Ok, today I'm gonna dig a little bit into the design of the Dissident playbook, the first of Daybreak's playbooks that I concepted.

Design Story: Like I mentioned last time, one thing that's a little tricky about designing for Girl by Moonlight over other fitd games is that there just isn't as much "mechanical space" to expand into! My usual approach, which you've heard if you checked out my design blogs for NEW BLOOD, is to see if I can find open mechanical spaces and conceptual spaces, and to imagine if there's anything that fits nicely into them. Coming off of my first couple of games of GbM, I was really taken with the eclipse mechanic.

Eclipse is far and away my favorite way of handling Blade's stress "economy" (including "trauma"). There are a couple of tricks though - in some ways, eclipse is out of your hands (you roll to check), and if you stay eclipsed too long you enter the "doom spiral" - with no transcendent actions, your most powerful tools are gone, and if you're stuck in eclipse for multiple sessions, your dwindling stress reserves mean you have little gas in the tank to push yourself (and you might be leery of trying any action roll anyway). As-is, it's just a little too punishing for me to get really excited to hit it. But it seemed like open mechanical space - no core playbook references eclipse in its abilities!

The launching off point for the conceptual space was imagining what playbooks I'd want to use for each of the characters in Steven Universe (which is both my most recent foothold into magical girldom as well as the one I feel like I have the strongest grasp on). Our major players are pretty obvious - Steven is the Unlikely Hero (in early seasons); the Guardian seems like a pretty good pick for Pearl; Amethyst you could fit into the Outsider, although the fiction there needs to be edited a little; Garnet's pick is obvious. But the other characters are less well-served! Peridot could kind of be the Stranger or the Outsider, but neither really perfectly captures her position; Connie is unfortunately excluded entirely, apparently; and Lapis... Well, what do you do with Lapis? She could make a bid for Stranger too, but while the mechanics seemed right, none of the fiction seemed like it quite fit. Leaving space is great - getting too specific here is what I think lands you in Harmony-territory, where it can be difficult to make the playbook into your own thing - but I was convinced that Lapis had an arc that could point in a different direction than the Stranger's.

I wanted to dig into what I found compelling about Lapis' arc, to see if I could draw parallels with other characters from other media! So, my takeaways from Lapis: Here's a magical girl who knows about the horrors of the abyss, maybe even more so that the crystal gems! Her relationship to the team is strained, because of how she relates to the struggle - the other characters don't have the specific experience, and it can lead to strife. But her triumphant moments come not in spite of her unique perspective and experience but because of it. That struck me as a powerful and interesting relationship archetype! And one that definitely seemed to have other exemplars - that generalized beat of a character who grapples with despair, but can maybe pull strength from it, seem resonant. At this point, the tentative name was "The Skeptic" - there was something I liked about that implication of distance. I would change to "Dissident" later because I liked how it implied something a little more active.

The other part of the design puzzle was joining this character relationship archetype to the eclipse-centered design. This was where I was fully convinced that the Stranger and the Dissident were occupying different space - where the Stranger's eclipse is all about their isolation from people and their determination, the thing that resonated for me about the Dissident was leaning into their doubts and fears. Their experience has led them to doubt - the cause, themselves, their power to make a difference - and those doubts can be a powerful tool! But they can also lead to despair. That strong focus made coming up with playbook abilities pretty easy! I only had to scrap one transcendent ability - the rest made it intact conceptually, and mechanically came together after a few rounds of edits.

Mechanical Considerations: There's kind of a big one at the heart of the Dissident - what do you do with eclipse? I.e. how powerful/dangerous should eclipse be, and how easy should it be to fall into? If eclipsing is too easy, I think you run the risk of making it feel a little cheap - and on the other side, it might be tough/feel bad to hit the escape clause with regularity. I think eclipsing can remain pretty powerful without getting too safe - the consequences, after all, include the permanent retiring of your character. But how much "power" should that buy you?

The other mechanical piece is that you can give the player other kinds of tools to approach eclipsing: abilities that let you accrue stress or harm, abilities that make other downtime actions appealing, so you give out fewer Links (so they have none to spend to prevent your eclipse), abilities that put you into the thick of things, meditating on what could go wrong.

I'm pretty pleased with the answers I landed on - I think eclipsing still feels dire, but a little more like an emergency button that the Dissident can press, and the rewards for doing so are pretty powerful, but not a lot safer. I think the result is that the Dissident feels slightly less "powerful" than standard transcendent heroes, but does get to step into the spotlight when things break bad.

Assorted Inspirations: These are already listed, but I think it's worth spelling them out. Kai Shiden from Gundam 0079, who became one of my favorite characters - not just because of his arc, from put-upon mecha pilot to reluctant partisan to war hero (to anti-war investigative journalist), but also because he's awfully funny, and in a way that I think is often imitated but rarely brings as much color and life to the ensemble as Kai does. Elan #5 stars in one of my favorite episodes of all time, one of the most tragic pieces of Witch from Mercury, and has a similarly incredible to watch transformation. Lapis of course, but particularly talking with a close friend who's a big fan of hers. Mechanical inspiration is a little trickier. To try and push the mechanics a little further out, towards pbta moves, I went looking back through some of my favorite pbta games.

Favorite Text: I think On my terms is pushing into a space I really like for fitd games and really epitomizes what the playbook does that is cool and fun and interesting - "When you reveal your darkest fears to a dangerous foe, the GM chooses one; they stop what they were doing to confirm your fears; they hesitate out of guilt or compassion; they reward your candor in kind"

That's one down! Next time, I'll be taking a look at the Rising Star!