Hey folks!

Hey folks!

Hey folks! Just a friendly note to say you are all excellent and I’m glad you are here. We had a great time at PaxUnplugged and it made me want to play and design games! We loved seeing Bluebeard’s Bride and The Ward at the con, as well as hearing about all the PbtA play at Games on Demand. We got to hang out with new friends and old friends, and hear about their games.

If you have a PbtA game in even the earliest stages of development, I’d love to hear your elevator pitch!!

53 thoughts on “Hey folks!”

  1. I’m working on a game where the PCs are revolutionary politicians in the Reign of Terror phase of the French Revolution. It has an emphasis on social maneuvering and politics.

  2. Meguey Baker is relentlessly supportiveand enthusiastic! Sharing early PbtA drafts with her really added clarity and momentum to my design process and her input was invaluable.

  6. I’m working on an AW hack called Demihumans. It’s about facing the physical and cultural extinction of the famous fantasy species like elves, dwarves, and orcs. It’s a pretty close hack, mostly just remixing and reskinning playbooks, and adding a few features. I’m in mid playtest now and am really happy with the results.

  7. Sure. Up From The Dungeon: You are a group of fantasy adventurers recently returned from the Terrible Dungeon. You’ve got loot, and are terribly worn out, hurt, and spiritually distraught. What do you do?

  8. William Nichols is this the one we talked about a while back, where you have to figure out how to reintegrate into regular life after going on an epic adventure? I like that idea bunches.

  9. That game is on hold, as it got a bit big and hard to hold in my head.

    This one is the same direction and about inflation. As you spend the coins from underground, the town grows and changes. Things get both more expensive and a little better.

  10. I think it might be a far departure from AW, but I’ve been working on a game about a heavily politicized culture where people randomly acquire unlimited and instinctual magic that they subconsciously use, but causes them to eventually burn out.

  11. I’m working on a gritty sci-fi game where you play cloned soldiers whose deaths help an AI called ANNA to create an algorithm that will save the world. ANNA is an autonomous military tank. She only has two shells, and she won’t waste one to save you.

  12. Although I’m still working on Nahual, I also have this idea in a super initial state:

    Halloween monsters are invading the Land of the Dead, threatening to destroy all its unlife and traditions! But hope is not lost, Catrina is calling up a team of heroes, masked luchadores chosen among the bravest souls of the departed. These anonymous fighters, armed with their magical máscaras, wrestle on the ring in the Land of the Living to charge up their power—by the cheers of the crowd—so they can then face the werewolves, zombies, vampires, and other creatures of Halloween that threaten to destroy el más allá.

    Do you have what it takes to be a luchador? Answer Cantrina’s call, and join this fierce fight, a dos de tres caídas, sin límite de tiempo!

  13. I’m working on a game about mech pilots defending earth. It has a sort of Night Witches duality to it, and doesn’t use 2d6+stat resolution, but keeps agendas/principles/moves for the most part

  14. I’ve been working for years now on a game that is descended from AW but designed mainly for my kids and students (but I really like it too, and I’m 39). We use a hand-game I made up instead of dice (primarily, though d6s are still an option) because I found that kids get distracted a lot by the dice as physical objects and lose focus on the game. So there has been a lot of drift and simplification from AW.

    They play avatars exploring the world of dreams and solving mysteries there. It has no stats, just keywords, so that kids can let their avatars be any sort of hero they can imagine. But the focus is always on solving mysteries and problems in some sort of fantastic environment (maybe even outer space). It’s not very gritty, but the mystery aspect still creates a lot of suspense.

  15. David Bowers I am SUPER interested in hearing more about the hand game! Role playing games without dice is a neat design space, and one I’ve explored a bit. What’s your game called?

  16. Mike Espinoza Oh goodness yes! How are you structuring the back and forth between the fights in the ring in the Land of the Living and the fights out of the ring in the Land of the Dead?

