My playtest is up. I've concentrated on the events of player over there; here I'll give feedback about the actual playtest document. Read the playtest first :)

I was surprised to discover how far through the book the chargen section is. My preference would be to have it positioned between the current pages 15 & 16: after the setting introduction, and before conflict.
I was also surprised to realise how little of it there was, although you don't need that much. One area though causes us some confusion. The supernatural gift. If you look at page 31, section 1, "Choose your human appearance", it says, "your demonic features give you a supernatural gift, such as fire-starting, walking on air, stony skin, etc. This immediately follows "add one ore more demonic features. These must be obvious and all but impossible to hide. Horns, scales, bat wings, elemental forces, a tail, etc."
It wasn't obvious to us what made one thing a demonic feature and another, a supernatural gift. The ones I've put in bold seem to belong in either, for instance.

The creation steps refer to "fighting style", "magic style", and "social style", while the character sheet has boxes for "blood style", "magic style", "shadow style". For this box, at least given the options, I think the character sheet has it wrong - the fighting styles listed are fighting styles, for example. If you added extra options (like, say, "athletics," "wire fu", etc.) it wouldmake the more general "blood style" make more sense.
I'm not sure you need to keep the strict human/demon split for Blood - there's no similar split for social. It makes sense with Magic.

Also the character sheet has two "Carried Item (Human)" boxes and no "Carried Item (Demon)" box.

I found myself ignoring what little the book had to say about magic - I forgot to apply the penalty following use of instinctual demon magic, and the blood & shadow magic by Gratz to reproduce something he'd seen seemed to not fit either the human or demon magic classifications, but was cool so we went with it.

Those were the only problems that I can remember -  all pretty minor.

One thing that I've mentioned before and play has reinforced - I'm not convinced that Strangers need three Injury boxes. The fact that they heal one box per scene means that they are pretty robust anyway. All the three boxes does is give players more chances in a single conflict - which they probably don't need.
I wonder if your linking for recovering rerolls during a Recovery scene isn't at least partially driven by the effect that having extra boxes available in a conflict and over a session means that characters tend to use more rerolls than in vanilla trollbabe.
Personally, I have a feeling (just a feeling, I haven't played much) that this approach diminishes the value of hurt boxes and rerolls.
Here's what I'd be inclined towards, though I'll repeat that these are gut-reactions and not informed by heavy playtesting - maybe I'm just too familiar with trollbabe...
* Keep the 1 Hurt box per scene
* drop the Injury boxes to 1 Hurt and 1 Incapacitated
* During a Refreshment scene you recover 2 Hurt boxes and 2 reroll items.
* After Incapacitation, you heal 1 Wound (just like any other scene).

I also wonder about the 1 hurt box per scene... I don't think the game would suffer much by removing this and allowing the only refreshment be during a refreshment scene. Then even players with lots of relationships have a reason to create them - they probably become a standard event in many sessions.

In trollbabe, you get a Discommode box, a Hurt box, and an Incapacitated box. After the conflict is over, the discommode vanishes. In Strangers, a Hurt is devalued to the level of a discommode - it has no lasting effect.

With that rant over :), the 1 hurt box per scene does mean characters tend to be more reckless and more adventurous, more likely to rush from one hard-fought conflict to another, so I am conflicted about it: in trollbabe, you did sometimes see players getting cautious after getting a couple of injuries. But then, in trollbabe it didn't come out and explicitly state that you could create a refreshment scene, so I think that problem would go away with that rule.

Thankfully, I don't have to worry about any more - I can kick the ball over into your court. :)

I also think there should be more in the rules about refreshment scenes: I'm a little vague on what players should have to create to get one, and I'd like something explicit - preferably something which provides opportunities or suggests ways for people to highlight their human or demonic or in-betweener nature. I wonder if the currnet text assumes familiarity with Dying Earth or Shadow of Yesterday, which not everyone will have played.

Well, that's all for now.

