For my PbtA hack for my in-person group, I’m considering having the stuff you get (like a cult, gang, etc…) be separate from the playbooks, and the playbooks are more “this is how you got weird” (since, the characters in it are mutations of a sort, and you may have “gotten weird” by dying and coming back, by being ridden by a spirit or so on).
Has anyone tried a mechanic where the stuff like mentioned above is separate from the playbooks? Could “background” (who you are as a person before you got weird, I guess) work as a distinct thing from “now you’ve gotten weird, and this is the stuff you can do because of it”?
I’m thinking for now, I may just ask players questions about their characters and give them stuff (gear, cult, etc…) based on how they answer it, and after seeing how that tends to work, maybe formulate backgrounds more solidly later.
I can see that working. Things that occur to me in no particular order:
Gear and crap in basic AW reinforces niche protection. The battlebabe is awesome but the gunlugger can start with a grenade launcher. The brainer and hocus may both be compelling and intense, but only one starts with a cult. If two players both want to be leaders of settlements, how’s that going to affect play?
Also, what’s the weight of these backgrounds? Does a personal armoury equate to a car, or a workshop? Will it be decided by fiat, or some kind of point-buy system? How will the players regard it? I do like the idea, but consider the ramifications.
I think I’ll try to push them towards not picking backgrounds too similar, or if they do, make them work (in maybe a lifepathish sort of way) towards something that results in them being sufficiently different.
I don’t know that any of the backgrounds really can equate to one another… I get the impression that even in the playbooks that supporting a concept is more important than balance with gear, cults and other stuff… I could be wrong about that, as I’ve played a few different PbtA games, but not AW itself (but I’ve managed to get through a pretty hefty chunk of the book for it).
I worry about point buy getting a little convoluted/overcomplicated with this… but, I could see some sort of priority system, maybe. I could also see maybe some of the “stuff” being “Hey you can take this stuff, but, it’s sooo much cool stuff, that you have to sacrifice one of your special moves to get it”.
Actually, hmmm, I wonder if I should totally ban something like two players getting settlements for instance or not, because, that could be interesting too, if there’s some sort of competition going on between them, or some other sort of relationship between the two… I think it depends on what the players want for any of these instances, and I’ll have to make a point of asking them to make sure that if someone picks the same stuff they actually talk out how that interacts with the other player’s stuff.
Ultimately, if they go the route they usually do though, I suspect one person is going to want to pick something, and then some of the others are going to end up wanting to play some role within it, while another character might want to have their own thing going on that could interact with it (either in a for or against manner). They’ve started businesses, founded settlements, and done some more questionable things, like black market endeavours in my games (not PbtA, but, still) many times before…
John Harper did a lot of work in that direction with Blades in the Dark. I recommend you check it out
I toyed around with a supers hack for quite a while that split playbooks into two halves: the Origin half gave the character’s background and connections, with the reason why they have superpowers, whilst the Style half gave the specific superpowers they had.
Listening
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Sigh, one more reason for me to want to buy Blades in the Dark, and my RPG budget is just about tapped out for a while… tempting.
James, how did your handling of that end up going in play? Did it work well?
TBH, it worked better from an MC’s perspectives than a players. The system has mostly been used to create pre-genned characters for pick-up & play games (there’s a hack based on the Sentinels of The Multiverse characters) It actually turns out to significantly slow the process for players: as they have to choose two playbooks then make specific choices on each of those, it means character creation is a much slower process unfortunately.
It should help then that the crew sheets are a free download. It’s also worth noting crew rules are designed to be a completely optional part of the game evilhat.com – Blades in the Dark – Downloads
Very cool. I’m not seeing how what crews characters get are determined though. Just gained through roleplay?
I think you mean how they decide crew type, which is basically gained when the crew forms. Ie when the table decides they are playing a campaign.
So it’s just decided by the players. They pick the one that best fits what they want to do (see XP triggers). Or they use the custom one and mix n match. Many of my tables don’t have to pick one until after session 1