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hyphz posted:So have people who have played AW (actual AW, not the spinoffs) found it to naturally incline to misery and when it is run in that way does it appear easier to run or more coherent than when not, or than other PbtA games? Whoof. Man, there's still some fundamental misreading here. Lemme see if I can clear things up for you a little? Like, first off, AW and Blades in the Dark are, neither of them, about some average level-0 joe clawing above the rank and file. In AW, you are *tagonist level - you run Bartertown, you lead some War Boys, you're the spooky one everybody's careful around, you have all these loving guns. In Blades, you're part of a crew that has the potential to be a shadow power in the city, but even before then, you have a stress track, which is the only thing that lets you look at any of the bad poo poo incoming from the world and say "not here, not now, not to me". So when you take action and succeed, you can learn or do or overcome a hell of a lot. And in either game you are generally capable, which means there's not an insurmountable gap between the worst any PC can be at something and the best that you can be. So let's start there, with people who are already big goddamn deals compared to most of the other people around them. Apocalypse World tends to focus a lot less on a united front taking on a single big problem and instead plays around a diverse group of people, each with their own interests, sometimes working at cross-purposes, and what they have to worry about is the entire world. Like, potentially, anyway. What they end up dealing with is probably better thought of as threats from a wide variety of sources, but handling any one of those threats is, in the short term, fairly shallow. Like, you're a Savvyhead, and you've got some pricy new kit in your workshop and you have to come to grips with it, and loving Sling is probably going to try and run his protection racket on you again, and at any point somebody who was kind or canny enough to pay in advance is going to drop by with a ton of repair work on short notice, and somebody in an extremely clean suit just showed up asking after somebody you're caring for in secret and the artifact you lifted off their unconscious body, and the pricy new kit came along with this huge medicine caravan, who are all setting up temporary shop in the immediate vicinity and who knows what kind of strangers, illnesses, or strange illnesses came along for the ride. It's not like any one of those things is suddenly going to turn and obliterate you utterly, but you've got to keep up with all of them, and one you're not currently focusing on might suddenly demand your attention. Dealing with it is going to be a matter of making like two-three rolls before things get resolved, at most? Usually? And the GM is given tools for managing this wide array of threats and interests and having them to reference and turn against the players. As far as attrition goes, PCs don't have a lot to casually lose. I mean, there's barter, which, well, money in money out. There's other sorts of supplies too, but they would have had to buy most of them in the first place. There's their 6 hit points, but risking even one of those might come with knock-on effects, and the last three are more of a clinging-to-life thing, so, well, either you're willing to get hurt or you're not. There's the potential to risk their more notable things, the things that define them, but staking any one of those is much more dramatic and deliberate. But if it's something huge that concerns everyone, the GM has tools for that too. It's called a countdown, but it really isn't any different from the average PC's way of tracking their 6 hit points. Obviously anything that gets, you know, physically engaged is going to have a very obvious countdown to deal with, but as a player-visible tracker for a bunch of other things it also suffices. Like, if the hardholder decides to set up their hardhold so they have maximum possible benefits and wants, but misses the management roll and has them all come due, suddenly everybody concerned has to deal with all that chaos. And you have a countdown representing the "health" of the hardhold, as opposed to chaos and misrule, that's currently at space 3 out of 6, and the individual things PCs will attempt to accomplish in two or three rolls are all trying to heal it. ...probably. Blades in the Dark is a lot more explicit about clocking. Like, if they don't bypass the search through the Dimmer Sisters' spooky house, the GM draws out a clock four or six or eight segments big, probably eight since the Sisters are higher than the PC crew at the moment of the example and the search is intended to be somewhat involved, and as the PCs describe what they're doing to search the place the GM sets a base effect level of 1, 2, or 3, with 2 as the baseline, and tells them about the position of the roll, which will usually start off at the position they left the engagement roll in. So you go around the table, everyone for sure rolls at least one 6, and then you're through the house and clean, bing bing bong, so simp- (1 1 2 3 1) oh dear. Blades has a lot more to casually use and lose. There's stress to bump rolls, start flashbacks, and resist everything, loadout slots to commit to the problem at hand, harm to take, and afterwards, coin and reputation to get all of that back or pay it forward for the next time. But the thing about each of these games, that I think will help the giant list of GM moves that looks like a menu of catastrophe make a little more sense to you, is that very rarely is anybody looking at you to find out what they've won. The upside is right in front of them. Your Blades crew knew what clocks they were trying to tick and for how much when they made the roll in the first place. Your Apocalypse World PCs have all the benefits of their moves listed in front of them, too, but the downsides are more variable. So, the giant list of moves is half ways to set the stage - offer opportunities, detail consequences, announce future badness, make small initial moves like separate them or put them in a spot - and the other half is enough of a variety of potential downsides, that when it comes time to present one there's enough variety that you can find one to fit most situations, and you don't feel like the only thing there is to do is inflict harm as established. AW, specifically, as I've run and played it, is a game that has a lot of space for bad things to happen in, like actual, meaningful bad things, not just "you lose 10 out of your 100 hit points, ouch". But that's different from being a game where a lot of bad things are happening. It's more like... a game where a lot of bad things aren't happening, and you're dealing with the ones that are?
