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Flavivirus posted:As I found out when fleshing Legacy out as a full product, writing GM advice and explaining the subconcious procedures you use in play can be a lot harder than writing rules material. I'm pretty sure that's the biggest part of what made AW so great - it formalised and communicated clearly how you actually run a game of it. Sitting down and working out exactly how the game should be run, and how it's different from a 'standard' RP experience, is something I'd say even most published games don't do, but it can be really helpful. Night Witches uses (with permission) Monsterhearts's pretty good "Teaching the Game" section. I'd be curious to hear what people with no PbtA experience think of Night Witches, but I do think Jason Morningstar offers some good guidance, although I do agree that the "no actual character sheets/playbooks in the book" thing is a problem. I know page space is at a premium and it's not going to be a problem for most of the market to download PDFs, but it's inconvenient. Has anyone here actually played NW? I'm considering pitching it to my usual group (experienced roleplayers, some with backgrounds with AW and Monsterhearts, some without) and am trying to figure out how to spin the "rotating GM" thing, in particular.
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Jun 30, 2015 02:50
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Golden Bee posted:Monsterhearts continues to fascinate me. Unlike almost all other RPGs, a limited location (that PCs can't reach the pinnacle of) means to getting what you want is at someone else's expense. That fits my observations of Monsterhearts. The campaign I ran didn't get to a season break / Growing Up Moves, but the intention of the game pre-Growing-Up is pretty clearly that you don't have a toolbox to cooperate and compromise, nor to accept setbacks gracefully, so every victory is someone else's bitter defeat. (I believe this is actually a GMing principle, too.)
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Jul 16, 2015 01:31
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Covok posted:Can I say it's interesting how all of the Exalted PbtA hacks that have come out of this thread so far all focus on a different aspect of the Exalted setting? If they all turn out well, a lot of Exalted fans might be very, very pleased. I feel like this is a reflection of how Exalted itself tried to be everything to everyone / had its tone and themes all over the place, generally not to its benefit. Very few of the themes they tried to work with were bad, but they weren't conducive to being crammed into one game together, and in my experience, this often led to people at the table not being on the same page about what to expect. Turning Exalted into a few tight PbtA games with very distinct themes might narrow the scope of each individual game, but it seems a lot more likely to create something interesting and fun from the Exalted setting and metaplot.
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Feb 12, 2016 11:35
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I would play in a Pigsmoke playtest, were such a thing launched on Tradgames.
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Apr 13, 2016 18:56
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Ugh. Bennie-points-as-XP mechanics suck anyway, but actually tying the advancement of the plot to how many of them your players spend for bennies (which they won't, and probably shouldn't, be doing in any great quantity) is a notable wrong step. I can see "the plot doesn't advance until the characters have had X cool bennie-point moments" maybe being okay, but in that case, don't make the cool-moment currency hoardable.
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Aug 17, 2016 00:08
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I think it really depends on how much you want to push the economic horror, "the legbreakers are coming" feeling. Even then, it seems like it might be something you can make more abstract and still keep that feeling -- if the important thing is that you need 5X cash when the rent comes due and jobs pay 1-5X cash per, it's kind of moot whether X is 1 barter or 10000 spacebux. The only advantage I can see to bigger numbers is allowing more granularity in purchasing, if you want that. I don't know a lot about it myself, but you may want to look into a game called Red Markets -- not PbtA, but heavily focused on economics and debt as a driving force in the adventuring economy. Antivehicular fucked around with this message at 16:16 on Sep 28, 2016 |
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Sep 28, 2016 16:13
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This is so simple that I assume there must be something hideously wrong with it, but for ace-friendly play, why not just slightly change the Turn On flavor to be less sexual? Phrase it as "Get Someone's Attention," say, and make it about gaining recognition and social currency. Change the "they give themselves to you" option to something social-status-y -- "they publicly praise or acknowledge you," maybe? I do agree that removing the sex element potentially guts Monsterhearts, but it seems like you could replace it with the adolescent drive for social recognition and have something at least a little feral. What is this variation doing about Sex Moves?
