Freshness requirement

From: Benedict Adamson <yahoo_at_...>
Date: Tue, 09 Jun 2009 20:13:40 +0100

ttrotsky2 wrote:
> In the two games of it I played (at Tentacles and Continuum, both
> last year), I found that the "freshness" requirement was sufficiently
> distracting from the story that it was at least as bad - and probably
> worse - than the old hunt for augments. Which made it harder to judge
> how the one-augment-only rule would have felt as the only change.

A convention game would be a single session with a character nobody knew anything about, so I'd guess almost everything would be fresh. Can you be more specific?

I hadn't thought of it before, but perhaps the new rules are trying to change the philosophy behind augments? Like this?

OLD STYLE: I want to win this contest. Therefore I must find the most/biggest augments I can to get. Which might be the same augment as last time, but so what.

NEW STYLE: You have improved the collective story through your entertaining description/character revelation, so have this bonus.

When I've been narrating, from HW through to HQ1.5, I've tried to have descriptions first, numbers second. I don't like "I use by Warrior Keyword" as an answer to the question "How do you fight the Lunar soldiers?". Perhaps the new rules are trying to do something similar for augments?