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Messages - stras

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61
Dungeon World / Re: I wish we just had modifiers, not scores
« on: June 19, 2012, 05:33:03 PM »
Azri - the choice isn't about equivalence, it's about theme and old school.  Some people play hardcore (you rolled a 3 int, you keep a 3 int).  You're looking for balance (which is found in the lineup vs game difficulty), when the optional rule is meant for flavor and old-school theme ^_~

62
Dungeon World / Re: Glorantha World ?
« on: June 19, 2012, 05:30:17 PM »
Sounds like a hack of a hack sir.  Best get on that! ... >_>

63
Dungeon World / Re: Please to make blank playbook in format I can use
« on: June 19, 2012, 05:28:41 PM »
This is an excellent plan, I just haven't had experience with any Python specific PDF apps (all my py was AI/backend oriented).  Also, more overhead for installs and such.  I know people though ... I'll see if I can finagle a suggestion :)

64
Dungeon World / Re: Please to make blank playbook in format I can use
« on: June 19, 2012, 04:44:39 PM »
@sage: for sure.  Whoa! Congratulations! Also ... what a time to have crazy kickstarter/game-publication >_< you're crazy dude.

65
Dungeon World / Re: Please to make blank playbook in format I can use
« on: June 19, 2012, 04:40:38 PM »
@sage: The easiest way to do this is to have 2 labels: Header, and Body.  Separate.  With an 'add' button.  You can easily _POST this (although i would use basic ajax/js).

So you say 'you can do 10 moves with header at 200 chars, body at 2000 chars'.  They fill in a move, click add.  it appears below.  The space is still there for the add, but you can 'edit' or 'delete' it.  Just have a basic validation function for counts/bad_char_stripping.

I've got boardgames tonight, but I'll see if I can sneak in some time to do a mockup after work. If not tomorrow it is!

Also: TCPDF is just a couple functions laid on top  of PHP (which you know, bad language, but super easy to install/maintain for minimal effort to slap up something).  It allows for easy PDF creation.  You can layer some images in the background and type on top of them for example.  It's how I do a lot of auto-form population at work.  It's also very intuitive, so you can natural-language read the functions and it should make sense.

66
Dungeon World / Re: Please to make blank playbook in format I can use
« on: June 19, 2012, 03:52:44 PM »
Guys.

Step 1: Figure out what you want your final layout to be.
Step 2: Remove all text (moves etc), but make sure the fonts used are installed and you have the ones used written down.
Step 3: Create a FORM.  Namely something that has a label that says Races: Which you can cut/paste text into, but which has a hard cap character limit etc.
Step 4: EITHER output to an XML file, or much much better, use TCPDF to just output a clean pdf by writing the text on top of the image of the un-texted background.  Can be done on the fly and saved to your local machine.  Can also add basic moves pages or GM pages with a toggle/checkbox and just splice the files together.

Easy Peasy.  I do this all the time.  Forcing the user to learn layout or use InDesign is not your ideal solution.  I promise.

The problem with Excel/Word/TCL/LaTex/InDesign is that you can't do a fair bit of backend pre-processing to calculate fits, number of lines etc.  The problem with InDesign is that many people don't have it.  All this would require is a machine with LAMP on it.

67
Dungeon World / Re: Monsters - I am confused
« on: June 17, 2012, 04:39:28 AM »
Good post nemo!  Makes me think about stuff.  A few comments.

I think it's always a good idea to be honest and up-front with your players, and discuss things before you start.  Before every game of DW I run I explain that the game is probably a lot more lethal than they're used to.  Encounters are not necessarily balanced, and that they need to be cautious.  If you don't explain what they're buying into and then they can't harm something, it's very reasonable for a player to be frustrated.  But if they know what they're getting into and complain, I'm not sure what to tell you.

In a play-to-find-out mode I'd be more inclined to have every conflict be theoretically winnable rather than to have decided beforehand, for example, that a given foe can only be harmed by magical weapons and if the characters don't have them then nothing they do is going to shave any of those 16 HP off.  (Wondering whether others agree even with this stance for this game - maybe your prep tells you otherwise and the PCs need to Discern or Lore their way to the solution and come back another day because this fight this day is utter suicide).

I think this is where fictional positioning comes into action.  Lets say you fight a monster that cannot be harmed by non-magical weapons.  Something like a werewolf who heals any cut or wound not made by silver or magic.

The players (who probably don't seriously carry silver copies of every weapon) may not have a way to damage the creature, but they can drown it.  It has to eat - you can also poison its food source.  They could find out that fire may hurt it.  The point here is that the strategy and tactics for defeating the monster may have nothing to do with hacking or slashing, but it doesn't make the encounter necessarily untenable.

And frequently it's exactly a case of leaving and returning.  Or doing something to mitigate monster damage (like lighting the building it's in on fire) to keep it busy while you evacuate the village and buy time to go do research and return with something capable of defeating it.

If my amount-of-defy-danger assumption is roughly correct, I wonder what cues the game has or wants to be able to translate this to MCs.  Are there tags that convey it?  Or is a name like "Dragon" enough?  As an aside while thinking about tags I'm wondering whether others would translate the messy tag as tacit permission to de-limb PCs as a part of a foe's attack?

There's a great fictional blurb next to every creature.  

Also I'll quote:
p. 107 Messy: It does damage in a particularly destructive way, ripping people and things apart.

How would you interpret that?

After chewing on this and running some more DW, a found myself in a session where two of the players were a little frustrated with a situation where I was indicating H&S was not a viable move in the current circumstance.  They'd been able to use that move in all combats previously and now they were dealing with a foe that was too fast, intelligent and ferocious to be cut down by trying to simply step up to it and hit it with an axe.  I had some ideas about how such a foe might be harmed but 1) The thoughts weren't fully formed/prepped (I didn't expect them to come after this thing after describing what it had done to an armed camp!) and 2) I didn't want to lead them by the nose.

