The Gaming Den

Still an early version, but it's shaping up to something interesting, I think. Page 1 http://i63.tinypic.com/x35z5s.png Page 2 http://i66.tinypic.com/10dh2ci.png By now only Stats, Alignment, Race and Moves are more or less defined. (don't consider the Faction part, I got it from the AW "Turnco...

Is there a good way to ensure success on a clutch roll, or to negate an especially bad failure? Apocalypse World: You can ask other PCs to help and potentially get +1 for each of them. But to give you the bonus at no cost to themselves they need to roll a 10+ on a "Hx" check; rolling less...

What about this: In the "Acting under Fire" move and derivatives, the player comes up with the cost or complication ? And the MC says if it's reasonable or else asks for another one. So, say, the player wants to open that lock while enemies are closing in, and rolls a 7-9. Then he suggests...

In an effort to get things away from discussing pointless things with someone who is obviously silva, what is the purpose of this game under all the obscurantism? That is, why would you "play" this thing instead of some variant of "I tell a story until someone wants to jump in and en...

Yep, but sometimes the design is solid enough, and the problem lies in the text communicating it. In such cases, talking with experienced people can help. Don't know if it's the case of Masks though. Just sayin. :wink: By the way, @shinimasu, has you look at Undying in the meantime? I still think it...

I'm confused about why you're replying to some of my points in terms of how AW does it. I'm not super fond of AW either but I also didn't mention it at all in relation to Masks. Orion was the one making the point that Masks it Better than AW specifically, my point is merely that masks is bad at pla...

@Guts, Masks actually runs on a Tank/Healer/DPS combat system. In combat, you use "Danger" to inflict damage on the opposition, "Saviour" to prevent damage to your allies, and "Mundane" to heal allies. The other 2 stats are "Freak," which is used to debuff en...

Apocalypse World promised to let you be a sexy badass or a hardened survivalist and it did not deliver. Masks says you can use the same mechanic to be a reckless-but-invincible kid, and comes a lot closer to delivering. Have you had a Battlebabe or a Gunlugger or - god have mercy on the MC soul - b...

Teammate with influence: Don't listen to him bull, your punches are great and just because we're young doesn't mean we aren't real heroes. Experience matters less when he's the one who's outnumbered. Me: Er, is than encouragement or are you also telling me how the world works? Them: Um.. the latter...

Yeah, saying "there's no difference between fighting a hobo and a stromtroopers squad" is blatantly false, at least for the PbtA games I know. The original Apocalypse World already differentiates between threats - distinct health (foes could have from 1- to 6-harm clocks); different armor ...

This doesn't make me feel like I'm playing someone with an impressionable and developing sense of identity. It makes me feel like I'm playing someone with borderline personality disorder. Did my favorite person say I'm good at fighting again? Well then I must be good at fighting again! What is my s...

So there's a teen superheros game called Masks: A New Generation. It's officially part of the PBTA brand, but seems to have had substantially more and better design work put into it than any other apocalypse hack I've looked at. Playing Masks has actually really helped me get a better understanding...

Alternatively I want to push back against the idea of an inevitable doom track being inherently unfun or something players are unwilling to engage with. There are a non-zero number of games pitched around the idea of your ultimate demise being more or less predetermined and a non-zero number of pla...

What you should do if you're going to have a doom track is that rather than advancing if the player acts and fails, that it advances unless a player acts and succeeds. But this already exists in the engine, right? It's what "Countdown Clocks" are basically.. COUNTDOWN CLOCKS A countdown c...

Looking again at the whole thread I think we already have a good set of answers for tighening up the engine and mitigate Bears: 1) Better structured moves, which automatically equals having more moves for specific situations, and less open-ended/catch-all moves like "Act Under Fire" *. 2) ...

If simplicity's the main goal, there are a range of systems that are even simpler and have far fewer of these problems. Fate, Risus, and especially Munchausen are all light on rules and don't suffer from lack of player agency. (Fate has a few problems of its own, of course, but very different ones!...

It would probably help to consistently codify what happens on a miss with each specific move and remove the "hard move on a golden opportunity." The generic "Act Under Fire" move would work a lot better if it were Hit: You do the thing. Partial: You do the thing, but the MC can ...

... which essentially means you can make a hard move whenever you feel like it. Actually, no. A hard move must have some setup first, which in PbtA parley is called a "soft" or "regular" MC move (I.e: "announce future badness"). Here, John Harper has a nice little arti...

Can someone explain roughly how the whole concept of "moves" in PbtA games actually works? Are you literally taking turns like you would in a combat situation where you're in "initiative time" in other games ("player one, it's your move," player chooses a move, rolls d...

Part of the problem with basic AW is of course that Act Under Fire is used both for "you're doing a somewhat tricky thing" and "the building you're in just exploded, here is a saving throw", and so the "cost" of success is rarely reasonable. Perhaps splitting the move ...

I agree with the sentiment but I also want to point out that Broken Worlds (and a few others, I think the Sprawl and Monster Hearts might do this too but it's been a while since I read the GM sections for either of those) does at least codify the specific types of bears to use. They're divided into...

Deaddmwalking, the example was just to illustrate how players deal with obstacles in Undying (by spending blood instead of rolling). Such a thing (an anvil falling from the sky) would not actually happen because there isn't a prompt for such in the game / there's isn't a "MC inserts a complicat...

The catch-all move for Broken Worlds is "Overcome" which comes up whenever you do something you know is dangerous and isn't covered by any other move. The player decides what dangerous thing they're doing (and gets a chance to back out if they didn't think it was going to need a roll) and...

Broken Worlds is a good example of a less-shitty version of PbtA. It accomplishes this by assigning actual pre-defined outcomes to your moves. Take the basic combat move, Reach Heaven Through Violence: 10+: your target takes damage equal to your weapon's damage AND you get to do your weapon's flour...

Some examples in the AW book are on the wonky side indeed (the author seems more intent on impressing the reader than explaining the game). But if you ignore them and just go with the rules as written, the games run just fine. God knows our Shadowrun sessions had a qualitative jump since we ported i...