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thoughts on Apocalypse World?
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<blockquote data-quote="Grendel_Khan" data-source="post: 8416838" data-attributes="member: 7028554"><p>Thanks [USER=42582]@pemerton[/USER] for humoring me with that FitD question that I directed at you. I think your example of seeing the culprits driving away is a great Lost Opportunity consequence.</p><p></p><p>But if [USER=6696971]@Manbearcat[/USER] and [USER=16814]@Ovinomancer[/USER] and whoever else might be a Blades/Forged in the Dark veteran can humor me further, here are some situations that came up in the test session I ran last night of Scum and Villainy in a Star Wars setting. I fully believe that I was GMing a ton of stuff wrong, given the FitD system/approach, so I'm not looking for attaboys or reinforcement. </p><p></p><p>Some quick context: </p><p></p><p>-Scum and Villainy differs from Blades in that you have a ship instead of a crew, and so you aren't generally tied to a given area. It's not a bounded sandbox, like wth Duskvol. If anything it's the opposite, making it (in theory) a good fit for Star Wars, where you have lots of interstellar mobility. This changes a lot of things, including making something like that very compelling setup that Manbearcat laid out less possible, imo. You take jobs because someone is paying you, and those could be in lots of places.</p><p></p><p>-For this test session I may have broken the premise without realizing it--my main interest was to get practice with the core mechanics, and I wound up having my solo player, who chose a new Jedi for his character, and his more experienced Jedi partner NPC assigned to hunt down a supposed terrorist. Did kicking things off unrelated to PC contacts and faction relationships make everything that following invalid or at least clumsy? Maybe so. </p><p></p><p>I'm not (I hope) doing the dreaded listen-to-my-session thing, but here are the specific moments/decisions I'm curious about:</p><p></p><p></p><p>1) Based on a roll to learn the terrorist's whereabouts from local criminals--the player rolled a success with consequence on a risky Command action to intimidate them--I figured they were now being led into a trap. So they took a boat to another area of the city where the target was supposedly staying. This being a one-shot test session, in which I very much wanted a noir-ish moment where the newbie's more experienced partner gets killed, I figured the trap would start big, with an A-Wing attacking the boat from far above--a kind of sniper situation. I said that they could hear a high-pitched keening sound during the boat trip, but my player did nothing (he's also new to playing FitD, though not reading it). When he stepped off the boat I triggered the attack.</p><p></p><p>At this point I suddenly didn't know what to do, because in theory the Attune action specifically notes that you can use the Way (aka the Force) to "sense unseen danger or killing intent." But the player didn't initiate that action upon hearing the suspicious noise. So we awkwardly decided he could use Attune now to sense the attack and try to get himself and his partner off the boat in time. He rolled a critical success (two sixes) so he decided to pull the boat's driver off as well.</p><p></p><p>Everything about how I handled this seemed wrong, and in the moment we were left with the sense that if the player just kind of waits out a situation instead of taking action, maybe that's on them, because, as discussed in this thread, passive actions--especially the sort of passive Perception rolls that are almost constant in many trad games--just don't make sense in FitD. But what do you guys think? Was this just a hopelessly trad and off-base encounter from the start? And how do you handle stuff like danger sense or similar unnatural/enhanced perception in FitD, if it seems like an ambush has become part of the story?</p><p></p><p></p><p>2) The player and NPC decided to get to a rooftop to deal with the A-Wing assassin, and here, again, I may have defaulted to a trad situation. I said that as they were running into a building and about to get into the stairwell, a pair of guys entered from the street and immediately pulled blasters and opened fire--evidence that the trap was bigger/worse than expected. The resolution for this was simple and fast and great. But was having these two shooters pop up (to show the escalating danger and stakes) sort of a game-breaking trad intrusion, because it wasn't based on another, post-A-Wing-attack player roll and related consequence? This was, in other words, a GM-first piece of fiction, which would miss the point of FitD, right? Or am I just in my head with this one?</p><p></p><p></p><p>3) Finally, toward the end of the scene/session, the PC and NPC realized they were stuck, with the A-Wing loitering above the roof and a large group of people running up the stairs. How this situation was resolved was, again, very cool to me, and pushed me even harder toward wanting to do lots more FitD. But as with the earlier appearance of the two shooters, this horde of dudes did not appear based on a subsequent player roll or suggestion. Does that once again break the core FitD approach, and make the game about PCs reacting to GM-determined fiction, instead of the other way around? Or am I looking at this in a way that's too zoomed in, and really the whole situation is just flowing from the player's chosen approach for how to find their target, and the consequences that followed?