy moves).

I'm also endlessly confused by the places where the Moves seem to cross between backstage and kayfabe, like how Heels can override Creative's booking.

I think Lichtenstein specifically is going a little bit overboard with subsuming everything to Work, but you definitely do roll Work for like 80% of Wrestling. It has the unfortunate downside of making high-Work characters a bit boring to fight against (since they're going to rarely miss), but on the other hand playing a low-Work wrestler is super fun because you have to keep coming up with novel ways of using, say, Power. It's why my signature move for most of my early career was throwing people into the announcer table or even the drat crowd. (I later branched out into Heat.)

That's because most of the bread-and-butter wrestling moves fall under Work. Wanna clothesline somebody real hard? Work. Figure Four Leg Lock? Work. Superkick to the face? It's flashy, but most of the time it's not flashy enough - Work. And that's not getting into real technical excellence.

As for booking overrides: the magic is that Creative's booking is in the grey area between in-character and OOC. Depending on where you are and what you want to do, you can declare that it was actually a real breach of the booking (usually if you injure somebody in the ring) and see what interesting backstage consequences it may have, or you can just keep a straight face and say "that was how it was supposed to be all along," with the override being a fully in-kayfabe matter. Or you can yet again keep it in the grey area.

It all depends on what you want it to do and what is interesting, and in my experience WWW is really great about that specific element of PbtA.

Pope Guilty
Nov 6, 2006

The human animal is a beautiful and terrible creature, capable of limitless compassion and unfathomable cruelty.
I'm reading Dungeon World and I have to ask, is this game intended to be crazy lethal? A hack and slash roll under 10 causes the PC to get hit by the enemy, and then the enemy also gets to attack with the GM's deal damage or monster moves? Especially since you're only getting another HP or two, like, ever, by increasing Constitution, from your initial total?

admanb
Jun 18, 2014

Pope Guilty posted:

I'm reading Dungeon World and I have to ask, is this game intended to be crazy lethal? A hack and slash roll under 10 causes the PC to get hit by the enemy, and then the enemy also gets to attack with the GM's deal damage or monster moves? Especially since you're only getting another HP or two, like, ever, by increasing Constitution, from your initial total?

So... no. Monsters don't generally just get to deal damage. The GM usually declares "the monster is doing [some threatening move]" and then the player chooses how they're going to react to it. Then if the player fails or gets certain partial success results, the monster deals damage. That's the soft move > hard move flow of Dungeon World.

The exception is if it's like, a loving dragon. Or if the PC did something that clearly exposes them to an attack.

As far as the math, while player HP doesn't scale super high, monster damage and HP also do not scale. And characters can get very durable and also do tons of damage. If anything you're a lot more likely to have the opposite problem where your combat-focused characters seem effectively unkillable.

Oh, you should read this guide.

Kaja Rainbow
Oct 17, 2012

~Adorable horror~
Yeah, what admanb said. Really, lethality wasn't a big problem in the one Dungeon World game I ran. Yeah, PCs could get pretty beaten up sometimes, but that's mostly because I was pressing them and making a lot of threatening soft moves. And I know this one player went through a lot of shields in that game--they kept getting destroyed, mostly because the player used their shield to defend against everything reasonable to do so. Which meant a lot of middling (7-9) Defy Danger results and the like resulted in the shield getting sacrificed instead of the player's health.

There're all kinds of options, really, not just straight dealing damage.

Kaja Rainbow
Oct 17, 2012

~Adorable horror~
For example let's say a giant picks someone up and shakes them instead of outright bashing them. They likely didn't suffer that much damage, but they're probably disoriented from being shaken, plus they're dangling from the giant's hand. You've just put them into a perilous spot.

Take hostages. Knock them off cliffs so that they're clinging narrowly to life. Poison them with a stinger so that they're suffering. Hijack their minds and turn them against their allies. Enemies can do all sorts of things on a failed player roll. And, yeah, damage's definitely on the table, make their lives feel threatened. But always give them a chance to response to such bad situations. You don't have to do that on a failed roll though--you can just do whatever to them directly. That's what a failed roll means.

But above all, follow the fiction. Do what makes sense in the situation.

Pope Guilty
Nov 6, 2006

The human animal is a beautiful and terrible creature, capable of limitless compassion and unfathomable cruelty.
Thanks very much! I'm like 4 pages into that pdf and already wishing it was included with the pile of pdfs you get when you buy DW on DriveThruRPG.

Error 404
Jul 17, 2009


MAGE CURES PLOT

Pope Guilty posted:

Thanks very much! I'm like 4 pages into that pdf and already wishing it was included with the pile of pdfs you get when you buy DW on DriveThruRPG.

Welcome to dungeon world! Its fun as hell, even if flawed

Exmond
May 31, 2007

Writing is fun!
If anybody follows Urban Shadows the expansion got released after 2+ years.

http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/206665/Dark-Streets

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Golden Bee
Dec 24, 2009

I came here to chew bubblegum and quote 'They Live', and I'm... at an impasse.
Dark Streets rules.

I released a free expansion playbook for Masks. Only read it if you want to be the best.

Enjoy The Ascendant.

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