While /tg/ hates dungeon world and for good reason (it's not bad desu, it's just not the second coming of God) I think the original apocalypse world game is pretty cool.
>>43517173
We haven't being look at the same threads. Anyway apocalypse world is good.
Apocalypse World is quite good and very versatile. It can run any kind of apocalypse you like, and anything from something out of Heavy Metal magazine, to something incredibly compelling. The best example of this to date for me is the actual play podcast of The Jank Cast playing Apocalypse World. Shit was amazing.
>>43516994
Apocalypse world is a game of failure, where every failure can be accounted with tigers.
Fail to seduce, tiger knaws your face off, as it remove wig.
Fail to spot enemies, tigers already lurk in the shadows, ready to bite you in the face. Despite not existing before you tried to spot enemies.
Fail to best enemy champion, find yourself dropped into pit of tigers, tearing your balls' off.
This is a true and provocative statement.
What's so great about this?
I've seen it once and it looked like one of /tg/s awful homebrews.
>>43517977
it needs the right group capable of reading everything not literally.
>>43516994
I'm still not convinced that a game about the post-apocalypse needs that many wordcount dedicated to sex - I feel it's not genre-appropriate (I have no problem with how monsterhearts does the same things for example).
That said, AW has been something of a revolution in storygames, and that's great. It's not the best game in the world but it's a good litmus test about people on message boards.
>>43518159
>For it to be a good game, players must not do what the book says
Sure sounds like a good game. Why not just do freeform in that case?
>>43518184
> That much word count dedicated to sex
What else are you gonna do after the Apocalypse? IVF?
Personally I just thought monster hearts was in comparison just stupid. You're a monster in high school and you get superpowers in the form of variations of sex? It was dumb in Twilight and it's dumb here.
>>43518184
>Litmus test on a message board
How would that even work? On an anonymous board, anyone can spout everything and its opposite two posts later; and on any 'regular' board with names/registrations/postcounts Average Joe will just passively follow the opinion of the local majority/most vocal "authority" on the subject.
>>43518215
Till soil, fix shit, fuck.
It's like farm life but for everyone.
>>43518184
>I feel it's not genre-appropriate
lol have you had sex
heaps of applicable themes 'finding a connection when everything else has gone to shit' or 'cheap distractions during a crappy time of your life'. It's opportunity to manipulate someone, or it can be the thing you're manipulating them for, etc etc
The whole idea about sex and AW is sex is just something people like they do anything else
>>43518241
hey proof reading
My point is sex is something adults do, AW has adults in it; ergo...
>>43516994
Half of /tg/ will vomit violently at the mention of it but anyone interested in how Apocalypse World works, one half of the dudes who made Dungeon World ran a pretty tight Apocalypse World campaign for Roll20 on Youtube
>>43518184
>>43518215
The reasons given for sex moves being a thing in each are: in AW it represents your character leaving themselves vulnerable, showing a lot of trust in the other person, hence why all the AW sex moves are about the changes in the relationship between the two people, in MH it's there because when you're a teen having sex is a big deal so the moves are there to make sure that it's a big deal to the players as well.
>>43518268
With one of the dudes from One Seven design
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WFwIK5G5J0
>>43518232
I wish I could remember the hack someone made for playing as a bunch of farmers...
Also, if you're tilling the soil, you're playing a very different game of AW than any I have seen.
>>43517660
It's more like Bearworld baka.
>>43518194
I think >>43518159 just phrased it poorly.
You need to not be focused on finding the specific rules for each situation, because AW doesn't have specific rules. It's one of them fancy narrative games the kids are going on about, so it's based on interpretation of the rules.
It takes skill to make fun and consistent interpretations of what a partial success vs. total success vs. failure is like. You also need a group who's willing to put that interpretation in the hands of the GM and trust them to come up with something good, which is a problem both for groups used to codified failure tables and people who like freeform games where they can narrate the results of their actions.
>>43518290
I watched that whole thing, and it was fucking awesome. 9/10, would watch as an HBO miniseries.
>>43517255
>We haven't being look at the same threads.
Some portion of those posters who seemed to think DW was the second coming of Jesus were actually anti-DW trolls (*cough*Virt*cough*) trying to stir up shit. I called one on inappropriately recommending it as the best thing ever one time and he replied that he was only posting "sarcastically" and then proceeded to post a bunch of Virt's giant DW image macros.
>>43518354
Drop Bears? Those I can get behind, otherwise, tiger superior
>>43516994
I've always enjoyed it.
Mind you I also didn't *hate* DungeonWorld.
