Let me start by saying I’ve really been enjoying this game. I’m a big PbtA fan in general, and the combination of tech/cyberpunk and emotional philosophical aesthetics makes this game very interesting to me.
That said I have a couple of mechanical questions.
For the empath, I’ve noticed it is entirely possible to have a character who at the end of character creation has no way to spend flow. Is this intentional? It seems that by default flow does nothing for the empath until they take either charge object or search your feelings.
Second, for the executive, im having trouble understanding how the contracts are created. The playbook has contracts divided into two segments: payed, and mandatory, but the move Quarterlies only suggests to pull from “mandatory” and says to the board gives the exec the funds up front, but the mandatory contracts have no listed cost. In addition, assigning 3 contacts each session seems that there will inevitably be a lengthy backlog of contracts, or contracts will frequently go unfinished, meaning either the game as a whole will focus on the executive fulfilling contracts at the exclusion of screen time for other characters, or the executive will be forced to roll TPS and frequently have the board PO’d, leaving the executive to feel incompetent at their chosen profession. How would you recommend balancing screen time in a game with an executive, where characters other than the executive get their share of narrative control?
Hi Jake,
Yep–that’s by design. They can choose to be able to use the Flow they accrue or not by selecting their moves. Advancement is pretty quick in the game so not choosing one at the start shouldn’t be much of a problem.
Generally, I give them one overarching thing to do and the mandatory contracts are baked into it as different facets of it. So let’s say the player rolls a miss and the MC chooses 3 mandatory contracts. Maintaining appearances, protecting someone, and settling debts of the corporation–by way of taking someone one person out that does all these things. Since it’s assassination the board would give them 3 Cred to do it. The Harvey Time move is used to take care of problems of the peripheral, or otherwise yeah, the Executive is going to have to be figuring out how to solve these problems or else fail. They probably use the other PCs as vectors to further their own ends, though. And on the side, they might declare that they have a contact, set up a paying contract and use Harvey Time for that contract as well.
They may have to juggle a bunch of stuff in order to get ahead. I would say when you’re choosing your playbooks to make sure you’re choosing playbooks that make sense for the fiction you’re going for. You can bounce spotlight to 4 characters all doing different things in the fiction if you need to. But during setup, it’s easy enough, since the PCs all know one another, to have the Executive be the one feeding them work and going on missions for them, or bouncing spotlight between the Executive taking care of the corporate side of things while the players go do the dirty work.
I think a lot of that would be highly dependent on how you build up your setting, how the PCs decide they know one another, and what kind of fiction you want to have.
📍
Fraser Simons
Awesome! Thanks for the prompt and informative answer.
It’s community involvement like this that makes me happy to have supported your game! (And I’ll continue to do so for all it’s subsequent releases!)
Keep up the good work!
Thanks; hope all goes well with you and your group!