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Whirling posted:I can't remember any post-apocalyptic films with the kind of loving that Apocalypse World wants you to do, so I feel like this is just a weird thing the devs wanted. You can't think of any post-apocalypse movies that have sex in them? Because that's the amount of sex that's in AW : "possibly some". Considering your last post was about how you don't understand that it's emulating a genre, maybe you should try reading the book?
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May 3, 2023 17:42
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AW is remarkably more tasteful about sex than most 70s and 80s post-apocalypse movies.
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May 3, 2023 17:47
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Much, much more.
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May 3, 2023 17:49
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i've played AW with practicing mormons who handled the sex stuff better than goons. smdh
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May 3, 2023 17:54
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watching gor (1987) and going "hmm, not much sex stuff in this movie"
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May 3, 2023 17:56
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Gor is not post-apocalypse. It is an isekai.
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May 3, 2023 17:59
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The AW "specials" being a thing that fits an R-rated movie or prestige TV drama as an "option" makes sense to me. But they're also absolutely a thing because Meg and Vince are sex-positive hippies, and Apocalypse World being a personal project for them that iterates on their thoughts and interests. Like how Dogs in the Vineyard was Vince exploring his own relationship to his Mormon upbringing, or the more abridged game offerings they've done for Patreon supporters like Firebrands and Poison'd are fleeting, messy dramas. I suppose the mixture of the frank conversational tone, the specific and approachable shorthand of "Playbooks" as a concept, the particular way a conversation is systematized into navigable rules, and Vince's general permissiveness to people iterating on Apocalypse World (plus lightly promoting a lot of early games) happened to hit an unfilled niche in a way that caused a massive chain of derivative games to spring up. And nobody could've predicted it Apocalypse World to make the gigantic splash it did in the indie TTRPG scene. There's perfectly valid reasons for being put off by a character sheet that has a section labeled "When you have sex..." Some people on a personal level aren't interested or may be put off by sex (not in a prudish way, there's plenty of valid reasons to not want that.) Most people have heard some horror story or at least a running joke about some gross, stupid, or hosed up sex poo poo happening in a TTRPG. Like that Piss Wizard comic is one of the most popular D&D humor comics for a reason. It's dumb to be in a place, in a culture, where you have to have a conversation with anyone looking at Apocalypse World about how, no, it's fine. It's handled tastefully this one time, but it's the reality of things. That said, with broader Powered by the Apocalypse games, most aren't trying to create a narrative where sex is a major features. So they drop the rules. However, I think there needs to be some sort of interpersonal conflict at the core of how a PbtA game works. I'm not quite down with the way Masks pushes stats around but I appreciate the idea. And there's the similar tension of the Avatar game shifting your obligations around, or even a broader "when you have a moment of personal vulnerability" type situations like Flying Circus allows. I like that sort of stuff and I think it opens up other ways for conflict, tension, or personal connections to form between PCs.
