I mentioned before that I was making a Cowboy PbtA hack with a skill system instead of playbooks.

I mentioned before that I was making a Cowboy PbtA hack with a skill system instead of playbooks.

I mentioned before that I was making a Cowboy PbtA hack with a skill system instead of playbooks. I thought I would give some feedback.

We had a very enjoyable session tonight with a gunslinger, an outlaw, a southern gentleman who lost everything in the war, a deranged ex sherrif with pyromania, and an assasin masquerading as a train conductor.

The skill system with the generic “Use a skill” move works very well. The big problem, however was that two of the characters (played by teenagers who do not know the genre very well) were almost identical. The problem is that the system demands more creativity from the players to come up with unique characters than a playbook system does. It is also a problem if the players don’t know the genre. In this sense playbooks do help the players a lot in creating limited but unique characters.

The other side of the coin was that one character was unique and completely out of the box: An orphan who grew up in a circus back east, became an assassin for hire and travelled from one job to the other across the continent under the cover of being a train conductor. His backstory and contacts sent the story on a tangent I did not foresee at all.

So it seems that the weakness of a skill system is also its strength – depending on the player.

Character creation and explaining the rules took about an hour, which is longer than with Dungeon world where I can have newbies playing in 30 minutes. The reason for this is that players have to write backstories, insread of just ticking selection boxes.

One other thing they liked was the fact that gunfighting with the hitpoint-less harm system is deadly. One character caught a bullet in his left lung and was out of the much of the climactic gunfight of the session. (He survived being healed by an Apache medicine man afterwards) The feeling was that it heightened the suspense of the action because there was a real chance of dying. They voted that combat was more fun than in DW, because of the higher stakes. We’ll have to see if that opinion lasts if people start getting killed.

There are some mechanical problems that may need fixing, more playtesting will tell.

The players enjoyed the session so much, it was decided that we play again tomorrow night. My only problem is, they killed my main antagonist right at the start…

3 thoughts on “I mentioned before that I was making a Cowboy PbtA hack with a skill system instead of playbooks.”

  1. Playbooks are absolutely great at giving niches to players. You might try the Spirit of 77 solution with Backgrounds and Archetypes. So you could have a Hardbitten background, a Lawman BG, Eastern Bureacrat,  Tribes, Desperado, etc, and with different roles: Rider, Vigilante, Card Sharp, Preacher. That’d allow variety without having to be “The Sheriff” or something.

  2. We had our second session of the Cowboy campaign last night. This highlighted the strength of AW’s basic moves: read a sitch and read a person. The characters’ conflicting personal agendas are starting to come to the fore. The deranged ex sherrif got some loot off the assassin’s hencman’s corpse and elected not to tell the other players about the content. (The henchman had his own agenda and double crossed the group). And then the assassin found a very valuable letter on the body of one of the antagonists, and didn’t tell the others about it either. The fault lines for pvp conflict are developing…

    We had one massive gun battle, and again the honors have to go to the AW principles. Although I rewrote all the combat moves, the principles of “When you provide covering fire” and “When you are under concentrated fire” are rock solid, these two AW-based moves just made the combat work.

    Combat is lethal. One of the characters died, his last view was of buzzards circling above the burning desert sky… I specifically asked the players about their view on this, the concencus was that you should not run across open ground when you are drawing fire, and are already injured. The feeling was that they would think more tactically in future.

    As far as the FATE like elements in the game are concerned, players invoked their characters’ aspects a few times. One player got a 9 on a shooting roll, invoked “gunslinger”, paid 1 Grit, and changed it to a 10. It changed the outcome of the fight in a very satisfying way.

    While it is still early days, the group seems to be having a blast. Our next session is scheduled for monday night.

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