Working on a new playbook and need advice on a move. Does this sound too unbalanced? Or powerful?
Silver–tongued devil: when you are clearly unarmed and unarmored and you make your surrender clear, you cannot be killed.
Working on a new playbook and need advice on a move. Does this sound too unbalanced? Or powerful?
Working on a new playbook and need advice on a move. Does this sound too unbalanced? Or powerful?
How about “no one present can kill you”. You still could die from a artillery shell or falling into a hole willed with spikes or something.
I’d rephrase it so that it didn’t say what others do but what you do.
Silver-tongued devil: When you make your surrender plain to all, you can always justify being brought before a higher power.
Silver-tongued devil: When you make your surrender plain to all, your surrender counts as leverage when you Manipulate.
Marshall Miller Except there’s a precedent for moves affecting other players’ actions. See the moves for the Skinner (“Lost”, “Hypnotic” and “Arresting Skinner”). I’m trying to make a playbook that is similarly manipulative, or charming under the right circumstances.
The move is, essentially, that you are protected, but that stakes are that you can’t defend yourself.
How about? “when you are clearly unarmed, unarmored and surrendering, you cannot be harmed or killed by anyone present.”
“when you are clearly unarmed, unarmored and you’ve made your surrender plain, ignore Harm.”
This, sadly, will not work. This move would mean you can ignore a grenade going up in front of your face because you showed the white flag.
Its neither too unbalanced nor too powerful. It does however, seem not-fun, to dictate that a type of action is now impossible.
I would go for something like “Pre-empt any attempts to harm you with a Manipulation to not harm you, whether or not you can speak to your attackers”.
Wouldn’t that just be Manipulate?
I can think of plenty of times in literature where a character effectively surrenders and charms their way out of being killed, the chronicler at the beginning of Name of the Wind, Tyrion Lannister (repeatedly), and even Max himself in Road Warrior. You’re saying none of those examples were fun? Because those are all examples culled from highly regarded pieces of storytelling.
A) Well, I’m suggesting you give the benefit that the person doesn’t have to be aware of/directly communicating people attacking him, that his surrender manipulates people on his behalf, more or less. There’s a lot of other variations that would work equally well.
B) Literature is a bad case-study for my argument.
There’s things that aren’t fun in literature and in gaming – like say, super serious no-personality’d face-puncher protagonists.
But what I was criticizing was a rule between different players about what could happen in the future, “No one can kill this character”*,which can exist in tabletop gaming, but doesn’t exist in literature*.
* Oh, I’m sure there’s exceptions, like magical literature, but not in Mad Max, anywho.
Mad Max never died… or stayed dead. (Although the new movie sounds like it’s dead.)
I got the idea for the move from Tyrion Lannister actually. He’s the only character I really like in Game of Thrones and every time somebody threatens to kill him he manages to distract them with his words long enough to manipulate them into working for him or staying out of his way. Plus, as I pointed out before, there’s a precedent for manipulative characters being able to dictate player actions.
but most times he is just manipulating with the money of his house or the promise of revenge from his father.
You can do it like this – you can make a move.
i think a problem here (maybe the problem) is that “cannot be killed” is not really a great reward for me, as a player. i mean, it’s already pretty hard for me to actually get my character killed, unless i’m driving towards it myself – i have to take 3 harm, then 3 debilities, then 3 more harm, to be killed against my will.
what do you want to see happen as a result of someone clearly surrendering, that isn’t already covered by a Seduce or Manipulate roll? if i were making this move, that’s what i would ask myself. for me, personally, the idea that surrendering actually grants me some kind of mystical invulnerability is pretty cool (which is why i phrased my idea in the way i did) but clearly there are other results too.
That’s a good point. I never think of the debilities because I never use them. I always manage to avoid harm with my characters and I think even if I did ever go past 9:00 I probably still wouldn’t use a debility. That’s just my style though.
Back to the drawing board…