I appreciate that a bunch of them are like, vocations or callings. Including what it means to be the anti-socially violent person in an otherwise fairly close-knit and communalist village.
I will say that a Stormblessed Heavy can get to busted levels of stronk pretty easily; on the other hand those delicious consequences of that Arcana ("oops I summoned a storm that might just devastate the entire region").
Agreed about the Storm-Marked Heavy. That was a playbook/background combo that was in the game I played in, and then also in the game I GMed when we made a second group of PCs. The character in both cases was devastating in combat.
The Heavy and the Judge in the game I played in was a particularly strong combo... the Heavy would just destroy things and the Judge would shut down all the incoming attacks.
Some things I've struggled with in the game:
Time. It's really easy to fall into the classic TTRPG trap of "everything happens constantly." Stonetop really wants you "let things breathe" so that you have the time to have seasons roll past (with its attendant move(s)), obligations around town get fulfilled (oh you're the town blacksmith with all the respect and responsibility that entails? how does the town react when you're gone for 2 months straight?), and improvements can have progress made.
Yeah, as I said, this was an issue in both games I was a part of. In the game I played in, we went from level 1 to nearly 10 and ended the game in about a year and a half of in game time. That's way too quick given the whole Homefront component of play.
The game I ran, I was more aware of this (having already played) and so it was a bit better. But still... I had to consciously put in effort to allow time to pass more slowly. I had to adjust the way I approached and handled threats to the town.
Following on to above, Zoom. Knowing when to let time pass, or use Love Letters to wrap a chunk of progress while posing a set of decisions that the PCs really want to either have all of happen or none of happen has helped; but I'm not great at that yet. If we spend a lot of table time on really good Homefront scenes around relationships and obligations, it feels like we might be neglecting some other aspects of play. But some of these things are important to zoom in on, but maybe some of this is on the players as well - I'd like to keep encouraging my players to think more about how they can say a couple of lines and pass the conversational ball rather then a somewhat unnatural set of paragraphs
Occasionally... usually after some major event was resolved and there was no obvious next step... we'd just do what I called montages. I'd ask each player what their character was doing, and then frame things accordingly... and we'd use certain moves to see what happened. Keep Company and Know Things tended to come in handy here. This helped keep the NPCs central to play, which is really important... and helps cement Stonetop as a dynamic place.
One of the tensest moments in our game was when the pregnant NPC wife of the Heavy went to visit the midwife (the mother of two other prominent NPCs, and a sort of rival to one of our PCs) only to find that she had been brutally murdered. The shock sent her into labor... and the apprentice midwife (the NPC sister of our Ranger PC and betrothed to one of the midwife's sons) had to step up and deliver a baby during all of this. There was a lot on the line... not for any of our PCs, but for the people they cared about.
And I think this is something that, when run well, Stonetop really does better than many other games... the town matters. Its people matter. The players never shrugged and said "oh well, that NPC died".
Obligations. If I was doing Session 0 all over again (which I might be soon!), I'd really push the PCs into establishing how they play into the subsistence / agrarian portion of this so I can make em squirm if they neglect that. Between two groups / 8 players, I dont think anybody really picked up a craft or similar as a Possession or role, and it feels like that was a bit of a mistake. Without bonds like that, it's too easy to "hit the road."
Yeah, I would do what you can to make sure everyone has a "job" of some sort. That they have some kind of responsibility to maintain, and that may conflict with leaving to go off on some "adventure", no matter how important it may be. In the game I ran, we had the Ranger as the chief hunter, the Blessed as the shepherd, and the Seeker as the Judge's apprentice. The Lightbringer (who was the Judge's daughter) was the only one who started off without some kind of responsibility... but she quickly became a spiritual leader to many.
Again, these responsibilities help connect the PCs to the town and its people, and they can also be the starting point of some interesting situation or dilemma.
