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So quick one - is there a pretty comprehensive wiki or list of AW-derived games, or is the OP about as good as I can hope for?
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Aug 29, 2021 21:22
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Tulip posted:So quick one - is there a pretty comprehensive wiki or list of AW-derived games, or is the OP about as good as I can hope for? Here's a taxonomy of AW games someone made for a art history project but it's a year out of date https://caput-caprae.blogspot.com/2020/12/taxonomy-of-powered-by-apocalypse-games.html?m=1 It's hard to fully classify because AW was hugely influential and lots of elements of it got reincorporated into other games (and rightfully so). Things can be AW-inspired when the only commonality is "has Moves" or "explicitly stated GM agenda" and that's like saying D&D5E is Fate-derived because it has Aspects. Xand_Man fucked around with this message at 23:48 on Aug 29, 2021 |
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Aug 29, 2021 21:44
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Unfortunately, no, there is no comprehensive and up-to-date list of PbtA games. The Bakers host a list on the Apocalypse World site, but that one relies on authors personally asking Vincent or Meg to add their game, so it's also very spotty, out of date, and doesn't include any games in the Forged in the Dark and Belonging Outside Belonging sub-families (except for Blades and Dream Askew/Apart themselves). Yet another list was maintained on the PbtA Reddit, which included some unofficial and free hacks, but even there I can think of a lot of other notable free hacks that didn't make the list. The spreadsheet is also old and now locked for editing (and the genres and links are all messed up).
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Aug 29, 2021 23:21
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Updated Burned Over zine/hackbook went out with the latest of the Bakers' patreon updates. It's not new, but I'm particularly taken with this descriptor for the Monarch playbook: "Before the world burned, there was a creature, the story goes, smaller than your hand, orange and black. It could fly, and it loved flowers, and it was so powerful that they gave its name to kings and queens." A big improvement from "the Unalone". Vulpes Vulpes fucked around with this message at 02:17 on Oct 1, 2021 |
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Oct 1, 2021 01:56
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Blind Azathoth posted:Unfortunately, no, there is no comprehensive and up-to-date list of PbtA games. The Bakers host a list on the Apocalypse World site, but that one relies on authors personally asking Vincent or Meg to add their game, so it's also very spotty, out of date, and doesn't include any games in the Forged in the Dark and Belonging Outside Belonging sub-families (except for Blades and Dream Askew/Apart themselves). They dropped that list a week or so ago: "Once I maintained a database of PbtA games at this location, but I fell behind and now there are, friends, I kid you not, hundreds and hundreds. Too many to catch up!" The page links to games tagged appropriately on various RPG sites, though.
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Oct 4, 2021 03:22
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Is there anything in particular I should be aware of going into a game of Urban Shadows 1e? I'm planning a short, maybe 10 session game with some friends. Trying to go mortal-only for PCs and work them into the supernatural affairs of the city. The book is incredibly bad in terms of layout and I haven't been able to find a lot of resources online.
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Oct 23, 2021 21:00
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I think it makes sense to have everybody in different factions. Allows you to create player conflict because someone’s best friend is a target for another faction. I wouldn’t go above four players, and the fewer is the better, because this game more than any other provides and expects solo scenes.
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Oct 23, 2021 22:49
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croup coughfield posted:Is there anything in particular I should be aware of going into a game of Urban Shadows 1e? I'm planning a short, maybe 10 session game with some friends. Trying to go mortal-only for PCs and work them into the supernatural affairs of the city. There's a couple of things that won't work with Urban Shadows: First, there's only a 3 Archetypes that are Mortals, 4 if you include Dark Streets. Even if you don't have too many players, you want a variety of Factions among the PCs. Second, the game assumes the PC are aware of and a part of the supernatural world. The Aware is the only Archetype who is the newest to this world, and even then they can still do things like go to their werewolf contacts or call in a Debt from a wizard they know. The Hunter goes after supernatural threats, the Veteran has been a part of this for a long long time, and the Scholar trades in magical artifacts. None of them are uninvolved with the supernatural affairs. Finally, the advancement mechanic rewards and requires dealing with all the Factions. If they want to get more powerful, they need to call in and honor Debts, go to their supernatural friends for information, have knowledge of or history with important people, and investigate places important to the Factions. Not being a part of that means they won't be able to actually gain advances.