  18. David Rothfeder Neat! How / when does the magic ability manifest? And does the PC control their own magic? I’m thinking about a correlation to sudden wealth or privilege.

  21. Meguey Baker​, I wrote it so that people theorizes why triggers occur, but no real knowledge as to why exists. As far as magic goes, everybody in the world has instinctual access to magic (maybe a spell or two), the triggering is more of gaining unrestricted use. Since it’s instinctual, people use magic without thinking, but without restriction that can get ugly (i.e. a person is annoyed so they instinctually light the room on fire). It’s a game where people get instantly restricted to an upper class that is stuck in a perpetual cold war (everybody had effectively had nukes but nobody wants them all to go off).

  22. David Rothfeder Got it. So high tension and high stakes as a background for…? What am I trying to do as a PC? Obviously I am trying not to accidentally make someone else explode and trying not to let my own bombs go off in ways I don’t want, but what am I trying TO do? Where’s my agency? (And I gotta say, having grown up in a high tension high stakes house, I am immediately interested in what you are doing and how it plays out.)

  23. Oh, another one kind of on the backburner: Space Pirates!

    You play the officers of a space pirate ship. There’s a couple dozen other folks onboard, all with easy ways to lead them around and make it easy to make hard moves.

    Each of the officers has a special move related to their specialty.

    Oh, almost forgot the coolest part: There are 8 playbooks, each one opposite another so you can only have one of each pair; if you have a doctor, you don’t have an engineer. There’s this limit of competency.

  27. Meguey Baker pretty standard d6 dice pool, with 5-6 being a choice from a list, and a 1-2 being an opponent choice against you. Different skills add 4s to the success list, and pool size is based on stats and positioning.

    I’m leaning hard into the “list of choices” style of moves, allowing for PvP without special moves (because PvP mech fighting!)

  28. Meguey Baker Yeah, your individual character will only get small pieces of the puzzle, but the player will start to realize their macro-scale ‘destiny’. The players will (I hope) start to feel for these doomed characters. A bit like how Shakespeare’s history plays are more visceral because you know that nearly everyone is going to die at the end.

  30. Well, the roleplaying game is called Dreamwalker, but the hand game is called Redigo. It’s… um… Italian? Might be Portuguese. You have to roll the R, put the stress on the second syllable, and pronounce it with your tongue-in-cheek. I originally made it up thinking I’d use it for Blades-in-the-Dark-style resolution, but have since adapted it for something much more like Storming the Wizard’s Tower.

    First, you determine how many “goes” the player gets (usually 2 or 3), and establish what sorts of results you might want (or need) to spend your “hits” to achieve. The Player and the GM both say “Re… Di… Go!” and on “Go” they each use one hand to show any number of fingers between 0 and 5:

    * If the numbers match, that’s really good, a direct hit (or a 6 in BitD, if you wish);

    * if they’re close (just + or – 1), that’s still a hit (or a 4-5), with 5 and 0 counting as close since they’re the maximum and minimum;

    * but if they’re 2 or more apart, that’s a miss (or a 1-3).

    After the first go, the Player says “Go!” again (no need to say “Re…Di…” this time) and then both show their numbers again, continuing this way until they’re out of goes. Getting a direct hit grants an extra go, though, so it helps to have someone keep a tab of how many hits they got and how many goes are left, maybe using fingers on the unused hands, or just counting aloud as it happens (“Wow! Direct hit! so that’s 3 hits and you get to go again!”).

    If you have enough players, you can just have some number of people show one hand for each go instead, and then let the ones who score direct hits go again. This really helps get everyone involved in an excited way. Grownups can sometimes tire of hand games like this, preferring to just roll the dice, but for the kids (and… myself, too), I feel it improves our sense of tension and investment because we’re choosing the numbers we show. Somehow it feels more like our actions in the game are having real, if unforeseeable, consequences instead of just following after whatever the dice randomly (and somehow, seemingly, unfairly?) determine. It’s kind of like another step up from always letting players roll their own dice in AW. You feel somehow more responsible for the results you get, and when you do it together, it feels like teamwork.

