Author: Nathan Paoletta

A Heel Hack

I know sometimes the “cheat to win” ability on the Heel Move can cause consternation. Here’s a hack to it that involves a little bit of bookkeeping, but may be of value to structuring the “sense” of it:

You can only use the Heel Move as many times as you have Audience. When your Audience resets, so does this counter. If you gain Audience, you get another “slot” to use it; if you lose Audience and you’ve already hit your cap, there’s no additional change.

Treating the Heel Move as a limited resource by itself may create the mindfulness of “picking your spots” and only using it when it really heightens the drama that sometimes is hard to convey otherwise.

I received a really interesting (and nice) email asking about running WWWRPG as a larp.

Past my standard joke (“well, then you’re just actually wrestling”), it’s something worth thinking about, especially for wrestling matches!

My first thought is to minimize resolution and lean heavily on the elements that already resemble structured freeform larp, like the heel/face dynamic and Creative booking all results. That’s 90% of the game right there.

When players want to either prevail over a foe (win a promo battle, swerve the booking in a match, etc), what if there’s a small hand of cards everyone starts with. Everyone still has stats, too. Stats correspond to suits, and you add your stat to the same-suited card, high card wins, something like that. So in play you play, play, play, compare two cards, Creative frames the fallout, play, play and so on.

I dunno. Larp isn’t my strong suit! How would you do it?

I’m doing another pass on the Gimmicks as an inclusive set (including putting all of the Moves in an spreadsheet so I can start the Move Deck), and it’s pretty interesting!

I think I posted before about power creep in the statlines, and how I unintentionally was giving the newer Gimmicks higher (or lower) stats than the basic ones. Well, reviewing all of the Moves together, there’s also some “Move creep” in the sense that the newer Gimmicks have more Moves available than the older ones. Some variation is fine and expected, but once you take out the stat-boosting Moves, it pops out as a trend.

Editing is important and I think makes for stronger Gimmicks, so I’m doing a little pruning here and there on the newer ones, but I thought it would be interesting to point out as a process thing.