Does anyone have any advice on how to approach playbook design?

Does anyone have any advice on how to approach playbook design?

Does anyone have any advice on how to approach playbook design?  I have a couple of ideas I have started working on and I’m wondering what approaches others have taken to design.

The stuff in “Advanced Fuckery” is obviously good, but it’s more at the nuts & bolts level than I’m looking for.  Anyone have any good overall advice?  “Think about these key things before starting…”  “I always get a good visual image first…”  ” Define the core of who the playbook is first…”

That sort of thing maybe 🙂

42 thoughts on “Does anyone have any advice on how to approach playbook design?”

  2. I started looking for an Archetype i felt was missing. Guy that controls big freaking monster. Kinda like the Juggernaut but scarier. 

    You should think about the stuff that really nails down what this ‘Book is about and start there. 

    The Maestro’D without cool options for designing your club isn’t good. The Quarantine has his Stasis facilities and strange options for getting his weird. The Hardholder has Hardhold creation. But it isn’t allways about Crap.

    The Brainer has Deep Brain Scan, this is like THE Brainer move. 

    I would start there. 

    Then think more about them theme you want to accomplish and search for ways to emphasise this. Look how you can make moves, that will allow a certain behaviour in play. The Master of Hounds i created feels much safer with groups then with normal people and doesn’t get them so easily. I reflected that by giving him a bad sharp. He will suck at reading sitches and persons. He has a cool Read a Pack move though, that will color his interactions with the world and gives him new information other Playbooks wouldn’t have. 

    Also think about what the inclusion of your Playbook would do to AW. Having  a Quarantine in the game says A LOT about the world. There are still people out their that know the golden world. We just have to find them and release them from their sleep. 

    The Master of Hounds will make animals more part of the game and they will be a threat. Without a Hocus, there is not such a strong religous vibe to the came, or at least there doesn’t have to be. 

    But yeah, start with the core thing. The thing that is most cool about the Playbook and makes people want to play this. 

    But fair warning, i am new to this so don’t take it to seriously. 

    I still might be right. Haha.

  3. I generally start thinking about Playbooks when I feel there is a gap in character types or character arcs.

    Often this emerges from play and the things are specific, and really what’s happened is a bunch of custom moves have been developed. Sometimes they can be coherently tied together in a way that isn’t dependent on the specific game situation, making a more general Playbook (even if the Playbook shoves games in a direction similar to the one it emerged from).

    Other times it comes from just musing over the options available. For a while, I’d been thinking about the Bridge–a Weird type character that is sort of like a shaman. Right now you have your social dominating Weird folks (Brainer and Hocus) or your inward focused Weird folks (Hoarder and Savvy Head). I wanted a Weird character who needed to interact but didn’t have the follower / domination thing going on. That was how I started to develop the Playbook. It languished for a while, for various reasons. Reading the Solace gave me a new look at it and really made concrete for me what I was trying to do with it–the articulation of the Bridge’s role was what I was thinking around, but only after reading the Solace did it congeal into that explicitly for me.

    So, tl;dr you should feel the need for a new Playbook and try to fill that need as best you can using all the tools available to you.

  4. “I always get a good visual image first…”  ” Define the core of who the playbook is first…”

    These are actually great places to start. Next I’d look at the stat lines and see what the high stats are; is this a Hot playbook or a Weird playbook? Does it get a +1 in Hard and everything else shifts around? So it’s these three questions:

    Who’s in is this playbook, and what’s their motivation?

    What’s the strong visual associated with this playbook?

    What’s the high stat for this playbook?

    Then you figure out the moves and names and special and Hx and etc.

    You can also back-end it by designing the moves you want to see and figuring out what the heck playbook uses those. Like, if you are coming up with moves that are all about talking your way out of or into stuff, and maybe there’s some weirdness  going on with that, then maybe you’re looking at a con artist of some sort? is that already well-covered in the existing playbooks? No? Then keep working!

