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Pathara

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A member registered Feb 04, 2023 · View creator page →

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Me too! As a proud Forever-GM I absolutely love Foundation Sentences and think they're an incredible tool for immediately setting the tone and getting player buy-in even before character creation. I haven't run any Realis yet, but my North-star for them at this point is a piece of wisdom I gleaned from FatT itself: "one of the great things about TTRPGs as a medium is that you can just state your themes out loud." 

For example, a campaign I'm chomping at the bit to run is going to be pitched with (some variation of) these two Foundations: "Our story always evokes Spring: a time of transformation and new beginnings," and "Our story never solves problems through violence."

Something that Austin and Jack talked about in the Introduction to Realis episode is that over the past few years they spent a whole lot of time talking about tokens and iterating how they work. As a GM, I absolutely love that players can discharge their token to use a Moon Sentence: it rewards them for playing into the theme of the setting and give us the opportunity to talk about them more. So with that in mind, I want moon sentences to be easy for them to use.

But I also know that moon sentences are an important way for the GM to throw wrenches in the PC's plans, and to give strong identities to enemy factions. A sentence like "Secret Police on [moon] always..." is extremely dramatic and descriptive of what a moon is like, but probably very hard for the PCs to use as their own means. The purpose of it is to give a specific view of who the bad guys are and what they do.

So: What are you thoughts on how easy/typical a moon sentence should be for the PCs to use? Is the answer just that it depends, and some stories want sentences to be easier or harder to justify using? Personally, I love when a sentence can clearly be used by or against the PCs: one of the sentences I'm most proud of writing is "Arguments on Areteas are always won by whoever speaks most," specifically because I can imagine it being used by everyone at the table over a game - or having a player intentionally never use it.