Looking forward to Stonetop

#21

Oh man, where to start. So happy to see this getting some press on the gauntlet from Jason. I’m a long time listener, first time caller. Big fan.

I’ve run about 15 sessions with two groups in Stonetop over the last couple years and it’s one of my top 5 games and my players have all loved it.

The playbooks are fantastic, evoking a strong sense of setting and narrative coherence. The focus on the town and the community is a welcome break from being murder hoboes, though it can be emotionally heavy at times. The well drawn fantasy landscape that feels familiar enough for players to easily grok but different enough to not feel cliche. I like the emphasis on hard scrabble living, the travel moves. Jeremy’s also done a lot of work (theory crafting, research, and playtesting) to tune up the moves which really shows.

One of my games had a second season which was a year after the first. In long term or episodic play you can do larger gaps and really give the setting room to breath. I imagine something like that would work quite well on the gauntlet.

A stonetop wiki document is usually very helpful for helping the GM and the players to keep track of NPC’s and other activities (and for letting players catch up if they missed something or joined later). There is even a fictional justification, the town’s chronicle which is kept by the judge (and a fun mechanical reward for keeping the chronicle as the judge).

9 Likes
#22

Wow, those Arcana are quite impressive. Lots to explore there! I’d seen early versions of Stonetop which were - albeit very well presented! - basically DW with some “hometown” mechanics. This is a whole 'nother level of serious, thoughtful design!

I’m kind of surprised that many of the moves (especially on the back of the Minor Arcana cards) don’t specify a miss clause. I’m normally all for leaving a miss unspecified, but this seems like one place where it would be a good idea to tell the MC something more specific.

What’s the design thought here?

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#23

Aren’t “misses” without specifics generally calls to the MC to use a hard move like most PbtA games?

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#24

There’s a lot of variation in terms of how to design misses on moves. Lots of “popular” PbtA design has open-ended misses on most or all moves. On the other hand, Apocalypse World specifies misses for all moves except the basic moves - it’s a surprise if you’ve forgotten (I once did!), but every move tells you what happens on a miss! It’s an interesting thing to consider, anyway, as a designer.

I’m thinking in particular about Id’n Otez’s Galvanic Infusion - I feel like a lot of MCs wouldn’t know what to do on a miss there. (But perhaps the dangers of galvanic infusions are discussed elsewhere in the Stonetop materials or setting detail? I don’t know.)

1 Like
#25

Maybe I just need to dig into the playtest docs, but in my head a miss is just a pointer to the MC to make things worse for the player characters in any way they feel is appropriate - it doesn’t have to have anything to do with how the miss was generated. Heck I on occasion will just “bank” the miss and use a hard move later when it feels appropriate. A miss doesn’t mean failure it means things are going to get worse now or in the future.

4 Likes
#26

The galvanic infusion is probably one that could use a specified miss result, because it’s often something that would be done in a relatively calm situation, meaning there wouldn’t be obvious results to lean on.

The others, though, have all sorts of potential energy in any situation I can imagine them getting used. And in general, I prefer to leave 6- undefined and trust the GM and the principles.

Also: space considerations. The minor arcana just barely fit on the front and back of a card that’s 1/8 of a letter-sized sheet of paper. Including a miss clause on many would be implausible.

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#27

Yes, exactly! Glad we’re on the same page.

(For the record, I agree with you about the Ward, but I’m less sure about the Shattering Words.)

Space considerations are a problem. In my ideal world, every move would have a list of suggestions for a miss, too, for the MC. Could be a really useful thing, not just for new MCs, but also for experienced MCs who tend to do the same thing all the time.

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#28

I came here to say I’ve been looking forward to Stonetop since early 2016, and hope to play it before I die! Keep up the great work, @Jeremy_Strandberg and @jasonlutes (PS: Noticed some of your comics in North Sydney library the other day, JL!)

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#29

@Jeremy_Strandberg I noticed in the stretch goals for the Kickstarter that there’s a Markdown conversion. Do you usually write in Markdown? If so, how do you convert it to plain text without all of the decorators for PDF?

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#30

We don’t really have anything fancy going on there. As of right now, the “plan” is brute force but we’ll see if we can’t find some cleaner way to export to RTF from the InDesign files. Copy/pasting from INDD stories into Wordpad isn’t too terrible, and the guy who offered to do the conversion has some scripts worked out to convert from RTF to Markdown.

2 Likes
#31

Ah I see. I’m in the opposite situation- would love to export Markdown into formatted text easily. I thought Ibis might be the answer but its output generally has too many page breaks.

#32

You could export to PDF, then open in Acrobat Pro. You can then export to Word.

You can also export tables individually as Excel spreadsheets this way.