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Tevery Best posted:Thanks, this looks like it could come in handy, even if it's not 100% what I'm looking for. As the guy who wrote that, it's probably not what you're looking for based on your description of your game. It's way more about diving through plate glass windows and doing Mission Impossible shenanigans after all your Sam Fisher bullshit goes tits up. I would thoroughly recommend taking a gander at Urban Shadows, though. You can throw out all the supernatural stuff and what you're left with is a game about Debt, politics and underhanded dealing. The not-quite-PBtA game Undying which has a text preview up on Kickstarter at the moment sounds like it could be productive reading for you, too. It's a diceless game about scheming vampires and the "day-and-night" mechanics as well as the way competing schemes are effectively a bidding war with limited resources sounds like it could work very well for a game about two competing spy agencies. Like, feel free to tear Enemy Action apart for ideas but it's definitely more of a cooperative spy-themed heist game than a grand espionage Great Game.
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Jul 14, 2015 02:27
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Flavivirus posted:After a few years of graft and the support of friends, family, and kickstarter backers Legacy: Life Among the Ruins is now finished! gently caress yeah, nice one Flavivirus. And Enemy Action still languishes as a lovely google doc...
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Jul 14, 2015 02:28
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Verr posted:Is there anything along the lines of a Unknown Armies/Mage: The Awakening style hack? I'm interested in a game that allows "Mages" or whatever they might be called to start picking at the fabric of reality, confronting hubris and obsession in the search for power. There's one called World Of Our Desires, which I believe is literally an Unknown Armies hack. Haven't played it, though. I don't know of any hacks that are straight about playing Wizards. Urban Shadows and Monster of the Week both feature magic heavily, though. US is an Apocalypse World style game, MotW is a very Dungeon World style game.
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Jul 16, 2015 00:49
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DemonMage posted:Also page 43, Sense8ive should be Sensitive unless it's a reference I'm just missing! Probably a reference to Sense8, a TV show.
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Oct 12, 2015 15:28
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AriTheDog posted:The new version of AW? If so, link or explanation would be appreciated. If you support Vincent Baker on his Patreon, you get early access to the second edition of Apocalypse World. I haven't read it but I hear there have been some fairly substantial changes (Driver and Operator being mashed into a single playbook, Maestro D' and Quarantine being upgraded to core playbooks)
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Dec 28, 2015 02:44
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Boing posted:I'm planning a hack and I could use some help brainstorming. My idea is for a campaign where the players are all Time Cops* intent on stopping Time Crime, and chasing Time Perps who try and steal things or murder people and flee through multiple different epochs, dealing with challenges on the way. (there is already the Timewatch kickstarter for the Gumshoe system, but I missed the boat on that, and the type of game I want to run is more AW style anyway) A good way to look at the playbooks in core Apocalypse World at least is that they're actually 9 sub-RPGs masquerading as a single game. The game the Skinner is playing is actually radically different to the one the Gunlugger or the Hardholder are playing, both in objective, mechanics, rules used and "feel". Think about what the sub-games that can be played under the umbrella of "Time Cop". As a spitball, the actual CSI guy who does down-to-earth police work, the loose cannon who just wants to get in the same room as the bad guy and gently caress due process, the lab guy who can get you all the answers you need as long as somebody does the legwork, the chief who has to deal with the legit bureaucracy and ensuring that the Time Code is followed, the time travel consultant who doesn't know more than the basics of actual policing but can speak ancient Greek and tell you what first century Chinese court advisors wore. Think about the different facets of gameplay and work out what the "game" for each one is, then siphon those off into playbooks. Work what the playbooks who look nothing like each other look like first.