The Basic Moves need better clarification, I mean every first time player always struggles with the difference between 'Going Aggro' and 'Seize by Force'
>>43519655
I though it was explained as 'going aggro' is one sided violence, 'seize by force' is for when they're fighting back? that's not too complicated surely
>>43519679
Yeah, I've seen a few people through the game, and it's pretty easy to pick up.
Can they hit back, and are they willing to do so? Seize by Force. If not, Go Aggro.
>>43517660
And that's ultimately true to any PbtA games I ever seen and heard about.
>>43518227
You've only been to bad forums.
>>43516994
Yeah. The Apocalypse World campaign I recently finished was the most satisfying I ever had.
Mostly because it was the first that ever came to a conclusion, but also because the PCs properly interacted and not always as a team.
Playing it made me see DW's issues clearly as well.
>>43517660
This sounds like an awesome idea for a PbtA version of Kobolds Ate My Baby.
"On a miss, tigers."
Also reminds me of Caesar's Day Off
>>43526480
> Playing it made me see DW's issues clearly as well.
care to illustrate?
I've heard 'DW has problems' a thousand times on this thread and never an explanation
>>43516994
Apocalypse World is good if the players are enthusiastic and engaged. I played with a bunch of gung-ho guys and it was great. Then I played it with a bunch of lazy fuck players and it sucked.
>>43516994
I fucking adore this game when everyone just rolls with it and is active in a campaign. If the players are more prone to being reactive than proactive then it can become stale quick.
>>43527475
I really should record this statement in a jpg or something, because I've made plenty of variations on it in PbtA threads, but then you get called a virt-tier shitposter.
Basically, it boils down to the PbtA engine being great for antagonistic relationships between PCs, and shit for cooperative relationships between them. I've brewed up a couple of rulesets based on the engine, and read and played a ton of others, and it's a strong running theme.
At it's core, the mechanics are set up so you can never get all of what you want. The dice are going to tell you to settle more often than not, and you've got all these things pushing and pulling on your character to sacrifice one thing or the other: in AW you've got your gang, other NPCs you work with, your physical gear, your ability to be in a safe and supplied situation, etc. The whole MC section is basically a tutorial in understanding these relationships, and how to set them up so characters play off each other. The core direction for running NPCs is 'make a triangle between an NPC and two PCs'. All sorts of shenanigans follow because the PC wants to fill all of these demands, but they don't have enough to fill them all at once, and now there's this asshole who has some contradictory demands they need to meet. Sometimes you work together, and you can be damn powerful doing it, but eventually you find those little hooks pulling you apart.
DW has none of that. Not only are you lacking the strong responsibilities of an AW character (believe me, saying you've got so-and-so relationship is nothing like having an actual mechanical assent on your sheet), but all of the threats the PCs face are external. It's not a bunch of people trying to do the best they can in a hostile world, it's a bunch of people working together to do the best they can.
>con't
>>43527999
You can't split the party in DW because A) it's ingrained deep in them to stick together as a D&D-esque group, and they are all committed to each other through both metagame and in-game bonds, and B) not only do the lack of demands prevent you from splitting their resources, it also reinforces the weakness of the characters. They don't have the crutch of their external resources like a gang to count on (even Gunluggers and the like have that kind of relationship with someone, including mechanics and obvious mechanical incentives for getting a gang), so they need each other. Together, with all the aiding (never interfering), a DW party can overcome most anything.
And that's the thing. Apocalypse World has a nice little secret to it: If you all work together, literally no front can stop you. I've seen it happen; the characters have enough power, both externalized and in their moves, to crush problems through sheer force and dice probability. The key to running AW is to pull them apart by making each failure hurt one of them in particular, testing their loyalty to their gangs and families vs. the other PCs, who have their own gangs and families. It creates a nice organic othering.
In DW, you have none of those relationships tying you down. You, as the party, can say, 'Fuck it,' and waltz off to the next town, because you are a strong unit and your choices are in your own hands. The GM will throw threat after threat after front at you, because you are friends who work together to fight monsters, and it makes sense that you protect each other. There's none of the deep wedges and hooks built into the characters to pry their loyalty apart, because first and foremost they are loyal to 'the party.' In AW, if flows organically from a zero-sum idea: There's only so much to go around, and for you to gain it someone else has to lose it. In DW, that zero-sum idea doesn't work because you win and lose together, always.
