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LongDarkNight posted:All of the above is true but I'll stand up for DW as being a great, if flawed, gateway to bring folks entrenched in Dungeons & Dragons into the world of narrative games.
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Dec 24, 2017 04:58
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Armor on NPCs is super good and makes for incredibly boring fights and damage is swingy as hell with all the the 1d8s-with-no-modifier - when loving kobolds have effective 4 hp, you can have a whole lot of boring 'okay i inflict damage' moves going on. Monster armor shouldn't reduce damage below 1 at least. The biggest crime for me is that it doesn't have the incentives to disagree with other players and get that interesting table banter going on - you are generally going to be the standard D&D group working together, and bonds don't really cut it as far as producing intraparty tension.
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Dec 24, 2017 07:03
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Although people may disagree, I think fellowship is a success in every area of the Dungeon world is a failure. Play directly making race equal class for all but three of the classes, but making you define your race completely uniquely, You let players be a type of thing while giving them a mechanical support to build it exactly their way. The only problem is that +blood is a extremely useful stat, and pushes people to resolve things with violence, but that too is very D&D. I’m sure if you had players consult on their character builds it wouldn’t be huge.
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Dec 24, 2017 07:08
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Unrelatedly, I was thinking of Modifying spirit of 77 so that act under pressure isn’t plus whatever stat. Since soul is only really useful to rocker characters, I was thinking of making it +Soul like in Cartel. At least in parties without rockers, this gives a lot more chance for players to either prioritize being good in a pinch or failing when the chips are down. As it stands, rolling +soul is completely optional in a session.
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Dec 24, 2017 07:16
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Golden Bee posted:Although people may disagree, I think fellowship is a success in every area of the Dungeon world is a failure. Play directly making race equal class for all but three of the classes, but making you define your race completely uniquely, You let players be a type of thing while giving them a mechanical support to build it exactly their way. The only problem is that +blood is a extremely useful stat, and pushes people to resolve things with violence, but that too is very D&D. I’m sure if you had players consult on their character builds it wouldn’t be huge. All the stuff with players defining what their races are is very cool. Actually, basically all of Fellowship is cool. (Except how you can get a bunch of hirelings? I never really understood how that'd work in play).
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Dec 24, 2017 14:49
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BinaryDoubts posted:All the stuff with players defining what their races are is very cool. Actually, basically all of Fellowship is cool. (Except how you can get a bunch of hirelings? I never really understood how that'd work in play). Like the biker leader playbook from AW?
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Dec 24, 2017 15:32
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The criticism of Dungeon World I'd seen before around these parts and which I think is a good summation of its issues is that PBTA works best when you're designing it to emulate a very specific genre of story, whereas Dungeon World is just trying to emulate D&D, which is anything but specific. Also, it clearly works to at least some degree for trying to get people weaned off D&D and I'd certainly rather play it than D&D, but I feel like it's close enough to D&D that people instinctively try to play it the same way, which doesn't work.
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Dec 24, 2017 17:20
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LongDarkNight posted:All of the above is true but I'll stand up for DW as being a great, if flawed, gateway to bring folks entrenched in Dungeons & Dragons into the world of narrative games. This is true. I've run tons of DW demos for people who've never played anything but 3.Path, and the similarities to what they're familiar with helped people get it in like five minutes. As for alternates, there's this DW hack/rewrite called Worlds of Aventure that was made to align DW with current PbtA understandings. No spell lists, simplified damage, stuff like that. I haven't played it, but it looks good.
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Dec 24, 2017 17:38
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I think someone is stealing Legacy 2e's cover art: http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/229616/ ed: nevermind probably, the artist is listed as the same name. Still kinda weird though. Foglet fucked around with this message at 20:11 on Dec 24, 2017 |
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Dec 24, 2017 20:07
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Foglet posted:I think someone is stealing Legacy 2e's cover art: Well, that makes a certain decision a lot easier. The cover was one of the art pieces we didn't have exclusive rights to, and to be honest it wasn't perfect. Time to commission more art!
