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Halloween Jack posted:A long while back, someone was asking where the Bopper fits into the kinds of stories the game is meant to tell--it actually fits snugly into a specific sub-subgenre of action movies from the tail end of the 70s and the early 80s, overlapping The Warriors, Escape from New York, and Mad Max. You might be remembering me- I had a question along those lines, though my question wasn't the flavour or tone for the Bopper but rather how it worked in play. Spirit of 77 seems more oriented towards groups of PCs working together to solve mysteries and have adventures, and when your character's special ability is that you have a dozen guys that hang out with you, it puts you on a different footing. For instance, I played a bopper in a playtest on these forums where all the PCs got into a scuffle with robots at the state fair. At some point down the line, everyone else decided to steal Evel Knievel's limo and escape. That's a cool, fun way to get out of a scene, but unless my character was willing to leave their gang (the thing that makes them special and useful) behind, they had to find their own way out, which, being a scooter gang, was fine but kind of leaves them out of the club. The Bopper is a cool playbook, but I'm just kind of curious as to the experience of others in using it- in every other game of So77 I've played in or GM'd, no one has used it. That said, I love So77 and wish I could play it more frequently. edit: Hey, there's a new Double Feature on Drivethru! Vulpes Vulpes fucked around with this message at 14:37 on Jan 2, 2018 |
# ? Jan 2, 2018 14:28 |
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# ? May 15, 2024 03:02 |
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Doesn't the DJ in The Warriors refer to gang members as Boppers at one point?
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# ? Jan 2, 2018 21:16 |
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Indeed. That said, Idunno if people who want to play Swan actually want to play a gang leader and deal with all that Chopper poo poo. After all, Cleon's probably a nightstick shoved halfway up his rear end right now.
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# ? Jan 2, 2018 21:33 |
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Covok posted:Hate to be that guy, but are you going to kick start that Dragon World game?
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# ? Jan 2, 2018 22:31 |
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Vulpes Vulpes posted:You might be remembering me- I had a question along those lines, though my question wasn't the flavour or tone for the Bopper but rather how it worked in play. Spirit of 77 seems more oriented towards groups of PCs working together to solve mysteries and have adventures, and when your character's special ability is that you have a dozen guys that hang out with you, it puts you on a different footing. For instance, I played a bopper in a playtest on these forums where all the PCs got into a scuffle with robots at the state fair. At some point down the line, everyone else decided to steal Evel Knievel's limo and escape. That's a cool, fun way to get out of a scene, but unless my character was willing to leave their gang (the thing that makes them special and useful) behind, they had to find their own way out, which, being a scooter gang, was fine but kind of leaves them out of the club. The Bopper is a cool playbook, but I'm just kind of curious as to the experience of others in using it- in every other game of So77 I've played in or GM'd, no one has used it. "Grounded" is a hell of a disadvantage. But if you grab a limo, likely they'll steal a vehicle too! Also, I don’t know if you know, but this exact adventure is used as an example of the DJ Playing to find out what happens in the core book. My character of C. Rebel Deveraux, when I was playing her as a Bopper, had a tour bus she used to transport the Salthill Casuals. And sometimes they sat on the curb or set up a perimeter.
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# ? Jan 2, 2018 23:02 |
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Yeah, the Bopper mentioned in that excerpt was my character, Reggie.
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# ? Jan 3, 2018 01:31 |
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Last Saturday was my third time running DW One-shots with my friends. The third session was definitely the best and I attribute this to really delving into the players, asking them about their characters and using their answers. It helped that everyone playing this session had played a Table Top RPG before, and that our Paladin started off with "Orcs are evil, we kill Orcs who defiled our precious Elven home!" which led us into some LotR Two Towers type shenanigans. What I came here to post though was my "Custom Moves" I had made during my second (#1 and #2) and third (#3 and #4) sessions and get some critique from more experienced DW GMs: Stand Before the Visage of the Famine Godess posted:Purpose: The Paladin had described the two gods of the realm, the benevolent "Harvest" god and the foul, omniscient "Famine" godess. I anticipated a show down with some sort of "hunger" elemental and I wanted there to be a serious "Woah this is not loving around" vibe. Confront the dreaded Snarflaughx! posted:Purpose: The Bard had talked up this insatiable, chimeric creature that could read souls, manipulate minds and had chameleon like skin. I wanted them to roll this before they could even begin to attack it, sort of like a descriptive Defy Danger. Tame a Tainted Beast of the Land posted:Purpose: The Orc army is capturing and enslaving mystical animals of the land and bending them to their will. Anytime you try to subvert this magic or connect with the animal, make this move. Command the Elvish Battalion into Formation posted:Purpose: The Elvish Paladin definitely had a "lordship" about him, and considering they were doing tactical movements, I really loved the idea of giving the character a move that demonstrated his heritage, strategic thinking and leadership. I based it off of the Druid's Shapeshift where he gets "Hold" to use, but on a Failure, the bumbling Steve Elf compromises the formation. They could spend any extra hold to give themselves +1 on the following roll as a "coordination" bonus. Looking for some feedback but also recommendations on resources for some Advanced Move creation.
