So one thing I've noticed is that there's a lack of a dedicated sheet for tracking your Bonds!
So one thing I've noticed is that there's a lack of a dedicated sheet for tracking your Bonds! Is this a thing that can happen?
For context I'm starting an Ironsworn society at the school I teach at in two days and in putting together a folio for the interested students I noticed that Bonds has a track, but not a space to write down what the Bonds actually ARE.
For context I'm starting an Ironsworn society at the school I teach at in two days and in putting together a folio for the interested students I noticed that Bonds has a track, but not a space to write down what the Bonds actually ARE.
Hi, Daniel Weichman. I fiddled with various bond tracking sheets during development. However, I found that my playtesters tended to have their own preferences on how much information they were tracking about their bonds (some just a name, some a mini-biography), and in the end it came down to just recreating a piece of notebook paper -- which didn't seem to offer much value.
ReplyDeleteI generally recommend the index card method I illustrate in the book (see chapter 4), since it's a concise way to manage locations and bonds.
That said, I'm certainly open to adding a worksheet for bonds to Ironsworn official materials if I can sort out a clever way to deal with it (or if anyone has any suggestions).
Would love to hear more about your RPG club! Have you done this in years past?
Shawn Tomkin Nope! But I started playing Dungeon World with some of my fellow faculty and a student overheard me describing the game Beautiful Anomalies and had a joy face, so I decided that a school tabletop society might be a good idea. We don't really have the opportunity to sit down for a few hours (being a rural school a lot of kids have a bus to catch) so I thought we could meet up once a week and discuss our Ironsworn escapades, maybe even have all the players romping around a shared hex map of the Ironlands, updating details as we go! Interest session is in two days, so we'll see how it goes.
ReplyDeleteOn the topic of added details to bonds.
ReplyDeleteI started my first play yesterday (the softcover finally arrived and it's lovely), and my inciting incident pushed me away from my settlement and the bonds I had there.
I thought it would be neat to see if the inner doubts sparked by being injustly sent away could affect the "loyalty" to the bond; I saw the "Test your bond" move, and decided I needed something very similar but that related only to my character.
So I'm using a sort of stress track for my bond, instead of being numbered, the states are labeled "Strong", "Weak" and "Fragile".
The bond starts as "Strong" and during every leg of my journey I will do a (custom) "Test your bond" move with these results:
- on a Strong hit, the bond is "Strong"
- on a Weak hit, the bond is "Weak"
- on a Miss, the bond becomes one step weaker and it is cleared if it goes off below the track.
It basically needs a string of 3 consecutive Miss or a Weak hit and 2 Miss to clear the bond. It feels an acceptable level of simulation of this kind of inner (possibly delusional) monologues without adding too much crunch.
I might be adding too much already to my game, I know but, 1) I always needed more mechanics to drive my fiction and 2) I really want to play with loneliness and desolation.
That's a really cool, mechanic neuzd. I like it!
ReplyDeleteneuzd I like this idea a lot! Maybe you should expose it more, because being in the comment to the other post it may be easily overlooked.
ReplyDeleteUPDATE: We're still plugging through character creation but I have almost a dozen students excitedly sketching their characters and imagining their future exploits. They're super psyched about the joint map idea, so we'll do group setting creation next week. =)
ReplyDelete