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Is there a PbtA hack that deals with Cold War (or Cold War-esque) espionage?
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Jul 12, 2015 17:40
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Zikan posted:Here is a link I found to a version, not sure if it's the latest: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B-blUgsUpjcIRXU0dkFwUk9qUEk/edit?pli=1 Thanks, this looks like it could come in handy, even if it's not 100% what I'm looking for. Full disclosure: A couple of years ago (boy, the time does fly) my friend Lichtenstein ran a session about two feuding Venetian noble houses. The kicker here was that everyone had two characters: one from House Contarini, the other from House Falieri. This worked really well, even though some characters had a lot of prep and backstory, but little screen time (it's hard to find a time to play a Falieri outcast who needs dough to marry a Byzantine heiress when your other character is the Contarini Doge). He then let the intrigue mostly run itself, with the players' actions and reactions guiding it. With everyone having a bigger or smaller stake in both houses, even small bullshit scenes were exciting and prompted a lot of activity from everyone, and with two characters for everyone by design, player elimination was not as big a deal as it would typically be (although only one character actually died - due to a terminal case of bungee-less bungee jumping). I'd like to do something similar, but about Cold War-style spies. Two rival agencies set up shop in the same place (a Central American country? Not-Berlin? Somewhere else? I'm not exactly sure yet). Both want to achieve something (rig an election? Intercept a defector? Something else entirely?), although they come in with different levels of equipment and preparation, and we take it from there. The problem is I'm gonna have to most likely borrow and tweak stuff from elsewhere to make it suit my needs. Lichtenstein's game used the A Song of Ice and Fire hack with some tiny changes, but I'd like some more control over the content. I'd like the character sheet itself to feed the players ideas to get them going right off the bat. I'm not very good at hacking PbtA, though, so I'd appreciate any ideas and help from the thread (even with the general concept building).
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Jul 12, 2015 21:06
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Doodmons posted: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. Thanks, I'll look into those!
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Jul 14, 2015 09:14
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So I was playing World Wide Wrestling recently, and I made a short list of good and bad things about it. GOOD STUFF - It comes with a list of example wrestling moves with graphs, which is cool for getting ideas if you've never seen a wrestling show. - The playbooks are absolutely great. When I played Apocalypse World the first time, I couldn't fathom why you'd want to play the Operator or the Driver if everything else seems so much more interesting. Here, every playbook provides exciting, interesting challenges and hooks and whatnot. When we played our first Episode, I had a clear picture of the character I wanted to play, yet when shown the playbooks, I wanted to pick pretty much any single one. - Getting into character is super easy when you know from the start it's going to be a little silly, and you can't really have wrestling any other way. - Its PvP nature means you get really, really involved in other players' characters, and start playing to their strengths as well, you want to see what you can do together, or you start to really get pissed off by how they play the game. That's just great. - It facilitates building story arcs so much, it's incredible. It just happens, it takes barely any pushing. You get a set of plot hooks right at the start, and the driving motivation for exploring them is so incredibly obvious (get that belt! don't get fired! kick their rear end!) they get to work right away. And you do grow attached to them, and to your characters. I started off as a cartoonish Soviet villain who couldn't wrestle a drat and resorted to throwing people around instead. I did not treat this thing seriously at all, it was all supposed to be Hulk Hogan jokes and John Cena memes and 80s to the limit. His off-ring backstory was that he was actually a dude from Minnesota who had to pay off his student loans and couldn't get a real job, and he knew three words in Russian he just yelled when it felt appropriate. This was my entrance theme, dammit. Then he became top of the card, because it turned out he was good on the mic and his feuds lended to some spectacular matches. Now, I'm completely revamping the character into a serious real-deal veteran who wants to use the trust he got from the management after he agreed to play a retirement arc just before the championship title was to be put on the line and put over a new wrestler for it to position himself as the middle man between the boss (Creative Director Vince McGator) and the locker room, then whip the promotion into professional shape. BAD STUFF - I don't think it would work well as a PbP. Tevery Best fucked around with this message at 20:54 on Mar 21, 2016 |
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Mar 21, 2016 20:49
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I think that's because many of them do give off the impression of being backstage issues, while we mostly focus on the on-camera action. ALSO I got a chance to be the surprise Creative for a session and it was strange how on one hand I felt I needed more prep time while on the other I managed to do so much anyway and it all felt like good-or-at-least-not-horrible ideas, so maybe I didn't need it after all?
