Heya, I was curious about something:

It seems like AW is a big hit with queer people. It seems to be pretty with it for an rpg designed by what I assumed was a married hetero dude

Was this the result of intentional design decisions to appeal to those players?

For reference I am a queer lady who tries to stuff as much homo-ing out in the game as possible.

Also, its very likely this isn't a good discussion for the internet. I'd be really mostly interested in hearing Vincent's take on the subject, and if he wants other people could chime in, thats cool too

Here's some dream rules for Monsterhearts. I haven't tested them yet. Maybe they're terrible. But they're fun to write.

Basics:
- You can spend a String on someone to appear in someone’s dream. This isn’t your real self, but someone’s projection of you. You control how your dream self acts, but they disappear when the dream ends. Don’t play out a dream if no other PC is inside of it.
- People are dealt “Dream Harm” in dreams. Dream Harm disappears upon waking. If you die in a dream you are alive upon awaking, but becoming your Darkest Self or giving up your Strings is permanent.
- When people Gaze Into the Abyss inside of a dream, they fill the dream with their visions.
- People can choose to wake up on a hit when Running Away in a dream.

- Everyone gets a Dream Move for free.
- You can buy another Skin’s Dream Move when buying someone’s Move.

Move amendments:
- Hypnotic: When people are following hypnotic suggestions, they’re dreaming.
- Guide: You can take people into other’s dreams, as well.

Dreams are an opportunity to interact with people in a way that would be difficult or risky in reality. Some characters may have special moves that makes them particularly powerful or dangerous in dreams.

Dream Moves:

Standard Skins:

Ghost: While you appear in someones Dream, you are never your Darkest Self. This does not cure you from your Darkest Self.

Fae: When you appear in someone’s dream, it is your actual self. You are able to remember what you learn inside of it, and deal real Harm to the dreamer instead of Dream Harm.

Queen: You can have any of your gang appear in someone’s dream in addition or in leiu of yourself, You do not control those gang members.

Mortal: your Lover adds +3 to all rolls they make in your dreams.

Werewolf: When you appear inside of someone’s dream, you get +2 to Turning Someone on, and can get as many Strings from repeating it as you want.

Witch: As long as you hold a sympathetic token of someone, you can appear in their dream for free. Anything you take from someone’s dreams is with you when you wake up, and counts as a sympathetic token.

Chosen: You are prophetic in dreams. Add 3 to Gazing Into the Abyss in dreams you are in.

Infernal: When you're dreaming, and you Gaze Into the Abyss about something you desperately want, add 2, but the Dark Power can see it.

Ghoul: You inject dreams you are in with your horribleness and tragedy. You can make any action by others require them to Hold Steady or gain a Condition to do it, in the dreams you are in.

Vampires: ?

Other Skins:

Selkie: If you have a dream outside of water, immediately take the Condition “Nightmares”. If you have a dream inside of water, your dreams are soothing, lose 1 Condition.

Serpentine: When someone else Gazes Into The Abyss about your family inside a dream, they gain a String on you on a hit, and you mark 1xp.

Hollow: You don’t dream, but you remember when people dream of you. When you are in someone else’s dream, ask what they project on to you, and gain it as a Condition.

Succubus: When you appear inside of someone’s dream, gain 2 Strings any time you would gain 1 String.

Hunter: The hunter is surrounded by the Terrifying Wilderness in dreams.

I wanted to take another stab at a Skin after the last attempt fizzled out, with the benefit of actually having played the damn game.

I wanted to make something supporting the more recent trend of what I'd like to call introverted-wish-fulfillment. I think the Hunger Games is an excellent example of this: You have a character that doesn't quite fit in with "the system", and "has trouble making friends", but its okay because the system is terrible and she makes the right friends anywho.

I don't really have a name yet. I was thinking of something like Loner or Hunter, but those are really generic and kind of suck.

ORIGINS

Backwoods, Cynic, native of a different world, survivor of the supernatural, forest creature, nature spirit, cursed legacy

STATS

Cold+1, Hot-1, Volatile+1, Dark-1

MOVES

Get "Private War" for free, and choose 2 others

Private War: There's some reason you can't fit in with the rest of society: social decay, tyrannical goverment, its manipulated by monsters, choose 1. When you are acting against it, carry +1 forward. When you make an impact on it, get 1 XP.

Independent: To get the benefit of spending 1 string on this character, a character would have to spend 2 strings (And spend 4 strings for the benefit of 2, etc.)

Looking in from the outside: When you observe a person in a charged situation, roll+Cold. on a 10+, ask 2, on a 7-9, ask 1.
- How is this person pressured to behave?
- How is this person being influenced?
- What is this person's secret virtue?
- What can I expect from this person?

Badass hunter: You're an expert with the bow, a master of traps, a stealthy and cunning hunter. You get +2 to rolls to Run away, and other people have -2 on rolls to run away from you.

One with Wilderness: You and those you choose to guard are able to thrive comfortably in the Terrifying Wilderness by your resourcefulness. You know how to adapt to its rules, how to get food, water, warmth, and which sounds to not be terrified of. (If someone takes this move, than the MC should throw in a Wilderness in the setting, and make it Terrifying for everyone else. Maybe the Wilderness isn't a natural place. If no options make sense, than this Move shouldn't be taken.)

