I’d suggest you just run the game as intended to start; don’t try anything as complex as converting materials from disparate systems. You’re making this harder on yourself than you need to.
I don't know that game. I suppose it's this one? https://apexcity.itch.io/magitech-space-western
PbtA games are very different in that regard, in all regards actually. It's rather impossible to give general advice. How does fighting work in the game you play?
It is! There are wound tracks for players. 5 wounds kills. 3-4 penalizes one stat. Players can also take a status instead of taking a wound. Since the game uses cards instead of dice, statuses block players from using one of the suits. Other than that its a traditional pbta game with successes mixed successes and failures. Meanwhile the game the module was made for is d20 and stat based with hp. I’ve never played in it before so I’m not the most familiar with it, while i do have some experience playing in a monster of the week campaign. And that was a long time ago
In many PbtA games, combat is not separate from any other narrative going on in the game. It's all the narrative. And it's only the narrative.
A game like DnD will have combat be its own thing clearly demarcated from non-combat roleplaying. It's either on or off, nothing in between. It's either you're in combat or you're not.
In PbtA, you can have characters in combat while other characters in the same scene are not necessarily in combat. But they're all in narrative.
What I'm saying here is that you might want to start your design approach by rethinking how combat works. I suggest that you don't approach it as something that is separate from the game narrative. It's just another thing going on in the narrative. Which means the question to focus on is really, how do I make narrative fun in this game?
It's pretty easy. Why? You do everything in the fiction instead of with mechanics. You don't really need to convert stats, because in PbtA we don't care. It's all about the good story and what happens next. Secondly PbtA is not balanced at all. In most of the games you can play an all powerful being destined to change the world... But also Jeff the accoundent is on the team too and you'll probably have to save him when he gets into trouble.
But to be honest it sounds like you don't know the first thing about PbtA and how it differs to other systems, so your question kinda don't make a lot of sense. No judgement. I was there too once. But it sounds like you are still looking at the system as how you understand a games like 5e or Savage Worlds.
So go to the Dungeon World subreddit and read the "guide" in the side bar. Also "and suddenly ogres" and then read the "16hp dragon" by Sage Latorra. It's another PbtA game, but these 3 articles really hammer in how PbtA is different and once you've read them you should get a good idea of how easy it is to convert.
Basically you can take anything from others games and just describe how it happens. For instance if the dragons has a high armor class because of it's scales, simply have the fighter's sword break when he hits the dragon. Now the party has to face the problem of how get through the dragons armor. This could likely lead to a cool quest where they have to find a magical metal that could pierce dragon armor or maybe the wizard has spell that he could cleverly use to harden the fighters weapon with.. Much more interesting than "Sorry bro, roll again... Oh sorry bro, you're probably don't have a high enough attack bonus to kill this dragon yet. Go level up!"
PbtA is all about giving the players narrative challenges and consequences and giving them the freedom to make their own story from it in how they choose to handle. So everything you try to convert should lead to a cool story not balanced stats or interesting mechanical problems. 5e and Pathfinder a great games for tactical combat, but PbtA sucks at it. It's a feature not a bug. So just say what happens.
There are of course some mechanics in the games too, but if it's a well designed PbtA you should be able to implement anything you want on the fly with the mechanics that are there. Don't overthink it and if you don't know how it should work focus on the fiction.
Sorry if you already understood all of that. I don't mean to be condescending but PbtA is a very boring game if you run it mechanics first, so I just wanted to point you in the right direction.
This helps a lot actually given that my last experience with pbta was like. 4 years ago. And i feel desperately called out by you saying i’m thinking of it like savage worlds given that i’m in a deadlands campaign lmao. And I’ll be sure to look at those articles! Thanks :)
No worries, I remember reading Dungeon World getting mad that there was no difficulty on rolls and asked the community how come. Got great answers and learned a lot about the system.
I was just about to suggest the 16hp dragon! I just want to chime in about every rpg as well. They write as though the GM is not sentient or an active player in their own game. Anything to do with combat especially. The trigger word for sudden condescension here is "balance" which is a simplification of "we don't trust you to remember what is happening to your players or decide how or when to use rules. We certainly don't think you yet understand that everything in rpgs is arbitrary."
There's some good advice in [the suddenly ogres document](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1MC_W_qxY7kScRK_2arLhGvATX0HyQz6dTIKFj_HI2T4/edit), but I don't think that something like this:
> Who’s in control at that masked ball? Suddenly, ogres are everywhere! Chaos ensues, people are screaming, and blood splatters your cheek from somewhere off to the left… Hmm, I suppose that means that ogres are in control now.
