So I’ve finished up the playable my current pbta project, which I decided to use a working title (subject to change) of “The Airs and Audacity of Inner Words”. Here’s the elevator pitch:
Did you ever wonder what it would be like to have near unlimited power at the tip of your tongue? Well here’s your chance. You get to play a person who discovered their inner magic able to have nearly any effect. The down side, plenty of other people have done the same and expect you to cooperate with them. That and the fact that your power comes from burning off pieces of your soul, but that’s not a big deal, right?
Let me know what people think.
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B511-yaR3CdxTlhKNXVCVVNrS0U
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B511-yaR3CdxTlhKNXVCVVNrS0U
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Would you like to share this on the Games on Trial community? You could get a lot of good readers on there and we might even squeeze it into the current term of the RPG Book Club if people are amenable. 😉
Games On Trial
Right now I don’t feel I can guarantee my time to read other’s work
I have some unexpected free time now, so I’m going to do a live feedback as I read the document:
Page 2
– I do love the elevator pitch, it’s very colourful and really helps me to picture the setting.
– Edit to “a magical suit of tooth armor”
– OMG the books! The poor, innocent harmless books! This is a daring technique but I’m not quite sure which book I could bring myself to destroy like this… maybe Trump: The Art of the Deal? 😉
– End of the page, edit to either “Add to it the fact that…” or “Add to it this fact: …”
Page 3
– Top of page, continuing from previous edit, the last phrase in this sentence either needs some punctuation or an ‘and’ just before it.
– Second paragraph, edit to “responsible for the day to day management of the Empire” (if you want to capitalize ‘Empire’ throughout for consistency)
– Same paragraph, omit the ‘And’ at the start of the sentence “And of course…”
– Same paragraph, edit to “Poaching members tends to start civil wars”
– Further on, edit to “The Iron League of Frex…”
– Same paragraph, omit the ‘And’ at the start of sentence “And finally…”
– Same paragraph, edit to “little more than delay a death sentence and even then…”, omitting the comma between ‘sentence’ and ‘and’.
– Next paragraph, I’m not sure what the first sentence means: the ‘but’ would suggest an exception, however the end of the sentence is in agreement with the beginning?
– Generally, read through and omit all commas preceding the word ‘and’ unless it is part of a list of items or subjects which might otherwise be confused.
– Generally, omit the words ‘And’ or ‘But’ at the beginning of sentences.
Page 4
– First sentence, edit to “the able bodied people of Earth“
– At this point I’m going to skip any further editing notes of a technical nature, as I realise this is still an early draft and I imagine you would correct these yourself on the next draft, but I’m still happy to give editing notes if you would like. For the rest of this read through, i’ll concentrate on the game setting, rules and how they are communicated.
– I like the evocative stat names, I just wonder if ‘Nerve’ could be called something else to stay within the ‘substances’ feel? Wind? Spark? Also, ‘Nerve’ to me means either ‘courage & bravery’ or ‘dexterity & reflexes’, I don’t associate it with observation of detail.
– What is an Arcane’s path? Is it the same as a stat? Or a faction? Or something else?
– Are high stats good or bad? If I have a high value ‘Blood’ stat, won’t I be tearing out more pages when I use Blood? That sounds bad if the pages represent fragments of my soul.
Page 5
– When you say “two of those three may be the same,” do you mean you can pick two different targets for the same effect? Or…. something else??
– I’d like to see more definition of Hard Moves, Soft Moves, injury, pain, etc, either before or in parallel with the spell list.
– Overall, I think the spell list is inspired: I’d want to use almost every one of these, just to see the consequences in action! 😀
– I’m not 100% sure what not powering the spell means. Does it work like this: the player says what they want to happen, the MC tells the player which spell that will require and then the player decides whether to cast that spell or not? Or do they still cast it, but it has unforeseen consequences if they choose not to fuel it? This is very unclear to me.
Page 7
– I’m not sure what practical effect Blessing of Memory’s Last Gift has: what would my character gain by forgetting something? It seems like a lot of potential problems for a small narrative difference.
Page 8
– I see the explanation of what not powering a spell means here: I’d move this to nearer the start of the Magic chapter and put the spell list at the end. I’d also prefer to see really clear, definitive guidance for the MC on how to respond to a spell not being powered, instead of just leaving it up to the MC to do whatever they feel like doing.
