So is there anybody out there making/using DW move cards?

So is there anybody out there making/using DW move cards?

So is there anybody out there making/using DW move cards? I saw the French ones, but it doesn’t seem like they’re available in English.

I helped make a bunch of MH ones, so if nobody’s taking the lead (or if Sage doesn’t already have something up his sleeve), I’d gladly come up with some.

16 thoughts on “So is there anybody out there making/using DW move cards?”

  1. I’d been playing about with some ideas but I’m no designer and wasn’t too happy with the results especially compared to the French ones! My plan was to upload them to Artscow as one or more custom playing card decks so people could order themselves a printed set if they wanted.

  2. Adam and I opted not to make cards ourselves. We felt like they might steer play towards always looking at the moves. We could be wrong! Feel free to make your own and make them home-print or PoD (DriveThru now does PoD cards) if you like.

  4. Having played a lot of 4e with power cards, I can say that having DW ‘move cards’ would almost certainly be a detriment. When you have these cards with ‘things you can do’ on them, your idle plans will naturally steer only in the direction of those things.

  6. James Stuart, I was going to make some for nerdly. I wasn’t certain the direction I was going to go yet, possibly an Access database with a customizable front end.

  7. I did notice the same “pay attention to the cards” thing in the newest Warhammer fantasy too.

    That being said I feel like the rules support the GM being the only one to hold these. He starts with fiction, “What do you do?” Then the PC gives and action. If appropriate the GM pushes a move card forward with some more fiction. The player decided whether to roll and they narrate the outcome. I don’t see these as things the players handle much.

    Thoughts?

  8. I tend to like to have the moves open to the players. Let them see what they’ll be triggering.

    This feels good to me because it makes their characters reasonable people. The rules of DW are kind of the rules of the world: when you do something, you take a risk. The best you can hope for when you discern realities is a few pieces of information. To get someone to do something you have to have leverage on them. Presumably, the characters know this (much like real people know these kind of things), so I like to give the players access.

    Not giving them access is kind of like not knowing anything about how other people think or act. Reading Parley I know that if I have something a person wants I have a shot at getting something out of them, otherwise there’s no guarantee I even have a chance. It’s kind of like a baseline understanding of how the world works, not like gravity and physics, but more of the intuitive understanding that things have costs and people only do what you want when you have leverage and so on.

    Wow, that’s kind of long and rambly. Bottom line, I slightly prefer to give the players the moves, so that they can play their characters like real people where these things apply. That doesn’t mean they have to read it all up front, but after the first time they trigger Parley I want them to be able to look at it and say “ah, that’s why I was able to roll dice to get that guy to do that thing, I may want to leverage that.”

  9. Yeah, I mean, my overall goal is that I like exposing moves, and I like cards better than move sheets, from a space/aesthetic perspective. 

    I also think that you can be putting fiction first, but that exposing the moves is pretty helpful. There’s a lot of things that aren’t super useful/common in traditional fantasy games, that people may just assume is also kind of a waste of time.

    But Recruit? Bolster? It’s nice to let people know that actually, hirelings are pretty darn useful, and that yeah, spending a lot of time reading up on the court politics of bees will actually help you when it comes to the ball.

  10. I played a couple of game with cards as “help” and in my experience..it’s bad. Really..really bad. Players tend to focus their options on what card they have and think more on how they could activate them instead of just playing. Tested with Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 3rd, D&D 4E and Star Wars SAGA..

  11. When I see my characters look to their character sheet to see what they can do, I die a little bit. But since I’m the GM, I just make a hard move against them.

  12. Personally, I think having the reference is good in a pinch, but a deck of cards is a limiting factor, not an inspiring one.  To me, it says “this is all you can do”.  Which is gross.  I think, though, like a lot of extra peripheral stuff, it’ll vary depending on the player.

  14. Sage LaTorra Yes but I think it turns monsters into statistics. I’ve never been a fan of random encounters because it’s difficult to explain a unicorn in a bar fight.

  15. A wounded unicorn blundering in through the backdoor of a tavern during a bar fight sounds pretty epic to me. I’m betting most of the room would stop in awe and then about half of them would go back to punching each other. Also you then have choices to make about whether to help or ignore the unicorn and if you want to explore the mystery of how it got to such a wildly inappropriate place or who injured it!

    (I love DW. At one point the DM asked me “How did [some people who’s library you broke into] respond to finding you there?” and the first thing out of my mouth was “They gave me a hug and sent me on my way” and we still made it work!)

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