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# ? Jan 4, 2018 05:43 |
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I'm working on a Fire Emblem PBTA hack with a friend, and am looking for some feedback. First and foremost, we are focusing on the intra-group dynamics of the system, and not the tactical warfare. Second, it's okay to us if this isn't the best system for this idea, it's a shared experience with my friend, so while I'm definitely open to reading other sources, we are fairly set on using PBTA for this. So we are using the Simple World starting point, and are going to be running our first one shot tonight or tomorrow, and I think we need to clean some stuff up about how we followed the template. This is only an hour or two of work, and we are following the advice of getting into playtesting immediately, but I figured you all know way more about this than we do. For stats we did this: Reflexive/Graceful
The first name listed is trying to stick to FE language, while any others are in rank order of what I think might work better for PBTA, especially looking at the advice over the last few pages. Magic and Strength in particular are the largest offenders from my perspective. For classes we just listed some of the FE staples, I can list them if needed. On the Agenda we did "How will the mercenary company survive in a big scary world?". However, on a reread this morning, I don't think we understood the question properly and thought of it from the MC perspective enough. I feel "Upset the balance of power" would work both better as an Agenda, and be FE as gently caress. Principals was straight forward I think, we added "Sacrifices are permanent and meaningful" and "Nothing is as simple as it seems". These encapsulate the FE meta of permadeath/resource scarcity and layers of intrigue the storyline tends towards over the life of the series. With MC Moves we went with "An innocent is put at risk" and "A relationship is put to the test", which once again draw directly from the narrative of the games. Finally, for the Relationship stat we called it Support (obviously) and went with the two characters special scene = up 1, and public bickering = down 1. We're already kicking the can around on how to handle the mercenary company overall, followers, additional units, resources, etc, BUT, as a huge fan of MVP, we are aggressively following the "playtest early and often mantra", so for the basics, does it look like we are moving in the right direction?
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# ? Jan 4, 2018 20:44 |
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Playtest Trip Report! So we had a Caviler (mobile mounted shock troop), a Knight (heavily armored frontline defender), a Sniper (guerrilla warfare archer) and a Fighter (Axe wielding frontline bruiser). We did light narrative before jumping into battle, and oof, we definitely did the stats wrong. We're going to have to take a look at them and define where we want the game to go towards a bit more I think, but trying to apply the FE stat names to the PBTA stat concepts was a large whiff. Strength was a bit over relied upon (not surprising considering group composition), but people kept getting tripped up on Skill vs Speed. And no one used Magic. They are plainly now not nearly evocative enough. Nothing super amazing came out of the players making up moves, although all of the moves are setting appropriate. This feels like its mostly a result of using a template framework, and we can use some of the ideas to iterate into better things. Not a huge amount here, but I did want to thumbsup getting into playtesting asap. Getting immediate and meaningful feedback on features this early is great and actually makes us want to work on it more.
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# ? Jan 5, 2018 08:32 |
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Writers of PbtA hacks may find the Idyll project interesting. It's broadly meant for data presentation stuff, but it's also one of the least annoying Markdown variants I've seen for common output layout stuff (embedded tables/images, background images, sidebar notes, etc) without putting full-on HTML in your source file, and along with a normal compile mode, it also comes with the ability to automatically publish the compiled version to Github Pages using a (free) Github account.
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# ? Jan 6, 2018 04:05 |
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What's the math on how much the "roll 3d6 pick highest 2" mechanic, like Something Extra from Spirit of 77, affects the average roll?