I think that you have to get the rhythm of describing the fiction down right away.  I usually try to put together a fight with an H&S block early when I run stuff to explain the whole 'fiction triggers moves' concept.  A lot of people are trained (by every other game) to just say 'attack' and there is nothing that stops that.  Once folks understand that this isn't the flow of the game always, you get less pushback.

All of this to say that with some players I think I'm going to need to run DW a bit differently than I might prefer.  I don't really want to add hitpoints to monsters, so I'm thinking about some other possibilities and house rules that make "low hitpoint" legendary and scary monsters work better for me.  I'm finding that if a DW party focuses on damage, they can really lay it on starting at 2nd level - there's a big difference between 1st and 2nd level in the amount they can do if they're permitted to go straight to their damaging moves in any given conflict.

If you feel you have no other choice, just slap +10 armor on them unless they can bypass it.  Or let them do 12 damage and have the creature heal right up.  It feels like cheating (I'd rather say the blade just bounces off the hide) but it's an ugly systematic solution to essentially something you should probably talk to the players about outside the game.

68
Dungeon World / Re: Please to make blank playbook in format I can use
« on: June 17, 2012, 04:04:03 AM »
Also, if you're using XSLT, a quick PHP/TCPDF script can make playable files in short order.  Printable output FOR THE WIN.

69
Dungeon World / Re: So, The Druid
« on: June 16, 2012, 04:16:06 PM »
Have you thought about doing this in your game?

Druid: "I shapeshift, into a bear."
GM: "Fantastic.  You get a move.  Spend your druid hold one for one to:
* Rend and Tear your pray for an extra 1d4 +messy damage.
* Turn blade and arrow from your bear-hide with +1 armor against a single attack."

What do you think?

70
Dungeon World / Re: Lethality in Combat
« on: June 15, 2012, 01:43:18 PM »
The other thing to keep in mind if your players are more into the kill everything mode is to Show Signs of Doom. The running joke for me is "The more skulls outside the door the worse it is." Of course those skulls needn't be literal. If an area of a dungeon (or other adventuring site) is empty you'd better start wondering what creature is powerful enough to carve out some privacy...

Nothing, the scariest sign of doom ever.  I love it.

71
Dungeon World / Re: Lethality in Combat
« on: June 15, 2012, 11:41:21 AM »
You are not (I don't think).  Back in the day (way back in the 70's and 80's when dinosaurs battled hairbands across the interstates) when D&D was young, most of the XP was gained for Treasure.  Monsters are scary! I mean in more recent (3/4e) editions encounters are balanced so a PC can with fair confidence charge whatever it is they need to fight.

But this is insanity.  I mean seriously, if you see a 14 foot monster with a club bigger than you that uproots trees which idiot runs straight at him confident he'll survive?  If you were a real person in that story, you'd run away (as they do even in Lord of the Rings until they're cornered in Moria).  So DW lets you do fictional positioning.  I mean hacking and slashing a giant can bring him down, but it might be better to defy the danger of him smashing your puny-bug butt and lead him to a cliff where he falls off, using only 1-2 rolls with some assists from well placed arrows, or friends causing distractions.

This may be a 'gear' switch in the mind.  What are your goals?  If they are to systematically kill everything in the dungeon? Then patience, careful waiting for groups to become separated, several volleys from the dark before engaging certainly seems more logical than 'CHAAAAARGE!'.  If it's to get the secret treasure, you don't have to fight every time.  If you do choose to, well then you're brave and epic (and maybe just a smidge crazy) because you stare death in the teeth every time.  And if you die bards will sing about you (probably).

I personally don't feel this is something you're doing wrong.  I also don't think it's anything your players are doing.  Fighting people with swords who want to kill you shouldn't be a guaranteed success always.  I mean, a shiv to the belly in a barfight will kill even the stoutest person.  Battle-hardened or no.  Taking away the teeth of combat makes it less meaningful, and encourages less diverse thinking.

72
Dungeon World / Re: So, The Druid
« on: June 15, 2012, 03:37:32 AM »
Hey @(not that) adam: I made this for you based on an earlier comment: http://goo.gl/uGFyv
(Didn't have much time to polish, word carefully or trim, but the idea is there)

I'll tinker with it this weekend for funsies.  (There might also be some original home-brewed goodness)

73
Dungeon World / Re: So, The Druid
« on: June 15, 2012, 12:39:44 AM »
For the race moves, they speak less about the here-and-now and more about stuff like ancestral memory and the power of blood passed down.  Men have learned to bend animals to their will - it's part of their spirit.  An individual druid, or maybe even all human druids, might reject that consciously but in their blood, the bonds are still there.  Dogs, Cats, Rats, Ravens - they're part of human life and have been since as long as men in Dungeon World can remember.

Perhaps a re-wording?
'Your people have long ago bound the animals to field and hearth, and with it their spirits. You may always take the shape of any domesticated animal, in addition to your normal options.'

Also:
Level 1 spell: Summon dimensional shambler.
Level 10 spell: Bind dimensional shambler.

/cthulhu_highfive

74
Dungeon World / Re: Gen Con Indy?
« on: June 14, 2012, 10:29:59 PM »
@skinnyghost: I'm in!!!

75
Dungeon World / Re: Gen Con Indy?
« on: June 14, 2012, 06:30:20 PM »
Look for the Indie Games on Demand, show up, demand some Dungeon World.

It's the best place to try new games (nonstop), often features games run by their creators, and it's how I ended up running DW three times at Origins.  It's pretty awesome.

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