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Messages - Daniel Wood

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496
Monsterhearts / Re: The Fae
« on: July 30, 2010, 01:16:41 AM »
The only issue is that this sounds just like how Strings work already - you earn them, and then you spend them later to fuck people up and fuck people over, or to buy stuff from them, or to make them do stuff you want them to do.

I think I probably need to write the "You can spend Strings to..." move really soon. However, while guessing at its content, I might revise the fae move to:

Faery Contract
If someone breaks a promise or contract made to you, take a String on them. When spending Strings to even out the score and get justice on a broken promise, add these options to the move: they fuck up something simple at a crucial moment; carry +2forward on an action that will hurt them; they suffer 1 harm, whether the cause is obvious or not.

Could this be used as a model for the different Skins? Maybe every Skin has a special thing they can spend String on, or a way of spending String they're particularly good at (achieving additional effects, or increased bonuses/penalties) -- as well as a particular way of gaining String, similar to the Fae's 'broken promises' thing.

That would be pretty cool if so.

497
Monsterhearts / Re: The Infernal
« on: July 28, 2010, 07:34:58 PM »
I want you to be able to give the power Strings for more interesting things than bonuses & re-rolls... But I'm currently stuck wondering what those interesting things are.

Thoughts?

Maybe make them more specific but more powerful. Instead of a bonus to any roll, a move to make somebody sleep with you for a String?

'Need' Is My Favourite Word
When you, like, really, really want something... Give your power String equal to the +barter of the object and roll +sharp. On a 10+, choose 2:
* You get exactly the thing you wanted.
* It doesn't come at a cost to anybody else.
* It costs you one less String.
On a 7-9, choose 1.
On a miss, you don't get exactly what you want, it comes at the expense of somebody else, and it costs +1 String.

I used 'barter' and 'sharp' as placeholders; I am not sure if a +barter-equivalent even makes sense for a teenage-centered game.

498
Monsterhearts / Re: The Fae
« on: July 28, 2010, 07:23:32 PM »
I had always assumed you could just go voluntarily into your Darkest Self, but having it as a choice in moves is even better. I would have it on some of the 7-9 lists too, not just on a miss.

On the Fae: I think Faerie Contract needs more teeth/flavour. How about a Hold mechanic, where you can spend the Hold for +2 on rolls OR immediate harm OR <something else cool>?

Because like, if Franklin stands me up for our movie date, do I really just want to give him bad acne or have him twist his ankle? Or do I want to take +2 forward on my attempt to seduce Johnny, Franklin's best friend, because it will show Franklin how fragile his pathetic human bonds are, and also make him totally jealous OMG?

And even if I do want him to twist his ankle, wouldn't it be awesomer if I waited until later, right when he was about to drive into the endzone and win the Big Football Game in front of everybody? Timing is important for proper vengeance!

My stance on getting out of the Darker Self has already been described in the other thread, but 'dark pact with faerie' is just yawn compared to something involving the people the Faerie already loves and/or hates.


499
Monsterhearts / Re: Monster, What is Thine Heart For?
« on: July 28, 2010, 07:17:24 PM »

Those principles are so spot on it fills me with glee.

(Though I think the Acceptance one will probably get rephrased at some point.)

500
Monsterhearts / Re: Your Darkest Self
« on: July 28, 2010, 07:08:47 PM »
I feel very strongly that the only way out of your Darkest Self must involve another person with whom you have a pre-existing relationship. You have to do something to someone specific, or someone has to do something specific to you. Isolation and running away might happen AFTER that triggered event, but it can't be the whole thing.

Werewolves (and possibly Vampires) escape their Darkest Self by harming a loved one; Ghosts escape their Darkest Self by somebody realizing they are there (and calling their name or somehow acknowledging their triggering event); Fae escape their Darkest Self by being forgiven by somebody they've wronged (something they themselves are incapable of doing); Mortals escape their Darkest Self by standing up to a Monster (going aggro, basically)...

Anyways, something like that. I just feel like the genre demands that it is your relationship with other people that ultimately lets you regain your grip on yourself. Not your personal willpower, not random circumstance -- other people.

501
Monsterhearts / Re: Skin Deep
« on: July 28, 2010, 06:58:54 PM »
Maybe when the Ghost pulls away from the world, he can still affect it, but only in vague, violent, lashing-out type ways.

This is exactly what I took away from the skin description -- it never occured to me that the ghost being invisible would interfere with her ability to mess things up. In fact my assumption was that the invisible ghost would be terrifyingly effective at messing with other people... after all, nobody can see them.

502
Monsterhearts / Re: Let's Fight About Source Material
« on: July 28, 2010, 06:44:54 PM »

One of the actually-important-to-the-game differences between Buffy and Twilight, which Joe touched on already with his description of the Twilight movies, is that in Buffy, things actually happen at a remotely reasonable pace. The Twilight series, to the best of my knowledge, is predicated on a complete and utter lack of things happening -- they are 90% descriptive passages and wallowing in established-to-death 'conflicts' that the author is fundamentally unwilling to resolve at a rate of more than one per two books.

