Princess: the Hopeful, Crystal Edition

[Huitzil37]

Okay, I want to get to the rest of the post in full but that will take time, but I couldn't possibly disagree more with this.

The entire central thesis of the game is about the human contribution to that force's advancement. It's all over everywhere. There's a supernatural corruption that gloms onto your soul and turns you evil and makes you do evil things that hurt other people. The game then says "oh and that corruption, which works like the Shadowlands Taint or Generic Blizzard Fel Corruption or whatever, is something so omnipresent you don't even notice how fucked up and...

[Huitzil37]

Thank you very much for the detailed feedback! I am always looking for negative feedback, and I consider it all valuable, even if I don't end up agreeing with it. I would quote reply to each point line by line, but that would take a billion pages.

I don't get what you mean by Belief being easier to retain. There is a load-bearing core mechanic of "stack this buff that gives you a penalty to all Compromise rolls" and you can roll Compromises for failing, even and especially when you had no other option. Buying with XP is not the primary way you're supposed to get it back,...

[Huitzil37]

Noted.

Any opinions on how it works overall?...

[Huitzil37]

Counterproposal: the God-Machine was made for a purpose, is carrying out that purpose, and that purpose is something so completely trivial that we think the God-Machine is doing something grand and ineffable because we can't think small enough. Like, every horrible squamous blood-gear thing it does is part of an incredibly circuitous plan to alter traffic patterns in Peru by the butterfly effect.

The reason I prefer this explanation is that I think it's what makes the God-Machine truly grotesque. It's not even bereft of a purpose. It's got a purpose. It's spreading madness and misery...

[Huitzil37]

Princess: the Hopeful is a fanmade game line about magical girls in the Chronicles of Darkness, struggling against the overwhelming evil with the light of Hope. A lot of people loved the premise but found the rules clunky and the execution profoundly unfocused. I was one of them.

Princess: The Hopeful, Crystal Edition

It's not DONE done -- it's in beta, which means it's feature-complete. A few options need to be filled in (a couple stat blocks, some Signets only have one option at a given level, Embassies don't have all their benefits, and not all the interstitial fictions...