18 thoughts on “Has anyone here ever run Action Movie World? Thoughts and experiences?”

  5. I’ve run it a few times (though never played) – it’s good fun but I’m not 100% sure the basic moves are great for the genre, relies more than usual on the players leaning into the tropes

  6. I’ve run it a few times (though never played) – it’s good fun but I’m not 100% sure the basic moves are great for the genre, relies more than usual on the players leaning into the tropes

  7. I ran it at a con. It’s surprisingly tough to GM, as it requires you to pace scenes fast and cut them hard. I wish there was a list of locations for each playset/movie or some mechanics to help with that.

    It some cool bells and whistles, especially for campaign play. I found the harm/gear rules a little loosey-goosey personally. I feel like instead of bothering with equipment, they should’ve gone with a specific move for each weapon, that would feel more cinematic.

    One of the best rules is that if you make a mistake with the story/continuity, you can leave it in and celebrate it, since B action movies would have the same errors!

    It’s a solid chassis for a game, but you need to do a little tuning up to get it to run well.

  8. I ran it at a con. It’s surprisingly tough to GM, as it requires you to pace scenes fast and cut them hard. I wish there was a list of locations for each playset/movie or some mechanics to help with that.

    It some cool bells and whistles, especially for campaign play. I found the harm/gear rules a little loosey-goosey personally. I feel like instead of bothering with equipment, they should’ve gone with a specific move for each weapon, that would feel more cinematic.

    One of the best rules is that if you make a mistake with the story/continuity, you can leave it in and celebrate it, since B action movies would have the same errors!

    It’s a solid chassis for a game, but you need to do a little tuning up to get it to run well.

  11. I ran it for the better part of a year and had a blast. I kept a blog about it, which I’ve linked below.

    In my experience, it’s very easy to run and pick up. I agree that gear is mostly useless, but that to me is a feature and not a bug. The harm rules are very loose, but they’re supposed to be — in the rules as written players can basically choose to have their character die at any time, even before the GM gets around to it. Death is an option the game makes players want to take, in general; I don’t think I had a single session where a player didn’t voluntarily blow themselves up or otherwise embrace the death mechanic.

    With our group, it always got ridiculous very fast; I’ve never tried a “serious” game of AMW and I’m not sure it would hold up if I did. We embraced the B-movie sensibility with everything we had and it was always a blast.

    actionmovietrainingmontage.blogspot.com – Training Montage – An Action Movie World Blog

  12. I ran it for the better part of a year and had a blast. I kept a blog about it, which I’ve linked below.

    In my experience, it’s very easy to run and pick up. I agree that gear is mostly useless, but that to me is a feature and not a bug. The harm rules are very loose, but they’re supposed to be — in the rules as written players can basically choose to have their character die at any time, even before the GM gets around to it. Death is an option the game makes players want to take, in general; I don’t think I had a single session where a player didn’t voluntarily blow themselves up or otherwise embrace the death mechanic.

    With our group, it always got ridiculous very fast; I’ve never tried a “serious” game of AMW and I’m not sure it would hold up if I did. We embraced the B-movie sensibility with everything we had and it was always a blast.

    actionmovietrainingmontage.blogspot.com – Training Montage – An Action Movie World Blog

  15. I ran it once as a one-shot spin-off from our Tears of the Machine campaign, in which we did the movie of a video game franchise constantly mentioned in the campaign. It was a lot of fun, although we did make it a bit more meta than intended by having the main campaign kids interject with MST-style commentary. I considered running it on the Gauntlet for a ‘Summer Blockbuster’ series, but didn’t get round to it. Might try that in the new year though.

  16. I ran it once as a one-shot spin-off from our Tears of the Machine campaign, in which we did the movie of a video game franchise constantly mentioned in the campaign. It was a lot of fun, although we did make it a bit more meta than intended by having the main campaign kids interject with MST-style commentary. I considered running it on the Gauntlet for a ‘Summer Blockbuster’ series, but didn’t get round to it. Might try that in the new year though.

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