Thanks for the pointer, Tod!  The Cat-astrophe premise sounds fun, but the moves are mostly about combat and getting bonuses, or are just renamed AW moves.  Eden's going to have Moves about working together, maintaining traditions, facing the New, foraging, running away, and other arenas of conflict.  At the beginning, anyway.  :)

DWeird, yeah, impassioned, antagonistic conflict where neither person is quite willing to resort to violence is probably an under-explored RPG situation.  I'm not aiming Eden at that primarily, but it absolutely is an important ingredient.  I can think of many ways to handle it -- emotional hit points, custom moves with specific Stress outcomes, etc. -- but I'm thinking simple is probably best here.  Honestly, "Go Aggro" in a fictional setting whee people don't Harm each other is pretty close.  I may separate the goal (get what you want over someone else's wishes) from the method (aggression), though.  Using superior social skills to make someone back down to you in public, all in a "friendly" way, should be on the table.

It just occurred to me that "adopt new lifestyle" and other developments might tie into two separate (or one bi-directional) advancement tracks.  There are two cycles going on in the show:

• Within an episode, things get more awful for most characters until near the end, but then wrap up with things mostly back to normal.  Standard serial comedy, but with the degree of personal misfortune turned up to 11, such that changes can seem profound ("Now we're homeless junkies!") rather than circumstantial ("I can't let my friend catch me having borrowed her favorite shirt without permission!").
  
  
• Character positions and relationships are slowly altered over time, often for the worse.

Accordingly, making an AW-style list of advances which are basically improvements seems inappropriate... but a list of advancement options that are special (that is, not otherwise accessible), for good AND for ill, could still be fun.

Losing points from a positive stat could be an option for those who enjoy using the system to mirror the fiction, but would otherwise be a waste of an option; it might be best to make losses mandatory rather than optional.  On the other hand, if the stats themselves are negative, then advancing one gives the player more options to choose outcomes (7+ rolls on "player picks" lists) even as it lessens their character's odds of success (with GM narrating successes on 6- rolls).

Is rolling to lose, and picking your failure, a perfectly Always Sunny way to play?  Or would it simply be no fun?

Another option is to leave improvement to the realm of [decreasing Enmity, getting others to do what you want, and fictional developments], while assigning "advances" strictly to negative stuff.  (No prob asking players to choose bad options if ALL the options are bad.)

Perhaps over the course of a session, your stats get worse, and then you have to buy them back up to their starting positions by the end of an episode, so the show can start fresh for next time.  So the pervasive concern across multiple sessions is not the stats, but the budget you spend on them.  This budget should then tie into lasting changes in positioning; the less you must spend on your stats, the more you can spend on shares of the bar, or some other sort of leverage over the other characters. 

I could also tie in Enmity, letting it carry over across sessions and allowing players to take on more Enmity to buy back stats (if you're in good with Charlie, 0 Enmity, then you can afford to con him into some obnoxious shit he'll resent, in order to boost your depleted In Charge stat).

Yep, that show.

Brainstorming stats & moves.  Feedback & your own brainstorms welcome.

Move triggers:

When you outshine someone,
When you belittle someone,
When you ignore a reason to stop what you're doing,
When you trick someone,
When you celebrate someone's misfortune,
When you adopt a new lifestyle,
When you are confronted by your failures,

Stats:

capable
mean
decisive
in charge
slick
realistic
stable

I'm assuming that, though the players are rooting for things to go wrong, it'd be most fun to advocate for the characters as in AW.  On the other hand, given that Always Sunny characters are reprehensible enough that some P/C distance is a given, it might be better to equate high rolls with misfortune:

Alternate stats:

inept
petty
indecisive
unconvincing
clumsy
deluded
fragile

As for the move outcomes, I'm thinking they'll deal primarily with the following:

outshine - whether you succeed, and how much incidental trouble and ill will you bring upon yourself
belittle - whether you make someone roll "confronted by failures"
ignore a reason to stop - whether your commitment wins/loses you allies/enemies, and/or ups the stakes (+/-1 to next "confronted by failures"?  +/-1 to one or more enmities?)
trick - whether you get an NPC to do what you want, or a PC to accompany you on your path; also, how badly they'll strike back at you afterward (+1 enmity?)
celebrate someone's misfortune - how well you bond or squash beef with other PCs who are also celebrating (-1 enmity?)
adopt a new lifestyle - how much of your new routine is how self-destructive
confronted by your failures - whether you flip out and adopt a new lifestyle / ignore a reason to stop

Enmity would be the amount you can Hinder the other PC's roll.

Anarchangel,

1) The social pressure I experienced mostly came from:

Player wants to Help.  Player's character has no obvious means to Help.  Player thinks up very creative way to Help.  Player feels clever.  Player congratulates self and picks up dice.

Once it's at that point, it's harder for me as MC to say no and get the player to feel okay about it.

2) "Dude, stop Helping with every friggin' roll!  Your character has no particular reason to care all that much, you're adding a lot of convoluted fiction to justify it, and it's just slowing down the momentum of the story and killing the balance of screen time.  Yes, it's neat that you can earn 20 advances in a session, now STOP."

That's exaggerated for effect.  That didn't actually happen.  But it was going in that direction more than I was comfortable with.

