Just ran my first game of Ironsworn last night and it went really really well!
Just ran my first game of Ironsworn last night and it went really really well! I was impressed by the way the mechanics created an exciting, seamless narrative -- journeying was fun and the players got really involved in the fiction. In terms of PbtA games, this is definitely one of my new favorites.
The highly mechanical nature of the game, though, does feel a little punishingly snowball-y -- which was something that I thought momentum would help correct, but actually it seemed to have the opposite effect. One of my players failed a few moves and managed to get negative momentum, and the failures snowballed from there: action dice were cancelled, when he finally got up to 0 momentum he kept on failing rolls he actually cared about, and without having any momentum he couldn't fix the problem.
I thought momentum would give him the opportunity to get out of the hole of bad rolling, but actually it just made it a lot worse. Is that how the system is supposed to function? What should a character do narratively when their momentum is bad, and how should they mechanically correct it?
The highly mechanical nature of the game, though, does feel a little punishingly snowball-y -- which was something that I thought momentum would help correct, but actually it seemed to have the opposite effect. One of my players failed a few moves and managed to get negative momentum, and the failures snowballed from there: action dice were cancelled, when he finally got up to 0 momentum he kept on failing rolls he actually cared about, and without having any momentum he couldn't fix the problem.
I thought momentum would give him the opportunity to get out of the hole of bad rolling, but actually it just made it a lot worse. Is that how the system is supposed to function? What should a character do narratively when their momentum is bad, and how should they mechanically correct it?
Hi, Josh Symonds. Thanks for giving Ironsworn a try!
ReplyDeleteSorry for the frustration with that player. First of all, to confirm, you were only canceling the action die when it was equal to the negative momentum value, correct? Statistically, negative momentum will only have an impact in 1 out of 6 rolls, but of course a bad string of luck can happen.
Did the player bring Secure an Advantage into play? You can frame it to target a favored stat, and even on a weak hit you gain some momentum.
Were other players making the Aid Your Ally move to get that character in a better position? That can be pretty effective, and if the aiding player rolls a miss they can take the brunt of the price instead of further punishing the down-on-their-luck character.
Did the player leverage failure sinks other than momentum? Pay the Price gives you a fair bit of flexibility on the mix of mechanical and narrative cost. You can suffer costs on other tracks, or face a purely narrative cost. Heck, you can even have an ally or companion take the brunt of the cost if you've got a volunteer and you can make it work narratively. There's only a couple of moves that force an explicit momentum penalty.
I've actually been concerned that negative momentum is a bit meaningless because I haven't seen folks getting below 0, so I'm slightly heartened to see it come into play, but disappointed it was probably a bit frustrating at the table for you.
Shawn Tomkin no worries on the frustration -- it certainly was bad luck. (Said player had a 2 and 3 cancelled by negative momentum in two subsequent rolls.) The players definitely didn't spend a lot of time securing advantages or aiding each other. I'll point that out in the next session so hopefully momentum can stay moving upwards.
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