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May 3, 2023 18:05
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I ran a Shadow of the Demon Lord campaign for about 2 years, going from levels 1-9. I think I came away from it with a very different impression from others, though I did hack it a bit to do things like replace "insanity" with "stress" and add some OSR dungeon crawling mechanics (I mostly used it to run an OSR-style campaign). Here are some of my takeaways: 1. I had no trouble removing the couple bits of poop humor in the game. I think the actual number of words spent on poop humor in the core book is drastically exaggerated, but the real problem is that passing around the book to your new players still screams "juvenile dark fantasy" and that can be a tough hurdle to overcome. It's not very controversial to say that the aesthetic design of the actual book is going to affect how people perceive the game it instructs you to play, and that's worth considering when pitching it to your players. 2. Replacing insanity with stress and using stress as a bargaining tool similar to BitD made the game very easy to run and also made it pretty easy to adjudicate all kinds of things my players wanted to do like martial stunts or improvising spells. I would highly recommend doing this if you run the game (or D&D-adjacent games in general). 3. My players did not come anywhere close to breaking the game with their builds accidentally in the way that this group did while playing 5e. SotDL has its share of balance issues, but you gotta go out of your way to totally upset the balance of the game in this one compared to a game like 5e where you simply pick a Bard or Wizard. The only time this came up was the Order and Time domains, which I would recommend putting an asterisk next to and asking your players to consult you on before taking those. These are two of the worst designed traditions in the book and open up some ridiculous combos, but more importantly the spells just take too much time and attention to adjudicate and resolve. They're not worth the trouble; and after seeing them in play for a couple sessions we agreed to just ban them. My group didn't have much problem with that because I told them changes like that would always be paired with an opportunity to do drastic respecs. 4. I did encounter my share of problems with SotDL, though, some of which have been mentioned. First, there are way too many path features that involve boons and banes. I think the math still roughly works out, but I also think if so many boons and banes exist to be canceled out on the enemy side, a game with math as facially simple as SotDL should simply not feature so many of those as path features in the first place. It's ridiculous that certain tiers of enemies have a chance of just passively inflicting banes simply to counteract how many boons your characters have at high levels. This is a thing that Schwalb has said will be addressed in Weird Wizard, at least. 5. Another issue I had was with Power, which is a bit of a one step forward, one step back kind of thing. It makes it wonderfully easy to track caster levels and create gish characters, but ultimately the point of tracking caster levels is to gate characters out of grabbing higher level spells in later paths if they weren't magic users before that, and I think this is totally in conflict with SotDL's expectation that you pick paths that suit your character's growth in the story. Instead, this encourages build planning which I dislike asking my players to do (I addressed this with respecs, but felt like I shouldn't have to). I think just giving everyone Power at certain levels is a decent solution, though in my case I created a parallel track called Valor which gave you access to cool wuxia martial arts poo poo. Overall I still don't think I've played a game that is roughly "D&D 5e/3.5 but better and simpler" than Shadow of the Demon Lord. It really hits a decent balance of being a simple OSR-friendly game with easy rules and math (until high levels) while having just enough character building options to satisfy the folks looking to make cool OCs. I think Weird Wizard is going to be even better, but I had a great time hacking SotDL into the game I wanted to run, and I think it took a lot less work than it would have with other systems. Edit: One comment I saw someone make was the issue of some paths getting play-defining features at high levels and I agree this is another significant issue. Be open to swapping some of those if your players ask. It's silly that the mech pilot cannot pilot the mech until the game is basically over, for example.
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May 3, 2023 19:37
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Xiahou Dun posted:You can't think of any post-apocalypse movies that have sex in them? Because that's the amount of sex that's in AW : "possibly some". I dunno, I can only think of the Mad Max films and I can't remember anyone loving in those. Also, I could've sworn my last post was entirely about how it emulates genres too much to the point where it feels derivative? That's my entire problem with the system and its various children.
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May 3, 2023 19:55
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Roadwarrior actually has a pretty obvious example of sex as a turning point in someone's character. It's only after the gyro pilot hooks up with one of the girls at the refinery that he really becomes a part of the community rather than a passing opportunist.
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May 3, 2023 19:59
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Well fair enough
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May 3, 2023 20:06
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Xiahou Dun posted:That ain't a Murphy's Rule and is entirely intended. I didn't think it was a mistake, I thought it was poo poo design.
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May 3, 2023 20:15
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Sex is pretty important to A Boy and His Dog, as well. The protagonist's motivations and a later choice he has to make both intersect very strongly with that.
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May 3, 2023 20:18
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So. you don't know what it means to emulate a genre (hint : it means doing that genre and not other things, the thing you think is bad) and you have seen precisely one (1) series inside that genre that you don't actually remember. Have you considered that the problem isn't with the game. theironjef posted:I didn't think it was a mistake, I thought it was poo poo design. Then we just gotta agree to disagree. It's one of my favorite design elements and really underlines who the Battlebabe is. Xiahou Dun fucked around with this message at 20:20 on May 3, 2023 |
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May 3, 2023 20:18
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Post-apocalyptic film often features brutal rape, but it's really neither here nor there in arguments about whether or not a post-apoc RPG should have mechanics for consensual sexual intimacy.
