Show Posts

This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.


Messages - Daniel Wood

Pages: 1 2 3 [4] 5 6 ... 36
46
and what's stopping you from your skinner taking a Faceless bodyguard that obeys your every command and will never actually betray you or hold an independent agenda?

Because that has to be the most boring of literally all possible uses of the advance? Is this hypothetical player trying to put themselves to sleep?

Anyways, I haven't taken this particular advance myself, but have run and played in several games where it got used. Generally by the time it was taken, the world of the game had expanded in enough directions that it wasn't difficult for a player to situate the new character in a relatively distinct part of the geography/story; in some cases, the original PC had also become more and more locked in to a specific place or set of behaviours/concerns, which both motivated the choice to take a second character but also made it, again, quite easy to ensure that they rarely if ever ended up in scenes together, or with directly overlapping concerns.

47
Apocalypse World / Re: How to respond to overwhelming firepower
« on: November 04, 2016, 04:02:48 AM »
Didn't know about the changes to Ice Cold though! That is a pretty strong nerf though, a real shame. Oh well.

Have you played 1st edition? This dynamic is, IMO, one of the best things about the Battlebabe. Seriously, '+3 to all your fighting moves' is not going to make a character's life nearly as interesting as '+3 to all your fighting moves except when you're actually, like, fighting.'

48
Apocalypse World / Re: Temporary PC as a "boss" like character
« on: November 01, 2016, 02:29:12 AM »
I would be a bit hesitant about doing this with a player who lacks familiarity with RPGs, as an MC who lacks familiarity with AW. That said, what I mean by 'this' is like, explicitly being like 'ok you're gonna play an Antagonist who is like, fictionally-special capital-A antagonistical and has special boss powers'. It just seems like a lot of risk for little benefit.

On the other hand, allowing the player to play a character more at odds / less ally-connected to the existing PCs is fine, because it won't cause as many problems as it would otherwise, and could add some fun spice -- but this doesn't mean they have to play that sort of character, either. There are plenty of other PC setups that could allow for a character to appear intermittently, or for a character to act recklessly and end up sidelined or act as a catalyst for the sessions when they are there. (For example, this may be the one and only time in the history of this board that I would actually suggest somebody play a Quarantine or a Touchstone.)

49
Apocalypse World / Re: Dual Wielding custom rules?
« on: November 01, 2016, 02:23:08 AM »

Yeah, what Ebok said. At most I would consider making it a weapon type: 'twin handguns (3 harm, flashy, multi-target)'. I would probably only do this if it was the Battlebabe player wanting this for their fancy/signature weapon choice or something, though, and it would be a specific set of guns, not any two handguns.

50
Apocalypse World / Re: Scarcity of Sharp
« on: October 25, 2016, 05:41:50 AM »

As you point out, the only difference from 1st edition is that the Driver is no longer Sharp-based. The thing about only the Angel being able to advance to +3 Sharp has always been true, and I never tire of pointing this out to people designing new Playbooks, who seem to invariably toss in a +1 Sharp or +1 Cool playbook move without considering the larger consequences to other playbooks.

On the Cool front, it is worth noting that in the playtest version of the game the Battlebabe had +2 cool statlines and a +1 cool playbook move that they had to take automatically; this was eventually changed to the Battlebabe just starting with +3 cool, which had the obvious side-effect of making +3 cool unattainable for other playbooks, since they could no longer take the Battlebabe move as a move from another playbook.

It may not be a major design goal, but it is very clearly on purpose.

51
Apocalypse World / Re: A big ass name list.
« on: October 25, 2016, 12:33:49 AM »

Hmm, possibly something happened with the permissions, I tried sharing it again but can't edit the post: https://goo.gl/photos/E7pve3PqJL4zUyFt6 ?

52
Apocalypse World / Re: Angel Debts
« on: October 24, 2016, 03:04:09 AM »
My thought would be that making those choices guarantees that the debt in question is a real thing in the fiction, that the rescued party has no choice but to acknowledge. Sure, the Angel can say 'you owe me' even without this choice, but who knows if anyone else agrees? If these options are chosen, then there is no doubt in anyone's mind that Rolfball was gonna die otherwise, no doubt about what that means for Rolfball and his friends, etc. You can't actually create debt/obligation unilaterally in the lawless post-apocalypse, after all -- not without some separate leverage, at which point it just looks like extortion with window-dressing. Choosing these options says 'this is leverage -- all by itself, this is a real thing.'

