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tech that players would distribute a standard array on a character would specialize in a basic move meaning if you wanted to be an engineer you specialize in the engineering move finally they would get a playbook and two moves from it in terms of talking points the stats are pretty weak associated numbers are rarely good at that and pbta as rather small ranges with 2 to 3 in addition many hacks have this scheme of choosing one of a few fixed stat rows at chargen so you get some talking pointedness like that but i never bothered to do this here so yeah those stats are pretty boring i also found they do not work very well with some of the playbook moves needing rolls this bad fitting exists mostly because pbta typically uses the hard coded calling strategy calling strategy is how we know what stat to use in mechanic i just invented the term neat eh and when you have a typical pbta move it will tell you what stat to use just like i did the with the when the the ship is struck in the last post it s always morale period there are a few options of course we can use the situational calling strategy depending on what the problem at hand is the most likely stat is chosen but we defy defy danger for pbta games if there are situations that should vary enough to get different rules they should get different moves outright what else pasion de las pasiones does not have stats at all but uses questions as procedure input exclusively each move has its own list of specific questions if you want to take a look download the materials at the bottom and scroll to basic moves this encourages taking stock of the current scene and fits the game very well many other pbta games use this pattern for downtime or similarly low frequency moves it s a no stat modifiers only calling strategy another option is approaches the term originally comes from fate accelerated but pbta games such the veil and perhaps better known hearts of the wulin have used it as well the idea of an approach is that it s not what you are doing that decides which number is used but how the character goes about it more on that below really yeah let s use some approaches if you like stop here and think about what might make good approaches for star trek characters so let s look some star trek character say kiry nerys how does kira approach things as a faithful bajoran as a former freedom fighter by speaking her mind clearly and pretty much never as a member of the bajoran militia or starfleet officer how about jean luc picard as a starfleet captain by pontificating about humanity s achievements sometimes through his former career in archeology and rarely through any personal touch besides that so what about species professional background self these need some specification of course for ezri dax we would write down species joined trill professional starfleet counselor self quiet and background shady business people an approach is not the situational calling strategy from above a clear counter example is whenever a starfleet doctor or nurse enters a brawl with a hypospray in hand the situation is a fight so the situation would call for some fighting stat but the characters approaches it as a doctor in the end the four approaches of species professional background and self now look a bit like made up check bases from games like risus wushu the pool pdq except with four categories that you need to fill in and indeed those game all use the same calling strategy i m not quite sure what to call it associative reasonable player driven the method is like that anyway the active player says what stat they use and gives some reasoning on why it fits we usually accept that reasoning next time i look at what that change does to character moves apocalyptic new worlds part 1 morale 26 monday jun 2023 posted by holothuroid in uncategorized leave a comment tags anw game design pbta it s been 8 years since i had the idea to write a pbta star trek hack in that time some groups played it some new trek came to streaming services near you and the pbta scene had some innovations so i think it s time to take a look at it the good thing is the game certainly works it is super fast a typical star trek plot can be played through in about an hour the bad thing is that morale never was so central as i wanted it to be and advancement never felt right the ugly thing is that some playbooks are apparently more enticing than others and there isn t a good rule for supporting characters in and players less enmeshed in pbta thinking frequently asked if you have to take the alien playbook to be an alien so let s start with morale morale should go up and down during play you want it up it is generally used for when npc crew people do things instead of rolling a stat they roll morale we need some way to go down the typical thing is when the ship is shaking when everyone leans to the side let s make a move when the ship is struck by a hazard anomaly or enemy weapons roll