[Haunted] Revisiting A Ronnies Entry

[Jesse Burneko]

So I've been getting the urge to revisit one of my Ronnies entries.  A quick synopsis: It's called Haunted.  One player is a murderer.  Another player is the ghost of his victim haunting him.  The rest of the cast is played by any remaining players at the table.  So at a minimum you need three players.  I suspect it works best with 4-5 and would probably work okay with 6. 

I had one really solid and promising playtest of the game that revealed a lot things.  Structurally the game is sound but there were a few mechanical problems and I've come up with solutions to many of them.  For anyone who may be familiar with the older version one thing I've decided to do is completely remove the police mechanic.  It didn't do anything in play AT ALL, it made some scenes problematic that would have been fine if the mechanic simply didn't exist, and it distracts from the main focus of the game: the ghost/murderer dynamic.

There remains one mechanical problem I need to solve before I can do another play test.  I've partially solved it.  Here's where I am so far:

So, by default, the ghost can't directly interact with anything.  All they can do is talk to the murderer player.  When the murderer rolls dice they have the option of following the ghost's advice and earning a bonus.  The premise of the game, of course, is, "Are you going to follow the whispers of your guilty conscious?"  In playtest, the murderer player noted that he didn't feel enough pressure to follow the ghost's advice.  He wasn't dependent enough on the ghost's bonus.

I think I've solved that part.  Every character has two scores.  Influence and Reserves.  Influence is a fixed number of dice they roll in any conflict.  Reserves are dice that can be gambled on the roll.  It works like a reverse version of The Pool.  If the roll is successful, you lose the Reserve dice you used on the roll.  If you fail, you keep them.  Simple.

Okay, now for my fix for the Ghost and Murderer.  The Ghost only has Influence and the Murderer only has Reserves.  To get ANYTHING done the Murderer has to either do what the Ghost wants or gamble from his Reserves, which of course is going to get spent down.

What I'm stuck on is how do Reserves refresh?  What kind of action does the Murderer need to take to regain his Reserves?  Note: I'm tying NPC Reserve refreshes to the Murderer's refresh.  When the Murderer refreshes his reserves so do all the NPCs.

Another Note: It can't be a direct confrontation with the Ghost.  There's already a function for that.  There's a way the Ghost can gain Influence and if the Murderer wants to knock it down a bit he can take the Ghost head on.  This might also be a way for the Murderer to actually gain Influence of his own.  It's also the way the Murderer can actually permanently banish the ghost.

So I'd like some OTHER way to refresh Reserves.  But I'm having trouble thinking of a way.  If anyone has any suggestions, I'd love to hear them.

Jesse

[Ron Edwards]

Cool!

Jesse, are you using the V2 draft at Bloodthorn Press? Or a more recent version? I think that one still has the police in it.

For anyone who's interested, here's the [Haunted] Ronnies feedback thread.

As a shot in the dark, perhaps the murderer refreshes his reserves if and when he can convince everyone in the middle (the overlap) of the Venn diagram that "everything is OK," i.e., that there's no crisis. This can put a little attention toward the priority of keeping his shit together and preserving the semblance of normality to the people who are most likely to notice otherwise.

Best, Ron

[Jesse Burneko]

Hey Ron,

Version 2 is what I used for my play test.  I haven't created version 3 because I wanted to solve this problem before revising and posting.  I can post a bullet point summary of intended changes if you would find that useful.

Your idea about the center of the circle is interesting.  How does one recognize that state of affairs?  Also I'm not sure how frequent such a state of things can be accomplished.  My current thinking is that the Murderer only starts out with 3 Reserve dice.

I do like the refresh being associated with some state of calm.  It's definitely a "catch a breath" moment.

Jesse

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Jesse!

I was thinking of letting the fiction lead completely - hey, these particular people are all off my back for the moment, refresh my dice. Or if that's too vague or iffy, then maybe hell, just one of them. That seems more concrete and doable, although it does require attention toward getting it done. At least as I understand the game so far.

Don't worry about posting your revisions here, unless you want to - you have a blog dedicated to that purpose after all, and there's no need to duplicate. I am definitely psyched about seeing you work on this again. That was one hell of a Ronnies round, wasn't it? I went back and skimmed the threads, and man that was a weird community moment of shared vision.

Best, Ron