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Shamblercow posted:I have finished a working draft of a Necromancer class: Here's my suggestions for the Necromancer. It's a neat idea, but there's a lot of stuff I, at least, would consider changing. I hope you find these suggestions helpful and that they at least give you an idea of what you'd like the class to do. In general, if I don't mention it here, I think it works fine. I'd tweak the verbiage on the 10+ result for Thrall Seeker so it reads "The thrall executes your instructions to the best of its ability." If it just "attempts" it, it sounds more like a 7-9 result. I get what you're going for, just a minor quibble. It may be me, but I don't understand Lend Me Your Strength very well - the triggers are pretty wordy and esoteric. Plus, it's problematic that you can screw an ally over with this but can't use it on an enemy - does it require the consent of the target? If so, make that explicit. Plus, how big is it? What is it intended to do? Why does breaking it kind of gently caress you up even if you roll a 10+? It just reads as a kind of weird power to me, and not really iconic to the Necromancer. All things to consider, though you may have already. The Good and Neutral alignment moves seem like they should be switched to me. Phylactery is cool conceptually, definitely keep it in some form. That said, I'm struggling to figure it out. You're a thrall? So you give a three word command to yourself? Do you have to roll +Con to do anything? Can you get revived from an undead state? When your class damage is d4, Corpse Explosion is a pretty useful, but not broken ability. If someone takes it with multiclass dabbler, it can be a hell of a lot more powerful. You might consider just making it a flat d4, and perhaps include a move to upgrade it later. Bloodhound has an unclear trigger. How far away does it work? What do you have to do to "channel necrotic energy"? I'm really not fond of the choices on Healer's Poison or From the Brink which allow you to choose to do damage to an ally. It's one thing if the GM does it, it's kind of a dick move if the player constantly is. So, either you'll do it and people will be annoyed, or you won't do it, in which case, why have it? If it's going to be there, make it the GM's choice. Possession has a very unclear trigger. Crossing the streams is kind of a mess too. With both of these moves, I'm not sure exactly how they're triggered or what the fiction should look like. Remember, simplify, simplify. Death Knell seems really good and potentially overpowered to me. Death is a Disease needs to be re-written. There are no turns in Dungeon World. I Bring a Mighty Bounty, My Liege is another move that needs a more elegant trigger. Like, try this instead: "When you deliberately shatter your phylactery..." The earlier issues with Phylactery also apply to this move.
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Mar 28, 2013 03:12
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My best advice for the Psychic Warrior is to just think, conceptually, about what you want it to do, then have a look at other playbooks that do that. If it's more of a monk thing, as stated, have a look at the Initiate. If it's more of a Jedi thing, have a look at Pheylorn's Star Wars World AW hack, there's some good move ideas in there. Right now it feels a little conceptually fuzzy, which (trust me, I know, I'm working on multiple playbooks now) will lead you to come up with moves like "does 1d4 extra damage."
That Rough Beast fucked around with this message at 01:32 on Apr 6, 2013 |
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Apr 6, 2013 01:28
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TombsGrave posted:I think I'm the only person in this thread who prefers "Psychic Warrior" to "Soulknife," and that weirds me out a bit. Not really. I don't think Psychic Warrior is fabulous or anything, but I prefer generic to just straight up using the name of an esoteric D&D class. I can put up with it for the iconic classes, but it feels weird for something like this.
