Keys in Asterisk World

After a conversation with two other great Kiwi game designers, I was motivated to adopt and adapt a Key based system for Asterisk World XP. It could equally be used in Dungeon World with minimal extra changes.

Experience

Experience is gained by invoking Keys. A Key must involve a motivation, problem, connection, duty, or loyalty. It must be an action that the character takes, rather than a situation that the character may passively find herself in.

Each character has two Keys at any one time, and may use the key in the following ways:

• Mark 1 XP when you _____.
• Mark 2 XP when you _____ despite a clear and present danger to yourself, directly associated with doing so.
• Mark 2 XP when you _____ despite having to go directly against the wishes of the rest of the characters.
• Mark 3 XP when you _____ despite an inevitable and significant cost to yourself, directly associated with doing so.

Starting Keys:

• Key of Adventure: Thoroughly explore a new environment
• Key of Alcoholism: Drink when it would not be appropriate
• Key of Awesome: Act in a cinematic, interesting manner
• Key of Belief: Defend your belief, or convert someone to your belief
• Key of Bloodlust: Start or cause a conflict
• Key of Chaos: Perform or incite random or unplanned acts
• Key of Conscience: Help someone who cannot help himself
• Key of Cowardice: Avoid or flee a dangerous situation
• Key of Deception: Try to pass yourself off as someone else
• Key of Freedom: Free someone from literal or figurative bondage
• Key of Greed: Act to obtain new wealth or physical items
• Key of Honor: Act according to your code of conduct
• Key of Knowledge: Learn something new and significant
• Key of Questing: Take action trying to advance your personal mission
• Key of Renown: Act to improve your social standing
• Key of Vengeance: Act against your hated target
• Key of Violence: Hurt a defenseless or unworthy target

You can only mark XP from each Key once per scene for each of the four different levels. For the levels above 1 XP, you must confirm with the GM that it really is dangerous, or that there will be a cost. Every 5 XP marked with Keys gives a Character Point to spend on advancements. These Character Points may be spent immediately, regardless of what is happening in the story.

You are encouraged to come up with personalized Keys for your character with the assistance of the GM. The GM may also have Keys that are always in effect and do not count towards the two Key limit.

Alternatively, you can ignore keys completely and simply gain 1 Character Point per session, and an additional one at the end of each adventure.

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In Dungeon World, a new level might be 10 XP from keys, depending on how quickly you want people to improve.

Please suggest more keys, or other ways to improve the system. For reference, the TSOY Key system I started from is described here.

Spelljammer, Asterisk World Style

In thinking about how to take my campaign to the next level of epic-ness, topping the last session that involved crashing a flying cloud castle into an ancient undead white dragon, there's only one thing that comes to mind as inspiring even crazier antics: Spelljammer.

Spelljammer is essentially high fantasy in space. To give my perspective on the key points of the genre, as differentiated from regular D&D style fantasy:

• The party, plus a few named or unnamed minions, crew a flying ship capable of space travel though converting magical energy of spell casters.
• The ship is owned by the party, not a single character, and should be able to be upgraded, traded in, damaged and repaired.
• The ship is frequently put in danger, beyond just typical danger to the characters. This includes both ship to ship combat, and non-combat encounters like magical asteroid fields, the Phlogiston, and collapsing gravity wells. Combat should flow seamlessly between ship/ship combat, boarding actions and character/character combat.

In my view, the ship is what provides the difference in genre, rather than just being an environment that the characters find themselves temporarily. Although I understand the ship-as-dungeon perspective in which the ship provides a set of challenges to be overcome (a front, in *W terminology), and for a fantasy firefly setting would be perfect, I don't feel that it captures the essence of Spelljammer.

In Apocalypse World derivatives, there are a few ways that the ship can be modeled in the system: Gear (like the car for a Driver, or Animal Companion for a Ranger); as a Stronghold or Steading (in DW and *W, or similar to a Holding in AW); as a shared character with its own playbook; or as a dungeon, environment or front. This post discusses my thoughts on that choice. Next time I'll post the custom moves that integrate the genre and system.

Ship as Dungeon
As above, this doesn't fit my idea of Spelljammer as opposed to just adventuring in space. The party explores the ship and overcomes challenges derived from it, but the ship isn't theirs in any meaningful way. You don't upgrade a dungeon, and it doesn't get damaged. The dungeon provides danger to the characters, it isn't put into danger itself. The only advantage to this option is that it doesn't require any additional rules.

Ship as Character
For a mecha game, where either the character or the mech is in use and each character has a mecha, this might make sense. For Spelljammer, where there is a single ship, and the characters are intimately and individually engaged in piloting and defending it. Characters can be upgraded, but when does the ship gain XP? Assisting a ship with Bonds/Hx is very strange. There's doubtless a reason that this isn't a common pattern in any game. The main advantage is that the ship can be upgraded while stil using basic moves such as Attack, Defend and Defy Danger to resolve conflict.

