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CitizenKeen posted:Apocalypse Keys CCYA license leads me to believe it would be okay for people to write mysteries for it, but I'm not seeing anything on itch.io. Hasn't it only been out for barely over a month? Also, what license is CCYA?
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# ? Jan 4, 2023 20:21 |
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# ? Jun 3, 2024 22:05 |
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JMBosch posted:Hasn't it only been out for barely over a month? Also, what license is CCYA? Sorry, CC BY SA. Fast typing. quote:The text of this work is offered under a CC BY SA 4.0 license, meaning that you are free to distribute the text and to adapt it within the scope of the license, which requires attribution and that you share your adaptations under similar terms. In your attribution, please credit the author, Rae Nedjadi, and the publisher, Evil Hat Productions, LLC. The text of this work is additionally offered under a license having the terms of CC BY SA 4.0, except: (1) if the Adapted Material is a literary work (such as an RPG book), then the Adapter’s License need only be applied to the text (not, for instance, illustrations) and (2) you must include this and the following sentence in your licensing terms. The CC BY SA 4.0 license is available at creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
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# ? Jan 4, 2023 20:26 |
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It's got some buzz but it's not at a profile level where it's surprising that it hasn't received third party content this soon after release.
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# ? Jan 5, 2023 03:45 |
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What do you know? We’re getting an Apocalypse World SRD after all this time. https://dice.camp/@lumpley/109700969578909759 quote:After 12 years' worth plus a spate of requests this past weekend, I'm doing the unthinkable and/or unconscionable and writing up an Apocalypse World SRD.
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# ? Jan 16, 2023 22:31 |
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Thanlis posted:What do you know? We’re getting an Apocalypse World SRD after all this time. Oh gently caress yes.
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# ? Jan 16, 2023 22:55 |
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Ran Escape from Dino Island tonight. One shot PbtA about arriving at an island full of dinosaurs and then getting off of it before everyone dies. I think it does a great job of narrative control to keep a PbtA to a one shot. It sets up two obstacles, one picked by the GM, one by the players, for the game. When one obstacle is solved, the whole situation escalates (for us, the volcano on the island erupted) and all players advance by picking one of two moves. No XP is tracked. And when both obstacles are solved, you move to the finale -- lots of loving dinosaurs swarming the Heroes The standard PbtA moves are In Peril moves, but when you aren't In Peril, your "look around and get information" kind of moves are Safety Moves that have to be done with at least one other player and you have to tell a story as you trigger those. Each playset has their own set of stories to tell. The Hunter might tell a story of their greatest catch. The Doctor might tell a story of someone pulling miraculously through. And then when the Finale is done, each character's overall outcome is influenced by the number of stories told. That said, there was much more "this is what is ahead of you" from the GM (me) than there was "this is what is ahead of me" from the players, if that makes sense. Could still be tighter as this is intended for one play through, but everyone had fun running from dinosaurs. A map from our game. The prominent feature is a monorail transporting tourists around the park, where rich kids control the dinos via VR to rack up high scores.
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# ? Jan 27, 2023 05:57 |
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This may sound odd, and I know that this thread does not get as much traffic as other places, but I wanted to ask. Does anyone know how to integrate more magic into a Blades in the Dark game? Specifically to do stuff like shooting fire from your hands, flying around, that kind of thing? My players want to be a bit more powerful and have a bit more D&D in terms of stories, that sort of thing. Sorry and thanks for your time!
