My home group and I are trying three different things for our next campaign starting tomorrow night (5 or 6 sessions). I’ll report back on all of them after they’ve played it a while:
1) Getting rid of the Ability Scores: There was some chatter quite a while ago about getting rid of ability scores and just using the mods like AW, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. What we’re going to try is when they level up they get to choose to either take a new move OR increase one of your mods.
2) Replacing alignment AND bonds with Traits: I’m taking the Trait list straight out of Freebooters on the Frontier (page 9). They can roll or choose 2 traits. Then at end of session they check if they’ve role played both of their traits (instead of alignment) for XP, and if they caused any ally to role play one or both of their own traits (like flags) for another XP. We’ve been playing Aid or Interfere as fictional description giving +1 or -2 for a long time now, so we don’t really use bonds anymore. We lose a little of the initial fiction associated with bonds, but I think I’ll use a “_Character 1_, tell us about that time Character 2 was Trait” format to make up for that.
3) Randomizing initial Stat mods: One of my players decided she wanted to randomize her stat mods after choosing her playbook. Then the other two players wanted to try it too. I made six cards (-1, 0,0,+1, +1, +2) and they’ll shuffle them and deal them out left to right. It may be interesting.
We’ll see how it goes. All three players are on board with these modifications. I want to give them a good try instead of just hypothesising about them lol.
Have you checked out AW: Fallen Empires? What’s your describing sounds a lot like it, basically hacking DW away from the OSR back toward story gaming.
Have you followed what we’re doing in Worlds of Adventure?
We use stats and not scores (like you describe) and Version .03 will replace Bonds & Alignment with Keys (you choose two)
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Worlds of Adventure
Marshall Brengle I have not, I’ll take a look!
Yochai Gal It was your original post about doing away with the ability scores that I was referring to. I think I even commented that I thought you’d lose too much by losing the granularity that ability scores provided.
I saw your post about Keys the other day and read a handful of them. I just wanted something really simple to replace both alignment and bonds. It may not work out the way we hope, but we’re going to give it a try!
On replacing alignment and bonds with keys… have you looked into flags? walkingmind.evilhat.com – From Bonds to Flags
Brian Holland it’s the author’s official reskin of Apocalypse World for a medieval setting. It’s familiar, yet new, and very, very good.
The stats could certainly be improved. Now, by removing them, rather than adding concepts upon them is detrimental to the system as a whole since it attacks one of its core concepts, being intertwined with leveling up. To do withour them is to play another system. As so, I advocate to make stats more relevant in and of themselves rather than circumventing them for little to no reason. One example I can provide and regularly use is passive checking, such as heavy object manipulation with str, or passive perception with wis. I’m some specific cases, even locking out some characters from doing certain stuff- showing both upsides and downsides of archetypes. Remember what stats represent mechanically, as a representation of reality. They’re chances of succeeding at something.
Camilo Suñer I’m not getting rid of the Stats (STR, DEX, CON, etc.), I’m getting rid of the underlying Ability Scores (Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, etc.) which are widely considered useless by most DW players because they’re an unnecessary holdover from old school D&D.
Youre getting rid of the stats and not the modifiers. I’m quite aware of what people think. With due respect I think that you missed my point completely- adding mechanics to enhance the stats score a rather than simplifying the system because of the reasons I mentioned.
Hmmm… I think what you’re saying is, when a character wants to narrate lifting that heavy thing, you’ll look at their strength ability score and say “oh, strength 15, no worries, you lift it with no problem”. Is that what you’re saying?
If so, that is a pretty cool idea! But that robs the players of a chance to fail (and get XP). Strength = 15 means STR = +1, and roll+1 can still fail.
Fictionally, I don’t care about the 15. If it’s fictionally interesting that they succeed without a roll, I just let it happen. If failure would be really interesting fictionally, I say the appropriate move triggers and make them roll (because roll+3 can still fail too).
If that’s not what you’re saying then I apologize, because yes I’ve missed your point.
You got half of it right. I wouldn’t want players to not roll- so, what I propose is more GM directed oportunities based off each character player’s stat. So perhaps you describe certain aspects of the new scenery with more detail to the guy with high wis, just as the guy trained in warfare would notice good fighter in an arena and such. Or if someone with 8 str attempts to force their way through debris, you just tell them that they can’t, roll or not. The rule of cool has a limit that should be respected and treated fairly. Again I want to emphasize that stats and even more so modifiers are just chances of the character being able to do something. When you roll you do so with a stat, what I’m conversing is having that stats themselves as a sort of passive check for certain, marginal cases, which a already do in one or other way and I’m just using this resource as an expansion of the concept.