When a character chooses their advancement, do they choose one for each career or just one single advancement? On page 162, it’s kind of unclear to me.
When a character chooses their advancement, do they choose one for each career or just one single advancement?
When a character chooses their advancement, do they choose one for each career or just one single advancement?
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I believe the book says: you choose ONE advancement, unless it’s a 2-3 player game, then you can choose TWO.
Thanks! Another question, if you don’t mind. Can you impose a minor penalty to rolls if things are more difficult than normal. Say for example a character is injured badly and they’re trying to Launch an Assault. Would it be bad form to say? “But, roll with a -1 because of your injuries.”
Rolling with a -1 due to injuries sounds like a debility, which is covered by the rules.
I regularly give players +1/-1 in every PbtA game I play if their fictional positioning aids or interferes with what they’re doing
Technically, yes that is bad form. Difficulty isn’t modeled by penalizing the players, but by ramping up consequences. It’s not unheard, but isn’t strictly speaking by-the-book.
Depending on the Injury, deciding to Launch an Assault might be a golden opportunity — meaning the MC can just dish out a hard move on the fly. (“Okay, yeah, so you jump this guy and you immediately know it was a bad idea when you feel all of those stitches pop out. You’re going to need to get it treated again. Now go ahead and roll your move.”)
Similarly, depending on the Injury, you have fictional positioning to justify additional picks on a bad roll. (“Okay, so, there’s some collateral damage — you’re using a scattergun, duh — and that manifests as the alarms going off when your scattergun perforates the fire alarm on the far wall.” “Okay, cool, so I–” “Hang on buddy. ALSO, the enemy suffers a lesser condition. You shoot him, sure, but he’s crawling away and vanishes into the elevator when your head starts spinning.” “Seriously?” “Look, chief, you’re the one who decided to get into a fight while nursing a concussion.”)
These ideas have already covered by others, but the ways I tend to do it:
– Require additional explanation from the player about how they overcome the problem. “So how exactly are you going to fight off those thugs with a broken leg?” Maybe this triggers more rolls, maybe it doesn’t.
– Require an additional explicit “prerequisite” roll. “Your leg is broken, so roll Physique to see if you can manage to fight hopping around on one leg.”
– Harsher consequence for failure / partial success. “Trying to brawl with a broken leg was a bad idea. The thug saw your weakness and kicked you right in the kneecap, dropping you to the floor. What grim-looking weapon is he now holding to your throat?”
Thanks guys. I’m new to pbta games
Another question–with Cramped Quarters. The move is trigged when players
spend time in a confined space with each other. But the move also describes
a question. So is it triggered by a question, or by the confinement? It’s
kind of vague and confusing.
Part of Cramped Quarters is one player asking another player a question.
Only on a 7-9 right? On a 10+ they just bond and there’s no questions? Or
am I reading this wrong?
No you’re right.
Cramped Quarters is supposed to be an interpersonal scene between two characters, like you see in a TV show.
Firefly example: Maybe Mal and Kalie sit down and have a chat on a long journey. On a 10+, perhaps they play some mahjongg and talk about their teenage years. On a 7-9, Kalie might ask Mal about what happened during the war. On a 6-, maybe Mal says something about him thinking of her like a brother more than a sister and Kalie gets all mad about it.
If you’re missing anything, it might be that you’re trying to math out something that should be character inter-play as if it were a mechanical scene.
Cramped Quarters is also a move meant to manufacture things to talk about. This game is a conversation, right? It says so in the book: you talk, I talk, we talk, about sci fi stuff.
Sometimes when the crew hops on the ship and heads off to another planet, well, nobody really has much to say? But you don’t want to completely ignore the journey and say “what with one thing and another, you all arrive at Hyperion.”
So, Cramped Quarters. Bam. Who is hanging with whom, who is curious about whom, who pisses off whom. Roll the dice and discover something to talk about briefly to cover what the journey was like.
Do you think it would be a bad idea to make a list of gear/equipment players can choose from at creation? I’m trying to think of a few clever ways to save time before the session creating the characters. I thought about just doing premades, but I don’t want to take away their ability to customize. I figure if they have a list to choose from with gear, it would save a lot of time and effort. I think I would disclaim to them that if there’s something on the list they don’t see, or they had something unique to their character in mind, we can take time to discuss that. Otherwise, if you want a shotgun, there’s the “stats” for one.
I think it is 100% fine to prep some gear stats.
There’s already a lot of premade stuff on the gear pages; what I did for my game was I just printed those out. My groups have always been about 50/50 on just choosing stuff off the list and bothering to build new stuff. I will say that building stuff doesn’t really take up any time, except when people get confused about calculating an item’s Class.
You can also build lists as part of world creation. Like decide what are common items and rare items on a certain world or something.