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Comrade Gorbash
Jul 12, 2011

My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.
Also, don't be afraid to follow the fiction - in some situations it may just not be possible to use a far weapon in close quarters.

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Comrade Gorbash
Jul 12, 2011

My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

spectralent posted:

Yeah, I was similarly dissatisfied with Tremulus and I couldn't shake the feeling that the entire game was just someone's AW game with a new coat of paint.

I did appreciate that trust works in reverse, though; i.e. people use your trust in them for their assist/interfere attempts, and vice versa. I thought that was neat. I wonder if that's what finding a fantasy heartbreaker's like if you're into D&D?
Very much so. If it was just a badly written clone or clumsy pastiche, you would just roll your eyes and move on. It's finding those little nuggets of brilliance buried in so much wasted time and effort that make it heart breaking.

Comrade Gorbash
Jul 12, 2011

My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.
Monster of the Week's revision is built for that, but I haven't taken a close look at it yet.

Urban Shadows could work for the early comic stuff, but would likely tend to break down if you move into the bigger meta-plot stuff later on.

Comrade Gorbash
Jul 12, 2011

My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.
Basically the difference between US and MotW is that US is decidedly street level. Early Dresden basically. Smaller scope and more personal, significantly less action (US characters can be quite fragile). MotW is more supportive of combat encounters and comic book action.

There's overlap between the two, but they are designed for different kinds of games.

Comrade Gorbash
Jul 12, 2011

My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

Vulpes Vulpes posted:

I've really gotten a hankering to put together a Spirit of 77 game based around car racing in exotic locales under the auspices of an underground race sponsored by a shady contessa. Basically Enter the Dragon crossed with Speed Racer, with the players alternatively racing and investigating the race.

I'm just trying to figure out what to do with character creation. Should I let all the playbooks take the Hot Wheels move to put everyone on the same footing? Or should I just scrub the Good Old Boy altogether? Having one playbook be so much better than the others at driving would really throw off the racing segments, and I'd like to let everyone be poo poo-hot drivers. Any thoughts?

QuantumNinja's approach is the most direct, and what I ultimately did in a similar situation (decided to do a Mad Max AW game, so dropped the Driver and handed out cars and No poo poo Driver to everyone).

That being said, the other thing I considered was giving everyone a car & A No poo poo Driver, but keeping the Driver anyways. The thinking there is, if you set up the situations correctly, the Driver becomes a lot like the Gunlugger.

In AW, there are a number of combat playbooks, but the Gunlugger is by far the best at direct, uncomplicated violence. But it doesn't outshine everyone else in violence heavy AW games. Rather than dominating those games, the Gunlugger instead gets to make what are stupid decisions for everyone else and have it work out to their benefit.

Potentially the Good Old Boy could work the same in a racing game. If you set up the races correctly, the Good Old Boy gets the schtick of trying to power through challenges with pure driving ability, even when this is a terrible idea narratively.

A classic of race movies and shows is having challenges where, instead of just mashing the accelerator harder, the racers have to think on their feet. A draw bridge goes up, so now they have to find an alternate route on the fly. The Good Old Boy, though, is the character who decides to jump the bridge. If they make it - great! They get a big advantage or even win this race. If they partially succeed, now they need to baby a damaged vehicle to the finish line with the time they saved from the jump (or something similar threatens to negate the benefit they got from the jump).

The reason I didn't keep the Driver, and the potential problem for the Good Old Boy too, is the A No poo poo Driver/Hot Wheels move. If you give it to everyone, the playbook is definitely weaker and needs a new move to make up for it. If you do keep it, they become so much better at driving that it's clearly unfair.

Personally, in retrospect I found A No poo poo Driver (and by extension Hot Wheels) to be a problem inherently. Because bonuses are so small in PBTA games, adding the car stats on means a lot fewer misses and partial successes. In a game where you want a lot of action to take place in vehicles, this can be problematic.

