In relation to a thread of Aaron Griffin's earlier today:
What would a pbta game where PCs are tasked with running a settlement at the edge of civilization look like?
Needed components: "adventuring", upgrading, the process from settlement to real town.
what moves do they need? What playbooks do you envision? Is there any resource management and, if so, what is it?
What stats, if any, do you use?
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I see you have "adventuring" in quotes. Can you expand on what you mean by that?
ReplyDeleteAnd what happens when the settlement burns to the ground?
ReplyDeletePbtA games eat your sacred cows, absent very substantial rules tinkering.
Maybe, Kimberley Lam, though I'd maybe prefer it if you were in the chair.
ReplyDeleteI mean something like: making the land safe for your sort of citizen. Whether that's reducing the population of wolves, ghosts, or orcs there's this not at all savory thing that is done by D&D or OSR or dungeon world style adventurers.
Sounds like Stonetop by Jeremy Strandberg.
ReplyDeleteThere's some questions of how far into culture design you want to go...
ReplyDeleteIf I were making this thing, you'd need to know --
How do we get shelter, including heat (if too cold) and cool (if too hot) or from other natural hazards.
How do we get food. Trade? Raiding? Farming? Herding? Gathering? Fishing? Who does this? Is there a "harvest season?"
How do we get water? How do we protect our water supply?
We also need: child rearing (or other source of new personnel) training, specialists, durable goods like clothing and tools.
Tell me more about that, Jesse Cox. How does it relate to playbooks?
ReplyDelete"Going Native" would be a great PbtA spiral - estrangement from your own chauvinistic culture would lead to instability/ego damage, but you would be able to reap some limited benefits from adapting local culture.
ReplyDeleteas far as playbooks, what literature are you thinking? I'm guessing, you know, NOT "Heart of Darkness".
Oh, going native is a really interesting idea...
ReplyDeleteIf the focus is the community then the playbooks would be the roles in their society?
ReplyDeleteLeader, Librarian, Guard, Scout, Mechanic, Priest, Doctor, Farmer, Labourer, Driver.
Moves could be the tasks the community sets for themselves?
Build, Expand, Clear Location, Defend, Explore, Scavenge, Patrol, Research, Hunt.
Oh, okay, so there's an external threat of some kind (I'm going to mentally use orcs as a placeholder but what we're talking about is some threatening unknown other that can be fought off with enough firepower).
ReplyDeleteHere's a fun exercise: I would make family playbooks and rotate through focal characters in play. And have those families loosely tied organizational jobs ("I'm sheriff, my daddy was sheriff, his mammy was sheriff, and by God if you don't take your shot at sheriff, girl, you'll be a shame to the Blake name!"). Oh! Or maybe just have organizational playbooks and have players play families.
Taking moves from other playbooks becomes the families intermarrying.
Countdown clocks of the progress of the town, where you can steal progress from one clock to feed another.
ReplyDeleteLet's see. All those things are needed to be a Real Town -- in fact, I'd say that they're the definition of a Real Town. Maybe there's some sort of political requirement, too -- you need to not lose everything to war, bandits, or Eminent Domain from back home.
ReplyDeleteSo they form sort of a "victory front" -- a checklist of problems that keep coming up until you find a solid, sustainable solution. I kind of think of the town as a character, so I'm going to try to think of this backwards, forgive me if it's awkward.
For me, the fun of such a game would be bound up in the scars of the community -- the weird customs and compromises that developed to make this little edge-town work. Filial polyandry, for example, has developed only among subsistence/starvation level steppe farmers.
So one way of solving problems is importation from the central country -- asking them for troops, manpower, hard goods, food. You need clout back home to pull this off. That could be an attribute.
Another is to get people in the community to work together, basically founding institutions and customs to, say, guard the water, or reroof someone's house every summer. The faith the community has in you could be an attribute.
Some problems can be solved with violence. Root out the wild boars, scare off the locals, hunt and raid. The capability to do organized violence could be an attribute.
Friendly interactions with the locals would also make sense for an attribute. How well can you negotiate and trade with them for what you need?
Possibly, the settlement might have a Major Important Resource which was why it was founded. It's over a salt mine, it's the only place the Norwegians come to trade their meatballs, the local animals make great hats, it has military/strategic import. This could probably also be leveraged in ways particular to the resource, and how much control you have over the supply and distribution chain could be an attribute.
So playbooks might include soldiers, woodsmen who are half-native, the representative of the crown back home, the wise-woman or local priest who has everyone's ear. Important moves and lasting repercussions from even totally successful things get recorded to make the emerging story of The Town And How It Was Founded (Or Vanished).
