Writer's Blog: Impressing The Party People (Patreon)

First off, October’s Q&A for UCRT tier patrons will be held today (Friday, Nov 4) at 7 – 8pm PST as according to the poll. The second one will be tomorrow (Saturday, Nov 5) at 11am – 12pm PST. If you were on UCRT tier last month but no longer have access to the discord channel, please dm me on discord and I’ll grant you access.

Now! Onto Rewritening news:

Chapter 10 will get posted this evening or tomorrow at the latest. I’ll make an update announcement once it’s up on dashingdon, but I wanted to get this post out while we still had semi-stable power as my town is under yet another wind advisory and lights been flickering. Gotta love the Pacific Northwest.

The only thing I have left to fix is the numerical values for the “heretoparty" variable, since the math is Picasso levels of wonky. Chapter 11 will be out before next Tuesday—I just need to fix the party numbers there as well. (Chapters 12 through 14 may be uploaded as well, but I’m trying to stop promising things since there’s always a million and two unforeseen problems that arise when I do my final playtest.)

As for Chapter 10, there’s a lot of changes (and almost 15,000 new words!). Here are the highlights:

1) Glitch has new names for your gear (and also more bad puns). There’s now a conversation where you learn about some of their past experiments . . . and failures. Rosy has opinions.

2) I ultimately deleted the scene that Button stay home alone instead of going over to Kenzie's house. The clues available at Kenzie's house are too important to cut off access without making it clear that you'd be missing out on something. That said, I’ll post the deleted scenes as a short story sometime this month. (And beware! Some of the clues at Kenzie’s house can still be missed!) To make the strongarming make more sense, there’s now an imperative for Button and Kenzie sticking together pre-party (insightful Buttons can notice this reason before Kenzie does).

3) At Kenzie’s house, choosing to eavesdrop now leads to much heavier foreshadowing. Let me know if it’s too baseball batty.

4) Nick is cattier to Nover!Buttons (Buttons who have the worst possible relationship with him). There’s also more variation in Nick's dialogue depending on your overall dynamic (newly reconciled, equal partners, or him still being more protective).

5) All players now meet both Caleb and the Barnes by default. After that, you need to pass a progressively harder “heretoparty” stat check (which measures how convincing you’ve been undercover) to learn about Isaiah and meet two new Vengeance members.

6) The two new Vengeance members are Boris and Juliette. I would very much want to be friends with Juliette if she wasn’t a terrorist. She has cool hair.

7) Caleb’s conversation is longer. Did you know that Button and Caleb graduated high school the same year? Because Caleb knows.

8) Cathy Barnes' name has been changed to Edith in order to better differentiate her from Caleb.

9) The “heretoparty” stat requirement to meet the new members can be passed if you earn enough affection with Andy/Liz.

10) Both AL’s and Reese’s affection meters are now hidden. There are more subtextual clues in the text as to how they feel, however (this applies to all chapters where they appear going forth).

As with the first draft of Mind Blind, you earn “heretoparty” points by getting Vengeance to believe your cover story. Options like showing interest, acting empathetic, and generally keeping your cover will raise party points. Dialogue options which show disinterest or sympathy towards Ments (or referring to Reese a violent extremist) will lower your party points. Having a high interpersonal score also makes it easier.

Almost every option in Chapter 10 will lower or raise your party points, so choose wisely (and please let me know if you feel the thresholds are too easy or hard).

You’ll need to meet all seven Vengeance members in order to pursue the “Vengeance Ending.” Jerri, Caleb, Mitch, and Edith are all met by default. Convincing AL to tell you about Isaiah is pretty easy—you just have to have a “heretoparty” stat of over 50, which is the number you start with, so as long as you’re not actively unconvincing, you’ll be able to learn that Isaiah is a Precog. Meeting Boris requires that “heretoparty” be over 55, which is also pretty easy to achieve. Meeting Juliette, however, requires “heretoparty” to be over 62, which doesn’t leave too much wiggle room for flubbing up (but is still very doable across a variety of different answer combos).

Alternatively, you can just seduce AL and they’ll introduce everyone.