I never came up with a satisfactory solution that didn't require major overhaul to either car stats or completely re-writing the move.

Your best bet might be to drop the Good Old Boy, and not giving everyone the moves and standard cars. Instead, I'd try doing cars as providing fewer bonuses and maybe a custom move. More work, but might give you a better outcome.

Comrade Gorbash
Jul 12, 2011

My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

Golden Bee posted:

There are some proofing errors (the Ace is also called the Warrior and the moves aren't finished; you say Roll and Add X instead of Roll +X, pick two of those instead of "Pick two moves below", etc).

For Flashy:

The middle result is bland. It should be something like "They're curious about your potential", which is a great source of trouble. Also, the trigger and results are entirely passive; it should start when you ask someone if they've heard of you.

Celerity for the Idol should probably be Celebrity. The Idol should probably get more bonds than everyone else (and moves that trigger off stats besides +Kind; it's important to mix and match good and bad stats to create odd builds and elicit cross-playbook move choices).

I agree with all this, and just wanted to add that you can do what I think of as riders. Something like "the first time you meet someone" or "when you announce yourself" or "when you make an entrance."

If you look at AW and the good PbtA hacks, you'll see these a lot. The character isn't prompting the move directly, but they're still making a specific decision and taking a specific action that will trigger the move.

It's a good option to keep in mind if the most direct action (eg. asking someone if they've heard of you) feels awkward or out of place.

Comrade Gorbash
Jul 12, 2011

My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.
I think the Waterbearer says less about the apocalypse than it first appears.

Most of us are likely from places where clean water is an assumption, something we count on without thinking about it. But even a casual glance at the news right now shows just how tenuous that really is.

There are a handful of regions where clean, fresh water is plentiful and easily found. But for most of the world, the fresh water available needs treatment to be safely potable. Or, its locked up in underground sources, requiring well digging and maintenance.

You don't need a Mad Max style desertpunk world for clean water to become a critical resource, or even one with a particularly nasty apocalypse to contaminate it. Once the treatment plants and pumping stations shut down, once the pipes start to fail and corrode, once you start burying the people who knew how to make and maintain those things, readily available clean water rapidly becomes a thing of the past.

It still says certain things about the world, but it's not nearly as narrow a concept as it might first appear.

Comrade Gorbash
Jul 12, 2011

My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

Covok posted:

Is it any good?

So far it seems solid. The approach it takes to cyberware is good - provides tags and narrative abilities, and also access to take cross-playbook moves as advances. That makes 'ware better than gear, but not in an unbalanced way. 'Ware is harder to get and has a higher cost, but the benefits accrue over time rather than providing an immediate jump in power above buying the synonomous gear.

It does some smart things with pre-mission prep and resources. You get +intel and +gear, and can use it mid-mission to pull out just the right plan or piece of equipment to solve a problem. That is, to retroactively claim you were prepared for something.

There's a lot of moving parts though and I'm not sure every playbook's starting moves have the narrative heft to hold their own. xian is running a game of it now, so I'll know more soon.

Comrade Gorbash fucked around with this message at 05:19 on Feb 25, 2016

Comrade Gorbash
Jul 12, 2011

My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.
Seventeen "basic" moves actually.

Really, the beef I have with the basic moves list isn't the number, but that the game calls them all basic moves, when that's not really how most PbtA's would classify them. The Sprawl mixes several of what would be termed special or peripheral moves in other systems into its "basic moves" list. If you count them the same way, DW also has 17, and AW itself has 16 (not even counting the battle moves - add those in and you've got 20). Even Monsterhearts would have something like 10 or 11 if they were parsed out the way The Sprawl does it.

For example, there's Go Under the Knife, which is a move specifically for getting cyberware. It's hard to imagine it coming up more than once a session, if that often. The Harm move and Acquire Agricultural Property (similar to DW's Last Breath or AW's debilities) are also in there. Plus, there are mission start (Get the Job) and mission end (Get Paid) moves, which work very well in the genre since working with fixers and getting screwed by employers are staples. And then there's Declare a Contact, Produce Equipment, and Reveal Knowledge, all of which let you retroactively declare narrative details to streamline missions and avoid the never ending planning session so common to the genre.

