In response to my last post about running DW for my partner,Paul Arezina suggested a Princess playbook might be fun.

In response to my last post about running DW for my partner,Paul Arezina suggested a Princess playbook might be fun.

In response to my last post about running DW for my partner,Paul Arezina suggested a Princess playbook might be fun.  And then I got the itch to make one too.

So here are my preliminary thoughts.  It’s explicitly Disney Princess.  I’m trying to capture as much of the feel of a Disney Princess while making them valued and important members of the party, with a wide variety of moves, but focusing on social manipulation through niceness and winsomeness.

Thoughts

11 thoughts on “In response to my last post about running DW for my partner,Paul Arezina suggested a Princess playbook might be fun.”

  1. My expectations, they are shattered. This is great. Definitely some rough patches though

    Missing stuff gear damage die etc but it’s unfinished so meh

    the poise economy is short staffed but making open and honest a basic move goes a long way towards solving that. as would an combat poise (advanced) move 

  2. Hmm. Off the top of my head:

    – what are you looking at for starting moves? Most books open with two/three mechanical moves and a flavor one. I can see “Among the Common Folk”, “Poise”/”Small Furry Friends”, and “Winsome” as openers, with a choice of “Stunning” and “Whatever’s At Hand” (you can take the other one as an advance). 

    – for Poise I wouldn’t suggest actually losing what you have in case things come up that you’re triggering it a bunch, but maybe something like 3-poise at 0-poise, 2-poise at 1-poise or 2-poise, 1-poise otherwise.

    – Your concept for “Whatever’s At Hand” is probably along the lines of “something small you can throw”, “something heavy with reach”, and “something balanced”, right? I’d just suggest “hand, thrown, near, -1 damage, 0-weight”, “close, 1-weight”, and “2-handed, reach, 2-weight”, since it’s pretty trivial to get real weapons that do +1 damage for any of those bands.

    – for the last two bennies from “Small Furry Friends” I’d suggest “an escape route that won’t be safe for long” and “enough food to let you and your friends Make Camp for the night without using a ration”

  3. I wasn’t sure which should be starting moves to be honest, but I was thinking along the same lines as you.  Nice to know I was on the right track.

    In my head, my concept for Whatever’s At Hand was an apple, a frying pan, and a poker.  Your suggestions are better.  I was planning on adding an advanced move that adds the Powerful tag or +1 damage to a specific type of found object, maybe only if you hold poise.

    Your small furry friends suggestions modifications will be made post-haste.

    I don’t want players to stockpile massive amounts of poise.  If you’re triggering a lot, well, you can use the triggers to clear triggers you’ve used already.  But I think that I can reword it more clearly, and there will be advanced moves that increase your poise capacity.

  4. Maybe more importantly, “Small Furry Friends” should probably be “My Dear Friends”, because those powers also fit Aurora’s fairies, the castle staff in the Beast’s castle, and if you wanted to have a real people’s Princess who got help from the brave but oft-overlooked people of the kingdom that’s how you’d do it too.

    I’d suggest “your improvised weapons deal +1d4 damage; take +1 ongoing to Hack and Slash or Volley with an improvised weapon while you hold Poise” as an advanced move. The actual combat wombat classes will add +1d4 but they’re also likely using weapons that deal +1 damage.

    There needs to be an advanced move where you ask one of your dear friends to do something complicated for you and roll +cha/+poise spent/both to see how well they pull it off. Maybe that could also be an alternate starting move?

    Your “armor” move could start out as “with poise, 1 armor when unarmored and unencumbered” and have “with poise, +1 armor” as an upgrade.

  5. Hmm. I almost want to have some kind of exclusive upgrade system later on for this. Like as a 2-5 move you explicitly get a starting move (and any dependencies) from another playbook, then at 6-10 you can reclass into that playbook but keep your Princess moves and take Princess advances freely.

  6. I’m not sure I’d call it a really useful class, but it was a fun read.  I may drop it on my wife at some point to see if she’d play it  (big Disney princess fan).

  9. Yeah, that’s the thing with the Powered By the Apocalypse games. The game engine is basically built on verbs so you can start with a list of tropes, grab the verbs, scope them appropriately and you have a playbook.

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