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Oct 28, 2016 01:31
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Yeah, I wouldn't go into GMing AW with anything more than a setting idea, and even that should be flexible. The players' character concepts and playbook choices will dictate most of the content of the game; it's not a D&D-style "players bring vague murderhobos, GM brings everything else" system, and running it that way generally doesn't end well. I would also recommend running the right-wing survivalist thing past your players before springing it on them. A lot of people wouldn't really enjoy having topical material like that in a game.
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Dec 15, 2016 19:36
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Heliotrope posted:The Sasquatch is from Second Skins, which is pretty official although made by Jackson Tegu. I do agree that it's not really a "secrets" skin. They have some moves that can let them sort of find out secrets but it's not in a paranoid, "I have to know what people are thinking" way, and it's possible to just not take them as well. To be fair, Second Skins varies wildly in quality, and I'd argue the lower half of the skins in there are probably closer to third-party skins in quality than the core skins. Some of them definitely go to third-party design spaces that don't really play well; I believe I've voiced my opinion on the Unicorn on these forums before, but I still feel like a skin that can force players at the table to discuss sex acts in greater granularity than "the characters had sex" has potential to violate Safe Hearts principles at the bare minimum. (Then again, given the Unicorn character portrait's place in the Monsterhearts 2E Kickstarter banner, Avery Alder seems to disagree with me.) The Sasquatch is an interesting skin in that I'd argue that it's the inverse the classic MH skin flaw of "only one build/interpretation possible of this playbook": it's got parts of a lot of approaches, most of which only have a move or two's worth of support, so a Sasquatch is probably going to have to dabble. That may or may not be a bad thing, but it's a thing worth noting.
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Mar 13, 2017 08:27
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Halloween Jack posted:Monsterhearts is IMO the leanest, meanest implementation of the engine. Yeah, that's really it. Core MH is so tightly designed that most third-party content for it just fails to stand up on the mechanical level, even before you get into other issues ("too niche/too broad," "has some really weird/disruptive mechanical gimmick," "forgets to have the skin be an adolescence metaphor as well as a monster," and so on). I feel like MH gets written off a lot because of its genre, which isn't everyone's cup of tea, but it's as well-written a PbtA as any out there.
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Mar 13, 2017 21:22
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Toph Bei Fong posted:I say the following as someone who loves Monsterhearts. It's one of my favorite games. I agree with you that the Hot/Cold vs. Vol/Dark stat utility discrepancy is probably the biggest mechanical issue with core MH, especially when it comes to highlights. A Vol highlight is objectively way harder to hit in game than a Hot or Cold highlight, just by virtue of the consequences in the fiction, and Dark highlights are usually going to require a Gaze roll, which aren't table-interactive. (I do think Gaze gets plenty of use at the table, but Dark's definitely still more niche than Hot and Cold.) I almost wonder if Volatile and Dark were written around expectations that the game would be played more Buffy-style, with lots of magic and combat? I mean, the Chosen exists to fuel that sort of game, even if SA meta pretty much never plays it. On the subject of highlights and the Sasquatch: one of the redeeming features of Musk is that it gives the Sasquatch a way to hit Vol highlights without turning the scene violent. It would be kind of nice if more high-Vol playbooks had "roll Vol for something that isn't murdering" moves.
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Mar 14, 2017 01:40
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Those triggers are... man. "When you take action and the stakes are high?" So, any time it's worth rolling for something at all? Also, I get that those move names are all references, but they also all suck.
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Jun 27, 2017 04:06
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paradoxGentleman posted:I keep creating Monsterhearts characters that aren't what the skin is supposed to be about and it's becoming such a pattern that it's starting to bother me. Are we talking "different interpretations of the skin," or are we talking "the idiom of one skin in the mechanics of another?" I don't think it's crazy to interpret a skin in a way that isn't the obvious one, but it might be good to think about how you're approaching things if you keep coming up with stuff that feels like an awkward fit.
