I could use a little general design advice for going forward on Household Renovation of Great and Terrible Power.
I can’t fucking create lists of character options or crew upgrades to save my life. Every game I’ve gotten this far on DOESN’T have them. Something about it ELUDES me. It’s taken me MONTHS to write 5 character special abilities on each sheet. Even now, I want to edit or trash some of them because they’re written as a “what thing do you get +1 effect in” instead of “how can I give mechanical teeth to the awesomeness inside the concept of this crew/playbook”. How should I go about it? Just keep stealing ideas from media? Anybody had a brighter idea? I’d love to hear it, cause I’m being driven slightly crazy from staring emptily at my lists of entanglements, abilities, etc.
I’m sorry I can’t offer more concrete help besides empathy. I too have hit that same wall – maybe I can squeeze out one or two abilities but to do half a dozen strong abilities across an equal number of playbooks is pretty hard, dude.
When I was trying to write Fate stunts, I always had more luck with purely narrative ones. “+2 to X when Y” was boring, but “once a scene you can do X” and have that kind of break out of the mechanics? Those came easier and usually were more memorable.
Adam Schwaninger Yeah I’m of a similar opinion.
I can say that WRT these lists, I started my idea off (Glow in the Dark, a post-apoc hack) as a more generic apocalypse. Coming up with concrete stuff was super hard then, but as I gave up on generic or roll-your-own and narrowed down the setting I would want to play, the lists came easier because I had the additional focus of trying to convey the world in my head through these mechanics.
I said this earlier in a different thread, but what I did was write the XP triggers for each playbook first, and then tried to write abilities that either encouraged or enabled this kind of play.
For example I have a playbook called The Immortal (think Dorian Grey), and his trigger is “Whenever you address a tough challenge with longevity or debauchery.”
So I went about adding powers that either encouraged him to revel in his most base instincts, or gave him mechanical benefits for doing so. I also added powers that game him benefits for roleplaying how long he’s been alive.
For instance, he gets +1 position when blackmailing someone for some horrible thing they did together. He also gets bonuses for flashbacks more than 100 years ago.
Of course the other thing I do is steal, steal, steal. I stole abilities from the core playbooks, I stole abilities from blades against darkness, I stole from Night Witches, I stole from Dungeon World and Grim World. I might steal abilities from you if you post them. When you see a cool ability you like, see if you can rework it to make it fit your playbooks.
My special abilities are largely cribbed from Blades, but I have written some new ones that are really tough. My general approach is to try to be of a piece with the original design, and try to find areas of the mechanics that can be interacted with in a way that makes fictional sense for the playbook. I’ve also gone through older versions of the Blades QSes for ideas from rewritten or abandoned abilities. (I also have a harder time with purely narrative abilities because I usually like more concrete abilities, and I’m not working with any supernatural elements like those narrative Blades abilities generally involve.)
Crew upgrades are fucking haaaaard though. There’s so many of them! I have some worked out that I like enough for alpha but I don’t love. A lot of the Blades ones are upgrades to specific items, or items that crews wouldn’t otherwise have access to. I’ve written some similar ‘unlockables’ but I don’t know if they’re varied or interesting enough.
Mark Griffin I did! Search the community and steal them. They’re old character sheets, but I did put up much earlier previews of them.
Also, cool rule breaking powers are awesome and you should absolutely have 1 or 2 of those per playbook (think the Whisper’s Tempest, Lurk’s Ghost Veil or the Hound’s Ghost Hunter). When you make them try and make sure that using them is likely to generate XP.
However you’re still going to have several abilities that are a little more mundane than those. The kind that add +1D, or +1 effect, but there is a way to make those more interesting. You can think of them as permission slips you’re giving to the character to act a certain way or do a specific thing.
+1D for flashbacks over 100 years ago tells the player they can be ancient if they wish, and they’re allowed to have been planning for jobs for centuries.
The hounds sharpshooter ability gives him potency on ranged attacks, but also makes it clear that he can reload quickly. This is important because the pistol in Blades is generally described as “Devastating at 20 paces, slow to reload.” Sharpshooter however gives the Hound permission to attack with the same gun over and over. This is what gives him potency, but it’s also permission that not everyone has.
Adam Schwaninger Narrowing down to a setting is very useful. I was really influenced by a discussion John had a while ago with Adam Koebel about his space hack, where John talked about preferring settings to generic toolboxes, and seeing the author’s own vision for the game. That helped me move toward making Copperhead County a really personal setting vs envisioning a modern crime toolbox.
Right Jason Eley – I think when you focus, you might polarize your audience, but on the whole I think most GMs could probably hack your hack to make it fit modern crime, which is work they’d have to do anyway if you made it generic. Meanwhile, you’ll get people (like me) who think Southern Bastards and Justified are amazing and Copperhead County is going to nail it.
Mark Griffin Coooool. Yup, there’s several tasty points in that last post. Yeah my creative blocks are definitely not, “But that would be unbalanced!!” cause… Ugh. I played a fucking 1 Lifepath Human character in Burning Wheel among Elven Etharch characters and didn’t give a shit about how “weak and useless I was” cause I was rolling in the Artha. I maybe don’t care about balance at all. That’s not my problem. I maybe haven’t made enough fictional notes about the things so now I have no fictional fuel to transform into special abilities.
Adam Schwaninger Jason Eley I agree so fucking hard. I’m driven crazy by games that are agnostic about everything. “We’re playing Lovecraft so make up an investigator, make up a monster, and make a scene about them. What’s the setting? That’s for you to decide! What’s the situation? Who knows! Who are the characters? That’s what roleplaying games are all about!” NO. THE NAMES OF THESE GAMES ARE SIGILIZED ON PARCHMENT AS A RITUAL ACT OF MY MYRIAD ANGERS AND BURIED IN MY BACKYARD NEXT TO MY FRIENDLY LOCAL GAMING MONOLITH THAT HUMS PUGNACIOUS RHYTHMS INTO MY THIRD EYE AND DOWN MY FEET INTO THE CORE OF THE EARTH.
Lol, sorry. I really don’t like iffiness setting-wise. Give me your intended setting, and if I need to, I can make my own LATER.
Also, remember that there’s no magic number for special abilities or crew upgrades or whatever. If your hack calls for fewer, that’s fine.
I’d just like to put in that I’m intrigued by your title.
Benjamin Davis Lol thanks. It’s one of the rare times I came up with the title first. I’ve been really enjoying the game. We’re maybe 8 sessions in and I’ve never had a session of playtesting where I haven’t gotten an intense frisson of delight that’s entirely different in flavor than I’ve experienced in other games I’ve run or even designed. It’s WEIRD.
John Harper Yeah… I kind of want more, but maybe I’ll just go into Beta v0 (throwing PDFs here) with 5 Special Abilities on each character and crew sheet….. I can manage 5 (I already have 5 on most I think). And depending on what whoever plays it demands, I can expand into making more or whatever.
Cause it also feels like with Crew Upgrades, I’m shooting into darkness, cause I can’t tell for shit whether people who are Flippers will want to expand into buying an Arkansas Clear Quartz Mine so they can adorn windowsills with their findings and blahblahblah, or if there’s a glaringly obvious crew upgrade that people want but I just can’t see.
I really want to push brashly and insouciantly into Beta fairly soon. I’m waiting for my Alpha group to jump on my mechanics that I have in a Google Doc so I can feel good about making some quickstart pdfs.