morale on a 10 choose one of the following a supplementary or subsystem goes down there are injuries 1 to morale shields holding take 2 forward on this move on a 7 9 choose one of the following a central system goes down drives life supports communications weapons there are dead 2 to morale choose two from the list above this is a very simple harm move it also gets rid of the separate concept of shields design tip if you want some stat to be central make it central see you next time were we stat some characters more musings on fantasy genres 17 saturday jun 2023 posted by holothuroid in uncategorized leave a comment sing me oh muse of well that s the question literary genre is an old idea it started with the greeks mostly in terms of form whether you write stage play with certain typical meters depending on whether it s comedy or tragedy whether you do something lyric songs for the lyre whether it s epic poems which are to be six dactyls dam da da or dam dam a verse genre is all receptive categories it can be about medium book film about origin manga is japanese comics intended audience young adult certain literary styles or iconography narrative structure fictional location space opera is set in spaaace characters and lots of other stuff often certain genres are associated with a time and age no one does silent movies anymore and no one has written augustean epics for 2000 years and usually it s some conglomeration of more than one those category as for my last post a commenter called it a quick simple world building tool which is very apt it all operates on elements of what we call world building that is overall a very new category that only became a thing after fantastic fiction was well established it still is usually absent as a criterion among literary critics and it is indeed simple because these concrete contents of fiction are easy to grasp and we are well trained by popular culture in doing so in fact it s what is usually called genre when we talk about rpgs which is a bit weird an rpg genre would by common understanding be more like pbta games or the osr or the forge or 90s storytelling those are genres of rpgs we usually talk about elements of fantasy story emulated by rpgs instead and that works for the most part we have rpgs emulating scifi or rpgs emulating fantasy etc but what i did last time doesn t actually capture the most common ways of subdividing fantasy novels whether people have elongated ears mostly doesn t factor into it people are more likely to talk about epic fantasy sword sorcery progression fantasy or maybe cozy fantasy nowadays and for some extra weirdness the wikipedia article considers epic fantasy the same as high fantasy and basically just fantasy happening not on earth a in last week s article that i wager is at best incomplete because when you ask people to name a few epic fantasy books the answers are likely to contain an unexpected protagonist from a remote place vanquishing some dark lord other against all odds or maybe they name malazan and despite my best attempts i have still no idea what s going on there but people will not for example name a story where real master thieves actually engage in that illicit acquisition goods lies of locke lamorra or some girl decides to join the evil empire to effect systematic improvements for her subjugated homeland baru cormorant or practical guide to evil take your pick or a half goblin is suddenly princess serenity of the elvish pseudo austrian empire the goblin emperor or an orc opens a coffee shop and these all do not take place on earth so the question stands how to tackle those fantasy subgenres that are actually used i suggest looking at how do the protagonists succeed primarily through the g oodness of their hearts the power of friendship and similarly lofty qualities hard w ork training and perserverance c leverness trickery great plans k ickassitude and personal prowess and what is the main antagonist like a ncient evils dark lords menaces to civilization the e stablishment o rdinary criminals and plotters i ndividual personal rivals and enemies so our typical epic fantasy story like lord of the rings or shera and the rebel princesses is ga the protagonists here are usually outclassed in a material sense the hobbits have no army and while shera and her friends are definitely better than horde goons they ultimately succeed by turning katra and the horde s leader progression fantasy is typically we through hard work those obnoxious young nobles shall be left in the dust the opposition of the established parties is not necessarily malicious or even taking note of the protagonists in the beginning and they are not usually destroyed or reformed either rather the protagonists strive to become part of the established power structure at least in the beginning goblin emperor and legends lattes are gi the protagonists succed by being decent to good folk and the overwhelming incompetence of their rivals locke lamorra cleverly and ruthlessly takes