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# ? Jan 6, 2018 07:01 |
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mixmastermind posted:What's the math on how much the "roll 3d6 pick highest 2" mechanic, like Something Extra from Spirit of 77, affects the average roll? As I recall it's about even with a +1, but it's cooler because you roll more dice and get a "choice". I'm working on a PbtA game with the Advantage mechanic now. I expect it to work out fine.
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# ? Jan 6, 2018 07:13 |
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mixmastermind posted:What's the math on how much the "roll 3d6 pick highest 2" mechanic, like Something Extra from Spirit of 77, affects the average roll? If you go to Anydice, you can input the following: output 2d6 output [highest 2 of 3d6] This will show you the average of 2d6 and 3d6, pick highest two. The average ends up being 8.46. You actually get 9 about as often as you get 7 on 2d6. If you pick graph, you can see it a bit more clearly. 2d6 ends up being a triangle, raising up at each point at a fixed rate, while there's more of a gentle slope on the 3d6 keep the two highest. Anydice is a pretty good tool for figuring out where the math actually is in your game.
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# ? Jan 6, 2018 07:55 |
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JackMann posted:If you go to Anydice, you can input the following: Oh wow that's a really useful website, bookmarking that.
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# ? Jan 6, 2018 09:24 |
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Roadie posted:Writers of PbtA hacks may find the Idyll project interesting. It's broadly meant for data presentation stuff, but it's also one of the least annoying Markdown variants I've seen for common output layout stuff (embedded tables/images, background images, sidebar notes, etc) without putting full-on HTML in your source file, and along with a normal compile mode, it also comes with the ability to automatically publish the compiled version to Github Pages using a (free) Github account. I've been experimenting with it the last few days. I just put up a little hack to play Paranoia. I've found it a little buggy and frustrating to use, although most of that is probably my lack of familiarity with Git and Javascript. That said, the final result ended up looking pretty nice, so I can't complain about it too much.
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# ? Jan 8, 2018 22:30 |
I'm considering starting my first PbP game since I'm currently in a time zone and country where synchronous gaming is very difficult. I've settled on PbtA as the system I want to use...are there any games you'd all recommend as being especially PbP friendly? Right now my top 4 are: Monster of the Week, Fellowship, Tremulus, and Apocalypse World...though I'm open to other suggestions.
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# ? Jan 9, 2018 18:03 |
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Devorum posted:I'm considering starting my first PbP game since I'm currently in a time zone and country where synchronous gaming is very difficult. Apocalypse World 2e is great and to be honest if you're into PbtA you should try it out at least once. As with OD&D's influence on TTRPGs in general, there are some elements that have become cargo-cult-ish defaults in PbtA design that ultimately stem from actually meaningful design choices in AW. It's also particularly PBP friendly because the game assumes that each character is going to spend a lot of time pursuing their own thing rather than acting as a cohesive group. So if someone posts more rarely or needs to take a break, it's a lot easier to account for that. The revised edition of Monster of the Week is pretty good, especially if you lean into it's title and riff off things like Sailor Moon or X-Files, or the early parts of Hellboy or Fringe. It is however one of the more generic, paint-by-the-numbers PbtA games and can be a bit clunky. Fellowship is great and does a lot of unique things with the PbtA formula. However it's very group-centric so you have the usual issues with making sure everyone keeps up. It's also fairly complex for a PbtA and takes some time to get the hang of. It's probably the least PBP friendly (besides Tremulus which is unfriendly to all play modes). As another suggestion, as much as we talk about Dungeon World's faults, it's still fun to play and on the MC side is actually quite good. It can ease players used to "traditional" TTRPGs into PbtA quite well too.
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# ? Jan 9, 2018 18:43 |
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Anyone have thoughts on The Veil? The emotions-as-stats approach seems interesting, but I wonder how it goes in play?
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# ? Jan 11, 2018 22:03 |
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BinaryDoubts posted:Anyone have thoughts on The Veil? The emotions-as-stats approach seems interesting, but I wonder how it goes in play? I'm just going to quote myself from October. Lurks With Wolves posted:It's a few days late, but I've run a few sessions of The Sprawl and read through a reasonable chunk of The Veil so I might as well give my opinion. Lurks With Wolves fucked around with this message at 22:15 on Jan 11, 2018 |
# ? Jan 11, 2018 22:13 |
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Cool, thanks. From my first reading, I definitely agree that it could use some more detailed explanation and edits - and maybe a little more guidance on what the players should be actually doing.
