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Messages - Borogove

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106
Dungeon World / Re: Infinite Bard Healing
« on: August 28, 2014, 10:39:58 AM »
Also, remember that on a failure (6-) you just get to make a GM move.  *ANY* GM move.  Time passes elsewhere and the evil ritual approaches completion.

Right -- Grim Portents from the GM's fronts can activate. Having all the hit points in the world doesn't help much when the big bad opens up the heckmouth.

107
Dungeon World / Re: Infinite Bard Healing
« on: August 27, 2014, 01:19:54 PM »
Again: the 7-9 results for Cleric's cast are player's choice, not GMs.

The GM can prevent spamming by revoking on a 6- if they choose, but could do that with a Bard as well ("Oops! You broke a string on your lute and can't perform well enough to invoke Arcane Art until you get it replaced.").

It's pretty common to see new players question DW moves that look spammable; the answer is almost always "yeah, it works great until they roll 6-."

108
Dungeon World / Re: new player/GM exploring the system
« on: July 24, 2014, 07:32:55 PM »
What I'm saying is that all other variables being equal, puppy wrestling and troll wrestling have the same average results. So, the story is that puppies kick your ass as often as trolls. You can mitigate this somewhat with subjective success levels and throwing around custom moves. But even then, the story is, puppies kick your ass as often as trolls, unless we throw some excuses into the mix.

We've gone to great lengths to explain that this isn't so.

109
Dungeon World / Re: new player/GM exploring the system
« on: July 23, 2014, 04:17:12 PM »
You wrestle the Orc. We really don't need to figure out how difficult the orc is to wrestle. If you make your roll, it wasn't too difficult. If you blow the roll, the GM makes a move from the list of moves.

This is key.

Kneller, think of it this way. Say you simulate every factor that might be involved in the wrestling roll: less than an hour since you last ate a meal, so your hands are slippery, that's a -2%. Recent rainfall, ground is muddy, additional -4%. Orc is Knobblegob clan, so his armor has lots of big rivets you can get a grip on, +7%, and so on and so on.

In this system, every roll you make has a different modifier, some positive, some negative, but over the long term, your success odds even out to include the consistent modifier that applies to every attempt -- the relevant stat modifier.

The DW system just puts all that detail stuff after the roll. The 2D6 roll, as you noted, is pretty swingy, and you're gonna miss sometimes even when you're rolling at +2 and you're gonna hit sometimes even when rolling at -2. When you miss the roll, that's when the GM narrates what factors screwed you up. "You rolled a 5? Okay, your greasy hands slip right off the orc's smooth-worn leather armor as you try to grab him, and he sort of does this judo thing and before you know it you're face-down in the mud with the orc's knee in your back."



110
Dungeon World / Re: new player/GM exploring the system
« on: July 22, 2014, 06:14:22 PM »
Side note, is there any way to account for task difficulty? For example, scaling a dangerous cliff vs. scaling a dangerous cliff in the middle of a blizzard without proper equipment. Do you just throw a modifier into the mix?

DW discourages adding situational difficulty modifiers to the basic Roll+Stat. If another PC is Aiding or Interfering, there's a +1 or -2, and a number of conditions or setup moves give a +1 forward (i.e. modifier to the next roll) or +1 ongoing (i.e. modifier lasting until a specified condition), but there's no task difficulty modifier in the RAW.

So instead of saying "this is super hard, take a -3", what the GM can do is say "you can't do it at all, unless you do X first" or "you start to do it, then thing Y happens that you have to deal with before you can finish it," or what Munin said, making the consequence for failure much nastier in the harder case. Maybe the GM says "there's no way you can climb this cliff face without any equipment" and someone else has to Spout Lore to think of a way to improvise some gear or Discern Realities to find an easier way up. Maybe the GM says "sure, roll Defy Danger with STR to start making your way up... okay, good, now, you get about halfway and then start to panic, roll Defy Danger with WIS to see if you can keep it together..."


111
Dungeon World / Re: new player/GM exploring the system
« on: July 21, 2014, 06:45:12 PM »
I'm picturing a Wizard with Strength -2 trying to push a troll or whatever off a cliff. Naturally, the odds should be against the Wizard in that situation. But all the same, there's a lot of action happening in the +/-1 to 2 range considering the distribution of 2d6.
A wizard with a -1 STR shouldn't try push a troll off a cliff.

Are you kidding? He totally should try.

112
Dungeon World / Re: new player/GM exploring the system
« on: July 21, 2014, 10:06:44 AM »
It's worth noting that the six stat modifiers for a starting character will be +2, +1, +1, +0, +0, -1. The player will normally want to arrange to play to his strengths (e.g. INT +2 for a Wizard, who uses it on his Cast A Spell roll), but sometimes circumstances will require them to make a move with one of their worse stats.

As mentioned above, the 7-9 results are fairly clearly written out in the moves, but usually give the player some degree of choice in the outcome, as well. Sometimes the choices will be easy and sometimes they'll be hard, but at least the player gets some agency.

113
brainstorming & development / Re: A different dice mechanic?
« on: June 10, 2014, 02:34:56 PM »
This is unclear to me. Are you talking about making a single-die roll for initiative to decide what order the regular moves happen in?

Rolling for initiative to decide the order for moves is just moving the point at which random unfairness happens. Using a different set of dice doesn't change that.