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Dec 24, 2017 20:37
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malkav11 posted:The criticism of Dungeon World I'd seen before around these parts and which I think is a good summation of its issues is that PBTA works best when you're designing it to emulate a very specific genre of story, whereas Dungeon World is just trying to emulate D&D, which is anything but specific. Also, it clearly works to at least some degree for trying to get people weaned off D&D and I'd certainly rather play it than D&D, but I feel like it's close enough to D&D that people instinctively try to play it the same way, which doesn't work. Take Apocalypse World itself - you could run Fury Road, The Road, A Boy and His Dog, Turbo Kid, Fallout, Blame!, Thundarr the Barbarian, Nausicaä of the Valley of Wind, Reign of Fire... There's a very wide swath of post-apocalyptic literature, all with very different tones and scales, you could tap and easily see work in AW. It's just a matter of talking out the scale of what a move can accomplish and what sort of things are in theme to establish in fiction. You could also work further away and have a medieval or old west game without changing much at all. You can see the same with other PbtA games, where tweaking some baseline agreed assumptions let's you cover a variety of inspirational works. Fellowship can give you Tolkien, but it can also give you Star Wars or .hack//sign... or to go very sideways a World War story. There's a difference between those examples that's important. For AW, having it work properly requires a few key setting ideas - scarce resources, a hostile environment, and a lack of established authority to enforce the law. In Fellowship, it's the broad thematic elements that matter - the quest, the dark power to challenge, the strained alliances. So with Dungeon World, it isn't that there's not a narrow enough genre in D&D to emulate, because PbtAs can be quite broad. Rather, it's that DW didn't sit down and devote enough thought to what key setting or thematic elements actually make D&D different from other fantasy. Because the reality is D&D has never been good at broad fantasy stories anyways. You can tell a lot of different stories in a lot of different settings with what it does have - from the Realms to Athas to Eberron to Spelljammer to Planescape - but the truth is you still come back to some core themes. Frankly it's right in the name. Dungeons, and dragons. You explore dangerous complexes in remote places, and fight big scary monsters, and then go back the safety of civilization to celebrate your success. And there are actually a lot of different stories like that. Outside of D&D, pretty much anything episodic built around a team of people going somewhere dangerous works. Destiny, Diablo, Stargate, Star Trek, and so on.
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Dec 24, 2017 22:33
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Do you know if anyone has done, like, an overview of how PbtA has mechanically evolved and what DW and other titles did wrong and what interesting new developments happened in newer takes on it?
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Dec 25, 2017 01:52
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Quidthulhu posted:What’s the best system, then? megane posted:I would kill for a better "D&D but in PbtA" game. may i introduce you to streets of marienburg? https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B5K_Bqfr0dqcVUFZeWpsa0E5T0k/edit?pli=1
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Dec 25, 2017 06:46
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So I'm pretty new to the greater PbtA world. What do you all think would be the best existing system to run something similar in style to The Warriors and especially Streets of Fire? Cool, low-powered, but slightly heightened in tone? Where a single revolver can tip the scales of a street fight, and a duel using sledgehammers doesn't seem out of place.
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Dec 25, 2017 07:44
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mixmastermind posted:So I'm pretty new to the greater PbtA world. What do you all think would be the best existing system to run something similar in style to The Warriors and especially Streets of Fire? Cool, low-powered, but slightly heightened in tone? Where a single revolver can tip the scales of a street fight, and a duel using sledgehammers doesn't seem out of place. Blades in the Dark?
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Dec 25, 2017 07:46
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Spirit of '77 can be played like that, if you just don't use the various "70's Scifi" stuff which is pretty well encapsulated so you can do just that. Blades in the Dark could also be hacked into that shape, it depends on what you want your playcycle to look like honestly.
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Dec 25, 2017 10:11
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HCFJ posted:may i introduce you to streets of marienburg? That is still Dungeon World, with too many attributes and rolled damage and presumably the crap Defy Danger.
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Dec 25, 2017 14:06
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homullus posted:That is still Dungeon World, with too many attributes and rolled damage and presumably the crap Defy Danger. I'm making a hack of this and I'd like to know what you recommend in place of those things.