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Oct 24, 2021 07:22
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I'm going through one of my periodic moods, following the completion of some piece of fiction I really enjoy, in which I consider trying my hand at making a PbtA hack oriented toward that genre or, more specifically, capturing what made the specific fiction interesting to me. This time it's playing Baldur's Gate 2, which always hooks me whenever I pick it up. Even though I know TTRPGs chasing video games is a kind of fool's errand, I don't want to recreate the video game experience, but the tenor of the storytelling. I'm not really compelled by the D&D mechanics (obviously, as I'm in this thread) so much as the shape of the thing: not only is BG2 built in this dependable modular way, with each big quest a kind of self-contained adventure, but it is also a somewhat darker variant of the traditional heroic arc / power fantasy, with its attendant dramatic stakes. I don't want to play D&D - I can't afford it, I don't have enough time in my life to track all the sorts of things a traditional GM has to govern, and like any alt-gamer I see its weird legacy and design priorities being more of a hindrance than a help to the kind of game I want. But I also like that kind of stone soup, Forgotten Realms-y high fantasy. I've only heard bad things about Dungeon World from a mechanical standpoint, but I'm also wrapping my head around the fact that when it comes to PbtA, the moves are the game, meaning, the moves you afford when you design the system dictate in large part what the game will be about. I've been thinking over ways in which an adventure-forward fantasy game could resemble epic sword and sorcery fiction more than D&D tabletop incentivizes. So I want high fantasy without a lot of numbers-getting-bigger, without Monty Haul economies. I want a game in which the focus is on the development of operatic drama... and one of the consistent movements that the BG series sticks with is that adventure is always imposing itself on the Bhaalspawn. BG2 and its expansion draw attention to this fact, and to the ways that, as she grows in power, the number of people that need her help or want to exploit her power likewise grows. This tandem movement lends itself to the kind of high melodrama that the series builds to. It's a kind of power fantasy of becoming important, whether you want to be or not. (Actually, something that's weirdly true of most heroic fantasy and almost all traditional TTRPGs, is that the hero of the story is actually the dramatic antagonist; in dramatic terms a character that tries to achieve something is the protagonist, and in pulp fiction that is almost always the villain. But good game design wouldn't strictly mandate that, I'd think.) --- So I'm thinking of hacking AW into something that mechanically incentivizes things like a cumulative history of an adventuring party, the enemies they gain, intrigue they get caught up in, that centers in some way the quicksand nature of power and renown - this would be a game that, over time, produces characters with baggage of various kinds. More responsibilities, more risks, triumphs, sorrows, etc. Obviously there would be the basic moves with harm and manipulation and information gathering, etc. But what could be added to realize that kind of progression through the game? I think of things like going around the table at the end of a session and having each player name an enemy or friend that the player across from them made during the session, or the ways in which forces offscreen (so to speak) have moved forward with their plans. Maybe moves that play upon history or create it in that storygame way that PbtA is so good for. Idk. I'd go with an existing fantasy hack and just homerule little things in, but it seems like the big ones all seem to be about bridging the gap between PbtA and D&D's mechanics. Maybe I'm just crazy?
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Nov 9, 2021 04:48
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*damnable double posts
Basic Chunnel fucked around with this message at 05:38 on Nov 9, 2021 |
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Nov 9, 2021 04:48
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I think Fellowship does that, and you double posted. It’s made by a goon.
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Nov 9, 2021 05:11
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Basic Chunnel posted:I'm going through one of my periodic moods, following the completion of some piece of fiction I really enjoy, in which I consider trying my hand at making a PbtA hack oriented toward that genre or, more specifically, capturing what made the specific fiction interesting to me. That definitely sounds cool as hell
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Nov 9, 2021 05:37
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Clever Moniker posted:That definitely sounds cool as hell Golden Bee posted:I think Fellowship does that, and you double posted. It’s made by a goon.
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Nov 9, 2021 06:09
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Basic Chunnel posted:This looks cool and I'm happy to support it! But the 271-page core book seems... a lot. Is there an expansion you think might be best to go straight toward, for my particular weirdness? Maybe I should just read it all. Worst thing that happens is I find it doesn't work, but there's bound to be mechanics to steal at least. The actual, like, rules in Fellowship are only about 50 (thoroughly illustrated) pages. The rest of the book is playbooks, plus a bunch of pick-and-choose stuff for the Overlord to use, or not, at whim. Fellowship has a whole Bond mechanic for creating mutual player/world histories, and gaining fellowship with communities garners new abilities for the players. At first blush it seems like it would align well with your ideas. The next two books mostly add new playbooks and introduce new campaign frameworks, like the Empire (a world where the bad guys already won, and the players are part of a rebellion) or the Horizon (a world with no big bad at all and you're just exploring). Generous Fellowship has new playbooks too, but its real value is as a compendium of every monster, NPC type, and set piece from the other three books. ... sorry I'm kinda a fanboy.