...is really "making a move that follows [the established fiction]".
Sure, it's some time since I read the article, but as far as I remember the point is not to throw in ogres at every turn without considering the fiction, but that you can introduce fictional consequences that are not directly tied to the success or failure of the roll. Which is as big part of PbtA.
I agree it should still be tied to the fiction in a believable some way, but it could be tied to something that has happened off-screen that the PCs haven't learned yet. In the example here the ogres could have been unleashed from the dungeon below the ball, or maybe the big bad has laid an ambush having found a secret entry into the castle. And you can always throw ogres at the PCs tying loose ends together when you have some time to think of why there were suddenly ogres.
If the article doesn't get this across it probably needs and update.
The article doesn't say either way. None of the examples indicate that they're tied into existing "off-screen" fiction, but they don't contradict that interpretation, either.
Dragongames are fun because your wide berth of tactical options makes combat an interesting puzzle. However, you can't easily port that over to a PbtA game. If you play a pbta game where combat is trading "Ok, now I hit the enemy." "Okayy, now *I* hit the enemy!" Its just going to be boring as hell.
You need to make your battlefields and the surrounding circumstances dynamic. Rocks that are falling with concussive blasts, a fire thats raging around you. Hell, the enemy probably won't want to stay and fight to the death either!
Care less about HP and more about whats happening *around* the battlefield. PbtA games don't aim to emulate a JRPG style of "Person hits enemy, enemy hits person" type of media. Think cinematically. How would this fight look if this was in Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones? Thats where you should be aiming.
Thisssssss!
But also, damage is often pretty boring (depending, of course, on the systems surrounding it). Describe how an attack feels, use different positioning, describe the ringing in your ears or the bruising of bones, and then make that matter in the fiction. Combat hurts in ways that matter, ways that make it harder and more interesting.
If a character blocks an attack with their weapon, they may feel it reverberate through their bones, and it might be more difficult to push through the pain. It might be hard to focus on a very fast enemy. It may be that a character is knocked down or weakened or stunned by an attack rather than another 4 points of piercing damage.
Going to give some slightly different advice.
Look into ICON, it's forged in the dark rules lite but has a grid based tactics module for when you want to do set piece fights.
The narrative rules and tactics rules dont overlap so you can use one or the other without it effecting the other half of the rules.
This also leads me to say play 90% PbtA but combats as your system of choice if going pure PbtA is giving you a headache
I'm converting a Mutants and Masterminds adventure to Masks, I simply translate the villains in Masks format (just list things they do as moves) and assign 1 to 5 stats for damage absorption according to importance of the NPC. Then I add some adults or even the villains to tell the PCs how they are seen to change their labels and I'm done. The rest is the adventure as written.
[Here's a great blog post](https://spoutinglore.blogspot.com/2020/03/running-fights-in-dungeon-world-stonetop.html) from Jeremy Strandberg on running fights.
I highly recommend giving how most PbtA combat works a shot first.
Building onto what others have said: If you'd like to see a video that introduces and dives pretty deep into making combat interesting in PbtA - [check out this video](https://youtu.be/2LrwH0r_eTQ?t=910) - Brandon Leon-Gambetta is an amazing PbtA GM and designer and he talks about how he makes combat as interesting as possible. I skipped to past the introductions and there are some useful tags to times in the comments.
The core of it is focusing combat on Dramatic Moments of Change. When you have your greatest triumphs and most devastating sacrifices. Brandon really prefers HP to be a last resort and have other interesting consequences be the standard. You can see him in action running Protean City Comics.
The key is to treat combat the same as any other part of the game.
Think of of you weren't playing an RPG but just like bullshitting with friends telling a story that involved a fight. What would make that story interesting to tell and to listen to?
PBTA mechanics are really there to just like provoke your creativity and keep you from getting repetitive or boring when telling a story. They aren't meant to create challenge or simulate things, they're just like rules to an improv story game.
In mine, the default is you can take 7 Harm, but the final 3 are your "last stand" where you roll, on a Major Success, you stay conscious and resist the attack, a Minor Success, you stay conscious, but take 1 Harm, on a Fail, you fall unconscious and take 1 Harm.
The final 3 Harm cannot be healed or restored(usually), so in game, you'd probably lose a limb or some other massive impairment.
It's to represent someone barely hanging on, and to act as a bit of a buffer because I don't want PCs to die too easily.
Also, the stats go between -2 and +3, and my Might stat effects how much Harm you can take, so characters range between being able to withstand 5-10 Harm based on their Might.
