I’m writing a PbtA-style game about colonizing Mars, in the vein of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy.

I’m writing a PbtA-style game about colonizing Mars, in the vein of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy.

I’m writing a PbtA-style game about colonizing Mars, in the vein of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy. The characters in those books are exceptional but deeply flawed. This isn’t a mechanic I’ve seen in ApW, DW, or other PbtA games.

One thought I’d had was to make flaws work a bit like alignment in DW, where if characters perform an action that incorporates their flaw they mark XP.

One challenge with that is that I’m structuring the game to be generational, so there’s not a lot of value in individual characters gaining experience. Flaws could generate other currency, like reputation (or notoriety as the case may be). Or flaws could trigger a debility.

What are your favorite systems for capturing characters’ flaws? Can you point me to any PbtA-style games that use flaws?

Thanks!

11 thoughts on “I’m writing a PbtA-style game about colonizing Mars, in the vein of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy.”

  1. Urban Shadow has a corruption mechanic that may be of use to you. Each playbook has conditions (if I remember correctly) that cause the character to gain corruption. Once the track is filled they get special moves. I believe the moves are powerful, but then tend to also give the player more corruption in a downward spiral. Once max corruption is reach the character becomes totally corrupt and becomes an NPC bad guy.

  2. This sounds incredible, please have a playbook called The Aerologist and The Psychologist and The Radical.

    Impulse Drive has Foibles. Also checkout Keys for Lady Blackbird (I also have some custom ones for Dungeon World).

  3. You should check out Avery Alder’s “Queer Apocalypse-game”, which I have a mind blank on the name.

    Before you can use cool [character moves], you have to do/show [character weaknesses].

  4. If you haven’t, considers taking a look at The Warren. Because rabbits largely share survival traits and behaviors, and because I wanted a high rate of character turnover to drive generational play, I used only a single playbook for rabbits with a deck of move cards representing unique traits. You gain new unique moves through play but getting hurt takes away moves, limiting mechanical agency over time and incentivizing voluntary character retirement/death. Spacefarers will similarly share a broad range of survival skills related to maintaining the integrity of their life support systems, along with overlapping subspecialties in mission critical skills and unique expertise. If you wanted to go the card route, players might share basic moves, choose a move card unique to their character to place on their violinist playbook, and a second card to place between themselves and the player to their left-wing that they may both use, to represent redundancy in mission critical training.

  5. Marshall Miller The Warren is one of my favorite games! Kicking myself for not digging into that for the generational thing. Thanks for the response.

  6. If I recall, the alignment moves grew out of keys in Lady Blackbird, which have a second buy-off clause. Reversing that concept to have an XP gain when you trigger the move by expressing your flaw then your buy off could be personal growth that lets you replace your with a new move by resolving your character flaw.

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