Category: The Gauntlet: Our Community

Another Long post about Hacking Worlds in Peril

Worlds in Peril Bonds / Plot Points

In general, I love the idea of relating “success guaranteeing” bennies to superhero relationships. Interpersonal drama is a big part of superhero stories and often are absent from ttrpgs. Since bennies are perfect for supers games, I think it’s a great idea for the PCs to earn them by creating drama.

In practice, however, some of my players didn’t like them. Use in our game usually went something like this:

Spider Man really wants to knock Doc Oc out by swinging into his face, feet first. So he burns a bond with Aunt May and gets to step up his result. (PbtA: -6 to a 7-9, or 7-9 to a 10+). He nails Doc Oc and super powered action ensues. The EIC (GM) makes a note to introduce some drama with Aunt May at a later time.

The player asks, “What the hell does kicking Doc Oc have to do with Peter Parker’s relationship with Aunt May?”

I (the EIC/GM) say, “Nothing really, fictionally speaking. But (insert something like the first paragraph above.)

So I thought about it and here is the first draft of what I came up with.

New PC’s start the game with a free Plot Point (the new name for bennies stolen from MHR). You can no longer just burn a bond, get a success, and then figure out the fiction later. However, you do have to trade some drama for triumph. Now you earn Plot Points when you trigger the “Burn a Bond” move.

Burn a Bond

Being a superhero is tough on relationships. It seems like the better you are at being a hero, the more drama you have in your life.

When a scene involves straining a bond relationship, roll +bond

10+ burn 1 bond and get 2 plot points “that went better than expected”

7-9 burn 1 bond and get 1 plot point

-6 burn 2 bond and get 1 plot point. EIC will tell you how it’s turned out worse than you expected.

My hopes for this change is that PC’s would proactively think about their relationships and narrate or frame scenes to earn Plot Points and add to the narrative. Also, the move could be triggered organically as the story progresses. If something happens fictionally to strain a bond as a result of a scene the move would also be triggered. In addition, if the EIC saw that a PC was low on plot points he could also use the GM move “Threaten a Bond” to trigger the “Burn a Bond” move to introduce some dramatic spotlight and plot point bennies to that PC.

If you made it this far, what do you think?

I’m going to pretend that someone besides me cares about hacking Worlds in Peril and post some of my ideas here.

I love that it’s PbtA and I love the way powers are abstracted and the push move works great in play. I like that they avoid playbooks. The way bonds work finally made comic book drama a part of the game. That always seems missing.

I just finished my second go at Mask, which I love. It’s great at teen supers team drama, and I can see myself playing a lot of it. But WiP’s is about different kinds of supers and the bonds system both allowed the adult supers success when they really need it and made those Spidey, Aunt May, Mary Jane type scenes happen in our games. Superhero stories have a lot of strained relationships with normal people in them. I like what the bonds do to encourage that to happen.

Also, Imho WiP handles comic action far better than Masks. The Take down Move alone can cover almost any narrative superhero stunt you can describe. And this is pretty important to me.

I would like to hack drives and advancement, because I just could not get any of my groups engage with it. I liked it a lot on paper, but… Nope. It could just be something with the way I explain it. I had the same problem with MHR and milestones.

So think I’m a going to make drives just a phrase (similar to dungeon worlds approach to Alignment) and if the group agrees that a PC acted in it during a session the PC will get an xp at the end of session move.

I also think I’m going to hack advancement with -6 gets an xp and every so many points unlocks an one of the WiP achievements (a la Masks)

Also, the conditions systems was a bit too free form for me. I felt I got a lot of raised eyebrows when I when I tried to explain how the extremity of conditions are determined and that for villians the difference in moderate and critical was only narrative. I understand why it’s that way, but it was a barrier for most of the players I ran it for.

This will likely be difficult, but I think I want to replace conditions with stress tracks similar to cortex plus heroic. (Physical, Mental, Emotional, and maybe a Complications track)

I’m not sure what I’ll do with socal moves but I want a bit more to represent more ways to increase or replace bond as well as moves that hellp inspire and adjudicate social drama. I’ll be running through several PbtA games for inspiration.

I fully get that I may be the only person that thinks any of this is important. I’m not trying to make a product. I’m just trying my hand at getting a game that does exactly what I want it to. I’m prepared to have my heart broken. LoL

Feel free to tell me I’m crazy!