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Jun 27, 2017 11:31
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Bear Enthusiast posted:I've got a Monster of the Week game brewing and I'm running into the same worry I usually do with PbtA games, that is the rules there's lots of room for interpretation. Those are a huge part of what make these games so good but they've been a problem for me in the past. Specifically I'm looking at The Dark Side aspect of The Spooky, which says: My advice with this sort of thing is to talk to the player about it. I don't know MotW specifically, but the idea with that sort of thing in PbtA games is generally to have enough communication with the player and/or ideas about their character to know what they're hoping will come up, then brainstorm from there; in this case, they're going to pick tags that I assume are related to the kinds of Bad Things they want their power to make them do, so that's going to be a start for brainstorming. If in doubt, ask the player, either with IC questions ("the last time you did this ritual, what sacrifice did you have to make?") or directly OOC ("so what kind of terrible things are you hoping to have go down when you play this guy?").
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Feb 10, 2018 07:01
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I'm not familiar with Worlds in Peril or MHA, but Masks has a very specific kind of story in mind: adolescent superheroes who are trying to figure out their place in the world, with all the teen angst drama and confrontations with flawed authority figures that that implies. It's a really good system for doing its thing, and it's reasonably decent at the standard superhero-adventure portions, but the meat of a Masks game is going to be interpersonal and coming-of-age stuff. If that's what you want, I'd go for it, but if not, it's not going to work out.
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Jun 5, 2018 21:26
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Halloween Jack posted:Random thought: I was looking through the Sprawl playbooks recently, and a thing that bothers me is that Synth is an entirely self-justifying stat. Unless your campaign ties some custom moves to it, it only exists so that the Killer and Hacker can take moves that redirect other moves to using Synth. Yet most playbooks will get a choice of cyberware that uses Synth, when they wouldn't be using Synth for anything else. It would make a lot more sense if there was some Open Your Brain type move tied to it. Am I reading correctly that there are no basic moves tied to Synth? I'm not familiar with Sprawl, but having a core stat with no basic moves attached seems like an extremely serious design flaw.
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Feb 9, 2019 06:22
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Yeah, the key is that Special Moves really represent intimacy and vulnerability. (What constitutes this kind of intimacy/vulnerability varies by genre, so give this a think.) When your character archetypes share this with another person, do they seek to increase that intimacy further, or downplay or deny it? Is it a predatory thing? Keep the sex details abstracted and play up the emotional/interpersonal/aftermath elements.
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May 23, 2019 00:34
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Count Chocula posted:I’m not the most comfortable with all this IRL, but songs like I’m On Fire do suggest some characters will be motivated purely by lust. The point isn't intent, it's consequences. Obviously, most sex moves are triggered by the characters just wanting to screw, but sex is emotionally messy for most people (and if it specifically isn't for a given playbook, that should be a part of that playbook's sex move, ala the Battlebabe). Unintended emotional consequences are the point! On the other hand, if you want sex in this game to just be for fun/not mean much, you need to think about what actually represents intimacy/vulnerability in your genre. For Springsteen songs, maybe that means letting your tough facade slip and telling someone about your fears honestly. The function of a special move doesn't have to involve sex just because several games have done it before. Antivehicular fucked around with this message at 04:41 on May 23, 2019 |
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May 23, 2019 04:39
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That's a fair point. Also, in my experiences playing Masks, people will burn through the Team pool as quickly as it's gained, which seems reasonable to me.
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Jun 22, 2019 22:56
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"We don't settle things by Thunderdome in this hardhold! We settle things by due process of law, then Thunderdome."
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Jun 29, 2019 04:44
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Covok posted:Intersitial: Our Hearts Intertwined is supposed to be Kingdom Hearts the RPG. The free preview makes me thinks its lacking. Why? All of the rules are in that preview because, according to the table of contents, they spend NO time explaining the rules in any detail. That speaks to...issues in the development process. That said, to those who played it, how good is it? The idea of "you are a bunch of licensed characters hoping into licensed worlds to save them" is a cool concept. I count fifteen core playbooks in that ToC, which seems like a lot. I'm guessing they're each intended to represent a specific KH character?