(Probably 2 more)

DARKEST SELF

You become a self-righteous crusader against an ambiguous enemy. Nothing short of the most extreme methods are considered. You refuse any bargaining. Anyone who refuses to leap to such extremes with you is a traitor and must be dealt with.

SEX MOVE

You get expierience. The other character may remove 2 strings that others have on them, as long as they don't come from you.

I ran a monsterhearts one-shot with a battle-royale premise and it went pretty good.

If you're not familar with Battle Royale/Hunger Games, the premise is: These students are being forced by the man to kill each other, with the last person standing declared the victor. If no one kills each other for an hour, someone is picked to die.

I finagled with the rules a little bit:
* Everyone has 2 pcs, so they will be more complicit with me in starting the bloodshed.
* Removed the stuff you could do to avoid death, because again people paid for blood.
* You can spend a String to find someone who doesn't want to be found, or to have been hiding in wait watching someone this whole time.

It did well in that:

* Two of the players expressed particular interest in doing a campaign.
* We got to see a lot of the Skins and a lot of the Moves.
* I think we all had a good time and the fiction was neat. There was a good amount of tension about who's-going-to-kill-who, and there was a good mix of resistance and murderousness.
* People used strings and their nifty powers.
* People had sex in the workshop.
* After having sex in the workshop people became a serial killer couple, and than turned on each other with their tools, and than the Hollow lost faith in humanity.
* I got that idea out of my system.

It did maybe not so well in that:

* There's a lot of fictional conflicts that I wanted there to be answers for that there wern't, like: Hey, can we barricade this place up so other people can't get in here? Or: Hey, I want to follow/evade following/hide/find a hidden person (I occasionally tried to use Hold Steadies and Running Away for those, but a lot of the time they didn't work.
* Running Away, in particular, asks for some NPCs to be inserted whenever there's a need for a scary person to run into. I really didn't want to have more than 1-npc this one-shot (I have to play a bajillion NPCs all the time, you guys can rip each other apart for once) so it didn't make much sense towards the beginning (Towards the middle part, there were more PCs running around being scary.)
* People didn't shut each other down much. They almost did a couple of times, but they just wern't sassy enough. Gotta teach people to inject more sass.

I wanted a custom rule to disincentive worn armor. I'm thinking:

ARMOR IS AWKWARD

- Its hard to move around wearing armor. When you act under fire, subtract from your roll the value of the armor you're wearing.

- Armor also puts you in the mood to bust heads. Armor of a gang is subtracted from Leadership/Pack Alpha rolls made for them.

I figure I'd keep vehicle armor as written, because its a much smaller part of the game as is, and roll+cool-worn armor-vehicle armor(+vehicle power?) is a bit too much for me.

I heard someone request a guide for creating new playbooks, and I thought it might be a neat thing to work on. I'd encourage the participation of anyone interested.

Here's my thoughts on such a guide:

1. Vincent Baker is a smart dude. You should listen to him.

2. New playbooks shouldn't be strictly 'worse' or strictly 'better' than the starting playbooks. 'worse' and 'better' are subjective terms, but you can probably agree on negative examples such as "Like the Gunlugger but better at killing" or "Like the Skinner but more limited in concepts"

3. The LE playbooks are pretty well designed. They're in the ballpark of what you'd consider a good playbook (but not unfalliably so.)

4. Think of a playbooks moves as individual entities outside of playbooks that anyone could take for an advancement. In most cases, again, they shouldn't be strickly 'worse' or 'better' than existing moves, and they should be -roughly- on par with the functionality of other moves.

So, on specific notes:

Stats:

Each stat line balances to +3
The first +2 counts as +2, but a second +2 counts as +3.

The battlebabe exception: If its really a big deal how Cool or Sharp your character is, you can give them a +3 to those stats at the start and treat it as them using up their required move. Don't make it an actual move, because it should be hard for the other characters to be Cool and Sharp (But its already easy to be Weird, Hot and Hard)

The driver exception: If there's a really cool move and really cool gear tied to the character that gives them a wide range of stat bonuses, maybe they should start off with slightly worse stats, like +2.

Advancements:

The standard set of advancements are:

2x get a move from another playbook

2x get a move from this playbook

1-3x get a particular move (or a workspace) that gives your character more external power + the stuff tied to it (Wealth + holding, Fortunes + followers, Moonlighting + gigs, gang + pack alpha/leadership, workspace + crew)

3-5x stat bonuses (to max +2, except for your main stat(s?), which goes to max +3)(Probably a good range of stats, but you could double up a stat if it seems where the character is headed)

If your playbook is already tied to external power, like the Hardholder, Hocus, Chopper or Operator, give them 1-3 options to change that power.

Quarantine exception: If the playbook is someone who is -becoming less of what they were-, than maybe it makes sense to not allow them to take more of their own moves and give them more take other people's moves.

I made a flowchart for violence in AW.

https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/1ETp72rzwzNhfGEb-yKj2buZlrZ3zfQqUnHStoNCDRBQ/edit