Quote from: gnome7 on April 30, 2013, 06:49:31 PM

I'd appreciate if you didn't start pirating out the playbooks before the kickstarter is even in its second day. We are considering putting the playbooks on creative commons, but the entire book will not be. It is fine to share it with your friends, and you can share the previews as widely as you like, but I'd like to keep the full versions of the playbooks available mainly to backers.

Hey gnome7, maybe there was a miscommunication. I wasn't planning to share the playbooks. What I meant is that if the final version were going to be released under certain Creative Commons licences, then I could have advertised that fact to the free culture community so they can back the project too.

I don't get it. Isn't this just what a bard can do?

This looks like a bard, only with less instruments.

I quite like the artificer you made, that one filled a hole in the game.

Double post but the update is live! Major overhaul to both The Mage and The Artificer, check 'em out.

I'm running a game with a mage of the Mask, as well as a druid and a thief who expressed some concern early on about how powerful "Cast a Spell" was. I put some thought into it and ended up satisfying everyone by emphasizing the robustness of the trigger. In my interpretation the "catches" picked from the list exist to give the player a sense of control over the costly consequences of casting a spell, and it's my vigilance in making sure the move is properly triggered that balances it.

Quote from: The Mage

    When you use the chaotic and unpredictable power of magic to deal with a problem right in front of you, roll +INT. On a 10+, your spell helps to solve the problem, but choose one from the list. On a 7-9, the spell takes effect, but choose two, or let the GM choose one:

I decided that the move even on a 10+ could only "help to solve a problem," and not solve it on its own, and on a partial success the spell need not help at all, since it only stipulates that the spell takes effect. Then I looked at the "right in front of you" clause, and decided the move only really helped with problems that were in his face or that he was aware of and paying attention to. Further, I decided that the effects of the spells should rarely put pressure on the other players, usually only the Mage. They only interacted with other people's problems if the Mage made them his problems and vice versa. Thus, at its best Cast a Spell can't ever solve a problem let alone everyone's problems at once, only buy time and create space for non-spell solutions; at its worst, it can't make things worse for the other characters unless they were counting on that spell to help solve their problems.

Also I suspect DMs are not really emphasizing that magic is "chaotic and unpredictable," so you can easily get a player to not spam it just by saying, "the Mage knows magic can't solve this problem," and even follow that up with "tell me why and what you have to do instead." That's using Reveal an unwelcome truth/Show a limitation of the class DM moves make sure everyone remembers they're all playing the same game.

Once the player got away from trying to describe the mechanisms and manifestation of the spell divorced from the problem it was intended to solve, and realized that his character needed to face problems to trigger his move it became easy for me to make him part of the team, not a second DM with disproportionate control over the pacing of the game and problems that would face the other players.

Somewhat related, I suspect my group's satisfaction might also depend on the party mage's Mask alignment. The player's opinion was that it the best Spell Focus because it's the only really versatile Aligned aspects and simultaneously has the most restrictive Opposed ones. I haven't thought about it deeply but the other schools do seem one-note and potentially unhinged by comparison.

To go more in depth, since his magic cannot do brute force, it doesn't shore up the stereotypical mage's dump stat, strength, and almost never does damage. He had to rely on his party members for that and started allocating points to dex so he could shoot at things when necessary. Since his spells cannot break facade, they have to be plausible in the fiction and neither handwavey nor showy. That means all his possible spell effects, aligned or not, are inextricably linked to the fiction, so I can do things like explain that his illusion drew upon its subject and audience as much as his direction. For example, the druid smelled an NPC they knew around a bandit hideout, the mage intended to use an image of the NPC to distract a bandit on patrol and find out whether that NPC was kidnapped by or in league with them by checking the patrolman's reaction. By making the image of him carrying her off in his arms and getting caught up in the moment I revealed that the NPC had been kidnapped and furthermore had ideas about being valiantly and romantically rescued by the Mage! Once they got into the hideout I then revealed that the NPC had felt him supernaturally calling out to her, and had threatened (and effectively warned) the guards of his magical powers and the fact that he was coming.