Mass Effect: Apocalypse

Here's my Apocalypse World hack for the Mass Effect universe/setting. The actual crunch stuff is on the "wiki" tab.

http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaigns/mass-effect-apocalypse

Game is still "in planning" so feedback here or on the site is appreciated.

Design notes: I wanted to preserve the variety of "combat/tech/biotic" powers from the games without flooding the game with complication. All those powers are moves, but the moves are comparatively narrow, and tend to hang strongly off of the "Optional Battle Moves." Players choose their "Class" moves for combat purposes and their "Personal" moves to give them background and flavor. Most of the Apocalypse World moves have been reskinned and turned into Personal Moves (or species moves, or whatnot).

I went for uniformity in Hx generation and advancement, and made it a more traditional "species/class" generation rather than a stack of discrete playbooks. I tried to keep the number of "killer combos" to a minimum :) But AW is not a game that rewards the min-maxer very well, so I can't say I'm all that concerned about it.

I divorced "special moves" from sex, and grounded them in full-on character motivation (which can, certainly, involve sex).

Looks really good! Using obsidian portal works wonderfully, it's a beautiful interface. I'd love to hear more as you playtest this.

I especialy like the MC special move you give to each player, that's sick!!

Also, I would consider moving Consult Training to a Will based move. As it stands Sharp has three basic moves under it and that seems like too many. Will should remain relevant and tempting.

You could consider adding a little bonus for using Consult Training as well, like a +1 forward for hitting the roll. This is what I did in my Star Wars hack and it seems to be a nice motivator for players to choose this move over Read a Sitch. As always, just a thought.

Also, LOVE racial moves, they are clean and evocative. Great idea. I want to play an Asari Adept somethin' fierce! You need to set up a google hangout playtest session sometime. :)

Hello! Me again. Tee hee. If you'd like some help designing a character sheet, I have been making a few for my hacks. Let me know.

Hey, thanks for the feedback. :)

I would absolutely love any character-sheet feedback you care to make, as I suck at graphic design and character sheets (as the crappy word docs I have up there can attest) :)

Here's a glimpse into my thought process on Consult Training. The reason I made Consult Training a Sharp-based roll is less to do with tallying the number of moves used for each Stat as the underlying function each stat serves in Apocalypse World.

Hard = Physical altercation and threats
Hot = Social altercation
Cool = All-purpose stress-test
Sharp = Setup-moves and Info gathering
Weird/Will = Specialty stat for setting-specific outcomes

Since Consult Training is basically a "clue-generator" move (kind of like Open your Brain), and is generally rolled only if someone needs a clue that can't be found via Read a Sitch or Read a Person, it seemed more like a "sub-move" of Read a Sitch and therefore putting it under Sharp didn't seem like that big a deal.

Also, since advancement isn't tied to rolling "highlighted stats" it doesn't really matter if Sharp has an extra move to it, especially since, functionally, it's not that different from the other two Sharp moves, just more situational.

I'll take a tangent moment to discuss the "highlighted stats" thing. I've played in and run many games that try to tie character advancement to frequency of die-rolling, or dice rolls tied to certain types of rolls, and they never work. Inevitably, you have characters who happen to advance super fast and others who move at a glacial pace. I find tying experience gain to failed rolls to be a much more elegant solution. When a player fails a roll, they already know that the MC is going to be there with a hard move, at least they get to mark a consolation Experience and "learn from their mistake" :)

Since I have so many narrower combat-focused "Class" moves that hang off the "Optional Battle Moves", I too wonder how this will work in actual play. Heh. We'll have to see. Sadly, my gaming schedule is such that I won't have an open evening / slot to start actually running this for a few more months... which is one reason I figured I'd solicit community feedback to see if I can keep tinkering :)

I had some time to kill at work so I made up an Engineer character sheet. Let me know what you think. I can easily port the other classes over once you find a layout design you like.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/eimh4ii97dgr499/Mass%20Effect%20Sheet%20Engineer.pdf

That is so much more awesome than my crappy word docs :) I like the Sci-Fi-style box borders.

It could probably use more space for moves, but that could probably be handled with just a few columns of fancy box-bordered empty space on a second page or something. Hmm... maybe something as simple as moving the Advancement box to the middle column where the starting Class Move is now, and leaving the entire right-hand column for moves so you don't have to break up the Moves box in two pieces?

Also, the stat should be Will and not Weird :)

Try the link now and let me know if you like this more. :)

Awesome :)

Shall I make the other 5 for you? The margins should be tighter when I render them at home. I have limited software here at work.

I think that would rock, and you would be a rock star if you did that, and I would totally credit you on the links to such sheets when I put them on the Obsidian Portal site.

Here's a link to the powerpoint files, the pdfs and your word sheets. In case you need to do any edits it's available for you to do. :) Enjoy mate.

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/4z4ah6nm1zyypxp/KXGb8Bqatw

Thanks a lot :)

One of these days when I have some more spare time and I think I've achieved a more-or-less stable beta, I think I'll lift all the info from the Obsidian Portal site and put it into a single, more easily-shared document for other folks on this forum to download conveniently and tinker with. I realized that while Obsidian Portal is very convenient for my purposes of constant editing and tinkering, it's not very useful for other folks that might want to use the hack or a variant on it.

Really dig what I see so far, nice work!

Would love to see all of your info pulled out and put on paper.

I would to help translate this into a PDF.

Here is what I have so far for 'Hood.

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B9Hhx1yXlz-OaG1fa0lPMjlsTkU/edit?usp=sharing

(it is not quite complete, should be in the next week or so ... MC section is squished here, but James is expanding that as we speak.)