I’ve been working on a lo-fi hack of AW to play in the Dragon Age setting. I’d love thoughts on the playbooks, particularly the new ones! The Battlebabe and Gunlugger aren’t that interesting since they mostly only have adapted gear.
https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B_4g2fDbqFhYRmNkdnJ5bE4yUUk&usp=sharing
https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B_4g2fDbqFhYRmNkdnJ5bE4yUUk&usp=sharing
I like it. Would definitely play it over the official DA TRPG.
Oh hey, I’m also playing a Dragon Age hack. We’re using just reskinned AW 2.0, but I will definitely look at these when I get a chance.
Kevin Farnworth Super cool! How is it going so far?
Cool. Just one thing – since you choose your race in a different step – maybe you wish to sobstitute the “male, woman” gender option with “male, female” or “masculine, feminine”?
When creating a custom bow as a dwarven battlebabe there’s no immediate benefit to picking “repeater” because a regular bow doesn’t have the reload tag anyway. I’m assuming that you can modify the bow later on and it if that mod would add the reload tag you would ignore it if you picked Repeating at character creation. Is that the case?
“For a hand or bow weapon with magic, you can also choose the following options:” should probably say “choose ONE OF the following options” just for clarity 🙂
Raul Fontoura look at this!
Colin Kierans The only reason you’d choose repeater is if you also chose crossbow. Also I edited the magic weapons stuff in the character sheet file but not the plain text.
Andrea Serafini Why is that?
if you’re an elf, you can’t be a woman.
But you can be a female elf.
Yeah that makes no sense to me. I find “elf man” extremely preferable to “male elf.”
Also that usage fails the Krem test – what would you call Krem? He’s a man but he’s not male, and I might call him masculine but certainly I wouldn’t use that phrasing in conversation. So “man” it is.
I think It was very fortunate that you detached “class” from playbook, because it makes for very interesting combinations. I don’t get, tho, why would you restric “Apostates” to mages. Isn’t the case to try and make the archetypes as broad as they can be?
Also, have you considered using the intimacy rules from Urban Shadows? Dragon Age has sex of course, but it kinda has those intense conversations that change the very perceptions of its characters too.
At any rate, really cool work, I’ll be following this closely
IMO, a non-mage could learn raw blood magic so they could be branded as apostates by the Chantry too.
I’m not familiar with Urban Shadows! Tell me about it?
As for apostates, it’s mainly a consequence of rules. You are an apostate if you do magic outside the Circle. The only way to do magic is if you choose the mage class. So you have to be a mage. I mean, unless you want to show me an example in the source material of someone who’s an apostate-not-a-mage somehow. My intention here is to recreate the source material faithfully, not to extend it with stuff I made up.
Urban Shadows (and I’m sure some other hack before it, anyway) took the special move and shifted it away from actual sex and towards “intimate moments” – the exact definition depends on what you want to achieve with those interactions. I do believe that it resembles closely the companion conversations of the game series, however.
As for the apostates and source material, I’ll try and show you my point of view out of what I read from your hack. It seems to me the choice of class is rather a choice of knowledge in magic or not (both warrior and rogue are the same choice, in that regard). But in the lore of Dragon Age there are people who can use magic in a different way than mages, either with other weird methods or just savants without any kind of training. Those are called hedge mages.
If you don’t restrict apostate (or any other class/playbook combination, for that matter) you can represent those concepts in a way the game engine can’t. Bioware can’t be programming special magic rules for every weirdo making magic in their game, but in our tabletop environment that is not the case.
I could make my Rogue Apostate, a hedge mage that can only use some types of magical abilities (those the playbook provides) but little else. A Warrior Apostate could be a hedge mage Avvar with shamanic powers, and so on and so forth. In the same way, a Mage Battlebabe would resemble a Knight Enchanter, and a Mage Gunglugger would work as an Arcane Warrior.
My whole point is basically to think more loosely about this class/playbook structure so that it feels adapting to the whole lore more than an adequation to the digital game’s mechanics.