thread: 2014-08-20 : AW:Dark Age playtest preview: the Troll-killer
On 2014-08-22, plausible.fabulist wrote:
There is a lot to love here. I admit to a little grief at the lost of the previous AW:DA experience system. It seems like that was structured around an incentive to broaden play—to use all your character's stuff and skills, not just a few core gotos—which I thought would be awesome in play. I really like, in AW games, how the experience metagame adds a level to play which is skew to both the character's in-world goals ("what Dremmer wants"), and the player's, for want of a better phrase, artistic or creative or "roleplaying" goals in interpreting the character ("what Dremmer would do"). In AW, highlighting something—say, the Hx with some other PC you haven't dealt with much—immediately changes the game; suddenly you have a drive to seek out that character and start messing with them, aiding or interfering. It's a simple lever that pushes the game somewhere it wouldn't necessarily otherwise go, and I find the frisson of the tension between the various levels of goals enjoyable. I thought the earlier AW:DA system had this aspect, but was a streamlined improvement of it, because rather than a relatively arbitrary declaration by other players of where to push you, you had a continual and constant incentive to push yourself beyond what your player would ordinarily do; it also seemed to make lovely backstory sense (your strong thug can bash people all day, but he's not going to LEARN anything doing it, past a certain point—he has to go past his comfort zone and start using his less optimal attributes to actually grow and change).
Under the new system, as I understand it, experience-as-incentive is entirely replaced with experience-as-social-engineering. So the part of the "highlight round" that I appreciate in theory but am not as crazy about in play—the "opportunity to mess with each other's characters"—is dominant, whereas the "give me a direction as to what I should optimize for in play which is skew to what my character wants/is good at/would do" is gone. Experience (except perhaps for the occasional playbook move) doesn't really guide you to go certain places in play—since the decision of what to mark is entirely in the hands of other people, nothing you do affects it, except in the nebulous sense that answering question about "your aims, your ambitions, your secret plans, and your experiences during the session" might influence how things fall out. But there's nothing *during play* that you're motivated to do because of the experience system, except surviving to the end of the session. That's a big departure from most PbtA games.
I have enormous faith in lumpley's talents, so I am entirely prepared to be won over, but at the moment—as much as I like the idea of realms of rights—this seems like a loss.
This makes TR go "I see it as a flip (with no teeth)"
It looks like a flip to me. In AW, the other players say "hey, I want to see what Dremmer acting Hot is like." So they mark it and you get an incentive to act Hot. In DA, you play as if the Right of the Land Itself would be the most interesting way to see Ned develop and then other players mark it. Only there are no teeth if they instead mark something else. I really want to try this new system - I found AW had annoyingly different rates of character advancement and I love how giving people a choice will make them consider and discuss things they might not normally have thought about. The pace of advancement feels like it is the only thing that needs really exploring!
This makes gk go "Somehow it never occured to me to highlight Hx?"
This makes VB go "the game allows it--"
--but doesn't make any explicit mention of it, and the playbooks don't have little highlight dots for Hx or anything. Few people think of it.