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Feb 22, 2018 06:52
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hyphz posted:Yes, I have. Sure it does. You announced future badness, didn't you? You put someone in a spot, didn't you? You told them the consequences and asked, didn't you? You inflicted harm as established, didn't you? If you did all or most of that, the audit trail isn't lying dead in the book, it's out there alive in the conversation.
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Feb 22, 2018 17:03
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Plutonis posted:Does anyone still read order of the stick It's more a reference to the forums culture at this point. The strip mostly referred to hard game mechanics so as to laugh at them, but from the resulting well of actually, a strange beast was born and, some say, demands precise copper-piece accountings of mustard prices to this day.
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Feb 22, 2018 19:20
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gradenko_2000 posted:In that context, what would it take, or how would change Munchkin, to make it shorter and have a more deliberate ending? Well, I tried this out a couple times. It worked, but it wasn't really with a group negatively disposed to Munchkin in the first place.
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Mar 21, 2018 16:14
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Pollyanna posted:I feel like my GM style would be fairly terse and based mostly in describing the world and running the NPCs, and reacting to the input of players. In contrast to other GMs’ tendencies to monologue, derail or go off on tangents, I mean. I don’t know if saying more with less is an advantage or a disadvantage in games like Blades or other Apocalypse-likes. The deal is that when a PC goes "I attack" you go "cool, how?" because there is no way to resolve a PC saying "I attack". There's a way to resolve a PC, say, helping a buddy, or protecting someone or something, or doing a flying stealth takedown, or wading into melee to hit and get hit. By barfing forth dungeonpunk, you leave a lot of things just lying around that a PC can incorporate into their explanations and/or demonstrate what they're interested in as they elaborate to your satisfaction on "I attack". And, similarly, they're inevitably going to roll a 3, at which point you get to come in and go crazy, and it would be nice if you could point it in a direction relevant to their interests.
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Apr 25, 2018 21:50
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LuiCypher posted:My major question is: What system should I use? I would suggest the Our Last Best Hope hack Our Last Best Dopes, as it's pretty good for Rick and Morty, but that's a GMless system and not up to this swerve.
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May 9, 2018 21:26
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Here's a talk Vincent Baker gave at Ropecon 2013, about game design and the original release of Apocalypse World. I've advanced it to an interesting point. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQbRevAu1dI&t=1500s So. Don't be afraid to alienate people - their rants will start conversations. Have rules that need some effort to understand - the questions will start conversations. And I thought about my time trawling the RPG stack exchange looking for the single non-d20 question per two pages of d20 questions and I wondered - is D&D poorly balanced and confusingly written on purpose?
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May 22, 2018 10:09
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gradenko_2000 posted:not at all. Every post-TSR iteration of D&D has been earnest and deliberate in wanting to be clear and balanced - they just didn't succeed at it. I'd say there's no "almost" about it, but to this day I cannot tell if HM4 was the product of someone with a genuine axe to grind with AD&D2 or if the first-level fireball, twenty pages of cantrips, and many rules explanations which used parallel logic to AD&D2 ones to spit out opposite results (one being "NPCs can have d4 HP because in real life people can die from even small injuries" in AD&D2 getting the "NPCs can have d4+20 kicker HP because in real life people can survive even great injuries" revamp) are a winking in-joke.
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May 22, 2018 13:20
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Covok posted:I think I've hit peak GM burnout. I joke sometimes about how the most accurate way to play out Knights of the Dinner Table is to use Dogs in the Vineyard rules. The in-game GM experiences injustice, which leads to grudge monsters, which leads to house rules, then homebrew, and eventually a TPK. But the truth is that GMing is work. It takes effort to prep games, and it takes effort to run them, and even if it pays off that's still work to do getting there. If your life is in a place where it's getting worn down, GMing isn't going to help, it's just going to be another demand.
