I don’t have any familiarity with FitD but I was similarly in love with BtW’s collaborative setup technology and let down by the gameplay after that.
I’d love to see it adapted to a FitD or PbtA format.
Forged Beyond the Wall
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I’m glad to hear I’m not alone!
I’ve started working on the Local Performer, and so far the pattern seems to work for the playbooks. I think I should add in something more about equipment - I tried that when I went back to the Heir to a Legend and it seemed to work okay, but it needs another pass.
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@Anders might I recommend putting your content into a google doc and giving anyone with the link comment access and then just let people know when you have made significant changes? That way if people want to know the current status of everything they can just look at the doc instead of having to read through pages and pages of revisions on the forum.
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That sounds like a wise approach now that I’m doing more than just throwing out preliminary ideas.
I’m going to test this character generation on two of the players in my regular group tomorrow so we’ll see how that works out. If it’s favorable, I’ll go ahead with something more substantial.
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I did a quick test run of the three playbooks I have sketched out so far with two of the players from my regular group. Both have played Beyond the Wall, one has played Scum & Villainy.
It generally worked quite well. One comment was that there should be more connections between the characters, which I think will come in more with the village construction but it’s still something to keep in mind. I think shifting one of the childhood tables to be for the character rolling and one of the others would work well for that.
Another comment was that perhaps being allowed to directly place one of your action dots would be beneficial (as, for example, the Heir to a Legend ended up without any dots in Confront which meant their fighting ability was rather limited; on that specific example I would be okay with it but I can see situations where it would cause more issues), and I think I agree. Removing one of the childhood tables seems like it would be okay, as right now you get three of your five dots from those, which probably puts more weight on those than is reasonable. Perhaps one of them could be converted to one that adds equipment options? Or it could be an optional dot-shift to be executed at the end. (I want to avoid putting in choices early on as my experience is that it pushes some players towards wanting to read all the possible results on the future tables so they can make as informed a choice as possible.)
Anyway, the reactions were generally positive. I think my next step is to rework these three playbooks with this experience in mind, and extend them to include more equipment as well as the village creation.
The coming week will be very busy, and I’ll be away from my computer so I don’t know how much work I’ll be able to do, but I should have something new (with a google doc) before the next weekend is over.
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I’ve got a folder up on Google Drive.
Right now the files there are pdfs because that seems to be the only format I can export to where I can then copy the text to paste it into a forum post without the formatting getting all screwed up. (I’m writing this in Scrivener, and copy-pasting straight from that doesn’t work either.)
I’ve finished a new version of the childhood tables which creates more connections between the characters, as well as a new version of the Heir to a Legend that’s more in line with what I’ve been looking for. Some of the changes are based on the feedback mentioned above.
I’m not sure I like how heavily the Heir is centered around the sword, but it does make them distinct from other warrior-type characters so I’ll stick with it for now.
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This is a fantastic exercise!
I was pointed here from a post I just made on Reddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/PBtA/comments/czabb2/am_i_reinventing_the_wheel_with_this_pbta_hack/) regarding do a community-forward OSR-style game using PBtA rules. And it sounds like what I’m looking to do and what you are doing is pretty similar.
Any chance you’d want to take a look at what I’ve done with my BETA version of the rules? They aren’t fully PBtA but that seems to be where I’m going to end up. Meaning: character creation and core rules are like 75% PBtA, but not quite there yet. The important thing is how I worked Community creation into Character creation, and how the Community rules include mechanics for prosperity or calamity, which I think could easily work in well with Fronts. The other important thing is that the Communiy creation/Character creation overlap seems to do a few things you’re looking for regarding Heir of a Legend and background/occupation stuff, but I’ve factored in how those things mechanically interact with building (and seeing to the prosperity of) your starting settlement.
If you’re not interested in reading the whole thing, I can post some highlights.
If you are interested, let me know and give me a way to send you the Google Doc or Drive links; I don’t want to share it too publicly just yet.
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Interesting! Yeah, it sounds like we’re both in the same general design area.
From what you’ve said here and in that post on Reddit, it seems you’re going more heavily into the community aspect. That’s interesting, but I’m sticking more with the village being a source of problems and support on the purely fictional side (so far - this is still very exploratory design for me). As mentioned upthread I’ve vaguely considered making the village take the place of the crew in Blades or the ship in Scum & Villainy as the main thing the characters improve outside their own capabilities, but I haven’t landed there yet.
I’ll gladly take a look at what you’ve come up with so far. I think my next step is to overhaul the village creation rules from BtW - I don’t think I’ll make any huge changes, though I’ve been toying with the idea of having the option of using a partly preset village rather than creating everything from scratch. Either way, exchanging ideas can only be good for both of us.
If you want to send me a link, my email is anondod AT gmail DOT com.
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Thanks! I’ve shared the folder containing the system to you from Google Drive. You should see an email already.
Feel free to discuss if you have the time to look it over. Either way, I’ll keep my eyes on what you’re doing because Forged in the Dark is something I want to read up on and dive into more in the coming months.
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I’ll hopefully be doing another playtest today with new versions of the tables that should be up on the google drive soon after this. I’ve added more connections between the characters as well as some of the village generation.
For the latter, I’m considering using a semi-premade map rather than the blank village map used in standard BtW. Partly this is to lower the threshold for players who have a harder time coming up with things and who don’t want to make big decisions, partly to make the villages more… naturalistic, I guess? It also makes it easier to pre-plan some of the GM prep, I think. I’ve uploaded a sample map as well to show kind of what I’m going for - this particular one would need to be extended to fill out some of the spaces left blank here, but I think it works well enough for a quick test.
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I just realized I hadn’t reported on the second playtest of the playbooks.
It went very well! Having a premade map with room for additions was a big boon. We used the one I’ve uploaded with the other files, and we added a few houses, an old stone circle, and some other features.
So for now I’m fairly happy with character generation. I’ve been mulling over how to proceed, but since I have other projects taking up some of my time (revising my D&D 4E-based game framework and starting up a PF2 test game) I don’t know when I’ll circle back to this. Hopefully it won’t be too long.
I will need to start looking at GM prep in some form. I want to tie it into the character generation in some way, like if a result from one of the playbooks mentions the fairies they should feature more prominently early in the game.
I have loose ideas for starting out with three enemy factions: Fairies, Goblins, and some kind of internal threat (the Cult in BtW). With a one shot you’d just use one of them, run an adventure based on dice rolls and input from the player choices like in BtW, thank you, all done. With a campaign game you’d want to weave them together and give the players options for different events to investigate - I’ll have to take another look at Farther Afield to see if I can steal more from that.
The characters will also need equipment lists and maybe some other bits and bobs before they’re actually playable. That may be a suitably bite-sized next step while I continue to ponder the structure.
Edited to add: Concrete work has been almost non-existant, but I’m still thinking about how to structure play and the enemy factions. My main issue right now is that there isn’t as clear a cut between preparing for the job/adventure and executing it in this setting as in BitD or S&V, but I hope to find some kind of solution to that.
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