The Wandering Headband - Review by archivebro

The Wandering Headband is a narrative-driven quest based on Afro Samurai. I have no experience with the game or the manga besides knowing it exists, so my perspective is based solely on what’s presented, no regard for the source material here.

…With one exception. I did see anons/you mention there were only 2 headbands in the source material and you expanded it to 100 (with the option to challenge up to 10 ranks ahead) for the quest. That was a good call, it gives the players more short-term goals to work on that progress the main plot (hunting for the next headband) while hunting for headbands 1 or 2 only would lead to a very unfocused quest. They should be moving targets themselves and logically be way above the MC’s current skill level. Hard for anons to find them and know how long to train for to make those few meetings count.

Onto the rest! The light-crunch style of no rolling but speaking of “stats” through the narrative (money, sword skill, pistol skill) is an interesting choice so far. I’m guessing dice may be pulled in later when anons start getting past the “tutorial” levels so to speak and have established what kind of fighter they want the MC to be. Even if it’s not the intent I can certainly recommend that as something for QMs to mirror in a new quest. Spaceship Pilot in a Fantasy World did a similar take, even if the rolling mechanic is more intended as a gambling mechanic the effect of getting people/yourself accustomed to the “baseline” MC before dice veer things off the rails further is smart for narrative quests that want to be taken even somewhat seriously.

Also, I appreciate any QM in a narrative quest that writes the question “what does your MC want” somewhere in the narrative. It may not be a choice for some quests that need a tighter focus, but I see it as essential for a longer quest so the QM knows what to directly enable or challenge. I have read other quests that had rather open worlds to explore and didn’t ask that question for a while, making the MC meander around for a while experiencing things without being proactive in seeking anything out. It works better when reading and not so much playing since it feels like plot is going to happen at you regardless of what you do.

The combat scenes you have are good, the right mix of action and description for me, but I will refer back to what I mentioned in >>5883233 for extended combat scenes. If you feel that constant combat is slowing down the pace of the narrative or want to experiment with shortening your voting window to help the muse along then take a look there. Writing a combat that goes for 5-8 posts, while epic, is something that most players in your quest (and maybe even you) wouldn’t be up for since you coaxed them in with world/character narrative and shorter scenes beforehand. Though players could also grumble at the shorter voting window so be sure to ask in advance if you want to switch styles for an event.

I don’t have any quest recs I can think of in a similar vein to this. It’s not normally what I follow/read. I supposed Wanted: Dead or Alive (substitute samurai for cowboys and a weird anachronistic setting for a weird supernatural western seis the best I can do. I’ll fill this out by shilling archived quests Blood Quest, Body Horror Quest, and Advent Soul with no additional context besides the fact that I liked them and haven’t seen them mentioned in a while.