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Dec 25, 2017 17:45
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HCFJ posted:I'm making a hack of this and I'd like to know what you recommend in place of those things. All of those things are better in their AW form. Static damage makes combat less swingy and makes threat selection easier; there's also some niche protection, such that the fighting-mans can consistently do the best in combat. Similarly, "Defy Danger" allowing you to use whatever attribute is dumb: only characters who have training for that sort of thing should be good at it. If you want to be a wizard who's got a little more real-world experience (and thus is better at acting under fire), it's at the expense of something else.
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Dec 25, 2017 20:06
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homullus posted:All of those things are better in their AW form. Static damage makes combat less swingy and makes threat selection easier; there's also some niche protection, such that the fighting-mans can consistently do the best in combat. Similarly, "Defy Danger" allowing you to use whatever attribute is dumb: only characters who have training for that sort of thing should be good at it. If you want to be a wizard who's got a little more real-world experience (and thus is better at acting under fire), it's at the expense of something else. I'm going to elaborate on this a bit more, because multi-stat moves in PBTA games are my white whale and I don't want anyone to think they should never touch them under any circumstances. So, multi-stat moves are fundamentally things you want a lot of character types to be good at in their own way. Take Finish Them from Fellowship. It can be used with any stat, because it's about the myriad ways you can defeat an enemy (combat or otherwise) and everyone being able to contribute is a key thing thematically, with each stat having a very clear set of situations where it would apply. For a more restricted example, take Talk Sense from Fellowship. (I have Fellowship handy right now and it has good examples, so sue me.) You can Talk Sense with Sense, Wisdom or Grace. Sense if you're talking about your plan because Sense is about being observant and planning things out, Wisdom if you're appealing to their emotions because Wisdom is about being attuned to people, Grace if you're getting by on flash or lying to people's faces because Grace is about being a tricky, flashy fucker. (I'm playing an rear end in a top hat elf in a Fellowship game, so I'm biased.) And this works, because those are all valid ways to convince people to do something for you and there isn't a good reason to split those off into separate moves. Now, why does Defy Danger suck? Three reasons. 1) D&D stats just suck in general. The stats have vague, badly-balanced areas they cover, so a move that uses multiple stats are going to be vague and badly-balanced no matter what. 2) Dungeon World's moveset just kind of sucks. The moves are weird and don't cover much, so 75% of what you'll want to do is just going to default to "eh, try Defy Danger". 3) Defying Danger is just too broad for one single move. "When you defy danger, do X" could trigger at literally any time. I know I just mentioned a broad multi-stat move in the form of Finish Them, but "when you attempt to defeat an enemy you hold an advantage over" is so much more specific than just defying danger and the Fellowship stats and how they'd interact with a multi-stat move are so much more clearly defined than the six D&D stats. Anyway, a pulpy adventure game like Dungeon World has a place for a multi-stat move that covers doing a bunch of pulpy nonsense like Defy Danger, but you're going to need to think about it more than they did with Defy Danger.
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Dec 25, 2017 21:50
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I like World Of Dungeon's approach of Defy Danger being the only move. Keeps things simple. I think Hack and Slash and Defend are the worst offenders for moves, I'd really prefer a seize by force style thing
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Dec 25, 2017 22:22
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Quidthulhu posted:What’s the best system, then? Or are you asking, "which is the best PbtA game?" Because the answer to that one is clear: Apocalypse World. I've played a lot of different hacks of Apocalypse World by this point, and the difference between the good ones and the mediocre ones usually boils down to two simple (and related) factors: how well do the basic moves of the game support the theme/genre, and how "complete" are they (in other words, how many situations crop up where you feel like something should be up to chance, but none of the moves really fit). The most recent one we played was Cartel, which we pretty much all agreed was spot-on thematically (and all the playbook moves were great), but in which there was just some stuff missing. Turn to Violence and Propose a Deal were the worst offenders for lack of clarity, but the fact that there wasn't really a move for physical threats or intimidation (i.e. no analog for go aggro) seemed like a gaping hole in a game about Mexican drug dealers. And Pressure someone didn't really fit that bill, which left us kind of scratching our heads. On the topic of Defy Danger, I find that the cardinal rule of "to do it, do it" salvages some of the move's worst offenses. Let the fiction set which stat you're using. If you're trying to dodge a falling boulder, that's not WIS or CON, it is clearly and obviously DEX. So as the DM, when the player says, "gently caress, I jump out of the way!" it's your job to say, "Great, roll+DEX!" And if their DEX sucks, well, mebbe they'll get some XP out of the deal. It's also totally cool to respond to, "gently caress it, I'll just stand my ground and take the boulder! Defy Danger with CON?" with, "No, rear end in a top hat, a boulder has just dropped on you. Take damage" because that fits the fiction, and YOU (the GM) ultimately decide when a move triggers and when it doesn't. But that doesn't change the fact that the move is poorly designed and not at all helpful to DMs new to Dungeon World.
