Paul Beakley Totally! I understand the impulse to incentivize them, I do! After all, one of the key elements we unfortunately often say about games/gamers is that social relationships are ~’~so difficult and unnatural~’~ for most players, so we have to encourage people to have them by giving them cookies, right?

Sometimes it’s thematic (debts in Urban Shadows) but it’s not needed all the time. In Turn, if you don’t have someone to trust, you are screwed. Basically, if you are about to turn into your alternate form (beast or human), another shifter can calm you down and reduce your stress. If they don’t, you just turn and then have to work your way back to the original form. It’s not a mechanical penalty or reward, it’s a narrative impact. If I were to mechanize this, making people have to have relationships for certain bonuses, or reduce those relationships simply to bonuses, I think it would lose the need – the story fails if you don’t do the thing, basically.

I hope that makes sense! I am sometimes bad at explaining how the game works without John (I get too excited).

For me, you can have all the strings in the world, but if the relationship doesn’t matter in the fiction, it’s still boring.