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Playbooks are always so interesting to me because the sum total of the playbooks you have in a game is always a declaration of who gets to have their stories told in that world.
(This is a thread about my personal approach to thinking about playbooks)
(This is a thread about my personal approach to thinking about playbooks)
The first playbook I write cements a person who exists. The second one defines the space that all other playbooks exist in—the difference creates the space for the rest of them. The last playbook is inevitably commentary on all the others.
I always try to write my last playbook to cover the space that the other playbooks fail to. In Sleepaway, I wrote the Fresh Blood last because I wanted to give a voice to liminality that the rest of the playbooks weren't giving a voice to.
When we write a game about a community, the playbooks we create define the space of the community. There should therefore be a playbook that sits at the edge of that community, and acknowledges that a group isn't just the people at the center. That's just my take though!
The weird exception to this is Wanderhome—because there's so many playbooks, I kept writing reflections on the other ones, finding new spaces outside how all the others exist. The final one (the Poet) ended up being a reflection on the space created within Wanderhome itself.
How do y'all approach playbooks? Does anyone else have weird thoughts like that?