It's dumb. The book's writing style is tryhard. The sex mechanic is a silly way to earn xp and make the game seem more mature. The AW community tries to jealously hoard and trade the class playbooks in some sort of ridiculous roleplaying exercise. The marking of the "most interesting" stats to decide what gets xp only encourages you to make an ass of yourself failing on rolls and acting erratically from session to session. The character of the classes and the Hx options gives you a party of brooding loners who have no reason to work with or trust each other and usually a bit of outright hostility that should end in the characters killing each other in chargen but doesn't because lol rpg party always sticks together. Just like in DW you're always barely succeeding if at all, the "choose #" result is always an illusion. To actually succeed at the task you need to select one option, to do it without taking damage you select another and then there's usually some leftovers with no real impact except the GM can creatively interpret not picking them as license to fuck you in the ass.
>>43528227
>The AW community tries to jealously hoard and trade the class playbooks in some sort of ridiculous roleplaying exercise.
It's a community thing that people like because they actually interact with each other, but if you're so sad that you can't be bothered to actually ask someone for a playbook (or you're too scared of telling some 'I did a good deed')
http://nerdwerds.blogspot.ca/2012/12/all-of-playbooks.html
The rest of your post is just bad, like you're reguritating what someone told you of AW but you never actually read, for example, how Hx works, how you pick it or advance it.
>>43528193
>' In AW, if flows organically from a zero-sum idea: There's only so much to go around, and for you to gain it someone else has to lose it. In DW, that zero-sum idea doesn't work because you win and lose together, always.
...that explain the difference between a post apo setting and a fantasy one, not why the later is bad.
I guess you could write a savage world with sword an orc, but it probably would feel nothing like a classical fantasy adventure.
>>43528377
I'm not saying that the latter setting or genre is bad, but that DW is absolutely the wrong system for it, because PbtA works on setting up zero-sum relationships between the players and using that to drive the game, and you don't have those kinds of relationships in a dungeon crawler game.
D&D is a blast, but it's the players vs. the GM, and you can't get that experience when your system is designed for the players vs. each other, with the MC just there to stir the pot.
>>43528370
>community volunteer moderator detected
Yes everyone knows you can just go download them, which is part of what makes their behaviour so retarded. It's like trading rare pepes but super serial. Hx is shit, the way it's built up is arbitrary and then it resets whenever you reach enough to generate xp. What does any of it actually mean other than a way to very slowly trickle out character advancement? Who knows, open your mind to the weird duuuude.
>>43528692
Hx is not a system for character advancement, and you're playing wrong if you use it that way.
I mean actually playing wrong, as in 'not doing what the book tells you to do.' Your Hx with someone is a mechanical measure of how well you know the person. It's not about you being isolated or against the person- generally the breakdown at chargen is 1 positive option, 1 negative option, and 1 option that ties in closely with the flavour of your playbook.
At the end of a session, you pick one person who knows you better, and give them a point, to reflect that learning; they're now mechanically better at both helping and fucking with you, through the aid-interfere action. It's a really slow and shitty way to grind XP, because it's in the other person's hands about whether that number goes up; assuming someone hands out XP evenly at a 4-player table, that's 9 sessions before the guy who started with +1 loops back around. That's an entire campaign, not a cheat to get more XP. The actual way to gain lots of XP fast is to roll your highlighted stats, which is doing exactly what the game and your fellow players/MC want you to do.
There is a house rule that's now an official part of the game where the reset does not just earn you XP, but you also gain a secret from that person. Another common one (which I don't know if Lumpley canonized it yet) is that you can hand out negative Hx to someone who knows you worse.
The building of it isn't arbitrary, it's based on the story of the game, probably the least arbitrary part of a story-based RPG.
>>43529033
>Another common one (which I don't know if Lumpley canonized it yet) is that you can hand out negative Hx to someone who knows you worse.
That one is actually in the rulebook, pg. 207.
Which makes treating Hx as a way to get XP even worse, because someone can set you back a session even more easily, by handing you negative when you need positive to roll over and vice versa.
It also points out that it doesn't mean you know them worse, but that you crossed a threshold in your understanding of them, and you need to see some different side of them to know them better. It's why he liked secrets so much, because it gave you a tangible thing that you could say, "This is what I know about them, and that knowledge cannot be taken away." And you could keep building from there.
>>43516994
I love this game. It's probably my favorite Tabletop game.
>>43519655
>>43519679
Vincent is making a second edition and this is one of the big changes. I think there will be One "violence move" instead of those two.
>>43528459
I disagree -- what you're describing about AW isn't the strong points of the engine design, it's the strong point of the playbooks, which are all lined up to do a kind of thing you find exciting (me too). DW, on the other hand, uses the same engine, but is wired up to do OD&D style dungeon crawling, which admittedly is neither exciting nor groundbreaking.