Ship as Gear
This one, although attractive from a rules re-use perspective, violates the tenet that the party, rather than a single character owns the ship. In AW the driver has nothing away from their car, and a pilot playbook/advancement tree would be just as tedious. It places the burden of improvement on a single character to spend their XP rather than the party as a whole. So while the rules exist, the ship would have stats that can be improved, this option doesn't quite hit all the targets.

Ship as Steading
And the winner is to use the Steading rules, in *W thanks primarily to @ColinJ76's great stuff from Living Dungeon World. This allows the party to contribute to the ownership and upgrading of the ship via the Treasure rules and rolls. This seems significantly more appropriate than a shared character with their own XP, or a single character responsible for both the ship and their own personal advances. It can provide additional moves to PCs that are on board, and thus differ from ship to ship. The ship could also provide free advancements to those moves, in the same way as Steading improvements can advance certain moves. Additional stats might be needed to model damage and repair, unless damage is simply temporary modifiers to the moves that the PCs make while on board (imagine ship inflicted debilities).

As always this came out of further thinking from a discussion on twitter, including @ColinJ76, @DMGallo, @Mease19 and @Clonebot; all definitely worth following!

Mecha World

Some thinking follows about how to run a Mech game (ala BattleTech / MechWarrior with huge anthropomorphic robots, rather than personal battlesuits) using a Apocalypse World based system. In this case I use my current Asterisk World (PDF) hack as the baseline. It's a reworking of Dungeon World to get rid of playbooks and spell lists.

Basic Design Choices

In my view, a mech that big is a character in its own right. It has Power, Maneuverability, Hardness, AI, Sensors, and Style unrelated to its pilot's STR, DEX, CON, INT, WIS or CHA. Maybe the pilot is a weedy bookworm, but runs a 100 ton Titan with bad-ass extended range particle projection cannons. Or a big bruiser bouncing around the battlefield in a fast mech with jump-jets.

Moves

Given the choice in Asterisk World to mirror the 6 D&D stats, let's see what happens if we keep them (reworked to the above names) with the basic moves.

• Attack+Power: Punch that other mech where it hurts. Fine.
• Attack+Maneuverability: Using the DEX equivalent for blasting things is a bit weird, and kind of over-balances the stat, but that happens in any futuristic game. Not terrible, moving along...
• Defy Danger: As a catch-all, it depends on the situation anyway. Fine.
• Defend+Hardness: Sure, you can act defensively in a mech, either to defend yourself or another mech, or your home base.
• Heal+AI?: One mech repairing another mech could happen. Would probably want to limit the availability to specialist mechs though. Strange to be using AI, however.
• Spout Lore+AI: Could be used for the mech's databases about terrain, weapons, other mechs and so forth. But a bit of a stretch! I would replace it with an auto-pilot type move that allowed the pilot to do something else at the same time. See below.
• Discern Reality+Sensors: Sure, using the mech's sensors to detect incoming dropships or find hidden weapons caches seems perfectly reasonable.
• Parley+Style: Yeah, not so much. Maybe some sort of Intimidation?

Auto Pilot Roll+AI. On a 10+, both the mech and pilot get to make a move as normal. On a 7-9, the Mech makes the move, but either the pilot must retake control, or pick two of the following three statements:

• The targeting is as intended.
• The move is the one intended.
• Both Mech and Pilot do not take -1 forward.

On a miss, the Pilot can take her move, but the Mech does nothing.

The Pilot should be able to use their Assist and Heal (Repair) moves on the mech.

Power Trees

The power trees, of course, are the improvements your can buy to power up your Mech. The Striker tree improves the weapons, Life increases the mech's frame, Defend gives you built in armor, and so forth. Some trees aren't very useful such as Scholar, Hunter, and Leader, but maybe some aspects are appropriate (Followers could be little Elemental Battlesuits). Magic would depend on the genre, but could be very appropriate in an Anime setting!

Additional Mech specific moves could easily be added to the regular trees to customize the pilots interactions with the mech beyond just Assist and Heal. Perhaps jump-jet specific piloting moves like Death From Above.

Playing the Game

Just run the game as normal, but be clear as to whether the players are in their mechs (and thus using their Mech character) or not (and thus using the pilot stats).

If you try it, let me know how it goes! :)

Naming Your Dragon

Mostly for @DanielSolis, but hopefully everyone's enjoyment... a Dragon Naming System.