    It turns out that the odds are the same as rolling d6s for this particular spread of results, so that’s nice too! You could play Burning Wheel with this if you wanted to.

  31. Oh, I should add, if you wanted to play Burning Wheel or some game like that without any difference between a “hit” and a “direct hit”, a simpler way to do it with hands would be a version of the Chinese game “Hei Bai Pei” (which means “Black-White Match”, but I like to call it “Flip-Flip-Match” in English). You simply get ready with the required number of players (or goes, I suppose), then say “Hei Bai Pei!”, or “Ready…Go!” or whatever, and then show your hand with palm up (white) or palm down (black), counting matches with the GM’s choice as hits, and non-matches as misses.

    I developed Redigo almost like a variation on Hei Bai Pei because I wanted something with direct hits and the special feeling of excitement that comes with them. I love the sound of kids cheering. Never gets old.

    (Thinking about Lehman and Dowler’s Deeds & Doers also helped — another game somewhere in this space.)

  32. I was hoping to refine the concept a bit after playtesting, but I see it as a political game (political horror?). The factions have different things they look for to gain position. To help link the characters together I came up with the idea that they are all part of a conspiracy with a specific goal.

  33. Slade Stolar Cool! Do players know going in that almost everyone will die? If you have my buy-in as a player, I will drive toward it; if you don’t have my buy-in, I (personally) will feel like you pulled a bait-and-switch. That might be what you are going for!! Just make that choice really consciously, yeah?

  38. Sarah Richardson, Those are some WONDERFUL games. This whole thread has me so excited.

    And now… deep breath

    Hi! I’m Brandon! I wrote Pasión de las Pasiones, a game of Latinx telenovelas Powered by the Apocalypse! Players take on the roles of the most dramatic, passionate, desire filled characters on television, the heroes, villains, and lovers of telenovelas. Additionally, they play a Latino family sitting and watching the action, giving their cheers, jeers, encouragement and shouts of surprise!

    The ashcan just dropped from Magpie Games!

    plus.google.com – BIG ANNOUNCEMENT TIME! You can now play Pasión de las Pasiones in the comfor…

  39. Brandon Leon-Gambetta Holy cats! I have a very deep affection for Latinx telenovelas!!! Why am I not playing this right now?!? (Runs to follow the link)

    Ok, a tiny bit of backstory: 12 years ago, I started what was probably one of the hardest times of my life. My grandfather had just died, we were about to have our youngest child, and over the next 18 months we would buy a house and I would lose five more members of my family in rapid succession. I was so deeply buried in grief and stressed by change I could barely function. Friends in town decided (rightly) that I needed something, anything, to get me out of the house and even remotely social. So they would drive over, pick me up, and put me on their couch with tea and telenovelas and watch with me for hours, laughing and discussing what was happening and wondering what was next. I don’t remember the names of the shows, but I am forever a fan of the format.

    Thanks for making this game!

  40. Meguey Baker, thank you so much for sharing this story! Having that kind of community watching experience is something that I really wanted to capture in the game. There is something healing about sitting down and just watching the highest of high drama. I’m hoping that there will be with playing it as well!

    Thank you so much for making Apocalypse World without which this game wouldn’t have worked!

  42. Meguey Baker, thanks from me too for all your encouragement! I have two questions for you (I mean, you know, for after you finish reading Pasión de las Pasiones!): 😊

    1. What sort of dice-free roleplaying have you been thinking about lately? Something with hand games like I’m using?

    2. I’ve got this game that my kids and students love. I play it several times a week, using my notes on my iPad (which I often project on a bigger screen so that everyone can see them). What to do next?

  43. Meguey Baker I’m still figuring that out, I’m thinking the Land of the Living be more like “downtime”, like you fight over there for a year, getting ready for next Halloween – Dia de Muertos. Then you have only 3 days of action while the holiday last, then another year of “downtime”. I’m thinking on taking a look at Nightwitches and Blades in the Dark.

