I’ve never played a PBTA game. What should a player do when their character gets killed or reaches retirement on the advancement track?
Is it expected that everyone will play multiple characters over the course of a full campaign story?
I’ve never played a PBTA game.
I’ve never played a PBTA game.
Hello Jen! That’s a good question. If someone loses a character through death, retirement, or another reason, we just have them make a new one and intergrate them into the group through their Ties That Bind. Newbies is a classic military trope, so we do recommend they come in at a lower rank than the others.
I’ve run or played in a couple campaigns of The Watch and I’ve seen one character death and one character choose to walk away from their duties and go AWOL. In both cases, new characters were made and it went great.
Also, if it’s useful at all, I’ve written a quick intro to PBTA games, you can find it here: docs.google.com – The Watch – Quick Start Rules
You can. Pbta allows for very smooth additions to the cast. In fact, Apocalypse World you could eventually play multiple characters. Differences in the number of moves earned turn out not to be a problem for the play experience
Is the new gal subject to the “no duplicates” rule?
As in duplicate playbook?
Yeah. I’m thinking about the situation where all 5 playbooks are in use and then someone’s character leaves the party – do they start over with the same playbook or can they use a new one?
I don’t see why not, I would just ask permission of the person playing the playbook being duplicated. Otherwise, go nuts!
That’s an interesting choice in a pbta game design. Is each playbook unique in the world, like “The Gunlugger” in AW, or do you allow for a small number of duplicates like “a werewolf” in MH
Well the characters are all soldiers, so there is already some overlap. That being said, we still enforce no duplicates at character creation (unless you for some reason have 6 players).
I’m running an AW game right now where it looks like some duplication is going to be unavoidable soon (there are PCs with a lot of advancements that have led to cross-playbook moves and alts), and I actually haven’t had a problem with it at all: until you get close to “maxing out” a playbook’s advances, two Gunluggers (or whatever) can look REALLY different from each other: at various points in time two players had created Savvyheads, one very Maelstrom focused, one very tech focused, and while they never ended up in play simultaneously, they couldn’t have been more different.