I have a few other thoughts here, which I’m mostly sharing to solidify them in my mind, prior to Monday.
Full confession - I’ve never read the rules all the way through - they flummoxed me in the early betas, and it wasn’t until Dungeon World that I really saw the point of the system, to be honest. This isn’t a detractor, but it’s worth noting. Both running AW straight and Demihumans will need me boning up on the assumptions of the game, which is at least in part “the world you knew ended, this is after that, and if you want to hold your community together, you’ll need to manage the maelstrom.”
I like the mechanics. The setting is … sort of a demonic-lightning-punk Victoriana. The assumption that you’re bad guys out for yourselves is… baked in pretty hard. Even with the Vigilantes play set, you’re really just getting on the side of the angels about as far as Daredevil, Punisher, Luke Cage, and Jessica Jones.
Now with all that said, the biggest turn-off for some of us is PvP, not tone. So we’re all in the same gang, and on the same side, so that’s fine. Tone can be modulated. Goriness is in narration, which we control, etc etc. With group consensus and conscious effort we can very forcefully AIM at The Palace Job, but those 7-9 results are mechanically where the game is going to land a LOT of the time. But bad things happen, and that can be a bummer for some of us.
It’s worth noting we’re not marrying any of these games - a shorter-run thing might be good, so picking something that we wouldn’t necessary want to see run for 10 months may be a gift.
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Stonetop - DW with all-different playbooks and community building
I’ve actually got a pretty good feeling about this one. I imagine the village leaders arguing about solving problems via reckless means. “Yes, the ruins are dangerous, and yes, strangers have gone in and never come back, but those were idiot strangers; the last time WE sent people (coffthree generations agocoff), they came out with treasures that kept us in steppeland wool for years. I say we go!”
Of these two, I’m leaning toward Scum and Villainy. ID doesn’t really have the ‘caper’ aspect reflected in there mechanically, the way S&V does. More on that as I read more into both rules sets, and maybe listen to some APs. S&V doesn’t seem to have the same darkness Blades does, either.
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Zombie World - PBTA game using card-draw mechanics, about … community. And zombies.
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In this case, I’m most intrigued by the NPC/enclave/background creation - the slow timed exposure of PC backgrounds/history. I’m also morbidly interested in a high-lethality PBTA game, but I’m a zombie apocalypse guy - it’s just my jam This is one of those “well, we already know it’s a shorter-run game” types of ideas.