I have no idea if this is something Joe wants to support -- it could easily be replicated by a group playing AW if they simply did nothing but Barf Forth Apocalyptica for 95% of their play time, and rolled the dice like once per session. So it's possible that Joe is on to something by describing the difference primarily in terms of 'competent vs. incompetent', but if you were really devoted to Twilight (as opposed to the wider genre) you could add moves like 'When you consider how beautiful your lover is...' and 'When you are overcome by the emotion of the situation...' which would have results on some purely descriptive/internal level.

503
Apocalypse World / Re: AW illustrations / photo manipulation
« on: July 26, 2010, 02:05:48 AM »
Yeah, it's a real shame some of those aren't public domain.

Indeed. The gallery is mostly those that I couldn't download, but wanted to have around in any case.

504
Apocalypse World / AW illustrations / photo manipulation
« on: July 25, 2010, 04:36:50 PM »

So I have been trawling Flickr for potentially awesome Apocalypse World portraits to use in an upcoming game -- but while I've found a bunch of awesome stuff, using actual photographs for NPCs always seems a little too specific, compared to more abstract line art or illustrations.

Ideally, I'd like to convert the photos I have into something like the AW interior art -- my impression is that these are mostly photos that Vincent has photoshopped into a particular style.

So the question is: Vincent, how did you do it? What filters, layer effects, etc. were used? Non-Vincent people who know what they are doing can also feel free to answer -- or post their own awesome AW NPC art.

(The beginning of my NPC portrait gallery can be found on flickr, here.)

505
Apocalypse World / Re: Stat Substitution Glitch
« on: July 23, 2010, 08:54:06 PM »
So in our game of Apocalypse World, we played approximately thirteen sessions before the game ended, and my character was the closest thing we had to something like you describe -- I had only one stat-substitution move, but it resulted in my not needing +weird at all and consequently, +weird was highlighted in only one of the sessions. The majority of my advancements were spent on stat increases, straightforwardly boosting my rate of success, and I also got a free +1 weird over the course of play because I had the Angel move where your +weird increases if somebody dies in your care. (This move was perfect, fictionally, even though it was a terrible choice min-max-wise because I only rolled +weird for some custom moves.) I had a stat at +3 very early and another at +2 not long after, and all my stats were +1 or higher for the majority of the game. I also switched from Angel to Battlebabe, gaining 'extra' moves as a result.

My character did not advance faster than the other PCs -- though the main point of comparison was the Brainer, who also ended up with a stat-substitution move. We had a Chopper join the game at the halfway point (so six sessions in) -- the Chopper had Hard highlighted for two sessions, and by the end of the game had actually caught up with my character in terms of advancements. I would guess that the other PCs averaged a little under one advance per session, though this often came in spurts based on the intersection of the highlighted stat and the opportunities presented by the fiction.

The rate of advancement in our game never seemed to be a problem. Our early sessions were slowly paced, in terms of fictional consequences (and time passing; our entire game happened over the course of two weeks of game-time) -- once the Chopper character showed up, the pace of things rapidly accelerated.

The Chopper's mid-campaign entry might be particularly interesting in terms of 'unbalanced' characters (advancement-wise). It is my opinion, which I am pretty sure my playgroup would echo, that the Chopper PC was equally or even MORE effective at getting things done than the other two PCs, from the very first session in which he appeared. Why? Because he had +2 hard and fairly quickly bought +3 hard, and the secondary stats just don't matter that much when it comes to getting shit done. As mentioned, the Chopper advanced far more rapidly than the other two PCs once introduced, but I would say that only his first few advancements had a serious impact on his basic character competence.

I bring this up because of the concern about the game somehow ending 'early' due to excessive character competence/growth/whatever. I really don't see it. The issue with certain moves (seeing through the Maelstrom in particular) seems more relevant to our game, but only because the Maelstrom turned out to be the primary focus of our fiction.

However, in our game, our Brainer took the relevant advance at approximately the three-quarter mark of the game -- like session 9 or 10 or so -- and successfully saw through the Maelstrom in either the same or the next session. It did not have any impact that I can see on the speed with which we pursued the final resolution of the game. It had a huge impact on how that resolution happened, but by the point the move came in to play we were already well on our way to doing what we eventually did to end the game.

--

One thing that I haven't seen explicitly addressed (though maybe I missed it) is the fact that tying advancement to actual moves is a built-in pacing control. You can only gain advancements by doing things in the fiction -- and doing things in the fiction is already changing things. In fact, the impact of a move -- hit OR miss -- seems to vastly eclipse the impact of advancement, in terms of shifting the fiction in the way Orion seems to be concerned about.

Our game seems like as interesting an example as any, since I am sure if you plotted our 'number of rolls per session' on a graph it would look a lot like a slowly-sloping-upward line with a spike at the midway point (when the Chopper joined) and a plateau soon afterwards. I would guess we were rolling dice almost twice as much in the last four sessions as in the first four -- and less of those rolls were Reading the Situation or a Person.

