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I think the problem is less with the infiltrator himself, but the fact most playbooks actually prefer the legwork, rather than mission phase. If you want some proper boots on the ground, non-support competence in your team, you pretty much have to pick infiltrator, killer or the driver - and the latter two are somewhat situational, in that they'll really warp the mission around them. The infiltrator is your only all-around go somewhere, do poo poo, pop some fun abilities along the way playbook out there.
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Jan 19, 2018 23:35
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Well, looks like I'm going to be running a Monster of the Week game for my girlfriend, my friend, and his two 65-year-old parents who have never played an RPG before. Any tips particular to MotW? It seems pretty straightforward from my readthroughs (aside from the 7,000 GM moves for monsters).
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Jan 21, 2018 06:57
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I want there to be a really solid Cyberpunk Heist Genre game in PbtA, because I think it's a great model for the way that sort of fiction works. Traditional RPGs usually don't allow for playing out a scenario where everyone is contributing to the mission, and their actions synergize and affect one another, but without everyone (except the hacker) being at the exact same place and time in the manner of an old-school dungeoncrawl. I like The Sprawl, on the whole, but it's a bit too fiddly and gear-minded for my liking. But like I said, there are other narrative games like Technoir that can do this, too.rumble in the bunghole posted:alternate hack and slash/volley/defend for Dungeon World
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Jan 23, 2018 18:24
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I mean, Blades in the Dark is right there. Just put Cyber- in front of everything.
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Jan 23, 2018 18:43
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Mr. Maltose posted:I mean, Blades in the Dark is right there. Just put Cyber- in front of everything. Exact same hack for Leverage.
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Jan 23, 2018 19:01
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BinaryDoubts posted:Well, looks like I'm going to be running a Monster of the Week game for my girlfriend, my friend, and his two 65-year-old parents who have never played an RPG before. Any tips particular to MotW? It seems pretty straightforward from my readthroughs (aside from the 7,000 GM moves for monsters). Make your monsters simple if you haven't run it before but have run PbtA. None of them are super-complicated, but most of them are not worth it to bring multiple moves per session. Have one big bad with a move, the rest being normal. Overall, if you stick to the book, it's pretty good at telling you exactly how to run it.
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Jan 23, 2018 19:25
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Halloween Jack posted:I like The Sprawl, on the whole, but it's a bit too fiddly and gear-minded for my liking. I've been pondering what would make a good cyberpunk/Shadowrun hack and gear has been a big concern for me. Bringing back elaborate gear tables would be wrong, but fetishizing the technology seems like part of the experience. Core texts like Neuromancer and Hardwired are so chock full of brand name gear and weapons that I can't see replacing them with generics. In my scratchpad, I've thought of making the brand name be part of the move, so you can't just say "I trigger my cybered-up nerves and steal the guard's gun," it has to be, "I trigger my Santoshi reflex booster and...".
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Jan 23, 2018 22:48
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Yeah, as I was saying to my gaming group talking about my Dune homebrew: statting out all the things a Mentat can do in precise detail in d20 or GURPS or Hero is about the last thing I want to do. But I also don't want to go the minimalist Fate route and just have a Mentat Aspect that you can tag for a bonus when you do Mentatty things. PbtA gives you some fun complexity in a rules-light narrative system. Sprawl's gear complexity does have some problems where some stuff is just plain better or kinda pointless, like the problems with the Killer already outlined. It reminds me of similar issues when I played that Rogue Trader PbtA game floating around, but Rogue Trader Apocalypse isn't a published product.