The game does a lot right, I think, though I do feel that it doesn't provide as much clarity or guidance for the Legwork vs Mission phases. This is really a presentation problem, though. The conceptual space behind the phases really works for the genre, and the way the moves work in each phase fits. Where it seems a little clunky (so far anyways) is in making it clear how and when to move from on to the other.

Of course, the like I mentioned above, the interminable planning cycle is a problem in pretty much every cyberpunk game. The Sprawl provides tools to break out of it while not screwing the players if they didn't cover every single eventuality. It could explain how to use those tools better, but every PbtA game has something like that - all the way back to the Go Aggro vs Seize By Force confusion endemic to AW.

Comrade Gorbash
Jul 12, 2011

My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.
Yeah, there's no mechanical difference, it's just an organizational thing.

Comrade Gorbash
Jul 12, 2011

My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.
Injuries are a common plot point in wrestling, and intentionally injuring an opponent is a classic heel/rudo move. That is, as long as it's kayfabe. It's also a common element of hardcore matches for wrestlers to intentionally make themselves bleed/cause minor injuries to increase the heat of a match (see blading). Additionally, wrestlers suffer real, accidental injuries all the time. Retconning the story to attribute an injury to a particular match is a common way to keep a storyline going while a wrestler is out recuperating (eventually they'll be back for revenge!)

Intentionally injuring an opponent for real, on the other hand, is a bad thing (see shoot fighting).

e: Basically WWW assumes kayfabe for that move, but depending on how much backstage matters in your game, you can generate a lot of different plots from whether the injury is real and whether it was intentional.

Comrade Gorbash
Jul 12, 2011

My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.
There's two things to keep in mind as to why a contemporary city in another country/culture might be more alienating than a fantasy city.

1. Contemporary large cities tend to be very similar in broad strokes and in lots of specific ways. But this makes the points where they differ more obvious and often more jarring. It's kind of an uncanny valley effect. You can operate as if its a city in the culture/country you're use to, almost on auto-pilot, and be fine, but when that fails its like hitting a brick wall. It can be very disorienting. Oddly, people tend to be less alienated when they are in situations that they know are out of their element and aren't lulled into complacency by things that are superficially familiar; players will expect a fantasy city to be different and will be less surprised when it is.

2. Paradoxically, fantasy cities are often just modern cities with a coat of genre paint. Trying to play a real city this way just stands out as incorrect, potentially even disrespectful. This happens with historical locations that have become mythologized as well. So other than some surface differences that add color, player default expectations are rarely subverted in significant ways outside of a few well telegraphed instances.

You often get both operating together so players are less jarred by differences in fantasy settings to begin with, run into fewer of them, and there is generally warning when they're about to encounter a major difference.

Comrade Gorbash
Jul 12, 2011

My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.
I still feel like the Operator could have been reworked to focus more on the crew as opposed to the jobs. There's not really a good playbook for running, say, a small salvage crew in AW.

Comrade Gorbash
Jul 12, 2011

My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.
I feel like the playbook moves could be fairly simple if the crew was built up.

Comrade Gorbash
Jul 12, 2011

My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.
My take would be:

• The playbooks generally under utilize the advantages of PbtA - their moves don't have enough narrative leverage and too many of them are fiddly mechanical bits.
• The caster playbooks are way too rigidly defined and basically not PbtA playbooks at all.
• Too many statistical bits between HP, ability score, ability modifier, etc. It's not too overboard but it should be scaled back a bit.
• Ironically the obvious D&D sacred cow they dropped - class and race as separate things - actually makes the game clumsier for a lot of character concepts.
• Defy Danger is a very bad PbtA move.
• Basic moves in general are a little clumsy with following the fiction and keep putting narrative direction back in the hands of the GM when it should stay with the player.
• Basic moves also don't do enough to account for the party working together pretty much all the time; there's a bit too much Apocalypse World in how they're framed.

