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Messages - SeaWyrm

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other lumpley games / Re: [DitV] Actual Play Recording: On The Right Path
« on: February 17, 2016, 02:32:48 AM »
Your links are very broken.
They are, in fact, so broken that when I fixed the one I went to in my address bar, it was still broken, and I had to fix it a second time.
Just thought you ought to know.

That aside, I'm looking forward to listening to these.

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Apocalypse World / Re: Master of Ceremonies Playbook
« on: September 14, 2015, 07:47:09 PM »
If your pdfs are like mine, you should have an MC booklet, some basic moves booklets, a first session booklet, and some booklets for your fronts in the same pdf file as the character sheet booklets. Just keep scrolling down - the character playbooks all come first.

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Not sure if this goes here or in the "Apocalypse World" section. I guess I'm putting it here.
I'm not making a full-fledged hack. Rather, on the bus to Game Night today, it struck me that we could throw together some rules for playing a colonial America revolutionaries-themed game in honor of the 4th of July, and that the simplest way to do it would be to start with AW and go from there.

So it's got mostly the same stats, the same MC moves and principles (aside from the obvious exceptions), most of the same basic moves, and none of the gear or peripheral stuff save harm.
Instead of playbooks, I said "Pick stats that add up to +3, and make up two custom moves apiece, and that's your character." For Hx, I asked them a couple of questions: "Who saved someone else's life? Who owes someone else a debt?" Then once all three players had some kind of relationship, I told them to identify who (if anyone) in each relationship had power over the other one. Then I said to put down +1 for anyone who had power over them, -1 for anyone they had power over, and 0 if it was even.

So we got a nice little triangle: The general saved the native woman's life, the salt baron is negotiating with the native's tribes over land use, and the salt baron used money and political power to get the general his rank. (As an aside, it's not actually America, it's an alternate setting... where the America-analogue continent rose from the sea a hundred years ago, and is populated by indigenous frog-people. No relevance, I just wanted to say it somewhere.)

I also replaced two basic moves. Seduce or manipulate is now:

When you make an impassioned plea or heartfelt speech to an audience with some shred of sympathy, roll +hot. For NPCs: On a 10+, they believe you without reservation. On a 7-9, the MC chooses 1:
-They go along for now, but with doubts and reservations.
-In the long run, you've swayed them, but they'll carry out their immediate intentions anyway.
-They'll listen, but only if you offer something tangible
-Some of them believe you and are swayed, but some of them don't.
For PCs: On a 10+, both. On a 7-9, choose 1:
-If they act in accordance with your desires, they take +1 forward.
-If they contradict your plans, or act against them, they take -2 forward.

(For NPCs, the first two options, I'm dividing what might happen up into two things: Do they do what you want now, and do they change their beliefs in the long run. On a 7-9, the player might get one or the other, but not both. For PCs... I guess this essentially lets them help or interfere with hot instead of Hx under some situations. Do I want that? All of a sudden, I'm not sure.)

And instead of opening their brains, they get to do this:

When you take a moment to consider an environment familiar to you, tell us about some feature or attribute of the landscape and roll +attuned [replaces weird]. On a 10+, it's as you say. On a 7-9, you're mostly right, but the MC will add or change some significant detail.

(Sharp might have made more sense. I guess I was going for some sort of possibly-not-entirely-PC Native American knowing the lay of the land in a slightly mystic way sort of thing. Except I also envision for instance farmers being attuned to their farms, or urchins being attuned to their cities and knowing where all the hidey-holes are. Also still not sure about does it have to be a place that they've actually been, or can they do it in, say, a forest, if forests in general are familiar to them, never mind that this particular forest isn't anywhere they've been before. Maybe not a big issue in practice.)

And for the characters' moves:
The native frog-woman has one move that lets her roll +attuned to summon an army of ghosts on a 10+ and a vague, creepy fog on a 7-9. She also has a move that lets her take strange drugs to have visions, where on a 10+ I guess it's like she opened her brain, and on a 7-9 I still tell her something but she takes -1 ongoing for the rest of the day. On a miss, -1 ongoing and she gets weird hallucinations instead of useful visions.

The general can roll +attuned to let the spirit of War possess him, which gives him 3 hold (10+) or 1 hold (7-9) to get +1s on rolls during battle. He also straight-up took the hardholder's Leadership move for leading his army.

The salt baron can roll +sharp to buy things he needs, which have flaws or strings attached on a 7-9. (We're not using the barter rules.) He can also roll +hot to find useful people, but on 7-9 he owes them a debt.

So that's what I've got so far. Any feedback or suggestions would be most welcome. We'll probably play our first real session next weekend, so I have some time to decide what else we need or don't need and make changes accordingly. (Any media I should consume? What happens in stories about revolutionary America, anyway? Not usually my genre. Nor am I much of a history buff.)

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Apocalypse World / Re: My playbook - need help
« on: June 23, 2015, 10:26:41 PM »
Yeah, nothing says you can't just say something like "Hey, maybe you've got like a tent and a folding cot in your pack, and you can set them up when you need to use the infirmary. Sound good?"
If you do that, you could make a custom tent-setting-up move or whatever if you really wanted to, but I don't see that being very useful. Might as well stick to "Okay, you set it up, cool. What now?" If anything intense is going on (hah in-tents) then maybe they're acting under fire. (Moving patients about, ditto.)

Juggling twelve players, I think the toughest thing will be making sure the stuff they do is all relevant to each other. So, don't skimp on the PC-NPC-PC triangles, I'd say, (maybe, hah, more like PC-NPC-PC-PC-PC pentagons?) and announce future/offscreen badness that has implications for as many of them at once as possible. But I never really pulled it off very well in my game, so that's just me guessing what might work.