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May 3, 2023 20:21
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Xiahou Dun posted:Then we just gotta agree to disagree. It's one of my favorite design elements and really underlines who the Battlebabe is. Yep that's fine. Certainly not something I need to raise the cannons over.
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May 3, 2023 20:27
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Xiahou Dun posted:So. you don't know what it means to emulate a genre (hint : it means doing that genre and not other things, the thing you think is bad) and you have seen precisely one (1) series inside that genre that you don't actually remember. Nah, the game is not very good. I think they should consider making actual mechanics instead of things like "You can use the WILD CHILD playbook and use the THROW BOOMERANG move when a NPC gives an overly long speech".
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May 3, 2023 20:32
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Whirling posted:Nah, the game is not very good. I think they should consider making actual mechanics instead of things like "You can use the WILD CHILD playbook and use the THROW BOOMERANG move when a NPC gives an overly long speech". ...you've never read the game. Cool.
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May 3, 2023 20:35
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Whirling posted:Nah, the game is not very good. I think they should consider making actual mechanics instead of things like "You can use the WILD CHILD playbook and use the THROW BOOMERANG move when a NPC gives an overly long speech". 
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May 3, 2023 20:35
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theironjef posted:I didn't think it was a mistake, I thought it was poo poo design.
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May 3, 2023 20:39
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Kestral posted:that's_bait.gif 
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May 3, 2023 20:51
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Whirling posted:I can't remember any post-apocalyptic films with the kind of loving that Apocalypse World wants you to do, so I feel like this is just a weird thing the devs wanted.
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May 3, 2023 22:35
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Xiahou Dun posted:Then we just gotta agree to disagree. It's one of my favorite design elements and really underlines who the Battlebabe is. I agree. I love the idea that you can spend as much time as you want seducing a Battlebabe is, you can succeed in seducing the Battlebabe, whatever... the Battlebabe doesn't care. My second favorite is the driver's sex move, where the fail state is the idea of being connected to someone freaks you out, and even a partial success just confuses you more.
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May 3, 2023 22:50
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Both of those also work for non-sexual intimacy, too. You can pour your heart out to a battlebabe, and it just won't matter, and maybe that's a backhanded comfort and maybe it's not. Pour your heart out to a Driver -- well, you'll get more back in the moment, but there's a good chance they'll bolt or otherwise make things weird.
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May 3, 2023 22:55
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I mean my reasoning is that it doesn't matter if you meant anything to the battlebabe. It's that the encounter doesn't mean anything to you. As I recall a number of the moves had effects on both parties. But yeah I get the general appeal.
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May 4, 2023 00:00
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Nuns with Guns posted:Poison'd
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May 4, 2023 00:15
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AmiYumi posted:Isn’t that the one 4chan loved for being “Rum, Sodomy, & the Lash - But Mostly the Sodomy, Good Lord That’s A lot of Sodomy”? With a sample NPC named Pigfuck Dan, yes indeed. Poison'd sure is a thing.
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May 4, 2023 00:34
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Zorak of Michigan posted:With a sample NPC named Pigfuck Dan, yes indeed. I'm now imagining a universe where this game got as big as AW and googling "Pigfuck Dan" gives you a bunch of play reports and stories of this NPC, like how searching for "Rolfball apocalypse world" gives you a ton of AW AP threads
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May 4, 2023 00:37
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90s Cringe Rock posted:Watch more worse films. Get that goon the Roddy Piper classic Hell Comes To Frogtown.
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May 4, 2023 01:21
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theironjef posted:I mean my reasoning is that it doesn't matter if you meant anything to the battlebabe. It's that the encounter doesn't mean anything to you. As I recall a number of the moves had effects on both parties. But yeah I get the general appeal. Yeah cause the battlebabe is a toxic psychic vampire by their very nature. They can’t emotionally satisfy someone even if they want to or no matter how much they love them. The character who is the sexiest is the one person you would never want to gently caress. Just like they’re the class best at starting fights and being flashy but they’re not particularly good at ending them and they die pretty easy. The whole playbook is basically a missile shooting off to go start some poo poo it can’t handle while looking amazing. As a design it’s big, it’s bold and I love all of it. It’s not the kind of story everyone wants to tell all the time, I’ll give you that. But it’s a drat good story when you’re in the mood.