I'm personally ambivalent about XP on a miss but it's probably fine in DW. There's a lot of games that copied the idea without consideration where it doesn't belong is the bigger issue.

EDIT: The game also doesn't really do anything to leverage the idea of the party as a thing in itself, which to be fair is true of D&D in general but feels like a bigger missed opportunity in DW.

Comrade Gorbash fucked around with this message at 04:01 on Dec 24, 2017

Comrade Gorbash
Jul 12, 2011

My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

megane posted:

I would kill for a better "D&D but in PbtA" game.
I have a text file with a bunch of concepts, theories, and partial designs for a "DW 2e" that I should pull together at some point.

Comrade Gorbash
Jul 12, 2011

My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

LongDarkNight posted:

All of the above is true but I'll stand up for DW as being a great, if flawed, gateway to bring folks entrenched in Dungeons & Dragons into the world of narrative games.
Yeah DW is still a lot of fun to actually play and the GM side tools are actually really good. It's just got a lot of flaws in terms of design that were initially ignored or not fully understood when it first came out, and unfortunately a number of those flaws ended up becoming PbtA standards for a time. It also doesn't help that the designers don't seem to recognize any of the flaws.

Comrade Gorbash
Jul 12, 2011

My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

malkav11 posted:

The criticism of Dungeon World I'd seen before around these parts and which I think is a good summation of its issues is that PBTA works best when you're designing it to emulate a very specific genre of story, whereas Dungeon World is just trying to emulate D&D, which is anything but specific. Also, it clearly works to at least some degree for trying to get people weaned off D&D and I'd certainly rather play it than D&D, but I feel like it's close enough to D&D that people instinctively try to play it the same way, which doesn't work.
I know this is a oft repeated common wisdom on PbtA, but I don't actually think it's true.

Take Apocalypse World itself - you could run Fury Road, The Road, A Boy and His Dog, Turbo Kid, Fallout, Blame!, Thundarr the Barbarian, Nausicaä of the Valley of Wind, Reign of Fire... There's a very wide swath of post-apocalyptic literature, all with very different tones and scales, you could tap and easily see work in AW. It's just a matter of talking out the scale of what a move can accomplish and what sort of things are in theme to establish in fiction. You could also work further away and have a medieval or old west game without changing much at all.

You can see the same with other PbtA games, where tweaking some baseline agreed assumptions let's you cover a variety of inspirational works. Fellowship can give you Tolkien, but it can also give you Star Wars or .hack//sign... or to go very sideways a World War story.

There's a difference between those examples that's important. For AW, having it work properly requires a few key setting ideas - scarce resources, a hostile environment, and a lack of established authority to enforce the law. In Fellowship, it's the broad thematic elements that matter - the quest, the dark power to challenge, the strained alliances.

So with Dungeon World, it isn't that there's not a narrow enough genre in D&D to emulate, because PbtAs can be quite broad. Rather, it's that DW didn't sit down and devote enough thought to what key setting or thematic elements actually make D&D different from other fantasy. Because the reality is D&D has never been good at broad fantasy stories anyways. You can tell a lot of different stories in a lot of different settings with what it does have - from the Realms to Athas to Eberron to Spelljammer to Planescape - but the truth is you still come back to some core themes.

Frankly it's right in the name. Dungeons, and dragons. You explore dangerous complexes in remote places, and fight big scary monsters, and then go back the safety of civilization to celebrate your success. And there are actually a lot of different stories like that. Outside of D&D, pretty much anything episodic built around a team of people going somewhere dangerous works. Destiny, Diablo, Stargate, Star Trek, and so on.