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Apr 6, 2013 02:44
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TombsGrave posted:I think I'm the only person in this thread who prefers "Psychic Warrior" to "Soulknife," and that weirds me out a bit. I have a bit more time now, so some more in-depth comments on the revision if you want them. As usual, if I don't comment on it I think it's good: Transcendent Agility is getting closer, and I -think- get the feel you want for it. That said, I can't see why you'd ever pick "you leave no trace of your passage" on a 7-9 roll. You might or might not need to get where you're going quickly, but "You evade detection" seems like a really, really obvious choice, since it's kind of the functional result of leaving no trace of your passage. This might be working as intended, but might work better replacing "you leave no trace of your passage" with another choice. Maybe: "Your positioning allows for an additional and unexpected opportunity."? That might be divorced too much from the fiction, but is worth thinking about. I'm kind of picturing this as more of a "dancing across the treetops" kind of move than an infiltration move, so my interpretation might be off. Is Ether Step intended to be a teleporting dodge, a utility movement ability, or both? Can your guy consciously think: "I want to teleport" and try it, or does it have to be the result of some other action (dodging a blow, climbing a rope, etc.)? There's a lot of ways to Defy Danger with Dex, after all. What will the fiction look like if your guy decides to teleport and gets a 7-9? Can or should the fiction support a guy who can only teleport when doing strange acrobatic moves? This may just be me, but I'd consider tweaking the trigger to make it its own move instead of triggering off Defy Dex. The most elegant action would be to can it and replace it with a slightly modified version of Slipstream Step. I believe this may in fact be explicitly contradictory to advice you got earlier, so have fun with that one. With Warrior's Precognition, I agree with gnome7: there's no move anywhere in the game that gives +2 anything on its own and I think there's a sound reason for that. Why not have the move give you a choice between the usual +1 forward and the two alternate options?
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Apr 6, 2013 05:52
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Wahad posted:So now that I'm more familiar with DW and how it works, I want to try my hand at making some content - in particular, a class. For those of you who already have created DW content, are there any general tips you can give? Or should I just dive in the deep end and get feedback as I go on? There will be some repeat statements in here. The absolute most important thing going in is concept. You need an idea of the archetype you want to evoke, and it shouldn't be one that's already covered in the core material. That said, you'll need around 20 moves, as others have said, plus the alignment and racials. You'll probably want to pick one primary stat to key the moves from, as well as a secondary for the rest. At the most you can probably manage three important stats, with the players picking from alternate move options. Any more than this and you're probably wasting people's time. The Bard suffers from a bit of this, as it's obviously meant to use Cha and Dex and then you have something like Metal Hurlant which uses Con. Make sure that the moves do not trump the basic moves. Beware anything that people would always use over Defy Danger or Hack and Slash. If you have such a move, either make it apply more narrowly or have it enhance a basic move. Have clear, useful triggers so you and the players know how to make the moves happen. Favor simple language when possible. If it takes more than a medium sized sentence to explain your trigger, you probably need to simplify it. Moves that just give a +1 or +damage are boring if that's all they do. It's fine to use the mechanical carrot, I'm of the opinion that it doesn't hurt, but make sure that the triggers for the moves will produce interesting fiction. If a move gives a reward, be sure that its trigger is intended to solicit the behavior that you want from the playbook. Stuff like "You do +1d4 damage" with no qualifications is really boring. For example, there's a world of difference between "Take +1 to Parley" and "When you Parley with someone who has never seen your face, take +1 ongoing." I don't say either of those are great, but the second's way better than the first, and a player will think, "My guy will always keep his face covered!" and that will inform the playbook's style. I don't personally have a problem with Multiclass Dabbler as some other posters do. The multiclass moves are scattered throughout the original text and thus not out of place in a playbook. There are some playbooks which benefit from restricted choices, I think, but there are also some (like the bard, or a scholar type character) where having a move to multiclass to any other playbook makes sense. The multiclass moves can be a crutch for lazy design, but they're not always. If you put them in, you should be aware of how your moves will synergize with those in other classes. You should also be aware of how other classes will synergize with yours. For example, (since I remember commenting on this) Shamblercow's Necromancer had a move that let the user explode a corpse to deal damage. The Necromancer's damage is d4, but if a Fighter with d10 multiclassed to that move, you're dealing with something far more powerful. Maybe the best thing is just to jump in, playtest, and get opinions. For the record, operating from these principles, you'll also find that the original playbooks are far from perfect.* *My theory is that the Fighter was probably the first, it's one of the worst and also very Apocalypse Worldy.
