anyway.

Thanks for the kind comments, Vincent!

Michael! Can I say? I like the way you've plain cut a bunch of stuff out of Apocalypse World, because you don't need it when what you're doing is fighting monsters. Fiddly Apocalypse World specific stuff: the differences between a gang, a population, and followers; vehicular combat; even whole species of character moves (it looks like).

So that when I make my professional, I still get to create his agency, but it takes 10 seconds instead of the 5 minutes it takes to create followers or a hardhold in Apocalypse World. Or when I create my initiate's sect, it's procedurally the same as creating a professional's agency, instead of being procedurally slightly different, the way that creating followers is slightly different from creating a hardhold.

I think that's great! I think that means 10 minutes creating characters instead of 30, and bam you're playing the game.

Am I right about that?

On behalf on Michael (and cos I've run it about 15 times now), yep: character creation is fairly short, and the reason you're describing (having options and moves being designed around fewer procedures) definitely helps.

Familiarity with Apocalypse World or one of its hacks also helps (because the steps are basically the same).

The character creation step that can take the longest is 'History', simply because the temptation is there to nail down exactly who met who first and what happened when they did. I don't mind that so much though: depending on the number of sessions I expect the game will run, nailing that stuff down specifically can be very helpful for creating a sense of coherence to all the hunters' relationships.

(Unsolicited Pro-tip: make your first session the 'Episode 2' of your monster hunting series. Origin stories are (a) implied in the history, and (b) slow the game down a lot. Related to this, I think the game plays best when it's a lot like old-school D&D: instead of starting outside the dungeon, start already on the trail of the monster.)

Oh. More specifically, I feel like it takes around 15 minutes to create characters. The biggest time-saving (compared to Apocalypse World) is probably that having a team structure of 'We all hunt monsters together' is quicker to finetune the details of than the equivalent AW conversation of deciding 'Where do we all live and what do we do there?'

Makes sense to me!

Hey look, thread 666! Should have been a gratuitous Kill Puppies post.

Yeah, I kind of meant to save it to announce the new edition of kill puppies for satan. But since there's not a new edition of kill puppies for satan, that would have been a long wait.

Congratulations, Monster of the Week! Number of the Beast! Woo!

I want to buy this game very much.  Like, willing to use italics very much.  Monster mystery advice to the GM has done nothing to dampen my italicism.

The pre-order phase is still going, I think - and Mike's arranging a Lulu.com option as well. You could check here for more details: Monster of the Week

Hey just saw this. I don't know if you're still reading here, Vincent, but my group has been playing MotW for awhile now. It's pretty cool.

I'm really into my Divine: he's actually a Devil, but (being a Divine) is metaphysically part of the Good Guys, because Yahweh? Total asshole. In fact, He is responsible for all the monsters.

My boss Belial ordered me to desecrate Graceland (in order to prevent Elvis being worshiped as a God), which I accomplished by getting it on with the party's vampire (Monstrous) in the Jungle Room.

Matt

Finally got a chance to try this. It was only a one-shot, but it was still awesome. My Expert ended up being the Spooky's dad, which led to a lot of hilarious conversations. ("Morella. Promise me you'll ask first before you set Tommy on fire.")

I ran the session Peter's referring to, and had my usual one-shot of AW/MH/MotW frustration: the players came up with so much cool stuff, I wish I could keep running the game.