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# ? Jan 11, 2018 22:19 |
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The veil is weird, the stat setup is very generic (although I don’t think it fits cyberpunk since that genre is dominated by the emotionally suppressed) but the playbooks are absurdly specific and weird, like Just the Solace and Debt Cop. A lot of it is copied from other games as well which really stands out.
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# ? Jan 11, 2018 22:25 |
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rumble in the bunghole posted:The veil is weird, the stat setup is very generic (although I don’t think it fits cyberpunk since that genre is dominated by the emotionally suppressed) but the playbooks are absurdly specific and weird, like Just the Solace and Debt Cop. A lot of it is copied from other games as well which really stands out. I think it suffers a lot from trying to build a broad themed game in PbtA. I think it would've been much better as a Blades hack, with Girl By Moonlight style thematic "crew" playbooks.
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# ? Jan 11, 2018 23:07 |
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Error 404 posted:This sounds cool, link? Wow I totally missed checking this thread. Here you go: Daylight Robbery Edit: Oh and there's a French version some folks translated out of an excess of keen: Braquage en Plein Jour
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# ? Jan 12, 2018 13:45 |
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In the spirit of "I want Dungeon World but with fewer D&D clunks" I've been writing and running this thing. Name provisional, in fact, everything is provisional at this point. I'd love for you guys to have a look and give me some feedback. The system began out my frustration explaining the various clunky bits of DW, and is intended for one-shots, and introducing new players to PbtA, and even to role-playing in general. In that sense, it works pretty well. I've run it for many groups, with people with different levels of experiences, and several who totally new, and it took no time at all to get playing, but I know there are a ton of mechanical problems still to address, at least one more playbook, and all the GM-side stuff
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# ? Jan 12, 2018 17:49 |
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Overcome prevents DM from making slower soft moves. A lot of these moves don’t get what you want on a 7. The bonds of companionship move let you turn a 9 into a failure Or a 12 into a partial success, which is not done elsewhere in PbtA. Patch it up and make yourself heard both have situations where you can roll, get a hit and not be any better than you were. When you don’t get players at least some rewards for rolling they stop rolling. From the wizard: jewelled dagger (deadly: infighting): The word infighting might mean closer than arms reach but the much more common usage is fighting within an organization. As written, this dagger looks particularly good for stabbing a teammate during an argument. . The exact purpose of glory doesn’t seem to be listed anywhere. Is it XP? If so, why do near death experiences cost you XP? Isn’t the hero who survives brushes with death more glorious than one who never gets it?
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# ? Jan 12, 2018 20:35 |
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Golden Bee posted:Overcome prevents DM from making slower soft moves. Golden Bee posted:A lot of these moves don’t get what you want on a 7. Golden Bee posted:Patch it up and make yourself heard both have situations where you can roll, get a hit and not be any better than you were. Golden Bee posted:From the wizard: Golden Bee posted:The exact purpose of glory doesn’t seem to be listed anywhere. Is it XP?
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# ? Jan 13, 2018 02:52 |
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mixmastermind posted:What's the math on how much the "roll 3d6 pick highest 2" mechanic, like Something Extra from Spirit of 77, affects the average roll? i made this ages ago.
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# ? Jan 13, 2018 11:30 |
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Does anyone remember that Attack on Titan based hack "Titan World"? If so I'm looking for thoughts on how its combat ruleset worked out, as I'm eyeing it for a hack I'm working on. A quick and dirty summary is that there is one Move that can be used to actually put down one of the enemies (the titular Titans) but part of its trigger is having an Advantage that is usually set up via one of the other moves. An easy example is a move that involves using your wacky grappling hook belt to get to a new position that gives you an Advantage, which could then be expended in order to use the finisher. Teamwork of course being required because you would have playbooks that focus on one but not the other. In addition to that idea, I was thinking there could be more interesting mechanical aspects to that concept like enemies that require more than one Advantage to have the finisher move be available, or enemies that can easily shed Advantages, that sort of thing.
