Author: J Stein

Question re. outcomes of a 1-3 roll and resisting:

The 1-3 roll lists several possible outcomes: severe harm, unintended consequences, etc. and instructs GMs to use some or all of these, as appropriate to the fiction.

If a GM goes with “all”, does a single resistance roll apply to each of these outcomes, or does one resist cover the lot? The latter seems like it has the potential to be fictionally incoherent, while the former seems mechanically… rough. You can end up burning a lot of stress on one bad roll.

Can anyone share their experiences with Fortune rolls in practice?

Reading the final version, and I feel like I’m not getting its interaction with the positioning/effect system.

Some examples of where I’m confused.

1) Fortune sample, pg 35, with shooting Bazso Baz. It seems like the 4/5 roll should already determine that it was success with a complication – why does the Fortune roll come into play to determine that the target lives? Doesn’t the 4/5 outcome roll already cover this? This feels like it’s essentially giving the NPC a Resistance roll, which I took to be a unique feature of the PC’s (stress -> push/resist). It seems weird that the player rolled a 4/5 to Hunt the target, and then the target, what, can roll a 6 to live? Or a 1? It seems like the Fortune roll is taking over the resolution mechanic that already got rolled.

2) pg 43, using Fortune to determine the impact of attire? That seems random – it’s not an uncertainty, right? The attire presumably affects a Sway or Consort or Command roll, and should alter effect: it’s not actually uncertain to the players whether his coat is actually a boon or just scoundrel-chic, right? It doesn’t have a mechanical impact /outside/ of those actions, does it? So what’s this Fortune roll do? Is it more like, “this coat’s super… uh, stylish, but I don’t know whether that suits this person’s taste really well, or is a huge turn-off. I’ll roll to see whether this is an advantage or a disadvantage”?

3) pg 66, a suppressed enemy rolling Fortune to see if they maneuver/attack. Again, it seems like if you’re skirmishing with the gang, and they’re suppressed, you’ve turned your actions into controlled and theirs into desperate – right, it’s built in? So again, I don’t get where the built-in positioning mechanism gives over to Fortune.

It seems like the examples that keep coming up in the book are all built-in to P/E, and I wouldn’t have even thought of using fortune for them… except the examples repeatedly call for it.

For the folks who’ve been playtesting for a while, how much do you use Fortune rolls? How much does it interact with P/E?

Originally shared by Marcelo Paschoalin

I’d like to share with you this great website. The unique feature is to create/generate word lists based on partial word lists. This way, you can input a list with, let’s say, twenty names and then the website will break them, mix and match and generate lots of names based on those you input at first.

This allows some consistency with name generation while keeping them random.

For example, for my published sword & sorcery Egyptian-flavored setting, I have this list of female names: http://www.nexi.com/fun/rw/rwcgi.cgi?cmd=source&id=291221 (yes, you can save your lists for later).

I hope you like it.

http://www.nexi.com/fun/rw/rwcgi.cgi?cmd=source&id=291221

I’ve been wanting to try BitD recently with my “I get to test shit out on you guys” group. I really enjoy PbtA, so they’re generally familiar with the engine, but they’re not familiar with bitd. They’re also not trad players, so they’re not accustomed to digesting a lot of crunch.

I’ve come across the issue, though, that BitD seems a lot more crunchy than other PbtA games, to the point where I got some push-back from my group when they saw the “assigned reading” (I shared the 7.1 document with them so they could get a feel for the system). I think part of it was the quantity of crunch, and part of it was perceived “density” of reading.

Any tips on ways to communicate the rules to not-so-new players in a stream-lined way?

Also, I guess if this isn’t an isolated occurrence, maybe it’s something to keep in mind for composing the final version of the game.