Thanks, Simon! I'll give this a good look. I know Vincent wanted to participate here, too, but I have to make the forum look like something he can look at at work, so he might be posting only intermittantly until I can make that happen.

Here are a couple of specific rules questions, that might be a bit easier than “read my whole thirty page document and tell me what you think”:

The basic structure of the game is that every year each player chooses from a small selection of cards to determine what happens to the character in that year of the war.  Each card has its own sub-system for determining what happens.  An archetypal card is “Horrors”, which is about your character receiving some permanent psychological issues.  It works like this:

You describe a horrible experience your character went through, and then the other players (or GM if you have one) decide what the permanent effect on your character is.

The reason it works like that is because it requires the player to describe something concrete and specific before the other players can make a decision.  It encourages narration in a way that “roll a psychological issue and then describe how your character got it” doesn't.

So “Horrors” is working well, as are a number of the other cards that use similar systems.

There are a couple of cards that aren't working so well.

“Tidings from Home” is about the character hearing news from the village they've left behind.  This is meant to be a way for the players to add more information about the place where play will eventually take place.  At the moment I've got a rudimentary placeholder rule, that just decides whether it's good news or bad (weighted towards bad) and who narrates.  I think it could be a lot better.  The problem at the moment is that it puts a lot of weight on the shoulders of the player to come up with something interesting and relevant.  I'd like to get some kind of interaction between players happening here as well.

 Here's my proposed new rule:

One player plays the person briging the news.  The player who drew “Tidings from Home” asks them about a specific thing back home, like ”What news from my father?” or “What news about my farm?”, and then the other person gives them news.  On a 1-5, it's bad news, and on a 6-8, it's good news.  (The game mostly uses d8s)

Thoughts? Comments?

Another card that's not working very well is “Marvels”.  There's only one of those cards in the deck.  It represents the character finding something really amazing, a magic item, or something of great value.  Here's the current placeholder rule:

Describe what your character found, and how they got it

So it's not the best.  The problem is that it is hard to come up with something interesting on the spot.  I'm pretty much at a loss about this one.  I don't have any smart ideas about making it better.

Nothing in the game is set in stone, so I'd be interested in hearing comments on all the cards' rules.  They're in a table starting on page 17 of the document.

Thanks Andrew,

I'm reading 6 Bullets now, too. 

My reasoning for putting them in the body of the text, rather than in a “bestiary” at the back or whatever is that I think having some idea of the flavour of monster in the game is a useful thing to have when playing through the game.  For example, during play you'll find yourself fighting “Foreign Mercenaries” or “Alien Monsters” or “Eldritch Horrors”, and I wanted players to have some sense of what that meant. 

I also thought that putting them throughout the text would reinforce the idea that these are just snippets of a larger setting, and that these aren't the only things in the world, just some ideas.  It also reduces the burden on the reader of having to read and digest a huge block of setting text, which is generally pretty boring unless it's directly relevant to play.

That said, I'm open to doing it differently, if it still fulfills those same goals.  Do you have any ideas? Maybe something as simple as putting a header on those sections that indicates it's optional reading? Or maybe it can be solved with layout? Putting them on a seperate page, or in a sidebar?

Post edited 9:09 pm – September 21, 2009 by joshua

Mod post:

they still interrupt the flow of the text too much.

You're stating this as an objective fact. Please don't do that. Just say what you see and the effect it has on you.

I think putting them as a sidebar would be less intrusive, yet still distribute the text in a similar way.

This is borderline. You can suggest something, but putting “I think” in front of an an objective appraisal of a matter of opinion is the same thing as above.

This isn't serious moderation — you're not in trouble or nuffin' — but it's important to keep these things in mind to keep the conversation flowing productively.

As you were! Good conversation!