This makes it a particularly useful option to choose in a case where the person you just saved would otherwise be inclined to take your help for granted, or to simply dismiss your claims out of hand.

Now, there are ways to acknowledge a debt that don't involve paying it -- presumably lots of the people who live in the post-apocalypse are not big fans of reconciliation of any sort, and certainly not to their disadvantage. That's what makes the choice interesting -- or more interesting than just 'you get X barter from your patient.'

53
Apocalypse World / Re: A big ass name list.
« on: October 23, 2016, 09:10:57 PM »

I dunno about Ten of Swords, but I believe this link to my (not recently updated) collection of character portraits still works:

https://photos.google.com/album/AF1QipPX6mDvd5DdqWAQRk7A84diTHtOsCD-GKlj-Mbl

Not as exclusively geared to AW, mind you.

54
Apocalypse World / Re: Gunlugger and augury
« on: September 14, 2016, 04:36:46 PM »

Yeah, just write a custom Gunlugger move, or something that fits with the PC's style specifically, then the player can take it as an advance. Since it's a solo game especially, you could also tailor it to the fiction in some way that suggests/requires some things to happen first -- or not, depending on if there's a cool idea there. I like sully's suggestions -- certainly something in that vein seems appropriate, but you know the character and the particular Maelstrom best.

55
Apocalypse World / Re: New character sheet: the Snoop
« on: September 06, 2016, 04:01:32 PM »

Seems like an okay playbook for a very, very particular type of AW game. Laying the genre assumptions of hard-boiled detective fiction on top of the genre assumptions of post-apocalyptic fiction makes for an odd match (like, who are these naive people you are gonna lecture? have you been to the apocalypse lately?) -- but I can see it working in a particularly urban, status-quo-y sort of AW game. (If the goal is simply to design something in the same satire-y/weirdo space as the Marmot/Space Mammal, then this is obviously not much of a concern.)

Other random impressions:

* The 'extra snoop perk' is like, hiding in the corner -- but it contains a bunch of kind of nutty things, including several that seem like they should just be Hx questions. Using the word 'ally' is confusing, because there are allies and there are allies (see: the advanced seduce/manipulate move.) Also literally nobody in their right mind is ever going to choose an extra barter from that list.

* Really not a fan of +1 sharp as a playbook move, unless you are quite sure about making this available to all the other playbooks in the game. The only playbook in the basic game that can get sharp +3 is the Angel, and they get it as an advancement; even the other sharp playbooks can't get sharp +3. The same thing is done with cool -- those stats are limited on purpose, so if you're going to override that you should do so for a good reason.

* Wake up and smell the etc. -- apart from the difficulty of finding naive people to lecture, the results of this move seem kind of... boring? You mark experience? You convince them? It doesn't really seem like this move is pulling its weight, fictionally. Contrast with the Hocus' 'speak truth to a mob' move, which seems to occupy a similar space.

* The Special Move just feels totally, jarringly out of genre, especially when the rest of the playbook is so very genre-y. Something more like the Driver's special move would make a lot more sense.

* Expert interrogator also feels out of genre, but not as jarringly. I'd rather see a list of genre-appropriate questions you get to add to Read a Person/Situation.

* The Raymond Chandler move is amazing and hilarious. But it also kind of assumes the player/MC understand the genre conventions at work, and if they do not I can see this being a headache to 'justify' in the fiction.

* Practiced intuition and Dive for cover both seem sensible and fine, but neither really seems 'worth' a move, especially in a generic game of AW: most of the time as MC I'm just going to tell a sharp character if they're being followed, or hint at it heavily enough that they could read a situation if they want. Similarly, rolling +cool to get approximately 1.5 armour once in awhile seems a bit underwhelming.

* Whole lotta roll with +sharp moves.

* Clues keep getting referred to as though they are mechanical objects, but then... they never actually seem to act as mechanical objects? Like, you talk about starting with an extra clue, and getting '1 clue' from moves, and I have a whole giant section of my playbook labelled 'CLUES' -- this makes me feel like they're supposed to some sort of Barter-type thing (vs. just being, y'know, clues)... but I never spend them, or trigger other moves off them, or anything?


56
Apocalypse World / Re: Maestro'D - Fingers in Every Pie
« on: September 05, 2016, 08:41:43 AM »
On the other hand, there are a bunch of other moves that clearly have the power to change the boundaries, like augury or the workspace rules, for example.