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Dec 26, 2017 00:52
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I think the first step in making DW 2.0 is to redo the stats completely. There should be exactly four of them and they need to be carefully chosen instead of just copied from D&D (which had a terrible, boring-rear end stat array before it was blindly dumped into a system where stats work in a totally different way). And yeah, if you're going to have a basic move in the Act Under Fire / Defy Danger / Hold Steady / Adventure / Overcome family, it should sit on one particular stat, preferably the one that's least useful otherwise. Personally I would start with something like Might, Wisdom, Skill, and Charisma, but obviously that's just a first shot. As for the other basic moves, they... probably all need to be at least edited. Spout Lore and Discern Realities can probably be merged, Defend can be replaced with something more like the AW battle moves, and like the person a few posts above said, it's probably best to dump H&S and Volley in favor of a more carefully-worded Seize-By-Force-alike. megane fucked around with this message at 06:06 on Dec 26, 2017 |
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Dec 26, 2017 06:01
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Ilor posted:On the topic of Defy Danger, I find that the cardinal rule of "to do it, do it" salvages some of the move's worst offenses. Let the fiction set which stat you're using. If you're trying to dodge a falling boulder, that's not WIS or CON, it is clearly and obviously DEX. So as the DM, when the player says, "gently caress, I jump out of the way!" it's your job to say, "Great, roll+DEX!" And if their DEX sucks, well, mebbe they'll get some XP out of the deal. It's also totally cool to respond to, "gently caress it, I'll just stand my ground and take the boulder! Defy Danger with CON?" with, "No, rear end in a top hat, a boulder has just dropped on you. Take damage" because that fits the fiction, and YOU (the GM) ultimately decide when a move triggers and when it doesn't. You are correct that having the GM stick to their guns on it mostly fixes Defy Danger, but then it falls into the other problem with Defy Danger: over half the time +Dex is the only correct stat to Defy with, because people use it to try and dodge things. You will almost never roll +STR, +CON, or +WIS to Defy Danger in normal play. Every physical roll seems to somehow end up DEX, and sometimes you use INT for a puzzle, and sometimes you use CHA to fast talk, and that's all the Defy Dangers you get! Which of course leads to: megane posted:I think the first step in making DW 2.0 is to redo the stats completely. There should be exactly four of them and they need to be carefully chosen instead of just copied from D&D (which had a terrible, boring-rear end stat array before it was blindly dumped into a system where stats work in a totally different way). And yeah, if you're going to have a basic move in the Act Under Fire / Defy Danger / Hold Steady / Adventure / Overcome family, it should sit on one particular stat, preferably the one that's least useful otherwise. Which also ended up being basically how Fellowship's stats and moves got to be what they are now. It started as a DW 2.0 attempt that rapidly evolved into its own (but still somewhat related) thing.
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Dec 26, 2017 06:37
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I’d go with Guts, Slick, Brains and Faith. Really it’s just adjectives for each basic class, which are your building blocks for classes.
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Dec 26, 2017 06:50
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gnome7 posted:You are correct that having the GM stick to their guns on it mostly fixes Defy Danger, but then it falls into the other problem with Defy Danger: over half the time +Dex is the only correct stat to Defy with, because people use it to try and dodge things. You will almost never roll +STR, +CON, or +WIS to Defy Danger in normal play. Every physical roll seems to somehow end up DEX, and sometimes you use INT for a puzzle, and sometimes you use CHA to fast talk, and that's all the Defy Dangers you get! Like I said, I think Defy Danger is poorly designed (or perhaps poorly explained), but it's not completely useless.
