Good day! As you play through your ballads as the game is in development, play let us know here if you have any feedback or suggestions! In particular, we want to hear if your characters and playthroughs feel balanced and if you're having fun. š
Hey! Thank you so much for this thought-out, detailed feedback. I really love that youāre enjoying character/SC creation, which is one of my favorite parts of the game, too.
Iām definitely taking your thoughts on the section order into consideration. The current order is by no means final and I have myself encountered the same difficulties while playtesting. Before the layout is made, Iām just trying to write all the rules and tables and have it be complete content-wise. My next priority will be arranging things in an order that makes sense.
I think youāre right about it āmaking senseā for NPC/SC stuff to be after the prologue, though. I think Iāll have it be more āif needed, create at least 2 SCsā post-prologue instead of what it is now. Iāll change the order for the next release, which is coming soon! Iām just finishing up the last set of major arcana summer tables. š„³
Thank you again for playing and taking the time to give your feedback!! Itās much-appreciated and really helps my motivation! š„
(Play report section moved to Korin Van Golding Play Report thread)
MORE FEEDBACK (with the disclaimer that I know you're finishing filling out content an much of this level of editorial pass will come later :) )
> I think Iāll have it be more āif needed, create at least 2 SCsā post-prologue instead of what it is now.
100% this, even though there's so much freeform about the game, which is great, I would love a "you may create as many or as few SCs as you're comfortable with, but a solid 2-3 at the start of the game is recommended."
And, in other places where the rules are very open to player decision, the words in the book are most important to the newest players and those least familiar. The more familiar you are with the game the less you need to refer to passages anyway, so I encourage frequent "the recommended number of XYZ to start is... the recommended number of SC Specialities is..." etc.
One other small item is I had some confusion around how/when relationship statuses change. To the best of my figuring, if a relationship status requires, say, 2/2, then 1/3 or 3/1 wouldn't trigger it. they both have to be satisfied. Then when it comes to antagonistic, if it requires 2/-2, then none of 2/-1, 3/-1, 1/-2, etc would trigger, because the favor is counting in the other direction. I'm 90% sure I have it right, but that section might do with some examples later on.
I'll keep you posted as I keep playing :)
I read your play report out loud on stream and everyone loves where this is going. Definitely keep us posted! I have no idea how you're going to get your half-sister out of this mess, but I hope you manage.
Yeah, I definitely can relate to that feeling of WHAT HAPPENS NEXT! It's where writing little bullet points of what happens can be really helpful.
I had that text in the "Ballad flow" section, but I've added it to the SC section as well, and moved the SC section to be after the Prologue. I think this helps the rules flow better, so thank you so much again for the feedback!
You're 100% correct in your interpretation of the relationship progression rules! Both Fate and Favor have to match to trigger the change. I have added this more explicitly in the explanation for that section so that it's more clear, as it's a very important part of the game.
I'm so-so on it. Some of the cards I really like, some just have distracting proportion and face detail issues :/
I had one that I wanted but I pivoted at the last moment, and because I was dutiful and supported a local store rather than amazon, I'd feel bad returning it.
And not in a financial place to suddenly become a tarot deck collector! I can tell from the subreddits that people go WILD if left unchecked lol.
Fixed the restaurant table (it started off at d6, then I came up with more stuff), Endeavors list, and the relationship transition table. Thanks so much!!
The thing with SCs is they're meant to be more important characters. Think of a TV show where there's a difference between the main character's friends they see in every episode vs side characters that only appear every once in a while. Side characters (NPCs in this case) also don't get much character development.
The rules for the Reconciliation Phase allow you to choose between losing Fate or Favor. So maybe Fate goes down because your MC meets this character less and less, or Favor goes down because the character's annoyed that your MC hasn't reached out to them lately. That's what I was going for. You don't necessarily have to "downgrade" them if you don't want to. If an SC drops off your list, it doesn't mean they don't exist anymore, just that you're on like an acquaintance level. They'd just drop to 0 Fate eventually which means you never really meet. But I also think that would be a great time for a Regression scene, which would likely be a meaningful scene that adds +1 Fate anyway! There's a lot of room to maneuver. My goal was to capture the nuance of different types of character relationships as best as I could. So whatever feels right for that particular relationship narrative-wise should be what you go with.
Also, my thinking is that -1 Favor is showing that it's 1 away from 0. They slightly dislike you or are irked by you, but it's pretty close to being neutral.
