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Bob Smith posted:I wouldn't by any stretch call Mothership or Troika, the writers' other games, "groggy OSR tripe" so I'm not going to be as completely cynical as that unless I've gravely misread the pitch. I've not read Mothership but that is absolutely what I would describe Troika as. The fact that everything in the game has funny psychedelic fantasy flavour text doesn't change anything about the game's mechanics and design philosophy. YMMV, but having taken a look at Swyvers, its mechanics are more of the same and absolutely not anything I'm interested in. 
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Feb 9, 2024 15:32
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The book literally explains what a Weird vice is, so it's pretty clear the sorts of things that it means by this: The Whisper's job is dealing with ghosts, not just hanging out with them for fun. The dollhouse probably counts as a bizarre ritual. Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 22:31 on Mar 8, 2024 |
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Mar 8, 2024 22:29
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Admiralty Flag posted:I'd say, whenever the player indulges vice, let them have a free downtime action to work on a long-term project, only usable on their No-impact-in-the-game haunted dollhouse, to reflect their work on their hobby. After all, imagine what the dollhouse could mean I don't know why you would need or want to do this. "Working on the dollhouse" is itself the weird thing the player is indulging in and their purveyor is whoever is supplying them with rare materials or helping them with rare skills. You don't need to also make it an LTP where they build things for the same reason you don't make the gambling addict wager actual Coin to indulge their vice; it has all the fictional and mechanical weight of any other indulge vice action. If you're concerned about whether or not a literal dollhouse is Weird enough, just make it Weird by dint of the character's beliefs. Maybe it's some religious observance or some sort of voodoo-esque ritual; mechanically, that doesn't actually matter. Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 00:12 on Mar 9, 2024 |
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Mar 8, 2024 23:55
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sebmojo posted:the ability to give someone a bonus dice on their stress roll by helping then with it is gold, you get great little two hander scenes and entanglements. Unfortunately you can't Assist someone who is doing Indulge Vice as it's not rolling an Action, which is specifically the only thing you can Assist with. (Also in general Indulge Vice is such a key part of the DTA economy that I wouldn't let players do this unless someone wanted to sacrifice a downtime action to do it, which is a pretty raw deal for the helper, but that would be cool narratively.) Vagabong posted:Do people have advice on how to run the free play part of the game in general? My players and I are all pretty much brand new to actually playing ttrpgs, and going into the fourth session tomorrow I've noticed that while things flow pretty smoothly once we're running a score with a clear objective, when we switch to free play things can get quite aimless and I end up having to use a somewhat heavy hand guiding the players towards the next score. Freeplay is for hanging out and vibing with the characters (and gathering info once they've decided to do a score, but that's kind of secondary). This is the phase of the game in which you play through the PCs' daily lives, the daily lives of your various NPCs, and the daily life of the city. What do the PCs want in life? What are they doing to accomplish this? What do the NPCs want? What are they doing to accomplish this? All of this is what's happening in freeplay and is what is giving everyone their objectives. If you can't answer these questions, then it's time to sit down with everyone and actually figure it out. Ask your players what their characters' motivations and wants are, and where their contacts and other existing NPCs fit into these. Ask yourself what your NPCs and the factions in play want, and what they'd do to get that. You shouldn't be trying to cut the phase short because it's where the lion's share of what makes the characters and Doskvol believable and memorable is located. The only thing you need to do as a GM is let the players do whatever they want and portray the world honestly (i.e. make things happen in reaction to the fiction-as-established and to what players are doing), calling for rolls whenever rolls would make sense as usual. Just keep an ear out for whenever your players want to do something that seems big enough and complex enough - that's a Score, and the game can then transition into prepping it. e; also, general piece of advice for everything in fiction-first games: make sure your players understand that this works like a TV drama, not like a game. Remind them of this constantly. In BitD, you are all collaborating to create crime fiction - characters should behave in a way that's believable for characters inside crime fiction. The PCs and most of their contacts are all dangerous criminals addicted to dangerous vices, trying to carve out their personal slice of the city, and they should act like it. If a character is behaving in a way that seems like it would be unsatisfying in an HBO miniseries, they shouldn't behave that way. This way, whenever anyone doesn't know what should happen next, they can draw from crime fiction they've seen or read for ideas. Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 13:10 on Mar 9, 2024 |
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Mar 9, 2024 12:14
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sebmojo posted:It's effortless to make a crews life harder though? If you want them more stressed, just make them more stressed, every single action roll is at gm discretion. I mean sure, the GM has full discretion over score/clock length so you can just make everything require more rolls just to tax your players because you've chosen to let them shed stress more easily, if you want; it's not like it's a crime. I prefer to play it RAW because players not going into every score with all stress cleared produces more interesting situations and it gives me more freedom to set clock length according to what makes sense in the fiction.
Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 13:28 on Mar 10, 2024 |
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Mar 10, 2024 13:22
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