As GM, should I be looking to award players treasure at any particular time or at any particular rate, outside of the rules for obtaining treasure from an estate or mercantile enterprise?

I'm intrigued by the tessellated random polygons thing you've used as a map on the Stronghold sheet, Vincent. Are those all custom drawn or do you have a program that generates them? Is there a reason they all have a single pixel dot in each polygon? When you actually draw a map out, what's it tend to look like? You go over lines to form larger shapes to suggest the outlines of buildings, walls and so on, I take it?

If people have example maps their group drew during playtesting I'd love to see them.

Hi Joe,

I've been playing Monsterhearts over IRC with a group of six players, and we have hit a major mechanical problem with the basic moves.

Here's the deal: the basic moves don't explicitly state whether you achieve your fictional intention when you roll a hit.

Take "lash out physically". In our game, one character (Ophelia) lashed out physically in an attempt to drag another PC (Abrielle) into the woods. She scored a 10 up and picked "they need to hold steady before they can retaliate". As it happened, Abrielle successfully held steady, so they still got to retaliate (she hexed Ophelia in response). But what the move's text doesn't tell us is: did Abrielle get dragged to the woods or not?

As we initially played it, Abrielle didn't get dragged there. Had she failed to hold steady I would definitely have ruled that she did; but instead, it seemed like she held steady and retaliated, and as such all Ophelia succeeded in doing was roughing her up a bit (i.e. causing harm). But! That kind of sucks for Ophelia, because she got a 10 up hit but didn't achieve anything that she wanted; just some harm!

Compare "seize by force" in AW, the closest equivalent move from the parent game. There, it's way more explicit depending on your choices as to whether you successfully seize the thing definitively, or whether you only kinda do. You do harm as well, but it's a side issue, the key question is "do you seize the thing by force successfully or not?".

After talking about it and reading some of the play examples (most notably the bottle example from the end of the book), we've concluded that the intent of the lash out physically move is that on a hit, you successfully manage to do what you were aiming to do with your violence - in this case, drag a person around, or in the example's case, get hold of the bottle. But that isn't clear from the wording of the move.

We have an even bigger problem of this nature with shut someone down. Simply put: while the mechanical effects of shut someone down are explicit (conditions or strings get changed around, possibly on both sides), what's the in-fiction effect of a successful shut down? What does it imply about what the shut down character can and cannot do, or must do, in-fiction, immediately after having been shut down?

For example, Abrielle was attempting to hex another player, Ping. Ping tried to talk her out of it by shutting her down (she threatens her by saying "You don't want to do this" with a rock in her hand), and succeeds on the roll. So can Abrielle still go through with the hexing, or not? Does she, in some sense, have to react in-fiction to the shut down? Does she now need to hold steady to hex Ping? Or in order to actually modify Abrielle's behaviour, is the only way for Ping to spend a string to force her to hold steady? If that is the case, what's the actual point of shutting someone down, in fictional terms?

I also feel like "hold steady" is missing a "you do it" clause, equivalent to how "act under fire" works in AW. If I keep my cool, that's great, but do I achieve my intention or not? More to the point, if I DON'T opt to keep my cool on a 7-9, does that mean I don't succeed at whatever I was tying to do?

So obviously the players know what the sex moves of their characters are, and as such may often wish to steer their characters toward having sex with particular characters or at particular times in order to accrue the mechanical benefits of so doing.

But are the characters aware of their sex moves?

I mean, obviously they wouldn't think of them as moves or think "this'll get me a +1 forward" or anything. But the in-fiction consequences when they have sex. Does a brainer realise that by having sex with someone they read their mind? Does the savvyhead realise he gets readings of those he has sex with?

How about the battlebabe?

What about other characters? Do they know that e.g. if they have sex with Marie she'll get to read their minds? Do characters realise that if they sleep with Damson their usual sex powers won't work?