Designer's Notes for the Interim Edition

[Michael S. Miller]

As you can see, I've shot one of the Preview Edition's sneakiest Sacred Cows: IMPORTANCE. The concept no longer exists in the game. It was a left-over from the very first drafts of the game, when it still used dice. It had outlived its usefulness and needed to go.

The old Enrichment rules seemed solid when I wrote and playtested them. When I started running demos at GenCon, they bothered me a little in the back of my head. By the time my Sunday demos rolled around, I knew they were wrong. It took me a long time to fix them because I kept tripping over Importance. Once I killed Importance, the skies opened and things fell into place. I've been playtesting them, and they work much better than the previous ones.

Now, the only variable quantity of an Aspect is its Suffering. Suffering does the same job as Importance, anyway. If a certain Aspect is down to Imperiled, we know it's important to the story because we've seen it spotlighted at least four times (to move it from No Suffering to Primed, Primed to Active, Active to Threatened, and Threatened to Imperiled).

Without Importance, conflict scenes run smoother because there's not the speed bump of "Yes, you have a numerical Importance rating on your sheet, but it only means something at the beginning or end of a conflict, not in the middle."

On a lighter note, now the game has NO NUMERICAL RATINGS at all! Which is just too darn cool for a systems junkie like me.   8^)

Also, in the RPG.net review of the game, our own Spooky Fanboy asked for "Examples, examples and a side order of examples." I hope those supplied in the Interim Edition do justice to the topic of Enrichment Scenes. Fear not, the Full Edition will have the Conflict section, Hero Creation and Story Arc section just as example-riddled.

As always, I welcome any and all comments on the Interim Edition

[hardcoremoose]

I've only glanced over the Interim Edition - it's printing now, and I'll sit down with it and my Preview Edition later this evening - but it looks good.  I agree, Importance just wasn't doing enough...it either needed to count more or get gone, and I'm in favor of jettisoning it.

The example of play looks nice, what I've read of it anyway.

More later.

- Scott

[Michael S. Miller]

Thaks for looking it over, Scott. I recall you and others saying "Importance needs to do more." It resounded over and over in my head. All I could reply to myself was: "I know, but it can't do any more. It's doing too much already!" When I could finally see that any game component that's "doing too much already" has to go, the design fell into place.

BTW, you'll note that I swiped Danielle's Enrichment scene lock, stock & barrell from the GenCon demo you played. It works very well, I think.

[Per Fischer]

Just downloaded and unpacked the interim thing. Unfortunately I am working right now, which means I won't be able to read it until tonight. But it sounds good from the above alone ;)

I was in the middle of reviewing the Preview Ed for my local forum (on request), but now I have to incorporate the update, I think. Very well ;)

Per

[Michael S. Miller]

I was in the middle of reviewing the Preview Ed for my local forum (on request), but now I have to incorporate the update, I think. Very well ;)

That's great. I love reviews. Please let me know when it's posted so I can add a link to the site.

[hardcoremoose]

I sure do recognize the example of play.  Danielle's particularly brilliant when it comes to that kind of stuff (regretfully, her PTA game hasn't received a decent actual play report from any of its participants, so I'm glad to see her getting some respect in WGP).

- Scott

[Andy Kitkowski]

Cool, I'll have to go through the new rules and give it another solid playtest.

Also, this is a carryover from TBZ/that demo I gave at GenCon of use of comics/manga in RPGs, but I'd love to see some of the rules explained in comic form, using examples either of a group playing with the rules, or a comic-y action scene with clear examples of the rules in use.  

That would be like Cialis for the visual geek in me.

It might be kind of expensive, though, if you're using a good artist to do such examples...

-Andy

[Michael S. Miller]

Hi, Andy.

That comics-in-Japanese-RPGs presentation you did at GenCon made me yearn for exactly what you describe. However, my art budget is laughably tiny and every page of example-in-comic-form script I write is one page of the text that doesn't get written in a timely fashion. I want to make it happen, but I'm not sure how much I'm realistically going to be able to do.

I look forward to reading about your playtest.