This is a pretty hot mess, but it’s a PbtA hack I used with my home group for a while.

This is a pretty hot mess, but it’s a PbtA hack I used with my home group for a while.

This is a pretty hot mess, but it’s a PbtA hack I used with my home group for a while. It was a weird Dying Earth genre meets steampunky magi-tech and some other stuff where the players were involved in the game’s narrative (and doing world building to some degree) IN-character.

I really wanted to be a thing but couldn’t quite find a solid enough vision for it for it to really go anywhere. Still, maybe someone will find things in it which they want to use with their group, and can have some fun with.

I also used the rules formed in here as the basis for my current PbtA hack that I’m running with my group.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B7iiKs6gf8dDU2ZKb19GdFA3eFU?usp=sharing

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B7iiKs6gf8dDU2ZKb19GdFA3eFU?usp=sharing

4 thoughts on “This is a pretty hot mess, but it’s a PbtA hack I used with my home group for a while.”

  1. This looks great. I live this setting! I’m curious about the choice of d10s. Did you find that the math worked better for the style of play you were looking to create or was there some other reason?

  2. Manuel Dominguez I’m glad it appeals. I still feel though like, there’s something too messy about it and it needs more of a vision… maybe in time it will find that and I’ll redo it, or continue it or something.

    I experimented with some different dice, and found that D10 requires a lot more modifiers to bring it relatively in line with standard PbtA D6 the rate of success vs. weak hits vs. misses. The D10 can work well for games where it makes sense to just have characters fail more often (and thus don’t give them significantly higher mods/bonuses or do anything else to compensate in such case) OR if you want a more zero to hero thing going on with strong character advancement.

    I ultimately swtiched to using D8 with the group because it proved to be a real nice middle ground between the results of using D6 and the results of using D10s. Also because not too many games focus on D8, so, why not?

  3. I really like the background to this. If it helps at all, while writing my own PbtA thing, when it all got too muddled I started a Lite version. Stripped everything back to fit in 15-20 pages. It really helped me focus on brevity. Of course it’s back up to 60 pages now but the main sections are much sharper.

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