Agreed that it’s a slow burn game, yeah. And I think there are probably best practices, as always, too shoehorning it into a shorter format.

Sitting here with my post, I think the deal with Meddle is this: in Move-speak it’s basically “when you do a nonlethal thing.” It’s kind of the Defy Danger of the game, except it always involves dicking with someone.

So in our game, we’d plowed a lot of time into sorting through how hunting works, and really putting the Humanity dog-and-pony show on display. This is possibly a mistake for one-shot play because it takes up a lot of time. In our game, we all had our chance to get into the hunting, and then we were running late and still hadn’t gotten into executing our schemes, and suddenly everyone is “uhhh I guess I Meddle?” But there was not nearly enough context set up for what that might look like. And again, the “Meddle them dry” play is not supported.

There’s this thing I could never really bridge in the fiction, and that’s the mechanical/fictional function of Blood as a resource. Mechanically you need to wear an opponent down but fictionally what can that look like?

If I had it to do over I’d probably back off the focus on hunting and lay down clearer handles in the fiction for the players to Meddle with.