FH8 has emerged from it's chrysalis and is a heartbreaker no more.  You can find a link for the newest incarnation down there in my signature. 

I'm pretty happy with last night's first playtest.  The clunkyness was minor and fixable.  There were zero minutes of "Gee, what do we do now?"  But I did have two issues and I'm pretty sure they're related.  Or at least I'm imagining that there's a single solution for both issues.

1.  I didn't think that the situation(s) I created on the fly were grabby enough.  Just not enough tension.
2.  There were too many periods of time where players were apparently disconnected from what was going on... for too long.

Check page 6, under the heading Preparation.  There's the three steps that I used the other night.  It worked pretty good.  Right up until I realized that my bang/fizzle ratio was a bit high.  I also neglected to wrap any of the PC's Twinings together, so each character really had a bit of an insular plot going on and didn't need the other players.  I know I can fix that part just using what I have.  I'm pretty sure all I need to do is to intentionally map the Twining and non-Twining NPCs to each other.  And then make use of that cross-PC Twining relationship in an early bang or two. 

So that would take care of problem 2 (I think), but I'm still missing a reliable solution to problem 1.  How do I take the Twinings as the fuel and make an extra-grabby situation every time?  Any thoughts?

-Eric

Ah, all is revealed.

Can you not force the players to self-twine among themselves during chargen?  "You must have a twining with every other character" or something?  that seems promising.

And how much of this is GM-dependent, anyway?  If your bangs were weak, they were just weak - you can't make a rule that says "bangs must be awesome". 

you can't make a rule that says "bangs must be awesome". 

Since twinings are a fairly scarce commodity, I think I'd say something like:

"You must have one positive twining explicitly associated with another PC in some way, and one negative twining explicitly associated with a different PC."

Or skip the positive/negative if that bothers you.

I was thinking of the Twining thing today and I realized I left something out of this version of the design.  There's no automatic Twining with the rest of the PCs.  That was a pretty important element in FH8 and I'm surprised I forgot about it when I wrote out Safinubi.

I mean, having a Twining in the other PCs is the "Go ahead and fuck with the other players"-invitation.

I think one of each, positive and negative, is just a little too much of a hand in the players' pudding.  I mean, right now the system only requires you to author two Twinings for your character to start.  So, what I'm thinking is something along the lines of;

At least one of your Twinings must either be one of the other PCs or must have some relation to the one or more of the other PCs. 

Personally I'd do more than hint.  If there were either a mandate or powerful positive incentive to "make the PI's job easier" I think that would be really good.  Not a deal-breaker, but still useful.  You're talking about something a player can do at character generation that will make the entire game more interesting and fun, right? 

Jason wrote:
"You must have one positive twining explicitly associated with another PC in some way, and one negative twining explicitly associated with a different PC."