Into the Hurt Locker

Hey everyone! David Hill here.

I’m getting drafts in for World of Darkness: Hurt Locker. They’re looking good. I want to share a few things with you. This is basically open and up for play testing. I would love to see notes. But I need to lay some ground rules for that occurring:

• 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.
• 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.

So here’s the first bout of drafts to play with:

Merits (This includes some combatty stuff, but no Styles, also a handful of Social, Mental, and other Merits).

Fighting Merits (This is Styles, and some additional combat maneuver stuff).

I’ll give these a few days, then post something else. But this is a pretty big chunk of word count. So there’s a lot to go over.