Mucking around with move selection

[fnord3125]

Okay, so I had some thoughts this morning.
I was thinking about my (possibly unfounded) concern that the ghost playbooks as I'm currently imagining them will be a bit too narrow.  It occurred to me that one thing I could do to ease this a bit would be to allow players, when they come to the "pick moves" phase of character creation to select one move from another playbook, if they wish.

Does this seem like a reasonable idea?

Another related idea I had was that I could write up a short list of... let's call them something like General Moves.  You wouldn't get these moves automatically like you do basic moves, but they aren't tied to a specific playbook either, so anyone could choose from them when they take improvements or select one of them instead of a move from their playbook at character creation.

Does that sound decent?

[mcdaldno]

Hey Brian,

I think letting everyone choose one move off another playbook is great. First of all, most people take advancements off other playbooks anyways. The game already lets people head in that direction; you're just letting them head there quicker.

I don't really see the benefit of General moves. Just work them into the playbooks, and people can take them if they want to. That way, the playbooks feel less narrow, and you're not introducing another place to look for moves.

[fnord3125]

Thanks for the feedback, Joe!

And I think I agree.  General moves was a thought I had, but I couldn't actually think of any moves that I'd want in that category.  :)  I think it might be feasible or useful for certain kinds of games, but it doesn't really suit my purposes here.

The thing that lead me to this thought was thinking about my playbooks that, as I currently envision them, won't include (m)any moves for interacting with the world of the living.  I figured this would let someone pick the playbook for the character type she likes best, but be able to grab a tool from someone else's toolbox to be a little more well-rounded.

[Michael Loy]

I could actually see something like the general moves happening - it would be, as you say, good for things like manifesting in the world of the living.  Also for Shadow-fueled moves, depending on where you end up going with that.  Those are things that maybe not everyone has, but everyone should probably be able to do if they want, right?

But maybe they're tied to stats?  So if you have a high Shadow stat, you can spend an advance to pick up a new +Shadow move (or maybe 12+ expansion of the existing +Shadow basic move), or a high stat for the basic move that lets you interact with the world (+Quick?) lets you buy the 12+ expansion of that.

So you don't have to wait around until you've spent 5 advances to acquire these ungiven future type moves/move expansions, and the rules could even allow for you to grab one of these moves as a starting move (in place of a playbook move) if you have the stats for them.

So, say, playbooks with high +Quick are kind of all capable of doing Apparition moves, since those are actually just moves tied to Quick.  Other playbooks would be able to gain those moves, but only if they picked a stat line with a particularly high Quick or brought up their Quick through advancement.

Then the playbooks could be, actually, super-specific in purpose: the Pardoner has this very specific range of moves, but he's also built around the Dead stat, so he'll be able to access the special +Dead moves.  And Pardoner stat lines also tend to be good at Centered or Spiteful, so he'll probably be drawing moves from one of those stats as well.

It's a rather different design space, but I think the general moves idea ('advanced moves' instead of 'general moves'?) could actually have some legs.

Wasn't Knife and Candle doing vaguely similar to this?  Where you could unlock more moves as your Shadowy or Watchful increases?

[Jeff Russell]

Wasn't Knife and Candle doing vaguely similar to this?  Where you could unlock more moves as your Shadowy or Watchful increases?

The notion over in Knife and Candle was of "Strata" where if your 'shadowy', for example, would advance to +4, you instead get +1 in a new 'stratum'. The idea here being that if you go against lower strata, you just succeed, it's beneath your usual notice these days.

The other idea was that 'qualities' would add further options to the your moves, so if you had "Connected: Urchins" you might have some Urchin-related options on your shadowy roll in an appropriate circumstance.

I'm planning on using some of these concepts in my own hack is why I'm following them :)

But I like what you're talking about with 'advanced' moves, I think that's an interesting design space, certainly. I'll have to let Brian speak as to whether it's for his game or not, but I'm definitely going to be thinking about it.

[fnord3125]

Yeah, I'm not really sure of it right now.
It's a lot of food for thought, that's for sure.  At the moment I think I'm going to assume that there will be basic moves that everyone can use, as normal, and there will be playbook moves, but you'll be offered the chance to take an out of playbook move during character creation, if you so desire.

Maybe once I start actually writing up moves it will become more clear whether "Advanced Open Access Moves" are warranted for this game.