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hyphz posted:Well, they should hate to lose, shouldn't they? I mean, not in a negative sense where they start flipping the table and walking out in a huff if things go badly, but losing shouldn't feel the same as winning, even if there is a narrative necessity. Some people are just unable to accept that failing forward is a legitimate step in RPGing. Fortunately, those folks usually get filtered out of decent groups by age or inclination of the other members.
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Jan 25, 2022 21:56
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I know it's not a PbtA system, but I really like Star Trek Adventures. It's a great system for playing Trek, I think. There's a thread on the Modiphius 2D20 system, which it uses: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3925914&perpage=40&pagenumber=1&noseen=1 Rulebooks go on sale pretty often too.
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Oct 2, 2022 06:17
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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 |
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Jan 29, 2023 15:56
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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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Rosalind posted:Looking for a good, offbeat PBTA or PBTA-like system for an online one-shot tomorrow and I was hoping this thread could point me in the right direction. I'd normally just search Reddit but alas it appears to be having issues. Without knowing what sort of genre/experience you're shooting for, I'd recommend Blades in the Dark is PBTA-like, though not quite PBTA, and excellent for jumping into things in medias res, which is perfect for a one-shot.
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Feb 21, 2023 22:14
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Bear Enthusiast posted:I've been thinking of apocalyspe world and Monster of the Week lately, having run both for short periods, and how things happening off-screen works. As far as I can tell the rules always have the narrative with at least one of the players, so if there's some mechanical effect (like the result of a 7-9 or 6- for a move) that they wouldn't be aware of you just don't mention it. Maybe it's just my style/philosophy for MotW, but I always let players know when a clock has been ticked, and almost always say, "And your characters know this as well." Out of game, it prevents surprise at, "We had no way of knowing the gate to the outer realms was going to open so soon!" In-game, I justify it as portents, bad dreams, mystic sendings, bad feelings, etc. I think the philosophy is transferable to most PbtA games. The characters are supposed to be savvy to the ways of the world, a cut above. They have contacts, perception, whatever. Besides, it's no fun just springing a death ray or the like on them when they could have been facing dilemmas all along related to those fronts. "You could have let the gangers overrun the town if you wanted to stop the mystic!" But that's just my opinion.
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Apr 12, 2024 19:19
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