Feedback thread
banner art by Michal Lisowski
Nacho Libre is a bit of a dated reference.
Even if you're not playing a VS character, the potential for acquiring or buying shit that has non-standard purposes, or the potential to build into tech-stealing or nefarious other purposes is fucking coooool.
I noticed this being the case where the interest and engagement with uses of drug lacing fell off a cliff once the belief circulated that characters could die instantly from laced food or drink (or be knocked instantly unconscious, or get immediate multi-drug addictions). I think you can have strong negative side-effects and still get players doing interesting things, as long as there is a feeling there will be interaction with the outcomes and not surprise red scrolls.
That being said though what an amazing addition to the game! Pseudo-PvE 'fluff' elements like this add so much in the way of immersion and a new means to interact with the actual world, love it.
Massively heralded and widely acclaimed systems like vehicle combat and macguffins launched utterly dead-on-arrival due to seemingly inconsequential barriers to entry, despite the tremendous feedback about their huge potential and how excited everyone was.
After the last several years I'm very convinced new systems have to be extremely easy to slip into and experiment with at first to get any sort of long-term engagement or they end up with a single player or three monopolizing them while they're forgotten by the rest of the player base.
This means that they system will be rolled out at the speed of players deciding they want to join VS and also interact with the system.
And currently as it stands there is a pretty good RP reason to withhold anything coming from this system from going near the majority of the player base. It's called fuck the Mix.
This is extreme bottle necking of availability to one or two players and the advantages never being felt by the majority of the game.
Now, this system does sound great if you want to give this machine to a syndicate faction as well, in terms of growing one of them into the candy people. And one of these somewhere out in the Badlands in the hands of questionable people making dubious things should probably be considered.
I'm a fan of the theory that no game system ever survives first encounter with the player, and hiding your game design behind a locked door is not the way to go. At least having three separate machines running you can see how it is used for medicine / candy / poisons. But you're never going to be able to fix a system if you don't let the players break it first.
And also, now that some really really bad side effects are being introduced, some empty gas dispersal grenades for your explosives experts to load chemical payloads into would be just great.
Sure, people may not willingly allow themselves to be experimented on, but who cares? Kidnap them and experiment on them.
I hope that the VS players / characters do a better job of spreading the wealth and interactions with this new system, than corporate players as a whole did with the McGuffins.
I like the suggestion of providing similar setups to syndicate(s) and the folks outside of the Dome. Maybe as a counter-balance if it appears that enough of the playerbase is being involved with whatever VS ends up doing with it.
