Hours, Cares, and Maturities

Hours and Maturity replace Stress and Trauma from core Blades.

TODO:

• what does the Growing up track do? is it even necessary?
  • should this be a more mechanical version of ‘when your maturity distances you from your friends?’
• enumerate the possible Maturities. There will be:
  • 3 that grant an Attribute tag
  • 3 that grant some other benefit (maybe a new special ability?)

There are two kinds of Hours: Idle, and Midnight. They both serve the same purpose, but you only start marking Midnight Hours when you’ve used all of your Idle Hours, and you know you’re gonna be in trouble with your caregiver when you get home.

Idle Hours

Idle Hours work a little differently than Stress, but not massively so.

• a kid starts with 10 Idle Hours
• you can mark all 10 Hours before there are consequences. Those come when you would mark an 11th hour

You can use them in the usual ways: pushing, assisting, resisting consequences.

When you would mark a Idle Hour, but don’t have a slot on your sheet for it, your kid has been called home for the day. If you go straight home, your kid is out of the action for the rest of the adventure (if it’s turning out to be a very long adventure, talk with your GM about when might be a good time to come back in before the end). If you stay out late with your friends, carry on marking Hours on the second line of the Hour track, your Midnight Hours. You can keep spending Hours as usual. If you fill the second Hour track, your caregivers come out to get you right away and you must go home immediately (do they call the cops to find you? come get you themselves? is it embarrassing?)

When you get home after staying out late, clear your Idle Hours track, and if you have marked any Midnight Hours roll dice equal to the number of unmarked Midnight Hours left on your sheet:

• on a crit, you manage to convince your caregivers that it was for a good reason. You can go back and find your friends today, or clear a Care
• on a 6, you mostly convince them things are alright. You are home for the day, but you’re not grounded or anything.
• on a 4-5, you’re in trouble, and grounded, but it’s not the worst. Mark a Care
• on a 1-3, you’re really in trouble now! Definitely grounded. You start the next Adventure with 2 Hours already marked, and mark a Care

At the end of an adventure, if you haven’t cleared your Idle Hours track from going home, do so.

Leave any marks in your Midnight Hours track until you do a chore to earn your caregivers’ trust again.

Cares

Cares are really just a progress clock. When it fills, you have matured a little. Take a Maturity.

The clock starts as an 4-segment clock. When you’ve taken your first Maturity, it becomes a 6-segment clock for the next two. Before the last one, it’s 8 segments. And when that’s full… that’s it. You’re not really a kid anymore. You can finish out your gang’s grand adventure, but you probably won’t be hanging out next Summer.

Kids who have marked Maturities have fewer Idle Hours than their younger friends, but if they really need to, they can mark a Care instead of marking any Hours (of either kind).

Maturity

When a kid marks a Maturity, they permanently fill in one of their Idle Hours–they are growing up and have obligations that they must fulfill outside of their adventures with the gang.

In exchange, however, each new maturity allows you to write a new tag into one of your Attributes. These tags, like in other PbtA (and other) games, are traits you can call on to give yourself an edge in a situation. You could, for example, call on your “emotional” maturity to grant yourself a bonus die when rolling [Consort], or [Sway], or even [Skirmish] if you were in a scuffle and strong emotions were on the line.

When resisting a consequence, the maturity grants you an extra die to the roll for an Attribute in which it lives.

You can call on multiple maturities in one roll (except Resistance rolls).

Every time you rely on one of your maturities, you should also fill in a spot on your Growing up track.