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Jan 23, 2018 23:05
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Zorak of Michigan posted:I've been pondering what would make a good cyberpunk/Shadowrun hack and gear has been a big concern for me. Bringing back elaborate gear tables would be wrong, but fetishizing the technology seems like part of the experience. Core texts like Neuromancer and Hardwired are so chock full of brand name gear and weapons that I can't see replacing them with generics. In my scratchpad, I've thought of making the brand name be part of the move, so you can't just say "I trigger my cybered-up nerves and steal the guard's gun," it has to be, "I trigger my Santoshi reflex booster and...". No idea when it will be finished, but ive been working on a shadowrun expansion for AW2E (not a hack, its literally meant to just add on to normal AW) The way I went around that problem is giving everyone access to a (altered and expanded) version of the battlebabe custom weapon. Rather than page after page of slightly different ways to kill people, you define your own. It keeps with the cyberpunk theme of "your gear and brands matter" and at the same time acts as another axis by which your character is unique and cool in the world, which pbta is absolutely about. Take Neuromancer's Molly, her choice of a flechette pistol says something about her as much as the cyber eyes and finger razors do, maybe it doesnt say AS MUCH, but it says something.
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Jan 23, 2018 23:15
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If you really wanted to you could even define half a dozen corps, each known for one particular aspect of their equipment, and have that be one of the things that you have to select from when you build your weapon. So a Santoshi might give your weapon AP, while a Maxilogistics might reduce incoming harm by 1. The disadvantage is less player creativity, but the advantage is that there's some basic worldbuilding already built into the system.
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Jan 24, 2018 00:25
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thelazyblank posted:Make your monsters simple if you haven't run it before but have run PbtA. None of them are super-complicated, but most of them are not worth it to bring multiple moves per session. Have one big bad with a move, the rest being normal. Overall, if you stick to the book, it's pretty good at telling you exactly how to run it. Not just simple but classic. A vampire or a werefolf or a something that people just naturally grok the particular puzzle that must be solved to kill it. You don't want a straight big fight and you don't want to too deep a dive for newcomers.
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Jan 24, 2018 03:47
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Thanks for the advice re: MotW. I ended up running a session for my friend and my girlfriend and her roommate (they played one character together since they were a little intimidated). It went really well - they even asked if we could play again, which I wasn't expecting. The system worked pretty well, although I wish that the investigate move had a few more non-monstery options.
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Jan 28, 2018 04:06
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It wouldn't be too hard to port over Read a Person from standard Apocalypse World if you want more involved character drama.
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Jan 28, 2018 04:58
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So this past weekend my group and I just ran our first PBTA game (The Sprawl). We'd previously only played 5e stuff and are halfway through Curse of Strahd. I think we made the mistake of not preparing enough and not truly grasping the system before hopping in to play. The setup went great but as soon as we actually started playing it ground to a halt. We ended up stepping away for 4ish hours or so while I went and did a crash course reading and watching snippits of lets plays and took over for the original MC who was having trouble grok'ing how different it played from 5e (not really his fault, we were all unprepared and a bit confused). After that it went muuuch smoother, and everyone enjoyed it quite a bit. So much so that no one is really looking forward to going back to 5e anytime soon, which leads me to my question: How much am I going to be fighting the system if I move our existing CoS campaign to Dungeon World? Obviously everyone would have to move their characters over, I figure maybe letting them be lvl 2 or pick an extra advanced move since they're all lvl 5/6 in D&D. Other than that I planned on using the characters/locations/narratives that already exist in the campaign, and just stick with the DW ruleset as much as possible. I know it may be a bit more "on rails" than normal DW games, for example I'd prob treat "spout lore" as similar to a history or arcana check in 5e, and instead of asking the players to fill in the relevant info, I'd simply narrate it to them. Good idea/bad idea? I know it's not the best, but we're ~6mo invested into the campaign and about halfway through, so we're in a spot where everyone would like some closure to the campaign, but no one wants to sit through another 6 mo of 3 hour combat sessions just to get there. With the streamlining that PBTA brings we can prob wrap up CoS in one or two months. Edit: I should also note that this is prob a long time coming, we didn't just try PBTA as a one-off and decided it was the new hotness and want to jump ship, everyone has been voicing concerns over the crunch of 5e for a while. If we wanted a tactics game we'd play a video game together, we look to RPG time for awesome stories and cool moments. trip9 fucked around with this message at 23:14 on Jan 30, 2018 |
