Thomas Deeny – Powered by the Apocalypse G+ Archives

Redid the playbooks in US Letter format, black ink only.

Didn’t do much differently to the playbooks except:

1. Grouped the playbooks under some archetypes to facilitate one-shot play at conventions — they’ve got Machine, Mastermind, Matrix, Meat, and Metal tags (or combinations of).

2. Redid the “Names” section to be called “Street Name”, just with a list of names (no “a spooky name, a fruit-based name” here — just names) and added street names from characters in cyberpunk games I’ve run.

3. Changes the name of the Killer’s “More Machine than Meat” move to “More Metal than Meat” ’cause I’ve classified that playbook as Meat/Metal. Machines in the rough classification are things that aren’t part of your body: drones, vehicles, and the like.

4. The Incoming Datastream hex can be used for the Touch stat, if you’re planning on playing the upcoming Touched setting.

The whole point was to format these as-is, then copy and modify them for some convention games I’m planning on running.

Comments appreciated!

https://www.dropbox.com/s/xqqavnsfqcmfsxw/custom%20playbooks%200422.pdf?dl=0

So I finally played The Sprawl at a local anime convention’s gaming room (with Hamish!), on a playtest of Touched…

So I finally played The Sprawl at a local anime convention’s gaming room (with Hamish!), on a playtest of Touched (yay!) and I think the game overall went really well. So much so, that I’m going to pitch it to the online group for our next Shadowrunesque game.

Anyway, the one thing that bugged me about the game is the concept of Cred as both a measure of money and reputation. It’s combining the two coupled with staking some at the beginning of a mission that I keep having issues with. Here’s something I wrote a while back:

Tuck has 5 Cred and gets a job. She stakes 2 Cred on the job, which means on the actual job, she has 3 Cred to spend to get stuff. She needs to get something from her fixer for this mission, a quite illegal narcoject gun and some KO darts. That’s 2 Cred. She now has 1 Cred left. The mission is successful, but the crew didn’t choose the “job pays well” option: Tuck staked 2 Cred, so she gets that back and then 2 Cred more, bringing her hidden Cayman Island bank account to… 5 Cred.

But what if she staked 3 Cred? Then when she got that narcoject gun and ammo with her last 2 Cred, she’s down to 0 Cred. Job is done: 0 + 3 + 3 again = 6 Cred. Stake 1 Cred? Tuck starts off at 4 Cred, spends 2, dropping her down to 2. Job is now done, so 2 + 1 + 1 again = 4 Cred.

Where is the profit in crime?

Playing the game, my thoughts led me back to that, so I wrote a thing that separates money and reputation. My thought it is would wind up getting characters to a point where they’d have enough to retire from the biz. (I have a difficult time thinking of how a character could save up the 20 Cred to pull off the Retire to Safety move.)

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this, even if it’s “Thomas, you totally misunderstand how easily it is to accumulate Cred.”

http://denaghdesign.com/separating-money-reputation-cred-sprawl/

Give me your villains!

Specifically, I’m looking for some good examples for villain moves. You’ve got villain move examples from your game? Let’s see ’em!

I hope this is a good venue for feedback as you’re going into revisiting the layout for final files.

I hope this is a good venue for feedback as you’re going into revisiting the layout for final files. There are two incredibly minor things that appear to be mistakes, but I think it’s the presentation that’s doing this rather than things actually wrong with the rules.

First, the moves that have a 7+ and a 7-9 range. When I saw that 7+ for Mix It Up, it looked like a typo. Whups, they obviously meant 10+, because in AW, moves generally have the structure: “On a 10+, this happens. On a 7-9, this other thing happens. On a miss, this happens.” If a move has that 7+ and 7-9 range effect is in AW, it is either written like “On a 10+, this happens. On a 7-9, that still happens, but these things also happen. On a miss, this other thing happens.” (See the Hocus’ Fortunes move.) Or it’s written like “On a hit, this happens. On a 7-9, these things also happen.” (See Basic Move: Help or Interfere.) Having that 7+ range before a separate 7-9 range makes it a bit unclear.

Related, the Hit the Street move also isn’t as clear upon first reading the results of the roll. First, there’s a range. Then we go up to a higher range. Then we go back down to a lower range. Why aren’t these in order like the following?

Hit the Street. When you go to a Contact for help, roll Style.

On a 10+, you get what you want, plus a little something extra (choose either [intel] or [gear]).

On a 7-9, you get what you want, but choose 2 from the list:

* list item

Because some games have typos and errata to fix mistakes, even though you mean a 7+ result is supposed to cover that 10+ range and 7-9 range, readers may be unsure if that was really meant or if it was supposed to read 10+ instead of 7+.

The second thing that bugs me just a little (and it’s really really minor): why does the countdown clock go up, up, up and terminate at 0? I mean, I know, but it looks weird. Clocks that display military time always display midnight as 0000 hours, but midnight is referred to as both 0000 hours and 2400 hours. When counting up to midnight in this strip, having the last number higher than the previous numbers makes visual sense, even if that’s not exactly how digital clocks work. It just feels strange going up, ratcheting tension higher and higher and then when the tension is highest we drop down to nothing.

I’m just thinking this informal poll might be of interest to some of you for… reasons.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on ePub solutions for RPGs: reflowable vs fixed-layout.

Originally shared by Thomas Deeny

I’m thinking about the merits of reflowable versus fixed-layout ePubs for role-playing game books. As a user of these books (or if you don’t play, imagine a high-school or college textbook with charts, images, and sidebars), would you prefer reflowable epubs or fixed-layout?

Reflowable: You have a lot of control over the look of the book: page color, font choice, and text size. However, all the content will generally flow in a large column: tables, sidebars, example blocks are all read after paragraphs and won’t always appear exactly where they do in the printed book. Pages might break in your reader strangely due to these font choices you make: one sentence on the next page, which is completely blank because the next page has an illustration that takes up the screen. Cross-references have to be rewritten from “See page 23” to “see below”.

Fixed-Layout: You get a book that looks like the printed material: sidebars, examples, tables all appear near the relevant passages. However, you have no control over how the book looks — that’s the font used and that’s how large it is compared to the size of the rest of the page. Some readers will have you pinch and zoom in to read some passages, some readers (Kindle) let you tap on paragraphs and they expand larger. Cross-references that say “See page 23” don’t need to be changed (which may be a benefit for people who have both printed and epub version.)