Jay Iles I think my big takeaway from your comment, and others, is that I really need to leverage the family stuff to frame up the character stories. That’s great and my preferred answer. My game-playing brain, though, can totally appreciate the draw toward “winning” the family game — achieving a net positive Mood or completing a Wonder or going out and defeating one of my Fronts or Threats.

I’ve seen this before. Burning Empires has this, and it’s really fucking hard to play past it and stay focused on the characters. Blades and Scum have this via their downtime stuff and building up their crews. Mutant has the Ark-building stuff and boy is it easy to get distracted by it.

Thing is, I love all of these systems and ideas! But god damn it, it’s brutally hard work to drag players back to the characters. Maybe there’s something about how I facilitate these games. Maybe it’s my particular players. I hesitate to call it a universal thing but jeez, it’s pretty universal in my experience.