Comrade Gorbash
Jul 12, 2011

My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

Ilor posted:

In some sense I agree, but I think it's incumbent upon the GM to put the players in situations where "I dodge" is not the obvious answer. Any time you're exposed to poison, for instance, would be Defy Danger with +CON. Air elemental trying to blow you over? Roll+STR. WIS is the hardest one to apply, because anything you're going to do with it is better handled by read a situation or read a person.

Like I said, I think Defy Danger is poorly designed (or perhaps poorly explained), but it's not completely useless.
I think DD has two problems. One stems from using D&D stats. Those have never been well defined in the first place, and their descriptions of intrinsic qualities of the character rather than intent/style approaches. Blood from Fellowship is a very different thing than Strength, for example. That makes it harder to adjudicate edge cases and hard to avoid those edge cases.

The other is that DD is broadened and designed in a way that it becomes the catch-all and the "permission to do cool things" move. It's clearly trying to crib from Do Something Under Fire, but that move is actually much narrower. Despite dungeon exploration being a key component of the genre concept, there aren't really basic moves for it - they get shoved into DD.

Plus Hack & Slash and Volley are written too discretely. In AW the various versions of combat moves clearly cover a lot of the maneuvering and tricks that should be part of the DW moves as well, but the DW moves aren't really written that way. So some of that gets inappropriately offloaded onto DD.

Ultimately it just goes back to the core issue with DW: it kept the wrong D&D sacred cows.

Comrade Gorbash
Jul 12, 2011

My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

admanb posted:

The best PbtA D&D hack is Blades Against Darkness, because the core of Blades in the Dark is much better suited to hacking into D&D than AW ever was.
This may well be true. I need to take a long hard look at it. The idea of the crew playbook gives it a dimension that DW really should have leveraged, and the game is already working under the assumption the PCs are working together.

Comrade Gorbash
Jul 12, 2011

My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.
For me, the issue with Dungeon World's stats is that by keeping the classic D&D names, you have two issues. One, you have the fact that they've never really been well differentiated from each other. Two, they're about the character's inherent qualities. Good PbtA stats are about the intent and concept behind an action. A wizard should be using the same stat for blasting things willy-nilly with fireballs as a fighter uses for bashing things with a hammer.

So I'd go with:

Might: Victory via brute force and ruthless action.
Finesse: Victory via the precise application of effort and skill.
Cunning: Victory via clever exploits and quick thinking.
Insight: Victory via planning and learned knowledge.
Presence: Victory via sheer force of will and charm.

If you really wanted,
Fortitude: Victory via endurance and courage in the face of adversity.
could give you the classic six stats, though I think its too fine a distinction with Might and potentially Presence.

You can make a clear analogues with D&D stats, but they're much more about approach than intrinsic character qualities. That makes them simultaneously more distinct from each other, and more broadly usable by all character concepts.

Comrade Gorbash
Jul 12, 2011

My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

Devorum posted:

I'm considering starting my first PbP game since I'm currently in a time zone and country where synchronous gaming is very difficult.

I've settled on PbtA as the system I want to use...are there any games you'd all recommend as being especially PbP friendly? Right now my top 4 are: Monster of the Week, Fellowship, Tremulus, and Apocalypse World...though I'm open to other suggestions.
Don't use Tremulus. It's bad.

Apocalypse World 2e is great and to be honest if you're into PbtA you should try it out at least once. As with OD&D's influence on TTRPGs in general, there are some elements that have become cargo-cult-ish defaults in PbtA design that ultimately stem from actually meaningful design choices in AW. It's also particularly PBP friendly because the game assumes that each character is going to spend a lot of time pursuing their own thing rather than acting as a cohesive group. So if someone posts more rarely or needs to take a break, it's a lot easier to account for that.

The revised edition of Monster of the Week is pretty good, especially if you lean into it's title and riff off things like Sailor Moon or X-Files, or the early parts of Hellboy or Fringe. It is however one of the more generic, paint-by-the-numbers PbtA games and can be a bit clunky.

