I have a player that feels the base character classes are so “1970’s” and he would rather return to the 1980’s when we played runequest, and characters got good at whatever they used, without being “locked in” to their little boxes. Does anyone have a “generalist” style character, or perhaps other ideas on how to keep a player that wants to feel like the world is open to any choices for advancement? I want to support him and play with him, without interfering with the other characters story space… any help is welcome.
I have a player that feels the base character classes are so “1970’s” and he would rather return to the 1980’s when…
I have a player that feels the base character classes are so “1970’s” and he would rather return to the 1980’s when…
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1. Every class has options to take moves from other classes that aren’t in play.
2. If the character does something great / of significance / just because it seems right, they can take a “compendium class”, a little add-on full of character specific moves.
All there in the manual.
I guess you could make a Jack of All Trades class, but I honestly think if you two look over Dungeon World together, you’ll see it can be done already.
Step 1) Anybody can take a move from another playbook as long as someone else isn’t using that playbook.
Step 2) Have fun!
I guess a that a quick and easy fix for that would be to open all the advanced moves to everyone (so basically giving infinite multiclass moves to all the classes).
If by “being good at something”, the Player means “rolling better dices” (so having bonuses to rolls), DW is not the right game to do it. But if it means “being able to do many things”, there is always the Defy Danger move. The player should not feel limited by the moves themselves : looking for traps do not require the Thief move, having an animal companion does not require the Ranger move, and so on. Those moves may make the PC more efficient or less open to danger, but it’s not a requirement to try it. Even the moves meaning something extraordinary (Shapeshifting, Ritual, the paladin’s quest) could be replaced by a Defy Danger (or not even rolling) if some special circumstances are met in the fiction.
Well, Rory MacLeod and I built a point buy system for DW.. so there’s that over here https://drive.google.com/open?id=0By6w_Fd5yhN5RGNNanlndF80NkE&authuser=0
Look up a variant called Asterisk World, it may give you a path to building out characters without playbooks or spell lists. https://dl.dropbox.com/s/u2vnqztpakfmtt9/AsteriskWorld.pdf?dl=1
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it’s been recommend before to allow players to draft moves from playbooks when creating them to allow for unique players. I did this once with my Boy and it was pretty fun. We used scissors and cut the playbooks up and taped them to a sheet of paper. We figured out HP and Load on the spot and rolled for coin old school to equip characters; it seemed to work out pretty great.
Thanks for the responses everyone. I was hoping for a playbook that has decent “story space”. Allowing everyone to take advanced moves from other classes seems like it breaks the the point behind having different classes. This might work for my friend, but seems like it takes away all the special characteristics of the other characters.
The point buy system is fascinating. Thanks Steve Wallace . We might go that way. It is kind of a lot to chose from each level up…. but it seems to require reasoning behind what moves a character chooses. It could allow a generalist style, and yet all the prerequisites force it to make sense.
Lemmo Pew Asterisk World looks deep. It seems like an interesting alternative play to DW, and I will see if my player wants to build a spell caster this way. The link you provided does not appear to work for me, but I found a link to the version 0.8 Let me know if there is a better link.