Hey Monsters,
I wanted your advice on a mechanism I’m considering. The title of the MH campaign is “Disenchanted”.
My goal is to give characters a chance to gain an advantage in the mundane world by temporarily giving up some access to their monstrous abilities. I’ve thought of two approaches: one being a penalty to certain moves depending on how much Disenchantment they accrue. The other being a Disenchanted Self, similar mechanically to the Darkest Self.
My goal is to set something up to explore the pressure to be “normal” along with its allure and sacrifice.
Does something like this sound workable to you guys? How would you go about it?
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I feel like a penalty is too likely to be toothless, as so many moves aren’t roll-reliant.
I don’t think any of my MH characters would balk at the option of trading away their weirdness in exchange for normalcy; they’d jump at the opportunity. But that’s probably not true of all characters.
It’s funny, that possibility never even occurred to me.
Might be better to think of it as temporarily holding in your weirdness, to fit in better now, but with the dual drawbacks that you’ll have less power in the meantime and the suppressed power will explode out of you sooner or later.
Which is totally a thing that happens in this kind of fiction, but probably needs a mechanical enticement so it’s not just asking the players to make a stupid decision because it’s genre-appropriate.
Of the two, I would probably do “Disenchanted self” and I would play it up to be the polar opposite of the darkest self (i.e. the Fae minces words and lies, playing with the newfound power to lie, the chosen shirks all duties and responsibility, the queen becomes indecisive, a natural follower.) make it all about overcompensation, and how going to far away from your supernatural nature can be just as bad as embracing it too thoroughly.