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Jan 19, 2016 04:09
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Boing posted:This is great advice. But I worry that this sort of approach leads to everyone playing their own little minigames independently of each other, and not really working as a team as if they were part of a DW-style adventuring party. Is that just one of the risks inherent in going AW-style? Considering that's largely the point of Apocalypse World, yes, it will lead to everyone not working as a D&D adventuring party. The reason Apocalypse World, Urban Shadows and Monsterhearts are considered by PBtA purists to be the strongest versions of PBtA in comparison to, say, Dungeon World and Monster of the Week is that Apocalypse World was designed from the ground up to be a TV show where everyone is their own strong, independent character who, because this is the apocalypse, doesn't have m/any friends and probably doesn't even trust anyone. The literal most dangerous and world-changing thing in AW is a group of PCs working together. You're meant to have wildly different goals and worldviews and expected to have to put those aside if you want to work together - directly contrasting the implicit assumption of D&D that the crafty, subtle Wizard, the brash, dangerous Fighter and the cautious, paranoid Rogue have already put their own personal foibles aside to better function as a team. In AW, the game wants the Brainer to treat agreeing not to brain-rape the people in the Chopper's gang to feel like a sacrifice rather than something you've automatically agreed not to do as part of a social contract that lets you get along with the Gunlugger. The Brainer's all about that brain-rape, it's basically all you have going for you and if you agree not to do it then your main source of power just vanished. Unlike in conventional party-based RPGs which usually allow characters to have a broad base that they build their speciality on top of - a useful part of being a team: it lets you have your "role" but means you can still contribute if your time to shine hasn't come up, encouraging you to continue working with the team when there are, for example, no traps to disarm. In AW, you have no gameplay available to you beyond basic "doing stuff" that isn't your playbook's schtick. The Brainer can't branch out of being a brain-rapist because the party really needs a mechanic now, so he's got to solve all of his problems with brain-rape. The Gunlugger's got nothing to do but kill, the Skinner has no options but to try and make everyone love him. Often, these singular drives are not compatible and that's where the gameplay begins. Playbooks like the Hardholder further complicate matters because their overriding desire for gameplay is really unusual for an RPG: they desperately want to keep everything on an even keel and don't want the boat rocked. If the MC rules that their hardhold is all messed up at the start of the session, their life is terrible. Most of the other playbooks largely want to gently caress things up so that they get to use their moves and have fun, and in fact the book explicitly calls this out: playbooks like the Gunlugger and Angel have nothing to do if things are all quiet. Your out of character job in the game if you're playing one of those playbooks is to make every situation descend into a bloodbath so that your character is needed. As much as the Hardholder totally wants to hire the Angel and the Gunlugger for his hardhold, their presence makes his life really difficult and "interesting." Every time I have MCed Apocalypse World it has inexorably descended into PVP and that's completely intentional. The bare minimum is that the situation should inexorably descend into one where two or more PCs are working at complete cross purposes, have incompatible goals, don't like each other and tolerate the other for the greater good. If you try and play happy families, the game will fight you. This is completely intentional. Monsterhearts and Urban Shadows are good because they didn't stray too far from this formula and didn't change the rules that much. Dungeon World and Monster of the Week didn't change the rules that much but tried to completely rewrite the fundamental conceit of gameplay. They work as games, and I've run and played an awful lot more Dungeon World than I have Apocalypse World, but there's a tension there where you and the game and trying to strain away from what the core rules have been set up to do. Moves are player facing to put all the power into the player's hands - scenes with competing players are like arguments where everyone is holding a loaded gun - you're not safe because that guy you're arguing with has the narrative power to declare changes to the scene. I'm not going to claim standard skill checks don't do this on some level because they do, but there's an obvious difference between somebody declaring that they're going to attack the other player, initiative being declared and combat beginning and what happens in Urban Shadows where somebody can declare they're going for their gun, roll Unleash, get a 12+ and end the combat as it starts without the other player being able to do a drat thing about it. In PBtA you're just not safe around other players. PBtA totally can be rewritten to be friendly to a party based game on a fundamental level, but I don't think anybody's done it yet and I think it would end up looking very different to Apocalypse World. Look at Fellowship for a good example of this. It's really hard to actually do PvP in Fellowship and the whole thing is set up to foster a good party relationship because it pits the group against somebody else: The GM is also the player of the Overlord and they have as much narrative power as the other players. It hides PBtA's tendency towards PvP by beginning the game with the premise that PvP has already begun and sanctions all PvP as long as it's between the Fellowship and the Overlord. Doing anything else requires you to fight the rules. I'd like to think I'm not a PBtA snob and I certainly am not sneering at Manifest Destiny for looking at AW, going "that's not what I want" and writing their own PBtA that lets them and their group play the game they want to play. I'm just saying it's a good job they did that because by the sounds of it if they'd reskinned Apocalypse World the game would have fallen apart as everyone tried desperately not to do what the rules wanted them to. There's a hell of a lot of PBtA hacks out there now and the big failing of most of them is that their authors didn't really understand the game. They looked at AW, went "that works" and based their rules on AW's while not thinking about the big difference between their game and AW. Whether it was intentional or not, US and MH hew very closely to what AW plays like and so don't stumble over that single, very important step.