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Nov 9, 2021 07:33
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No prob, I appreciate the insights. It is looking pretty good and straightforward so far, though it's not hard to beat Apocalypse World for legibility in explaining concepts. If anybody's played BG2 and/or has a good grasp of the Forgotten Realms in 2E-3E D&D and has every other Saturday open, I could use players to test this out. The only thing I'm really not liking so far is the emphasis on the very Tolkien-y "you speak for your people" bit. Characters should be heroes but fantasy "races" are weird enough without monolithing them. I assume the point is that you're meant to eventually lead "your people" into the coalition to defeat the Overlord, but that doesn't quite work in a cosmopolitan stone soup setting. Besides, I can't help but feel that "find a way to relate stuff to your winged elf heritage" as a mechanically incentivized goal can only lead to repetition after awhile. Basic Chunnel fucked around with this message at 08:01 on Nov 9, 2021 |
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Nov 9, 2021 07:37
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Fellowship is a good game, but it's definitely got a very specific flavor, and I think people do a disservice when they recommend it as a generic fantasy PbtA implementation. I'd read it for inspiration/stealable ideas, but it's probably not going to meet ypur needs out of the box, and that's fine!
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Nov 9, 2021 09:04
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Basic Chunnel posted:No prob, I appreciate the insights. It is looking pretty good and straightforward so far, though it's not hard to beat Apocalypse World for legibility in explaining concepts. There are enough playbooks in the expansions that you can run individual weirdos instead of just species representatives. It’s obviously Tolkein to have the one great Dwarf, but you could easily play the infamous devil, the genius inventor, the embodiment of rain/snow/sludge, A goblin collective, a mystic exile… it also has some fun Destinys that mimic how you’re a big loving deal by the end of any PC RPG.
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Nov 9, 2021 09:14
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Whatever happened to Baker's own fantasy skin of AW?
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Nov 9, 2021 13:29
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Basic Chunnel posted:No prob, I appreciate the insights. It is looking pretty good and straightforward so far, though it's not hard to beat Apocalypse World for legibility in explaining concepts. You are allowed to just say that your people aren't a monolith. You have a responsibility to represent your people, but that responsibility is as a player to the other players, not as a character to the other characters. If you're The Dwarf and all dwarves have stone hearts, then say that. If that means that most dwarves prefer the company of stone and dark, then say that too. But you have "an airy heart" (you know, an oxide) and you like it on the surface, and you can say that, too.
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Nov 9, 2021 17:02
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Of course I'll probably end up like "I want to actually set this in the Forgotten Realms" and thus nullify the entire project by dint of closing off huge chunks of Command Lore. I'm not sure that would work even when FR is built to be constantly expanding, even if I introduced plane-hopping characters or do the weird 4E thing where there's a literal twin world that overlaps Faerun and people can cross over from. You can always make up a town or a roving band of half-orc barbarians and say "this is your people" but it kind of cramps the spirit of PbtA, right? It's a system that's meant to be GM-full, from brass tacks to cosmology. There's the comfort and familiarity of the hero's arc but I also just like the comfort and familiarity of existing IP that I can keep in my head because I devoured a bunch of sourcebooks in my teens. Golden Bee posted:There are enough playbooks in the expansions that you can run individual weirdos instead of just species representatives. It’s obviously Tolkein to have the one great Dwarf, but you could easily play the infamous devil, the genius inventor, the embodiment of rain/snow/sludge, A goblin collective, a mystic exile… it also has some fun Destinys that mimic how you’re a big loving deal by the end of any PC RPG. Basic Chunnel fucked around with this message at 17:51 on Nov 9, 2021 |
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Nov 9, 2021 17:48
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Bear in mind that in Fellowship, "races" don't have to be races. It's entirely within the game's charter to go "I'll play The Orc, but he's a big tough human weaponsmaster." From that point forward, the lore they command is about their peers, their profession, and their personal history. Gnome once said that a player in a campaign they ran retooled The Elf playbook into, essentially, sasquatches. Just use the mechanics and create your own flavor.
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Nov 9, 2021 19:37
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Siivola posted:Whatever happened to Baker's own fantasy skin of AW? I think it got dumpstered, though I seem to remember a fantasy reskin of AW: Burned Over on his patreon (called On The Great Road or something).
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Nov 9, 2021 19:49
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Mirage posted:Bear in mind that in Fellowship, "races" don't have to be races. It's entirely within the game's charter to go "I'll play The Orc, but he's a big tough human weaponsmaster." From that point forward, the lore they command is about their peers, their profession, and their personal history. I've also seen someone who ran a Transformers game in Fellowship without modifying any mechanics. That one impressed me. I still don't really care for the game but it's both more and less flexible than it looks.