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Jan 30, 2018 23:07
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trip9 posted:How much am I going to be fighting the system if I move our existing CoS campaign to Dungeon World? Obviously everyone would have to move their characters over, I figure maybe letting them be lvl 2 or pick an extra advanced move since they're all lvl 5/6 in D&D. Other than that I planned on using the characters/locations/narratives that already exist in the campaign, and just stick with the DW ruleset as much as possible. quote:I know it may be a bit more "on rails" than normal DW games, for example I'd prob treat "spout lore" as similar to a history or arcana check in 5e, and instead of asking the players to fill in the relevant info, I'd simply narrate it to them. I think you're overly worried about the power of this move. It doesn't inherently give much narrative power to the player, it just gets a lot of attention because the possibility of making up stuff on the fly as a player blows D&D people's minds. quote:When you consult your accumulated knowledge about something, roll+Int. ✴On a 10+, the GM will tell you something interesting and useful about the subject relevant to your situation. ✴On a 7–9, the GM will only tell you something interesting—it’s on you to make it useful. The GM might ask you “How do you know this?” Tell them the truth, now. As a general rule, give them all the info they're going to need, don't gate stuff behind the roll. Also let them make stuff up if it's not super important and it's fun for both players and GMs. When poo poo goes in unexpected ways, rejoice because it's going to be exhilarating and memorable, and you can actually go along with stuff instead of flick through the monster manual in a panic and dump notes in a bin. Also, my advice for new pbta gms is to keep a tally of each time a player makes a move and try to keep them even, it'll help you know about who's in the spotlight and who's not getting any of the action. Not having an initiative track is hard. With DW, try to give non-numbers consequences, it's way more interesting to take a finger or force them into a bad spot along with d6 hp. This goes for enemies too, when someone hacks and slashes you need to give the narrative a little kick since it's not a super narrativey move E: oh yeah the race stuff is really limited because dungeon world draws from old-school D&D for setting details, you may need to whip up a custom thing for that. Just say in the thread and we'll batter something into place for you. Wrestlepig fucked around with this message at 09:53 on Jan 31, 2018 |
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Jan 31, 2018 01:17
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The problem I had approaching DW is that I would have to do a lot of rewriting to suit the races and alignment in my campaign setting. Not a big deal for experienced PbtA players, but if you're trying to sell a D&D group on trying a fundamentally different game... anyway. I was very preoccupied with the issue of bringing fists to a gunfight in AW, and how the Single Combat move doesn't model being able to slug someone who pulls a gun on you, which happens a lot in old action movies. I decided that go aggro or get in someone's face (Spirit of 77) covers casual violence just fine.
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Jan 31, 2018 18:00
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Halloween Jack posted:The problem I had approaching DW is that I would have to do a lot of rewriting to suit the races and alignment in my campaign setting. Not a big deal for experienced PbtA players, but if you're trying to sell a D&D group on trying a fundamentally different game... The new character sheets have blanks to write your own alignment triggers and race moves in. Still doesn't stop having to come up with them in the first place, but. When you say "being able to slug someone who pulls a gun on you", I'd say Go Aggro covers using threats of violence to stop someone from pulling a gun and Overwatch is for not making threats but decking someone who tries to pull a gun on you anyway.
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Jan 31, 2018 18:27
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Punching someone who tries that is a pretty direct interfere on their roll, rolling plus HX.
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Jan 31, 2018 18:35
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I got my hands on a copy of Fellowship, which I'm really enjoying the rules and stats-damage-advantage-companion system. I'm really excited to possibly also play as the supreme evil overlord I've always wanted to be in my heart (but settled with dming). Does anyone have any good recommendations of podcasts/videos/runthroughs of the game I can see in action? Watching Adam Koebel's Dungeon World oneshots really helped me understand and set the pace for my games.
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Jan 31, 2018 19:22
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http://www.sixfeatsunder.com/ The to winter's end campaign is a campaign done by gnome, the writer, themself.
