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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ovinomancer" data-source="post: 8256163" data-attributes="member: 16814">So, I have issues with 3 and 5, in that these systems are similar, yes, but are actually designed to do slightly different things and absolutely in different ways.  Torchbearer is using these phases in the OSR style to generate the naughty word that happens.  It's impersonal, and brutal, and puts pressure on the skilled play aspects of the game's design.  Blades uses these phases to create new complications and enmesh the characters in a wooly ball of narrative problems.  These are similar, yes, but they aim for different things.  Plus, the implementation of these systems is pretty different.  I don't think they are nearly as easy to integrate as you claim.  That said, I'm looking at a pure design standpoint, where these systems need to be clearly laid out to a new person learning them, whereas if you're making a personal hack, such problems can be papered over by you exercising GM fiat to do so.  Which is a fair solution.The Dungeon World journey mechanic also feels very different from the other two, and is starting to feel like an AD&D pastiche of mechanics rather than an integrated whole.  Which, again, is just fine as I just said above -- it might not be great for a published work, but it can work a champ for a personal hack.I don't think this is so, and also, again goes to the pastiche of mechanics.  Again, I go back to Indiana Jones, and don't really see the need for these kinds of mechanics in creating that fiction, from start to finish.  If it's important to do this -- to have a mechanic where the player is using a setup move to create new fictional positioning against an established obstacle -- I think that the existing mechanics in Blades do this well enough -- you can absolutely use those moves as setups, just like any other moves.  My complaint is that you're positioning these as only setup moves, which bucks the trend in the rest of the actions.So, to me, the biggest challenge to adapting Blades is what you're calling a strength, here -- the Faction game.  This is so tightly integrated into the concepts in FitD games and into the settings of those games that it is, in my opinion, the single largest point of design in any remapping of the FitD system.  This, to me, is the majority of the design work, and it absolutely requires a strong statement to what play will be about so it can reinforce it.  Your mission statement, to do Torchbearer with protagonism, is good and high level, but it doesn't have the setting theme necessary to really build a faction game.  YMMV, but I'd love to see some more about the faction game you envision rather than more on how you plan to integrate the Journey mechanic.   This is, IMO, a bolt on mechanic and so doesn't integrate into the setting tightly but rather sits upon it to achieve a specific mechanical end -- ie, applying stress to the PCs prior to the adventure.So, again, I think that this statement that it's trivial to integrate the Journey mechanic into the Engagement roll is very fraught.  Of all the things in this post, this is the one that stands out as the most abrupt and disjoined.  I say this because, as I understand it, the Journey mechanic creates fiction through play -- it establishes the story and danger of a trek through the wilderness to arrive at your destination.  The Engagement roll, on the other hand, it meant to elide everything from concept to execution and drop the PCs directly into the action right at the point things go wrong.  These things fight each other.  And, if you're using Journey results as inputs to an engagement roll, you are double counting things -- the failure in the Journey mechanic has already exacted a cost and some fiction, and that's not feeding into the Engagement as another negative.  Plus, there's the thing that the Journey ends at arriving at the location, but the Engagement is supposed to get to the first obstacle.  What's the bridge between arriving at the adventure and then skipping whatever is between that arrival and where the action of the adventure starts?  I also like the Journey mechanic -- I really do -- I'm just not clear on how this is integrating into a score mechanic well.  If anything, I'd look at Journey as a type of score, rather than a lead into a score.And, all that said, I want to caveat this as constructive -- if you ignore it I will not, in any way, be offended.  And, I hope, in giving it, that it's received as a friendly concern and in the constructive manner it's intended.  I think it would be just fine if you hack these things together and use your appreciation of how it's supposed to work to run this.  There's enough here for that, and I can see it.  I'm pointing out places where I think it's relying on this, though, and not on independent design.  Not a bad thing at all.</blockquote>

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