Huh. If I were to hack an existing game, I'd probably start with Dreams Askew and make this GMless. That way, it's a game of families vying against each other while trying to grow the town.
ReplyDeleteMind you, I'm likely influenced by playing Terraforming Mars fairly recently.
Kimberley Lam
ReplyDeleteOh man. Family playbooks with a session or two for each generation. Awesome was of dealing with the sheer timescale. Much wow. Many cool.
Isn't that sort of what Legacy does, Jesse Cox?
ReplyDeleteI'm on mobile now.
ReplyDeleteI adore that there are maybe two or three possible games from this prompt. I want to play all of them
William Nichols this is absolutely what #Stonetop is about. The PCs are heroes of a small town on the edge of nowhere, with play mostly focusing on adventures to deal with threats or make progress towards the town. It's built on Dungeon World's moves, rules, and class structure, though with heavy tweaking.
ReplyDeleteClasses are largely your standard D&D tropes, but re-flavored and polished to fit in to a "lowish" magic, intensely local style of play. So you've got The Heavy instead of the Fighter, the Fox instead of the Thief, the Blessed instead of the Druid.
Instead of options for "Race," each class has a choice of Background. So the Heavy could be the town sheriff, someone on the run from a history of violence, or be a champion touched by the Storm God. Each class has a background meant to support growing up in town, one to support being a recent arrival, and another meant to support someone suddenly "stepping up" to adventurer/hero status.
The steading itself has a playbook, with numeric modifiers assigned to the core steading attributes from DW (Size, Population, Defenses, Prosperity). I also added a Fortunes stat (representing morale and the "luck" of the steading) and there's a generalized Surplus stat to represent the food in the granary/extra supplies/etc.
There are Steading Moves for Deploy (when you send the townsfolk into danger or repel an attack), Muster (when you press every able body into the steading's defense), Pull Together (when you set the people to work on some project), and Outfit (when you undertake a mission on behalf of the steading). There are also "prompt" moves for increasing or decreasing Fortunes (Return Triumphant and Suffer Calamity), and a Seasons Change move that both generates/consumes Surplus and that prompts threats and opportunities.
The Steading also has a list of possible Improvements, with Savvyhead workshop style requirements and benefits for each. Other improvements are sort of hidden away for the GM to reveal later, and there's a workshop-style move for creating new ones.
We track important shared resources and assets on the steading's playbook, too: trading partners, the surplus of stone, the lack of metal, the cistern, the town's two horses and wagon, etc.
Relevant links, if you're interested:
ReplyDeleteSteading Playbook Chapter (including stats and moves): https://goo.gl/NjOqCS
Steading Playbook Itself: https://goo.gl/2mCWBS
Quick overview of the setting & playbooks: https://goo.gl/r4Zpjj
Happy to answer any questions!
I've played Stonetop: it really feels different from DW. Grittier in all the right ways. You're not fighting for just your own survival, but for your town's. I can't wait for the final release!
ReplyDeleteChristo Meid Stonetop was the first thing that popped into my head.
ReplyDeleteDerrick Sanders This sounds a bit like what Robert Bohl is doing in demihumans.
ReplyDeleteJeremy Strandberg So looking forward to playing Stonetop sometime!
ReplyDeleteHow do I buy it?
ReplyDeleteListening
ReplyDeleteYou join the Stonetop community. 😎
ReplyDeleteplus.google.com - Stonetop
ReplyDeletePlaytest it, provide great comments, and buy it when it's released. It plays well now. The Playbooks are a blast. And no, I do not get any commission for this PR. I just want more people to know about it and ask about it so it will finally get released! (feed the addiction, Jeremy Strandberg__!)
ReplyDeleteWilliam Nichols (and anyone else), if you're genuinely interested in playtesting and have a group to do it, let me know and I'll hook you up with the playtest materials.
ReplyDeleteJeremy Strandberg Is there advice in the playtest resources for running a OneShot of Stonetop?
ReplyDeleteChristo Meid no... I'm not really sure what that'd look like. Probably pregen (or mostly pregen) characters and some pretty aggressive scene framing.
ReplyDeleteIt's definitely a long-form game.
I don't see full pkaysheets on the community. Am I missing something?
ReplyDeleteWilliam Nichols there are drafts scattered about the collection. Check Hangouts, though... I'll send you a link.
ReplyDeleteYeah, from what I have seen Stonetop is definitely a campaign game. Not for oneshots. Maybe a long con?
ReplyDelete