That’s pretty interesting, Brand Robins! One of the biggest challenges of game writing, in my experience, is not only writing down the rules you used in your playtest, but also communicating the way in which you used them. Obviously, we didn’t quite succeed in Legacy, and part of that does seem to be that it clashes with ‘standard PbtA assumptions’; maybe even clashes with what is possible in pbta.

For example, for a long time I’ve held back on breaking play at the Family level down into explicit rounds and turns, because I prefer to leave the timing of PbtA abilities at the fiction level and stop it feeling board game-y. But maybe some explicit concessions away from standard PbtA would help tell people how the game is best played?

So as for the issues outlined in the root post by Paul Beakley, it may be that it’s hard to imagine what play looks like at the Family level that isn’t activating moves. Is it possible to just sit at the family level and tell the story of the unfolding fiction in the same way you do at the character level? Or should we reframe the family level so that you play it like SWN’s faction turn, with the different players each picking an action and working through its effects before you dive back to the character level?

As for the specific example of how to remove Need: Morale, I liked the situation and the answer you gave! But maybe you’d have been happier if you’d used the answer to explicitly guide them back to the Character level. Like… ‘Engineer Andre in your family has been exchanging letters with Rustblood Hellspike over in Crossroads City, and you think if they met and really hit it off that’d life your Family’s spirits greatly.” Priming you to tell the character-lead story of the Enochians’ character escorting Andre through the wasteland (wasteland survival!), making introductions, maybe doing some social manipulations to make it work (find common ground/familiar face/defuse), and finally throwing a celebration of some kind.

It’s real important to the way I run Legacy that Family moves are used to set up heroics and interesting stories at the character level, and I realise that could have been made more explicit!