More Weirdness for MotW

I've created an experimental document with some rules tweaks for playing games with a focus on investigating weirdness rather than just hunting down monsters.

You can grab it from the MotW site.

Fair warning: this is all un-tested. I’d love to hear how it goes if you give it a try.

I think I might like your telekinesis move more than mine in Planet of the week. Its more fiction first. Mine was more like the spellslinger's move.

I was trying to not make it combat focused, which I hope comes through.

If I can I will playtest these as soon as I can gather some friends, by chance I was already wanting to do a more investigative style, (I usually do). I will let you know what my group thinks, if and when I can get them together.

If I can I will playtest these as soon as I can gather some friends, by chance I was already wanting to do a more investigative style, (I usually do). I will let you know what my group thinks, if and when I can get them together.

Great! I'd love to hear how it goes (if it works out).

I showed the alternate moves to my group, and they were all fairly intrigued, since only one of our number ever used Use Magic with any sort of frequency.  Three out of four PCs decided to try swapping.  Some notes from our game tonight:

Looking over the options, none of us found Hunches to be that appealing, because 1) a well-paced mystery is going to point you to leads anyhow, and 2) we had a Spooky, whose predictive powers kind of made it moot.

The Flake took Sensitive, but we didn't do much investigating this session, so it didn't come up.

I (as The Professional) took No Limits.  There were some situations where I conceivably could have used it, but with a Weird-1 and Cool+3, it was generally smarter money to find some mortal, if difficult, way of doing things and Act Under Pressure instead.  (Maybe that's my fault for picking "more reliable" over "more interesting to fail", but there we are.)

On the other end of the spectrum, we had our Spooky with Telekinesis.  With his Weird+3 he was using it all night long, trapping monsters, lifting things, throwing things at monsters, flying for a bit...  At the end, our GM decided it needed some tweaking before our next game.  His main problem, which I agree with, is that with any other basic move, 7-9 is a partial success.  With Telekinesis, even if 7-9 only lets you pick one option, each of the options were good enough to accomplish what the player wanted to do anyways, with no drawback.  One floated solution was to let the player and GM both pick an item from the list on 7-9, which I suspect would end with some more things catching on fire each game.  Maybe TK needs a list of glitches like Use Magic has?

Thanks for that feedback!

I'll have a think about Telekinesis - my initial thought is that on a 7-9, you take 1 harm as well.

Okay, here's the revised Telekinesis. Definitely in the nosebleeds and migraines section of psychic powers now...

Telekinesis
When you move something with your mind, despite the pain, roll +Weird.

• On a 10 or more, you move it as desired. Choose two options and mark 1-harm.
• On a 7-9, you move it, but it hurts. Choose one option and mark 2-harm.
• On a 6 or less, something goes horribly wrong.

Telekinesis options (anything not picked is not true):

• Someone is trapped.
• Someone is hurt (2-harm smash).
• Something catches fire.
• Something is flying under your control.
• Something goes just where you want it.
• Mark 1 less harm.

(Advanced telekinesis result is unchanged).

We plan to play some of these on Friday, but considering some of the feedback you already got, I wanted to add that I too was a little concerned that these moves were somewhat out of place, and could at times overshadow existing class moves. That being said I figured you were just playtesting them as standalone and might integrate them into the classes later.

I think the Telekinesis is a great example of this, its powerful but if its integrated into a class that's not to big a deal. For example my psychic can take telekinesis. It looks like this:

_{Telekinesis: You can move objects with your mind. Pick a base and add an extra to it, or two bases
•   Base: Push/ Pull (small close)
•   Base: Wall (1-harm weird barrier close 1-armour obvious loud,)
•   Base: Sustained (small close)
•   Extra: Add +1 size to a base 
•   Extra Force: Add “+1 harm forceful” to a base, or “+1 armor” to a wall.
•   Extra: Add an extra range to a base (far).
•   Extra: Add energy type to base.}

I think separating the different ways people use tek helps make it less overpowered. In my example if you just take "push/pull" you can only shove things around, if you want it to float you have to take sustained. If you want to do both the range is small and or the weight limit is small. You choose these when you take the move, not every instance.
 
But the class also requires three restrictions; Consumables, Object, Stance, Faith, Scream, or Discipline. I very much embraced the nosebleed and migraines.

Personally though I prefer not to cause harm every time its used, that feels like punishment. Maybe 0-harm stuff? Unconscious, falling down, dizzy? Keep the 1-harm for 7-9. Maybe take away a few options? Like instead of someone is trapped it could be you hold something in place (that lets the GM weasel out of some things.

Just my thoughts.


 

Thanks for your thoughts, I appreciate them.

I'll leave things as they are for now, however. I think that the harm cost of TK offsets its general usefulness (which the other weird abilities lack).

And for the case when a certain ability doesn't fit a game or character concept... well, you don't have to allow them all. I'll add some words to that effect, and suggest that probably hunches, sensitive, or use magic should be the default options for characters who aren't especially drawn to a particular option.

And I certainly have no plan for integrating them into particular hunter classes - they're specifically for the case when you don't just want to have everyone have use magic. But, depending on the game concept, you could allow all or a subset of them.

My friend was in town and wanted to Keeper the game. It was a little shorter than I'd hoped, and while we made some new characters it was technically a continuing campaign. Here's our iterations with the "more weirdness"

-I took the Hunch for my Mundane character. It seemed to work pretty well. Mostly I used it to get some direction at the beginning of the campaign, the Keeper usually just said stuff like "you notice this clue"

-I don't think he used any of the Phenomenon stuff.

That's it unfortunately. We had spell-slinger and initiate, so they wanted to keep use magic, and a chosen who had already taken The Sight from the spooky, so she wasn't super interested. I definitely still want to try these the next chance that I'm at the helm. My goal is to build a game around these instead of tacking them on. It would make it a lot easier to restrict Use magic in a game if everyone had some alternatives.

Cool, thanks for the report.