I don't know if AW's at all the right system for it, but heck, I'd play a post-apocalypse-themed West Marches game. That sounds awesome. 

Just out of curiosity, which playbooks are you using?

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Apocalypse World / Re: My playbook - need help
« on: June 23, 2015, 01:18:30 AM »
My strong suggestion: Don't worry about hacking the rules to make them run faster. The game already runs fairly snappy as-is. Don't worry about getting the players all together or explaining their absences, either - the game already assumes they aren't always in a group and works fine under that assumption. Else, what use is the Savvyhead's bonefeel move?

Instead, worry about bodies at the table. 12 players in the same campaign, I dunno, maybe you can make it work if you rotate them out or something, though it'll be messy at best. 12 players at the same table, my direct experience says won't work at all. Not one little bit. 8 players at the same table won't work. 6, just maybe. I personally wouldn't go any higher than 5, and prefer 3 or 4.
I suggest you don't break those numbers unless you want sessions where at least one or two players have to sit there the whole time without getting a chance to do anything at all - which was a regular feature of the 8-player game I ran. Even when we were missing a player or two. Too many players at once, and the whole game becomes a confusing mess where nobody really has enough screen time to accomplish much at all, certainly not to make something of their world. Plus, you, the MC, can barely get an NPC in edgewise.
That's what happened when I did it, at least.

Me, I'd either split into two groups of ~6 and get one of your friends to be the other group's MC, or else just pick 5 or fewer of them and play with the smaller group alone.

(Not convinced? Imagine twelve people in a room, all trying to have a meaningful conversation together, and you tell me how that goes: Awkward at best, right? Or about half the people are barely saying anything? In my experience, conversations with 12 people tend to naturally splinter into conversations between 3-6 people anyway, you know what I mean?)

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Apocalypse World / Re: AW- Vehicles (non-Drivers)
« on: June 20, 2015, 03:50:14 PM »
That doesn't sound like a big worry - I hear tell that as MC, your job is to make Apocalypse World seem real and to make the characters' lives not boring, not to keep them from having interesting things just because they don't have the "right" mix of playbooks in play. ;)
Maybe one of them will choose to take a no shit driver from the Driver playbook when they next get an improvement. Now that they have a car, it's valuable to them, right?

As far as getting a car in the first place is concerned, it might be something they obviously can't just like go buy it like that if they go into a holding's bustling market, depending I suppose on the market. But maybe they can make known that they want the thing and drop jingle to speed it on its way. My last group of players managed to take the NPC warlord's monster truck from him, so maybe yours will be able to seize one by force as well, or maybe they'll get lucky and find an opportunity, with or without a cost.
I think you have lots of options here, is what I'm saying.

Tangentially, I'm about to start a new game of AW tomorrow, and it looks likely we'll have an Apocalypse World where people live on the tops of ruined skyscrapers, unable and unwilling to go below. In which case I fully intend to offer the Driver a helicopter instead of a car. Maybe that's a bad idea, I don't know, but it seems pretty okay to me. Why the heck not, right?

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Apocalypse World / Re: Threat: Sea Swarms
« on: April 21, 2013, 03:59:57 PM »
+Sharp because I see this as being more about the Angel using a steady hand and a keen eye to carefully remove the sting without having to actually spend stock. It's supposed to be closer to the 3:00/6:00 angel kit move in terms of severity, I guess. I don't know, that may or may not make any sense.
I guess it's true that if the patient already took 2-harm from the initial attack, and then the Angel gets 7-9 and picks the 1-harm option, the patient's at at least 9:00 and the Angel will probably be spending stock to heal them anyway. So it's a choice between 1-harm and spend stock, or spend 1 stock. Not much of a choice.
Then again, maybe that's okay - under most circumstances, the spend 1 stock is the obvious choice. If the patient had armor, or if the Angel has a reason to not want to treat their other wounds, or something of the sort, then the 1-harm makes sense as a possible option.

Ten of Swords, these things actually came up in-game already before I made them a threat. Generally I Announce Future Badness in the form of saying there's something frothing in the water off in the distance, and it's coming closer. The Gunlugger used a grenade to blow up the swarm that attacked him, and the Chopper had his whole gang concentrate their fire into the water when they faced this threat. We don't have boats in this game so far - the city's in the middle of a flood, so the streets are filled with water. (I hope we do get boats, though!) 

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Apocalypse World / Threat: Sea Swarms
« on: April 19, 2013, 11:45:07 PM »
Our game takes place in a coastal area. One of the fronts has to do with the rising sea. I've got this threat:

Is Called: The Things of the Deep
Kind: Brutes
Impulse: Hunting Pack - To victimize anyone vulnerable
Description & Cast:
I want to add a whole bunch of sea monsters eventually, I have provisions for what starts showing up when in my flood countdown. For now it's only these guys:
Sea Swarm (2 harm, pack, aquatic): Translucent round jellyfish things that move in frothing packs and suck the blood from their victims. Can leap from the water. Attracted to blood. Not fooled by standing still.
Custom Moves:

 When you roll harm for being stung by sea swarm tentacles, if you roll 7-9, add "You feel faint from blood loss. Take -1 forward" to the list of options the MC can choose from. If you roll 10+, also add "Your flesh is badly stung. Take -1 ongoing until the nematocysts are removed."

When you use an angel kit to remove nematocysts, roll +Sharp. On a 10+, they're fine, though it'll leave a nasty scar and be sensitive for a week. On 7-9, choose 1:
  • The stings are in deep, and it costs 1 stock to surgically remove them.
  • The stings start pumping blood. Your patient takes 1 harm.
On a miss, all of the above, plus the wound's infected.

Anyway, how's that sound? This is my first time doing this.   

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