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# ? Jan 29, 2023 15:24 |
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Josef bugman posted:This may sound odd, and I know that this thread does not get as much traffic as other places, but I wanted to ask. You could just do it as an Attune roll for characters with appropriate training/innate talent for general purposes and then expanding the use of actions for specific uses (below). Instead of shooting a guy with Hunt or Skirmish, they use Attune and do harm that way. Want to fireball a group of bluecoats? Well, they're tier 3 and you're tier 1, so they probably have at least some basic anti magic hexes or the like while you've got a broken twig for a wand, so call that a risky/limited or a desperate/standard roll, your choice. (Strictly speaking, differences in tier should only affect effect IIRC, but I'm assuming the PCs really want the option to fireball people.) You want to fly? Sure. You want to fly so you can't get caught? That's Prowl. You want to fly at top speed through a window and not smash into the wall? That's Scramble, or whatever the BitD action is called; I think I might be remembering the S&V name for it. (And rich estates have defenses against flying invaders: animate gargoyles, casters of their own, etc.) Charm Person? That sounds like Command while Suggestion sounds like Sway. (Or vice-versa; just keep it consistent.) If you want to be a little more organized in how you do it, you could look at Scum & Villainy playbooks, namely the Mystic, and have players take advances from there to represent their abilities, reskinning as needed. e: two ideas to ensure that your casters aren't outdoing your other players in every way: 1) action rolls to support magic rolls are capped by the action rating or by Attune, whichever is lower (this will only serve as a brake in the beginning, and may just hinder the group as a whole as casters pump attune and nothing else that's useful), and 2) group rolls where magic is being used can only be made by people using magic. (E.g., your ground stealth team can't help your flight insertion team mitigate failures and vice-versa.) OTOH, these are only needed if some players want non-wizardy PCs; if everyone's a wizard, who cares? e2: Instead of trying to retrofit Magic into BitD, why not use a different gaming system? GURPS seems like it would work well for mage-thieves of Duskvol. My suggestions really are just 80% reskinning equipment and action rolls when you get down to it; the other 20% is going to be work for you as you figure out what changes have to happen in the Duskvol to keep up with these new developments. (Do all bluecoat patrols now have a wizard with them?) It can't just be the PCs who have access to these new powers, or it completely changes the atmosphere of the game and the power structure of the city. Admiralty Flag fucked around with this message at 16:11 on Jan 29, 2023 |
# ? Jan 29, 2023 15:56 |
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Also, remember that you don't need to completely reinvent the wheel mechanically. What does Blades have already? A lot of skills and gear, crafting/ritual rules and the ability to make custom moves. For skills, if you're shooting fireballs in a magic duel it might be Attune, but in an actual bar-room brawl it's probably still Skirmish or Wreck. If you're flying onto a rooftop it's a Prowl roll, just like the guy who's parkouring onto the rooftop. Gear is most useful for the basic fight stuff, but you're designing the magic system here. You can just have the stuff necessary for combat wands and mage armor take an equivalent amount of Load to regular guns and armor, and the fiction changes but the mechanics stay roughly the same. And don't forget the existing rules for making your own weird stuff, rituals/inventions and custom moves. For rituals and inventions, maybe just give them a free +1 Magnitude to encourage them to make wild stuff with it. And Custom Moves... Well, it depends on how much custom content you're willing to make, but you can always just give each PC one free one at the start of the game for whatever weird magic stuff they already know how to do. Making a move like "Fire Mage: You can always shoot fire from your hands, whether you have a combat wand or not, and you have a few other benefits" is close enough to the existing custom moves like this one. quote:[Adept] Sash Fighting: You may You may need to reexamine what exactly Attune is capable of, but if you follow my advice here and you keep Attune's actual scope to somewhere around the kind of minor divination and basic magic poking it handles now you probably won't need to make entirely new subsystems.
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# ? Jan 29, 2023 16:46 |
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I agree with working within the moves Blades already has and taking a page out of Masks, where if your character has powers it’s not a question of if they can use them or not, but what the consequences of using them are. Position and Effect will handle that really well. A player wants to throw a fireball? Sure, but if they miss (or even if they don’t) that might start a huge fire in the city. From my experience, it works best in this system if you tie it to items and consumables like scrolls, rings, etc instead of innate magic, which can be a bit too much player power narratively and mechanically. That also feeds really well into crafting and Downtime actions for the players that want more magic. Bottom Liner fucked around with this message at 17:01 on Jan 29, 2023 |
# ? Jan 29, 2023 16:56 |
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Blades already has a special ability to shoot lightning. Just add more abilities that do whatever you want, and set appropriate boundaries so your players aren't demigods.
