Hi Larry!

Thank you so much for reading the series, it’s really nice to hear from folks.

First off: I’m also bummed. Well…half of me is bummed. Half of me is a ridiculous novelty-obsessed goober who drops games way too fast in search of the next high (and stuff to write about, a nontrivial concern now that I’ve got a Patreon going). But half of me would have been pretty satisfied slowly exploring the world, just kind of live inside it for a while. My players are much less flexible in finding the fun in games, though, and they prefer storylines with action and twists and through-arcs. IS can get there but it’s a heavy, heavy lift the whole way.

Okay so INDIE LESSONS. Stuff/techniques/ideas I think would have helped the game:

• A different approach to doing things than succeed/fail. I like-ish that the game is a stealth diceless game, and as your stats grow your diceless ceiling goes up (because your venture will overcome ever higher target numbers). Early in the game, though, it doesn’t feel that way at all. It feels like a very trad success/fail game, with the GM left to interpret — or not! — failure. I mean it’s not a new idea; GMs have been “allowed” to fill in the gaps around misses since forever. But I like having a little more mechanical direction there. It’s one place I think the ongoing creative load could have been greatly reduced.
• Pull back from the focus on combat/violent conflict, particularly given the game’s themes. Privileging violence by loading it up with more detailed/interesting rules means you get more of that, and that seemed off-tone to me. This would have been accomplished, I think, if they’d done something with my first bullet, ie make everything an interesting outcome.
• Made the in-game economic cycles more explicit. Like…you never find out how to earn magecoins even though they’re the key currency for non-basic magical stuff. Obvs the GM can just give you a patron or employer or whatever who pays in magecoins, but like…what’s a suitable rate? What’s that look like? All the economies are like this once you get past your Foundation’s monthly income thing. If they’re gonna require the characters engage in diegetic economic cycles, they need to explain that stuff.
• I really (really!) like the joy/despair/crux system, but I feel like there could have been room for the players to define for themselves what generates both. Like…guidance from their various character bits. Then they’re setting up their own flags and chasing their own stuff based on their build, rather than leaving it to the end of the session interview with the GM, where it really ends up looking like GM-fiat XPs. J/D for GM shifts are hot, that’s great — as is the whole GM shift thing. But letting the players workshop their own J/D lists seems like a missed opportunity.
• The Arc system for earning Acumen is so close to great. Really close. I think this might’ve been the biggest mismatch between my local play culture and the rules-as-written. Best practice is almost certainly for the GM to incorporate all the Arcs into each other and create an endless stream of coincidences to make that happen — which is fine, totally. But the holding environment of the game is nonexistent until you pick your Arcs, and then the ease with which you’ll have matching up each other’s Arcs into big coincidental knots of action becomes…highly variable. If I had it to do over again, I’d have changed our starting setup (you’ve been in Satyrine for years, not hours) and I’d have mandated they pick Arcs from their Foundations, not whatever they felt like, so they could ease into the fiction slower. (I’m not sure if any of that comes from indieland, I’m just kind of talking about how I’d tweak what’s already there.)
• You already mentioned the last one but: coming up with a thematic through-line for your magical weirdo. It’s so build-oriented that you end up with cool powers and nothing connecting them. I actively dislike that because going forward, the game continues to be about your build and not your…theme, I guess? I think he wants to get you there immersively through the Arcs you choose, but it just ended up such a muddle. Why does our musical Bard Weaver dude care about why the War started? Why does my bookish Vancian nerd want to murder spells? I’m totally open to the likely fact that this is just a taste thing, and that other players might totally dig into that. For whatever reason, my players didn’t.

Hope this is helpful,

p.