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May 4, 2023 01:28
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Yes and getting in bed with that would affect me in some way. I'd realize it was a mistake or be hurt or pissed or you know... something. Anything but "yes that was regulation sex in accordance with all package directions all right." Like I love your Iggy Pop style definition of them, total street walking cheetahs with hearts full of napalm, etc. I could even see the mechanic working if instead of "your move doesn't do anything" it had a replacement effect. All "You expected something to happen. And it didn't. And you don't know what to do with that. Take one forward (or whatever I don't know pbta too good)."
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May 4, 2023 02:41
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I mean, you're not forced to not roleplay that? It just doesn't have a mechanical effect. Characters aren't required to be blase about it.
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May 4, 2023 02:45
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Colonel Cool posted:I think there's a reason games with a narrow focus tend to be... better than sprawling generic systems. That isn't to say sprawling generic systems are inherently bad, but I do think it's much harder to design a good one. I think that there is a key difference between generic and setting-agnostic. A setting-agnostic game can (and should) still have a theme or a mechanical focus. I am willing to say that sprawling generic systems are inherently bad. And that it is not just hard to design a good one, but literally impossible. The idea of designing a game that can suit any story is a denial of what design means. Can you design a toothbrush that will brush the teeth of any animal, from the tiniest shrews to the largest toothed whales and everything in between? Maybe, sure, but it will suck most or all of the time. I say this as someone who has designed a couple of setting-agnostic games. You need to have a focus to a design for it to be any good. Strike! works in all kinds of settings, as long as you want "tactical combat and heedless adventure" in that setting. Should you use Strike! to play a game about soap operas? Or about pro wrestling? No, it would suck! Ariadne and Bob is for the genre of comedic duos, whether you're playing Jeeves and Wooster or Rick and Morty or Arthur and The Tick. You can use Ariadne and Bob to do Sherlock Holmes, but only if you want it to be funny - you're not going to get a satisfying and tense mystery out of it, but you will get fun japes. Historically, games that advertise themselves as generic actually smuggle in assumptions that really do not hold. Can everything be framed as tasks with success or failure as the results? No. But that's how some games do it! Other games try to fix that with a more narrative take on it - what if we change "success" to "yes, and" and change "failure" to "no, but"? Nope, that still fails to capture what is needed for all kinds of stories. But moreover, a lot of roleplaying is not even about telling stories! Trying to extract loot from a dungeon isn't necessarily trying to tell a story any more than playing sports is. RPGs can be tactical challenges, can pose moral conundrums, can set up hilarious banter, can generate stories, and more. They can do more than one of those things at a time, too - but they can't do all of them at once. Some combinations of those goals will be mutually contradictory.
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May 4, 2023 03:14
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Xiahou Dun posted:Yeah cause the battlebabe is a toxic psychic vampire by their very nature. They can’t emotionally satisfy someone even if they want to or no matter how much they love them. The character who is the sexiest is the one person you would never want to gently caress. Just like they’re the class best at starting fights and being flashy but they’re not particularly good at ending them and they die pretty easy. The whole playbook is basically a missile shooting off to go start some poo poo it can’t handle while looking amazing. The very first time I ever played Apocalypse World I didn't know anything about it. It was, like, late 2012, I was showing up at an RPG pick-up-and-play open house for the first night. Had no idea what I was getting into, just decided Battlebabe looked interesting but since I wanted to play a dude I just figured "what if I played a dude who had messed up ideas of being like a knight to his hardholder (NPC)". It was a pretty good time and it basically worked exactly like the above quote even though I hadn't seen most of the reference material for the archetype. GM had an NPC seduce my knight and I described him just going along with it in an enthusiastic but very bland way. Basically like (warning, NSFW scene) this scene from The Guest where he just goes through the direct motions of what his partner 'expected' but zero connection. In retrospect, it was pretty cool! The move and character archetype worked as written for a total newbie! Anyway The Guest is real good, I recommend watching and it's probably a good inspiration for a male Battlebabe, even though the movie is not post-apoc.
