The impression I have right now is that the revised battle moves (including seize by force now!) aren't basic moves. You still only break them out when you want, on special occasions. I mean, sure, they're there to be used, so players will want to f…
Lately, I've been interested in OD&D, which uses a single d6 for resolving a lot of delving tasks: opening doors, hearing noise, do you set off the trap, is there a wandering monster, and so on. It struck me that this is pretty ripe for an Other…
All of that said: Tolkien also toyed with the idea of a sequel to LotR that would revolve around the growth of a new secret cult of Morgoth in Fourth-Age Gondor. He abandoned the idea, apparently because he thought the stakes would never rise above …
The Three that were given to Elves were carried into the West by Galadriel and Elrond.
Of the Seven that were given to the Dwarflords, four were eaten by dragons and destroyed by the time of the War of the Ring. The remaining three had been re-acqu…
Although the One Ring is destroyed and the Ringwraiths have been slain, the lesser rings of power are not accounted for, and are now no longer subject to Sauron's command. If they have been smuggled out of Pelennor Fields (or Barad-dûr or wherever t…
Your game lets anyone do anything on a natural 20.
My game's task resolution uses real actuarial tables, Bayes's theorem, and a number of uniquely coloured d10s equal to the number of significant digits in the calculated probability of your success.
This is interesting!
How do you do it if the players think they've got it nailed down, take a die with absolute confidence—but you the DM know they're wrong, they've persuaded themselves of an error! Do you let them have that die but then also add …
How do you read the dice to determine success? Are you adding them all up, or counting successes, or taking the highest, or taking width and height, or what?
I think, from a player's perspective, one way you might approach this is to ask a lot of questions about what different outcomes may mean before you roll the die. Be clear about what outcome you want (and what you want to avoid), and ask: Will succe…
I'm curious to know: How dependent is the game on having a stable roster of players? And how necessary is the playbook niche protection? My worry is, not knowing who'll show up from session to session: I'd like it to be not a serious impediment if, …
For my part, as a kid, I never needed rules, instructions or incentives to play make-believe, either with my friends or on my own. Of course it was intrinsically enjoyable!
I would also say, for as long as recorded history, people have sought out o…
A rolling method I haven't seen used, but might be fun: roll 2d6, use the bigger result as the ones digit and the smaller result as the tens. This gives 21 possible results, clustering around the low end but diverging at the top: 11, 12, 13, 14, 15,…
May I make a suggestion? It might be fun to give PCs a financial profile rooted in the story (like "working to put the kids through college," "five year commission," "medical bills," or "gambling debts"—as well of course as the ship owner's mortgage…
Diaspora does this for space ships. It's based on FATE 3, and I expect the principles could be adapted to Fate Core or FAE without too much fuss. Make movement zone-based instead of linear and you're already a lot of the way there.
The last D&D campaign I DMed was Dark Sun. The PCs were attached to a merchant house, a smaller one that did not deal in slaves. One of the house's former allies was a band of brigands who used to run raids on slavers and rival trading houses as…
Is Passive Perception used for anything more than spotting hidden enemies? I'll probably use "Passive X" as a Gumshoe-like criterion for handing out clues and lore.
The last public playtest packet had a section in GM Guidelines about when to make A…
Every proficiency confers a proficiency bonus, except armour proficiency. (ETA Oh, and some tool proficiencies. But others do.)
Also, your proficiency bonus applies to some things that don't involve a proficiency, like magic attacks and spell save …
My first instinct is to say, the crucial part of an Operator's obligation gigs is not that they're burdensome, but that they're personal. So I interpret "Seeking answers" as trying to solve a mystery about something that happened to you. Veronica Ma…
A pack of wights has been "recruiting" in the area. They pose as small groups of stranded or waylaid pedlars or pilgrims. Anyone kindly enough to help them or take them in disappears ... until they show up on the road one day, on a cart with a broke…
I came to some similar conclusions after tinkering for a couple of weeks. Right now I think, in a *W game, the most important thing is to have the players keep rolling the dice, and making sure you have vivid ideas about what can go wrong on a faile…
I really really like the idea here, but I do have one reservation: if you can earn skills from other careers, doesn't that mean you have to keep track of ALL the milestones in the game simultaneously? That's a lot to remember!
I always support going back to basics, and asking, "What do I want to incentivize?"
You're all having a conversation about these characters, and telling a story. What behaviours make a character more interesting? What behaviours make you say, "Oh, …
For my hack-in-progress, I'm experimenting with something like Loresheets, and that might work for UW too.
The idea is, instead of getting Advances at fixed XP increments, you store your XP until you spend them to buy moves from a Loresheet. Each m…
The "opera" in "space opera" refers to soap operas, not Classical operas! Something cobbled together from tropes and clichés. It was originally pejorative. The term was "reclaimed" in the '60s and '70s and applied with nostalgia to the "epic" stuff …
Yep, AW also has a similar Harm move! (And I hiiiiiighly recommend AW! You're missing out!)
ETA on a reread, I see I didn't quite have a handle on what you were proposing; AW's harm move is a little different. BUT either way, what you're suggestin…
So, I think I have two solutions here. One cleaves more closely to AW, the other more closely to Torchbearer. The viability of either of these systems depends on having really good dungeon-delving moves, which I don't have yet (and am happy to take …
You might do something like this:
A turn is a 10min period of time in the dungeon. There are dungeon moves that take 1 turn to complete, like tossing a room and whatnot.
After five consecutive turns without rest, you must rest for one turn or suff…
Another thing to bear in mind here is that AW games really only work when moves are made by one person at a time—with, at most, one person assisting. You don't want a setup that requires every party member to roll the dice every time they enter a ro…
Well, let me tell yous all a little more about what I've got so far, and the way I've framed the problem for myself.
I'm tentatively calling my game "Down There." It has some basic moves that include an "act under fire" type general move, a helping…
I'm tinkering around with something in a similar design space right now. I don't have much to show off yet.
Here's my current approach. Apocalypse World treats the conversation as continuous, to be interrupted occasionally by moves. Compare that to…
There's a lot here to take in and I might have more to say on a second read. Here's a first impression, though, which I hope is helpful. My interests currently lie in the same direction as yours—gritty fiction-first dungeon crawling, powered by the …
If I might make a suggestion, you might want to use the expression "best practice" or something like that instead of "hygiene." Hygiene sounds clinical; when used to describe anything other than physical cleanliness, it has kind of a Mengele connota…