  5. Mh, i am not a really visual guy so that approach is hard for me. I guess i have to start with defining mechanics because i can’t really start from an Audio perspective ^^

  7. I find that including a stat set you would never take yourself if you were playing it is a good starting point for thinking about expanding the Playbook beyond a specific character you have in mind for it. Even if you ditch it later, it’ll get you thinking “What does someone like this who is also Hard look like?”

  9. I was summoned but I don’t know how valuable my input will be since the playbooks I’ve done are for Monsterhearts. Just in case someone might be interested in my process, though…

    I try to start with a hybrid of a recognizable horror archetype and a familiar high school archetype. For instance one I’m working on now is a mashup of “animal shapeshifter” and “the prude/the ice queen.” It needs to be something someone can pick up and almost immediately say “oh yeah, I get what this is about and how to roleplay it.”

    Then I make a short list of keywords that reflect the main themes of the skin. Like for a different skin I’m doing now, the keywords are “duality, repression, dysmorphia, and addiction.” Through the rest of the design process I try to keep those keywords as my guideposts. If I’m making a Move and I can’t see how it lines up with at least one keyword, it needs to be reworked or scrapped.

    A lot of your flavor/theme can come out in places other than Moves. In MH you can do all sorts of neat stuff with Darkest Self and Backstory, and I figure you can pull the same sorts if stunts with Hx in AW. And don’t halfass the Look sections! It may seem trivial but I find it really helps to emphasize your theme if you have appropriate, well thought out Look options.

  11. That thing Chris Mitchell said? Very true. In the first rush of new playbooks back in 2010, I saw a goodly number that were mostly someone’s take on an existing playbook, they just hadn’t looked at it that way. This is easy when folks take the art as prescriptive instead of checking out the moves and stuff and seeing where their character concept fits. Maybe that con artist I was talking about is actually an Operator with some sort of scam as a gig!

    Topher Gerkey’s mash-up route is also cool.

  13. I still cast the Battlebabe. 

    Handle+long blade = katana

    trade your second weapon for +infinite throwing stars

    perfect instincts/Ice cold 

    Impossible reflexes

  14. then you can pick up moonlighting for Assassin gigs, Eye on the door and Easy to Trust or Just give me a motive. 

    You can pick up the other Battlebabe move i talked about and maybe Visions of Death if you have the Weird. 

  22. What Topher Gerkey said is sound advice. Moves are not the only thing that make a playbook stand out. The coolest thing about a Savvyhead is their workspace.

    I think if you’re making a playbook and it sort of emulates an existing playbook that’s not a bad thing, as long as you deviate enough from the themes and tropes of the existing playbook. Look at the Juggernaut, it’s obviously just a variation of the Driver playbook but instead of a car they’ve got a suit of armor. What makes the Juggernaut stand apart from the Driver is that there’s a different theme dictating the moves, it’s a thoughtful and gregarious character and the Driver is a loner and impulsive in comparison.

    The last thing I would say is try really hard to think outside of the box. If you’ve got a crazy idea that you don’t think would work, write it out anyway and see how it feels, tweak it and poke it and slap it around until you get something out of it or you’ve wasted it’s potential. There are some amazing concepts in the player-created playbooks, and the bonus playbooks have some pretty freaky stuff too! The Solace’s definition of wolves, the Operator’s gigs, the Hocus’es followers, the Last Child’s family, the Grotesque’s mutations, these are all simple concepts to grasp that leave tons of room for interpretation within character creation but also lay down something scary-good for the MC to toy with later.

  24. also a question. Would beeing able to fly be enough to justify a Playbook? I’d allow a Driver to pick up a Plane with Collector (but he has to loose the second car from this) but something like a weird Icarus? It’s not enough i am sure but it is interesting. 

    Maybe to random for AW, not weird enough. 

  39. Touchstone and Maestro D as well. Possibly the Skinner, depending. Maybe the Operator, although the rest of the moves don’t mean genre. Most obvious is Maestro. Change it to everybody learns and change one or two of the scene bits.

  40. Maestro, yeah natch. “Everybody learns, even that one” Cool.

    Skinner is a cool take – you’d need some moves form somewhere else perhaps. What if the Savvyhead’s workspace was a classroom?

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