I suspect you're mistaking that for the engine design, when it's really a mixture of personal taste and the core DW classes being a bit bland. (You're supposed to build the game out to suit your world, OSR style, which means new races, moves, compendium classes, and stuff)
Within the confines of what it's aimed at, DW does the same kind of thing, creating an exciting frame for dungeon crawling where you careen from thrilling success to terrifying complications at a breakneck pace, which is really what the core of the Apocalypse Engine does. The PVP stuff is primarily playbook design -- you could build out a set of PvP focused classes for DW, but that was not a design goal.
>>43531477
I strongly disagree with you there.
Take Hx, or Bonds. What exactly is the point of having that in DW? The point of Hx in AW is as a measure of how well someone knows you, and as >>43529487 points out it's both positive and negative, to represent your fluctuating relationship. When you give someone Hx with you, it's an acknowledgement that your relationship has changed, and it carries with it an inherent weight- you both know that by altering that number, you are changing their ability to both help and hinder you. You have exposed or concealed your true self in the narrative, and the mechanics reflect that.
Meanwhile, Bonds is a non-starter. Firstly, you know that no one is going to interfere with someone else in the party, so keeping that "+1/-2" dynamic is just silly. As well, you have a much flatter relationship with your Bonds; there's no variation in what each represents, you just +Bonds. That means you should try to fill in every Bond you've got with someone in the party, crafting a big complicated history because that's what makes the most mathematical sense for future aiding, and it's eminently easy to justify in the fiction. Not only that, but >>43528692's dumb argument actually works for DW. There's no reason you shouldn't resolve a bond every session, because you get XP every time and you get to write a new bond with whoever you want. There's a fundamental disconnect between what the bonds want to do (represent your deep and changing relationship with another character) and what they actually do (offer basic mechanical bonuses that can be only loosely attached to the fiction, and which you can change regularly for mechanical reasons because there's no reason not to or limit beyond the GM saying no).
>cont
>>43533229
Similarly, the nature of PbtA rolls is that they work well when you have multiple actors at cross purposes. When you fail a roll in AW, the GM makes a move, then he tosses it back to the players to react. A failure might put one person in a totally different position, but another PC can still capitalize on it because their goals are still valid. If I can try to explain my rambling this way, a Battlebabe and a Chopper are fighting with an NPC hardholder over a prisoner. Each of them can have a different agenda, and it doesn't matter what the result of any given roll is (whether success, partial, or failure), it still creates an opening for another person in the scene to act. Even if the GM makes a move, it's immediately tossed back to the players, and whichever one did not fail has the opportunity to use whatever move they want in this new situation and grab that prisoner, or decide they want to do something else. The fact that the odds are stacked to make you suffer at least a bit is less important, because every inch you lose is another inch another player can immediately try to take, and when they try more dice roll and the situation keeps rolling on and passing the initiative.
>cont
>>43533249
In DW, the stakes don't change in such a way. If a Fighter and a Cleric are going up against a lich to save a princess, their success and failure is tied together. If the Fighter fails to Hack & Slash and is grabbed by the lich, the Cleric can't just grab the princess and run, or stab the Fighter while he's down, or snatch the lich's treasure. Now the shitty roll the Fighter made is the Cleric's problem too, and both of them are in the same shared situation; the Fighter's roll didn't give the other player the option to shift the game, because they're still in the same situation of having to kill the lich and preserving the party that they were in when they entered the dungeon. AW lets you do build momentum and move off of everyone else's moves to change the situation because what you want is different and flexible in the way only personal goals can be, while in DW you share the load of every roll because you all are in the same situation working to the same shared goal.
The careening in DW is more like a general downward slide, where one person slips and grabs another person to pull them up, and so on until someone succeeds to the point that they are all safe. There's no give and take in the scenes, except setting up the GM as the enemy who gets to pound on you a bit for each mistake of the dice (which are weighted to allow pounding) while also having to realise that doing something that severely disadvantages a person does not really improve the scene in a narrative so much as it hinders the rest of the party for as long as the disadvantage lasts.
>>43533229
>What exactly is the point of having that in DW?
To create connections between players for aiding and interfering, and to push character interaction and development?
The idea that nobody will interfere with you is belied by my last group where it came up on a number of occasions, especially when our Elf lost his shit. (In our universe elves are a bit high-strung and prone to sudden obsessiveness - they were created as divine guards and the ability to watch vigilantly for hours on end sometimes backfires)
Resolving bonds is done fiction first, too. You can't just say "that's resolved, gimme XP" it has to actually be significantly changed or resovled in play. And if players are interacting strongly with each other every session, then they deserve some XP.