Fellowship is great and does a lot of unique things with the PbtA formula. However it's very group-centric so you have the usual issues with making sure everyone keeps up. It's also fairly complex for a PbtA and takes some time to get the hang of. It's probably the least PBP friendly (besides Tremulus which is unfriendly to all play modes).

As another suggestion, as much as we talk about Dungeon World's faults, it's still fun to play and on the MC side is actually quite good. It can ease players used to "traditional" TTRPGs into PbtA quite well too.

Comrade Gorbash
Jul 12, 2011

My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.
The Killer's trick, which the book does a poor job of describing, is all about maximizing cyberware. For the other playbooks, cyberware is a bit of a catch-22. To really get a lot out of it, you need to combo certain pieces and you'd also like to have a high Synth. However, with the exception of the Driver, going Synth+2 means they'll be rolling lower on their core moves so it's not a great choice. Going lower Synth then makes 'ware less attractive, and will either still cut into their initial utility because a stat they'll use more often is worse, or will force them to spend advancements later to catch back up - and will probably entail at least one advancement that is effectively a null step. The end result is the other playbooks have a lot of pressure to put a low score in Synth and only dip their toes into 'ware, if even that, and spend their advancements and resources elsewhere.

For the Killer, cyberware can always be an immediate plus without trade offs. They're essentially one of only two playbooks (the other is the Hacker) where a starting with or advancing to Synth+1 makes sense, since they'll start with enough 'ware for it to be useful and have incentive to get even more. They can also quickly build the 'ware combos that produce deeply scary combat numbers - a Meat+2 Synth+1 Killer with Cyberarms/Augmented Strength and Muscle Grafts at character creation is at +2 to mix it up and will deal +3 harm with their melee weapon. If they take More Machine Than Meat to also select Synthetic Nerves, they will usually be at +3 to mix it up with additional benefits. And they'll still be very good with a gun with the option to get even better - that +1 Synth gets added to their firearms damage if they later snag a Neural Interface/Targeting Suite.

At core the Killer's deal is that cyberware is good and they're the ones who get to play with all of it. They start ahead of the 'ware curve and stay there. In theory other playbooks could go that way as well, but in practice they have strong disincentives to that approach, and even if they ignore those they'll still be behind the Killer. It's one of those cases where the playbook doesn't so much use its custom moves to create it's own space, but instead leverages a set of mechanics theoretically open to all playbooks to the point that they're actually doing something unique with it.

That being said, their Custom Weapon move is pretty flat. It's solid for guns, decent for melee implant weapons, and bad for non-implant melee weapons. A melee focused Killer who doesn't want implant weapons is definitely better off with a non-custom blade, with their Custom Weapon creating a specialized backup that covers what their blade doesn't. Personally I think the Killer would be better off with a slightly expanded gear list and a move that further leverages their tendency to acquire more 'ware.

Comrade Gorbash
Jul 12, 2011

My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.
I think the Sprawl shows a lot of its warts during set up, but in play it's a lot like early MotW where you end up paring down the decision space to the point it mostly runs just fine. That being said, it could use another heavy pass of polish. The Driver has the old bad "add vehicle stats to your moves" thing going on, for example.

Golden Bee posted:

I’ve also noticed that there will always, always be an infiltrator on the team. I’ve never seen a core playbook be so necessary in any powered by the apocalypse game.
I have seen a game without one and it actually is totally fine.

However, I think you're right that there's an issue with the Infiltrator's concept. While mechanically it's not critical, the narrative space is so deeply ingrained in the genre that someone almost invariably gravitates to it, which suggests that its de rigeur enough to just give a solid part of it's narrative space to everyone, the way everyone gets gigs in AW 2e.

Comrade Gorbash fucked around with this message at 23:02 on Jan 19, 2018

Comrade Gorbash
Jul 12, 2011

My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.
The only thing is people cannot resist playing with Pop-o-Matics so every session would have to start with a 10 minute pop-a-thin to get it out of their systems.

