Into the Hurt Locker

Chronicles of Darkness, Open Development, Projects

Hey everyone! David Hill here.

I’m getting drafts in for World of Darkness: Hurt Locker. They’re looking good. I want to share a few things with you. This is basically open and up for play testing. I would love to see notes. But I need to lay some ground rules for that occurring:

First off, notes need to be in one place. I’ve set up a forum thread for that. I’ll pay attention to that thread.

Don’t bother commenting on grammar, spelling, and punctuation. These are super raw drafts.

Please don’t reiterate points. I’m not looking for consensus or “votes”. If someone said, “this issue exists”, don’t second it. I don’t want to bog down the conversation. If you have a new point or thought, cool. But don’t dogpile the conversation, please.

Some points don’t need context. “This has seven dots, Merits don’t go to seven dots” doesn’t need context. But, “This is unbalanced” is not really a point that helps anyone. That’s subjective. Now, if you played with it, and it created a specific experience at your table, I want to know.

Speaking in experiences is good. If you played with something, I want to hear the experiences it created at your table.

Please note the positives. This is partly because I want my team exposed to positive notes as well as negative, but also because I want to see what works for you and creates positive experiences. I’m in the business of creating positive experiences.

Don’t be insulting. Don’t insinuate motives from my team. Just address the material; don’t try to bring in assumptions and political issues.

If you make a “this doesn’t work” style note, couple it with what you think would work. That’ll help us frame your commentary.

Understand that there’s some overlap here. A few people did different versions of the same Style, for example. This was by design. I’m not going to “take one but not the other”. But I might strip apart duplicates for alternative maneuvers or similar. I wanted more raw ideas to work with.

I will be reorganising and renaming these. Many are a little more specific than I intend. I want to make them more generally useful. If you have thoughts, awesome.

At a certain point, I’m going to call an end to notes. At that point, I have to send over my notes to my team, and I can’t go back and integrate more ideas.

So here’s the first bout of drafts to play with:

Merits (This includes some combatty stuff, but no Styles, also a handful of Social, Mental, and other Merits).

Fighting Merits (This is Styles, and some additional combat maneuver stuff).

I’ll give these a few days, then post something else. But this is a pretty big chunk of word count. So there’s a lot to go over.