DragonName = [origin] [size] [adjective] (feature) (noun) dragon
origin = (undead|demonic|northern|southern|eastern|western)
size = (miniature|giant|lesser|greater|minor|major)
feature = (color|number)-(spotted|striped|tailed|crested|winged|
           breasted|headed|faced|nosed|eyed|horned)

Thus:

• Undead Giant Red-Horned Hell Dragon
• Northern Miniature Purple-Nosed Kitchen Dragon
• Demonic Three-headed City Dragon
• Greater Glittering Golden-Winged Fairy Dragon

and so forth :)

Dungeon World Hacked & Slashed

As an eternal tinkerer and game theoretician (I hesitate to use the word designer), I love to mess around with systems from my own set of ideals. Before we start, this is not in any way criticism of Dungeon World. It's a fantastic product, and admirably achieves what it sets out to do. It just so happens that I'd like a very very similar system that does something slightly different.

Let's start with what is awesome about Dungeon World:

• Simple, easy to learn and easy to play
• The story is what matters, but not at the expense of a coherent base resolution system
• The resolution system does not prevent epic stories from day 1
• Failure is often the most interesting option

And what I've come to not like is the intentional adherence to retro concepts of classes, levels and Vancian-esque magic. Yes, that is to say I want to completely gut the system, even back beyond its Apocalypse World roots. And, given the generous and insightful licensing of the products, I can do just that.

The fundamental source of awesome in *World is that failure is interesting. You don't necessarily even fail at what you set out to do, you just have to deal with the increasing bad consequences. Every roll is a chance to fail and make things more awesome, or succeed and make things more awesome. Given the base of 2d6+stat, questions driving the system, and everything being EPIC, where can we go?

Firstly, let's keep it simple. HP, damage, armor reducing damage, weapons increasing damage, stats as the base for rolls... they can all stay. I agree with Sage's post on HP regarding automatic increases, but we haven't even got to levels yet.

Advancement is important, but doesn't need to delay stories being epic until the mythical "high levels". To mash up #LivingDungeonWorld1 and a great parody of the Lord of the Rings films:

Day 1: Killed Orcus. Still not King.

We always need new awesome things to do, both in the story and system.

Let's take levels first. If you don't gain static bonuses (like pluses to hit, extra hit points, better skills or saving throws), then they're irrelevant. There are essentially 3 levels in DW, 1, 2-5 and 6-10 as these are when different options open up. Spell casters have 5 levels due to the division of when you can acquire individual spell effects. Yes you do gain stats every 3 levels, but see also HP. Or, we could use a power tree system to get the same effect.

Classes (aka Playbooks) serve to differentiate characters' abilities. Until you add in the extensive multi-classing feats^H^H^H^H^H moves, and suddenly a level 6 Paladin can also be a level 5 Cleric. And tell me why, again, a Fighter shouldn't be able to turn the sky black with arrows, but a Ranger (now) can? Power trees again solve the issue, perhaps with templates for initial characters.

Finally, Vancian magic ("forget" the spell) is a terrible solution to limiting the power of spell casters. A fighter can hit things over and over again with a sword, but a wizard can forget how to blast it with lightning? What about if Hack and Slash was like Defy Danger and could use any stat? Roll+INT if ... you blast your opponent with awesome arcane MAGIC! The system is so simple that the un-epic Vancian like casting is a terrible waste of an opportunity. Let's just roll with the unwanted attention and get creative!

So... Asterisk World. Coming soon. (ish) (hopefully with a better name)

Dramatic Magic in Dungeon World

As often, a blog post that came out of a twitter discussion. And as often, started by Quinn Murphy:

[The important thing] for me is in making casting dramatically relevant. Making choices, taking risks, raising stakes.

In order to keep magic feasible in combat or other timed situations where characters take turns, yet still have some sort of drama associated with the casting of the spell rather than just a couple of die rolls, a spellcaster would need to be taking multiple actions to complete their casting. The problem can be managed by splitting the casting into phases, in which different things can go wrong.

1. Summon Energy
2. Shape Energy

Dungeon World already has some drama associated with partial success in casting spells: the player chooses between attracting unwanted attention, losing the spell (Vancian style) or taking an ongoing penalty to cast the spell in the future. But the drama is so compressed in such a system as to not be significant... or at least not as significant as Quinn was intending.

Assuming that each spell (or supernatural effect in general) has some energy cost that must be paid,

Summon Energy (CON/INT/WIS/CHA)

10+ You gain 3 points of energy towards the spell
7-9: You gain 1 point of energy towards the spell, and choose two:

• You don't attract unwanted attention from the energy source
• You don't take -1 forward
• It's not obvious what you're doing

Why the multiple stats?

CON: You're using your own life force to power the spell.
INT: Arcane magic, you're summoning the raw magic stuff of the universe.
WIS: Divine magic, you're channeling the power of the Gods.
CHA: Spirit magic, you're coercing another entity to give you the energy.

