One of my group members came up with the idea of move combo’s that produce more than the sum of the individual moves. We immediately rewrote some of the Sea Dog playbook moves to test the idea. (The first draft Animal Companion move was slightly boring, so that got an overhauled anyway.)
1) Animal Companion
You have an almost supernatural connection with a loyal parrot or monkey. You can’t talk to it per se but it always acts as you wish it to.
When your parrot distracts your enemy and you roll 12+ on Hack and Slash, take +1d4 damage.
When your monkey picks a pocket or steals a small object, Roll+Cha
10+ He gets away with it
7-9: He succeeds in taking it but the GM chooses one.
He draws attention to you.
He gets the wrong item, although it is not totally useless.
He gets chased and disappears for the rest of the day.
2) Lady Killer / Black Widow
When you parley with someone of the opposite sex and it fits the fiction, take +1
If you have the monkey as animal companion, you are allowed to reroll a failed Parley move once. (Describe why)
3) Insult Fighting (Cha)
When you utter a grievous insult to your opponent or his mother. (Somewhat intelligent humanoids only). If the GM thinks your insult is funny, original or deserving of recognition, take +1.
Roll+Cha
10+: Take +1 and +1d4 damage forward against that opponent
7-9: Take +1 forward against that opponent
6-: Your opponent makes the perfect comeback and takes +1d4 damage forward against you.
You may insult an opponent or his mother only once.
If you have a parrot as Animal Companion, your parrot gets to insult your opponent or his mother as well.
Per-move feedback:
The parrot Hack & Slash move is a double “penalty” on the trigger – the parrot has to distract them and you have to roll 12+. It should just trigger on a hit as long as the parrot is distracting them (also, it’s deal +1d4 damage – take +1d4 damage means you take more damage to yourself).
The monkey move sort of feels like it outright replaces a Thief trying to use Tricks of the Trade; it should have a cost on a 10+.
Lady Killer/Black Widow: why “of the opposite sex?” What fiction is it fitting? The trigger should be “when you Parley with someone who considers you attractive.” The monkey hook doesn’t make any sense in the fiction as-written, either.
Insult Fighting: the trigger would work much better as “when you utter a grievous insult to an opponent intelligent enough to understand it,” etc. The benefits are a little boring for a move about insult fighting; you’d be better off with something about luring the opponent into a mistake or out of position or whatever. Why can you only insult the opponent once (this makes no sense in the fiction and wasn’t even a restriction for Guybrush Threepwood)? What happens, mechanically, when the parrot insults your opponent? It’s not a player character, so it doesn’t get to roll.
General feedback:
I get what you’re trying to go for, but it doesn’t really work. A move is supposed to be a single discrete unit of mechanics; tacking what is essentially a second unit of mechanics on at the end of move A that depends on you having move B just makes things more complicated.
A cleaner way of doing it (albeit one that could still feel like a bunch of smaller moves have been mashed together) would be to write a single starting move that covers all of these “combo” scenarios, but I can’t think of a way to word it off the top of my head.
The parrot move: I get what you say, but I am scared that it will become just another generic +1d4 damage buff. Since the parrot distracting the opponent is in the fiction, there is nothing to stop the player from invoking it every time he rolls hack & slash. So having a trigger that happens infrequently makes more sense in the fiction – the parrot will not be able to distract every time.
Could you suggest some cost for the monkey stealing at 10+?
The Lady Killer/ Black Widow had tropes like Jack Sparrow (and his Spanish girlfriend in the last movie, I forget her name), Errol Flynn and the Dread Pirate Roberts in mind. (And obviously I stole the name from Fallout)
The idea I had of the monkey and the parley was that the Lady Killer/Black Widow delivers a pickup line that fails horribly, the monkey (it is cute) distracts the target and the Lady Killer gets a do-over so he (she) can deliver a new line. But I’ll definitely rethink it!
You are right about the insult fighting – it should be more interesting. My brain is already working on that. Allowing only one insult is again to stop the move from being to powerful and becoming just another generic +1d4 buff. The idea is that the parrot makes the move twice as powerful, since it allows you to do the move a second time against the same opponent. I’ll rewrite it so it is more clear.
The whole idea of combo moves was triggered when somebody posted about using Magic cards as monsters. Magic cards can produce the most crazy combo’s, what about linking DW Moves to each other in some way to produce combo effects?
OK, that was the general idea. It still has a long way to go, but I think it deserves some more of my mental energy.
