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Showing posts from December, 2014

Class Warfare

I thought Class Warfare was going to be a rules-lite approach to creating classes for DungeonWorld, rather along the lines of the variant rules for races in Dark Heart of the Dreamer. This was my preconception of the book and I'm not going to hold it against it that Class Warfare is something subtly different. It is a toolkit for deconstructing the existing classes into components that can be used together to create new playbooks and also a rich source of new moves. The technical analysis of how DungeonWorld's class playbooks work is excellent and worth a read for anyone interested in game design (particularly of DungeonWorld playbooks) and the relative merits and flaws of DungeonWorld in particular. With that done the book then moves onto an example new playset and illustrates how the book is to be used to construct new character classes. The bulk of the book is made of various classes that are tighter in scope that the ones in the main rulebook. Most of the main book classes

Carcass

Carcass is Jim Pinto's game of leadership and danger. The design goals are to take complete narrative control away from players and create situations where their characters are trying to deal with situations beyond their control. The philosophical aim is to examine the nature of leadership in groups and perhaps as a consequence look at the impact of authority. So how does it do those things? The core mechanic is one of scene-framing and looking for conflict in situations that are then resolved via a dice mechanic. The difference here is that control of the outcomes lies with the player to the left, the Foil of the player controlling the character. The dice determine the nature of the outcome but interpretation is left to the Foil. The nature of the interpretation colours the darkness of the game. To balance out the PvP aspect the characters are all elements of the same tribe, struggling to survive. Making things worse for the character makes things worse for the group. The leader

Showdown

Showdown is a game for two players that uses a split set of scenes that are played out simultaneously. The main frame for the game is a duel between two characters. The duel is somewhat abstract, in that it might be two aviators clashing above the trenches or simply a literal duel with swords, the key point is that only one of them is going to survive the duel. The secondary frame are flashbacks into the characters' history to discover what brought them to this mortal conflict. The flashbacks also feature conflict but in the sense of the characters testing and trying to manipulate one another. Showdown continues to use the two-track theme in the round resolution, where players dice off via the selection of limited hand of cards representing a range of sizes of dice. The highest roll wins but there are two rolls to resolve, the one for the fight and the other for the flashback. The person winning the duel gets to eliminate the other players attack card, forcing them out of optio