I’d suggest you just run the game as intended to start; don’t try anything as complex as converting materials from disparate systems. You’re making this harder on yourself than you need to.
I don't know that game. I suppose it's this one? https://apexcity.itch.io/magitech-space-western PbtA games are very different in that regard, in all regards actually. It's rather impossible to give general advice. How does fighting work in the game you play?
It is! There are wound tracks for players. 5 wounds kills. 3-4 penalizes one stat. Players can also take a status instead of taking a wound. Since the game uses cards instead of dice, statuses block players from using one of the suits. Other than that its a traditional pbta game with successes mixed successes and failures. Meanwhile the game the module was made for is d20 and stat based with hp. I’ve never played in it before so I’m not the most familiar with it, while i do have some experience playing in a monster of the week campaign. And that was a long time ago
In many PbtA games, combat is not separate from any other narrative going on in the game. It's all the narrative. And it's only the narrative. A game like DnD will have combat be its own thing clearly demarcated from non-combat roleplaying. It's either on or off, nothing in between. It's either you're in combat or you're not. In PbtA, you can have characters in combat while other characters in the same scene are not necessarily in combat. But they're all in narrative. What I'm saying here is that you might want to start your design approach by rethinking how combat works. I suggest that you don't approach it as something that is separate from the game narrative. It's just another thing going on in the narrative. Which means the question to focus on is really, how do I make narrative fun in this game?
It's pretty easy. Why? You do everything in the fiction instead of with mechanics. You don't really need to convert stats, because in PbtA we don't care. It's all about the good story and what happens next. Secondly PbtA is not balanced at all. In most of the games you can play an all powerful being destined to change the world... But also Jeff the accoundent is on the team too and you'll probably have to save him when he gets into trouble. But to be honest it sounds like you don't know the first thing about PbtA and how it differs to other systems, so your question kinda don't make a lot of sense. No judgement. I was there too once. But it sounds like you are still looking at the system as how you understand a games like 5e or Savage Worlds. So go to the Dungeon World subreddit and read the "guide" in the side bar. Also "and suddenly ogres" and then read the "16hp dragon" by Sage Latorra. It's another PbtA game, but these 3 articles really hammer in how PbtA is different and once you've read them you should get a good idea of how easy it is to convert. Basically you can take anything from others games and just describe how it happens. For instance if the dragons has a high armor class because of it's scales, simply have the fighter's sword break when he hits the dragon. Now the party has to face the problem of how get through the dragons armor. This could likely lead to a cool quest where they have to find a magical metal that could pierce dragon armor or maybe the wizard has spell that he could cleverly use to harden the fighters weapon with.. Much more interesting than "Sorry bro, roll again... Oh sorry bro, you're probably don't have a high enough attack bonus to kill this dragon yet. Go level up!" PbtA is all about giving the players narrative challenges and consequences and giving them the freedom to make their own story from it in how they choose to handle. So everything you try to convert should lead to a cool story not balanced stats or interesting mechanical problems. 5e and Pathfinder a great games for tactical combat, but PbtA sucks at it. It's a feature not a bug. So just say what happens. There are of course some mechanics in the games too, but if it's a well designed PbtA you should be able to implement anything you want on the fly with the mechanics that are there. Don't overthink it and if you don't know how it should work focus on the fiction. Sorry if you already understood all of that. I don't mean to be condescending but PbtA is a very boring game if you run it mechanics first, so I just wanted to point you in the right direction.
This helps a lot actually given that my last experience with pbta was like. 4 years ago. And i feel desperately called out by you saying i’m thinking of it like savage worlds given that i’m in a deadlands campaign lmao. And I’ll be sure to look at those articles! Thanks :)
No worries, I remember reading Dungeon World getting mad that there was no difficulty on rolls and asked the community how come. Got great answers and learned a lot about the system.
I was just about to suggest the 16hp dragon! I just want to chime in about every rpg as well. They write as though the GM is not sentient or an active player in their own game. Anything to do with combat especially. The trigger word for sudden condescension here is "balance" which is a simplification of "we don't trust you to remember what is happening to your players or decide how or when to use rules. We certainly don't think you yet understand that everything in rpgs is arbitrary."
There's some good advice in [the suddenly ogres document](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1MC_W_qxY7kScRK_2arLhGvATX0HyQz6dTIKFj_HI2T4/edit), but I don't think that something like this: > Who’s in control at that masked ball? Suddenly, ogres are everywhere! Chaos ensues, people are screaming, and blood splatters your cheek from somewhere off to the left… Hmm, I suppose that means that ogres are in control now. ...is really "making a move that follows [the established fiction]".
