Got the physical book yesterday, it looks beautiful but… Where are the playbooks? They are not in the rulebook. Sure there’s a chapter that’s sort of about the playbooks, but the actual playbook mechanics are missing.
Was this an oversight or design choice, because it invalidates the back of the book that says the playbooks are in the book.
A similar question was asked on the PDF over at DriveThruRPG: the lack of playbooks in the book was a specific choice, and they need to be downloaded separately. The quote:
“We had to make a tough choice with this book: cut multiple pages of material to make room for the playbooks/move sheets or host the playbooks/move sheets outside of the book. Ultimately, we figured that folks download them anyway, so we decided not to include them in the direct text.”
I imagine they were at some kind of limit in terms of either cost or binding or similar with their printer. No way to just stuff in the 20 to 25 extra pages of material without screwing everything up.
EDIT: I guess more like, what 50 pages? The playbooks and GM sheets are each 4 pages long, after all.
Yup! Since so many players are relying on PDF copies of the playbooks for actual play (and not making much use of the book), we decided to focus the book on real advice and tools instead of repeating the playbooks. Please see our website (and DTRPG) for PDFs of all the playbooks and other downloads. Thanks!
Makes perfect sense – photocopying a playbook from the book itself was just going to be awkward at best – but it definitely caught me off-guard when I went looking.
Yeah, tell that to my roommate I tried showing the book to to see if she’d like one of the character playbook types for her to go… errr, I can’t check them out in the book because they are NOT there. IMO, bad design choice. It breaks convention of PbtA books having these books and all game rules in one source because, honestly, they have to be there. As a rules reference, so we don’t have to flip through multiple sources of rules, and as a guide within the book so everything can be referred to.
Knocks this book down a couple ratings at least because it’s simply not a complete game book. Requiring people to actually print out rules because… bad. Making people have to print out extra rules to fill in the gaps that should be in the main book… bad. This also makes it impossible to hand the book to somebody who doesn’t fully grasp what the game is as a PbtA game book and without being able to read the Playboooks rules yet have all the extra rules that keep referring to them in the book… really, really bad.
I had the same question, so I looked in the index and introduction for a hint where to look. I didn’t see a specific URL in 30 seconds of searching, though maybe one is there. I might know to look online, but I’d be reluctant to loan the book to another person who had no context for this.
This is only tangentially related. But I received my hard copy yesterday. And I am trying to compile all the playbooks to print out. However I, being the totally tech savvy individual I am. Was wondering where we could download the stretch goal skins.
I agree that a URL to the supplemental materials required to play would have been an essential addition to the book.
I disagree, though, that you need to have eyes on these materials in order to know enough about the game’s rules and the playbooks to play. There Is far more comprehensive coverage of each playbook in the core rules. The sheet is just a cheat/tracking sheet for your character. I don’t need to know all the rules of the Bull’s Heart to understand what it means, how to roleplay it, or to know if that’s the character I want to play. All that information is contained in the book.
Maybe my perspective is that of a newbie. Never having laid eyes on a PbtA product before, no rules references made any sense to me anyway. 🙂
My thoughts exactly. If you can’t figure out what a playbook is about from the rulebook’s clear discussion of its themes and moves (with examples that are absent from the sheets) then I don’t think the playbook would necessarily explain it better. Differently sure, but probably not better.
@Marc- The additional playbooks haven’t been released yet. We’ll post here when we get them out the door.
@All- The URL for the playbooks is included in the book under “What You Need to Play,” but you can also find everything on our website:
http://www.magpiegames.com/masks/masks-playbooks-moves/
We’ll try to make the URL more clear in the future! Thank you for the feedback. 😀
I’ll just disagree with the decision because none of it makes any kind of sense on any level of reality. Either a core rules book is either a complete game, or incomplete… and this one is very incomplete and not what I backed for.
Just because they ‘figured’ and ‘assumed’ players would do something doesn’t mean all of us will. And just because we ‘may’ download them doesn’t mean we will use them as a pdf.
That’s a lot of ‘assuming’ and ‘maybe’s and ‘ifs’ and ‘presumptions’ without taking into consideration what we were pledging for in the first place. A complete rules game book. It’s a lot of assuming that everybody would be okay with this kind of decision… please don’t assume.
