Jay Treat has talked a lot lately about in the moment character generation.
I wonder what we can do with current tools.
Here's kind of what I'm thinking:
-- pbta, because easy starting place.
-- Before the game, the GM or the GM and the players decide on what sort of game this is going to be. Revolutionary politics? Super heroes? Traveler-style?
-- By default, there is one move. When you want to do something risky, roll plus no stat. On a 10+, you do it. On a 7-9, there's a problem: you do it, but only if your reaction tells us something new about your character: look, gender, history with another character. On a 6-, we learn something about why you fail.
-- Start with names, and what characters are known for. Examples:
Alexander Hamilton, Washington's Right-Hand Man
Thor, God of Thunder
Superman, Man of Steel
Malcolm Reynolds, browncoat mercenary smuggler (or maybe "Captain of the Firefly class vessel Serenity)
Lafayette, America's Favorite Fighting Frenchmen (LAFAYETTE)
That sort of thing. Anyone can know this about you, and the PCs probably do.
Start with the PCs in the same place, in media res. Something in genre is happening!
Maybe that's a cabinet battle, maybe its a fight against super villains. Maybe you are doing a job.
-- When you would need to use the basic move, you may instead say how you know something previously revealed about another character and gain an advance.
-- The first advance grants you a playbook. (hooray). After that, advances grant you a move from that playbook.
Clear as mud?
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Sounds a lot like level 0 DW but more fun.
ReplyDeleteIt could be dungeon world, Josh Mannon ! Start with a name and what we know about you. I think it'd work just fine.
ReplyDeleteI'd like to try it out with no playbooks.
ReplyDeleteDo so! Let me know how it goes.
ReplyDeleteI feel like that would do a Stephen Spielberg movie game pretty well.
ReplyDeleteHow so, Josh Mannon ?
ReplyDeleteEveryone starts as a characature and becomes more well rounded and deep as the action becomes bigger.
ReplyDeleteWorld of Dungeons anyone? I like the idea of slowly discovering the character...
ReplyDeleteHmm. Playbooks have a lot of...stuff in them. Moves and stats and looks, obviously, but also starting Hx, gear, and a very strong impression of one's role in the world and/or the party.
ReplyDeleteSome of these are distinction, others are glue, connection. I'd explicitly add some architecture for defining genre (defining and adding universal moves) and more glue.
What you have here is tinyFate.
Jesse Cox That's kinda the point, though: as the character grows, it'll grow into the playbook. I'd want to do a little work on the playbooks, maybe mostly removing Hx and replacing it with the bonds coming from knowing about each other. Maybe that turns into a camraderie system, where you spend points to aid instead of rolling.
ReplyDeleteShane Liebling Yeah! I often feel like I get to know a character as the game progresses anyway. This makes that into gameplay. It might not work, but it'd be kinda fun to try.
ReplyDeleteJosh Mannon Yeah! And other characters evolving lets us hear more about your story, too.
ReplyDeleteYep :) Stephen Spielberg the RPG is what I hear.
ReplyDeleteFor me, locking the player into a playbook defeats the further discovery of who this character is. We already know everything they're capable of.
ReplyDeleteThat said, I do see appeal to some structure, both mechanically and narratively.
This is a bad reference, because it's from a game concept only I've seen, but perhaps disciplines would work here. Very briefly, disciplines were my answer to D&D, breaking classes up into the five or so tracks that they tend to follow, and allowing players to choose their own disciplines and which ones they focus on.
I definitely can see playbooks as constraining. That said, they do build in something to deal with that via advancements, since in general "take a move from another playbook" generally is an option (and even multiple times).
ReplyDeleteI feel like I have even seen advancements that are: change playbooks...
Jay Treat Maybe so! You're kinda the inspiration for this, what with you being all smart on the internet.
ReplyDeleteFor this, I wanted it to be easier than a full redesign -- something portable from hack to hack, too.
For my money, what PbtA does so well isn't this.
ReplyDeleteI do think you could try your idea out pretty easily, and I'd be most interested to see how that goes.
Fate has a bunch of material and would convert to this pretty easily.
I'm inclined to work from scratch, but that's my jam. Getting a kickstart from existing material/systems is smart too.
Jay Treat That makes sense; you're further along the designer path than I am. I fumble around, and wind up relying on my improv capability.
ReplyDeleteAt this point, I'm not positive pbta games need more than one move. I wrote something about that last week. These thoughts are not unrelated!
Improv skills are incredibly valuable for RPG design.
ReplyDeleteAnd more important to running an RPG than any amount of design.
Jay Treat Tell me about how improv skills help with RPG design. I don't disagree, I'm just not sure I know what you mean!
ReplyDeleteWhen you bring a board game prototype to the table for the first time, if it doesn't work, chances are good you just abort the game, talk about issues and possibilities, and starting thinking about the next build.
ReplyDeleteWhen you try an RPG prototype for the first time, you have much more room to fudge. In the same way that a good GM can run a bad game well, you can save a weak prototype. Importantly, you can then directly apply the techniques you improvised to the re-design.
Jay Treat ok, so improv is important in making sure a session actually worked, and making sure a session actually works is essential to improving design. That makes sense!
ReplyDeleteI think a lot of that is because RPGs are a discussion. So're board games, but are a lot more structured and usually have their own language.
My own impression, and I'd be interested to hear if you guys agree, is
ReplyDeleteFate relies heavily on table consensus for what's reasonable, and provides some tools for helping the table find that. It's sort of a gestalt approach.
PbtA move structure gives people direct handles and pulls them into what the game designer holds as the genre, and so is a powerful tool for communicating a set of expectations about what one does, and some tools to help channel creativity into the forms (individual PbtA game) supports.
I think that's right, Jesse Cox .
ReplyDeleteThis is actually why I generally prefer pbta to fate. I don't like the idea that "winning" is about convincing the GM to let me use my aspects. The mechanics in pbta -- especially AW -- are so bloody clear that it is impossible or damned hard to go awry. And if you, that's OK, too.
But, yes: If you do it, do it. To do it, do it really makes the game structured around the narrative.