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Jun 18, 2018 04:12
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Pollyanna posted:I'm primarily thinking of Inverse World cause it's a fantastical magitek setting and I'm sure there's a way to slightly reskin it to be more computer-y. Also song magic is cool. Survivor, Mechanic, Golem frontline Lantern, Collector, Witch backline (The Witch is not an official Inverse World class, but it's from the same author and seems to fit the setting well.) Of course you've got genuine strikers in there, too, which is maybe AT3 styles? Probably not as much nudity though.
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Jul 15, 2018 05:32
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FirstAidKite posted:I really like the idea of players helping each other and getting rewarded with special tokens that can have an arbitrary value that changes from situation to situation solely for the purpose of helping the players push each other along through the adventure, whether by bribing the gm into altering events in their favor or just altering rolls. I'm wondering if there are any other games with a system like this, or maybe some similar system that Hasbro copied for this game, because I'd legit be surprised if the MLP game is the first one to ever have something like this in it. JTTRPG Tenra Bansho Zero has an aiki/kiai system where people get audience applause (audience being their fellow players) and turn that into fuel for character powers. Golden Sky Stories has a similar system, except you use the applause to strengthen your relationships, which give you power points when they come into a scene. (Therefore, you powergame by being as adorable as possible.) Epyllion is a PBTA system that's ponies except dragons and it gets a bit too far up its own cleverness sometimes, but it's got an interesting bit where everyone picks a virtue, and if somebody else is acting in line with it, you toss them a gem, and you can cast magic by returning gems to their owners and rolling +returned.
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Aug 7, 2018 13:14
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Halloween Jack posted:I was discussing the new Twin Peaks with a friend and I mentioned that there was a RPG heavily inspired by it, Heaven & Earth, but that it kinda falls flat because it doesn't encode the themes or atmosphere it wants in any meaningful way. Don't Rest Your Head says hi. I think if you're going for atmosphere you've got to roll for outcome directly. Swords Without Master does that too; you either succeed with a particular mood or fail and create foreshadowing, and at the end you look at all the foreshadowing and decide what the throughline was. It's pretty neat.
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Sep 6, 2018 23:19
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Thuryl posted:Seems like your skills would have a huge impact on the game despite the small range of numbers involved; a +3 means you get a crit on anything from an 18 to a 24. No, "a blackjack" is specifically an opening deal of an ace and a 10-value card. (The OG blackjack that gives the game its American name was a promotional stunt, a super jackpot paid out on the ace of spades and a black jack, but that's rare enough any blackjack-based game resolution probably shouldn't incorporate it.)
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Sep 28, 2018 14:03
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fool_of_sound posted:I don't think you understood my post. When the take 10 system is limited or not present, success floors matter, No they don't. If rolls are supposed to represent something where a character's success is uncertain, such as in Lady Blackbird and Burning Wheel, then a character's success should be uncertain.
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Sep 30, 2018 05:33
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fool_of_sound posted:Yeah, when the system call for this and gives advice about how to render failure like this, that's superior. Most systems still don't have that though. Lady Blackbird and Burning Wheel both do, though? Failure means an escalation in Lady Blackbird and Burning Wheel has the twist-or-condition rider. In fact, a lot of systems do, whether the system is a task-resolution system where safecracking takes up a unit of time and the GM will advance patrols or make an encounter check before you get to do it again, or a story-resolution system where safecracking determines where the story goes and, success or failure, it somehow advances it. The only systems that don't are the ones that got caught halfway between frameworked task-resolution and freeform story-resolution, and try to have task-resolution procedures in a freeform environment with some kind of flimsy patch on top like "when you fail cracking a safe you can never try again because reasons". So basically... later-edition D&D and the majority of commercial RPGs that copied it.
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Oct 1, 2018 02:06
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And the people she hired to print Chuubo's took the money and did sweet gently caress-all with it, to the point of sending her proofs of a different book entirely when she asked for something months past the due date. Kickstarter people are only actually getting prints of Chuubo's thanks to the uncommon generosity of one of the backers.
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Oct 4, 2018 14:26
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Agent355 posted:I don't know, I'm just scanning through the list. I just see lots of actions like comforting and persuading and stuff. I don't know how the rules actually function in play, it just seems to be covering a very different sort of super hero than somebody who is going to throw down with dr. doom over his moon laser. It's not the character archetypes themselves that seem squirrel girl but the system? We're talking about the guy who's constitutionally incapable of getting over the travails and failures of his young adulthood, right? RICHAAAAAAAAARDS? If you were brawling in re a moon laser you'd probably use, I dunno, Directly Engage a Threat and Unleash Your Powers, which are immediately above Comfort Or Support on the list you're looking at? (Also, Persuade and Empathize are a) advanced moves which are really weirdly placed on that player aid and b) a couple of goddamn knives.)