    Another important thing is that, like luchadores in Mexico, we don’t know who is behind the mask. So, as players, you don’t know who the characters are, they are only the luchadores, and then—thru play—you’ll start to find out who your character is. So “play to find out”…what we’ll find out? Who your characters are. Once you know that, you retire your character… like luchadores when they retire and you finally know their identity.

    How I’m gonna do this? I have no fucking idea! LOL

  45. Other than The Ward, which is now out in ashcan, I’ve got two other AW hacks on the go:

    Princess World – a game about girls that rule. #PrincessWorld

    And:

    SemiGods – “You’ve all heard the ancient legends of noble heroes and the wise gods that led them… well, this is the real story!” #SemiGods

  47. Kevin Petker I am hearing so much good stuff about The Ward! It ran at JiffyCon, and if I hadn’t been running a game in that slot, I would have loved to play. I was a EMT before I had kids, and we have a ton of medical professionals in our extended family.

  48. Meguey Baker Cool cool!

    Yes, EMT is a playbook in development for the “Extended Care Edition” of The Ward that will be a follow-up to the current ashcan, I have a few others I’m working on, as the Acute Care Edition has just four playbooks; I interviewed quite a few medical professionals during development, so I may be asking you a few questions about “moves” you feel EMTs make that make them stand out.

    JiffyCon 2015 was the first time The Ward was run so it was great to come full circle and run it at JiffyCon 2017! It also turned into a spaceship hospital story and I’m always pleased when The Ward is able to go to strange new places.

    While I wait for people to play and respond to The Ward, Princess World, inspired by my young daughter’s suggestions, has almost all my designer attention.

    Thanks again to you and Vincent Baker for your creativity and support!

  49. David Bowers my recent game The Thing That Gnaws* uses your hands very literally as your available resources. When I was working in Ethiopia, one very real design constraint was avoiding dice because of the connections and connotations of gambling, which the target audience would reject for safety reasons. Also, designing for low- to no-cost tools is really great. Dice might seem cheap to us, but they are a luxury to some.

    I’m thinking a lot lately about how to use the real world as a resolution mechanic: maybe the color of the next car that drives by is the answer, maybe if you can hit that tree with this pine-cone you do the thing, maybe if you can kick the rock along the sidewalk for five segments you do the thing, and if you make it in one kick that’s the best, but two and three kicks also work just have complications.

    Also, I’m thinking about plenty of early Victorian parlor games and playground games and “new” games that have rpg elements or rpg potential.

    For your second point: take those notes and write up a clean playtest document, then have one of the kids run that week’s game!

    *reminder to myself to get that up somewhere besides my Pateron.

  53. Meguey Baker, thanks for answering my questions! I’ll get to work on the playtest doc! (My kids have already started playing on their own though, just through familiarity with the rules.)

    Also, those are really interesting ideas. I really appreciate your point about how dice can have inappropriate cultural connotations for a lot of various cultures. Reading your thoughts made me think of another possible real-world thing that would work easily in a roleplaying game. You know that game where someone puts a stone under some cups and then shifts the cups around while you try to keep track of which one has the stone? That would work. If you don’t have cups and stones, or if you want some variety, you could have some evocative tarot-like cards that represent different sorts of possible outcomes (or even just repurpose playing cards for this — you could draw cool symbols on them as you play), and then mix them up so that the player can choose one or several, according to how many outcomes you need in the fiction — kind of like Otherkind dice. You could adapt dominoes or Scrabble letters for this sort of thing too — anything where something is hidden.

    Other random thoughts:

    * One of the favorite games of children everywhere: “Guess which hand is holding the lego!”

    * Use any book as a d10, just opening to a random page and checking the last digit.

    * Tongue-twister-like magic spells with nonsensical words — must be pronounced correctly! “Shellisol Sishells Sishor!” … “Papa Cuppa Proper Coffee Copper Coffee Cup!”

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