Hey there, all! Check out my first draft template for one of the playbooks in my PbtA game, Wyrdish!
Wyrdish is a #destiny inspired sci-fantasy game about immortal space wizards. It’s a work in progress right now, but I’m very pleased with the look so far. This format, when printed out on regular paper, gets folded in half to create an adorable little six-page booklet.
I still have to play around with some formatting before I start on the remaining playbooks, but the general idea is that this should be everything the player needs, besides some scratch paper (and dice, of course).
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BwF75bfO6_4LeGhJemVMWXBGUE0
That does look like a lot. Not gonna lie, the size of it does put me off. I worry I’d be flipping back and forth to try and remember things. I like the concept though. Respawning with Scars adds a neat wrinkle to the usual.
Can I suggest you remove the horizontal line between Hits and Misses in the Stats section?
Agendas and Principles are, in my experience, MC facing, is there a reason they’re in the middle of the playbook?
Toby Sennett Thanks, that’s good advice! I’ll definitely be tweaking little formatting things like that as I begin revising.
As for pages, I experimented with a couple different things when I made my Dungeon World playbook revisions. I tried a fold-out system (the playbook unfolds into a three-panel shape almost like a GM screen), and while that made for a little less flipping, it wasn’t much different than just laying all the sheets out on the table.
My table quite enjoyed the booklet, because they are, after all, called playbooks, and it just seemed to fit so naturally — this is your actor’s playbook, you know? But you’re right, there’s definitely some flipping back and forth, especially until you get used to things.
I was considering also adding in move and gear cards in a separate file — you’d lay them out on the table and flip them when discharged. That would help a little.
Jonathan Perrine There is!
Instead of alignments, it’s common for a lot of Dungeon World players to use drives — and a lot of other PbtA games use something similar, too — a character-creation choice about who you are and why you behave the way you behave that sort of informs the shape of the character.
Well, in Fellowship, a lovely PbtA game with a Lord of the Rings, we team up to take out an evil overlord vibe (the GM is literally an overlord, with stats and minions; it’s brilliant!), agendas show up right on the playbooks — and I found that just such a smooth move, for a few reasons:
It uses language already in the game. While the GM doesn’t usually speak their move, many players will at least be curious about if not already informed of what those moves and other rules are. This couches both sides in the same language, which makes it feel a little more evenly distributed.
Second, it clearly communicates in a single word what that choice is: an agenda is easy to understand, which is why agendas and principles were named that way to begin with.
Lastly, pairing player agendas — universal agendas players should remember — with a character agenda hearkens back to the first reason, which is that it cuts down on language and reminds the player that they go hand in hand. It says, “remember, this is how to play your character.”
As for where they are physically located, I’m still finalizing that. If I haven’t bungled my layout, they ought to appear after character creation in the pages, mostly because that puts them closer to the stats page and the basic moves, which is where you’ll be spending most of your time — you only ever return to CC at the end of a session, or if you’ve forgotten a very basic fundamental about who your character is.
But I did consider putting them inside the title flap, as the first thing the player sees. Not 100% sure yet.
(This also reminds me, does anybody know of an easy way to chop these in half and reorder them in pdf? That would be way easier for people to read online as I put them up for peer review, rather than keeping them in print order.)