|
Xelkelvos posted:is it weird that I think the MtG colors could be used as stats for a PbtA-type game? White for protecting/defending/healing, Blue for Intuiting/Avoiding, Black for Bargaining/Sneaking, Red for Destroying, and Green for Physicality/Mana stuff. I kinda like MTG colour-stats.
|
#
¿
Aug 17, 2018 20:24
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 15, 2024 06:53 |
|
|
Xelkelvos posted:WotC did a lot to really define what the colors represent. There's a few gaps, I think, that aren't represented by any color (other than working with Artifice), but that's usually solved by finding something similar that is covered and stretching it. The other side, which is more interesting is where colors overlap and how it's possible to do the same things, but under different methods and end goals. Maybe you have a selection of options but one's auto pick depending on colour, or something?
|
|
#
¿
Aug 17, 2018 22:02
|
|
|
OscarDiggs posted:I mean, it's text so it's like I spoke to fast and you misheard me... Motivation, background, and personality massively affect everything you'd want to possibly do in an RPG. AW isn't like D&D where the bones of the game are a board game you have roleplaying interludes in, the way moves function ties them to the roleplaying bits and vice versa.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 14, 2018 00:29
|
|
|
Heliotrope posted:While Do Something Under Fire can cover a lot of things, it isn't "always use this when doing something not covered by another move." Sometimes what happens if a PC wants to do something not under a move is that they're looking at the MC to see what happens, so the MC should make one of their moves. Also, I think it's worth noting that sometimes that doing a thing is just doing a thing. Moves provide variability but sometimes a thing has a really obvious outcome. I guess strictly speaking this is use of GM moves, but it feels a bit of a different emphasis to me.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 14, 2018 11:36
|
|
|
And given those two things it's very important if the Gunlugger is a cheerful idiot who'll kill people on a whim because he has no sense of right and wrong or if he's a morose, haunted veteran of The War*, who prefers to deal in threats than violence because he knows its terrible cost. *Your MC is probably now going "Ooh, tell me about The War!" too; setting also changes your calculus a lot.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 14, 2018 21:30
|
|
|
I think kinda but I'd read it in the totally opposite way; they're actually VERY tightly linked. Moves happen when triggered in the fiction, and tell you what happens next. So someone who's constantly threatening people is going to trigger Go Aggro all the time, for example. Once triggered, moves give you a defined narrative outcome, with some mechanical tracking. So, your belligerent character will trigger Go Aggro a lot, and by Going Aggro, they're going to have a lot of people who are hurt (fictionally) and have taken Harm (mechanically). You're a belligerent dude, though, so you probably don't care, converting them into dead people, which other people in the game will have opinions about. Some of them are probably going to retalliate or try and stop you. Conversely, if you don't play someone who gets into arguments a lot you'll trigger Go Aggro less frequently, and maybe when it does trigger you'll panic from having nearly killed someone you didn't mean to, and drag them to the doc, and end up in his debt for emergency medical care. You're only using basic moves, there; anyone could trigger those. But, two different gunluggers are going to play two different games, even with an identical statline, though they certainly might be very similar given the incentives of that statline. I'd wager most gunluggers are going to have boring games if nothing's ever kicking off (but who's got everything locked down that tight?) (As a minor note, AW moves follow the principle of "To do it, do it". You can't get in someone's face and demand they give you the money and not roll, and you can't roll without trying to get in someone's face; though, of course, plenty of people are going to go "I go aggro on him, by-" or whatever. But, there's never a mechanical outlay without a fictional setup for it, and once the move triggers they always tell you about a new state in the fiction)
|
|
#
¿
Sep 14, 2018 23:10
|
|
|
Golden Bee posted:Also there is a separate uplifted animal playbook. Is there? Space Marine Mammal is just Landfall Marine now and isn't inherently about being a dolphin.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 15, 2018 11:13
|
|
|
Yeah, I can see them being useful but honestly I find PBTA games easier to run off the cuff and with improvisation, rather than harder. OTOH I guess it's very YMMV.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 10, 2019 15:04
|
|
|
I think in that case I'd probably just tell them straight-up. In general I think PBTA games play best with pretty "open" information, as it becomes relevant; "announce future badness" and similar moves exist for a reason, and threats are allowed to have hard move triggers. If your PCs are running into a minefield, someone should go first and explode so they know that instead of just suckering them (or have a "WARNING! MINES" sign, or whatever).
