Just a design question I’ve been curious about…
I’m getting to know all the flavors of *World, and I noticed that for many versions players choose characters from a buffet of character “classes.”
How come you didn’t go that direction with Worlds of Peril?
You could have easily identified super archetypes, like the Energy Controller, the Size-Changer, the Martial Artist, etc.
I would venture to guess that character classes don’t make sense in a superhero game. Every one I’ve seen with classes wasn’t very good.
We started out doing something similar – though we always had powers open and not specific as books (we had playbooks like – “The Brain” and “The Guardian” etc. for certain tropes).
The thing is – if we did playbooks for each kind of ability we’d have insane amounts of playbooks we’d need to make and even then we’d still be limiting what people can do with their powers.
Not only that, but if the moves were about powers, not only would they be limiting, but there wouldn’t be anything to show drive and motivation. Or, if we did include motivations and drive then that would mean every single martial artist, shape-changer, etc. would be pretty similar in that they all had the same moves.
This way your powers are completely open and you can do whatever you want with them. In addition, no character is going to be alike because they can show their character’s goals and motivations with their Drive Book and choose their Origin Book for some backstory too. The more stuff you can change up and leave open, the more different each character will be.
Wow, good question! But Kyle beat me to it. lol
Ok, sounds like a good decision.
Great insight. I think this modular style will be an eye opener across the system and hope to see more happen with it
I think it’s a great direction, what makes super-heroes interesting isn’t what makes them super, but what makes them heroes.
While I definitely think it’s the way to go for supers (obviously), I think there’s a trade-off there as well. You lose the pick-up-and-play nature of playbooks which is kind of a dream come true for new players or con games.
A bit more prep and thought needed for character creation and for pick-up-and-play games is what we lose out on right. Whether the modular style is something we’ll see more of will be interesting to see I think!
I don’t see why you couldn’t supplement this method with traditional playbooks… Maybe an alternative way to play for conventions or one-shots?
I’m not sure what you mean by traditional playbooks – if you mean pre-made characters then yeah, I’d assume that in a con or one-shot setting you’d probably prepare a few character concepts for players to choose from.
That’s pretty much what I mean, but by “traditional,” I was referring to the “class” playbooks like those in DW.
I realize these are different from your current design considerations, so I was just brainstorming/hypothesizing/rambling… 🙂