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Apr 11, 2016 08:51
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Stupid Newbie question: what's the real difference between basic and peripheral moves?
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May 8, 2016 10:34
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LICHTENSTEIN DO NOT READ I'm preparing for my first "real" session of The Sprawl tomorrow evening, and I'm somewhat stumped for Corporation moves for some of the Corps my players have created. Vishkar New Media is a huge media conglomerate that essentially wants to be 22nd Century Buzzfeed. They rely on automatically generated lowest-common-denominator content produced in overwhelming amounts just so one of those billion things goes viral and they can start pushing merchandise within hours. They have no qualms about abusing copyright law and shamelessly stealing other people's content. Their market practices are extremely aggressive, earning them the ire of other corps. Rikimaru Foods is a junk food conglomerate that constantly bribes public health authorities, scientists and journalists to claim their garbage synthburgers cure cancer rather than cause it. They have a significant media presence; their face is a fat, obnoxious female chef. HDD Conglomerate is a merger of Disney, Durex and a bunch of smaller companies. Their business model is essentially "sell them drugs, then sell them cartoons to watch while on drugs, then a truckload of dragon dildos once they grow up a bit". They control huge tracts of land in Central America, where they put up hundreds of theme parks. All of these are very evocative, instinctively repulsive, and dirty chrome. So that much is good. You can see where they can start to come into conflict. But I kind of can't think of any cool moves they could make that would be both unique to them and clearly visible to the players. For Vishkar, I was thinking so far: - Steal someone's spotlight (one player has the Illustrious Directive, another is a Reporter) - Buy someone out and shut them down (but this hardly feels unique) - More? Rikimaru: - Lie through their teeth (while evocative and could interact nicely with the Reporter, I'm not sure how to frame it in practical terms, what could it really result in) - More? HDD: - Corrupt and abuse the innocent (sounds largely like a long-term thing, though) - More? I'd be glad to hear your thoughts.
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May 29, 2016 22:39
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Golden Bee posted:For Vishk, just steal people's identity. Have them live stream from the eyes of people in the player's day-to-day existence. Any "Sitcom characters vs Hollywood" story will work here. I just realised the Reporter has a cybereye  , so thanks for that thought. Not sure what you're thinking about with the "Sitcom characters vs Hollywood" thing? I must admit I've never been much for sitcoms.And what do you mean by "Public a health source"?
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May 29, 2016 23:40
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Golden Bee posted:Fixed Oh, yeah, that makes a lot more sense. Thanks a lot, these are great!
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May 30, 2016 09:05
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Also while we're on the subject of stealing from The Sprawl, it has a nifty idea in that the move Get Paid is not dependent on stats of any of the characters, but on the state of the Legwork Clock (the clock which measures how much attention you had managed to attract while preparing for the mission). You might, for example, have a move in your game that allows the players to dodge the consequences of failing to pay back their debts, and have it scale with how much they need to make up the difference. Like so: quote:When you come up short when the collectors arrive, roll +amount of $currency you're lacking. On a 7-9, pick* 1. On a 10+, pick 3. *alternatively, "The GM picks." **note how the seizure is not said to be fair. Tevery Best fucked around with this message at 13:25 on Sep 29, 2016 |
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Sep 29, 2016 13:22
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Please don't make me run a WWW game my first character was a +3 Power -3 Work Giant named Stran Ogromnay who was from SOVIET RUSSIA* (the story was set in present day, originally there was no explanation) and later on had a backstory revealed where he travelled to Afghanistan to find the bones of his dead father who was killed by a CIA agent, who was then revealed to have been THE CHESSMASTER (chess-themed villain of the promotion) who time-travelled to do that for reasons and backstage he still had probably the most serious character development of any character I've ever played in any game WWW kicks so much rear end it's not even funny *actually was a classical philology graduate from rural Minnesota who was way too much into bodybuilding at university and could not find a real job after graduation, so he decided to sign up for wrasslin'
