While the pledge train keeps rolling (our core book contributors are getting a 50% pay raise, with another bump firmly in sight at $190k!) we'd like to take a pause here and share some design insights from Andrew. Today's topic: the role of promises in the game.

We'll let Andrew take it from here:

Given that a crowdfunding campaign is a promise of its own, I thought I might talk about promises in Girl by Moonlight. Promises are defined thusly in the book:

A promise is an in-character statement, a belief about something you will do (or will never do) because of how you feel about another character. These promises aren’t necessarily something your character has ever said out loud—at least not to the other character—but they are conscious beliefs that guide their actions.

I was short a couple ways to give the protagonists XP, having pulled some bits out of Blades In The Dark. I loved the XP prompt “You struggled with issues from your vice or traumas during the session” and wanted something similar in Girl By Moonlight, but I didn’t have Trauma, or anything really analogous to it. 

So after some iteration I came into this idea of a connective element between protagonists, something with intention and hope behind it: Promises.

Each playbook has two Promise prompts, and protagonists are expected to have each filled out, connecting their character to two other protagonists. So immediately we get the much celebrated relationship triangle, with not only some detail of the connections, but asymmetry, and intent in there as well.

Writing good Promises is a skill, and it can be difficult at first, especially with limited context to write them in. The good news is that bad Promises won’t get in the way of play, and over time you can hone in on who your character is, and what they want for the other protagonists, and then change your Promises accordingly.

My hope with this element of the game is that it will drive the protagonists to think about each other, and how they all interlock as pieces of the larger narrative. The group is the primary unit in play, so having fruitful group dynamics, internal tensions etc is essential.

It’s something that I think is a good play habit in any game, really, and a natural extension of ideas like ‘be a fan of the other players’. It’s one of the many places in GBM where you can see my thoughts and opinions about roleplaying come through. And since I wrote the rules, I get to insist that other folks try it out.

-Andrew