Having two of a condition would seem to work fine in the fiction (you're extra freaked out or tired). If it's invoked, it has twice the effect, and it wears off more slowly by stages. It would also discourage people who are already terrified/drained from just going for those moves more, since a weak hit has less downside. Whether that's good or bad is probably subjective.

Okay, that's interesting. I was wondering how to portray the Dark Power in gamespace, other than sort of global custom moves. Like, "do the weird occult drug, it gets a string on you," which it will probably use by whispering in your ear and offering you XP, or whatever. But I guess nothing stops the players from back-chatting, given a two-way avenue of communications. Or even back-handing, given a physical manifestation?

When someone chooses the Infernal's "Soul Debt" move off of the "Another Skin's Move" advancement, how would you play it? It gives you candy in exchange for the Power getting strings, and when you hit 5 strings it triggers your Darkest Self. For Infernals, this means that the power makes big demands of you that you're compelled to give in to, and when you fulfill one it loses a string.

But if another skin takes it, they've got a different Darkest Self, which doesn't get rid of the strings. The options seem to be a) go to the Infernal Darkest Self, b) Go to the character's Darkest Self, and wipe strings (or at least lose 5 strings, since you might have called on your bargains while in Darkest Self) when they hit their native escape clause.

Obviously this could depend on the fiction. If a werewolf takes it to represent him drawing on his animal self/moon powers, making him more likely to snap, then option b makes more sense. But does anyone have any input at the relative merits or problems of either approach, or some other ways to handle it?

NOT TO BE FUCKED WITH has been discussed some -- whether you get armor piercing if you have it otherwise (you do), whether your harm stays 3 or takes whatever your weapon is (it stays 3, which is about as good as you get anyway), and so on. I was wondering what happens if you advance your gunlugger to have a group of additional hardcases, or join up with the Hardholder's gang, and how that stacks. If they're standing with their boys, do they benefit from NTBFW? If they do, do they count as an additional 10-15 bodies, or whatever a small gang is, or something else? If their gang does less harm than them (either due to a base harm of 2 on the gang's part, or the gunlugger taking the +1 harm move), which do they deal in combat?

First: A friend ran this game for me and some friends, and it was glorious. So, thanks.

To the point: I want to pay it forward and run this game for some friends, but! Particularly for a friend in town only briefly, and another buried by schoolwork. The way schedules line up, we won't get more than one long session, or maybe two short ones.

This runs in to the obvious problem that Monsterhearts gets better with age. In the game I played, even though the MC was only in town for a week, we kept on trying to shoehorn in juust one more. Relationships develop, moves snowball, all that good stuff. I was struck, reading AW for the first time after, when it said something like "I don't consider it a real game until around six sessions."

So: advice? What do people do at Cons, or in similar set ups? How do you make things pop in a limited time, while keeping the story feral, i.e, not relying too much on MC prep?