World of Algol Revised

So this is a thing I've had kicking around for I guess a couple years now, and recently I figured out how to make all the basics of it work. Since I've got a bunch of other commitments to attend to, this has to go back in the drawer, but I figured I should at least cobble together a playable draft. So here is the World of Algol Explorer's Guide.

There's no GM rules, so here is how you run it:
1. Prep like it's old-school D&D. You need to bring a dungeon or a hexmap for the PCs to explore.
2. Add in the PC backgrounds as you go. The PCs should feel like D&D characters of approximately levels 3-6 who have already gone on a bunch of adventures. You can use that stuff if you want, when they go back to civilization with their ill-gotten loot, but if they stick around in town, that's the intrigue mode and I haven't written the rules for that yet. So make them go back to the dungeon.
3. There's no "defy danger" move. If a move does not apply, you have to decide what happens. That is mandatory.
4. Injuries are always actual wounds, the numbers are there just to back them up. If you deal 2-harm to a PC and don't tell them what kind of wound it is, they don't have to write down shit. That also means: regularly check what condition the PCs are in (ie ask what conditions they have).
5. Read the Planet Algol blog for ideas.

The document's pretty rough, only some of it's been playtested. Probably somebody will enjoy reading it anyway.

OMG! OMG! OMG!

Yes! Thank yooooooou! :D

What's the difference between "defy danger" and "go into danger"? Are they triggered by different situations somehow, or is the difference in the implementation?

(The hack looks fantastic, by the way! Kudos.)

So, Go Into Danger isn't a catch-all "do something dangerous" move. It's for when the GM has described an obvious threat, and the player says "mm, no, I can tackle that head-on and come out on top."

Example:

GM: The palace is on fire. You can see the crown prince on the other side of a wall of flames. What do you do?
Player: I grab a tapestry to defend myself, run up on to the feasting table and jump up onto the side of the wall and over the flames. I grab the prince and cover us with the tapestry so I can run out the doorway without getting burned.
GM: Well, that's going into some hella danger all right. Roll+mighty.
Player: I rolled 9, and mighty+2 makes 11.
Since she rolled 11, that means her tactic works at warding off the flames, and will continue to work until the situation changes considerably, since that one Go Into Danger roll covers the whole danger, or as much as the PC's tactics are both reasonable and employed.

However, if you are not actually going into danger, then you can't make the move. There's a wide range of interpretation of course -- if you are trying to retreat but that means risking danger, that can be going into danger, but trying to maintain your cool and take cover in the face of suppressive laser fire is explicitly not going into danger.

Divergences from my original plans

Well, assess your situation was going to be a basic move, of course, and now it is not. I really, really like this move. It is such a noir detective move... but that's the problem. This is Planet Algol. And yet, here's the thing: I gave the Sage two really awesome special moves: you can study things that aren't people with the study a person move (other classes will be able to study gods and monsters, too), and you can assess someone else's situation. Which seems to me very much like a Sage kind of thing to do.

So the obvious solution after a lot of thought was to make assess your sitch a Sage class move and free up space in the basic moves so I don't have to abandon the three-by-three move organization. Besides, the guys who play the D&D version of Planet Algol will never use that move, so it's almost pointless. Some of them might study a person because they want to know if an NPC is lying, but it's only really the AW crowd who will be assessing any sitches, and if they can hack it back in if they really want to.

I also struggled with the move names and which moves they are associated with. I finally figured it out when I decided to go with careful as a stat. I used to have skilled instead -- it was still the technology and search stat, although tech was a peripheral move. But I like careful much better because it emphasizes a personality trait that helps you make those moves, instead of being a trait about those moves (or being about the tech move actually, which was especially weird since it was a peripheral move).

Injury and Curse

So the ratings have 2 purposes. First is so you know how serious a wound is, and how close it brings you to death. I want actual character death to be paced by the game and not by the GM. This is actually very similar to the way Chris Weeks described using countdown clocks in the AW-for-gamism thread. It is a countdown clock! You add up the ratings of all your wounds and if they equal 5 or more you have died!

It is also there so you know if you have stabilized a wound or not, because then the injury rating is reduced to zero -- it no longer contributes to your immediate death, but it is still a condition that can give you a penalty die.

And curse is there for stuff that isn't really harm, like magical curses and insanity and stuff. That part is a bit fuzzier than injuries, because while I playtested the injury stuff a bit, the curse stuff never really came up.

The main point of conditions and the doom and death countdowns is to remove hit points and make each wound an actual thing in the fiction, but at the same time retain the part where the game determines when you have died, so that the GM doesn't have to make judgment calls about it and doesn't have to think about how close the PC is to filling up all five circles.

I'm also not 100% sold on:

- Bonus dice and penalty dice. They have a pretty major effect on the probabilities, and I sort-of wanted that, but I'm 'a have to play with it a whole bunch more before making a final decision.

- The knowledge move. I kind of added it in at the last minute so the GM can use it as an info dump move or something. I dunno how it plays with all three modes of play.

- Black and white. Planet Algol should really be in colour, but man. The work involved. Still, I don't really like that the most "exotic" thing about some of my portraits is that the people are black, when really they are supposed to have bright green skin.

Two questions:

1) On Go Into Danger, on 7-9 "the GM can offer you a hard bargain or an ugly choice." It notably does not include "a worse outcome."  What's your reasoning on that? 

2) For the Bond moves, you're using the Bonds you have with another PC as a resource that can be used to aid/receive aid/interfere with a PC. That's pretty neat. Have you found yourself missing the chance of "expose yourself to danger or cost" or a missed roll that you get when rolling +Hx or +Bond?

1) I feel like most of the words in that phrase are redundant, even having both hard bargain and ugly choice. Also since a 7-9 is supposed to be more or less a success, it's not real clear what a "worse outcome" is, is it? I might reword this move to: "the GM will give you a choice between two or more consequences, which may including turning back. Pick one."

2) Not really, because it's still there. Here's a situation I wanted to be possible in the game:

Situation A: You have a bond with an NPC. You're doing something dangerous. You get the NPC to help you. They roll 7-9. You get a bonus to your roll, they die.

But then I realized that Situation B (where you get help, you roll with a bonus, you get a 7-9, and the NPC dies) is the same thing with one roll instead of two. Basically, the consequences of both rolls are condensed into one.

Also, turning bonds into a spendable resource allows for a whole new design space in terms of moves. A thief and a trader working together can become a steamrolling juggernaut!

That said, most of my playtesting so far has been 1-on-1 and I haven't properly put the teamwork, party-dynamic rules through their paces.