To me this was the absolutely, self-evidently most overwhelming factor in the pacing of our game. My character's advancement played a part for sure, but really it was not comparable to the shift in how many moves and what sort of moves the fiction was demanding of us. Making moves push the fiction forward, and the fiction is when the game ends. The fact that my success rate increased by like 20 or 30 percent over the course of the game -- and the possibility that, with further min-maxing, I could have added very slightly to that curve (at some point you run out of relevant +stat advances, and for me that point was fairly early) -- was important, but far less important than the fact that early on I spent a lot of time having talky, social scenes and later on I spent a lot of time making hard physical and social moves to resolve the situation the way my character wanted. This was a natural outcome of both the fiction and my advances, but my feeling is that the fiction -- and the way the other PCs, even apart from the MC, had begun to push the fiction -- played a larger part.


ETA: Cross-posted with Vincent. Taking a break now!

506
blood & guts / Re: Advancement, what is it for?
« on: July 23, 2010, 04:30:34 PM »

1. Because change is interesting, and because increasing power and responsibility are key to a lot of the things Apocalypse World can be 'about.' Also, the 'meta' advances such as retiring characters and playing new ones really give the game and the players room to breathe, and the opportunity to take the game in new directions as it develops.
2. Lots. As far as I can tell there is no such thing as too much advancement in Apocalypse World. The moves I mention above are really, in my opinion, an extraordinary response to concerns about characters becoming 'too powerful' -- a phrase which only makes sense from the point of view of the player. In AW if your character's mechanical development is outrunning your vision of the fiction, you have a lot of very strong options to use advancement in other ways, to curtail any excessive upward motion by instead pushing outwards into the world.
3. Because characters who take decisive action are hot.


507
Apocalypse World / Re: Going Aggro or Manipulating Groups
« on: July 23, 2010, 01:28:36 AM »
Quote
"Sucking it up" would just be them letting that guy get shot.
I guess the biggest problem in my mind is whether you'd be able to have enough over a larger group to be able to go aggro in the first place rather than it all just exploding and getting dog-piled.

I think this is pretty straightforwardly covered by:

1) The gang sucks it up, taking the Harm.
2) The gang then decides to beat the crap out of the PC as a result.

508
Apocalypse World / Re: My first front
« on: July 22, 2010, 02:10:21 AM »

Who are all these innocent people in Monk's territory, that get attacked all the time? I'm guessing you have some more specific ideas in the fiction, but my gut reaction whenever I see the unqualified phrase "innocent people" in a discussion of AW is "whatnow?" In this case I get the idea of Monk's territory as this impressive ideological factory that randomly manifests abstractly-innocent groups of people to get beat up. Maybe they could be a specific type of people, to tie in with one of the other Fronts?

In general, for your custom moves, I would say you need to seriously jack up the 7-9 options. 7-9 is the sweet spot where you want the fiction to really shine -- it's gotta represent what you see as the real potential for the move, a kind of MC best-case. I think the Monk's territory one does this pretty well, but the others could use spiking.

Quote
When you move in the wilderness roll +Weird. 10+ The weather is fine. 7-9 Storms is coming but you find shelter. On a miss- attacked by a storm, and no shelter to be found.

This move seems like a perfect opportunity to make the players choose on a 7-9. Something like: On a 7-9, the storm is coming, choose one:
* You find shelter
* You are not acting under fire from the storm.
* The storm does not open your mind to the psychic maelstrom.

Or whatever. I'm not sure what the storms are about, in the fiction, but if you are making a custom move for them they must be about something.

The cult one, the 7-9 option just seems toothless. Aren't the sun cult always trying to recruit people? Are their recruiting methods like, super-violent or otherwise problematic? Right now it just sounds like they're chatting about how great their cult is while otherwise doing exactly what the character wants...

The last one, I'd just do another 'choose one' with the two bits you already have there: either the deal is on OR the soldiers don't poke their nose in your business.

509
Apocalypse World / Re: Communications issues
« on: July 20, 2010, 10:07:17 PM »

I don't think it ever even occured to me that someone might have a radio in our game -- which is interesting, since in other ways our game felt very Apocalypse-light (not much food-scarcity, for example.) All communication was face to face. A couple of times people would send runner NPCs to set up meetings. I can't think of a specific example of communication tension/breakdown that resulted, but I think there were definitely several instances where cellphones radios would have helped clear things up faster.

Relatedly, our PCs were almost always operating out of a single holding, and usually travelling together in groups -- we had one major 'party split' early on, but the player of the split-off character ended up bowing out of the game before we really worked out how that was going to be dealt with at the table.

510
Apocalypse World / Re: Help me out with "NOT TO BE FUCKED WITH"
« on: July 20, 2010, 01:42:52 AM »

Yeah, I always figured 'in a battle' just meant 'if you are using the countdown timer' -- but I think if you were for some reason dealing with a similar-scoped fight in a single roll, that could work too, at the MCs discretion.

Personally I would let the Gunlugger use their full weapon stats in addition to the gang part -- they must be an exceptionally well-armed gang, that's all.

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