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Mar 15, 2017 20:05
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Depends? Usually there's at least some moments explaining stuff from the backstage perspective, but how much you actually engage with it is up to you. I had a big backstory about being the last wrestler from the original promotion and having a lot of respect and trust from the management and trying to use this to position myself as essentially a representative of the wrestlers to help others resolve conflicts with the upstairs (think The Undertaker), so understandably it was a big deal for me, and from what I gather the expansion book had a lot of stuff for behind-the-scenes drama thrown in, which means that this is definitely a legitimate focus for the game. But you can run WWW as just the on-camera product just as well, with everyone never leaving kayfabe and whatever conflicts develop naturally being treated as scripted and written ahead of time. It's fully up to you. EDIT: I think it's part of the wrestling experience that breaking kayfabe may be fully within kayfabe
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Mar 15, 2017 21:43
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Halloween Jack posted:We discussed this a little in the F&F thread; I was confused about the Stats in WWW because it seemed like Work was useless (I'm working off the free stuff they were distributing off a blog or something before the official release). You could also use Power or Look to wrestle, and Work doesn't do anything but wrestle, so I was confused as to why you want Work. I think Lichtenstein specifically is going a little bit overboard with subsuming everything to Work, but you definitely do roll Work for like 80% of Wrestling. It has the unfortunate downside of making high-Work characters a bit boring to fight against (since they're going to rarely miss), but on the other hand playing a low-Work wrestler is super fun because you have to keep coming up with novel ways of using, say, Power. It's why my signature move for most of my early career was throwing people into the announcer table or even the drat crowd. (I later branched out into Heat.) That's because most of the bread-and-butter wrestling moves fall under Work. Wanna clothesline somebody real hard? Work. Figure Four Leg Lock? Work. Superkick to the face? It's flashy, but most of the time it's not flashy enough - Work. And that's not getting into real technical excellence. As for booking overrides: the magic is that Creative's booking is in the grey area between in-character and OOC. Depending on where you are and what you want to do, you can declare that it was actually a real breach of the booking (usually if you injure somebody in the ring) and see what interesting backstage consequences it may have, or you can just keep a straight face and say "that was how it was supposed to be all along," with the override being a fully in-kayfabe matter. Or you can yet again keep it in the grey area. It all depends on what you want it to do and what is interesting, and in my experience WWW is really great about that specific element of PbtA.
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Mar 16, 2017 11:42
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paradoxGentleman posted:Question from someone who's not at all familiar with wrestling: is there any particular reason, in WWWRPG, that you might want to injure your opponent? The match stipulation move Hardcore/Violence treats it as a good result, but I can't figure out why. Like others said, you can run it kayfabe or for real, depending on the circumstances. As for Hardcore/Violence, here's what that actually means: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EaFZxiXhMSI
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Mar 26, 2017 21:00
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MagnesiumB posted:Looking to start a short campaign of The Sprawl in the near future with some friends and it's my first time using the system. Any good advice, things to watch out for, etc from folks who've played it? Golden Bee posted:Don't use the Hacker. I would say less "don't use the Hacker" than "use Hacker only if you have a firm idea in mind and know what you're doing". The rules for hacking and the Matrix in general are not very well written and you'll default to winging it a lot of the time, and it really helps to have an idea of what a Hacker can and cannot do and how. There's also the issue of managing screen time, where the Hacker is traditionally a huge problem in all cyberpunk games. It's a lot easier in The Sprawl than, say, CP2020 (at least in my experience), but probably still something a first-time GM (and players!) will struggle with.
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Aug 26, 2017 10:47
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Action Movie World sounds interesting, can anyone tell me more about it? Any experiences with it?