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Nov 23, 2019 09:03
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Neopie posted:So, your basic moves don't really fit the genre you seem to be emulating? While they're all workable moves on their own, they're clearly drawn from other basic apocalypse world hacks and not something that comes through considering what sort of actions are Common that move the narrative forward in your genre. Yeah, I think it's hard to overstate how important getting a robust and tone-specific set of basic moves is for a PbtA hack. They're what players will look to as the fundamental guide to what their PCs can and should be doing and what kinds of actions are important to the story your game is designed to tell. These should be as specific as possible, both in action type and outcomes; while it's reasonable to start from other games, you really shouldn't just lift them straight.
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Apr 4, 2020 06:47
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BlackIronHeart posted:Yeah, I'd even say that when running Monsterhearts you may wanna look for a hard 'yes' instead of a hard 'no' when it comes to player buy-in to certain topics. If you're gonna bring in any kind of hard 'R-rated', trigger warning level content, forecast it before hand and if people aren't enthusiastically consenting to it, dial it back. Agreed on this. The content of Monsterhearts makes it pretty easy to assume implied consent for a lot of things, which makes it potentially very dangerous for players who think they have to just go along with group consensus even if they're not comfortable. You should absolutely be checking and looking for enthusiastic player consent, as well as extensive out-of-character communication and abundant safety tools, and maintain an atmosphere where those safety tools can be used without judgment.
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Apr 8, 2020 07:24
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Infinity Gaia posted:Thank you all for the advice! Yeah, while everyone is very into crunchy systems they are all smart enough people to understand the general narrative expected by Masks after reading the core book, so that part is not an issue. The hint to try to get them to not look at their character sheets is great, and probably the most significant advice I've gotten. I'll try to get my hands on the apocalypse world GM section too, while I think the Masks GM section was pretty thorough more advice never hurts. You've already gotten a lot of good advice, but one thing I'll add that can be counterintuitive for new PbtA groups is to make sure the players have plenty of narrative control. As a PbtA GM, a big chunk of your job is asking the players interesting questions, and a big chunk of the players' job is giving interesting answers with narrative heft -- encourage players to go out on limbs with their ideas and to make choices with impact on the world. The conversation format means everyone's developing the story together, and players should ideally be more proactive about this than the GM is.
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Apr 12, 2020 05:57
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I'm always confused by how so many people arguing about sex moves seem to think AW is the first game that brought sex to the table. Even if you didn't play at one of those tables where the adventurers blowing all their money on prostitutes was considered to be a cute punchline and where female PCs were likely to be sexually threatened or harassed, a lot of content for traditional RPGs is already sexual. Half the pregenerated D&D modules I've read have had a succubus (I swear to God that "your module must contain a succubus disguising herself as a helpless female prisoner who seduces her 'rescuers'" was a submission requirement for Dungeon), along with a dizzying number of female monsters whose gimmick was "seduces dudes to murder them and/or bear a monster baby," and of course the connection between male monstrous humanoids and sexual violence is well-trodden and gross. It's hard not to feel like what people are really objecting to with the sex moves in AW is the concept of sex as a thing PCs seek out (instead of having inflicted upon them) and with non-trivial emotional consequences (not just a roll on the Brothel Table).
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May 2, 2020 05:08
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admanb posted:I would go so far as to say that the Skinner is the Bakers' thesis that beauty and art are part of the pyramid of needs. Yeah, I think this is a very pointed choice by the Bakers about the tone of the AW setting, as also seen in the bit of fluff in the Chopper playbook about there being plenty of bullets and gasoline to go around. Things that create violence and ugliness (weapons, ammo, war rigs and their fuel) are usually plentiful; things that make life tenable and bearable (plentiful clean water, secure shelter, food, entertainment, beauty) are scarce, and hence valuable. You're not fighting over bullets; you're fighting over a chance to do anything more than survive another day.
