Welcome back to a new edition of Hurt Locker Stuff I’m Sharing For Open Development.
Same rules apply. I’ll paste those at the bottom. I’d love your thoughts. I’d love them even more if they come from gameplay.
I’ve featured our three new templates, the Dreamers, the Infected, and the Cursed of Hachiko. I’ve also featured a glut of new Supernatural Merits, to complement the ones in The God-Machine Chronicle/World of Darkness Second Edition.
The Rules:
- First off, notes need to be in one place. I’ve set up a forum thread for that. I’ll pay attention to that thread. This will be a new thread from last time, to help me organise.
- Don’t bother commenting on grammar, spelling, and punctuation. These are super raw drafts.
- Please don’t reiterate points. I’m not looking for consensus or “votes”. If someone said, “this issue exists”, don’t second it. I don’t want to bog down the conversation. If you have a new point or thought, cool. But don’t dogpile the conversation, please.
- Some points don’t need context. “This has seven dots, Merits don’t go to seven dots” doesn’t need context. But, “This is unbalanced” is not really a point that helps anyone. That’s subjective. Now, if you played with it, and it created a specific experience at your table, I want to know.
- Speaking in experiences is good. If you played with something, I want to hear the experiences it created at your table.
- Please note the positives. This is partly because I want my team exposed to positive notes as well as negative, but also because I want to see what works for you and creates positive experiences. I’m in the business of creating positive experiences.
- Don’t be insulting. Don’t insinuate motives from my team. Just address the material; don’t try to bring in assumptions and political issues.
- If you make a “this doesn’t work” style note, couple it with what you think would work. That’ll help us frame your commentary.
- Understand that there’s some overlap here. A few people did different versions of the same Style, for example. This was by design. I’m not going to “take one but not the other”. But I might strip apart duplicates for alternative maneuvers or similar. I wanted more raw ideas to work with.
- I will be reorganising and renaming these. Many are a little more specific than I intend. I want to make them more generally useful. If you have thoughts, awesome.
- At a certain point, I’m going to call an end to notes. At that point, I have to send over my notes to my team, and I can’t go back and integrate more ideas.
The templates are all wonderfully creepy. The two criticisms I have on them are:
1) I found them frequently pretty confusing, in terms of the mechanics of the overall arc. Do you get lost time after running out of memory or at the beginning of the chapter (if you fail the roll) or both? Are you still a Dreamer when inactive? Sometimes Memory is talked about like a pool (you can store one memory…), sometimes in narrative terms (the dreamer finds she recalls memories…). Infected find breeding grounds but… then what? How does the rest of the infection arc work out? What happens to their conditions when they do? There’s something about supernatural objects, but then sometimes it reads more like places?
2) I don’t really get a good sense of what to *do* with them. They feel very detailed and bitty for antagonists, but seem hard to build a story around for players. Some guidance on what to do with them (e.g. “Dreamers work great for one-shots and convention games, but can arc out pretty quickly. For longer games, allow them access to their Memories at all times, but only make them risk Missing Time when you’re ready to throw the spotlight onto them.” or however the author actually envisages using them) would be really helpful.