Western World

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Western World
« on: July 03, 2010, 10:13:36 AM »
Western World

A quick and dirty AW hack for westerns

Stats
Cool becomes Nerve
Hard stays Hard
Hot stays Hot
Sharp stays Sharp
Weird becomes Spooky (or Hunch or something)

The Playbooks:
Angel - Doc
Battlebabe - Gunfighter
Brainer - (Medicine Man)
Chopper - Outlaw
Driver - Wagonneer/Roper
Gunlugger - Lawman
Hardholder - Boss
Hocus - Preacher
Operator - Cowpoke
Savvyhead - (Inventor/Blacksmith)
Skinner - Entertainer

I recommend having or not having the Medicine Man and Inventor depending on the level of weirdness you want. If you want a savvyhead type and a more normal game, make him a blacksmith/gunsmith or some such and limit his activities to more realistic stuff.

Opening your brain becomes listening to your gut and is less psychic and more general awareness and picking up on hunches.

Weapons probably oughta be tweaked around a little bit, with most having reload and maybe more 3 harm pistols around. Hatchets make a nice messy hand weapon. Probably change 'hi-tech' to 'fancy' and make it pretty rare. And autofire oughta be super rare (like, maybe a gatling gun if you're feeling crazy) unless you're going for some steampunkiness.

For the playbooks, most would work pretty well as is, with some flavor changes. Obviously the doc's kit's contents are gonna be way different, and heck, some custom moves that involve amputating things might be fun.

As mentioned above, the brainer/medicine man is the most troublesome in a 'straight' western. I took the easy way out for this quick and dirty approach and figured 'use it if you want weirdness, don't if you don't'

The car/bike rules are a bit of a stretch when applied to, you know, horses, so some more tweaking is probably in order there, but the chopper and driver can probably get away with having horses with different stats. If I were going into this more, I'd probably replace a lot of the car/bike specific cool stuff with neat tricks horse riding specialists could do.

For the boss/hardholder, color the gigs a little different (for a ranch owner, saloon owner/crime-lord/et cetera) and the details of the holding. Otherwise, looks pretty good.

The lawman, preacher, and cowpoke work pretty good as is, again with the flavor changed somewhat. The operator gigs work surprisingly well for odd-jobs in a western setting.

The breadth of options available to the savvyhead don't translate so well to a low-tech setting, so probably use them only in a steampunk type game or severely limit what he can do to 'realistic' stuff.

The skinner/entertainer works pretty well as is, too, if you make allowance for a bit of weirdness with "Lost".

Otherwise, armor is pretty problematic (unless you strap a potbelly stove front under your poncho there, Clint). Maybe you should just not get shot or get too attached to your character.

Modifying the fronts would take some more work, and obviously there's some holes in character types. I bet the swapper/capital would fit right in here as an enterprising businessman.

And that's all I got! I'm sure a more detailed and specialized hack would give some fun opportunities, but I think this would work with very little legwork.

Re: Western World
« Reply #1 on: July 03, 2010, 10:21:03 AM »
If you have it, the Maestro'D playbook would probably also work pretty much as written, with no changes.

I think this would work for Deadwood with almost no trouble. Although I'd really really like to see a real western hack done some day, even if it just needs a few changes.

Re: Western World
« Reply #2 on: July 03, 2010, 10:25:34 AM »
I heartily agree on all counts! I was just listening to the theme from 'For a Fistful of Dollars' and started idly speculating about what changes would be necessary, and when I realized 'not many' I decided to jot down my quick ideas.

But I definitely agree that a full on proper hack would be awesome.

Oh, and yeah, definitely on the Maestro D', I can't believe I forgot to mention that one.

Re: Western World
« Reply #3 on: July 05, 2010, 04:29:48 PM »
'Hunch' is good. I'd go with Hunch over Spooky.