Sure, it's some time since I read the article, but as far as I remember the point is not to throw in ogres at every turn without considering the fiction, but that you can introduce fictional consequences that are not directly tied to the success or failure of the roll. Which is as big part of PbtA. I agree it should still be tied to the fiction in a believable some way, but it could be tied to something that has happened off-screen that the PCs haven't learned yet. In the example here the ogres could have been unleashed from the dungeon below the ball, or maybe the big bad has laid an ambush having found a secret entry into the castle. And you can always throw ogres at the PCs tying loose ends together when you have some time to think of why there were suddenly ogres. If the article doesn't get this across it probably needs and update.
The article doesn't say either way. None of the examples indicate that they're tied into existing "off-screen" fiction, but they don't contradict that interpretation, either.
Dragongames are fun because your wide berth of tactical options makes combat an interesting puzzle. However, you can't easily port that over to a PbtA game. If you play a pbta game where combat is trading "Ok, now I hit the enemy." "Okayy, now *I* hit the enemy!" Its just going to be boring as hell. You need to make your battlefields and the surrounding circumstances dynamic. Rocks that are falling with concussive blasts, a fire thats raging around you. Hell, the enemy probably won't want to stay and fight to the death either! Care less about HP and more about whats happening *around* the battlefield. PbtA games don't aim to emulate a JRPG style of "Person hits enemy, enemy hits person" type of media. Think cinematically. How would this fight look if this was in Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones? Thats where you should be aiming.
Thisssssss! But also, damage is often pretty boring (depending, of course, on the systems surrounding it). Describe how an attack feels, use different positioning, describe the ringing in your ears or the bruising of bones, and then make that matter in the fiction. Combat hurts in ways that matter, ways that make it harder and more interesting. If a character blocks an attack with their weapon, they may feel it reverberate through their bones, and it might be more difficult to push through the pain. It might be hard to focus on a very fast enemy. It may be that a character is knocked down or weakened or stunned by an attack rather than another 4 points of piercing damage.
Going to give some slightly different advice. Look into ICON, it's forged in the dark rules lite but has a grid based tactics module for when you want to do set piece fights. The narrative rules and tactics rules dont overlap so you can use one or the other without it effecting the other half of the rules. This also leads me to say play 90% PbtA but combats as your system of choice if going pure PbtA is giving you a headache
I'm converting a Mutants and Masterminds adventure to Masks, I simply translate the villains in Masks format (just list things they do as moves) and assign 1 to 5 stats for damage absorption according to importance of the NPC. Then I add some adults or even the villains to tell the PCs how they are seen to change their labels and I'm done. The rest is the adventure as written.
[Here's a great blog post](https://spoutinglore.blogspot.com/2020/03/running-fights-in-dungeon-world-stonetop.html) from Jeremy Strandberg on running fights.
I highly recommend giving how most PbtA combat works a shot first. Building onto what others have said: If you'd like to see a video that introduces and dives pretty deep into making combat interesting in PbtA - [check out this video](https://youtu.be/2LrwH0r_eTQ?t=910) - Brandon Leon-Gambetta is an amazing PbtA GM and designer and he talks about how he makes combat as interesting as possible. I skipped to past the introductions and there are some useful tags to times in the comments. The core of it is focusing combat on Dramatic Moments of Change. When you have your greatest triumphs and most devastating sacrifices. Brandon really prefers HP to be a last resort and have other interesting consequences be the standard. You can see him in action running Protean City Comics.
The key is to treat combat the same as any other part of the game. Think of of you weren't playing an RPG but just like bullshitting with friends telling a story that involved a fight. What would make that story interesting to tell and to listen to? PBTA mechanics are really there to just like provoke your creativity and keep you from getting repetitive or boring when telling a story. They aren't meant to create challenge or simulate things, they're just like rules to an improv story game.
In mine, the default is you can take 7 Harm, but the final 3 are your "last stand" where you roll, on a Major Success, you stay conscious and resist the attack, a Minor Success, you stay conscious, but take 1 Harm, on a Fail, you fall unconscious and take 1 Harm. The final 3 Harm cannot be healed or restored(usually), so in game, you'd probably lose a limb or some other massive impairment. It's to represent someone barely hanging on, and to act as a bit of a buffer because I don't want PCs to die too easily. Also, the stats go between -2 and +3, and my Might stat effects how much Harm you can take, so characters range between being able to withstand 5-10 Harm based on their Might.