The playtest rules have been updated. Important new passages are in dark red. And deprecated passages are crossed out. Mostly, the changes are what I laid out on the beyond the post-Utrecht reformulation thread, but I ditched the separate formulas for non-murderous and murderous resolution against Victims. Ultimately, I realized I was working against myself. I'd incentivized killing of Victims over non-murderous resolutions by awarding three points of Power for killing. And then I tried trying to keep players from killing their own Victims by awarding three points only if you killed one that you didn't originally Status Change to a Victim. And then the whole goal of two separate formulas was to make the Traits being assigned to Victims and Nobodies more mechanically relevant. Except the whole damn thing was getting too cumbersome.

So what I have now, I think, is leaner, and skews things back to a game of occult rivalry. You get one point of Power for a successful Resolution Against Nobodies or Resolution Against Victims, regardless of whether you're killing them or not. (So killing becomes not a decision about empowering yourself, but about whether you can disadvantage someone else.) Traits are more relevant in that you can only kill an NPC if their Trait Count is a prime number, and in the outputs of failed Resolution Against Nobodies and Resolution Against Victims rolls. And the section on how Nobodies and Victims get Traits is more specific.

I'm interested in thoughts on whether deciding to kill another player character is sufficiently problematized by the rules for discarding rolled primes in Resolution Against Nobodies, Change a Nobody to an Underling, and Change a Nobody to a Victim. And particularly in thoughts on the Trait dynamics.

(The example of play remains un-updated, and so is increasingly out of sync with the rules.)

Thanks,

Paul