[Apocalypse Girl] Ronnies feedback

[Sydney Freedberg]

[satisfying click]

Okay, now I feel my questions and your answers are connecting. (Including, retroactively, things you've said I wasn't sure I was understanding).

Don't try to introduce sexuality issues explicitly into the mechanics, check. I'd never wanted to do that anyway, I just wasn't sure how else to make space for them. For now I'll just punch up the part about, "hey, when you capture someone else's Engine, you get to redefine its Meaning unilaterally, ain't that cool?" Perhaps I can even make it possible to redefine Meaning of someone else's Engine without making the full effort of taking it -- that'd be a tactic of no use in mechanical terms, as things are written so far, which is a weakness needing correction, but it'd be a great way to pressure the other players in story-terms.

No safety mechanic evident so far, check. Again, I didn't think I saw one, but I didn't trust myself.

Backblast mechanic to allow escalating stakes as my top priority, check. If that can tie nicely into a relationship-mapping mechanic, great; if not, I'll set that aside for now.

a big part of winning conflicts is about introducing things into the narrative that the other players care about; I want my back-and-forth conflict resolution to do the same. I suspect it'll be stronger, though, if I can make a relationships mechanic that allows "backblast" or "fallout" from resolving the conflict over one Engine affect other, related Engines.

I think that's why you need to consider those Currency issues. However, you can only do this so much based on reading and counting on your fingers; play it a couple of times and see.

Playtest to see where Currency breaks, check. The game is all built around Currency (Power dice turning into higher or lower ratings turning into more Power dice), but I've not even raised the issue of the currency flow so far because (a) it didn't seem fundamentally broken in the playtests so far and (b) I can't address marginal brokenness until I've stopped adding new mechanics, e.g. the new turn structure, multiple die types, and relationships/fallout/backblast, so I have to wait until I've finished perturbing the system before trying to fine-tune the flow.

[Sydney Freedberg]

P.S. Plus I need to introduce more Color -- actually, that's as important a part of the examples as showing how the mechanics work -- and I'd love to add some simple ritual (viz. Meguey's essay, and the very cool "salute" ritual in Beast Hunters).