Whether this is a downside or an upside I leave to the reader to decide.

Comrade Gorbash
Jul 12, 2011

My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.
Monsterhearts is a really well designed game and it’s good that it exists, but a lot of folks seem to underestimate just how much it could go sideways. It’s not a game I’d play with a pickup group ever. A number of the playbooks lean into potentially abusive relationship dynamics or could be vectors for toxic players to act out fetishes at the table. You have to have a really clear discussion about lines and veils at the start, and trust that the group will stick to it, and the ability to stop play and work things out midstream without anyone getting bent out of shape.

If you have that - and there are groups that do! - Monsterhearts can be amazing. If you don’t, then it’s probably not the game for your group.

Comrade Gorbash
Jul 12, 2011

My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.
To be honest, that’s the precise response I was referring to.

That failure mode is not unique to MH, though the subject tends to push it to the forefront. The creep lord Ghoul player in that example is going to pull something at some point, regardless of game. It just happens sooner in MH.

There is an aspect there that is particular to MH and games dealing with the same subjects in that the it creates a greater degree of vulnerability for the other players when someone does something heinous like that, but ultimately those sorts of players are just to be avoided in all games.

But more importantly I absolutely do not think it has to be at that level for things to go badly, and because of the subject matter and the way certain playbooks work, players can harm each other even with the best of intentions. MH itself, 2nd edition especially, does a great job of upfronting that and talking about how to navigate it. I do not think the discussion around the game does nearly as good a job, and in fact tends to minimize that risk.

Again, I think it’s an excellent game and it addresses those issues well. But it’s a disservice to potential players to act as if there isn’t potential for discomfort or hurt to result even when everyone is being respectful, or that it doesn’t require a higher degree of trust and care to play.

To put it another way, MH inherently deals with subjects that most folks have to learn to navigate, and during that learning process they can injure themselves and others entirely unintentionally. I think it’s really important that if you’re in an MH game everyone has a very clear understanding of that and are past a certain point in that process.

It’s essentially recognizing a form of clumsiness - a clumsiness that will be grown out of, but until that happens it’s to everyone’s benefit they not be handed sharp tools without having a chance to practice in a safe environment first. I can imagine a game of MH that exists within that kind of environment, but you have to know it’s needed and create it ahead of time, which just goes back to the need for extra trust and care.

To extend the metaphor a bit, most other TTRPGs aren’t as “sharp” as MH. The horror story players are perfectly able to come at you with a cudgel as a knife, but there are a lot of other players where the difference represents a bump or at worst a bruise, vs a deep cut.

Comrade Gorbash
Jul 12, 2011

My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.
It’s not a bad PbtA, but it’s definitely not one of the stronger examples.

Comrade Gorbash
Jul 12, 2011

My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.
Night Witches, Strike Witches is something else entirely.

In any case - Flying Circus is the answer to your question and it just finished it’s Kickstarter. It’s from the designer of Patrol so she’s done a ridiculous amount of research to back it up as well.

Comrade Gorbash
Jul 12, 2011

My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.
Tank Girl.

Comrade Gorbash
Jul 12, 2011

My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.
Narrative positioning.

It's important to remember that that tag is a fundamentally true and different thing about the item. A valuable pistol, for example, looks really nice and distinctive and is just flat out better. It's not the usual rough & ready or improvised weapon most people in the world have. It marks you out as someone with means, or as someone who had means once, or someone who took something off someone with means. It's also something that doesn't look out of place if you take it somewhere lux. It also makes the weapon something other people want.

Picking +valuable does give you the option to pawn it off for something else, but it also says something about the item and your character.

Hi-tech is similar, but instead of just being fancy you've got something that's, well, hi-tech. Lots of plastic, it's sealed up and probably not easily repaired, but it's lighter and easier to handle and probably more reliable and almost certainly has capabilities nothing of the current world can match.