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Nov 9, 2021 20:01
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Siivola posted:Whatever happened to Baker's own fantasy skin of AW? He found that the play assumptions people were defaulting to weren't the ones he wanted or found interesting. And when you don't get your play assumptions right in a PbtA game it fails.
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Nov 9, 2021 20:15
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neonchameleon posted:He found that the play assumptions people were defaulting to weren't the ones he wanted or found interesting. And when you don't get your play assumptions right in a PbtA game it fails.
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Nov 9, 2021 20:44
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neonchameleon posted:He found that the play assumptions people were defaulting to weren't the ones he wanted or found interesting. And when you don't get your play assumptions right in a PbtA game it fails. Can you elaborate on the specific example? I'm not like a professional game designer or anything so I'm curious how it failed, where in the design it failed to click.
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Nov 9, 2021 20:52
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Basic Chunnel posted:Can you elaborate on the specific example? I'm not like a professional game designer or anything so I'm curious how it failed, where in the design it failed to click. I'm afraid not. I just remember that that's what he posted about it; I wasn't part of one of the playtest groups.
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Nov 9, 2021 20:55
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Under Hollow Hills is a fantasy style setting, but not a traditional fantasy game.
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Nov 9, 2021 21:07
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Gave Fellowship a little test drive - it's an odd duck if for no other reason than it's a PBTA hack designed mainly around continuous campaigns. Wasn't able to dip into that side of the system much, obviously, but a fun time was had. Basically just ripped off the Umar Hills quest in BG2 on the fly. No Overlord stuff, just a quick dungeon crawl with opportunities to do stuff other than just, you know, hack and slash. One thing we kind of winged, was curious about how this is meant to work... We had two players (plus me), fighting a shadow. Shadow had two traits: Insubstantial and Scary. Is the way it's meant to work that one player gains advantage for the party, via Keep Them Busy or some other tactic / move (eg my players lit a torch to weaken the shadow) to gain "advantage" and then other players use Take Them Down to damage them (ie knock off traits) until they have none left? The way we interpreted Take Them Down was that on a 7-9, one damage is inflicted but the advantage is lost, and on a 10+ one damage is inflicted and advantage retained. Is that how it's meant to work? Or is there some other process? I'm also pretty leery of the "rule of threes", where triples of an enemy are treated as singular units, which makes some sense, but the way that defeating a triad of enemies splits into two smaller units seems like it sort of defeats the simplifying purpose of the rule - as in, I'm not sure why you wouldn't just treat the group unit as a group unit and forgo the "fission jelly" effect. I'm curious how people deal with that. Basic Chunnel fucked around with this message at 01:35 on Nov 14, 2021 |
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Nov 14, 2021 01:31
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Basic Chunnel posted:
You have the 7-9 correct, but on a 10+, you just straight-up Take Them Out, they are done. As for splitting large groups, being reduced in size narratively decreases their ability to do things, if you reasonably have the capacity to take on a gang, they will probably split and run once they are down to individuals, been a minute since I have looked at the book but remember that PCs can gain advantage from sources other than moves and it might just be a matter of fact that a singular soldier (or whatever) is always at disadvantage to a suitably dangerous PC. Ash Rose fucked around with this message at 01:59 on Nov 14, 2021 |
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Nov 14, 2021 01:54
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Basic Chunnel posted:Gave Fellowship a little test drive - it's an odd duck if for no other reason than it's a PBTA hack designed mainly around continuous campaigns. Bit confused by this statement, the majority of PbtA games are really designed around having at least 5-10 sessions to really properly get an arc and growth out of them. They're literally mathed out to work that way for games like Apocalypse World and Monsterhearts and Masks - you start out rolling 7-9 results a lot, so you rarely resolve stuff, it just keeps happening. But you do keep gathering XP, which raises your stats, and then you eventually unlock the Advanced Moves like Make A Real Friend or Take Definite Hold which means you eventually naturally start solving all your problems (if your character lasts that long).
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Nov 14, 2021 02:16
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bewilderment posted:Bit confused by this statement, the majority of PbtA games are really designed around having at least 5-10 sessions to really properly get an arc and growth out of them.
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Nov 14, 2021 02:29
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I think the reason a lot of AW hacks that center around the PCs all being a cohesive, symbiotic group feel weird is because AW just works better when the PCs are working at odds to one another. I include Blades in this but that's a whole other topic with its own self-inflicted problems. We've had a few AW campaigns that lasted well over 20 sessions just by doubling the XP required for an advance and it's worked out pretty well but none of those campaigns were in the vein of a 'We're all working together to defeat the Big Bad' kind of campaign.
