Musings: Playbook design

I was planning to talk about the playbooks of Hello, World today but as I was thinking about what I would say, I realized that before I did that I first needed to talk about playbooks.  Wait don't go!  Let me explain.

Playbooks in tabletop games in the post-Apocalypse World era are important not only because they show the player what their character can do and how they gain XP but also because in many systems they are the substrate through which you prepare players for everything  else mechanical that the GM is going to communicate to them about your game.   When your player looks at their sheet and see Stress and Trauma, their subconscious is triggered to wonder "when will I need to fill in these?"  When they look at the item list, they start to form sketches of what people might have in their pockets in this setting.  Rivals and relationships, gather info prompts, all of these contribute to the potential fiction of the game and are among your player's first contact point with your setting.  And then of course there is the graphic design of the playbook as a product, and how it can enhance or thematically color that information.

What did I want to communicate about the world of World?    Well, Memory is one of the overriding themes of the game.  I chose to make that graphical element large and in charge, even though early on in concepting it was still just an analogue for Gear slots.  Enhancing it's physical presence in the playbook ended up communicating strongly to the playtesters and even influenced the way I GM'ed the game in playtesting.  I discovered that I was describing the physicality of Memory in the setting at great lengths, and playtests kept exploring ways they could manipulate that setting element.  I found myself asking players to check Memory boxes (for a Daemon's Bargain, or as a function roll consequence) a lot more than I would have thought to push Gear-based consequences as a GM in Blades.   It's a big item on the list and my eye kept darting there!  

Memory has since expanded greatly as both a mechanical centerpoint of the mechanics and a staple of the setting of HW, partly as a response to positive playtesting feedback about how important and different it felt.

Many Forged in the Dark hacks don't touch the base math of Blades: 12 Actions, 7 starting dots, 9 Stress, and so forth.  However, once I realized that World actually wanted 9 Actions facing the Player, I couldn't stop toying with the dials.    Could I make the starting Stress track a power of two to emphasize my digital theme?   8 isn't a lot less than 9 but in practice that 1 extra Stress box could quite easily mean the difference between taking Traumas or players becoming unwilling to push their character hard earlier in a score, especially combined with a system where there was a lower ceiling of Resistance rolls due to 3 fewer total actions.  

Looking at the design holistically, I knew that I still wanted bold and daring PCs so rather than compromise on what felt like interesting tweaks I wanted to pursue, I adjusted the availability of Special Armor and Resistance roll ability bonuses up for the playbooks.  That gave back some of the durability and flexibility of players that was lost by adjusting other numbers.  Additionally, I knew in the back of my mind that I would be making Stress and Harm recovery much quicker in downtime, meaning it was more likely overall that PCs would be entering Scores fresh and uninjured. 

All of these changes needed to pinned down as this framework was going to inform how the Special Abilities and specialty gear for my playbook "classes" would later be written.  That's why it's necessary to talk about Playbooks in general before I can talk about the Playbooks in specific detail!

Next time, I'll talk specifics about the Breaker and the Seeker, two playbooks that directly informed what "violent action" in World was going to be like.