Powerful spells might require multiple types of energy to cast.

Shape Energy (INT/WIS)

10+ You shape the energy into the desired magical elements
7-9: You shape the energy into only one of the desired magical elements, and choose two:

• You don't suffer a backlash from the energy you're shaping
• You don't lose any energy (may be recovered with further Summon Energy)
• You can continue to Shape Energy

Magical Elements? Up to the world, but a spell might require multiple schools or shapes for the raw energy to generate the desired effect. For example a Haste style spell would require manipulating both Life and Time. In a more Elemental system, you might need both Air and Fire for a spell. Or in a Verb/Noun system, telepathy or scrying might be Move/Mind. If you don't have all of the magical elements required, then the GM/MC will adjudicate the results of the spell. Once all of the elements have been shaped, the spell goes off! There isn't a further roll for this, it happens after the final Shape Energy.

Dungeon World XP Hack

First, read Ryan and Hamish's posts about the XP hack for Dungeon World, listed in my previous post. Okay ...

... and now on to my take on it.

Ryan drops Aid/Hinder from the initial six. I agree that there's a problem with it, as the Aid or Interfere move is weak by itself and that's the only real way to roll for this type. So do we keep it, or drop it? Before we cast it to the winds, let's see what can be done...

• Move Healing into Aid from Defend. This helps Elven Wizards, Bards, Clerics, Paladins, but Rangers, Thieves and Fighters not at all. Maybe that's okay, as Fighters don't get much from Discover, Wizards not much from Defend, and so forth.
• We can fix the Aid or Interfere move to not be worthless! Given that you're giving up an attack or other useful move, to have a chance at giving +1 and only a small chance of not attracting unwanted attention for that +1, it's hard to see when the move as written is ever a good choice. How about:

  Aid or Interfere (Bond)
  When you help or hinder someone you have a Bond with, roll+Bond with them. On a 10+ they take +(1 plus your modifier for the action you're helping with) or -2, your choice. On a 7-9 you also expose yourself to danger, retribution, or cost.

• Allow indirect assistance to count, so long as it doesn't already count towards marking XP. So a Defy Danger roll to get in someone's face before they make it to the tasty tasty wizard could count as Aiding the wizard (so long as it doesn't count towards Stunt or Defend). But this gets really messy, in an otherwise quite clean set of actions.

You still don't like it? Truth be told, I don't either. Okay let's look at the highlight types in more detail, and I'll highlight (ha!) what I would call them, plus get to why I think Aid/Hinder is janktastic. As in Ryan's first post, it's about saying "I want to see you do X", and originally, "so I highlight Y." So we get rid of the middle man, Y, and just tell it like it is:

• Attack. I want to see you Destroying things (notably monsters).
• Defend. I want to see you Protecting things (notably your fellow adventurers).
• Discover. I want to see you Learning things (notably about the adventure).
• Converse. I want to see you Interacting with things (notably the NPCs).
• Stunt. I want to see you ... I don't know, jumping over things? Defying Dangerous things? The time that I saw Stunt used it was a style of play, rather than a particular action. I would rework Stunt to: I want to see you Risking things (notably yourself).
• Aid. I want to see you Helping [with] things? Lame. And it's lame because it's not about doing awesome things that you can later tell people about. "My character totally destroyed this evil water demon!" YEAH! "My character totally gave a little bit of advice about how to do things to other people!" Uhhh... not so much.

And there we have it. In a roleplaying game I would never want to tell a player: I want to see you stand on the side lines and offer advice, and as a player I would never want to be told that.

Ryan's solution is on the right track, I feel, but not quite there yet:

When you Aid or Hinder another PC, and the move you’re affecting is covered by one of your highlights, mark experience.

If it was covered by one of your highlights, why don't you just do it yourself? Hopefully you're pretty good at it. And on top of this, in a reasonably balanced set of characters and highlights, it's quite possible that no one else is really doing your highlights and instead leaving it to you, especially with Protecting and Interacting.

So along with the above revision for Aid or Interfere, should you choose to do it, instead:

When you Aid or Hinder another PC, and the move you’re affecting is covered by one of their highlights, mark experience.

Then you're actually helping people to do what they should be doing, not what you should be doing.

[Edits below, covering points that Ryan brought up on Twitter, paraphrased]

• If the highlight is one of theirs, it's impossible to use on NPCs as they don't have highlights!
  True enough, but along with the principle that every monster has a name, perhaps just arbitrarily say that the player can mark XP or not as if the monster had a highlight. Or just say that it only works with PCs.
• If you can interfere, then you can interfere with another PC using parley on you to stop them... and get XP if they have Converse/Interacting highlighted. That's fucked up.
  Yes, perhaps just Aid and not Interfere. Very much an edge case.