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# ? Jan 29, 2023 17:56 |
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I've been thinking about this since I wrote my earlier answer. I think the most important thing to do is understand what your players want. Do they want to be magical second-story men in a grim dark magical city, where everyone of note has access to magic? Or do they want these powers to be rare? OK, then how do they want to be challenged? I think you probably need to understand the motivation as well as the ask to make sure your solution fits expectations.
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# ? Jan 29, 2023 18:47 |
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Also consider the interplay between magic and ghosts.
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# ? Jan 30, 2023 20:49 |
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Hey, did the Monsterhearts MC advice collection What Big Teeth You Have by Jackson Tegu ever come out? It sounds super interesting but I can't seem to actually find it anywhere.
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# ? Feb 2, 2023 02:48 |
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The last thing he ever released from that was updated version of the Skins for the second edition, a lot of the other stuff never came out though.
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# ? Feb 2, 2023 02:55 |
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Photographs of Nothing
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# ? Feb 2, 2023 05:34 |
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Heliotrope posted:The last thing he ever released from that was updated version of the Skins for the second edition, a lot of the other stuff never came out though. Aww, that's a shame. At least I know now, thanks!
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# ? Feb 2, 2023 20:05 |
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Dr. Clockwork posted:This is a very good point, and something I was having trouble putting into words when I was chatting with some friends about my idea. You nailed the differences better than my hand-wavy "crunchy" thing. At this stage? Go maximalist. Let the Dungeon Boss trying to stay at the top be a playbook and see how well it works.
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# ? Feb 4, 2023 17:51 |
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neonchameleon posted:At this stage? Go maximalist. Let the Dungeon Boss trying to stay at the top be a playbook and see how well it works. Yeah this is a great idea TBH
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# ? Feb 4, 2023 19:21 |
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Now that I think about it, is there any kind of advice/resources about MCing Monsterhearts aside from reading the book/listening to APs? If anyone knows any good APs though, I'll gladly listen to those.
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# ? Feb 5, 2023 16:41 |
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Agent Rush posted:Now that I think about it, is there any kind of advice/resources about MCing Monsterhearts aside from reading the book/listening to APs? If anyone knows any good APs though, I'll gladly listen to those. The main advice I can give from my experience gming monsterhearts over the last few months boils down to making things teenage. One of my favourite ways to open monsterhearts games is asking each player to describe their room and the things inside it because that's some teenage poo poo. Other than that? The book is really good, keep it simple and feral and don't let your players characters get too comfterble and happy and you'll be well on your way. I don't watch AP's so I can't offer any of those. Is there anything specific you're wondering about in terms of MCing?
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# ? Feb 5, 2023 17:56 |
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ItohRespectArmy posted:The main advice I can give from my experience gming monsterhearts over the last few months boils down to making things teenage. One of my favourite ways to open monsterhearts games is asking each player to describe their room and the things inside it because that's some teenage poo poo. Thanks for the advice! As for specific issues, maybe something about an opening incident/session or progressing the conflicts? I'm playing in a game now that's going pretty well with the various main characters' desires clashing with each other, I guess I'm interested in how to manage if that doesn't happen on its own.
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# ? Feb 5, 2023 21:56 |
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Start with a homeroom with something subtly wrong and a dance/party coming up. The rest takes care of itself.
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# ? Feb 5, 2023 22:30 |
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Golden Bee posted:Start with a homeroom with something subtly wrong and a dance/party coming up. The rest takes care of itself. That's literally how my current game opened, haha! I guess it's a classic for a reason.