|
|
#
¿
Feb 13, 2019 00:23
|
|
|
I feel like Defy Danger is a golden example of why you should look very carefully at the necessity and implementation of Act Under Fire in a game, frankly.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 11, 2019 23:57
|
|
|
I feel like the biggest issue with Defy Danger isn't that it's an easy safety net for the player but it's such for the GM. Literally everything you could possibly do is encapsulated under Defy Danger somewhere. Also dungeon world is bullshit because it allows damage dice to negate strong hits and adds double-randomness to players but not monsters (whose moves always happen).
|
|
#
¿
Mar 12, 2019 23:46
|
|
|
"If you can't do it you can't do it" is kind of an unstated opposite of "To do it, do it". My guess is it's not such a prominent feature in AW, because by and large people are human baseline, but in a comicbook game, yeah; the person with no superpowers can't outrun a Flash type villain or hold up a collapsing skyscraper. That said I'd be forgiving about other things; the whole "mama bear lifting up cars" thing should apply for desperate effort and Unleashing is nothing but that, and if the guy with no real powers can get a perk for desperate effort, it's only fair the people with powers do too.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 13, 2019 07:50
|
|
|
Tricky posted:Look at drives as another example. They are, by and large, about the Beacon punching above their weight class and doing things that people think they can't handle. If you establish something as objectively being outside their reach, then the haters are right. Do you see how that flavors their narrative in a really lovely way? I mean, the haters are right: the beacon does not have superpowers and they're inherently unsuitable to have a punch out with Darkseid. The Beacon earns their place with cunning, courage, the support of their friends, and all that stuff, not by suddenly working out how to enter Super Saiyan 2 and being able to go 1-1 with Vegeta.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 14, 2019 20:09
|
|
|
Tricky posted:Did I say they would be having a punchfest with Vegeta? No. In fact, if you actually bother to read some of the things I have posted in this very thread, I said earlier: Yeah, sure. So, you'd agree that if what's said is "Golden Arrow just runs straight up to Vegeta, and punches him in his dumb face!", that's probably not a Directly Engage and is worth maybe going "Golden Arrow's just a normal dude, right? I think he's probably too strong/fast for that to play out in a good way; you're looking at probably eating a GM move on the basis of golden opportunity here, unless you meant there's some kind of trick to it?", instead of going "Awesome, roll directly engage to see if you're knocking him out"?
|
|
#
¿
Jun 14, 2019 20:18
|
|
|
Ilor posted:I routinely run AW or re-skins thereof at convention games and have never had anyone even bat an eye at the sex moves. It has been an issue with me presenting the game to a couple of existing gaming groups of mine*. It's not an arbitrary, theoretical concern. *both via "haha, boobs" reactions and "why is this a sex game" reactions.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 8, 2019 22:53
|
|
|
I can semi-agree; I feel like, generally, in blades, stress was quite manageable and money tended to come easily. What WAS bonkers, though, was any time someone let an injury happen without buying it off somehow it took them loving forever to recover, even (and especially gallingly) if it was something relatively minor. The balance between stress recovery and injury recover, IMO, feels insanely out of whack.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 28, 2019 23:34
|
|
|
Yeah, I think he's just straight wrong there. I don't even think AW characters are bumbling; even 6-s aren't "fuckups". I think this comes from the school where you critfail and trip on a flagstone and land on your face and the goblin laughs at you instead of the school where your failures are like, "while you cleave through the goblins towards the ceremony room door, you hear Prince Algor cry for help and turn to see the ogre is carrying him off over his shoulder". The second is a 6- but doesn't mean your hero is a clumsy shithead idiot, it means their lives are interesting.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 12, 2021 01:10
|
|
|
Halloween Jack posted:Chunnel and Mirage already implied it, but I'll state it right out: In classic dungeoncrawl D&D you're rolling to unlock a door, rolling to disarm a trap, rolling to unlock a door, rolling to unlock another door. In PbtA you're rolling to Navigate The Maze of Locked Doors and Traps. Clockwork's friend may just misunderstand the number of die rolls in a typical PbtA game vs. most D&D games. I think the big twist with PBTA specifically is how the roll outcomes can be kind of unrelated to the actual action. D&D's task-based resolution implies, even where it doesn't directly say, that you should have consequences based on the roll; it's okay to have, for instance, the door stay locked, or a lockpick to break, or have the guard catch you (wandering monsters!). The moves system, by contrast, legitimises plays like "you're in the middle of that when you see prince horace run past the corridor on the left, being chased by king dragon, what do you do", or "you're trying to do that when you hear a clank of a glass bottle and realise the fairy you bottled earlier has managed to escape, and is flying off". D&D, and, honestly maybe more D&D's culture, implies those are unfair play.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 14, 2021 23:55
