Winning the Peace V 0.2 Playtest + Play Materials

Hello All,

It sure has been a year, huh? That said, I have finally been able to integrate some playtest feedback, as well as provide the long-overdue play materials that should assist in managing the sheer amount of information contained in each Year of play!

WINNING THE PEACE V 0.2 UPDATES

• REPRESENTATIVE SHEETS, COMMUNITY SHEETS, EVENT TRACKER, AND EVENT REFERENCES AVAILABLE FOR DOWNLOAD
  • These are 4 separate downloads, and provide ease-of-use tools for taking notes, tracking Representative and Community information, and keeping track of what Events are actually active and who is voting for what. These are what I call "usable mock-ups," that is, functional, but kind of ugly.
• REPRESENTATIVE DRIVES
  • Previously, Representatives functioned mainly as tools to access specific moves and stat boosts, so they didn't have much story impact. To address this, a new step has been added to Representative Creation: Adding a Drive! A Representative's Drive is a personal belief that has impacts on their dice rolls when using moves, where acting in accordance with a Drive grants a bonus while acting against a drive imposes a penalty. This should help make Representatives feel more like characters within the City and Community as opposed to a faceless "Yes, I want to have Carthago Delenda Est as my extra move."
• UPDATES TO EVENT RESOLUTION ORDER
  • Events are now resolved in the order in which they are drawn, instead of being resolved in order of group choice. It turned out that allowing Events to be resolved in any order usually ended up stretching the end of the Year out into an exercise in optimization that made it nearly impossible to trigger the "A Turning Point" move. Additionally, this makes it a bit easier to visualize which events have been active across multiple Years.
• UPDATES TO MOVES:
  • TOTAL NUMBER OF MOVES USED
    • Each player may now only use up to 2 Representative moves per Year. This includes THEY'RE VALUES, NOT HOBBIES.
  • WE MUST BE BETTER
    • This move has been mostly rewritten. The original wording of this move was very much in the spirit of the sort of scene it was meant to emulate, the passionate speech that gets several people to change their votes. However, rules as written, the hit and mixed hit results allowed the other Representatives to simply not change their votes, even if it was encouraged with a Community Stat Increase on a hit. This move has now been updated to allow the Representative who makes the move to change the votes as they choose (subject to THEY'RE VALUES, NOT HOBBIES), with a significantly reduced effect on a mixed hit. This does a better job of emulating the climatic moment of convincing the opposition members, even as nameless Votes, to change their minds.
      • Updated Text: We Must Be Better 
        When you make an impassioned plea to the Council’s better nature on a specific Event, Roll +Conviction. On a hit, you may move up to one half of the votes cast by other Representatives (including votes added by Weighty Words) to match your vote on that event. On a mixed hit, you may move all of the votes cast by a single other Representative to any other option on the Event. On a miss, your plea is laughed off the floor and your Community loses 1 Esprit from the public embarrassment.
  • WHAT YOUR COUNTRY CAN DO FOR YOU
    • The trigger for this move is now only checked at the end of the year, and no longer on every time that Engagement is lower than Esprit.
  • WHAT YOU CAN DO FOR YOUR COUNTRY
    • Same changes as WHAT YOUR COUNTRY CAN DO FOR YOU, with Esprit and Engagement, respectively.
  • CARTHAGO DELENDA EST; PROCEDURAL TRICK; BUILDING BRIDGES
    • Clarification that these moves need to be declared before the initial Vote. Additionally, clarification on how Building Bridges requires that a specific event needs to be specified in advance.
  • WEIGHTY WORDS
    • Clarification as to how Unaligned Votes are distributed in certain edge cases.
• EVENTS
  • Some clarification on when certain events are removed (e.g. Famine) by another Event, it does not count as Resolving an Event, and as such do not alter Community Stats.
  • Additional clarifications on when to remove dice on Events with countdowns (8/Queen/King of Clubs)
  • King of Clubs Event (Plague) has had the 3rd option set as the default in the event of no votes/tie (previously no default choice was listed)
  • Jack of Diamonds event (autocratic movement) 3rd option has been clarified to be referring to the chosen Community, and corrected so that all other Communities lose Engagement as opposed to all Communities.

• Additional Changes/Corrections
  • Communities are more consistently referred to as "chosen" when there are events that affect specific Communities.
  • Symbols added to each Event Oracle entry to improve readability.
  • Representative Creation Example expanded in order to include Representative Drives.
  • Certain instances of "Greater than" or "Less than" have been changed to "Equal to or greater/less" for clarity's sake.

So what comes next? Well, additional playtesting, for one. I've had several runs through the beginning of the game, but have not been able to get a consistent group with which to run through the entirety of a 10-Year story. I do have some upcoming playtests though, with a group that has committed to 4 total sessions out of an expected needed 3, so hopefully I will be able to see how the game evolves over the course of a whole campaign. There have been some concerns about difficulty, but it is hard to tell at the moment if that was simply the result of poor luck in the first few Years of the game or if this will be a consistent issue through the whole campaign.

Barring additional playtest feedback, however, what largely remains to be done is formatting, addition of some art to pretty the game up some, and getting feedback on the play materials to make those the best possible. I will be continuing to work on Winning the Peace, and when I feel it is in a "release" state, will update it to v 1.0 and likely move it to PWYW. I do not plan on forcing people to pay for this game at any point. I am currently workshopping some additional game ideas, including but not limited to a solo game with light management elements, and a lightweight tactical fantasy game meant to emulate a very specific JRPG series. When those are ready for public viewing, you'll be able to find them here.

Until then, Happy New Year, and may 2025 let us 2020-thrive instead of 2020-survive.