Cross posting with the barf apocalyptica forums:
I’m playing in an online game of Monsterhearts. In my physical book and my PDFs, there is a paragraph on page 14 that says “At the start of subsequent sessions, choose highlighted stats
again. The person with the most Strings on a character and the MC both get to choose one stat to highlight.”
Both my MC and another player in the group have versions of the PDF bought much more recently in which this paragraph does not appear. My MC says that highlights never change or change only when there are story reasons for them to change. I think it seems weird that this one paragraph would be removed without something being put in its place to, if nothing else, point out that highlights don’t normally change.
Can anyone shed some light on this?
highlighted stats change every session. If you look at monster hearts as a tv show (because it’s supposed to be) a highlighted stat shows that there is an interest in the character being put in certain situations or acting certain ways. For instance, let’s say the Vampire has been turning everyone on then shutting them down all season, but that asshole from PE is still trying to get the upper social hand. Maybe the MC highlights volatile one seassion and it encourages the Vampire to flat out break the jock’s neck in a moment of annoyance. All the sudden the Vampire’s network of seduction and denial falls appart as they are now trying to juggle the consequences of thier actions and have no time to metaphorically blue ball the entire school. Changing highlights is an important tool to stir the pot and create new depths and new tensions in the plot. In this circumstance we learn the vampire’s temper means that sometimes their cool persona falls away with disasterous effects.
This is what I said! But as I said, apparently in these recently PDFs, the chapter that says to change stats every session does not exist.
try pointing them to the game MH is based off of. I’m rather sure AW says it explicitly.
Yeah, they know that. I emailed Avery directly. If nothing else, if there’s a problem with some PDFs being distributed, she might want to know.
Huh. Yeah. My more recent PDF doesn’t seem to have anything about changing highlighted stats each session, though I am dead sure that is in my print copy.
Hehe
Saw this while changing highlights. Going to go by old rules until there is official ruling.
I think I can have this answer directly from a conversation between Ernesto Pavan and Avery Mcdaldno which dates back to “old” 2012:
“Do you ever change highlighted stats in MH?”
“Yeah! It mentions it on page 14 of the printed book (though an earlier version of the PDF omitted this detail): at the start of each session, choose highlighted stats: the person with the most Strings and the MC each choose one stat to highlight. They can be the same stats that were highlighted last time, if desired.”
Note that, differently from what happens in Apocalypse World, in Monsterherts you have to change your highlighted stats at the beginning of new sessions. It’s not a players’ choice.
that’s really weird, because if that’s the case, it sounds like my MC and the other player somehow ended up with earlier PDFs than I have… and I got my pdf, I think, from the original indiegogo campaign, and they (or at least one of them) got theirs VERY recently.
Brian Peters, you can trust me on that. I had both the PDFs from the IndieGoGo campaign and, in 2012, after Avery’s answer, I checked them. In fact, the text of the PDFs is different in some little parts, and among them there is this part concerning the rules for the highlights.
I assume the PDFs got confused in some way in their chronological version in some digital release of the game in the last four years. But this is only my personal guess.
Just looked at what I have and I have BOTH versions of the PDF. The one without this paragraph is what I got from DriveThruRPG and has a created date of March 15, 2012.
The one with the additional paragraph was just sent by Avery because my physical book didn’t ship on time and has a created date of March 27, 2012.
Grey Kitten, those are the right update dates for the two versions of the PDF. Of course, the right one is the last one, the one of March 27th, 2012.
Unfortunately, the updated info in My Library at DriveThruRPG says 2012-03-17 17:44:00 so it never got the 3/27 version.
Daniele Di Rubbo oh, i believe you! it’s just such a weird mix-up…
so today, the player, who bought the game direct from Avery, and downloaded it to her dropbox folder, attempted to open it on her phone and discovered that it HAD that paragraph while on her laptop the night before it hadn’t. Then she closed and reopened the file on her laptop and suddenly it had the paragraph two. no idea how THAT happened…
Ghosts. Definitely ghosts.