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# ? Jan 18, 2018 02:10 |
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Bear Enthusiast posted:Does anyone remember that Attack on Titan based hack "Titan World"? If so I'm looking for thoughts on how its combat ruleset worked out, as I'm eyeing it for a hack I'm working on. A quick and dirty summary is that there is one Move that can be used to actually put down one of the enemies (the titular Titans) but part of its trigger is having an Advantage that is usually set up via one of the other moves. An easy example is a move that involves using your wacky grappling hook belt to get to a new position that gives you an Advantage, which could then be expended in order to use the finisher. Teamwork of course being required because you would have playbooks that focus on one but not the other. Read Fellowship.
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# ? Jan 18, 2018 02:10 |
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Golden Bee posted:Read Fellowship. Well I suppose I have no excuse not to anymore, thanks.
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# ? Jan 19, 2018 01:28 |
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I'm about to enter a Sprawl game as a Killer, and I feel like I have to be missing something. The grand total of my playbook abilities seem to be one extra piece of cyberware with obligations attached and a custom weapon that is actually worse then the bog standard machete. And that's it. Like, I don't even feel like I'm actually better at killing dudes. And half the rules are different in other places! The pdf with just the playbooks gives them only one piece of cyberware, and in the actual main pdf example of character creation, that Killer gets three enhancements to their weapon! So...what am I missing here? Is the "Blade" option actually a joke? Am I in fact just a super generic dude with a slightly better gun (and you better choose a gun!) who's even more hunted or owned?
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# ? Jan 19, 2018 10:58 |
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I think it really values Implant as a tag, more than it probably should, and you can’t really take many augmentations at the start, which sucks for what is set up as a heavily enhanced murder cyborg. That and it’s basically just a Fighter playbook with a couple cooler options. At the very least I’d make the weapon a custom combat upgrade over a battlebabe copy paste. I think the reason to play the killer is to have busted numbers from the gate. You can take a crazy custom sword, Milspec and cyberarms and be a small gang with 6 harm and 2 armour, which should be enough to ruin basically anything in your way until the gm turns the game into an action movie and starts throwing choppers at you, because the game mechanics were designed for mad max with pvp and social manipulation rules. Wrestlepig fucked around with this message at 13:14 on Jan 19, 2018 |
# ? Jan 19, 2018 12:27 |
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rumble in the bunghole posted:I think it really values Implant as a tag, more than it probably should, and you can’t really take many augmentations at the start, which sucks for what is set up as a heavily enhanced murder cyborg. That and it’s basically just a Fighter playbook with a couple cooler options. At the very least I’d make the weapon a custom combat upgrade over a battlebabe copy paste. This is kinda why im a little cold on the sprawl. Mission and Corp clocks are cool ideas, but on the player side it feels a little...dungeon world-y.
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# ? Jan 19, 2018 14:40 |
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The Killer's trick, which the book does a poor job of describing, is all about maximizing cyberware. For the other playbooks, cyberware is a bit of a catch-22. To really get a lot out of it, you need to combo certain pieces and you'd also like to have a high Synth. However, with the exception of the Driver, going Synth+2 means they'll be rolling lower on their core moves so it's not a great choice. Going lower Synth then makes 'ware less attractive, and will either still cut into their initial utility because a stat they'll use more often is worse, or will force them to spend advancements later to catch back up - and will probably entail at least one advancement that is effectively a null step. The end result is the other playbooks have a lot of pressure to put a low score in Synth and only dip their toes into 'ware, if even that, and spend their advancements and resources elsewhere. For the Killer, cyberware can always be an immediate plus without trade offs. They're essentially one of only two playbooks (the other is the Hacker) where a starting with or advancing to Synth+1 makes sense, since they'll start with enough 'ware for it to be useful and have incentive to get even more. They can also quickly build the 'ware combos that produce deeply scary combat numbers - a Meat+2 Synth+1 Killer with Cyberarms/Augmented Strength and Muscle Grafts at character creation is at +2 to mix it up and will deal +3 harm with their melee weapon. If they take More Machine Than Meat to also select Synthetic Nerves, they will usually be at +3 to mix it up with additional benefits. And they'll still be very good with a gun with the option to get even better - that +1 Synth gets added to their firearms damage if they later snag a Neural Interface/Targeting Suite. At core the Killer's deal is that cyberware is good and they're the ones who get to play with all of it. They start ahead of the 'ware curve and stay there. In theory other playbooks could go that way as well, but in practice they have strong disincentives to that approach, and even if they ignore those they'll still be behind the Killer. It's one of those cases where the playbook doesn't so much use its custom moves to create it's own space, but instead leverages a set of mechanics theoretically open to all playbooks to the point that they're actually doing something unique with it. That being said, their Custom Weapon move is pretty flat. It's solid for guns, decent for melee implant weapons, and bad for non-implant melee weapons. A melee focused Killer who doesn't want implant weapons is definitely better off with a non-custom blade, with their Custom Weapon creating a specialized backup that covers what their blade doesn't. Personally I think the Killer would be better off with a slightly expanded gear list and a move that further leverages their tendency to acquire more 'ware.
