36 thoughts on “What genre of PbtA game would you be most excited about play(test)ing?”

  2. I have not read it or much Culture, but I expect there would be overlaps. But inspirations that I have read are Charles Stross, Greg Egan, Cory Doctorow, Vernor Vinge, et al. It would be fairly-Hard SF.

  9. Jeremy Strandberg Alfred Rudzki It would focus less on characters and more on the environment; what makes stealth video games fun. Think Thief, Dishonored, and Styx. It would have much less narrative focus and be generally less heavy than BitD. It seems difficult, it might get sucked into simulationism and fail horribly, but I’m curious to see if it’s possible.

  10. Hans, there’s a game being developed by someone for samurai, but I can’t remember who (it might be someone whose signal I don’t want to boost based on the events of last year).

  12. Chanbara is not only the one I personally would like to see the most, but also a) the most original, there is a real void in the rpg for that genre; b) the more fit to the pbta system (which is more storytelling than crunchy) c) the movies might be old enough to have free rights, so you have free art

  14. I vote for Chanbara as well. The other good samurai-esque games I can think of are The Mountain Witch, Blossoms are Falling and Kagematsu, but none are PBtA.

  16. David Rothfeder It’s about horrible stage parents at a child’s glitz beauty pageant. So kind of both, except that the children are represented by inanimate objects, so they don’t “perform” per se.

  20. I knew it was either someone I loved or someone I … didn’t. Yes, Brennan’s the one to come up with SW; I played an earlier version with Brennan and its codesigner, James Mendez Hodes. It was a lot of fun. My ninja slid under a horse in a misty morning to gut a soldier.

  22. Wilhelm Norsten Robert Bohl ramonthe3rd Aha, cool, thanks for finding and posting it, I’ll have to add it to some lists of PbtA games so I don’t lose it 🙂 This does some of what I was looking for; I’ll definitely look to it for inspiration, and it’ll force me to think about how my hack would set itself apart from this (or switch to developing this out, scraping off the L5R and pushing it toward authentic Japan).

  23. Hmm, I guess this wouldn’t hurt…

    Any plans on further developing your L5R World hack, Brennan Taylor?

    EDIT: Ah, just noticed this comment – how is the “different samurai game that you can actually publish” coming along? Is it more along the lines of Chanbara than L5R or…?

  28. For those who voted for Post-human Space Opera, what would you be looking for in it to distinguish it from other sci-fi games like Uncharted Worlds, The Sprawl, and Impulse Drive (for those who have looked at it)? And for that matter, Stars Without Number, Diaspora, Eclipse Phase?

  32. Steffan DelPiano So I hadn’t looked at The Veil yet, but looking at “2.0” playtest docs, it seems to have very cool, heavily Trans/Post-Human playbooks in that vein, covering some ideas along the same lines I had previously.

  33. So here’s the skeletal embryo of that Post-human game, for anyone who can stomach very early drafts with no playbook moves and an as-yet nebulous focus: docs.google.com – Inflection:Prelude

    Have at it with suggestions and criticism! Comments in the doc itself are encouraged. The majority of it was actually written before I made this poll, though I’ve been messing with it the last week or so.

  35. There was a standout typo, but you got it. So, some thoughts.

    This is really neat. It’s far future transhumanism that emphasises the issues. It asks what ethics will we have in the future, and how do they relate to one another? I like the setup for Arcilects with the Utility Function and Intelligence Explosion (no spoilers, but I’ve been watching a lot of Person of Interest lately). Resist Force is a cool move, I can just see an armoured smartsuit reshaping to resist an attack and the onboard computer using a deflection plate to blast a hole in a wall so the user has an escape route (12+).

    Right, quirks. Raising Limited Abilities – with the tech, is there no way around this? Perhaps a longer project, perhaps it causes some fundamental change in your character, but can it be done within the scope of the rules?

    The Contact – I get it, but you remember that Contact are the pathfinders of Banks’ Culture? That (and the definition of the word) lends to a slight cognitive hiccup thinking of Contact as the stay-at-home types.

    Ok, that’s me for now.

  36. Limited Abilities represent the integral hindrances of a biologically evolved body, part of what makes a species that species, and a reminder of their origins. If a character truly wishes to overcome that weakness, they can always(?) Upload, but they’ll need to be willing to sacrifice what makes them them… and stuff. Maybe they could get to +1 specifically with augmentation, similar to how every +3 requires it.

    I have ready only part of one Culture book, so good point about the naming (it’s also actually lifted straight from the worldbuilding in the book Torchship Pilot), so I’ll likely change that.

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