I can't think of many capital F Fairies I really dig, but I like the other mother in Coraline for this - She's all "I give you lots of wonderful stuff! Now just promise me you'll let me do weird invasive things!"

I wanted to take another stab at a Skin after the last attempt fizzled out, with the benefit of actually having played the damn game.

I wanted to make something supporting the more recent trend of what I'd like to call introverted-wish-fulfillment. I think the Hunger Games is an excellent example of this: You have a character that doesn't quite fit in with "the system", and "has trouble making friends", but its okay because the system is terrible and she makes the right friends anywho.

I don't really have a name yet. I was thinking of something like Loner or Hunter, but those are really generic and kind of suck.

ORIGINS

Backwoods, Cynic, native of a different world, survivor of the supernatural, forest creature, nature spirit, cursed legacy

STATS

Cold+1, Hot-1, Volatile+1, Dark-1

MOVES

Get "Private War" for free, and choose 2 others

Private War: There's some reason you can't fit in with the rest of society: social decay, tyrannical goverment, its manipulated by monsters, choose 1. When you are acting against it, carry +1 forward. When you make an impact on it, get 1 XP.

Independent: To get the benefit of spending 1 string on this character, a character would have to spend 2 strings (And spend 4 strings for the benefit of 2, etc.)

Looking in from the outside: When you observe a person in a charged situation, roll+Cold. on a 10+, ask 2, on a 7-9, ask 1.
- How is this person pressured to behave?
- How is this person being influenced?
- What is this person's secret virtue?
- What can I expect from this person?

Badass hunter: You're an expert with the bow, a master of traps, a stealthy and cunning hunter. You get +2 to rolls to Run away, and other people have -2 on rolls to run away from you.

One with Wilderness: You and those you choose to guard are able to thrive comfortably in the Terrifying Wilderness by your resourcefulness. You know how to adapt to its rules, how to get food, water, warmth, and which sounds to not be terrified of. (If someone takes this move, than the MC should throw in a Wilderness in the setting, and make it Terrifying for everyone else. Maybe the Wilderness isn't a natural place. If no options make sense, than this Move shouldn't be taken.)

(Probably 2 more)

DARKEST SELF

You become a self-righteous crusader against an ambiguous enemy. Nothing short of the most extreme methods are considered. You refuse any bargaining. Anyone who refuses to leap to such extremes with you is a traitor and must be dealt with.

SEX MOVE

You get expierience. The other character may remove 2 strings that others have on them, as long as they don't come from you.

Thanks for the replies ya'all. The actual situation played out much better than expected. Good friends shot in the face to appease basement Frankensteins.

In a game I'm running, there's a Hocus who gathered a lot more followers by preaching the hell out of a hardhold, and thus got an increase for barter, and also lost a lot of followers during a grenade fight, and lost the the original barter growth they had.

I ran a monsterhearts one-shot with a battle-royale premise and it went pretty good.

If you're not familar with Battle Royale/Hunger Games, the premise is: These students are being forced by the man to kill each other, with the last person standing declared the victor. If no one kills each other for an hour, someone is picked to die.

I finagled with the rules a little bit:
* Everyone has 2 pcs, so they will be more complicit with me in starting the bloodshed.
* Removed the stuff you could do to avoid death, because again people paid for blood.
* You can spend a String to find someone who doesn't want to be found, or to have been hiding in wait watching someone this whole time.

It did well in that:

* Two of the players expressed particular interest in doing a campaign.
* We got to see a lot of the Skins and a lot of the Moves.
* I think we all had a good time and the fiction was neat. There was a good amount of tension about who's-going-to-kill-who, and there was a good mix of resistance and murderousness.
* People used strings and their nifty powers.
* People had sex in the workshop.
* After having sex in the workshop people became a serial killer couple, and than turned on each other with their tools, and than the Hollow lost faith in humanity.
* I got that idea out of my system.

It did maybe not so well in that:

* There's a lot of fictional conflicts that I wanted there to be answers for that there wern't, like: Hey, can we barricade this place up so other people can't get in here? Or: Hey, I want to follow/evade following/hide/find a hidden person (I occasionally tried to use Hold Steadies and Running Away for those, but a lot of the time they didn't work.
* Running Away, in particular, asks for some NPCs to be inserted whenever there's a need for a scary person to run into. I really didn't want to have more than 1-npc this one-shot (I have to play a bajillion NPCs all the time, you guys can rip each other apart for once) so it didn't make much sense towards the beginning (Towards the middle part, there were more PCs running around being scary.)
* People didn't shut each other down much. They almost did a couple of times, but they just wern't sassy enough. Gotta teach people to inject more sass.

Dont be  fan of your NPC, see them through crosshairs.

Be fan of your player characters.

Let the thank hit people/things that is important to the other (not yet interested) players.

I don't think "not letting the NPC go" is an issue at all. Its a rule I respect a lot.

Situation:

We're playing the game and I'm MCing. A bunch of situations have already resolved. I've asked people what they were doing and than we mostly resolve that. I want to liven up the situation so I'm like:

A GUY WITH A TANK ROLLS INTO YOUR BACKYARD

The guy with the tank asks for some money, they agree to give it to him later, the tank heads back out.

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?

A player starts making elaborate anti-tank plans, with descriptions of what the gang is doing, descriptions of traps to set up, descriptions of where to put their dudes, etc etc.

PROBLEM

My first response is: Your dudes follow your exact plan that you set out, and than we have some combat rolls to make the next day.

This also sounds intensely boring to me, and the other players didn't seem super engaged with the earlier tank-plan-setting-up.

What would you do instead as MC?

I'm inclined to think some of the moves could be replaced by limited, focused common use cases:

Go Aggro is -> When you point a gun at someone and tell them to do something.

Seize by force is -> When you beat someone into letting go of what you want

With the adendum "Make up new Moves on the fly if you want. If an existing move would work for it, great, use it, with maybe a tweak". Shreyas, do you think that'd be more congruent?