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Jul 16, 2020 23:40
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SkyeAuroline posted:Apocalypse World GMs: do you ever restrict playbooks? I'm specifically eyeing the Driver because of the multitude of suitable settings in which "guy with a car" is not tenable for whatever reason (it didn't come up but a previous campaign had people in high-rises above a deadly fog, I've been pondering Bioshock's Rapture or something similar as an inspirational location and it explicitly has no private transport, etc). I imagine the Brainer would meet that barrier for people who don't like the psychic elements too. Never seen people advocate for it, though, usually the opposite. "I don't want to GM for this/this doesn't fit in the setting I want to run" is completely legitimate. (My one warning re: the Brainer is that the psychic maelstrom is built into the mechanics, so you're still going to have that even without the playbook -- but it's fine to say "I don't want to have a Brainer in this game, can you do something else?")
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Dec 3, 2020 03:37
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Demon_Corsair posted:Has there been a new contender for a generic fantasy hack to replace dungeon world? Fellowship gets recommended a lot, although I'm not sure I'd call it totally generic fantasy; I feel like it wouldn't serve very well for a stereotypical "dungeon crawling murderhobos" story, since it's built around a specific sort of heroic fantasy vs. the Big Bad arc. (If anyone's played a successful Fellowship murderhobo game, please correct me!)
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Apr 5, 2021 02:25
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Fellowship is a good game, but it's definitely got a very specific flavor, and I think people do a disservice when they recommend it as a generic fantasy PbtA implementation. I'd read it for inspiration/stealable ideas, but it's probably not going to meet ypur needs out of the box, and that's fine!
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Nov 9, 2021 09:04
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Do hardholds and gangs end up getting taken away a lot in actual play? I had assumed it fell under the "don't take away the characters' cool/defining stuff" guidance in the GM section. As a GM, I certainly wouldn't burn any of that stuff down unless it was as part of a planned playbook change.
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Nov 21, 2022 21:51
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BlackIronHeart posted:I wouldn't say they get taken away a lot but hardholds and gangs aren't just tools for their respective playbooks to use, they're their own thing and so they have their own motivations, wants and needs. They tend to cause problems for their respective playbook holders, especially newer players who might be assuming they'll always do what they're told. Oh, sure, that's fair and correct. I just don't think of that as "taken away" in the sense of, like, "if you make a D&D character with a family, some GMs will immediately burn your village down to make sure you're a peripatetic adventure goon." Becoming a source of conflict and obligation still means they're in the story.
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Nov 22, 2022 00:18
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neonchameleon posted:Taken away? No. But dealing with the holding and/or gang getting into trouble is one of the major recurring themes/plots of any good Apocalypse World game involving them. It's not 'they get burned down' but 'the chopper's gang is continually setting things on fire, and there are regular fires that threaten the holding'. Right; I think I didn't really convey what I meant there. When I talk about "taken away," I mean in the classic crappy-GM move of totally writing the PCs' backstory elements and narrative hooks out because they're inconvenient -- "oh, you have a family/business/dependent? Village burnt down, they're gone now, you're free to be a murderhobo" stuff, the non-consensual change of what the player signed up to have the PC do and care about. The conflicts and responsibilities that come with gangs/hardholds/etc. is part of the player sign-on in this case, and obviously the GM can and should use it, which may result in logical narrative consequences.
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Dec 5, 2022 23:29
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Monsterhearts PbP was huge on the forums several years ago, so it seemed to work well for some people, although I had mixed results. There may be people here who have more specific advice.
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Feb 11, 2023 06:06
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Colonel Cool posted:But with that being said, there's a reason the system gives enemies emotional conditions for their health points, because emotionless enemies are very dull and kind of against the whole spirit of the system. Which isn't to say you can't ever use them, but I'd be careful to do it very sparingly. If you can at all justify giving an enemy emotions, you probably should. Yeah, this is my concern. I'm not familiar with TSL, but if the system is built around emotional conditions, it suggests to me that emotionless enemies aren't a good choice for encounter -- or that the real encounter win/loss condition isn't just beating those enemies up, but reaching some kind of emotional state (ally morale? Some intercharacter emotional beat?). Can you design the encounter around something like that?
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Mar 20, 2023 00:55
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