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Apr 8, 2013 02:22
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Well, I think the arguing over multiclassing is really interesting and probably the results of two of the system's strengths butting heads. Namely, flexibility smashing headlong into the specificity and beauty of class (AW's revival of the concept through the "playbook" really resonated with me for some reason). So, your opinion on whether MC sucks or not probably depends on whether you give primacy to playbook purity or flexibility. Personally, I love the playbook concept, but I think the possibility to multi-class should be there in most cases (though, as Lemon Curdistan said, it shouldn't be something you require to make the class good). People will use it or not and choose appropriate moves or not, but that's something that I think is better hashed out at the table than necessarily mandated by me. It's not wholly a holdover from Dungeons and Dragons, either - "Take a move from another playbook" has been baked in to the * World games from the very beginning.
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Apr 10, 2013 00:34
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Guys, I applied the design philosophy we've been discussing. Did I do it right? The Kender "I'm just borrowing it!" Names: Tasselhoff, Bufflemuff, Tiddlywinks, Fruitthrow, Bearchase, Buttercup, Peanut Look Twinkling eyes, Merry eyes, Sociopathic eyes Long hair, Pixie cut, or Topknot Wiry body, chubby body, or athletic body Stats Your maximum HP is 6+Constitution Your base damage is d6 Starting Moves You start with the following moves: Fearless When you throw yourself into physical or social danger without regard for your well-being, take +1 forward. "It Must have Fallen into my Pocket!" When you try to steal the personal possession of someone you know, take +1 to the roll. Taunt When you Taunt an enemy in combat, stand up at the table, blurt out the taunt in real life in a Kender voice, and roll +Cha. On a 10+, the enemy targets you and is made incautious by their rage - take +1 ongoing to your rolls against them until they get it together. On a 7-9, the enemy focuses its attention upon you, but is less incautious, more "really pissed." I Just Don't Understand When your childlike curiousity produces social or physical conflict, mark XP. Naturally Inquisitive When you Discern Realities, hit or miss, you may ask one additional question of your choice. This question must be inane, but you still take +1 forward if you can manage to act on the answer. Innocent When someone accuses you of thievery, take +1 ongoing against and do +1 damage to them. Gear Your load is 6+Str. Choose your gear last. You start with Dungeon Rations (5 uses, 1 weight), a Healing Potion (1 use, 0 weight), and an item of your choice from someone else's character sheet. Choose your clothing: -Traveling Clothes (0 weight) -Leather Armor (1 Armor, 1 weight) Choose your armament: -Rapier (close, precise, 2 weight) and Shield (+1 Armor) -Hoopak (close, reach, near, far, 2 weight) and Sling stones (3 ammo, 1 weight) Advanced Moves Irrelevant, choosing this class should get you booted from the game. That Rough Beast fucked around with this message at 01:23 on Apr 10, 2013 |
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Apr 10, 2013 01:11
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Lemon Curdistan posted:Yes you did. All kenders aside, this is a legitimately good set of starting moves and a great base to build a full class from (although it has too many starting moves). Yeah, I gave it an extra move or so since there was no Kender racial (I forget how the Elf playbook floating around handles that) and because I knew I wasn't going to be writing any advanced moves. I'm not sure exactly why I bothered to balance that though, given my intent was to produce a class that would emulate toxic Kender behavior and which no group would want to see at the table (for long, anyway). Oh well, at least most of the principles are sound, now I just have to get around to the real playbooks I want to make. I'm addicted to hacking this game/reading hacks about this game, someone help.