(This will be my last belabouring-the-point-about-healing post :))
One thing that occurred to me about the recover 1 Hurt per Scene: what exactly is a Scene?
Here's the way I played. I'd do stuff with one character, hopefully driving towards some situation where one of us would go - "this is a conflict," and at that point, I'd jump to the next player, do the same, and so on, till we got back to the first player. Then we'd do that conflict, follow its ramifications, and drive towards the next conflict, at which point, cut to the next player.

I have not seen other people player trollbabe or Stranger Things, so I don't know if this is standard practice.
When I've been doing this, I've been treating each unit of play concentrated on one character as a complete scene; the next time I come back to him, it's a new scene even if the place and characters involved haven't changed. On reflection, this isn't anything like the conventional meaning of the word Scene.
This approach might well be influencing my impression of the healing 1 Hurt per scene as being Fast.

How do other groups handle Scenes?

Hey Darren,

That's not how I mean the word "scene." You're cutting back and forth between players, yes. Each cut is not a complete scene, though. The scene ends when the Director says it does, usually after a conflict roll. Then, when that player takes their next turn, a new scene is framed for their Stranger, probably in a new place and time. You can cut in and out of a scene any number of times.

If you're healing a hurt box everytime you cut away, I can see why that's a problem. :-)

I've been thinking about the number of hurt boxes, and you may be right. Two Hurts might be too many. I'm considering having only one Hurt box. If you fail a re-roll, you're Hurt. If you fail a re-roll when you're Hurt, you're incapacitated (there's no box for that). There would be no 1 box auto-healing in this case. When you wake up from being Incapacitated, you would remain Hurt.

It's simpler, and it's just like Trollbabe (two failed re-rolls puts you out). No auto-healing means recovery scenes are more important. This is looking like the way to go.

Good points about Blood/Flame/Shadow styles. I am going to include non-fighting styles for Blood and not stress a human/demon split there.

The "Carried Item" re-roll is now just one item, it doesn't specifiy human or demon. New to that column is "Sudden Ally."

Magic is probably getting a kind of overhaul. I've never been really happy with it, and I have some ideas for how to make it easier to understand and more sensible rules wise. I'll post about it soon.

Thanks for the great playtest and the detailed feedback. I appreciate it.

John wrote:
I've been thinking about the number of hurt boxes, and you may be right. Two Hurts might be too many. I'm considering having only one Hurt box. If you fail a re-roll, you're Hurt. If you fail a re-roll when you're Hurt, you're incapacitated (there's no box for that). There would be no 1 box auto-healing in this case. When you wake up from being Incapacitated, you would remain Hurt.

It's simpler, and it's just like Trollbabe (two failed re-rolls puts you out). No auto-healing means recovery scenes are more important. This is looking like the way to go.

The "Carried Item" re-roll is now just one item, it doesn't specifiy human or demon. New to that column is "Sudden Ally."

Magic is probably getting a kind of overhaul. I've never been really happy with it, and I have some ideas for how to make it easier to understand and more sensible rules wise. I'll post about it soon.

So it's the same, really, but again, is I think simpler to understand because you don't have to worry about that doubly injured situation. (In trollbabe, you'd have to describe a more serious result on that first failure to justify the second injury; in ST, you don't - and that fits the feel of the game well I think.)

One more thing -- I definitely like the clarity of the "one injured box, one incapacitated box" thing.  One effect it will have however is to reduce the number of rerolls that players are likely to chew up per scene.  Of one way you might accomodate that is to limit the number of rerolls regain in a recovery scene.

Thought:  What if a recovery scene got you back your hurt box (if checked) and ONE reroll.  The scene must include something related to the reroll you clear.  So to clear a relationship, have a recovery scene featuring that relation.  If you want back "Sudden Ally" make unexpected new acquaintance.  If you want back say, "Smoke" (I'm not looking at the matrix, don't know if that's actually one of the items) how about a nice relaxing visit to a hookah bar?  And getting back demonic feature or supernatural gift?  What a great way for players to feature their kewlness in a non-conflict situation.

Dude! Stolen.