Thanks for your analysis, I find it extremely thoughtful and thought provoking!
Appreciated!
Re: the parrot – it being a +1d4 damage move is fine because it’s a nice, thematically strong +damage move that’s also pretty funny at the table. Remember that the parrot is essentially gear that can be threatened, and you can have a partial success or failure result in it getting punched out.
Re: the monkey, on a 10+, it succeeds but draws attention to itself, and it’s going to have to run away and hide for a little while, maybe? It’s a less severe version of the chase option on 7-9, which works as a 10+ vs. a 7-9.
Lady Killer: my point is that you should absolutely be able to use it on people of the same sex as your character, and using it on someone who isn’t attracted to you makes no sense regardless of their sex and yours. Attraction is what matters, here.
Insult Fighting: the parrot doesn’t get to roll, so a normal tiered resolution move doesn’t work for it. Just make it give a +1 to the roll instead – it’s mechanically more boring, but it also makes more sense and works better from a mechanical perspective.
For the combo moves idea, that stuff is already possible within the DW framework without writing moves that aren’t discrete rules units, as I pointed out. The trick is to write a move that keys off another move’s trigger or result. The very simplest example of this is e.g. Merciless, which triggers whenever you deal damage – in effect, it’s comboing with H&S as well as any move you make that might damage the enemy.
OK here is the current iteration of the moves.
— Nerfed the 10+ on the monkey move as you suggested.
–After discussion it was thought that the parrot move would happen rarely (about 20% on a modifier of +2) so its damage was upped to 1d6. I’m not convinced it is right.
— Added some explanatory text to the monkey-lady killer move. I’m still not happy with it thematically.
–Added explanatory text to the Insult Fighting move. The benefits of the move remains the same for now.
Animal Companion
You have an almost supernatural connection with a loyal parrot or monkey. You can’t talk to it per se but it always acts as you wish it to.
When your parrot distracts your enemy and you roll 12+ on Hack and Slash, do +1d6 damage.
When your monkey picks a pocket or steals a small object, Roll+Cha
10+: He gets away with it, but hides for a while. You can get the object a bit later.
7-9: The also GM chooses one.
He draws attention to you and puts you in a spot.
He gets the wrong item, although it is not totally useless.
He gets chased and disappears for the rest of the day.
Lady Killer / Man Eater
When you parley with someone who finds you attractive, take +1
If you have the monkey as animal companion and you can explain how the monkey helps you out, you are allowed to reroll a failed Parley (Lady Killer / Man Eater) move once.
Insult Fighting (Cha)
When you utter a grievous insult to to an opponent intelligent enough to understand it or his mother. If the GM thinks your insult is funny, original or deserving of recognition, take +1.
Roll+Cha
10+: Take +1 and +1d4 damage forward against that opponent.
7-9: Take +1 forward against that opponent.
6-: Your opponent makes the perfect comeback and takes +1d4 damage forward against you.
You may insult an opponent or his mother only once.
If you have a parrot as Animal Companion, your parrot gets to insult your opponent or his mother as well. Which means you can do the move again.
If you still want to “gate” the parrot +damage, have it happen on a 10+, not a 12+. Also, the trigger should probably “when your parrot is distracting an enemy and you attack them, on a 10+” (if they’re distract_ed_ they’re not paying attention to you and you should probably deal damage automatically; if the parrot is distract_ing_ them it implies he’s squawking at them in the middle of the fight. The rest of the wording lets it work for Volley and spells as well, because there’s no reason whatsoever for it not to).
The monkey modifier on Ladykiller/Maneater still makes basically no-sense in-fiction (why does the monkey helping you give a reroll?).
I stand by my original comments for Insult Fighting: +1/+1d4 is boring, it should do something like bait the enemy into over-reaching or out of position. Also, again, the parrot can’t do the move, it’s an NPC/gear and therefore does not get to roll, just like the Ranger companion!
Thanks Alex.
My thinking about the parrot: You are fighting with cutlasses and dirks, and the parrot flies squawking into your opponent’s face. I want it to happen infrequently so that it has a similar emotional effect as a crit in D&D. (At the moment its about 20% on a +2 modifier.
I’m changing the wording to: “When your parrot distracts your enemy during a brawl, and you roll 12+ on Hack and Slash, do +1d6 damage.”
I believe your other comments are valid, I just do not have solutions yet. Will be brainstorming with my guys!