PvP combat in AW is sometimes less about who wins the fight than about what the stakes are. Seize By Force normally yields an exchange of harm. In PvP, that means one PC's move reflects both PCs making an attack. So instead of rolling for initiative, you're rolling for advantage, and because of the success terms for the move, you're not rolling to see who shoots first, but rolling to see what happened to the stakes. It's both faster than making 4 or more separate rolls and it serves the story better.

114
I need to be able to come up with NPCs that are unique and interesting

You can always delegate some of this to your players. "So, Vega and Lee, you guys are making the rounds of the hold, and Barker comes up to you. Vega, is Barker a man or a woman? Lee, Barker pissed you off a couple of days ago, how did he do that? Vega, do you care if Barker lives or dies? I mean, what is he to the holding? Is he useful? Who does Barker sleep with?"

When you don't know what matters, lean on the players to make stuff up. Share the workload. Bounce ideas off each other. At first the NPC factoids and connections will be random and not seem important, but do them anyway.

One one hand it doesn't matter if the PCs solve every problem by killing an NPC, because you're looking at NPCs through crosshairs - but if you've established a connection or a factoid about every NPC before you let them get killed, sooner or later the PCs will be facing someone who's connected to someone they've killed, and things start to get interesting.

115
Apocalypse World / Re: PCs improving too fast?
« on: June 06, 2014, 01:39:45 PM »
If it seems like things are going too fast, you can borrow the "one XP per highlighted stat (or specific XP move) per scene" limit from Monsterhearts.

It's not a problem in itself for the PCs to advance at different rates, though. Fast advancement may make for a shorter campaign, mainly.

116
Apocalypse World / Re: Handling a Hardholder PC
« on: June 03, 2014, 02:19:20 PM »
It's unclear to me what the actual problem you have is. Give us some specifics.

Is the player actually micromanaging the hold? Does that make the player happy or unhappy? Does it make the other players happy or unhappy? If no one's unhappy, there's no actual problem.

The Hardholder has a lot of power, but a lot of problems at the same time. The holding defines a number of "wants", which define where the problems come from. Most of them aren't that intrigue-y, though the solutions to them might be partly political. If you've got an external threat in the form of "reprisals", "disease", or "famine", things might be too busy for the players to worry about the internal-conflict NPC, which is a great time for the internal-conflict NPC to make her move.


117
Monsterhearts / Re: Questions about Conditions
« on: June 01, 2014, 01:47:21 AM »
I don't see any hard answers in the book. My gut feeling would be, only take advantage of one Condition at a time, but if the fiction supports taking advantage of the Condition repeatedly in a single scene, why not?

118
Dungeon World / Re: Barbarian: Musclebound vs Smash
« on: May 21, 2014, 02:46:54 PM »
Messy and Forceful are interpreted by the GM; the object of the Smash! is named by the player.

As a GM, if someone dealt only 1-2HP of Messy/Forceful, I'd say they slashed the orc's face open, and blood sprays everywhere, and the orc falls back a pace -- but I wouldn't dismember the orc. With Smash!, it's not up to me; if the player hits 12+ and wants the orc to lose an arm, it's gone.

Messy/Forceful also won't usually take away the particularly important magic item your opponent is wearing. Smash! is ideal for getting Magneto's helmet off.

119
Dungeon World / Re: Bloody Aegis - how to deal with it?
« on: May 19, 2014, 02:57:50 PM »
Eh. I still don't think it'll actually be a problem, but if you're seriously worried about it, the simplest patch is to say a character can only have one Bloody Aegis disability at a time.

That lets you tune the availability of the move by making disabilities easier or harder to cure via magic items or NPC healers.

120
Apocalypse World / Re: Cover mechanics in AW
« on: May 19, 2014, 01:38:08 PM »
What do you want to do that you can't do with the rules as written?

"As you walk up the road Sweathog yells "take 'em!" and the guys on the rooftops to either side here start opening up with their Uzis. Fishstick, what do you do?"

"Crap! Is there anywhere I can take cover?"

"Yeah, there's a little kind of low shack where someone's been living, like a hobo in a box but made of sheets of corrugated steel, just beside you, but it looks pretty seriously rusted out. You can duck behind it, or there's a concrete jersey barrier up ahead that looks sturdier, you could try getting to that but you're going to get shot at."

"I run for the jersey barrier. Acting under fire?"

"Yeah"

"That's a 7."

"Okay, you take 2-harm but you're now under pretty solid cover. June?"

"I'm diving back behind the rusted-out shack."

"They spray some fire at it. You don't get hit directly but little rusty scraps are splintering off and spalling. Take 0-harm, but make the harm roll."

"5, I'm okay?"

"Yeah, a little rattled but you can act."

"I yell 'Sweathog, you've got two choices! You can put the guns down and we can talk, or, well, Fishstick brought the grenade launcher!' That's a manipulate, and I get... whoops, a 5."

"Sweathog yells back 'Grenade launcher! Great idea!' A second later, bam, it feels like you both got hit with god's own sledgehammer. The jersey barrier is cracked in half, Fishstick, you're no longer under cover, and you take 4-harm and you're stunned. June, you're going to have to act under fire to avoid getting pinned under the shack as it collapses..."

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