Enhance: The Hunter Move.
Enhance works when you examine gathered evidence and unlike many other moves requires you to use Edge instead of allowing you to substitute Edge for Mind. I have two questions related to this:
1) What constitutes evidence? Are we talking physical evidence only? If you use Ear to the Ground to circulate among a community and research, are your findings there considered evidence? I’m leaning towards no, but I want your opinions.
2) Should edge be required to replace mind? If it is required, could you trigger a second research by using a database to further dig into your findings from Enhance? As an example: You find a gun at a crime scene and use enhance to find out who owned it, but you don’t get a 10+, so there is no follow up question. Knowing who the owner is, could you now consult a database to find out where you could find him (perhaps a future phone book or police database)?
Full Disclosure: I’m looking to make a Sherlock Holmes type character and figuring out how to arrange my starting attributes and moves. I feel like Mind and Edge are definitely the two to best represent him. I’m just drawn between which to begin with a 2 in. Holmes is all about the evidence, so edge would help me via enhance, asses, & it all fits together. Really, I think of him as making research rolls with a database in his head. Perhaps Skillwires could fulfill that role (of the database), as starting with a Neural Interface is not an option.
Feel free to drop me any advice.
1) This will depend on the table, their background, and perhaps the character of the Hunter. This move does takes clues and observed phenomena and turns it into a direction for character action. Whether those clues be legally admissible in your cyberpunk justice system or whether they are just hunches that lead the Hunter to a conclusion will depend on what feels “real” to everyone at the table and on the Hunter. An ex-lawyer Hunter working with a Reporter to expose the guilty through the justice system is going to require different “evidence” than a vigilante Hunter who plans to take the law into their own hands.
2) With enhance, edge replaces mind, yes. You could always hack it to make a custom move. But if you don’t want to roll edge, you could always just roll research again. PbtA deals with repeated attempts by a) requiring fictional circumstances for engaging moves, and b) making every move have a fictional consequence. Players sometimes don’t get this, especially with, say, healing spells in DW. You can’t just spam healing like you can in D&D, because every roll has the potential for bad stuff to happen. Same for repeated research, as long as you keep rolling well, you’ll be fine, but at the very least, those clocks will move eventually, and more likely other stuff will complicate your legwork too.
So you could find a gun, roll research, get one question, take the gun to a forensics specialist, roll research again, take the forensic evidence to a ballistics expert, roll again, etc etc.
Re: the Sherlock Holmes character. I would say Sherlock had +2 in both Edge and MInd, but often having a higher stat just means that things generally go well when you use it. Be clear about your character idea with your MC and its perfectly allowable for you to always be find clues and working stuff out like Holmes, just with more complications. You solve the devilish mystery, but the witness is already dead. You solve the devilish mystery, but accidentally run into a underworld goons. You solve the devilish mystery, but MorERT Inc. find you…
From the MC’s perspective, the key rules that govern these questions are the Agenda, “fill the characters’ lives with action intrigue and complication”, and the Principle, “be a fan of the characters”. Especially the latter.
Hamish Cameron makes a great point here that newbie PbtA GM’s tend to forget. “Be clear about your character idea with your MC and its perfectly allowable for you to always be find clues and working stuff out like Holmes, just with more complications. You solve the devilish mystery, but the witness is already dead. You solve the devilish mystery, but accidentally run into a underworld goons. You solve the devilish mystery, but MorERT Inc. find you…”
Misses and Weak Hits focus a lot more on complications and goals rather than fictional successes/failures. If your goal is to unmask the killer before he strikes again, a fair Miss is still “unmasked the killer,” but he struck again, and now he’s interested in your baby brother. They’re really excuses for the GM to ramp up the fictional complications – you can still be a Holmesian juggernaut of deduction. Translating Misses into actual fictional failures gets real boring, real quick – PbtA very much lends itself to failing successfully / successfully failing.