Weaver Dice

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Mistborn
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Weaver Dice

Post by Mistborn »

So notable web serial author Wildbow has been working on a role playing game for several years. In it's current state it's more like a set of MTP prompts than an actual game, but it has some interesting ideas. It's a superhero game in the setting of the authors first web serial Worm.

In terms of potential selling points you have
-Trigger Events. In the Wormverse powers usually manifest during moments of extreme psychological stress and those powers are heavily tied to the nature of the event and the underlying psychology. Due to this people with powers or Parahumans tend to be dysfunctional as they are essentially forever defined by the worst day of their lives.
-Shards. To make a long story shot powers come from fragments of godlike alien entity which have been farmed out to humans to stress test the various abilities they grant. To this end Parahumans are compelled to seek out conflict, those are frequently successful at conflict find their powers easier to use. Those who are more conflict avoidant sometimes find their power acting out of control. It's a pretty good excuse for PCs to do PC things and for their powers to get better after doing them.
-"Draft" Character Generation. Wildbow puts forward an interesting compromise between a random character generation and full character customization where the group rolls up a number of characters and those who are not picked by the players are residents of the same city and potential antagonists. This basically ensures that there are plot hooks/NPCs that the players are invested in from the word go.

Of course there are also a bunch of potential pitfalls as well.
-Fucking Tinkers. On of the potential powers characters can have is "build super sciences gizmos" and in universes the powerset is noted as complete Bullshit. PC Tinkers are basically playing a different game from eveyrone else.
-The high end of the powerscale is unplayable. Worm has a lot of powers that are either story/game breaking or potentially impossible to translate to a TTRPG. People with instant you-lose-no save powers, invulnerabilities only bypassable 1-2 specific powers or agency destroying levels of precognition. (Or all of the above like best girl Ziz.)
Mask_De_H
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Post by Mask_De_H »

So what does this post have to do with the actual Weaver Dice game? We went over making a Worm TTRPG a year or so ago (you were in that thread, IIRC) and you don't even talk about the new or the old design docs in your damn link.

Anyway, the system has a less defined version of the Cortex+ Marvel milestone as its leveling system, which allows you to gamble for bonuses with a percentage chance (when the game uses d6 and d4 for everything else, AFAICT). It tells you to bid on triggers, powers and traits without telling you what fits which classification. The way they want you to design characters leaves pretty much the entire design to the rest of the group, which a) means everyone has to know Worm well enough to connect power to trigger and b) there's no guarantee the player even gets to run what they envisioned. I'm not sure there's an actual skill list (just what happens if you have crap stats), and I don't think the new document tells you how to do non-combat task resolution. It also sets human average to 3, but creates a derived bonus from that applicable to who the fuck knows.
Last edited by Mask_De_H on Thu Aug 24, 2017 3:09 am, edited 2 times in total.
FrankTrollman wrote: Halfling women, as I'm sure you are aware, combine all the "fun" parts of pedophilia without any of the disturbing, illegal, or immoral parts.
K wrote:That being said, the usefulness of airships for society is still transporting cargo because it's an option that doesn't require a powerful wizard to show up for work on time instead of blowing the day in his harem of extraplanar sex demons/angels.
Chamomile wrote: See, it's because K's belief in leaving generation of individual monsters to GMs makes him Chaotic, whereas Frank's belief in the easier usability of monsters pre-generated by game designers makes him Lawful, and clearly these philosophies are so irreconcilable as to be best represented as fundamentally opposed metaphysical forces.
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