Author: Gregory Daily

I have a few questions about this game, and PbtA in general. I feel that Dungeon World is an exception to the PbtA rules as they intentionally made that game more as the type of thing to pull in traditional tabletop rpg gamers. I understand that following the fiction is the key to just about everything in the game, but I guess my questions are a bit more about where you draw certain lines.

1. The Sprawl uses a mission structure of sorts, and I feel like that takes away a sort of organic flow from the role-playing. My players love role-playing, and it seems like in PbtA games, role-playing is less in-character, and more described. At least this is how so many of the games I’ve watched on YouTube wind up. I guess my question here is, how to I transition from phase to phase? Transitioning from get the job to legwork is fairly seamless, but aside from saying something like, “We’ve got 3 days to plan for this job, but then it’s going down.”, how would you transition from legwork to action?

2. I have a group who is very much used to Dungeon World, so they should be fairly easy to adapt to the combat, but I want to introduce this game to my old Shadowrun/current Pathfinder group. Both SR and PF have much more detailed combat. Even for my Dungeon World online players, I think they’ll want more detailed combat. Most of the time I have seen combat in The Sprawl and Apocalypse World has been done in a single move or two if someone failed. It’s also usually brought on by a Killer or Battlebabe type class. The question here is, how can I make combat more intimate? I assume that most people are going to answer with something along the lines of requiring smaller objectives and using the act under fire move more, but I was wondering if anyone had any other ideas here. I don’t want to minimize the area tag’s effect by armoring everyone, but I also know that my players would be extremely disappointed if combat scenes were to end with a single meat roll. As much as the Killer is meant to be a combat beast, I know my players are going to feel robbed if the Killer renders their ability to participate by firing off a few pock shots of their own.

3. I’m concerned about my ability to come up with clock triggers on the fly beyond a few things. This goes for mission clocks, threat clocks, and leg clocks, and action clocks. In my experience, things like corp clocks seem to be easier to handle as I can create their conditions after the the first session. I guess what I’m looking for is a layout for how clocks should go.

I’d love to see some comments from players of this game as well as general PbtA insights to these talking points. Hamish Cameron, I am also interested in seeing your ideas on the whole thing. I’d love to see how games you’ve run go. Do you have any actual play videos or podcasts of playtesting the game or just playing with your friends?