Comrade Gorbash
Jul 12, 2011

My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

Halloween Jack posted:

Because the corebook puts emphasis on hitech gear being costly to repair or replace, I tend to see it through crosshairs. But I'm contradicting myself, since I'm assuming that cool unique gear shouldn't easily be lost or discarded. I should be thinking of it as lighter, more durable, and more convenient instead of less so.
I think the key with hi-tech is that when you do need to see it through the crosshairs, that's when the issues with repair come through. It's harder to break in the first place, and has the advantages you mention, but if it does get damaged or broken, it's harder to get fixed - in contrast to a non-hi-tech piece, it's not just a matter of finding your local savvyhead and having them do a quick patch up, you've either got to just live with the screen being cracked or you have an entire quest, so to speak, to get the material you need.

In contrast, valuable through the crosshairs is something that's likely to get stolen or looted first thing, something you'll need to track someone down to get back - and is something worth hunting someone down to retrieve. That can be a solid task to present to a character as the consequence for a major gently caress up. Alternatively, if the player took it off someone themselves, the original owner turns up looking to get it back.

Of course you can also use theft on for hi-tech and damage for valuable. I think they each lean towards their particular set of consequences though. Hi-tech is still worth stealing for people, but often they won't know how to really make full use of it, so it's either only partly useful or even potentially dangerous to them. In contrast, a damaged valuable item probably still functions just fine or can easily be jury-rigged back to functionality, the difficult part is more a matter of restoration than repair.

Comrade Gorbash
Jul 12, 2011

My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.
The bigger problem with Defy Danger is that it often gets used as a permission barrier to do the cool thing the player actually wants to do, or is directly triggered by a GM move, without the player actually doing anything. It's very reactive and PbtA moves should be active, at least in their standard application. It also becomes too much of a catch all for parts of DW that should have more discrete moves of their own - Defy Danger gets used way too much and as a result has too little built in narrative of its own.

All of that is made worse by using D&D stats, which have never really been well defined and overlap in a way that has an especially big impact on PbtA. It puts the GM in a tough spot when the player describes a clear, concise narrative of what they're doing... and then it will fit two or more stats quite naturally.

Comrade Gorbash
Jul 12, 2011

My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

mllaneza posted:

I actually think that DW defines its stats better than D&D does. A 2e of DW should actually say this, but your three "soft" stats; INT, WIS, CHA are obvious when you look at the basic moves. INT is for stuff inside your head, like figuring things out or knowing stuff (that the player just totally made up). WIS is for stuff outside your head like the divine or just plain perception. CHA is for stuff going on inside other people's heads like persuade or intimidate.
I don't agree with this assessment, narratively I don't think the distinctions are at all clear in far too many situations. If I say I notice a pattern in the attacks of an opponent and use that to dodge the next one, which stat is that?

Comrade Gorbash
Jul 12, 2011

My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.
Honestly OscarDiggs, I think you’re totally misreading AW due to coming in with some pre-conceived notions of how it works and trying to fit what you’re reading into that, instead of just taking in what AW is doing. I think you’re going to get a much better idea of what it actually is by reading some of the AW game threads here or by watching a recording of a game, like the one Roll20 did. I’ll toss some links in when I’m not phone posting.

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Comrade Gorbash
Jul 12, 2011

My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.
In regards to "what archetype is this character channeling" with Apocalypse World, it's worth remembering that AW was published a decade ago, and in development for some time before that. It has heavy influence from surrealist punk post-apocalyptic British comics like Tank Girl (clearly a major inspiration for the battlebabe), Strontium Dog, and the later Judge Dredd stories, plus some of the weirder scifi from the 70s.

That stuff has basically dropped completely out of the post-apocalyptic canon as far as I can tell, which is surprising because it was really central for a while. As a result some of the concepts in AW seem out of place in a genre where even the more out there works have largely dropped that maximalist kitchen-sink of weirdness world building.

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