I don't really see them as very comparable -- and the workspace rules absolutely follow the same logic as what I said, since my answers as the MC are bounded by my principles regarding the fiction as it stands so far.

Augury is a move that, itself, suggests a new or previously undiscovered reality -- e.g. that the Maelstrom can be manipulated in some specific ways -- so it is definitely closer. But the Maestro D' move itself does not suggest any new reality; it fits very clearly into the boundaries of any fiction in which a) the Maestro D' is an important social figure and b) people want to curry their favour.

It would be something else if the move was like 'pick from this list of things you could ask for' and the list included a bunch of crazy stuff like 'dragons' and 'a tank' -- a clumsy parallel to the augury move, but hopefully it illustrates the point. In one case, the move itself brings a new structure; in the other, the new and potentially fiction-disrupting element comes from the PCs choices when using the move. I feel like those choices should be bound by the fiction, within reason -- and I gave a general sense of my reasons, but obviously each group will have their own take.

57
Apocalypse World / Re: Question's about +1 Forward and +1 Ongoing
« on: September 05, 2016, 06:47:56 AM »
Otherwise you're always acting on second-hand intel, and you have to trust that your scouts noticed all the important things, and that what they thought was important was the same stuff you'd find important, and that their report was 100% accurate.

Well that's why you roll, right?

The fictional resources you are bringing to bear on a Read a Situation are relevant to the sort of answers you get -- but a gang is a pretty obvious resource that a PC might make use of when describing HOW they read a situation, much in the same way they might describe their character keeping their ear to the ground at the local watering hole, or drawing on their knowledge of the local political scene. Whether these resources are sufficient to Read the Sitch or not is up to the MC, the scope of the current action, and the situation in question. But 'I am literally in a specific physical place' is only at issue for a particular subset of situations -- this isn't Read a Person, where the Person has to be right there in front of you.



58
Apocalypse World / Re: Question's about +1 Forward and +1 Ongoing
« on: August 27, 2016, 07:24:52 AM »

I don't see why they wouldn't stack, honestly. If this actually happening often enough that it feels problematic, you are probably not using the core playbooks?

I mean, most things that give you +1 forward require you to roll. This provides a fairly straightforward check on how many +1 forwards you are likely to have going at the same time. And very few circumstances give +1 ongoing, so again that seems like a pretty marginal concern. If a PC somehow had more than one +1 ongoing, I would expect them to very quickly resolve whatever the situation was that was giving them the bonus in the first place, because they're going to be kicking ass pretty hard for as long as it lasts.

59
Apocalypse World / Re: Savvyhead "get a gang" -> a robot?
« on: August 21, 2016, 06:58:42 PM »

If he spends the improvement, he gets the gang -- he doesn't need to do anything else, other than explain in the fiction how it happens. That said, if he doesn't know how to build a robot, spending an improvement on a gang won't magically allow him to build robots; he'd just get a regular gang.

So I am with JustusGS, in that they seem like orthogonal capabilities. If he wants a gang of robots he needs to establish that he can build robots at all. How difficult it is for him to build robots is kind of game-dependent -- it could be as easy as 'oh yeah I already built one last month it just needs some tweaks', or as hard as basically impossible.

I would also emphasize what Ebok says -- a Robot gang should probably have enough agency and complexity to act as a gang of people would, or at least to qualify as a Threat. (I don't think this means they need AI, but they need enough complexity that they can appear to act of their own accord in some meaningful way.)

60
Apocalypse World / Re: Maestro'D - Fingers in Every Pie
« on: August 20, 2016, 06:16:13 PM »

'Make Apocalypse World seem real' seems like the more relevant agenda. If your Maestro D' is asking for something that seems actually impossible, or stretches the boundaries of the world as you understand it, you should probably address that when they are first using the move -- not by messing with the result of the 10+, after the fact. Like, if there is no suggestion so far in the game that someone owning a functioning tank is even a thing -- like so far you are in some sort of low-tech jungle region full of spear-hunters or whatever -- then that sort of request seems outside the boundaries of the fiction. But if this is a world where there's lots of scavenged stuff around, and military hardware (even of a lesser size) is around, then sure, why not.

It is obviously super not-boring to have somebody give you a tank, after all.

My feeling is that the move is specifically about allowing the Maestro D' to avoid having to use Barter to get what they want -- the flip-side of that is that if they are asking for something that could not reasonably be acquired by Barter (up to and including like, a million barter) then maybe I should be concerned. But other than that, go for it.


Pages: 1 2 3 [4] 5 6 ... 36