So certain kinds of attack against your council will only add to their power, so the other player might have to insure they listen to what your resource is to insure they can counter it, something like that!

I checked the play guide, and it does say that, after positioning, you “narrate how you are preparing to act”.

Let me explain the “context-free narration hooks” thing, which is simpler than I made it sound. Your rule explicitly says “do X; now narrate something”. But there’s a lack of fictional cue about what I’m narrating, or whether there’s a fictional or mechanical importance to what is being narrated. I know generally what I’m narrating – describe getting closer to your goal, basically – but continuing to narrate that sort of thing abstractly is exhausting after a time, and there really is no reason for it. This is why it seems to be in the “parlor narration” category, because there’s mechancis and there’s narration afterwards but it would be functionally the same regardless of what was narrated.

In DitV, the fictional “raise” is as important as the mechanical one, but that not the case with positioning.

I am also getting the impression that you had too much fictional significance loaded onto your positioning. Which is an error of the text, if it gave you that impression. When you take your turn to position, you aren’t doing anything — you’re getting ready to do stuff. Placing dice is where you’re doing and acting. So if you’re going in expecting your positioning roll to tell you how successful you were, you are going to be disappointed. At best, a good positioning roll will tell you if you are in position to complete a goal in X number of turns (your “I take it” suggestion is close to a lot of table chatter I have heard in playtests). So that’s another bit to highlight in the text — positioning rolls are for introducing elements of the fiction, not immediately using them.

I am not quite following you on the context-free narration hooks comment — or rather, I might understand what you’re talking about, but I’m not quite sure, and I don’t want to fall into a situation where we’re both talking past each other. Can you unpack a bit?

Secondly, I think I want to emphasize the problem of tying mechanics to narrative without much at stake or consequence. When this breaks down, it’s sometimes called “parlor narration”, i.e. when the narration is separate from the mechanical move, and where they are not related. Whereas, say, a fictional “raise” in Dogs could have more influence than the mechanical weight tht goes along with it, I didn’t see a strong equivalent for some steps (such as placing). So, hence my suggestion to minimize the context-free narrations hooks, or to give them some other kind of hook.

First off, thanks so much for giving the game a whirl. Feedback is precious honey, even when it seems like it’s all negative. And that is not the case here — this is very illuminating.

For most of your thoughts and suggestions, all I can say is YES. That’s certainly the spirit of the game, and all of the non-mechanical suggestions you give you could use in the game as-written.

I have one question before I go off and start assuming things — were you narrating before or after you rolled dice?

Jonathan, the game is (or perhaps becomes is better) intensely political. While you start play with everybody coming in from different directions, in the process of play those distinctions get fuzzy. Alliances blur lines. Often the ‘national’ distinctions collapse, and you do get something akin to political parties within the same nation-state. By endgame, if all goes as envisioned, the ideogogues (and obstacles) are factions operating in the same polity, that polity being the entire planet. Now obviously, all this should be explicated in the book — I have a ‘what to expect’ section planned in Mastery, and this will probably go there. But thanks for highlighting what needs to be included! :)