With regards to hacking this game, I am interested in talking about how best to reuse the original Blades mechanics and advice (they’re so good!), while also customizing many parts of it.
The problem I am having, for example, is that when I talk about “Do this like in Blades, but..” it ends up all scattered and confusing. Some sections have the same things in them, but when I add a couple GM Principles, I have to say something to the effect of “use the GM Principles in Blades, but not #3; instead use this one.” and then describe that one.
And when I reflavor one of the GM Goals to better match the setting, I tried including them all to make it read better, and realized that this is just repeating material (probably says roughly the same thing).
TL;DR How do I hax all the gamez?
Better to repeat material than to make a reader keep jumping back and forth between two different documents.
I think my issue was less of “repeating” and more of like “here’s the GM list, but its the original blades list except for 3”. Just feels… dirty? to copy-pasta w/o having some sort of “this is BitD standard except
–[XXX]” somewhere.
I guess my followup question would be, at what point do you want your hack to be standalone, or do you just assume those playing are already familiar w/ Blades?
James Etheridge I know right!? but it feels ..I dunno.. cheap to do that. Maybe unavoidable, though I was hoping for some genius method of structuring a hack that I was missing (my page counts for my various hack are all getting quite high!)
Ben Wright yea that too. feels wrong.
So to answer your question: the experience with Blades is certainly helpful, but it’s standalone in some key ways (a GM playbook; tonal differences; toying with roll results being 1/2, 3/4, and 5/6). It’s going to oh-so-obviously be a derivation of Blades – but in some ways it will be a different game.
Sounds like those parts (change in resolving and the GM playbook) would need some substantial stand-alone description/coverage then!
Yea, and despite all that, I still spend slightly more words repeating things than creating to make it a standalone thing :/ maybe this is just one of those things that is sort of unavoidable as you get further from the core game..
If it’s a standalone game, you’re gonna have to write it all in your own way for your purposes. See the examples of Monsterhearts, Dungeon World, etc. evolving out of Apocalypse World.
Thanks for the confirmation. This could take awhile.. Guess I better get my stuff together!
My big hacking question/request from John Harper​ would have been a clearer break down of the “little black boxes of blades” as discussed on Adam and his hacking blades YouTube videos and systems you would group together for streamlined hax0ring. I find myself losing momentum trying to isolate what mechanics need to be packaged together. Even having played quite a bit. So many seem very close together and side by side holding hands if not out and out connected. On the YouTube videos the guys hint at the black boxes amd talk about them but never are explicit with what they are or consist of.