on the powerful ce as does catherine in the practical guide to evil there are actually ancient monsters but those are a problem mostly because they stand in the protagonist s way to make the world as they like it early dresden files books are ko dresden deals with ordinary magical criminals through the overwhelming power of being a wizard of the white council the books then move gradually to ka territory fantasy genres 26 friday may 2023 posted by holothuroid in uncategorized leave a comment i frequently encounter discussions about what is high fantasy what is dark fantasy what is weird fantasy etc i will now help the confusion of standards by proposing another standard where does it take place o ur world e ntry into another world portal fantasy a nother world outright fantasy world second word starts with o e a who is a potential pc h umans only t olkienesque people different kinds of fantasy humanoids elves dwarves orcs etc f airy tail menagerie all myths are real anthropomorphic b easts this is not about who and what theoretically exists in the world this is only about potential protagonists you can make more categories if necessary be sure to start with a consonant and explain what it is who uses magic o verlords monster gods e xperts priests academic wizards the nobility a nyone tech level s andals k nights g uns v ictorian age steam tech t ens to thirties 1910 1930 to be exact c omputers f uturistic this is category isn t very detailed and modeled after typical genre distinctions pick what fits best if magic is commonplace some technologies may be replaced with magic and now we can say middle earth atok fantasy shadowrun otef fantasy faerun ateg fantasy harry potter s wizarding world ehat fantasy dresden files ofec fantasy functional dice transformations 19 friday may 2023 posted by holothuroid in uncategorized leave a comment tags game design or is ftd for funky dice tricks or fancy dice tricks who knows i m talking about when you do not just roll and read teh dice but mangle the results somehow to get different probabilities and ranges rpgs have found a lot of these over the years i assume you know how to get probabilities for a single fair die of course this does not make a dice mechanic for a dice mechanic like for any other mechanic we need to know when to use it what parameters we require and what happens after they can change the feel of mechanic though so much so that they are the first thing players might recognize brutal named after a weapon property in d d4 on a certain results you get a reroll repeat until the result is not in the critical numbers anymore this means that you basically use a non standard die the critical values are effectively excised you can never get it so if you have a d6 brutal 1 you effectively have a d5 1 luck similar to brutal but you get only one reroll halflings do this in d d they have d20 luck 1 what does that do to probability to get a final result of 1 you have to roll 1 twice in a row so p 1 1 20² 1 400 for any other result you can either it directly 1 20 20 20² or first roll a 1 and then that result 1 20² we can add together for 21 400 for a general formula the lucky numbers for your dx have 1 x² the normal ones x 1 x² advantage advantage is like having a reroll but always taking the better result so you just roll two dice and take the highest let s do this for d6 our result space is pair of number between 1 and 6 that is 36 6² possibilities total we just have to write down all the possible pairs and divide by 36 pairs formula 1 1 1 1 36 2 1 2 2 2 2 1 3 36 3 1 3 2 3 3 3 3 2 3 1 5 36 4 1 4 2 4 3 4 4 4 4 3 4 2 4 1 7 36 5 1 5 2 5 3 5 4 5 5 5 5 4 5 3 5 2 5 1 9 36 6 1 6 2 6 3 6 4 6 5 6 6 6 6 5 6 4 6 3 6 2 6 1 11 36 results for highest 2d6 as you can see with 2 dice it goes up by two options every time explosion a rather common mechanism it makes a die bigger by allowing a reroll on the maximum number and adding the new result to the old sometimes the two heighest numbers etc are used let s look at d6 explode 6 the number 1 5 have p 1 6 as usual the 6 can never appear we roll again next p 7 1 6 1 6 we roll a 6 and then a 1 same for 8 11 the 12 again cannot happen we roll again for p 13 we get 1 6 1 6 1 6 digitifying this is what we typically do with a d100 we digitify d10 d10 games like in nomine digitify other dice thankfully probabilities are simple each particular resulting number has a probability 1 n1 n2 nx for a combination of dice with sizes n1 to nx flip flopping from unknown armies ua uses a d100 but under certain conditions you may reorder the digits for a result you like better so it s like digitifying but combinations are the same under reorder let s look at that d100 this actually seems to be the place where the term fancy funky dice tricks originated from there are ten combinations that only appear once 11 22 33 99 00 so p 1 100 for those every other combination exists twice 2 200 1 50 so for dn dn you have n repdigits with p n² and every other value has p 2 n² succe...