Consensus Teaser:
Still hard at work getting the playable draft of Consensus done, but today I figured I’d give a small teaser of some of the work Eric Willisson and I have been doing.
When you do vulgar magic in the presence of a sleeper, gain +1 paradox and roll +nothing (The Consensus doesn’t care how smart or sexy you are).
On a 10+ choose up to 3, on a 7-9 choose exactly 2.
-You don’t gain an extra paradox
-You don’t backlash
-The sleeper is unharmed
-The sleeper remembers what happened
On a miss, choose one, but not the sleeper remembers
And as an extra bonus, one of the Advanced Moves that the Pious may eventually choose.
Lead to Gold: When you perform vulgar magic in front of a sleeper, you may add another option to the list: The sleeper Awakens. You may only choose this option if the sleeper also remembers the event.
Why don’t you turn it around and let the player choose what bad ings do happen instead of what does not happen? Because they thought and communication process is longer if you tell people,what does not happen and then remind everyone what does happen. Choose your failure consequence and go.
Would make it easier.
First reason: I have a thing for the negative phrased moves like this. That’s not a good reason, but it’s why it was first conceived in this way.
Second reason: Doing Vulgar Magic is supposed to be pretty bad overall, and the tone I prefer to convey about it suggests talking in the negative, rather than in the positive. It also works nicely with the Lead to Gold move being written in the positive. It does take a slightly bigger cognitive load, but I haven’t seen that as a problem in AW so far. If it’s too confusing and slows things down too much in testing, we’ll certainly consider changing it.
Thanks for the feedback, I love hearing what people think!
But then your first 2 things are about things not happening while the third is neutral.
The sleeper is not harmed
Would fit better with the others.
The last one then also interacts a bit weird with the other options but I don’t know how to change that and if them remembering is good or not.
It has occurred to us that it’s relatively easy to just go around doing vulgar magic to rip the hearts out of sleepers by choosing no extra paradox and no backlash (still not free though, 1 paradox each time minimum), which says some interesting things. Ultimately we’ll have to see how it turns out in play, though I don’t expect too many mages to turn serial sleeper killer.