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« on: July 04, 2012, 01:38:37 AM »
Hi Jeremy,
We started a new game of Companions last night. So far it's going well - they've arrived in London, discovered it near-abandoned and covered with mysterious energy and filled with Cybermen. There have been some ingenious ideas (keeping the TARDIS safe by moving it forward two hours in time, and building a homing beacon to attract it to a different location) and some fantastic failed moves (the Agent blowing his 'Oncoming Storm' role while trying to make friends with the Resistance was a classic cock-up).
We've been looking at the rules as we play, trying to note points where we were confused and had to invent our own interpretations. I thought you'd like to know about the following areas we found unclear:
For useability, you'll want to clarify the Bonds and History section. (I haven't played Dungeon World, so I'm not familiar with Bonds.)
- When you say 'it's better to fill in more than one', are you saying that you can write the name of a PC into more than one item?
- When you say 'the total number of bonds each character selected for you', are you talking about the totals of the numbers in parentheses or the number of lines/items
- Are the Hx rules the same as in Apocalypse World? If Hx goes to +4 (even when you're doing the initial History selections in character generation), do you mark experience and reset to +1?
- At the end of each session, do you say who you feel closer to and they mark +1 Hx with you?
When people are explaining their bonds, you might want to indicate to the MC to write down any questions that those Bonds provoke (for the MC to ask the character later).
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In the Warrior-Poet playbook, insert 'than' into the following bond: "---'s friendship is worth more to me THAN the way of the warrior."
It'd be good to add the Fate clock and Spark counter to the character sheet. (Under the Fate clock, you might want a comment like 'Using Armour doubles the value of the Fate points you spend'.) It's also be good to add five dots for marking down Experience.
For the Construct, you might want to add 'Clockwork' as an option in the 'Material' section.
Everyone's XP section mentions emotion keys, but we couldn't find a reference to those in the rules.
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The RUN! move was a little problematic. Let's say the Agent and the Whiz are together and they screw up an encounter with a band of resistance fighters. The Agent says "Let's run!" and the Whiz agrees.
The question is: do they both need to make the RUN! move?
The reason I ask is that one of the options in the RUN! move is 'One person of your choice who follows you is safe'. It seems this could apply to a PC Companion - meaning that they don't need to make the RUN! move. Is that option only supposed to apply to NPCs?
While playing, I felt like it had to be applicable to the other PC, so I didn't ask them to RUN!
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Possible MC moves:
- Reveal the past
- Hint at off-screen badness
At one point, the Agent wanted to do some research on the internet. Jenni wanted to know if there was a 'Research' move? As there wasn't, I just told her what she'd find out, which implied 'a Reveal the past' MC move.
Hinting at off-screen badness works well too. In this episode, we had two Companions being watching by video surveillance (which was later revealed to be a Cyberman's eyes).
The players in this session were: me, Jenni Dowsett, Svend Andersen, Celeste Mackintosh, Wayne Ulyate.
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