– Also, could there be a list of concrete examples of how different spells appear depending on the Deep Word of their caster? Maybe have three example Deep Words and use them to give three examples of how each spell could manifest?
– Specialty Magic needs a lot more unpacking: what’s a role? If I don’t use stats, what number do I use?
Page 10
– What are statuses?
Page 11
– Adding a new character to this game is harsh! Is it meant to be a death spiral, so the game ends with all the PCs being soul dead? Even their replacement characters are already on the brink of soul death!
Page 12
– I’d prefer to see the character creation at least referenced sooner in the text: up until this point, I had no idea that the game used playbooks for player characters! It would also help to have some idea of the numerical range of the stats earlier, so I know whether I’m ripping out two to three pages at a time, or ten to twenty.
– I am having difficulty with the idea of ripping pages out of books: it’s a fantastic, bold, innovative resolution system, but… could it be something softer? Like using magazines and newspapers instead? Or just give players a ‘virtual’ book, like a sheet of graph paper where they can mark squares off to represent pages destroyed? As much as I love the game, I hate the mental image it conjures of four or five people sitting around a table, arbitrarily destroying books.
Page 13
– “Choose one that you like, one you hate and one you pity.” Beautiful! That’s the best way of assigning relationships I’ve seen in a long time.
Overall
I won’t go too deep into looking at playbooks, roles, etc, as I feel like they’d really need actual play to give meaningful feedback on, but I would definitely play this game. I love the idea of an alternative resolution system to dice, even if I have reservations about the exact implementation of this system, but it’s clearly PbtA in a fresh new form! I’m sure I could people to play it too, but probably as a one-shot game at first using magazines instead of books.
Thanks for the comments. I’ll need to go over them more when I’m at my computer. As far as the boom mechanic, I like it because it’s visceral. It is a reminder that magic is destroying you. As far as choosing a book, used book stores have countless $1 “gems” that are relatively guilt free to destroy. A few months ago I picked up a batch which included a book of cowboy poetry, a suspense thriller that sounded as boring as could be, and a cheesey romance whose description was probably the most racist thing I’ve ever read, so pretty easy. You can definitely use magazines, but that would make a short game, probably ok for one shots. The new character thing is to force an end game to the campaign even if new characters are needed. Think about it this way, if you start a new character with 1000 pages, what’s the rest of the group going to feel if they all have about 90 left?
Even using cheap, nasty books, I just can’t get alongside the idea of destroying them for the sake of a game. Putting any green issues aside, the idea of playing this in public puts a chill down me: what sort of impression will people carry away when they see a group of people gathered around a table, destroying books? :-O
Other than that though, I would definitely play this game in some form. 🙂
I think books sitting in a used book store is the bigger green issue. The ecological damage of making paper has been done, but the result is not used, this the damage was truly a waste. Since most of these books are ones nobody wants to read, destruction for the sake of a game may be the only use they’ll see. As far as the public thing, I guess I’m just self conscious. I think it’d be cool that the game would draw the interest of outside observers.
So I see three big reasons for Memory’s Final Gift. The first is that Arcanes can easily edit spells. The common magic may be to make yourself forget, but with a little more effort you can start covering up evidence. Or maybe you want to share a memory with another, that’s not a hard change, just edit the word forget with share.
The second is that Arcanes are people who don’t need to accept reality. Think you’re a stand up person, but you’re faction coerces you to burn down a village? You could wrestle with guilt and regret like a mature person. Or spend a large amount of time trying to repair the damage and make things right. Or you can just take the easy way out and forget you ever did anything wrong. Your self image is saved with seemingly little consequences.
The last reason is in a game where political intrigue, it sometimes is better if you can temporarily forget something that will help you act in a certain way. Maybe you forget that you hate a person so that you can get through a state dinner. Or maybe you’re planning on assassinating a superior and don’t want them to see it coming. Turn yourself into a sleeper agent and you get rid of your tells.
Overall it’s not a spell that likely will get used all the time, but when it does I foresee it having really cool narrative effects. I also think it will have more of an effect on the game than the Incantation of a Bloody Mess because most Arcanes can just spend to undo the damage.