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Ratpick posted:Hey, so, what's the goonsensus on Night Witches? I saw a copy of it at my FLGS and thought about getting it but I'm on a very tight budget at the moment and decided to pick up the latest volume of Rat Queens instead. I'm thinking that I might get it once I have more money again. Night Witches looks pretty good, and I'd love to give it a full-on go at some point, but it's another in an ever-increasing list of PBTA games for people who already know how to play PBTA games. (A pet peeve of mine, which I think is a side effect of most of them starting life as hacks rather than complete games.) A quick review based on my read-through: Pros:
Cons:
But yeah, I haven't played it so take that with a grain of salt.
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Jun 29, 2015 11:43
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QuantumNinja posted:poo poo, now I want to write a Shadowrun hack. Which seems like one of the classic blunders, right up there with Land Wars in Asia. Me too. This conversation has really got me thinking, but I don't have anywhere near enough time.  Although if I did, I would totally steal that move for hacking.
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Aug 14, 2015 15:31
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It also raises the prospect of a game which is just the Mortal, the Neighbour, and the Parent.
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Sep 5, 2015 21:14
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Nifara posted:Of course not, go nuts. Finishing projects is an entire discipline of its own. *eyes a thousand unfinished projects* ...yeeeeeaaah. (This is slightly on-topic because one of them is a PBTA game about revolutions, industrial and social. But it's not even slightly close to ready for feedback yet.)
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Feb 10, 2016 14:25
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Benly posted:It's fine, I'm aware my formatting is poo poo. I don't really know how to use any formatting software I might have access to (I'm on a Mac, so what options are available to me are probably different from most folks) and every time I start thinking about formatting this my hindbrain goes "no, this is too unfinished, make it better". So.. laziness and depression, I guess? I don't know. If you've got any advice for how to learn how to do this poo poo I'd appreciate it. One good option I can recommend is to write your work in Markdown. It's plain text, so you can use it on any platform, it's simple enough that it quickly becomes second nature to format as you write, and with a bit of work and good macros you can convert it into basically any other formatting style. (I have a bunch of routine macros I use to turn Markdown into a Scribus layout, for example.) Markdowntopdf.com will generate a quick pdf from Markdown text, and Pandoc is an incredibly powerful document converter (and is Mac-compatible) but was created by someone super-comfortable with Perl and command-line interfaces so is about as user-unfriendly as it comes. E: Benly posted:Basically, many years ago I bought the first edition of Exalted before any of the splatbooks had come out, and the story it was pushing was "now you have the power of a demigod who hosed up real bad, and there's no reason to think you'll do any better, and destiny wants you to do great and terrible things", and I wanted to go back to that root. I am all about this poo poo. The cursed god-kings angle is what hooked me into Exalted in the first place way back when, and I've been increasingly frustrated by successive editions' move away from that. potatocubed fucked around with this message at 09:37 on Feb 12, 2016 |
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Feb 12, 2016 09:23
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Since we're all posting our PBTA WIP ITT... Pigsmoke: roleplaying as the faculty of a cut-rate American Hogwarts. It's a very basic 6000 word hack, and it's not complete, but there should be enough there for PBTAers to see the shape of it. Anyone want to tell me what they think?
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Feb 15, 2016 15:29
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I've expanded Pigsmoke into almost a full game (the file's still full of xxes and notes-to-self). I think it needs some playtesting before it goes any further though, which is an obstacle in its own right.
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Apr 13, 2016 10:12
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Covok posted:That was the "Hogwarts from the perspective of the teachers and written by someone who knows how cynical and terrible academia is" game, right? I never actually saw that. Do you mind linking it? That's the one. Latest version. I've thought about doing a PbP playtest of Pigsmoke here, but I've got one PbP on the go at the moment and that's my practical limit because I'm a terrible flake. Maybe if I catch a free evening somewhere I can try a one-shot version via IRC or roll20 or something.
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Apr 13, 2016 20:16
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megane posted:i-it's like you made an rpg out of my life I work in an academic-adjacent field, and many of my friends are in academia. It's very much first-hand cynicism.  And yes, if you want to PbP it please go ahead!