Paul, cool.  I'm not surprised at all that sometimes it works out just fine.

John, as for leaving it to the group, I hear ya; that is fun to see what folks will come up with.

The one thing I'd try to avoid is the point where the mechanical incentives ("We want the +1!") are fighting the players' instincts for roleplaying their characters ("You don't get to tell me what the plan is!").

As a player, I am the guy who will simply object in the process of playing my character, and the +1 can go to hell.  But stick me in a group with folks who really value their mechanical resources, and there could be friction.

If you'd rather not make that your business, I wouldn't blame you!  Just bringing it up in case you do feel like addressing it.

only one person is in charge of what's actually present in the fictional landscape, and that's the GM. A player can't invent anything into being, including when they make a battle plan.

That is exactly what I would want, is consistent with every game I played for my first 15 years of roleplaying, and makes total sense.  And yet, I didn't feel safe assuming it here.  Perhaps there's a good reason for that, or perhaps it's because I've only played AW with story-gamers.  I dunno.  My only suggestion would be that you consider driving the "ONLY the GM EVER authors the landscape" m.o. home quite strongly (mnemonics, repetition, multiple references, etc.).

Thanks, Paul.  I dig the general idea, just wanted to get clear on the procedure and division of authorities.  So, let me see if I get it:

- I can ask the GM what I see at any time, and after a successful Make Battle Plan roll is no different. 
- I can also attempt to Assess at any time.
- The GM can draw a map whenever they want, and I can draw a map whenever I want.
- Rolling well on Make Battle Plan allows me to add opportunities onto my knowledge of the area.  I do not ask the GM what these opportunities are; I simply respect the fiction by not contradicting what's already been established*.
- Someone ought to add these opportunities onto some sort of map.

Correct?  If so, I wonder if the wording on the Battle Moves sheet could make any of that more explicit?  If not, probably not a big deal.  But more clarity and less reasoning-thru-at-the-table is always nice in my book.

*This means that, the more that area facts are established, the more constraints I have, thus perhaps more inspiration.  Cool.  However, it also means that, the less that area facts are established, the more I get to make up whatever I want.  I could easily imagine approaching an area with vague details, instantly rolling Make Battle Plan, then inventing much of the area, and only THEN rolling Assess, so the GM is constrained by MY established content. 

Maybe a bug, maybe a feature, I dunno; just throwin' it out there.

Just played with Shelley, who played D&D for about a year in 1999 and has never had an interest in GMing ("too creatively demanding").  I told her Murderous Ghosts was a scary horror game and handed her the MC booklet.  I asked her if she got scared by fiction easily; she said no.

We picked up the booklets and spent about 5 minutes reading through the intro pages.  Shelley noticed the female pronoun and started a chat about that; she seemed to appreciate it.

We started play a little bit silly.  There was a lot of, "Now I'm supposed to..." and reading off the page.  I was a little worried when Shelley said, "You're supposed to imagine a place where terrible violence has happened.  So, uh, imagine it."  But!  A few seconds later she started describing stuff.  First, cliches: chains and broken finger bones and skulls.  But then, "So many cobwebs you can barely move through them, and soot covering the windows!"  Nice!

For many of the pages we flipped to, there was a bit of a lull as we stopped talking to read, and Shelley once said, "Whoa, that's a lot of text."  (Page 19, I think.)

Things started slowly.  I asked Shelley a few questions, "What do I see?  Where are the exists?" and saw her scanning the book.  I said, "If there's no instruction about that, just make something up."  She wasn't sure if she was supposed to do that.  But she did start just making stuff up, and the game took off from there.

I spent a while trying to escape from one creepy but not super-dangerous ghost.  The most intense the game got was when I kept failing to get away, exhausting every option I came up with.  I think I forgot to discard once on a bust, but otherwise I drew correctly with pretty average luck.  Shelley noticed me getting blase at one point as I easily eluded the ghost, and she upped the supernatural menace quotient, which totally worked.

Eventually Shelley got tired of coming up with new ways to keep me in the first room, and let me kick through the wall into a new room.  I asked her after the game about her logic there.  She explained:

After I'd tried and failed once to escape, she used the ghost to try to get me to do other things, so she could flip from page 19 to find out what was on some of the other options' pages. 

When that didn't work right away (I was stubborn), she kept at it for a bit, because she didn't want to let me leave the room.  She'd interpreted her job as to trap or kill me, and was viewing getting 4 cards (i.e., me getting to a 4th room) as losing.

We looked back over the rules to see if that was in there.  It wasn't!  But it still seemed like a logical way to play.

When I got into the second room, Shelley started narrating nice carpets, just for variety... and then she thought, "Who keeps a room with nice carpets right next to a room of murders?  A sadistic prison warden!"  She did a great "Back in the dungeon!" mantra at me.  Spying the bullet hole in this ghost's head, I found a gun, threatened him with it, and he Darth Vadered it right out of my hand! 

I drew, busted, and that was that.  She looked at her book and laughed, "Ahh!  No!  Ha ha!"  Time for me to die.  She had the warden ghost telekinesis me into the chains in room one, where the first ghost gave me a mercy killing energy-drain kiss rather than leaving me chained to waste away.  The end.

Found a link for Zendo, if yer interested.