Author: Wynand Louw

https://plus.google.com/111256963556395023796/posts/EwWj76QbDC3

One possible advantage of a playbookless system:

We were going to continue our Weird West campaign last night, but Samuel, who plays James Jones could not make it. So Thomas volunteered to GM a zero prep once off. His instructions to us: Make characters for a medieval high fantasy setting. (Using the Cowboy World ruleset which is archetype and skill based instead of playbook based.) We did, but as soon as the session started, the characters fell through a portal into a futuristic high technology world.

What followed was a cinematic, adrenaline pumping episode with fighting in out of control helicopters, base jumping off buildings, and medieval trolls fighting 23rd century marines. It was a Vin Diesel movie on steroids.

With playbooks, it would have been very difficult to just pull a new setting out of thin air like that.

Originally shared by Wynand Louw

While the Cowboy World rules are more or less finalised after two years of playing, we are just now venturing into the weird. So armed with moves for Going Weird and going insane, we had our first weird session last night.

GM: Me

PC’s

Ivor Oppenheimer, played by Pieter. Ivor calls himself a “practical ilusionist” and has a travelling science show. He is from Prussia and speaks with a heavy German accent. Gear: A Gauss Rifle and an electrical device that he charges with a crank to shock his heart back in to rythm when he gets an aryrhmia. His goal: to bring the dead back to life.

Juan Miguel Lopez, played by Dawie is an undertaker, who has a Secret Identity: He is also a masked luchador called The Undertaker. Jaun buries the dead at day and fights in saloons at night.

James Jones played by Sam. James is a military doctor who served with the Confediracy during the war, when he lost a leg. He now has a clockwork prosthetic leg and wants to prove that the supernatural exists since he is convinced that he fought some sort of supernatural being when he lost his leg.

Demas Azarius played by Thomas is an immortal vampire hunter. When the nephilim were destroyed during the flood of Noah, some were spared on condition that they turn from evil and become demon hunters.

We start our adventure in the Texas Saloon on Hell Street in Canyon Diablo. The year is 1883, and it is the night of the big fight between The Undertaker and El Lobo Loco, an upstart who just came to town from Mexico. The saloon is packed to capacity with large volumes of rotgut being consumed and money bet on the two fighters.

Oppenheimer presides as umpire for the fight and uses it as an opportunity to demonstrate some of his weird scientific gadgets to the crowd. When he makes a bad call in favor of Undertaker the crowd turns on him and he has to change his decision. Undertaker turns the fight around in his favor by hitting El Lobo over the head with a whiskey crate.

During the fight Demas is approached by a stranger at the bar. He grabs Demas by the arm, and seems to be relieved to see that Demas is simply annoyed. Then he shows Demas he has crosses tattoed on his palms. If Demas were a vampire, contact with the holy symbol would have caused him excruciating pain. Having confirmed that Demas, who he recognised as a weird creature, was not a demon or a vampire, he offers Demas a job. Demas accepts when the stranger mentions the Plague Doctor, an entity Demas has been tracking for decades.

Juan, James and Ivor join them as they leave the Texas Saloon and walk down the street to the Colorado Saloon. The stranger (his name is Obadiah Grimm) enters a dark alley next to the Colorado, when they hear a woman scream at the back of the inn. They rush around the corner and see a woman stooped over a body lying on the ground.

Grimm levels his shotgun at her and shouts, “Step away from her!” She stands up, her back to the group and says, “Why Obadiah. You found me at last.” Then she turns around. Her eyes burn like coals and she snarls, revealing an impossible set of razor sharp fangs as she manifests as a vampire. The lower part of her face and the bodice of her dress are red with blood.

Demas responds by firing his wooden bolt-shooting crossbow at her heart. He misses and hits her in the left shoulder. Grimm turns on Demas and hits him with the fist. James fires his Winchester at the vampire but misses, and a moment later a bunch of cowboys rush into the alley, guns and shotguns ready.

The vampire immediately turns human again, and accuses Grimm of murdering the dead woman at her feet. When they see the bolt in her shoulder they are convinced, but then Ivor tells them that she is crazy. (He makes a succesful Influence move) For a moment the cowboys are confused, giving Grimm an opening. He rushes forward, grabs the vampire by her neck, presses the barrel of his shotgun to her chest and says, “Go tell Mortdecay I am coming for him. His time is up.” Then he shoves her away, she screams and runs off in the night. He walks off in another direction.

