Interview with Vincent Baker
In this episode of StoryAlways we had the pleasure of interviewing the great Vincent Baker. We talked about all the details of his and Meguey Baker‘s new game The King is Dead, his design process, his evolution as a designer, his current interests and many other things. Thanks so much to Vincent for giving us this opportunity and I hope you all enjoy it as much as I did.
The King is Dead kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/226674021/the-king-is-dead-a-roleplaying-party-game
Meguey’s website: http://www.nightskygames.com/
Meguey’s Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/Meguey
Vincent’s Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lumpley
Vincent’s website: http://www.lumpley.com/
Ooh, Vincent Baker can you say anything more about the dice pool version of AW? I might be doing something with that right now.
I can’t say much! Apocalypse World came directly out of this other game I was making, Storming the Wizard’s Tower, that used dice pools. You can look it up if you want to see where my head was at in 2008.
I liked how, for instance, for reading a situation, the move could be “for each hit you roll, ask 1 of the following questions.” That made a lot of intuitive sense.
Or the first version of going aggro: your victim can either cave and give you what you want, or else force your hand and suffer 1 harm per hit you’ve rolled.
For other moves, chunkier tiers – strong hit, weak hit, miss – made more sense, and ultimately that’s what I went with.
I though you were talking about Storming! I remember a bunch of the “moves” being very similar. That game had a lot of good stuff in it. Incidentally I just went to check it out and I got a database error. I think I still have a pdf on an external hard drive somewhere but if you want people to still be able to check it out, see if the link is broken or what.
But anyway, I’m toying with a game that’s not exactly PbtA but AW is an influence, plus the GM rolls, plus there are dice pools plus it has no playbooks so it has everything on your list. Maybe it will work maybe it won’t. We’ll see.