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Sep 10, 2017 21:38
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Sprawl story from last Sunday. So we started off sometime last year, I think? It's been a while. Played a bunch of missions, it was rad, but some interpersonal breakdowns meant that the group had to be rerolled and someone replaced. But we decided to continue playing in the same universe, with unfinished threads from the original campaign still dangling loose and old characters having cameos every now and again. We brought in a new guy, who did not have much RPG experience, but is a cool guy with a lot of potential. Unfortunately, the characters we made for the new session tended to suffer from meme overload, partly because the new guy was not housebroken yet and this had a ripple effect on the rest of the bunch. I tried rolling with it, couldn't, failed miserably. So after a few months of not playing I threw a bit of a tantrum and talked everyone into de-memeing their characters, and everyone decided that'd be for the best and actually the easiest way is to just kill them off. So we played a session where we did just that. Except for ech0 the Hacker. Ech0 was the most normal of the entire party, and his shtick was solely that he was a huge no-life and had a sweet bike. So when at the end of the mission where everything went wrong, the bike was taken in by Lucky Land Communications' hit squad and he spent all of his Cred on getting out of Japan and shipping himself to Berlin, where he spent whatever he had left on a new bike. He is now at 0 Cred. And as we all know, that's a perfect excuse to mess with a player. So right now he's living in an old capsule hotel for gastarbeiters with a bunch of angry Turks who can't get citizenship for five generations now. He keeps the lights on by troubleshooting at a tech bazaar on Prinzstrasse. Nobody respects him, nobody knows him, and for all his posturing the only "hacking" jobs he could get were through Mr. Wizard the Tech, back when he worked for the police (he's since been severed after getting shot at fried his comms implant and the force has been privatised anyway). So Bill Lowrey the Infiltrator goes to get the job. And, as it turns out, his contact Klaus has a corporate extraction all lined up! You need to pull a woman out of the Bayer-GSK arcology on the west side of the Berlin Wall. Then clone a transponder chip she has implanted in her and stick it in a genetically-identical corpse to feign her death. Luckily, she has a twin sister, except nobody knows where she is. But I already lined up a crew for you, Bill! Meet Blazej the Hunter, a cool, solid professional. He's a Pollack, but what can you do. He's on the team to find the missing girl. Then there's Mr. Wizard the Tech. Ex-cop. He's gonna help you build an interface for the chip! (Klaus neglects to mention Mr. Wizard is not a cybernetics specialist.) Obviously, you're also gonna need a Hacker, right? To write the software. I got you a Hacker! A great Hacker! Her name's Terzi Basha. The girl is amazing. Although a Turk. But you can rely on her! Oh, and there's also this expendable errand boy. Goes by ech0. I pay him just enough to pay the rent, but it's okay, he's so transparently illegal if you think he's acting up just call immigration services and he's at Lampedusa before the weekend. And this little setup worked perfectly. Ech0 has a huge chip on his shoulder and it's so drat transparent everyone else is actually scared he's gonna pull off something stupid. The first thing he does is go dig for dirt on Terzi. He keeps trying to pull everyone into his little harebrained schemes to undermine her, and everyone sees it. He also volunteers for jobs he has no business doing just to get anyone to respect him. Bill, who's supposed to be the chief of the crew, does not trust him at all. Thus when, after three real-time hours of crying wolf, he actually finds a tracking bug in his motorcycle gas tank, everyone roundly tells him to go gently caress right off. There's also the story of how Bill went to a luxury German brothel to see if the missing sister is there and moved the Legwork clock three segments in the process, but that's for another time.
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Nov 15, 2017 12:10
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I've been writing a PbtA hack in my free time. The theme here is police dramas, mainly inspired by The Wire, because it is the best, but drawing on a whole lot of other things. It's been coming along quite nicely, I've never gotten this far in hacking, and I'm not feeling burned out at all yet, so I figured I'd share it with people. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1D_jFRcVok5Dwz4dXIUIgONiLZ_LbvYFA37kpW6eyuVY/edit?usp=sharing (The link should have comments enabled, let me know if I messed it up.) So far I have the first draft of the basic mechanics and moves, and a firm idea of what the Playbooks should be, which I am slowly going to translate into actual mechanics. The general principle is that the game would be centred on cases and have a more episodic feel, like The Sprawl. Through various moves, players would get Clues, which have a value in themselves as XP, but also serve as a "ticket to ride" in that you must have a number of them before the case actually starts rolling and you get Reveals. Reveals are kept on a track and measure how much you already know about the case. They are provided as a result of the players' actions and some moves and represent big breakthrough facts about the case. Once you have Reveals, you can start gathering Evidence, which is both a currency enabling some powerful moves (which I have admittedly yet to write) and what allows you to put the bad guys behind bars. Basically the idea is that there are three degrees of success in the overall Case, meaning that the MC can afford to be ruthless in failing players without them feeling like they have not accomplished anything of note. The first degree of success is solving the case, which is formalised in-game as a move you roll when you fill out the Reveal track (this move also serves as an opportunity to recapitulate the story and fill in any plot holes that may have emerged as a result of play). After that, you move to arrest, which, if successful, is the second degree of success. Finally, the case goes to trial, and the more Evidence you have collected, the better the chance of complete success at sending the bad guys away. This is the third degree of success. Naturally, the whole time the criminals are working to cover up their tracks, and may even just up and run away if backed into a wall. In other words, the core gameplay loop is go do poo poo and get clues for it -> go do casework and get Reveals -> pick up Evidence along the way -> solve the case ->  -> grab some more evidence while you can -> case goes to trial, nice job lads -> start over.For now I am first and foremost looking for advice in regards to the Basic and Peripheral Moves, and the way Cases are structured. I want to have fairly robust core mechanics before I move on to Playbooks. But if someone has a great idea for a move or something, I'd love to hear that as well.
