When designing a playbook, how many moves do you feel is too many for a player to choose from?
When designing a playbook, how many moves do you feel is too many for a player to choose from?
When designing a playbook, how many moves do you feel is too many for a player to choose from?
Depends on what the playbook starts with. Look at the basic playbooks as a guideline, but most playbooks that start with something really cool tend to get options for modifying it rather than new moves. After character creation you might want 3 to 5 moves o be available for progression, unless the character starts with something really powerful like a hold or a gang.
3-5 is a good rule of thumb. I gave 4 to a playbook with a starship, another with some psi powers got 5, but one of its 3 mandatory moves is a disadvantage. I’ve seen successful playbooks with two.
I don’t think there’s such a thing as too many, as long as each of them brings something unique and fun to the table. You got to try to avoid the trap of coming up with moves that are nothing but stat bonuses; that’s not really what AW is about, and the system won’t support them too well.
You really don’t want a player getting a consistent +3 bonus before you have a good idea of how to properly challenge them
The players should have enough options to have some choice, but not so many options that there’s no tough choice to make.
On the contrary, watching players agonize over choices between – and within – playbooks has been one of the joys of playtesting my hack.
Are you kidding? Just giving the option to choose from other character’s move is already a hard choice…. =P
The important thing is that the decisions need to be about character development, not metagame. If the players are agonizing over decisions because there’s so many cool things they can do with their characters, that’s good. If they’re agonizing over decisions because they want to increase their damage output, or survivability? Not so much.
If they’re agonizing, that strikes me as bad. It’s supposed to be pick up an play, right? That’s the point of all of your choices fitting on one piece of paper.
Oh no. Choosing between options should be a tough choice. If everyone takes the same stuff you shouldn’t have given them choices in the first place. I found that players who agonized over their choices have a clear idea of what moves they want to pick up with their advances. Those players were also very committed to the characters they ended up choosing.
Just because it fits on one page doesn’t mean it should be an easy process to get it on there.
Plus, rememeber that rolling a new character is very much a part of the late game experience in the Apocalypse Engine, to the point that it’s listed as an advancement option! The implication is that the playbooks should be so stuffed with cool ideas that players should WANT to make a new guy, when the time is right!
Exactly. Everyone who spent time agonizing between my playbooks is so eine who knows exactly what they want to do after I kill their character,
Nobody has had more than the equivalent of 2 harm in 4 sessions, but what they’ve gained is balanced by what it cost them to get it.