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Jan 31, 2018 20:36
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Thanks for the response everyone. Luckily our party was pretty simple so I'm pretty sure there's direct analogues for their races and classes. We're running The Sprawl again this week and I think next week we'll try the DW version of our 5e campaign. Anyone use Fantasy Grounds or is Roll20 the VTT of choice for PBTA? Seems like you can probably get away with just some sort of video chat and something like Trello or even Google Docs in a pinch.
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Jan 31, 2018 22:25
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Bear Enthusiast posted:Goddamn does Fellowship basically do exactly what I want. Now I just want to play that instead of whatever dumb hack idea I had. Fellowship is very good at that. It's relatively Generic which makes it great for adapting to other settings, but leans much more into anything with an ensemble cast with a specialty in fantasy or fantasy-esque settings. There are some settings it can't do quite as well or have more focused alternatives, but it's light enough that some creativity can fill in some of the more accessible gaps. It's a shame there isn't more variety in PbtA games, but it hits some of the more popular types of settings as well as a few uncommon ones.
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Feb 1, 2018 04:43
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OfChristandMen posted:I got my hands on a copy of Fellowship, which I'm really enjoying the rules and stats-damage-advantage-companion system. I'm really excited to possibly also play as the supreme evil overlord I've always wanted to be in my heart (but settled with dming). Would you consider running it online?
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Feb 2, 2018 03:19
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I've got a Monster of the Week game brewing and I'm running into the same worry I usually do with PbtA games, that is the rules there's lots of room for interpretation. Those are a huge part of what make these games so good but they've been a problem for me in the past. Specifically I'm looking at The Dark Side aspect of The Spooky, which says: "The keeper can ask you to do nasty things (in accordance with the tags [they picked earlier]), when your powers need you to. If you do whatever is asked, mark experience. If you don't do it, then your powers are unavailable until the end of the mystery (or you cave)." It sounds really great, but when the rules later on for making playbooks explicitly say it's there as a balancing factor against the playbook's other more powerful aspects I get wary of my ability to use it in a fun/interesting way. Any tips on when and how often stuff like that should kick in, or maybe examples of when it was used really well that anyone has seen?
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Feb 10, 2018 06:04
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Bear Enthusiast posted:I've got a Monster of the Week game brewing and I'm running into the same worry I usually do with PbtA games, that is the rules there's lots of room for interpretation. Those are a huge part of what make these games so good but they've been a problem for me in the past. Specifically I'm looking at The Dark Side aspect of The Spooky, which says: My advice with this sort of thing is to talk to the player about it. I don't know MotW specifically, but the idea with that sort of thing in PbtA games is generally to have enough communication with the player and/or ideas about their character to know what they're hoping will come up, then brainstorm from there; in this case, they're going to pick tags that I assume are related to the kinds of Bad Things they want their power to make them do, so that's going to be a start for brainstorming. If in doubt, ask the player, either with IC questions ("the last time you did this ritual, what sacrifice did you have to make?") or directly OOC ("so what kind of terrible things are you hoping to have go down when you play this guy?").
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Feb 10, 2018 07:01
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Does anyone have any good custom moves for gambling (for Urban Shadows, if it matters)? I could have sworn I saw something along those lines somewhere.
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Feb 14, 2018 02:13
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if it's just poker machines or other random stuff it's probably not worth rolling for or adjusting total wealth levels, if it's Poker or something like that, Act under Fire or it's equivalents should work fine since it's all about psychology.
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Feb 14, 2018 02:41
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I threw together this one, it might be "a bit much": When you gamble a hand at the Important High Roller Casino, roll 2d6+Mind. On a 10+, you impress someone present, you gain one debt on someone present, or you gain piece of useful information (the GM will tell you what) On a 7-9, you gain one debt, but choose one: -You cheated, but didn't get caught. Mark one Corruption. - You cheated, and people are getting suspicious. You'd better get out. Now. -You didn't win that big. Owe one debt -A real shark joins the table. Take -1 ongoing to further gambling. On a 6-, you owe one debt, and choose one.
