I have a question about The Joined.
At present, there isn’t a clear indication of how the Joined interacts with the other new playbooks. Is there a good rule of thumb for applying the joined to new or fan playbooks without explicit instruction and/or is explicit instruction forthcoming?
Easy rule of thumb: Don’t.
Joking aside; Alberto Muti and me can probably whip something up for the Newborn.
There are some notes in the Halcyon City Herald Collection about how to use the Joined with the other playbooks in that book, and how to modify the Joined for any other playbooks, but T. Franzke isn’t off-base with the joke! 🙂
The Joined, like most of the new playbooks, is neat because it pulls the game in brand new directions. Playing the Joined alongside a new playbook is going to pull the game pretty darn hard! That’s not to say you can’t, of course—just to say that we wanted the default to be using the Joined with the basic playbooks.
As a helpful default it makes plenty of sense especially given layout constraints. Personally, I like letting players pull the game in as weird a direction as I can follow and in Apocalypse World I’ve messed around with unusual scenarios involving a curated set of playbooks which is something I could really see enjoying with Masks.
So one way or another, I’m fairly certain it will come up eventually and I was curious how much official wisdom I’ll have on hand to help me when it does. 🙂
The rule seems to be 2 moves & a bonus feature, but different.
“The Youth” can’t be Joined. One tween in the party is plenty. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Htnv5KQdEgOROsfkO7TbwvyfJTj6e43nf_t0vQcwhBM/edit?hl=en&forcehl=1
Adam Goldberg By coincidence I posted this an hour or so before getting an e-mail that the preview of Halcyon City Herald Collection is up on Backerkit. I took a look at that and it has pretty detailed advice.
The shortest version is more like: If there’s no extra, two moves one TOH has and one they don’t. If there’s an extra with features/abilities, share in the restrictions but select those features separately. If there’s an extra with independent fiction, let TOH establish that extra and then embellish it with an extra choice from relevant lists and so forth.