I know a lot of you have playtested The Sprawl and given me some great feedback. As I prepare the manuscript for editing and a Kickstarter, I'm looking to update the playtester credits in Appendix 2. If you and your group have playtested the game and wish to be credited, please email me, message me, or post here a list of players as they wish to be credited. Let me know where you played as well, so I can give your group an geographic designation (as per the examples in Appendix 2 of v0.2). Feel free to suggest such a designation as well!

Yeah, I removed the +cheap tag. It didn't seem very interesting, it just made your badass professional less badass, which runs against my vision of the game. Much better to have glitchy cyberware or some sort.

Thanks for the feedback, Mikael!

We were using the playbooks that some kind person on the Apocalypse forums created...

Yes, updated playbooks are definitely a priority for the next revision.

* Character creation took longer than expected, more than 3 hours all told, I think. This was a big chunk of the available playing time, which led us to conclude that this is not really a one-shot game.
...
* Jobs against the corps were entertaining and quick, with the limiting factor being more my typing speed than the players' imagination.

Interesting that it took so long. I run it as a one shot regularly and it usually takes me an hour. Of course, I know the procedures pretty well! But from the comment about typing, were you playing online or something?

The next version will have an extended chargen example and I'm thinking of recording a character generation session that might provide some additional guidance.

* One player would have liked to play a stereotypical Face, i.e. the suave and social Stylish and Cool mouthpiece of the team, but could not find a suitable Playbook. This we felt is a gap worth filling.

Depending on the angle the player wants, the Fixer or the Pusher should fill this role. What did the player want to do that couldn't be handled by those playbooks?

Jobs seemed to very quickly fill the Corporate clock, especially as GPS got two missions against it. The text is a bit open for interpretation here, but I ruled that being taken as the target does NOT advance the clock, only the other characters joining in on the raid. If I would have made the other interpretation, the two missions would have easily maxed the GPS clock, which did not seem right in terms of pacing.

The first character to define a mission against a certain corporation starts the clock, but doesn't advance it. If a second character defines a mission against the same corporation, that advances the clock. This will be clearer with a play example, I'm sure.

But, yes, if two players choose to make a run against the same corporation and everyone piles on, then the clock will max out. That gives the players the option of setting up the game with a corporation out to get them from the get go. I'll add a note for the GM to make that clear in the Links phase.

One player especially commented that the gear packages felt like an artificial "hard choice" on top of all the other hard choices already made, and that the approach did not really fit the stated vibe of "characters are professionals, and have the necessary gear". Maybe "pick 5 out of the following long list + colorful paraphernalia" could work better, not sure.

Yes, those are going to change to be a bit more flexible on that front. I'd be willing to be that the "hard choice" comment was from the Infiltrator? Their choice is pretty hard.

Personal directives, while clear in intent, were not easy for most of the players, probably because they did not know their characters' personalities well enough yet. Also, it was a bit of a mixture between picking from the list and rolling their own, and when rolling their own there was uncertainty on what exactly is appropriate and how to word things. Note that this is a group with not that much direct experience of the Keys from... I forget the name of that game.

They're currently a bit unwieldy, I agree. They'll be better integrated in the next version.

We wondered whether the goal for the players is to not get the corps annoyed with them - many successful missions with the characters being the professionals they are - or whether the basic assumption is that things will go wrong, corp clocks will quickly fill up, and the point is playing a story where the first mission already is a bust and the focus of the play is more on the aftermath than on the missions.

* Actual game was very much the team working as a team to reach the common goal. There was virtually no real interplay between the characters. This may and probably will change in longer play, with varying pressures from the corps and directives, but it still felt too mission-focused to match our expectations of the cyberpunk genre, where the discussions, varying backgrounds and real goals of the characters seen a big part of the stories. We were thinking that maybe there should be some mechanic that would specifically make it so that the players or characters would need something from each other, in order to be effective. I say "players or characters" deliberately, because we did not even iron out whether this something would be some kind of a meta currency or more in-fiction things, or both.

The goal for the players is to play to find out in a certain kind of cyberpunk setting. To paraphrase the "Why Play the Sprawl" section in Chapter 1, the goal is to create a story about badass professionals living outside the law and struggling against the corporate status quo in an environment coloured by treachery and double-crosses.

The Sprawl is intentionally mission focused, so there's a natural focus on the team. Friction between the characters lies in the directives and in the GM's moves. Corps should make demands on characters they own that make those characters make hard choices. Corps that are hunting characters should show up at the worst time and threaten to blow the current mission. Corps should offer money, cyberware and survival to get their hooks into characters and make them dance to their tune. All of those things add friction that threatens the team dynamic.

Thanks again for this feedback, Mikael, I can see lots of places where I will need good examples to clarify things and where I will need good procedures to help the game run smoothly.

As I noted in the other thread, I've started integrating external feedback into the game for version 3.0.  This is a follow up message to note that I've incorporated the various omissions, found mistakes, and suggestions that you guys have brought up. In particular Grunto's various weapon tag issues, and Gwathdring's basic move suggestions (especially that very considered discussion of the Check it Out questions). Thanks again!

Hi guys,

I just made a new post on ardens.org: http://www.ardens.org/2014/06/back-on-the-grid/

The highlights are:

• I've started working on the next version,
• there's now a G+ community for The Sprawl, and
• I've started planning the Kickstarter.

There will be more posts over the next couple of weeks as I think through and solicit opinions on various tricky rules points.

Thanks for all your feedback so far, and keep it coming!

You're exactly right about how I conceived of the hacking rules, and that is what I imagined the +encrypted tag for, specifically for cyberware that makes connections to the outside world. My personal preference is for Neuromancer-style hacking, so I haven't thought so much about wireless hacking and hacking of cyberware in general. I'm going to be re-watching the GitS series and movies in the near future, so I'll keep question A) in mind. I do like the idea of a corp hacker getting into a character's cybereyes as a miss that advances a mission clock!

In terms of hacking on the move, there's nothing in the rules that prevents that, you could totally just weave hacking and physical world moves together into the conversation in the same way as you would weave together the hacker's and another character's moves.

C) How would full-bodied cyborgs work? Granted, if a character has dermal plating, synthetic nerves, and muscle grafts at the start, I suppose you could fluff them as being a full-conversion robot, since all the important pieces are included in those three items.

Yeah, that's how I'd model a full-body cyborg in The Sprawl. In fact, I've had players make full-body cyborgs or vat-grown bioroids entirely as fictional positioning/colour. Pieces of cyberware simply add specific mechanical effects which the player can use. Is there something that this method lacks for you?

Thanks for the comments, Grunto!

I think the main thread for The Sixth World is this one on RPGnet: http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?697009-Sixth-World-It-s-basically-done!

I haven't looked at it for a while, but the last version I saw was a cool re-write of Dungeon World which really captured the flavour of Shadowrun.