Why did you have to cut pages out of the book in the first place is the real question? I mean, the kickstarter funded extremely well and it should have been more than enough for the writer to produce and write the book he wanted to write, so why did this design decision even have to happen? Isn’t that the purpose of using Kickstarter, to get the funding to write the book you want to write and produe and get published? Would you have been able to get the entire book you wanted had you gone black and white instead of color?
I’d have rather had a black and white complete game book than a full color incomplete game book any day.
I’ll buy your full color incomplete game, if you want. Missed the KS, myself.
I think it’s disingenuous to say the book is incomplete. Character sheets NEED to be available as separate printable forms. They do not need to be in the book.
@Stacie- We’re sorry to hear that the book isn’t what you wanted. We’re happy with the decisions we made, but we understand that some folks have a different idea of what the book should include. If you’d like to talk more about it, please drop us an email at info [at] magpiegames.com and we’ll see if we can make it right for you.
@Alfred- The book will be up for sale on our webstore after January 1st. Thanks!
I personally like the idea of having the playbooks separate (just my opinion). When I bought the book from drivethrurpg, they were added into my downloads (made it easier to print them out), now I’d love to get a hard copy of the book, but I’m fine with my coil bound book ( I printed it out).
The playbooks, moves and GM moves are also available on their website for free!
Any who, I’m pleased with the out come.
looking forward to the limited edition playbooks mentioned (The Brain, The Harbinger, The Innocent, The Joined (yes, hello Shazam!), The Newborn, The Reformed (looking forward to this one), The Soldier (hopefully Captain America ideas), The Star (Can you say Booster Gold!)
Sorry I just love this game and its storytelling capabilities.
Enough rambling.
Ron
I am just learning I may have Aspergers (AS), and when I reread what I wrote, I am thinking that this was an influence in how I responded to getting the book.
Personally I think it’s a fine choice, given the realities of why the choice was made, better to have good examples and explanations in the rulebook than the playbooks that I can freely download and print as needed!
Personally I disagree with the choice because of a number of reasons. One – the Playbooks are the game Without them the rulebook is incomplete as is the game. Advice is something you can give out free on a blog. Playbooks are required to play the game.
Two – not everyone is using PDFs, and there may be times when people want to run the game and don’t have easy internet and/or printer access.
Effectively it means that the free downloads on the site are the game and the rulebook seems kind of extraneous to playing the game. Why are people paying money for “advice” when all the tools for playing the game are free? It’s a weird business decision that just doesn’t make logical sense.
It’s one of those things that may look logical, but it really isn’t. It limits the audience, limits the access to the core element of the game. I’m at a loss to think of any kind of material that would go in the book that would be more important than playbooks.
I love Masks, but this decision was not a logical or smart one if Magpie are looking to expand sales beyond a very small community.
Lee Griffin I disagree. What use are examples without having the playbooks that they are based on? Again – having it a separate PDF download for free is impractical and inconvenient if they aren’t also in the core book.
Troy Ray They’re more than character sheets though, Troy. They’re character rules and creation. Without playbooks you can’t create a character. (And given the merry hell RPG publishers get when they don’t include the character sheet in the corebook anyway, your example is still not a sound one because people do consider lack of a character sheet as making a product incomplete.)
Edit: If you can’t create a character, you can’t play the game. It’s pretty much the definition of incomplete. And having it as a PDF download is making a lot of assumptions about the audience as well as limiting the accessibility of the game itself. PDFs of playbooks are great – don’t get me wrong – but not having them in the core rulebook to make way for pages of stuff you can’t use without having the playbooks is the definition of incomplete.
The idea that GMs wouldn’t be able to plan to download and print playbooks is an argument to me that feels very fake.
And while the free resources are very useful, the notion that I could run a game without the rulebook is an argument I can’t see
Conan McKegg I’m not very familiar with Apocalypse World games. Is the custom to make photocopies of the Playbooks from the book in order to pass out when you play? Or do you use blank sheets of paper and write down all your information using the Playbook as a guide? Do they come perforated so they are easy to tear out and use when you play?
How do you create a character in other AW games that include the Playbook in the core rules?
I don’t know one person who has ever flattened the book on a photocopier to get the info. It’s spread across a bunch of pages requiring loads of flipping.
