Author: steven swezey

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.

Second Skin Driver Move: Does it Apply to Drones?

Pretty straightforward. Does second skin work with drones, and if not (or the drone user doesn’t have second skin) how do you adjudicate drone actions?

Do you Mix it Up using your meat score if you are piloting a drone (perhaps from a position of safety)? Should this be treated similar to Jack In, where the user is at -1 to all rolls for working without the advantage of the speed of thought?

I’ve got a question for you all and it relates to the Pusher (in part), but could apply to anyone: how do you adjudicate use of internal assassination implants or other methods of doing harm that may not be opposed by the targets? I can easily conjure up a scene where a honey pot assassin lures their mark into a much more deadly game of tonsil hockey. You moment you are making out with a smoking red head, the next you have a poisoned cybersnake slither out to strike.

Of course, cybersnakes aren’t the only way to ambush people with unexpected weapons. Palmed syringes or disguised stilleto’s could just as easily take their place. On the one hand I could see a roll for acting under pressure as you try to keep your weapon concealed. On the other I think that if they don’t see it coming there should probably be no defense. Some of this would depend on the angle and method of attack, of course.

It would be easy to just say that the whole thing was situational, but that seems like a cheap cop out to me. How do you handle these sorts of occurrences in your games?

Neural Interface w/Data Storage

The benefits of this cyberware apply when you research using internally or externally stored data. Isn’t that all data that is digital? I understand that the bonus won’t apply to a book made of actual paper. My question is more about how it interacts with the other moves, such as 24/7 Live Feeds.

24/7 Live Feeds provides its bonus when you scan the feeds to research a topic. Is a feed externally stored data or is there a difference between a feed/stream and stored data? Might this also be an issue that relates to the tech level of the setting? I could see in a very retro type game needing a disk or chip if you didn’t have the data stored in your internal storage. I can also see in a more advanced game using cloud based storage, or even the net as a whole (it’s stored on the net, external from you).

Was this intended as a specific restriction, or just as a way to exempt non-digital sources Hamish Cameron?

Act Under Pressure or Mix It Up?

In my Tuesday night game I had a player tracked down by a bounty hunter at a bar in the free fire zone. As a result of a miss on a move, they found themselves being handcuffed to the bounty hunter, who intended to take them in for contract hopping. What then followed was the character being marched out the front with a taser pressed into their back, still cuffed to our erstwhile bounty hunter. This is when the character tried to make their break for it, by head butting their captor.

This is the situation I found myself in. I went with Act Under Pressure since the character was being held at weapon point. I figured it was less a question of if the player could accomplish the goal, but if they had the nerve. My decision was partially based on the fact that the character was at a hefty disadvantage (cuffed and at taser point).

How would you resolve this sort of situation where two different moves could apply?

Revealing Directive.

I’m preparing to play a reporter and the directive that most speaks to me is Revealing. The concept of incentivizing the finding of information that leads to breaking a story. My issue is that fill in the blank gap and the fact that directives can only be used once. I have a few thoughts about this:

1) Each time you fill in the blank differently on a directive you have made it unique and thus able to be used again in its new form.

2) You could instead take a more meta tact and fill in the directive with “Headline Threats”.

Which do you think makes for better play, or would you use a different method? I feel like the first method gives me more control over what the issue is be looking into is, while the second sets up more of a discovery and chasing of whatever issue the MC wants to represent.