Markets and Mages -- playtest one.
What worked:
-- Jay Treat's no-dice click stuff off a list moves, which I'm using for violence. The way this works now, violence is never a thing you roll to do -- you spend for it.
-- Jim White's Maslow's Purse. The Thief was a literal cutpurse, and got the Purse. It was empty. Later, she needed a way to signal parley and it had a white flag. It'll have other things as she needs them. If she'd needed to Pay The Rent, she would have found coin. If she'd asked the Witch to take a look, she could have told The Thief more about it.
-- My players. My GMing. The X-card. Many of the moves.
What needs refinement:
-- The economy. Oh crap is the economy borked. I think this is fixable by letting the Adventure move generate more income. Assets, Bonds, and Credits can all be generated using the same move. Then you've got a lot of ways to spend stuff, but you'll also have quite a bit coming in from going on wild and crazy adventures.
-- The Wizard's intimacy move is probably too harsh. At current, if you share a moment of intimacy with the Wizard you lose all bonds with the Wizard. Maybe I'll make it just one. Or something different entirely.
Typos and crap, of course.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I would argue that the Wizard's intimacy move is not too harsh. It simply incentivizes playing the Wizard as standoffish, avoiding intimacy under all circumstances. It writes them out of that portion of the game, which is fine. Not everyone needs to get close to people.
ReplyDelete(Edit: And I'm still considering how well or poorly the X-Card worked in that circumstance. I did not expect five minutes of argument about (essentially) whether I was allowed to X-Card something. You did a great job of being firm, but man. )
Tony Lower-Basch Conversely, if someone doesn't have bonds with the Wizard, then it is all the easier to share that intimacy with them. So, the Wizard can be intimate with people who don't have a lot invested in her. I'm not sure how I feel about that.
ReplyDeleteWhen you go on adventures, you'll gain bonds with each other. Over a long enough campaign, you'd primarily have bonds with the other player characters. So, you wind up relying on each other for friendship when you pay the rent.
On the X-card: I'm not sure about everything there, either. I could see where that was going about a mile away, and damn was I hoping it wasn't going to happen.
Design-wise, I think it can create an uncomfortable space when character A has an intimacy move that gives them an advantage, but character B has an intimacy move that is purely disadvantageous. It incentivizes conflicts over consent.
ReplyDeleteIts a thing to worry about, for sure.
ReplyDeleteUrban Shadows' mage has something like: When you share a moment of intimacy, they suffer a -1 to Run Away roles.
I might want to reduce the negatives to something like that, but I'd need to figure out which move or scope of moves to modify.
The Intimacy move rewrite for the Wizard is that when you share a moment of intimacy with someone, they have to open to the blight.
ReplyDeleteI think I like that. It isn't entirely negative, and shows the alien and weird nature of the Witch.