People print them off from PDFs. Everyone does.
That’s not a compelling argument. That’s purely anecdotal. Easily refuted thusly – I know many many many GMs who have “flattened” a book on a photocopier.
I even feel confident in saying the number of people I know who photocopy character sheets out number the number of people you’ve known personally who printed from PDF.
Again – the problem here is that for the rules to be complete you need the playbooks. Choosing to not publish the playbooks in the core rules just because you personally know some people who will print the playbooks separately is not logical or smart.
I’m not arguing that the playbooks shouldn’t be available as a free download – I’m saying that not including them in the actual printed core rulebook is not an intelligent nor business savvy decision to make.
It’s a short sighted decision and one that makes a lot of assumptions that overlook how limited it makes the value of the book and overvalues things like “advice.”
Troy Ray Yes. The custom is to photocopy from the book as much as it is to write on a blank piece of paper or print from a PDF.
I’ve been to gaming conventions where people have spontaneously decided to play games like Monster of the Week or Monsterhearts and had to write up characters on the spot because the GM had run out of character sheets.
You know how they managed to play the game? But using the playbooks in the core book.
Seriously there are some weak sauce arguments being made to defend limiting a core rules element to a separate PDF.
I’m not ragging on the game – it’s an awesome game. I’ve preordered practically every book and I don’t regret it one bit. But I’m not going to just smile and fanboy when the company makes a short sighted boneheaded decision like taking a core element of the rules and not put it in the core book.
Here’s the harsh, blunt, truth. Advice essays are rarely read by a majority of players. They are filler, not crucial material. They do not provide tools they just give one person’s opinion on how to interact with the tools.
I’ve worked as a freelance writer for RPGs, and I have seen it first hand. Players want rules, setting, and brief clear play examples to help explain rules. Advice essays are a nice to have but not worth removing the core character creation rules and abilities.
It’s not a smart business decision. It’s not a smart design decision.
Cool.
Conan McKegg I understand what you’re saying and I wanted to offer this as a different perspective: MASKS is unlike other AW games in style and tone and the rules reflect that a great deal. The advice essays are necessary for two types of people…
A) People unfamiliar with the teenage superhero genre and how to incorporate the themes and archetypes into a roleplaying game using this engine.
B) People unfamiliar with AW engine need the advice to tell them how and when moves get triggered. This also applies to people familiar with other AW games because I see them asking all the time “How can do X move from this other game in MASKS?” And we have to explain to them, “MASKS doesn’t work like this… We aren’t defying danger or sexing people up.” This is a different game.
I have the Bull Playbook printed up right now in front of me. To say that this Playbook I’m looking at IS THE GAME is a bit of an overstatement. Nothing on these two sheets of paper tells me anything about the game. I don’t know what moves are or how they are used. I don’t know what these Labels mean or anything. When I saw playbooks for the first time I thought, “Oh… these are for people who have never roleplayed before because they list all these choices that you circle and check off because you don’t have experience creating your own character. Aw… they even tell you what powers you have.”
If I want to run this game at a convention and I don’t want to run out of character sheets… I laminate this one and all the others and pass out dry erase markers to my players.
I think it’s disingenuous to say people have more access to photocopiers than they do to PDFs and printers. And I don’t think it’s a poor design decision. If you have limited space and you think some advice is important and you have the Playbooks which are needed outside of the book to play, you might decide to leave them separate to make room for examples and advice.
I guess I am having a difficult time grasping how anybody approves of them releasing the game incomplete with false advertising and broken promises.
A game, any game, that is a representation of an intention of what that game is, should have ALL the necessary rules required that makes up the core rules must be in the rule book.
This is further encapsulated by the fact that this game was Kickstarted. It got how many thousands of dollars, and yet they felt they couldn’t release a complete product… Isn’t that the purpose of the KS, to get the funds for the writer to get to be able to finish the book in his vision??? It would have been better to wait, be patient, and take as long as necessary till the book could have become the best possible version it could have been.
And if this decision was made because of too many stretch goals stretching the funding too thin… Then there were too many stretch goals.
No book is more important than the core book of any game line.
We would have waited. There was no hurry.
Who did they promise “the character sheets will be in the book?”