|
|
|
And I think that spins into the fact AW gives you freedom, as a GM, on how players fail which they're not used to from other RPGs. Most RPGs if you fail your fight check, you miss, or you take damage, or you lose the fight, or whatever. AW is very explicit that your moves don't have to be super basic - you can miss in your fight and have the result be that you stand victorious over a room full of crumpled bodies, and then turn around to see one bastard you didn't spot clambering out the window, the the secret weapon documents half-spilling out of his backpack. That's not a thing I think I see in most games, and it definitely takes the sting off characters who're meant to be unbeatable at X - like, sure, they are! They're not omniperceptive, though, as in this example, and this bad guy didn't make the losing choice of trying to make it a fight.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 22, 2022 23:29
|
|
|
Yeah, the fact fights have to be about something in PBTA is another scope change. It's genuinely kind of hard to have a fight where you just run into three orcs and you fight in a PBTA game - moves usually won't make much sense. But you're trying to grab some plans out of a supervillain's office, and you miss? Then it makes sense. And if you'd hit you could have taken hold of the plans or whatever the equivalent is in your system.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 23, 2022 02:09
|
|
|
The trick to those is the second half of the rule is in the GM's side of the book. On a miss, the GM makes a move, and that's kind of an art the book tries to explain.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 23, 2022 19:39
|
|
|
Every session apocalypse world characters lose one or two arbitrary units of essentials, and need to acquire some constantly. This is before you get to any specific costs, like gear downsides, needing new poo poo for your saavyhead's workshop, needing to restock medical supplies, etc etc. It's incredibly about scarcity in a way even other PBTA games usually aren't (though most good ones are aware there needs to be something that's needed and hard to get to drive drama and push play).
|
|
#
¿
Oct 3, 2022 23:37
|
|
|
Heliotrope posted:The last thing he ever released from that was updated version of the Skins for the second edition, a lot of the other stuff never came out though. When did those even come out? I backed second skins and it says they're publicly available on one of the updates but the website seems to no longer exist.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 11, 2023 13:18
|
|
|
ItohRespectArmy posted:yeah masks is very much a game about teen drama with a superhero coat of paint rather than the other way around, you can tell really good superhero stories with it but there has to be a understanding for the players that they're all roughly as strong, regardless of powers. I would actually disagree here; they have equal narrative weight but as people point out, Nova and Beacon should be able to attempt very different things.
|
|
#
¿
May 26, 2023 07:55
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 15, 2024 06:53 |
|
|
bewilderment posted:Yeah, a lot of the point is that the Nova really is probably the 'strongest' and the Beacon really does have niche powers at best, and it's up to the characters how they deal with that. Yeah, and when it goes well it works great, too, because soon you'll find your Nova player is going "I guess I summon exodia again" and now half the street is underground and the Beacon player's going "Okay, first I throw a shuriken and then there's a beat panel where I go 'oh, right', and then I turn around and run back down that alley, hoping he follows me" "Which is a provoke" "Which is a provoke, and then I throw shurikens at the water tower so that bursts and floods the alley!". And, like, then you can just give them the hit on that second one; it's a very similar thing to "so the beacon rolls direct engage with superior", but it's giving lots of material opportunities to engage with the enemy with the context of the fiction - the beacon will emergently care more about that than the nova does. (For people wondering where I'm getting that from, it follows from "Say what rules and honesty demand" and "Disclaim decisionmaking", and "make a move when there's a golden opportunity"; you don't have to, and, in fact, shouldn't, just make moves against PCs!)
|
|
#
¿
May 27, 2023 11:23
|
|