Huh, fascinating. And good to know! I wonder if it has always been that way, or if this was a change I failed to learn post-playtest.

I am only a secondary authority, but that sounds like a weird PDF error or something similar to me. Highlights should change every session, as described.

A few things that I've been thinking about and would love to hear people's opinions on:

• The Ditto's primary concept is that they are a copy of a person from before the apocalypse struck placed in a robotic body. I think this would lead to interesting interactions with other players, especially the Quarantine if they're in play - but they might be too similar to the latter.
  Is the Ditto too close to the Quarantine or does it stand on its own?

My first reaction here is: if that's the premise, why is there so little to support it in the playbook itself? The Quarantine is built around the question of the apocalypse -- the Ditto is built around being a violent psychic maelstrom cyborg. The fact that you are a person from the past is mentioned in the intro, and then features in basically zero moves.

To clarify, a violent psychic maelstrom cyborg is a perfectly fine premise for a playbook -- and the playbook as it stands is pretty coherently set up around it. But if you want the playbook to be about 'before the apocalypse' in the same way the Quarantine is, you need to build that into some of the moves. Same goes for if you want it to be about 'being a human mind in a robot body', for that matter.

• I recall reading on Story Games that the problem with custom Playbooks is that too many of them inadvertently make the whole game about themselves rather than letting the other players have time to shine.
  Do you think the Ditto avoids this? If not, what could be fixed?

I think it avoids this pretty well -- though the more you move it towards your expressed premise, the less true that might become. Right now the Ditto seems similar to the Faceless -- it has a Thing, sure, but it's a Thing that's primarily important for itself. The Quarantine's Thing, on the other hand, is the history of the apocalypse itself.

• What do you think of Vampiric Drain Protocol and Maelstrom Dependency as moves?

Not a fan. First off, healing harm is not that interesting. It's definitely not interesting enough to base two moves around it that both basically work the same way. Vampiric Drain Protocol is worse because most of the choices are extremely vague or (in cases where they are applied to PCs) actively hostile to player agency. A custom/playbook move should almost never say something like 'there will be consequences' -- it should describe some specific, concrete consequences that are going to happen right now. The more interesting those consequences, the more interesting the move.

Maelstrom Dependency at least does that, but again the results don't seem that interesting -- or their level of interest depends entirely on the MC coming up with a good thing for the Maelstrom to ask the Ditto to do. And why 'you lose a highlighted stat', when the game already provides lots of good carrots/sticks to use (e.g. mark experience, a la seduce/manipulate.) So many moves in this playbook seem to boil down to 'hope the MC comes up with something cool here', instead of providing their own, move/playbook-appropriate structure.

Also, while I am here, I am a bit confused as to why this is a Sharp playbook. Adding a +1 sharp move (that other playbooks can take, as opposed to an advancement line, which is limited to the Ditto) is already generally a super-dangerous idea (which I have ranted about elsewhere), but in this case it seems to make even less sense, since (to me at least) the Ditto reads as either a Hard or Weird playbook.

--

Reading more thoroughly, I kind of feel like you accidentally put the entirety of the playbook into the Consciousness Transfer Kit. That move is ultra-dense and ultra-powerful -- you could base an entire playbook around it, in fact -- but for some reason it has ended up as one option among many, despite containing what you later describe as the premise of the playbook. Meanwhile, your mandatory, playbook-defining move is about being in a broken-down cyborg body.[/list]

If a PC is fighting with one member of the Strongholder's gang, how would you approach adjudicating it?

This is what I was responding to. The question of whether a PC can reasonably be said to fight a 60-person group of people 'at once' -- i.e. in the context of a single roll -- is an interesting one, but is probably mostly going to depend on the tone of the specific game and the specific logic of the world the MC is presenting.

Maybe but those rules are terrible and nobody should ever use them.

I am with the 'they definitely can' camp, for the record. If your rules interpretation sounds like a 'gotcha' then you need to reread the Principles -- unexpected interactions should never negate the obvious benefits of the moves in question.

Yeah, the lack of an article -- 'take... action' vs. 'take... an action' -- is not a typo, though if you are used to combat rounds as a default mode of play it's probably an easy distinction to overlook. And certainly 'battles' are usually going to happen in turns, broadly-speaking -- but what sort of things make sense to say on your turn is going to depend on the scene and what level of moment-to-moment detail is currently guiding the conversation.

I haven't seen the new rules, but the idea of displaying the Threat Type of various NPCs/locations to the players seems like an Absolutely Terrible Idea. There is just zero upside -- for inexperienced players, all the terminology is just going to be weird and distracting, and for experienced players the terminology is just going to pull them out of their characters or result in awkward second-guessing behaviour. You never call a move by its name, why would you ever want to do the same for a Threat?