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Feb 14, 2018 03:22
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Someone remade the Man playbook for Sagas of the Icelanders, taking the Operator as a base: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0ByF9qkt14FlUQnVwM2l6VjI1djA Looks better than the default "counting beans" one.
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Feb 17, 2018 03:16
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Oh and just stumbled with this "Cartel" game: http://www.magpiegames.com/cartel-ashcan-edition/ It does some neat things with drug moves, La policia moves and stress moves. Anyone tried it?
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Feb 19, 2018 23:38
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lessavini posted:Oh and just stumbled with this "Cartel" game: It rules and there's a KS starting soon.
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Feb 19, 2018 23:41
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Golden Bee posted:It rules and there's a KS starting soon. Oh good, that game is screaming for more playbooks.
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Feb 20, 2018 00:56
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lessavini posted:Oh and just stumbled with this "Cartel" game: Cartel rules, it has excellent social interaction and the stress mechanics are really good for getting drama going. It is really lethal in combat so bring that up. It's a really tightly designed game. Also whenever you get the chance, do drugs and if you're running it and don't know what to do, introduce the CIA. I'd recommend supplying a quick glossary of basic Spanish words if you don't know any so you can check what 'Pandilla' means and just pepper random vocab into the sentences. If people aren't finishing sentences with "Comprende, Amigo?" or whatever it's not as fun. Wrestlepig fucked around with this message at 03:19 on Feb 20, 2018 |
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Feb 20, 2018 03:07
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That looks excellent. Is there a place to get it is it just that playbook sheet for now? And yeah, definitely should have El Coyote and El Padre as playbooks.
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Feb 20, 2018 05:24
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megane posted:That looks excellent. Is there a place to get it is it just that playbook sheet for now? And the dirty lawyer, aka El Abogado, aka Saul Goodman.
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Feb 20, 2018 05:42
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El Coyote might be weird because the game takes place 10 hours from the border. It’s explicitly not a game about Texas and Arizona. Edit: The latest version is here http://drivethrurpg.com/product/225344/Cartel-Quickstart. Golden Bee fucked around with this message at 07:17 on Feb 20, 2018 |
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Feb 20, 2018 07:10
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Is there a chunk of this thread that has discussed the Broken Worlds AW-hack for Kill Six Billion Demons? I'm exceedingly curious about it because I love the comic with all my heart, but I don't wanna make people rehash something if they'd rather just point me towards a preexisting discussion.
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Feb 23, 2018 04:37
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Cartel is thematically awesome, but in their current state the rules have some pretty glaring holes in them. There's a bunch of stuff that as a narcotrafficante you'll want to do but that aren't really governed under the rules. For instance, sticking a gun in some pendejo's face and telling him to give you what you want (i.e. "go aggro"). The combat rules don't really make it clear what "inflict terrible harm" or "suffer little harm" actually mean considering that there's no harm track. The negotiation/manipulation rules lack the mechanical teeth that Apocalypse World has, so you're kind of left going, "Uh, ok. For now, I guess?" about pretty much everything. The stress tracks and stress moves and drug rules are all (excuse the pun) loving dope, but IMO this game is not ready for prime-time, especially if you don't have a lot of other PbtA experience on which to fall back. We submitted a bunch of feedback to the author, but I don't know if any of it has been incorporated.
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Feb 24, 2018 01:43
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Yea I'm sending the quick look to my group because we use PbtA a ton and can shore up the holes well enough for us but yea great concept and really cool ideas but the quick look doesn't paint as good a picture as the game probably deserves
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Feb 24, 2018 02:40
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The lack of intimidation I think is because you’re not supposed to threaten to do things… You’re supposed to do things. It’s very easy to play what you think is a nice member of the Cartel but along the way you’re going to have to hurt people, or lie to them, or gently caress them over. If you want to intimidate someone, you can always pressure someone, propose a deal, or turn to violence.
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Feb 24, 2018 23:16
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