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May 6, 2018 17:53
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SlimGoodbody posted:Will there be an included mechanism to display how cops are bastards Bear Enthusiast posted:I love The Wire and especially love the scene where a detective tricks someone into confessing by making him think a photocopier is a lie-detector, which according to David Simon he actually watched happen. That's some "okay this was kinda hosed up, but we look past it because it's hilarious and we the audience know the guy was actually guilty." I want there to be plenty of outlets for you to be a bastard. There is an entire playbook (The Harry) concerned with being a violent gently caress with no regard for procedure, and it is intended to cover a whole range of archetypes from Herc and early Carver, through Dirty Harry, to Officer Tenpenny style rear end in a top hat (although if you are on the level of Tenpenny, Walker, or Vic Mackey, you're probably an antagonist at that point, I'm still ironing out if I want to set a line here). On the other hand, if you prefer to be a bastard to people who trust you and rely on you, there's The Bunk, an entire playbook for being a self-destructive fuckup (and possibly recovering, if that's your thing) who harms people around him. If you wish to be a jackass to your coworkers, play The Jay. If you want to lord how you are untouchable and steal the spotlight from others, play The Interloper. And, in any case, you have The Bosses, who are assholes by definition, and never stop being assholes. megane posted:When you grill somebody, roll +hardboiled. This is a good overall advice and two good specific points to think about. But I decided I want to keep the moves count low, and kind of punted the things about canvassing large groups of witnesses on the scene or setting up a crime scene. They are, I feel, things that would not be exciting to roll for or really even do, since you can just place a helpful first responder full of exposition on the scene. If you want to talk to witnesses, you should probably be talking to specific, important witnesses, rather than people who won't ever appear again, and at that point you can roll this like any other interaction (and if you really want to grill someone, there's the interrogate move). Forensics are not really interesting in and of themselves, in my view (rather, it is the results of it confirming or denying hypotheses or having it be a limited resource - see requisitions), unless you make it a CSI-style focus of the entire thing - which is why The Temperance playbook exists. Also I can see that someone dumped a bunch of comments on me - thanks, whoever you are! I'll get to reading them right away.
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May 7, 2018 18:42
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Are you going to be the Creative or a player?
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Sep 14, 2018 13:21
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GladRagKraken posted:I'm running the drat thing. Hubris Then just BRING IT ON, BROTHER WWW is super easy to run with even minimal prep, just watch some WWE highlights and come up with stupid match gimmicks and the players will do the rest for you if they enjoy each other's company in the slightest.
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Sep 14, 2018 17:32
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So after a few months hiatus I came back to writing my cop procedural PBTA hack. (Previous discussion here.) New stuff includes: - Rules for Stress and explanation of how harm works here - Every Playbook now gets a special move for making the big arrests - Equipment moves got parcelled out to Playbooks - I figured out how I want to do Hx (although it will probably require a bunch of work) - The Beadie is the first complete (although obviously not finalised) Playbook - A bunch of other stuff, mostly Playbook moves Feel free to look through it and tell me what is bad
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Sep 26, 2018 22:00
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They're onto you with whatever resources they need to crush you. That's where the campaign switches off from being guns for hire and becomes about survival. Until the players figure out a way to get out of it, pull no punches. It's a one-warning-before-car-bomb situation. (Also a good moment if you keep hearing about how the players are talking about cybernetic implants. Suddenly losing an arm will be a convenience, actually.) Obviously this does not happen overnight, so give them a few warnings at 2300 and before. And a chance or two to stop it. But if the poo poo does hit the fan, it hits the fan.
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Feb 12, 2021 00:54
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Figure out how you are going to deal with betrayal, double-crossing and assorted surprises. It's a fine line to walk and you don't want to do your players (or fellow players) dirty.
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Apr 20, 2021 23:28
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It was a good game, yeah. EDIT: almost nine years on SA and finally my first atrocious page snipe
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Jul 16, 2022 09:19
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