"Losing is fun." - Dwarf Fortress

The original eXiles was unique for its time in that, while it didn't have a lot of explicit sexuality or violence, it was darker and more mature than other X-Men titles-- the characters were all new, and the settings were different every few issues, so there was no status quo for the eXiles to protect. Disasters that could change-- or end-- the world weren't always averted in the nick of time, and casualties were brutal compared to other mainstream superhero comics.

That's the tone I'm aiming for here.

Also worth noting are some facts about my playstyle as a Watcher:

I'm going to hurt you. You're going to win your share of battles, you're going to save as many whole universes as we have Missions-- and then some-- but as sweet as victory tastes, it's even sweeter right after you've been kicked in the teeth. If you look at your Datafiles, and the character pitch process, all of it's designed to give me as much leverage as possible to make your character invest in my worlds as I'm burning them.

If you want to get maximum enjoyment out of this game, learn to love losing as much as you already love winning, and have faith that you'll be coming out on top again soon.

I don't have a plan. I know what's going on in this Mission, and I'm not going to pull the rug out from under you by changing it-- unless your actions as players change it. I don't know how the Mission's going to end, because that's your job. I don't know if you're going to succeed or fail. I have a pretty good idea how the next Mission is going to start, unless you change my mind.

I'm bringing the Missions, the twisted-up timelines that you have to fix; you, the players, are bringing the plot. If you want hints, I'll give them to you-- but, fundamentally, I don't have a plan for you that you need to follow, or a plan that you can disrupt. The only time I'm going to use my metagame powers to interfere with you trying to do what you want, in-game, is if nobody's doing anything and I think you're getting bored.

This brings me to some specific policies:

• You can change characters between Missions: let me know, as close to the start of their last mission as possible, and we'll make arragements for the Timebroker to replace you.
  
  • This can be death and/or "retirement" if you're done with the character, or a mysterious disappearance if you just want to play with someone else for a bit.
• I'm probably not going to permanently kill your character unless you agree to it. If we both agree that losing is fun, death means we both stop having fun, and we don't want that.
• I'm probably not going to force any other permanent changes on your character unless you agree to them. That's not fun.
• If you're having any kinda of issues or complaints with this game, me, or any other player, my PM box is always open and I am 100% committed to making sure that everyone who sits down at my table gets to have a good time.

This message was last edited by the GM at 12:07, Fri 08 Oct 2021.

Also, now that the first Mission is underway... the previous time that I attempted to run a game on this model, one of my players came to me saying they were unsatisfied with the course of missions... that they were taking crapsack worlds and making them marginally less crapsack so they could move on.

This game is probably the most "on rails" of any game format I habitually run; it is pretty bad about this, for my personal performance standards, but nowhere near as bad as it looks.

Which is to say, the Timebroker wants you to complete your Missions as quickly and as efficiently as possible while having as little impact on the timeline as possible. The Timebroker, that is myself, is telling you Out Of Character that this is the opposite of what this game is about.

Most Missions are going to be littered with Bonus Objectives, which are really just messed-up situations adjacent to your Missions that have little or nothing to do with your Mission objectives. There's no tangible reward to completing them, but (villains aside) this is a superhero game and since when have real heroes ever cared about tangible rewards?

If you see a loose thread dangling in any scenario I'm describing for you... feel free to pull on it. The worst that can happen is that you'll unravel a few days' worth of work for me and you'll get to watch me to paint some happy little trees to cover it up.

Trust me, after you get a feel for how we're playing this game, making me squirm is going to look like a much better reward than an extra d10 on your Datafile.