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Dec 26, 2017 16:05
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There's always blades against darkness, a bitd hack that's somewhere between dungeon world and torchbearer. Haven't played it but seems well done.
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Dec 26, 2017 16:58
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Ilor posted:In some sense I agree, but I think it's incumbent upon the GM to put the players in situations where "I dodge" is not the obvious answer. Any time you're exposed to poison, for instance, would be Defy Danger with +CON. Air elemental trying to blow you over? Roll+STR. WIS is the hardest one to apply, because anything you're going to do with it is better handled by read a situation or read a person. The other is that DD is broadened and designed in a way that it becomes the catch-all and the "permission to do cool things" move. It's clearly trying to crib from Do Something Under Fire, but that move is actually much narrower. Despite dungeon exploration being a key component of the genre concept, there aren't really basic moves for it - they get shoved into DD. Plus Hack & Slash and Volley are written too discretely. In AW the various versions of combat moves clearly cover a lot of the maneuvering and tricks that should be part of the DW moves as well, but the DW moves aren't really written that way. So some of that gets inappropriately offloaded onto DD. Ultimately it just goes back to the core issue with DW: it kept the wrong D&D sacred cows.
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Dec 26, 2017 17:25
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The one sacred cow that oughta be hamburger is the constant fighting. 
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Dec 26, 2017 18:03
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Comrade Gorbash posted:Ultimately it just goes back to the core issue with DW: it kept the wrong D&D sacred cows. 
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Dec 26, 2017 23:38
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What I'd want from a PBtA D&D hack is something that provides the "cool moments" you remember from D&D. The problem is, most of the ones that are D&D-specific are "and then our system mastery kicked in and we blew the fight/puzzle out of the water while the DM looked stunned the whole time" or "and then we rolled three twenties in a row" or the like. So you'd need some sort of meta-RPG where you're playing people playing D&D.
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Dec 27, 2017 00:07
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wdarkk posted:. So you'd need some sort of meta-RPG where you're playing people playing D&D. Bingo, that's a gold idea
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Dec 27, 2017 01:37
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wdarkk posted:So you'd need some sort of meta-RPG where you're playing people playing D&D. I think Ewen Cluney's actually writing that as we speak. At least, I know someone is, and I think it's Ewen.
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Dec 27, 2017 01:37
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That's because D&D isn't about making cool stories, it's about making cool characters.
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Dec 27, 2017 01:54
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I don't remember if I linked this in this thread or not, and I'm too lazy to check, but this is a DW rewrite called "Worlds of Adventure" that seeks to bring DW more in line with current PbtA understanding. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CTggilyWU7NUG5neI_OzOSykOG29RldS/view quote:The Main Changes
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Dec 27, 2017 02:32
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It still has spll lists and is drowning in +1 to a roll. GREAT barbarian tho.
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Dec 27, 2017 03:18
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BlackIronHeart posted:That's because D&D isn't about making cool stories, it's about making cool characters. Depends on which version of D&D. That's more true of 3.5/Pathfinder, for example, but older versions of D&D really didn't have any way of making cool characters. You had your class, but that was basically it as far as interesting choices in character creation. I've noticed that stories in older D&D tend to be about interesting interactions between rules and physics. Things like interesting uses for immovable rods and portable holes, the way spells would bounce on walls, and fun uses for monsters and traps. I'm not sure how to translate that into games like PbtA, though. They exist in that liminal space between rules-as-physics and GM bullshitting that exists when you have a lot of edge cases that aren't strictly defined.
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Dec 27, 2017 04:30
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potatocubed posted:I think Ewen Cluney's actually writing that as we speak. That sounds like something I want to show to my D&D group.
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Dec 27, 2017 04:33
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Worlds of Adventure is a step in the right direction, but there's definitely room for improvement. They didn't address the stats and basic moves, in particular. But drat, you've got it right that the Barbarian is amazing. Hi, I love gold so much it lets me throw boulders half a mile with one hand, fight me. We should have a PbtA Discord, I wanna run some pickup games.
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Dec 27, 2017 08:45
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The best PbtA D&D hack is Blades Against Darkness, because the core of Blades in the Dark is much better suited to hacking into D&D than AW ever was.
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