🛠️ pbta playbook maker

PbtA Playbook Maker is an app to make "playbooks" for Powered by the Apocalypse games:

One of my favourite TTRPG systems is Monster of the Week (MotW), which is a "hack" of PbtA.

MotW playbooks are great for the process of character creation (check them out) but, ...not so good in the heat of a session: there's a lot of "cruft" (ex. text describing moves you didn't take), and your various stat bonuses are hidden throughout.

I like MotW because the system mostly "gets out the way" of the story and action; but it really kills the momentum to have a player pause and scramble to find something on their sheet to respond to something. Like with DnD, PbtA player's pretty much need to create their own cheatsheets.

...or use this instead.

These playbooks...

• show only the chosen moves
• group moves by stat
• support custom moves
• standardize the way consequences are displayed
• are layed-out in a way that (IMO) is much easier to parse

The source is available, but the "app" isn't "released" because it doesn't have a UI yet (playbooks are defined by EDN files). If there's interest, I plan to make a UI for users to build their playbook and export to PDF.

Behind the scenes, it's a ClojureScript app that displays the playbook in the browser (which I then print). There's a fun little algorithm that figures out how to lay out the various blocks on the page to fit and look good (basically the "masonry" layout algorithm).

Currently, it only has data for the MotW playbooks we use, but could be extended to support all MotW playbooks and other PbtA games.