There is a tense moment as the standoff between the cowboys (security guards and bouncers working for the Colorado) and the group is resolved. Juan breaks the tension by offering to remove the body, he is the only undertaker in town, after all.

After examining the corpse (her throat was ripped out by the vampire, and she is bled out) they make a successful Tracking move and follow the vampire’s trail of blood to Clabberfoot Annie’s, one of the brothels in town.

We ended the session there, because we started late and because sick dogs. The whole session, including character creation of about thirty minutes, lasted just under two hours.

Ok voting for the ENnies is open. Go vote for Urban Shadows.

Now!

Our ongoing Cowboy World campaign last night, in which the assasin assasinated 5 npc’s by sneaking up behind them and cutting their throats, the vigilante found out the guy who killed his father was his father (“I killed your father, Wally, and I am your father”) and the gunslinger drew against his nemesis, ex confederate general William Wilds. The vigilante also found out that he has an evil identical twin brother, a fact that should cause mayhem in future sessions.

Mechanically I added a system for Fame and Infamy, which did not see much play yet, increased the Grit cost of upgrades, to make Grit points more valuable. A lot of grit points were spent to add +1s to rolls, but it seemed to be approriate because you die whenever you fail two rolls (actually 3, since there is a chance to be healed) in a row.

PvP fighting brought up an important question: In PvP moves as written now, the active player retains narrative control as long as he does not roll a fail. On 6- narrative control passes to the target player. This irritated one player, and is against the philosophy of AW that the loser gets to say what happens next, in order to escalate the conflict. As GM I actually thought it worked quite well, but I would like to hear opininions.

So the question is: in a PvP situation, who gets to say what happens next?

I mentioned before that I was making a Cowboy PbtA hack with a skill system instead of playbooks. I thought I would give some feedback.

We had a very enjoyable session tonight with a gunslinger, an outlaw, a southern gentleman who lost everything in the war, a deranged ex sherrif with pyromania, and an assasin masquerading as a train conductor.

The skill system with the generic “Use a skill” move works very well. The big problem, however was that two of the characters (played by teenagers who do not know the genre very well) were almost identical. The problem is that the system demands more creativity from the players to come up with unique characters than a playbook system does. It is also a problem if the players don’t know the genre. In this sense playbooks do help the players a lot in creating limited but unique characters.

The other side of the coin was that one character was unique and completely out of the box: An orphan who grew up in a circus back east, became an assassin for hire and travelled from one job to the other across the continent under the cover of being a train conductor. His backstory and contacts sent the story on a tangent I did not foresee at all.

So it seems that the weakness of a skill system is also its strength – depending on the player.

Character creation and explaining the rules took about an hour, which is longer than with Dungeon world where I can have newbies playing in 30 minutes. The reason for this is that players have to write backstories, insread of just ticking selection boxes.

One other thing they liked was the fact that gunfighting with the hitpoint-less harm system is deadly. One character caught a bullet in his left lung and was out of the much of the climactic gunfight of the session. (He survived being healed by an Apache medicine man afterwards) The feeling was that it heightened the suspense of the action because there was a real chance of dying. They voted that combat was more fun than in DW, because of the higher stakes. We’ll have to see if that opinion lasts if people start getting killed.

There are some mechanical problems that may need fixing, more playtesting will tell.

The players enjoyed the session so much, it was decided that we play again tomorrow night. My only problem is, they killed my main antagonist right at the start…

My first attempt at a Cowboy PBTA game.

Still very early days, although initial playtests were quite positive. 

Feedback would be appreciated!

https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B9G77aR8YgmbYmNtLWtOTW1IVWc&usp=sharing

OK Something I have been thinking about a lot, but came to no conclusion. 

One of the main drivers of successful fiction is subtext. Research shows that there is a direct positive correlation between the amount of subtext in a movie and its rating on Rotten Tomatoes. 

(Here is one person’s take on subtext) http://www.thescienceofstory.blogspot.com/2011/05/subtext-most-critical-tool-in-story.html

AW emulates subtext in the “Read a person” move.  Which is awesome. But is is still just an emulation, because players have to make their characters break the 4th wall to make the move. step out of character to make the move.

So here is my dilemma/challenge to the community:

☻Write a GM move/principle that makes the players (PC’s and GM) use subtext.

☻Write a player move that makes the players use subtext.

If a good rule makes the players say interesting stuff, and subtext is the most interesting stuff there is (not) to say, then this should be a worthy endeavour…