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Apr 10, 2013 22:37
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Shamblercow posted:I've been working on a Shadow Dancer class and it's ready for a second opinion. All comments, critiques, and thoughts are welcome, as always. Lost in the Darkness is pretty good, but I find myself wanting to rewrite it to change the dynamic a bit. I could see you taking or leaving this. Lost in the Darkness When you attempt to steal an object from within a shadow you can see, roll +Dex. On a 10+, you get the object without incident. On a 7-9, choose two: -You don't make any noise -No one will notice it's missing for a while -You don't damage the object On a miss, you still get the object, but your theft has been detected. I'd tweak the alignment moves a bit. Chaotic as it stands seems more evil and pretty specific. Maybe, "Chaotic: Steal something important without considering the consequences." If you want an Evil Shadow Dancer, maybe "Evil: Steal an item someone else needs." I agree that Moment of Opportunity seems kind of weird. If you're Defending something, fictionally it doesn't make sense to use that hold to move away from the thing you're defending to me, it looks like you would be exposing that thing to harm. If that's working as intended though, that's fine. Well of Shadows seems more like a +Int than a +Wis to me. Dex is already your primary and you have several moves using +Int. A +Wis move like this probably isn't getting used often since I'm guessing the average Shadow Dancer will have a pretty crap Wis. If you're intending to create a +Wis branch of moves and a +Int branch of moves, that's cool, but it's way unbalanced in the favor of Int right now. Similarly, Right Through Me seems like it should be +Dex instead of +Int. I don't quite understand Silent Shadow's fictional effect. In the Valley of the Shadow is good. Beware of people using it in lieu of Hack and Slash. Cool effect though, so I'm a bit torn. I'd at least consider making it require another move to get, or maybe just double the damage unless you get anything but a 12+. Maybe consider having it build off Hack and Slash somehow? The Penumbra power has you rolling +Con, but then doesn't have that result do anything. It also seems pretty powerful, but maybe that's me. I think you need a move that works when the Shadow Dancer is in absolute darkness. Or wait - do the powers of the Shadow Dancer only work when there's both darkness and light? Address this somewhere, it's sure to come up. Also, you could possibly add a move that lets the Shadow Dancer be able to target someone's shadow instead of them for the purpose of hack and slash/volley/whatever.
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Apr 10, 2013 23:17
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CitizenKeen posted:Who Doesn't Love Palladium Games No one else has really addressed this, so I will first. I realize this isn't really about the Fighter, per se, but we'll go ahead and use the Fighter as an example. With the stat distribution in the rules, you're going to get +2, +1 (which can become a +2 pretty quickly), +1, +0, +0, -1. The class moves are intended to reflect the class's role in the game, yeah? So the Fighter, naturally, gets a big weapon, is going to be hacking and slashing a lot, and probably needs to take a lot of hits. You're going to put the +2 into Str (or Dex if you're an Elf) and, since many of your other moves use +Con and you'll be in the fray and getting hit a lot, you'll put one of the +1s into Con. From that point, you'll decide what you want to prioritize, but you're going to end up fairly average at a few things and on the crappy side at one. Now, that's fine - no one has to be good at everything and it would be broken if they were, but to my mind the moves are supposed to be building on the class's core concept. They're there to be used. They should be something that, reasonably, are intended to work with most builds. If they key off of stats that are not optimal, they are less likely to get used. Keep in mind that this isn't 3.5 or 4e. In those, a failure on a task may worsen the situation, but it may simply represent no change of state. In Dungeon World this is explicitly not the case and a failure can always make things worse for you or others by triggering a hard move. And that's okay. 7-9 and misses are where the game gets creative, after all, and they create drama. Sometimes the dumb guy has to try to think his way out of a problem and that's fine. But when you're building a special bonus move that you want people to take and regularly use, it seems to me to be bad design to create something that only a few specific builds are going to be able to do that with, and which for the others would be useless at best or actively detrimental to the entire party at worst. In 3e terms, that's like making a move out of Toughness. Why not focus on the stuff you know the class should/will be doing? The fighter who chooses to prioritize Int still gets good use out of Spout Lore or Defy Danger (Int), and can multiclass to pick up some other Int moves. I do get the idea that things like replacement stat moves can broaden the class's power too much, and that is a legitimate concern. I'm personally in favor of moves like that, but only if their trigger is quite specific or if the class has some other mitigating factor built in. For example, the Fighter's Interrogate move makes perfect sense to me and seems like a good move - Str for a Parley, but only when you're being a thug. It fits, and is something the Fighter should reasonably be able to do. This is all just my opinion based on what I've gone through trying to come up with playbooks, though, I don't think this is exactly a precise science. That Rough Beast fucked around with this message at 20:15 on Apr 26, 2013 |
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Apr 26, 2013 20:12
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Lemon Curdistan posted:Do note that the Improved Fighter's additional move uses Str specifically because it is an additional starting move, though (and thus needs to be based off the primary stat so it is always useful to all Fighter builds). Stat-switching moves are bad design because you end up with e.g. the Wizard, who gives no fucks about anything other than Int. Yeah, I would add that while I think Interrogator is stat-switching done right (which Lemon Curdistan may or may not agree with) Logical is definitely an example of stat-switching done wrong because its trigger is so vague as to be pointless. They might as well have just written "Discern Realities with +Int instead of +Wis, always."