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# ? Feb 5, 2023 23:32 |
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Josef bugman posted:This may sound odd, and I know that this thread does not get as much traffic as other places, but I wanted to ask. Wicked Ones is a FiTD based game with a very free-form magic system that works very well in my opinion. It is a game about being monsters and running a dungeon but you could definitely take it's magic system out and run it in a different setting. The gist of it is that a character who can cast magic picks a theme (or school?) of magic they're proficient with like enchantment, spiritcalling, bloodmagic, pyromancer, etc. Then they choose a couple limitations for their magic, one limitation based on the type of magic (like requiring a flammable target for pyromancy) and then a personal limitation (like it drains your life force to do so, or some other song and dance for your magic to work). Then you just describe what kind of spell you want to cast based on your theme of magic. The GM decides if it's a Tier 1, 2 or 3 spell. Tier 1 spells would just be to perform an action that you could have done with another action but instead you get to use your spellcasting skill to do it. Like shooting fire to harm someone would be the same as rolling whatever ranged combat action to try for the same outcome. Tier 2 spells are the equivalent of a group action's worth of effort, and Tier 3 would be impossible magical effects or a groups action worth of effort over a period of time. Tier 2 and 3 spells require more stress to cast and incur a dice penalty. I'd recommend actually reading the Wicked Ones section on this as it does a very good job of describing it (and it's free!). But in my experience running the game it works out really well. Players can choose to incur the stress costs to try and cast some crazy powerful spells and with the limitations built into spellcasting it feels balanced in that players don't all just want to be spellcasters and use their spell skill for every single thing.
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# ? Feb 6, 2023 17:05 |
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Yea the Wicked Ones magic system is really good IMO. Arguably a bit too flexible? But that's tweakable.
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# ? Feb 6, 2023 17:44 |
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Tulip posted:Yea the Wicked Ones magic system is really good IMO. Arguably a bit too flexible? But that's tweakable. Yeah, Wicked Ones requires a relationship where the players are okay with the GM saying "No", because while every type of magic has their "thing", a creative player will accomplish anything with the right description and you need the GM to curtail that a little.
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# ? Feb 6, 2023 19:49 |
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As far as Monsterhearts advice goes, does anyone have experience with/running a PbP of it? I get it's not ideal, but I may have to look into it.
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# ? Feb 11, 2023 05:33 |
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It might be a good fit because there’s a lot of interiority.
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# ? Feb 11, 2023 05:41 |
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Monsterhearts PbP was huge on the forums several years ago, so it seemed to work well for some people, although I had mixed results. There may be people here who have more specific advice.
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# ? Feb 11, 2023 06:06 |
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I ran a Monsterhearts game for extra life that's up on YouTube... But we made the characters college aged because it was being livestreamed, we're all in our thirties, and I, personally, did not want to be out there pretending to be a horny high schooler. ...I had a lot of trouble remembering how people flirt with one another, tbh. But it was a lot of fun and I'll probably run it again for another group, unstreamed this time.
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# ? Feb 11, 2023 12:21 |
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Heliotrope posted:The last thing he ever released from that was updated version of the Skins for the second edition, a lot of the other stuff never came out though. When did those even come out? I backed second skins and it says they're publicly available on one of the updates but the website seems to no longer exist.
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# ? Feb 11, 2023 13:18 |
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Speaking of Monster Hearts, I am running Thirsty Sword Lesbians, which uses a lot of the same mechanics, and I could use some advice on how to handle something. Next session the players are about to head out from the safety of a town to find a stronghold where some folks from a Toxic Power are hiding. The issue is, I have established that the planet they are on is fairly hostile, with their settlement being the lone place of relative safety, how can I impart the danger present in the journey without necessarily zooming in and slowing the game down, there isn't really a move that tracks super well, Defy Disaster is for imminent danger and I don't think a perilous journey quite counts as that. Setting for the game is sci-fi western and I really wanna sell the rugged rough terrain and lean into some fun genre stuff here.
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# ? Feb 11, 2023 20:53 |
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Ash Rose posted:Speaking of Monster Hearts, I am running Thirsty Sword Lesbians, which uses a lot of the same mechanics, and I could use some advice on how to handle something. Next session the players are about to head out from the safety of a town to find a stronghold where some folks from a Toxic Power are hiding. The issue is, I have established that the planet they are on is fairly hostile, with their settlement being the lone place of relative safety, how can I impart the danger present in the journey without necessarily zooming in and slowing the game down, there isn't really a move that tracks super well, Defy Disaster is for imminent danger and I don't think a perilous journey quite counts as that. You can always just steal A Long Journey from Fellowship et al. Establish some problems with input from one person, have them decide what other PC handles the problem, and generally just keep the scenes at a montage level of investment. You don't have to do anything too complicated mechanically. Also, as someone who played in a lot of Monsterhearts PBPs back in the day, two pieces of advice. 1) Moreso than real time games, you need to get to the point and give people interesting prompts fast. Just given the slower pace of pbp, if you don't know what to do and wait for a scene change to do something you're going to be waiting a long time. 2) Make sure you all have some way to chat in real time as a group. Monsterhearts can go some rough places, but you can talk through them reasonably well if you can talk like regular people. But if someone makes a bad post and discussion of it has to go at typical posting speeds, that post where the Vampire went too far and weirded everyone out IRL will sit there for ages and it's going to be agonizing.