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Nov 14, 2021 02:37
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I don’t think there’s anything intrinsic in the base mechanisms of AW that forces all PbtAs to have the PCs at odds with each other: I think it’s more of a formulation of the moves themselves that determines that. That’s crucially why I think there are some PbtAs that work and some that don’t: the latter are almost all games that just saw moves as a limited mean of performing actions, rather than as vehicles meant to drive the narrative towards the specific type of genre that the game is trying to emulate. All the lovely PbtAs share this to some degree: you have your move to talk to someone, your move to attack someone, and the actual moves are basically just glorified fail, mixed or succeed rolls. If you construct the moves well, I think PbtA can easily accommodate both adversarial PCs as well as “big group against the bad guy” games. I’ve experienced both the former and the latter and they can both function effectively.
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Nov 14, 2021 02:50
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Picked up my physical copy of Voidheart Symphony today and drat this is a good looking book (and a great game to boot!) 
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Nov 30, 2021 10:20
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I don't believe I posted these earlier. Friendship, Effort, Victory is a shonen jump pbta game that started on these forums back in 2015. It found a publisher this year in Far Horizons Co-operative, an awesome publisher and one where I previously worked with on their small games digest for Crying Fantasy Friends and Shaping The Stars. FEV is inspired by Naruto, Bleach, One Piece, My Hero Academia and other Shueshia Battle Comics aimed at young teens. I'm not the best at selling myself or my work so apologies in advance if this explanation is messy. Essentially, it uses the narrative mechanics of PbtA to emulate the frantic battles and melodrama of these manga series. To that end, the moves focus on what matters in and out of battle: the characters and their drama. The basic and battle moves try to keep the camera on the drama. The miniutia of battle is mostly narrative, until a dramatic moment that would warrant a splash page or a two page spread. You are pushed and pulled by the drama, not combat statistics or action economy. The moves only kick in at moments of narrative relevance, like the first time you transform in a battle, when you use your final attack as a desperate final charge, or when you try to prove the ideology of your foes wrong. The playbooks pull from some common archetypes, including some that people called me wacky for using. From someone wrestling with an inner demon to someone with a tragic backstory seeking revenge to a childlike idiot to a vice led mentor to a pathetic loser who always gets their rear end beat to inspire others and so on, the playbooks try to emulate the most common tropes of the genre. Some examples follow: https://twitter.com/KamalaKaraA1/status/1443032672956203013?s=20 https://twitter.com/KamalaKaraA1/status/1436734362062622732?s=20 https://twitter.com/KamalaKaraA1/status/1434917854332264453?s=20 I'm open to any questions. Recently, I was interviewed on Scheduled For Launch about the game: https://podcasts.apple.com/ee/podcast/tabletop-kamala-friendship-effort-victory-sh%C5%8Dnen-pride/id1552006027?i=1000537593158 The book is set to be sent for final layout on December 10th. We are hoping for a late December release. Due to the global crisis, we will likely need to delay a physical release until prices stablize.
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Nov 30, 2021 21:30
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Here in the remnant world, sometimes our bodies fail us and can’t be fixed. Sometimes we’re just born different. For whatever reason, sometimes we have to find a way to bridge the gap between the bodies we want and the bodies we have. With some help from Serf, I made a prosthesis worksheet/handout for AW2e/AWBurnedOover, and you can download it here.
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Dec 1, 2021 05:02
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Looks like I'm finally coming back to Apocalypse World with an impending game. One player still yet to confirm if they're on board, but 4/5 of us gearing up for an apocalyptic southern swamp hell, operating out of a beached riverboat casino. Maestro D, Skinner, and Faceless so far. Features fanboat gangs and an oil baron in swamp Venice. Hype.
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Dec 1, 2021 16:44
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SkyeAuroline posted:Looks like I'm finally coming back to Apocalypse World with an impending game. One player still yet to confirm if they're on board, but 4/5 of us gearing up for an apocalyptic southern swamp hell, operating out of a beached riverboat casino. Maestro D, Skinner, and Faceless so far. Features fanboat gangs and an oil baron in swamp Venice. Sounds absolutely dope and I wish I was in that game. Hope you have a ton of fun.
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Dec 1, 2021 22:02
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paradoxGentleman posted:Sounds absolutely dope and I wish I was in that game. Hope you have a ton of fun. Hoping so. As a player I'm... definitely overpreparing, but I have issues with locking up easily in the middle of narrative games. No idea how to balance this successfully yet. But at least going to hopefully be deeply familiar with the rules again by the end of this.
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Dec 1, 2021 22:20
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