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Apr 13, 2016 21:28
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Golden Bee posted:If you can find a free Saturday I can get you a playtest group, no problem. This is real good stuff and the playbooks generate so many ideas it's uncanny. What time zone is that? If you're in the US it might be easier for me to run a playtest in the middle of the night and just prop myself up with energy drinks the next day. Golden Bee posted:Edit: You should make a Role based on Richard Feynmann, where you court controversy within your department by being too public-facing. Moves that let you indulge quirks, attain fame, and play the bongos make sense. These are good ideas! *scribbles notes* I find making playbooks is the most difficult part of PBTA hacks, since they're basically the meat of the whole thing, but you've neatly identified two areas that the existing roles don't cover. megane posted:Actually, in reading over it, I had one bit of feedback, specifically on the Slacker move Busy Doing Nothing. You get to do two time-consuming things per week, so you're effectively faster and more productive than everyone else? That seems to me like the opposite of what a Slacker should be, they should be phoning it in instead of doing research or whatever. This is a good point. megane posted:I'd suggest instead a time-consuming move for them to waste their time with, maybe something like this: And this is a great replacement for it. Mind if I basically steal this in its entirety?
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Apr 14, 2016 11:46
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Golden Bee posted:PST is GMT-8 basically. Set up a Doodle.com sched for days next weekend and I'll find peeps. The 23rd is a good day, yes -- I just need to know if I'm going to be free after the kid's gone to bed (8 pm GMT, give or take) or after my dad's gone to bed (midnight). And yes, I'll need to score a mic for roll20.
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Apr 15, 2016 09:19
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Alright, I'll be good to run a Pigsmoke playtest at ~8 pm British Summer Time (UTC +1) next Saturday. I'll run it via Roll20 assuming the mic I ordered arrives before then (it should). Capfalcon, if you want in that's fine. Golden Bee, you said you could round up some other testers? I'll be looking for 3-4 players total for a ~4 hour game; we'll do chargen and kick the tyres of the first session advice, and fingers crossed there will be both useful feedback for me and fun for the participants.
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Apr 16, 2016 14:40
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Heliotrope posted:If you still need playtesters, I´d be interested in trying this game out too. I should be available then, but I´ll let you know if something comes up. Sure thing. I'll post a reminder and a game link closer to the time. mllaneza posted:This is extremely well phrased, and now I need to make another pass on a few chapters in Spinward Worlds. Thank you. Now I feel like I've contributed something to the greater DNA of PBTA games. 
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Apr 17, 2016 19:36
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Golden Bee posted:We got 3 players (I'm bringing two friends) + Cap Falcon; can't wait. Also, you should know: if Pigsmoke is set in America, no American has ever used "flannel" in the British sense. Yeah, I'm getting that feedback from a few places. Such is the peril of trying to write outside one's natural idiom.
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Apr 22, 2016 22:25
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I haven't seen this posted here yet: City of Mist is a PBTA noir superhero game, which diverges from 'core' PBTA in a number of interesting ways. It's currently in a limited 'pre-KS' release, so you can have a poke through the rules for free. I've had a look through myself and I think it's got a lot of potential and a few issues. I really want to like it, but some of the moves need tightening up (Investigate, for example) and it's got a few jagged bits and pieces which make me wonder how it would work out in play. And it badly needs a structural editing pass -- too many concepts talked about before they've been introduced. And the moves don't offer much to support the supposed noir elements. I do like the system for character gen and development, though, and the way your 'crew concept' becomes a sort of shared character sheet that everyone can draw on. But you know, it's free if you want to make your own mind up.
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Aug 22, 2016 22:26
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Evil Mastermind posted:But as near as I can tell, there's no upper limit on how many tags you can bring into play; I saw a way for one of the pregens to get a base +4 on Convince rolls. Yup. On the one hand, my instinct is to warble about PBTA maths (where you should never be able to go higher than +3) but in CoM harm is tracked as statuses that range from 1 to 5, and which subtract directly from your dice roll when they're relevant -- so you're going to want to be able to crank those numbers once you start picking up statuses. I'm dubious, tbh, but I want to see how it plays before I condemn it completely.
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Aug 23, 2016 18:51
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While you're mashing things together, I think there's an engineer archetype in the Sprawl too.