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Apr 26, 2013 20:33
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CitizenKeen posted:That was kind of my thought, though coming at it a little backwards. I'm not exactly "splitting" the classes, as that might be difficult (though I'm not entirely adverse to it). Rather, I'm "rebuilding" the roles. For example, I have Rituals and a version of Bardic Lore as my starting moves in the Scholar hybrid class. It's not exactly what you're talking about (mainly because it's much more simplistic), but conceptually this is the approach taken by the World of Dungeons game. It's written as a fake Dungeon World retro-clone, like some alternate B/X version of the Dungeon World set. It doesn't have explicit moves, though, just brought umbrellas of skill which let players create their own class by choosing two.
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Apr 27, 2013 06:21
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Yeah, to me "Dungeon" is just shorthand for hostile environment. I mean, that's not to say there's some campaigns where it wouldn't fit, and it would require some tailoring to the PCs, but you're going to be doing that anyway. That said, the best thing for the playbook is probably to just leave it vague, since then people can make their giants as big or as little as they want.
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Apr 29, 2013 08:44
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Assassin's always seemed more "compendium for thief" class to me, but YMMV. I wonder why I haven't seen more ninjas. As for monetizing playbooks, I'll probably throw all the ones I've been working on up on DTRPG at some point just to justify the hours of my life I've wasted tweaking them.
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May 1, 2013 02:05
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Yeah, agreed with all of those, pretty much. With the layout, you might put the trigger at the top left, or even top right, it looks strange where it is. As for the rest, the concept behind the CC is evocative enough, but people won't choose it if it is mechanically prohibitive. Specifically, Doomed should give you something. I'll have to think about specific changes later, but at the moment you might consider making 6- less punitive. Maybe you know your destined end, so you can't die before then, but on a miss Death returns you to life with a charge you have to fulfill. Perhaps add a "when you act to fulfill a deal with Death, take +1 ongoing" to make it more attractive. Haunted Gaze Functional, but not particularly useful. Almost anything you're defending against is going to be a mortal threat, and it's the rare character that's going to be some sort of a Charisma tank. I wouldn't be tempted to take this move in lieu of a playbook move. Dance with Death Seems like it will work okay, but it's going to trigger fairly often, could get old fast. For Tomorrow We Die Needs work. It would still be a fairly weak move if it was just a static +1 to the Carouse roll, but the 6- result being even more harsh makes it a clunker. It's particularly bad when you realize that you can get a +1 on the Carouse roll by spending an extra 100 coin. Knowing that, who would waste a move slot on this to potentially get a worse effect? Remember, one of the idiosyncracies of the *world games are that they're so dependent upon the playbook/move style. While I am not the grand poobah of playbooks, let me just say that philosophically, the moves need to be stuff that people will choose as a bonus (that is, mechanically sound) before they are a narrative reflection of the character. No one is going to choose to intentionally cripple their character with a CC when they could just take a move from their playbook. There's a place for a cursed and tormented hero in Dungeon World, but I don't think great success awaits by trying to render that mechanically through the move structure.
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May 9, 2013 09:41
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Mikan posted:Those are just off the top of my head and they obviously aren't full moves but you could totally have a Doomed, Awful, Cursed, Tormented compendium class that still offers benefits and has moves that drive the narrative in a positive or interesting way. Yeah, it was late, I basically meant "If you're trying to write a move reflecting a cursed condition, don't make the move itself a curse." I'm a firm believer in the Carrot Not Stick school of move design.
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May 9, 2013 19:58
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So, the Assassin pretty much owns. Did I say it was more Compendium Class-y? I was wrong! Slight nitpick. In Thieves' Highway, I'd change "the city rooftops" to something like "the secret paths of the urban landscape" or something similar (and less clunky). Gotta let an assassin go through the alleys and sewers, after all.
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May 10, 2013 22:15
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