</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Grendel_Khan, post: 8416838, member: 7028554"] Thanks [USER=42582]@pemerton[/USER] for humoring me with that FitD question that I directed at you. I think your example of seeing the culprits driving away is a great Lost Opportunity consequence. But if [USER=6696971]@Manbearcat[/USER] and [USER=16814]@Ovinomancer[/USER] and whoever else might be a Blades/Forged in the Dark veteran can humor me further, here are some situations that came up in the test session I ran last night of Scum and Villainy in a Star Wars setting. I fully believe that I was GMing a ton of stuff wrong, given the FitD system/approach, so I'm not looking for attaboys or reinforcement. Some quick context: -Scum and Villainy differs from Blades in that you have a ship instead of a crew, and so you aren't generally tied to a given area. It's not a bounded sandbox, like wth Duskvol. If anything it's the opposite, making it (in theory) a good fit for Star Wars, where you have lots of interstellar mobility. This changes a lot of things, including making something like that very compelling setup that Manbearcat laid out less possible, imo. You take jobs because someone is paying you, and those could be in lots of places. -For this test session I may have broken the premise without realizing it--my main interest was to get practice with the core mechanics, and I wound up having my solo player, who chose a new Jedi for his character, and his more experienced Jedi partner NPC assigned to hunt down a supposed terrorist. Did kicking things off unrelated to PC contacts and faction relationships make everything that following invalid or at least clumsy? Maybe so. I'm not (I hope) doing the dreaded listen-to-my-session thing, but here are the specific moments/decisions I'm curious about: 1) Based on a roll to learn the terrorist's whereabouts from local criminals--the player rolled a success with consequence on a risky Command action to intimidate them--I figured they were now being led into a trap. So they took a boat to another area of the city where the target was supposedly staying. This being a one-shot test session, in which I very much wanted a noir-ish moment where the newbie's more experienced partner gets killed, I figured the trap would start big, with an A-Wing attacking the boat from far above--a kind of sniper situation. I said that they could hear a high-pitched keening sound during the boat trip, but my player did nothing (he's also new to playing FitD, though not reading it). When he stepped off the boat I triggered the attack. At this point I suddenly didn't know what to do, because in theory the Attune action specifically notes that you can use the Way (aka the Force) to "sense unseen danger or killing intent." But the player didn't initiate that action upon hearing the suspicious noise. So we awkwardly decided he could use Attune now to sense the attack and try to get himself and his partner off the boat in time. He rolled a critical success (two sixes) so he decided to pull the boat's driver off as well. Everything about how I handled this seemed wrong, and in the moment we were left with the sense that if the player just kind of waits out a situation instead of taking action, maybe that's on them, because, as discussed in this thread, passive actions--especially the sort of passive Perception rolls that are almost constant in many trad games--just don't make sense in FitD. But what do you guys think? Was this just a hopelessly trad and off-base encounter from the start? And how do you handle stuff like danger sense or similar unnatural/enhanced perception in FitD, if it seems like an ambush has become part of the story? 2) The player and NPC decided to get to a rooftop to deal with the A-Wing assassin, and here, again, I may have defaulted to a trad situation. I said that as they were running into a building and about to get into the stairwell, a pair of guys entered from the street and immediately pulled blasters and opened fire--evidence that the trap was bigger/worse than expected. The resolution for this was simple and fast and great. But was having these two shooters pop up (to show the escalating danger and stakes) sort of a game-breaking trad intrusion, because it wasn't based on another, post-A-Wing-attack player roll and related consequence? This was, in other words, a GM-first piece of fiction, which would miss the point of FitD, right? Or am I just in my head with this one? 3) Finally, toward the end of the scene/session, the PC and NPC realized they were stuck, with the A-Wing loitering above the roof and a large group of people running up the stairs. How this situation was resolved was, again, very cool to me, and pushed me even harder toward wanting to do lots more FitD. But as with the earlier appearance of the two shooters, this horde of dudes did not appear based on a subsequent player roll or suggestion. Does that once again break the core FitD approach, and make the game about PCs reacting to GM-determined fiction, instead of the other way around? Or am I looking at this in a way that's too zoomed in, and really the whole situation is just flowing from the player's chosen approach for how to find their target, and the consequences that followed? [/QUOTE]
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