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Sep 17, 2016 21:00
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The key elements in a PBTA hack are the basic moves, the playbooks, and the GM moves/agenda/principles. When I wrote Pigsmoke I started by writing basic moves that covered everything I expected academic wizards to get up to. Then I knocked out six playbooks to cover the six departments, giving them special abilities related to their magic, and largely copied the GM stuff from Apoc World but tweaking it as I went through to match the genre I was working in. That becomes the basic framework, and you add extra bits to reinforce what you've started building. If you keep testing the game, or have other people read it, you'll quickly find the spaces where they expect to have mechanical support but don't. Then you put something in there and try to tie it in with everything else. For example, a lot of the moves in Pigsmoke v1 had a cost that they 'took a long time' or similar, so I (eventually) created a time-consuming tag and hung a rules framework on it to cover the passing of time. That bit of design emerged as a necessity from the design that had already happened. Then you just keep expanding the game until it's finished.
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Sep 24, 2016 10:59
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Magical Fury, I think.
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Oct 12, 2016 08:08
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Rule Zero is a really useful safety net when you're running games -- it means that if you screw up e.g. encounter balance then it's no big deal, you can adjust it on the fly. PBTA has a similar safety net in the way the GM handles their fictional positioning, but if you're new to the system it's not immediately obvious.Dulkor posted:Politely explaining that this isn't that kind of game and it only functions properly when both sides follow the rules from their parts of the book is really the only way to go. If you can show him some examples of how the interactions are supposed to play out that will usually help make clear what kind of game it is. If you have time, it might be an idea to have someone who does get PBTA (maybe you?) to run a one- or two-shot game to show off how the system works, then go through it and explain why you made the decisions you did at the times you did. Or point him to a PBTA podcast? Friends at the Table is pretty cool.
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Oct 12, 2016 10:48
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Speaking vaguely of MOTW, this crossed my path earlier on G+ which might be relevant to some folks:quote:We want your mysteries! A not-so-secret cabal are going to put together a collection of Monster of the Week mysteries, and we need writers! The 'no so secret cabal' is Michael Sands (author of MOTW) and... some other people? I don't know. I don't have a link to the original post so I can't tell you much more than this.
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Nov 22, 2016 09:35
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Yeah, Awful Sea looks pretty boss. I was a bit concerned that they hadn't done their sums properly since their initial ask was so low, but now it's exploded and making mad bank I figure it's all going to be fine. Also, if I can engage in some blatant self-promotion: The Pigsmoke Kickstarter is down to 36 hours! Just in case you were thinking of backing it and hadn't. E: thefakenews posted:Development on my PbtA game, Malleus, has stalled out pretty hard. Okay, the very first thing: lose that font. Well, maybe keep it for headers. But while it's a very evocative choice and perfectly suits the tone you're going for, I could feel my eyes starting to throb after about two paragraphs. Your body text needs to be in something way simpler -- Book Antiqua is a go-to choice of mine which might work. potatocubed fucked around with this message at 10:25 on Feb 3, 2017 |
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Feb 3, 2017 09:58
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Thanks for that. I've read! And commented! Overall, I like it. There are a few bits in the basic moves which I'm not 100% about, but I'd want to play it before I make any more comments -- and I do want to play it.
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Feb 3, 2017 15:38
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QuantumNinja posted:Is there any way to get in on this? I missed the kickstarter, but I've been super-excited about this game ever since you posted a draft months ago. Thanks for your interest! It'll be out for regular purchase when it's done, or if you just can't wait throw me a PM and I'll see if we can't sort something out.
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Feb 24, 2017 09:47
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That would be me, yes. How would you improve the playbook layout? (Also, I'm pleased you enjoyed it.  )
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Sep 26, 2017 14:33
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Thanks for the feedback -- I'll see if I can make a more space-efficient version, although they already seem super-cramped to me. Maybe I'll just make some bigger versions. An A4 sheet for each of role and department should do the trick.
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Sep 26, 2017 15:38
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wdarkk posted:So you'd need some sort of meta-RPG where you're playing people playing D&D. I think Ewen Cluney's actually writing that as we speak. At least, I know someone is, and I think it's Ewen.
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Dec 27, 2017 01:37
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madadric posted:Thanks for the insight folks! When I Kickstarted Pigsmoke I specifically said 'no stretch goals' because I didn't want to deal with them. On the one hand, I probably ended up leaving money on the table. On the other hand, when the main book was done it was done and I appreciated that a lot.
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Mar 22, 2018 13:31
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