I talk a lot about how RPGs should be easy to run. That is, the barrier to entry to running an RPG should be as low as possible, and design should focus on that.
Pbta games do that, but they also do something else: make it easy to hack your own. I've still found this hard, because I don't have things like inDesign and am no good with formatting. I hate it.
That may be changing, due to some recent work and advances in tech by Andrew Medeiros.
Since Friday, I have written a fantasy pbta hack. I'm calling it Dragon World as a working title. It is more about relationships than hitting things.
I wanted this hack due to my design disagreements with Dungeon World, and not being able to get people to play Fallen Empires. This is designed as much more accessible hack.
Making this possible is The Watch, an unpublished and completely amazing hack by Anna Kreider and Andrew Medeiros. While theirs is important, and about a band of women fighting the darkness, Dragon World is about murderhoboes finding camraderie while struggling to find safety.
Two days and I've got seven classes (Fighter / Thief / Wizard / Cleric / Paladin / Bard / Ranger), a modified version of the combat resolution system from The Watch, and modified Keep rules from AW2E. There are three basic healing moves, and not a single punching basic move. And it is printer ready!
This is the fastest I've ever written a hack. Using The Watch as a baseline (including the sheets, thanks Drew!) meant I could write down what I wanted and have it formatted near instantly. This is already further along than just about any other hack I've done.
This might be a playable game, and I'll pitch it next time I'm gaming.
Here's to folks making designing games easier by building easy to use tools!
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Fun. I'd love to have a look.
ReplyDeleteGuess who just got shared with the ability to comment?
ReplyDeleteNice. I have yet to do any game design beyond kid LARPs. I'm not a big fan of pbta, but I did like monster hearts, so it's possible.
ReplyDeleteYay
ReplyDeleteMy biggest barrier to hacking PBtA was writing moves. It frustrated me. I'd much rather write skills as broad categories of "stuff you can do".
ReplyDeleteI don't know about "should be easy to learn." Some people value a learning curve, and feel it can do something good for a game.
ReplyDeleteDavid Rothfeder No secondary distribution, please. Not sure I own any of this, given how derivative it is.
ReplyDeleteCinnamon Bunny The kids larps are fantastic. I wonder if you could write them up and sell them?
Craig Hatler That's interesting, and we're at different places there. I adore moves because they give me direct hooks into the narrative. Broad skills I often find hard to use, actually. But, obviously, YMMV.
Robert Bohl Sure, and there are games for them! Lots and lots. What I want, though, is for it to be easy for people who don't have time / energy / spoons to plan out a game but who want the creative input as GM to be able to do so.
That's fine, I don't make a habit of reposting other people's games (it seems like a rude thing to do)
ReplyDeleteI've run similar things at kid birthday parties too and people are always telling me I should start a business doing it. And I am sure I could and make bank that way. But it would eat every single one of my weekends forever and I would never see my friends and also I HATE kid birthday parties. I love kids. It's just something about the atmosphere of kid parties that makes me want to hang myself. I am so glad my kids are old enough that I can just drop them off now.
ReplyDeleteWhat I would actually really love to do is negotiate something with J. Tuomas Harviainen and run The Tribunal for Law Schools as a lesson in the cognitive experience of being a witness and thinking you know exactly what you're going to say but being totally wrong.
ReplyDeleteCinnamon Bunny I mean publishing, not necessarily running them yourself! Maybe do it yourself for a few, then hire someone else to run your games.
ReplyDeleteI just finished my first read through, here are some thoughts:
ReplyDeleteThere's a lot I like about the structure of moves here. Combat is definately less of a focus, and it's treated as a teamwork activity rather than a roll to win.
I'm not sure if your battle moves will do what you think they do for the characters, but I won't know without trying it out
Mystic seems unfocused and not quite on theme. I guess I would ask what is the overlying force characters tap into with it (is it arcane power, knowledge, or some other overarching supernatural aspect)
There are a lot of artifacts from where you borrowed directly from somewhere else. I found mention of the world psycic maelstrom and a few other things. It got more pronounced towards the end, and I would especially look at the Bard for editting.
The concept Jaded moves are straight out of Urban Shadows AND THAT'S AWESOME.
The end talks about the final battle and changing the world and rolling stats that don't exist elsewhere in the document. I'm guessing this is an artifact. Having not read The Watch, I think that whole section may be an artifact, but hard to say.
I definately want to see more, and I may have to check out the Watch if nothing else.
The last is still straight from The Watch. From MC onwards, its not finished.
ReplyDeleteThanks for reading! Jaded is precisely Corruption, and stolen from The Watch. And hey, if Andrew Medeiros does Corruption, then its not stealing, right?
But yeah, there's some work left to do here, especially regarding the MC. The Bard probably needs work, yeah.
I need a thing to call the maelstrom. I want there to be a thing just beyond perception that messes with you, but I don't know quite what to call it. Ideas are welcome.
Mystic probably needs work. Wits and Tough are my favorite of the four, and both Heart and Mystic probably need to change. With Heart, I want that to collapse hot and charisma and all that stuff. Mystic is all the arcane stuff, not so much the divine. So, that's wizardly power through mystical understanding.
I'm not sure what to call that. Mystic is a decent working name.
I noticed early in the document you had a pretty farcical take on the gaem, calling the party muder hobos, but it never carries through in the rules. That last stat could be an oppurtunity to bring some more satire back into the game. I have two thoughts of how this can be done.
ReplyDelete1) Your mystical force could be the call of the murder hobo (CMH). Hearing this call is what turns animals into monsters and people into adventurers. Wizards don't just hear the call, they bath in it to the point where they can unleash their muder urges as magic. Mages be crazy.
2) Magic is breaking the 4th wall. Thats not actually a fireball the mage casts, it's the playe lighting a match (literally) and giving the fire to thier character. Players who have magic users for pc's need to bring thier material components (just about anything will do). Divination works the same way, the player just takes the map and write what's there. To characters without knowledge of the fourth this looks like dark and foul magics, but no, it's really just the player cheating.
Yeah, this started silly and moved a touch more serious. I'm revisting calling them murderhoboes in-text. Adventurers is a decent place holder.
ReplyDeleteI do kinda like the idea of emphasizing that wizards see the world in a different way, and baking that into the rules.
I don't want fire at the table, because danger. Other ways to do that could be cool, indeed. That bears thinking about.
Please change it away from murderhoboes.
ReplyDeleteWhy, Craig Hatler ? and what are some other options?
ReplyDeleteAdventurers?
ReplyDeleteIt just smacks of "we meet green (or black) skinned people and we kill them" to me. Not all adventurers kill or even use weapons/offensive magic.
Yeah, that's what I'm going with now. It seems bland.
ReplyDeleteThrillseeker? Glory hunter? Soldier of fortune?
ReplyDeleteI dunno, I get the vibe that the game might go too generic like this and not really stand out. I think a satirical fantasy game in the ptba space can do a good job of poking fun of classical dnd while still making a a game about relationships between characters. Still, if this isn't the game your interested in, then obviously you shouldn't make it. So if you aren't interested in explorig the world of muder hobos, what are iterested in for this game?
ReplyDeleteYeah, I'm not super interested in building satire. I'm more interested in emotions and feels, and focusing on the struggle to survive than I am in what happens in the dungeon.
ReplyDelete