With a good few play tests now conducted, it's back to the drawing board for some revisions.

Before I get into things in too much detail, please check out a few of said play tests below:

https://soundcloud.com/lttn-podcast/after-hours-one-shot-part-1

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZc81kff5rDFmskmp--WuSHNUvJ0qyeAr

Huge thanks to those who have and are currently taking part in these play tests - you're all wonderful for putting up with me.

*

Streamlining Moves

One of the major snags that came up during play has been that while the original list of Moves was pretty complete, they were very prescriptive and outside of a few more common actions, very few of them came up unless explicitly brought up. With that in mind, revisiting this aspect of the game brought up one really obvious question:

Why did I need to make so many moves at all?

In an attempt to be as inclusive and comprehensive as possible, I'd ended up slotting each and every action into a very specific pigeonhole. Amazingly, I'd managed to make moves more restrictive by mistake. Well done me.

Anyway, with that in mind, this latest version of After Hours completely guts 90% of the original move system, in favour of boiling things down to the absolute core of the original PBTA engine. Which Stat to use is now something called by the Director or Player (with both ideally reaching an agreement) and the result trading on the much more narratively flexible '6 or less/7-9/10+' scale of 'failure/success at a cost/complete success'.

Having tried running games with both old and new rules, I found that not having to frequently look up the minutiae of which move permits you to do what, a lot more of my job become off the cuff and far more adaptable to different situations. If a player pitched a good reason why an action may be more of a 'Fake' than a 'Strange' roll, then that was that. The less rules lawyer-ing the better.

Conditions

Secondly to this, the numerical tracks of Essence and Veil are now gone, simply replaced with Conditions. Given the more crunch-lite direction After Hours was going in, it made little sense to still boil down health and social status to numerical figures. Instead, Conditions allow for more personalised complications and damage to be dealt against a character in way that feels organic and less 'deal 1d4 shouting damage'.

Conditions are temporary, removable and only kick in when they would naturally affect a move being made. For example, a Condition such as 'Sprained Ankle' probably wouldn't be a problem while casting a spell, unless you're some kind of Kickboxing Warlock which, in all fairness, would be rad.

Instead, Conditions can be taken in three degrees of severity:

Minor, which lasts for a scene and reduces affected Moves by -1.

Moderate, which lasts until the end of the session, or until action is taken to remove it, and reduces affected moves by -2.

Major, which can only be removed by taking action to heal it or waiting it out, and downgrades all rolls made by that player. Yes, that means a 10+ would downgrade to a 7-9 result and a 7-9 result would count as a 6 or less. Yep. It sucks. Thankfully, a Major Condition will turn into a Moderate Condition at the end of the session it's obtained, so even if the player can't heal it, it'll eventually shift by itself.

Check It Out!

The latest version of After Hours is available to check out right now. Give it a look, see what you think.

Cheers, y'all.