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Oct 11, 2018 03:56
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theironjef posted:I've played it and it's great. Gets around one very minor weakness in Masks (really in nerds) which is that the suggested power sets on the playbooks are treated as scripture and a meta develops where if you see someone with like self-duplication you just go "okay, a delinquent" and that's a problem. Yeah, the actual defining bits of the playbooks are not really the available power choices but the things that other playbooks can't really grab without switching over. The Beacon's introduction scene is portentous, hinting at a much larger world. Their unique bit is a superhero bucket list with entries like "get a new costume", "solo a major threat", "pilot a fantastic vehicle", "go somewhere incredible". They think everyone's amazing and are worried that they shouldn't be here. The Bull's introduction scene has them (or at least someone they pushed) standing on top of a powerful enemy. Their unique bit is having The Delinquent's introduction scene flips the bird at duly constituted authority to save the day. They want people to think they're cool and are willing to turn themselves into almost anybody (in the non-shapeshifting sense) to get there. The Doomed's introduction scene regrets the price they paid. They're heavily, heavily into the doom mechanic, trading a slow countdown to oblivion for a few moments of great power, to the point of not really having other playbook moves, though some other types can poach their sanctuary. They're worried there may be no hope for them but the bright moments can pull them back from the brink. The Janus's introduction scene has a sidelight moment with a normal but important person, even if they're only important to the Janus. They have a possibly-fragile normal life that they're trying to juggle alongside being a hero. They know there's something worthwhile in both those places and the secret keeps them grounded. The Legacy's introduction scene includes an established hero taking note. They're tied into history through their legacy and connected to its holders and rivals. It weighs heavily on them and pushes them to be more. The Nova's introduction scene pulls out to reveal the rubble. Wow, that's a lot of rubble. They're heavily into their own burn mechanic, handicapping themselves for the sake of a few crucial moments, to the point of not really having other playbook moves. They're aware how afraid other people can be of them, and can focus better if they know their teammates can contain them if it comes to it. The Outsider's introduction scene starts them out as an unknown. There's nonetheless something compelling about them, and they can learn something from even the most ordinary human thing. The Protege's introduction scene ends with them setting up the comms, because someone has to. They're not as intimately connected to their mentor as the Legacy, but they are using/borrowing/responsible for a notable portion of their resources. Ultimately they want to stand on their own and boy do they feel the irony that sometimes they still need their mentor's help to do so. The Transformed's introduction scene is freeze-framed somewhere and captioned "Threat or Menace?" Socially they're a bit like the Janus, except instead of a secret identity they can go back to, they hold onto what they once were, even if they can't go back.
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Oct 11, 2018 06:50
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GimpInBlack posted:If I was going to design a playbook for Beast Boy (again, specifically the Young Justice version, because that's the one I know), I'd probably go for something like the inverse of the Beacon and the Janus--the hero who's with the team because they have nowhere else to be, either because their family is all gone, their powers don't let them live safely among normal people, or because powerful villains want to control them for reasons. Maybe call it the Wayward or the Orphan. Or the Nomad? (The Nomad is a playbook in the Unbound "dimension-hopper" expansion. Thematically they're kind of Starlord, but you can find and replace "outer-space weirdness" with "Doom Patrol weirdness" fairly easily. Nobody ever gets Influence over them; they give it out, and they get benefits from it but people also get more out of having Influence over them.)
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Dec 23, 2018 00:23
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Lemon-Lime posted:The Nomad is all about always being 5 minutes away from just bugging out of this dimension, only being held back by the handful of friendships they've formed on Earth, and their player has to take special care to actually give out influence lest they end up with no good reason to stick around. Except that in the framing material for the Nomad, they explicitly caution you against actually being 5 minutes and a piece of depleted chrononite/the passphrase to the portal out/the defeat of Dr. Birdcage from just bugging out of this dimension. "Just bug out of this dimension" is an advanced move. The effect of not giving out influence is being completely unable to comfort or support anyone, and vice versa. I mean, what's the tension around somebody who's trying to make The Team into a replacement family? Isn't it that it's not going to work this time, either? Opening up to people means finding comfort in ways you couldn't before, but it also means making yourself vulnerable in ways you might not be comfortable with? It seems like the extra "Putting Down Roots" lines up well with that.
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Dec 24, 2018 20:40
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