>>43533354
>The careening in DW is more like a general downward slide, where one person slips and grabs another person to pull them up, and so on until someone succeeds to the point that they are all safe
And that's EXACTLY as designed. A similar goal was used in the creation of Monster of the Week, where the Apocalypse Engine makes the characters pretty much count out the days until they're doomed.
Dungeon World is rough on low-level characters, as they have to hang together as a team hard to survive early on, and push through until the later levels when they can start tearing down those fronts that built up and start saving everyone before the game wraps up.
Dungeon World has a very different arc from Apocalypse World, and it's really well designed to draw that arc out.
>>43529638
Cool.
I regret mentioning dungeon world considering the amount of site discussion gets but it's really is the elephant in the room.
Well the apocalypse's engine attempt at filling 'traditional' dungeon crawl game is debatable. I think it does what it was design to docquite swimmingly.
>>43527475
>>43531477
Thanks for the great replies, it's certainly a nice change from 'DW IS FOR FAGGOTS' with some dick pulling macro.
I feel like your argument is basically 'DW doesn't support complex individualistic PvP, like AW does' though. While that's a legitimate point to make, I don't know if I'd label it as criticism of DW. There's nothing in there to suggest that DW is failing to be what it was designed to be - a lighter, simple, different way to do traditional, tropey dungeon delving RP based on a bunch of good ideas from AW.
You can definitely argue that that style of game is limited and overdone and uninspiring, and I'd agree, but as someone looking for something to cut my DM teeth on and something to teach to new players, I still haven't seen anyone say that DW doesn't do what it says on the tin (and well), despite the constant complaints about it
I am a fucking idiot. Quoted the wrong posts
I meant
>>43527999
>>43533229
Fuck I am dumb
>>43516994
apocalypse world is solid, that said the game book reads like it was written by a 15 year old who just discovered the world of transgressive material and the sex moves are lame.
>>43538074
>the sex moves are lame
out of curiosity what would you have rather seen for them, or would you just prefer they not be in the game?
So I'm interested in AW but I'm finding it a little confusing. What, bare minimum, do I need to understand the rules? I've seen playbooks, which seem to be some kind of character thing, but is there a basic rulebook somewhere? Or a lite version, like with GURPS?
>>43539000
The die roll mechanic, the Moves available to you or that affect you (which is a longer list if you are the Ref), and a deep sense of loathing for your fellow players.
>>43539000
Basically you just need the core rulebook. Playbooks are basically a combination of character sheet and splatbook -- the brilliance of the Apocalypse Engine was moving a lot of rules into modular chunks called "moves" which can be loaded onto individual character sheets, reducing the amount of rules in the core game and allowing each character archetype to be unique.
The game plays differently depending on what classes you choose. Like, if you want a player-conflict heavy game, like the dude upthread loves, then you want a Brainer or a Skinner, because those classes' mechanics give them a great deal of power to create tensions and conflicts between players.
And yeah, the writing is a little edgy -- Vincent is trying to help you get in the right frame of mind to run the system, because when you run this game you shouldn't be halfhearted or tentative, you should be read to create balls-to-the-wall apocalyptic insanity. It maybe tries a little too hard in places, but I'd rather that than another system that reads like stereo instructions and gives you no clue what the end result should be like.
I find it helps to imagine the writer's voice coming in over a crackly radio signal as you drive across the wastelands at 90 MPH.
>>43539000
Bare minimum (and maximum) as a player you need a copy of the Basic Moves playbook, your character playbook, and 2d6.
The Basic Moves covers the stuff that everyone can do; it tells you what to roll if you want to hit someone, run away from danger, scope out a situation, etc. Your specific playbook is your character sheet, with all your details and the special moves specific to your character.
As the GM, you only need the pages at the end of this attached PDF, which are the sheets you would use in play to create and track fronts and threats (the NPCs).
Theoretically, you could run a game using just these pages, but you probably do want to read the full book if you're going to run the game. It's available everywhere internets are found.
>>43540398
>>43540403
Awesome, these will be a lot of help - thank you!
>>43540470
No problem.
Print off >>43540403 (it's scaled for legal paper, double-sided) and you have all the pages you'll ever need for the table; You put the first few booklets on the table for the group to pick through and decide what they want to play, and the GM keeps everything from 'The First Session' on for his own notes.
Read >>43540398 if you have the time; you can buzz past reading each playbook and memorizing them, but you really out to at least read the chapter on The Agenda and The Principles to get a feeling of how to run the game. As they said, the writing is a bit crude and juvenile, but it's intended to be.
