So I recently came across Black Stars Rise – an old PbtA hack apparently made by Adam Koebel and Sage LaTorra in the original Dungeon World days.
It has a neat mechanic of damaging moves – when you take a hit of some sort, you flip a move card over to the “injured” side which has worse results for each roll.
I think this is really fun. Are there other hacks out there that have conditional changing of basic moves?
No quite what you were asking, but I took inspiration from the move card idea in that for use in What Ho World – essentially a move is either face-up, in which case it can be activated, or face-down, in which it can be used as a token to activate special effects on other moves. When a character gets time to refresh themselves, they can flip a facedown card faceup and vice versa to change up what moves they have available to them.
(link to current version of the game: http://ufopress.co.uk/2016/03/20/what-ho-world-design-diary-4-ready-for-playtesting/)
Hmmm. So, Headspace has Professional and Headspace Moves, both of which work the same way except for whether or not you take emotional stress. Which you use changes depending on whether your character has the Skill in question or if you’ve got particular emotional stress — and this is a big deal! Because Professional Moves are auto-successes, but Headspace Moves are rolled and have the chance for complications. And this gets even more complicated if someone with the proper skill is Taken Out, because then to use their Skill in the Headspace you have to make an Improvised Move roll, which are even trickier.
None of this is conditional in the same way as BSR, but its definitely a scale of “In Control” to “Out of Control” that is similar in theme.
I had an idea that I haven’t gotten to that would use changing basic moves to represent stress. Where if you’re high stress you might be worse at some things, or have more callous options when giving orders or something.
I think there’s some neat potential here. The trick to me is presenting it in a way that doesn’t seem too bloated or complicated. Flipping cards seems like it would work well.
Yeah, I remember thinking that card flipping would work well for emulating a game like Mass Effect, where you have a bunch of flashy abilities all with cool down periods. You use the move card, flip it over, and the other side tells you what you need to do to recharge it (and maybe gives you some ongoing condition while it’s recharging).