I’m thinking after my first campaign of DW ends that I’ll try something new with the next. Tell me if this sounds crazy or if any of you folks have tried out similar approaches.
Character creation involves players choosing a Primary Class and a Subclass. You may swap one starting move from your Primary Class with one starting move from your Subclass. When gaining levels you may choose to take your Primary Class’ advanced moves or take a starting move or advanced move from your Subclass (meeting level and move requirements as usual).
You cannot have more advanced/starting moves from your Subclass than advanced moves from your Primary Class.
My immediate concern is that less glamorous moves like A Port in the Storm will get swapped out for more potent moves. A quick fix is to consider certain moves Primary. You can’t swap a non-primary move for a primary move.
http://apocalypse-world.com/forums/index.php?topic=2997.0
Sounds like it would work, Matt Miller. I’m just wondering what you want to achieve by doing so. Is it just to experiment and see what happens?
Mh. Fighter with Ritual at level 1…
I don’t have a problem with that. In fact, it sounds pretty damn awesome. A Fighter with Bend Bars, Lift Gates, Signature Weapon, and Ritual (in place of Armored). Cool.
On thing I would consider, Matt Miller. Only allow players to swap moves on a 1 for 1 basis (instead of getting a package of dependant moves as from the multiclass advanced moves).
I’ve definitely tried something similar: Backgrounds. Essentially, characters start with access to a Compendium Class and gain moves from it when fictionally appropriate.
It’s part of Pirate World, and a late backer page for people who missed the kickstarter should be going up shortly.
One of the most satisfying thing in DW is that each player has its own niche and can be put on the spot easily. If you allow players to have shared classes you’ll probably end up with unsatisfied players.
If you implement such a thing I suggest to adopt the same approach of DW with normal classes: once you take a class and a subclass no other player can take those two booklets.
I did something similar but used a Compendium Class instead, everyone had access to a CC from the start. It seemed to work well and I had a little more control over what types of moves were in the CCs. I think this avoided player “cherry-picking” and the CC made more sense in the fiction than everyone being multi-classed.
totally, having a variety of CC to choose from is cool.
But it takes more time as people need to read all their options. Therefore analysis paralysis.
Maybe present 2-3 CC options per class with 1-2 that are not really matching a specific class.
Christopher Stone-Bush I only have two reasons for wanting to do this. First, as you say, to watch an experiment in motion. Second, I’ve been acquiring and creating lots of base classes. Now I want to see those new moves in play!
But now that you folks mention it… Including CCs would be awesome. Give the player the starting move for the CC and count that as his 2nd level move selection.
Luca Colombini I agree. There was a point where I wanted to zoom in on this rule and target specific moves instead of classes. I might give that path a whirl, too.
A very simple “hack” could be to start everyone at level 2 and the “multi class dabbler” as an option (for those classes that don’t have it already.) Giving the players the choice of where the stat point goes AND the option of just about any class move would allow each “first” level character a good amount of freedom and variance.