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May 4, 2023 03:50
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Antivehicular posted:I mean, you're not forced to not roleplay that? It just doesn't have a mechanical effect. Characters aren't required to be blase about it. Sure. Though in that case I'd argue that, to my knowledge, the character not being blase about, being affected by it, is what the mechanics represent. It's function following form. Like I'd even have figured that it was the point of there being sex-driven mechanics, to sort of try to evolve sex in games away from "if there's whores in the tavern I wanna do them" and towards being part of the story. Having a big old counterspell that targets story mechanics related to intimacy is, again just to me, both wild and antithetical. Further, if you want to respect that it's in there, being like "Yeah, I don't get my sex move granted hold or whatever, but I'm gonna act exactly like I would if I had gotten it" runs counter to intent anyway! But anyway, I really did enjoy AW and my read through of it. Just a small YMMV for me.
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May 4, 2023 04:12
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bewilderment posted:The very first time I ever played Apocalypse World I didn't know anything about it. It was, like, late 2012, I was showing up at an RPG pick-up-and-play open house for the first night. The Guest is one of the proest of watches. Dan Stevens as evil Captain America, Maika Monroe at an early part of becoming a modern scream queen, Lance motherfukken Reddick (RIP). Just a good action horror time.
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May 4, 2023 04:47
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theironjef posted:Sure. Though in that case I'd argue that, to my knowledge, the character not being blase about, being affected by it, is what the mechanics represent. It's function following form. Like I'd even have figured that it was the point of there being sex-driven mechanics, to sort of try to evolve sex in games away from "if there's whores in the tavern I wanna do them" and towards being part of the story. Having a big old counterspell that targets story mechanics related to intimacy is, again just to me, both wild and antithetical. Further, if you want to respect that it's in there, being like "Yeah, I don't get my sex move granted hold or whatever, but I'm gonna act exactly like I would if I had gotten it" runs counter to intent anyway! But anyway, I really did enjoy AW and my read through of it. Just a small YMMV for me. Battlebabes are meant to be weird - having a mechanic of "normally having sex has a special move attached to it but I negate that" is an intended effect of that. You can also have your PC react to their special not coming into play regardless - if a Hocus can normally connect with their partners by being able to hep/hinder them from anywhere, what do they do when sex with the Battlebabe doesn't have that happen? Interestingly there's an extended playbook called The Show which has the special of "If you and another character have sex, sweet." Sort of like the Battlebabe not having anything happen but it doesn't negate the other PC's special in this case.
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May 4, 2023 04:48
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See also the time someone wrote a joke "The Parent" playbook for MH 1E, with the best joke in the sex move: "If you have sex with someone other than your spouse: that's bad. Don't do that."
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May 4, 2023 04:58
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Heliotrope posted:Interestingly there's an extended playbook called The Show which has the special of "If you and another character have sex, sweet." Sort of like the Battlebabe not having anything happen but it doesn't negate the other PC's special in this case. which sort of implies that The Show and The Battlebabe having sex is not sweet.
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May 4, 2023 05:10
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Heliotrope posted:Battlebabes are meant to be weird - having a mechanic of "normally having sex has a special move attached to it but I negate that" is an intended effect of that. You can also have your PC react to their special not coming into play regardless - if a Hocus can normally connect with their partners by being able to hep/hinder them from anywhere, what do they do when sex with the Battlebabe doesn't have that happen? Eh, I already argued with someone else that battlebabe being weird isn't a good enough excuse to explain away why the person they slept with feels nothing about it as far as I'm concerned, I don't want to do it again. Like I said before, it feels like lovely design, and basically too glib. Sort of like that Show playbook sounds. Funny though!
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May 4, 2023 05:15
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