Giving that Endeavors list a lot of thought. I think once the text is in Layout, it might be nice to put them all together and like...indent them or color code them to distinguish the different types. You're right that there's not THAT many. It should work!
Again, thank you so much for the feedback and fun play reports!! It's giving me a lot to think about and iterate on.
I've definitely come around on any concerns about the -1 fate or -1 favor at the end of the phase, I think I genuinely just had too many named NPCs to get to, and so for many of them their starting fate/favor was immediately dropped to nothing which left me with... probably the proper amount of SCs lol. And yet I still have 14 somehow... I'm curious how many SCs other playtesters have found they have in the rotation :P
> Also, my thinking is that -1 Favor is showing that it's 1 away from 0. They slightly dislike you or are irked by you, but it's pretty close to being neutral.
That level of mild dislike makes total sense, I guess I was meaning to ask what it means to "subtract" 1 favor when favor is already negative. Sometimes it seems to mean their dislike of you goes up (which would be going from say -2 favor to -3 favor) but sometimes "subtracting" favor seems to be meant more to "return to a baseline of 0", as in, they don't think about you as much any more since you haven't interacted. This would be going from -2 favor to -1 favor, in such a case.
It's made me wonder if sometimes the rules should say "-1 favor (as in, subtract 1 favor)" and sometimes they should say "move favor to 1 point closer to 0", because those really can be two different things when it comes to antagonistic SCs (it's the same for platonic/romantic, as they're both in the positives). Depending on the scene/situation you might want the results of a given scene to do one or the other...
I hope that makes sense :D
Subtracting Favor should always be going down, though. If theyāre already at -1 Favor and like you less, itāll be -2. Whereas Fate going down towards 0 shows that theyāre not really thinking about you and you have less chances to meet, if that makes sense! Thatās why Favor can be negative, but Fate cannot. Often, having lower Fate is more devastating because a lot of prompts throw you with the SCs that have higher Fate. Thatās why for Reconciliation, itās up to the player whether they want to subtract 1 from Fate or Favor for a relationship thatās fading.
I see I see... I am taking this and integrating it into my understanding. I think I finally figured out what's got my mind stuck on this.
A platonic relationship with an SC, left unattended, will eventually trend to 0/0. However, an antagonistic relationship with an SC, left unattended, will eventually trend to 0/-1, 0/-2, 0/-3, 0/-4... and something about that disparity, that the antagonistics keep liking you less and less while the platonics just fade into the background, is triggering me lol. (presumably you're not leaving the romantic SCs unattended lmao)
Or, could it be that platonic SCs are supposed to continue going down in favor, across the "0" line and into negative territory? That would change a lot... and goes into a different line of thinking I had at one point, that maybe Platonic and Antagonistic could exist on the same table, and just let the favor positivity/negativity determine whether they're antagonistic or not, rather than opting into a relationship transition? That would take some of the agency out of they players' hands though, if a platonic went sour on them and they wanted instead to have a chance to salvage that relationship. Fate is a lot easier to raise intentionally than Favor is...
You've entertained me on this topic far too much already lol feel free to ignore my ramblings.
Oh no, Platonic, Antagonistic, and Romantic are all on separate tables for that reason. A Platonic relationship will eventually hit the negatives for Favor because once theyāre to 0 Fate, you have to start subtracting from Favor. At that point either you use an Endeavor or two to salvage the relationship, or use a Transition to show the friendship going sour. Regression scenes are optional, which lets you decide which of those youād prefer. Endeavors can help a lot because you can write them a letter and then visit, which can add quite a bit of Favor!
Omg the skies have parted and now I can seeeee!!! <3
This answers so many of my weird one-off questions around fate/favor. And also reinforces that I had waaaaay too many SCs, but I think I've sidegraded most of the unimportant ones off to NPC land by now. The rest I will weather the storms of fate and see who decides to hate me for being ignored ;)
Speaking of names :P
I supported at $15 when the game was at $5, does that mean I get to put a name in the tables? And um, what would someone have to do to get two names in? I have a little romantic couple that I played through in a Pathfinder game with a friend and my heart would burst to get them both in there >_>
Amatia and Vafistara, both on the Feminine Names table <3
I'm compiling their whole story (and any other characters they interacted with via play by post) into a Google Doc, up to the point that I had to take a break from the game. It's 616 pages long so far, with probably another 100 to go... 0_0 That's what this weekend has been, Ballads of Dawn and editing that document back and forth, back and forth lol.