People are probably approving because they’re having no difficulty printing out the character sheets and getting going. I’m not sayin there are no people having problems, obviously. But the reason people are going “fair enough,” is because opening a second PDF and getting it printed isn’t a barrier to them for whatever reason.
I think it’s overly dramatic to throw around the accusation that the game has been released incomplete (everything is available) or that any promises have been broken.
Alfred Rudzki The back cover says the book includes 10 Playbooks for young superheroes.
Troy Ray Solid! Didn’t know that! Thank you for answering simply and without being upset. Cool, yeah, the book shouldn’t say that.
Troy Ray I think it’s overstating the game to say that it’s so different from other AW games that it has to have more advice on how to play AW games than games like Monster of the Week (another crunchy AW game) has.
Teen supers is not an obscure genre by a long shot.
And it’s also disingenuous to call playbooks simply character sheets. They aren’t. They are character rules. The whole point of playbooks is that they provide specific genre rules for each “type” in an AW game.
In order to play the game they are required. To play D&D you don’t need a character sheet. To play any AW game you need the playbooks. Even if you’re writing the details down on a piece of paper and just referring to the rule book to use your moves, you still need them.
The rule book itself keeps referring to the playbooks. It is an incomplete game.
Let me put it another way – if you were skimming through the hard copy in a retail store would you have a good idea of how each type worked mechanically and how to create those characters?
Or how about when you’re at a convention and just want to pull out the game to play for a couple of hours – if you have to print out playbooks prior to going you need to have copies of every type because you can’t anticipate what the three other players might pick.
I can think of dozens of reasons why having the playbooks in the core book as well as free PDF playbooks is not only a good idea but essential to getting people keen to play the game.
I’m disappointed that Magpie were short sighted about that. I have a number of AW games. Look at the soon to be released Farflung RPG – that setting is more obscure than Masks, it has more complex rules than Masks, and even they are publishing the playbooks in the core book. Because they aren’t just character sheets. They are core rules required to be able to play the game.
I never played or read an AW game before this one. I never used character sheets from books. I always (since 1997) got sheets from Mr Gone’s website.
Would you be happy if Magpie admitted it was an oversight on their part and apologized for rushing and incomplete product to market?
Troy Ray No because it’s not an oversight. They made a deliberate decision. What I would be happy with is the admission it wasn’t the right call. But they claim to be happy with it which shows a short sighted perception of how people use rules.
I’m just hoping that they heed that this was not a unanimously popular decision and if they ever plan to do a second edition that they remember to put the playbooks in the core product rather than just assume it’s not necessary.
Conan McKegg Either way, they seem to have made a mistake. I didn’t realize it until today, though. But now that I think about it, they rectified the mistake as best they could by putting all the “cheat sheets” and Playbooks out for free download. That’s the most direct and cost efficient way of handling an error (in judgment) like this.
I’m still satisfied with my backing of this Kickstarter. I think my non-familiarity with AW games, familiarity with PDFs and internet access numbed me to the importance of the Playbooks and having them published in the core rules.
Troy Ray we can agree on being satisfied with backing the game. I think Masks is one of the most fun AW hacks I’ve played. 🙂
This appears to be an old thread, but I went searching and found it when I received my copy of Masks and could not find the actual playbooks in it (retail purchase btw, not kickstarter backer).
Count my vote in the “Please don’t ever do this again” column.
I have not backed a Magpie PbTA kickstarter before, and now I will not feel confident to do so in the future. Same with purchasing any future Magpie PbTA games from their website without clarifying whether the playbooks are actually included.
The most worrisome thing to me is that what Magpie has done here will catch on with other designers of PbTA games and they’ll begin doing it too. (Please! Other designers… do not do this!)
It is correct that currently, the playbooks are easily acquired in PDA form and printed out. And if I wanted to be required to get PDAs to go along with my paper book, then I wouldn’t have an issue. However I, as one consumer, expect the playbooks to be included when I buy a PbTA game (not a supplement, but a game) . It never occurred to me to need to check, but going forward I now will check, and will not buy another PbTA game without confirming their inclusion in the hardcopy version. (Incidentally for Masks in particular, the GM questions list and their “required order of asking” should be in the core book too, from the Introduction phase of play.)
Obviously Magpie will do whatever they want to do, but this is my opinion about the issue.