My question for people more experienced with BitD/FitD playbook design (everyone) is, are there elements that every (or almost every) good playbook should have in its special abilities? For example, should every playbook have a push yourself move? Should every playbook have a move that increases effect? Should every playbook have a Ghost move (like the core playbooks do)? What do you think?
Many playbooks in the jam break all those "rules", so I suppose it's up to you if you want to adhere to the "standard" BitD playbook format, which are like Dissonance listed. Special playbooks like Vampire, Hull, and Ghost don't follow those, though. I've stuck to the formula since I like pretending my books could work as core playbooks, but that's just me. Having abilities that grant +1d or +1 effect are likely good in moderation since they hook into a core mechanic of the game and how the bonus is triggered says a lot about the flavor of your playbook. But reread the core playbooks and you'll see that most special abilities don't follow that either.
Keep in mind that abilities that does the exact same as other ones (from other playbooks) are basically not worth putting out, since the player can basically pick the original one. Change them slightly, increase a bonus it gives, but add a condition, or change the type of bonus it gives, or in which circumstance it gives, and so on so forth.
I went through the book playbooks and tried to broadly categorize the different abilities to see what commonalities they shared to understand how those ones were written and to give me a better idea of what trends mine might adhere to. I wanted to keep my playbooks in line, somewhat, with those of the base book. So some things that I pulled out and again some of these are incredibly broad or vague and do not belie the actual intricacies are; all 7 have an ability for expending special armour to protect against a consequence or to push yourself, 6 of the 7 had what I refer to as a super ability which is often depicted in the book as being able to do beyond what normal people are capable of (ex. the Hound's sniper ability or the Lurk's Ghost Veil ability) and most of those had options tacked onto how you can use it or how you can spend extra stress to enhance it, 5 out of the 7 had abilities that interact with ghosts or the ghost field, 4 out of 7 had a gather information ability, 4 out of 7 had a downtime ability, and 5 out of the 7 had two or more abilities that granted bonuses to the two skills they had built in bonuses for. So those are a few factors you could look at for your own playbooks. I used them to get ideas for where I could round out my playbooks and I found it helpful. I was surprised at the fact that there was only 1 playbook with a new xp trigger but I have seen that in a few playbooks on this jam, so clearly there are plenty of places where creators can diverge from the book. I think its a starting place but it is by no means comprehensive or prescriptive.
