Murder Ballet: October Update

"Yeah, I'm Thinkin' I'm Back."

After a whole lot of real-life stuff and some on-and-off progress, I've got a whole lot of little improvements for Murder Ballet.

• Table of Contents. Seriously, why wasn't there one in the first draft?!?
• Expanded Lore. I've finally, finally seen John Wick: Chapter 4, and added new lore from that movie, such as Clans and the radio station WUXIA. I'm trying to strike a very delicate balance between what's canon, and what makes for a good TTRPG sandbox. It's important to me that groups have room to tell their own stories in Murder Ballet - even if it means taking some liberties with the source material.
• Overhauled Ghost Stories. Redid the Ghost Stories tables. There are exponentially more combinations now.
• Focus Points. Added a new resource Assassins can spend to auto-succeed on a roll, ignore their Wound penalty, or take an extra action. Your pool of Focus points is determined by your Cold, which was previously one of the weaker stats.
• New/Revised Exploits. Replaced some of the less-interesting exploits with new ones. Disarm lets you steal weapons from stunned enemies. Implacable gives Tough characters a chance to no-sell unarmed attacks. Incredible Focus plays with the new Focus Points mechanic. Knife-Throwing was reworded to let you throw knives without changing weapons first... which makes it a whole lot more useful.
• Pistol Buffs. 9mm Pistols are Burst (3) and .45 Pistols are Burst (2). 45s were kinda bad before. This gives each of the pistols a different play style: 9mm are rapid-fire, revolvers are punchy, and 45s are a compromise in between. Also added dueling pistols... because JW4.
• Burst Revision. The Burst property of weapons was... ambiguously worded, so I redid it. Now, getting hit by a Burst weapon requires you to roll X saves, where X is the number of shots the attacker fires, and take the worst one. As a result, burst doesn't multiply the amount of damage dealt, but makes it much more likely to inflict damage.
• New Associates. Harbingers are loremasters of the Underworld, with encyclopedic knowledge of its most obscure rules. Trackers are criminally underdressed hunters, capable of finding any quarry. Don't mess with their dogs.
• Combat Rock-Paper-Scissors. Swift was too good, so I made some changes to it. Now, every type of save (Swift, Tough, Armor, or Cover) has a hard counter available. Getting stunned disables Swift saves. If an enemy is too fast to shoot, get into melee. Deadly weapons bypass Tough saves. If an enemy is shrugging off your hits, use a deadly weapon. Armor can still be beaten by armor-piercing weapons or executions. If you don't have a big enough gun, get in close and go for an execution. Cover can be defeated by using speed or stealth to reposition.
• Deadly Wounds. Deadly wounds are no longer 2 Wounds... that killed characters way too quickly.

What's Next?

I'm still not 100% happy with the presentation of Murder Ballet. I'm still experimenting with moving or rewriting a few sections. I'd also love to make some more artwork for it... but honestly I'd rather finish cleaning up the writing first.
... And I should probably watch The Continental.

Once again, a massive thank you to everyone who's supported Murder Ballet so far! It has eclipsed Lightning War, the game I actually did a Kickstarter for, by almost every possible metric - and that's absolutely mind-blowing to me! You all rock.

- Ben