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Jan 22, 2016 17:39
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Megazver posted:I wonder if he'll actually do any stretch goals. Comments seem to point to 'not really'. I kind of appreciate that, to be honest. I think at this point, we've all seen projects go down in flames from trying to complete idiotic stretch goals that they came up with on the spot because they got too much money. I just want the goddamn book.
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Feb 2, 2016 17:58
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This is your daily reminder that Car Wizards is a game that exists and has the following rule in it:Car Wizards posted:When the SM tells you that your car probably can’t do something—like drive off of a perfectly good cargo plane, parachute down, and immediately start racing once you land—you tell the SM to shut their filthy lying face, then explain with the loosest grasp of physics why obviously it can.
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Feb 3, 2016 00:06
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The thing I'm mulling over at the moment is exploring the "arranging fictional circumstances to you get to roll the move you want" angle of gameplay space. In the context of my espionage thriller game Enemy Action, what I was thinking of doing was having there be a small handful of moves for Raids - nothing as fleshed out as the Battle subsystem in AW2.0 but more along those lines than a simple 'murder somebody' move. Fictionally, Enemy Action occupies that slightly odd fictional space of the "realistic spy thriller" where it still doesn't really bear a lot of similarity to real espionage, but is still in this sort of surreal dark world where bullets kill people, plot armour is hard to come by, you can totally fall out of a window and shatter your leg and then be in a wheelchair for six months etc. Guns are almost as dangerous here as in real life so the last thing anyone wants to do is get into some sort of horrible harm-for-harm exchange of gunfire against opponents of equal footing. What you actually want to do, because this is still fictional dark world and not real life, is arrange circumstances so you get to have a slick montage of brutal action where you clean up the bad guys. While you're in that pseudo-space inside the montage, the fictional rules are suspended slightly and a bit of a transition into balls-out action movie can take place where the players are a lot more capable of dishing out and avoiding the hurt than they otherwise would be. This is a trope that's used all the time in the not-quite-real-life dark world of "realistic espionage" - preparation, knowledge, experience and subterfuge win out over anything else. If you plan and equip yourselves right, and get the drop on the enemy, you can do anything. Mechanically, I'm thinking this would be represented by a fairly vicious move or couple of moves for unprepared combat - one for horribly killing somebody who you didn't get the drop on and another for surviving an awful, close-in gunfight where you get surprised. Then, there's a move for straight up Raiding somebody - for which the trigger would be a fairly hefty fictional requirement. You'd need the right gear, the right circumstances, to have good intel on exactly what you're facing, fictional time to put together a plan. If you can actually line up all your ducks, you're rewarded with a move (or series of moves) which have significantly more favourable options and results. A lot more "you take out everyone in the room" compared to "exchange harm for harm". You reward playing to the fiction by giving the players a huge mechanical incentive to be those cool superspies instead of just idiots with silenced pistols. A lot of the playbooks would have moves that would waive some of the requirements for Raiding, such as the mastermind being able to come up with a plan in a few seconds or the Triggerman having an extra bag of grenades. Gear choices could be a big part of getting those fictional requirements for the trigger: a heartbeat sensor to see enemies through walls so you can plan your assault, for example. The final result would look something like a cross between John Wick and Rainbow Six: Siege depending on how many guns the players were carrying at the time. What I've learned from desperately bashing my head against a fairly conventional RPG in PBtA format for like two years is that PBtA really does not lend itself to "a group of people go into a location and have action adventures" very well.
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Feb 8, 2016 18:30
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To advocate for the 'track exact spacebucks' side, if the primary driving focus of the game is looming impending debt collection and the hunt to make ends meet, tracking exact monetary values or at least calling units of barter something like '1000 guilders' instead of '1-barter' will really add to the themes of the game. If money is the primary focus, you should write the game so that the players treat it as money. If you end up with the players sitting around a scribbled sheet of paper full of crossed out figures going "jesus christ that motherfucker overcharged us for the plasma drive repairs and now we're 2000 guilders short where the gently caress are we gonna get two large in four hours" then imo the game's working as intended.
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Sep 29, 2016 12:17
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