10 thoughts on “Folks”

  1. For a bit of context, we’ve been discussing the healing rules in Legacy, and whether they’re a) too costly and b) a good fit for the very variable timescale Legacy offers. Any feedback welcome!

  2. During one of our sessions a player with the Cultivators spent months on the Pharmacology move and gained Surplus: Drugs. He then proposed to use them to heal a character…

    “Ok, exhaust surplus: drugs for Professional Care”

    “Wait, am I exhausting ALL my drugs to heal ONE guy, we have weeks to heal him!”

    Perhaps the problem is the way I narrate Legacy, in broad epic strokes, but the current rules are not matching my fiction :-/

  3. Douglas Santana and i have been discussing this a bit as well. I’m going to recap my thoughts here, for response, reaction, to prompt discussion, and to engage in the chatter with lots of folks (hopefully!).

    First and foremost, i really like how Harm works out. I like that it’s playbook specific for PCs, and i like how the Harm slots are open to interpretation to fit the moment, and to allow for a soft- or hard-move.

    For healing, the first thing that strikes me is that the game is pretty lethal. In a scene where you can’t slip away to trigger Professional Care, your only option to remove Harm is Shake it Off. At best, Shake it Off can heal one Harm, and it can have a heavy (although excellently fiction-building!).

    What brought me around on this though was realizing that in Legacy, we ought to be okay watching our characters die, with cause – we are playing a family line. And when a character dies, we get an artifact from them that goes to the family gear. The game looks at a longer time span than the adventuring career of any one character, and implicitly encourages us to let individuals run through the scenes while we cultivate the family legacy. This understanding really helped me appreciate Legacy more, and lines up with what i love about PbtA in general – we are encouraged to play boldly, to “drive PCs like rental cars” so that the stories we Players tell after the game are exciting tales of adventure, rather than tales of hours spent trying to plan the safest route for our characters.

    I really like Professional Care as a move concept; i like that there is a cost to the family to provide intensive treatment. But the move isn’t available to someone without access to Surplus to spend. I’d propose an alternative for long-term care, that might be represent a Family’s choice to heal character, PC or NPC, and their willingness to incur costs:

    Family Doctor

    When your family gives medical aid to an injured patient, roll +Harm. On a 13+, the patient will die of the injuries before the age turns; otherwise, heal all wounds. On a 7-9, choose one. On a 10-12, choose two.

    * Your family has been preparing for this day. Erase a Surplus and explain what was used to heal the patient.

    * Your family exhausts their medical supplies and gains Need: medicine.

    * Your family needs to call in help from another. Describe who comes to help, and give them 1 Treaty.

    * The healing goes… mostly okay. The victim will suffer permanent loss; in the case of a PC mark a Harm slot to have in permanent effect, never to be healed again; for an NPC describe the lasting injury: loss of a limb, function, reliance on some apparatus.

    * Your family must scavenge its technology; erase 1 Tech for each Harm healed.

  4. I like that move a lot Andrew Fish. I assume it’d take the place of Professional Care?

    For Shake It Off… would it make a difference if you rolled +Harm Healed instead of +Harm currently marked? So like you could take a risk and get rid of multiple boxes, or play it safe but not get much better?

  5. Thanks James Iles  – i’m not sure about replacing Professional Care. It’s definitely written that way, but maybe it needs to be changed up to not directly compete.

    is it more fun to have a family be able to simply throw Surplus at an injury until they’re healed? If so, perhaps remove the option to expend a Surplus from “Family Doctor” and rewrite the trigger to make it clear how they’re different?

    I don’t know that i’d change Shake It Off – i like that it makes trading Harm a very risky proposition. if characters turn toward violence to meet their goals, they run a real risk of mortal injury. But the Players aren’t penalized – they get to explore a new family member!

    For games that want a bit more healing “in the action” i think a custom Medikit/stimpack item could be written easily enough, with a move for its use.

    While Harm, and healing, seemed pretty harsh at first, i really like what you do in Legacy by letting us explore a family, over time, through individual members. I don’t think I want to make it too easy to protect individual characters, when the story we’re looking for fits in a much bigger frame.

  7. Oh my!

    Meanwhile I was going for a MUCH simpler option in my tables here…

    Healing

    When you have time for recovering in a place of safety you can heal all superficial Harm.

    To heal Harm with Stat penalties, spend time for healing in a place of safety that has the appropriate Resources (Surplus: Medicine, Surplus: Drugs, etc).

  8. IMHO the time spam and epic feelings benefit from simpler and more flexible rules. Think that a Surplus can mean A LOT if your group ever gets to thousands of people. Exhausting a Surplus is too much to heal a single character in this case.

    I believe that forcing characters to retreat and take some time out of action is already costly enough.

  9. I suppose the question is what else people are spending surpluses on that bringing a character back to full health is a big ask? Or is it just that it didn’t make sense in the fiction? And if we added rules for healing gradually over long periods and emphasised that spending a surplus is pulling out all the stops to heal someone quickly would that be better?

  10. Something like…? (last line added)

    Healing

    When you have time for recovering in a place of safety you can heal all superficial Harm.

    To heal Harm with Stat penalties, spend time for healing in a place of safety that has the appropriate Resources (Surplus: Medicine, Surplus: Drugs, etc). Exhaust Resource to heal all Harm at once.

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