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# ? Jan 19, 2018 15:39 |
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ProfessorCirno posted:I'm about to enter a Sprawl game as a Killer, and I feel like I have to be missing something. Technically you only need one pick to make the blade option equivalent to a sword/machete and you get two to three, so your custom weapon isn't going to be worse than a machete. Still, Custom Weapon is still weird and not great for melee weapons unless you want to make something weird like a stun knife or a sword with autofire or you're really attached to the mental image of a streetsam with a custom blade. As a side note, this conversation is reminding me of how much I dislike the way harm ramps for combat-focused characters in The Sprawl. It's really easy for characters with combat-focused cybernetics to do 5+ harm at a base level, and it might be appropriate for the capital-K Killer to be doing "they are dead" levels of damage every time when they're at their peak but it ruins my entire sense of scale for harm.
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# ? Jan 19, 2018 19:46 |
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Killers kill. Get the gently caress out the way. --- I’ve made my feelings about the sprawl clear over the course of this thread, But having played the soldier they are a team bonus machine. Add the Neural Interface with Targeting Suite... And you can be throwing down for a five harm, in a crowd, without any possibility of having your teammates. Not at all their moves are great. With recruiter you have either one reliable guy you can add to the team or a bunch of imbeciles. --- I’ve also noticed that there will always, always be an infiltrator on the team. I’ve never seen a core playbook be so necessary in any powered by the apocalypse game.
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# ? Jan 19, 2018 20:33 |
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yeah the more sprawl I see the less I like it. I enjoy creating the corps as worldbuilding and the clocks are a pretty good way of doing a timing mechanic in a wibbly wobbly storygame but the playbooks are boring and hacking is hosed. I find the mission structure pretty wack anyway. It's more restrictive than it should be, since running missions set by a Mr Johnson makes it more reactive, rather than proactive like blades in the dark or just having a generalised thing.
Wrestlepig fucked around with this message at 21:17 on Jan 19, 2018 |
# ? Jan 19, 2018 21:08 |
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alternate hack and slash/volley/defend for Dungeon Worldquote:When you Fight Together, everyone involved rolls +their combat stat Needs a lot of reworking of the game to really function and I'm not sure about the 7-9. Shout out to Tunnels and Trolls though
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# ? Jan 19, 2018 21:54 |
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I think the Sprawl shows a lot of its warts during set up, but in play it's a lot like early MotW where you end up paring down the decision space to the point it mostly runs just fine. That being said, it could use another heavy pass of polish. The Driver has the old bad "add vehicle stats to your moves" thing going on, for example.Golden Bee posted:I’ve also noticed that there will always, always be an infiltrator on the team. I’ve never seen a core playbook be so necessary in any powered by the apocalypse game. However, I think you're right that there's an issue with the Infiltrator's concept. While mechanically it's not critical, the narrative space is so deeply ingrained in the genre that someone almost invariably gravitates to it, which suggests that its de rigeur enough to just give a solid part of it's narrative space to everyone, the way everyone gets gigs in AW 2e. Comrade Gorbash fucked around with this message at 23:02 on Jan 19, 2018 |
# ? Jan 19, 2018 22:57 |
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# ? May 15, 2024 03:02 |
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Golden Bee posted:Read Fellowship. Goddamn does Fellowship basically do exactly what I want. Now I just want to play that instead of whatever dumb hack idea I had.
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# ? Jan 19, 2018 22:59 |