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# ? Feb 11, 2023 21:10 |
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Yeah, that actually sounds like a perfect solution, thanks!
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# ? Feb 11, 2023 23:59 |
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Chernobyl Princess posted:I ran a Monsterhearts game for extra life that's up on YouTube... But we made the characters college aged because it was being livestreamed, we're all in our thirties, and I, personally, did not want to be out there pretending to be a horny high schooler. That sounds cool, what should I look for to see it? Lurks With Wolves posted:You can always just steal A Long Journey from Fellowship et al. Establish some problems with input from one person, have them decide what other PC handles the problem, and generally just keep the scenes at a montage level of investment. You don't have to do anything too complicated mechanically. Thanks for the advice, that's very helpful!
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# ? Feb 12, 2023 02:02 |
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Agent Rush posted:That sounds cool, what should I look for to see it? We are a teeny tiny channel and kind of hard to find, but "livefromtheapocalypse stalker in the woods" found it for me. I'll be running a long term Urban Shadows game on that same channel in April. Has anyone ever adapted US to have the fail-forward mechanic other PbtA games have rather than try to use the interaction mechanic? I have some new players, and fail-forward is a lot easier to understand.
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# ? Feb 12, 2023 13:06 |
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Chernobyl Princess posted:We are a teeny tiny channel and kind of hard to find, but "livefromtheapocalypse stalker in the woods" found it for me. "Fail-forward" specifically means that the state of the game advances on a roll failure so the PCs aren't expected to roll for the same thing twice. Are you referring to taking the "interact significantly with each faction once to get an advancement" mechanic and replacing it with some sort of more general advance-through-experience-point system involving getting XP on a miss?
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# ? Feb 13, 2023 19:09 |
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Glazius posted:"Fail-forward" specifically means that the state of the game advances on a roll failure so the PCs aren't expected to roll for the same thing twice. Yes, that exactly. Sorry, I'm extremely bad at remembering jargon, even for things I really enjoy. The more I think about it, the more I'm inclined to not mess with the advancement system, Urban Shadows is a slow-advancing system for a reason, the tension between reaching for easy power through Corruption vs the slower growth through Advancement is pretty critical to the setting. ...but having played it before while also playing other PbtA games with the advance-on-a-miss mechanic I really liked the latter, it's just a lot easier to see satisfying growth on the character sheet that way. But if that's what I wanted to do I could run Monsterhearts or Monster of the Week instead and not even think about it. So I figured I'd ask here and see if anyone else has thoughts.
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# ? Feb 13, 2023 21:13 |
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# ? Jun 3, 2024 22:05 |
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Chernobyl Princess posted:Yes, that exactly. Sorry, I'm extremely bad at remembering jargon, even for things I really enjoy. Your XP actions kind of determine what you're looking out for during play. In AW, it's what sorts of things the MC/your best bud wanted you to do this episode. In DW, it's a mix of letting the DM cackle evilly on failures and reflecting on your adventures at end of session. Urban Shadows gives you XP for participating in the debt economy and playing the faction game, and given that those things are supposed to drive your character's plots they seem like pretty good things to think about. Are your "new people" new to roleplaying, or new to PbtA, or PbtA players new to this game? Unless it's the last one, there's probably more benefit in expecting them to learn to do the debt economy and the faction game. If it is the last one and you have people expecting to mark XP on a miss I'd suggest maybe a three-dot "hard knocks" track and say you can advance with either four factions (and clear your faction marks) or three factions and a full "hard knocks" track (and clear both).
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# ? Feb 13, 2023 22:08 |