Phases of Play
In Monster Care Squad, play is broken down into three distinct phases of play: Diagnosis, Synthesis, and Symbiosis. Working through these three phases makes up the core gameplay loop of Monster Care Squad. They can be understood as the following:
- Diagnosis - A phase of investigation. Generally spent asking questions, poking around sites where a Monster has gone wild, or chasing up leads on potential infection with the goal of gaining as much information about the infection or situation as possible. May also include an exploratory encounter with the infected Monster.
- Synthesis - The actual production of a cure, antidote, sedative, or other medical equipment and tonics needed to subdue and cure the Monster or solve the problem at hand. Most remedies are created on-site, using local ingredients, techniques, and tools. Players will have to work to find these resources, often overcoming smaller, minor encounters to do so.
- Symbiosis - The administration of the treatment developed through the previous two phases. This generally takes the form of a direct encounter with the enraged and wounded Monster, with players grappling for Control over the scene and maneuvering into a position that allows them to treat wounds, apply medication, and soothe the Monster’s suffering.
Many sessions in Monster Care Squad begin with your players being told of a Monster attack. This is not always true; you may arrive at a place with no idea of what to expect, or you may be chasing up a lead on a sighting of the False Gold. In these cases, the diagnosis phase still maps to an exploratory investigation, with the goal of a greater understanding of the larger threat at hand.
Between Phases
Sometimes a session might not ‘feel’ right when put into the three phases of play. That’s okay! The phases are designed to help you structure your sessions around the kind of play experience we imagined Monster Care Squad would be best enjoyed in, but if that structure doesn’t work for what you want to do, don’t sweat it too much! Just roleplay out of phase for a little while and come back to the phases when you’re ready.
Clocks
When you begin a Diagnosis or Synthesis phase, generate a Clock with at least three segments and up to nine. This Clock is a tool to track your progress through the phase and keep track of how well you’re doing. You advance this Clock by performing certain Moves; you will fill each segment by coloring the segment in or drawing a cross through it, depending on how well you do. The longer you make the Clock, the more involved and longer the phase will end up being, so keep that in mind when you generate it. If you’re playing with a Guide, they make the Clock; otherwise, decide yourself how long and complex you want this phase to be.
Clocks are great pacing tools for deciding what the most important part of your story is. Do you want the mystery of what illness is affecting the Monster to take center stage? Make the Diagnosis phase the biggest Clock! You could even experiment with one or two-segment Clocks.
Each phase comes with its own set of Moves and mechanics that make each one feel a little different. You can find more information about them in the Diagnosis [pg.34], Synthesis [pg.36], or Symbiosis [pg.38] sections.
Ending a Phase
Each Phase has an End of Phase Move. When you’ve filled the Clock, you can use this Move to progress to the next stage of the game. The success you’ve had in the current phase determines what kind of position you have starting the next phase. The Move text will explain in detail.
Ending a phase with more successes than failures will generally give you more information and bonuses in the next phase, but don’t be discouraged if you move on without having too many successes. You’re still expert, trained Monster Care Specialists, and you can still help the Monster, even if you don’t have all the best tools or information. Just try your best, and things will probably turn out fine in the end.
Control Tracks
The bulk of your time in the Symbiosis Phase will revolve around curing the Wounds of the Monster you’ve been researching and tracking this whole time. To do this, you have to struggle for Control.
Whenever you face a Monster with the intent to heal it, you generate a Control track.
A Control Track has five segments, with each segment representing a single die, ranging from the D4 on the left, to the D12 on the right. As you take actions during the Symbiosis Phase, and as the Monster attacks you, you move up and down this track, with successes moving you up and failures bringing you down. At the beginning of the Symbiosis Phase, you begin at the D4 segment and the Monster begins at the D12 segment.
To Cure a Wound, you use the Cure Move, which requires you to have Control. You have Control any time you have pushed the Monster back one space on the track, and lose it the next time the Monster pushes you back on the track. When you have Control and you trigger the Cure Move, you roll using the die you’re at on the Control Track, so the further along the track you are when you roll, the better.
Players and Monster can share one segment, but if either advances on their track, it will push the other back—so if the Players and Monster are both at D8, and the Monster advances, the Players are pushed back to the D6 segment.
If you are at the D4 stage and the result of a Move tells you to move down the Control Track, you must either retreat, or spend one Ace to stay in the conflict. Retreat isn’t inherently a bad thing, and an encounter with the Monster can be a helpful way to get an idea of what to expect in a future showdown. If the result of a Move tells you to move up the track and you’re already at D12, instead describe some insight into the Monster, the world of Ald-Amurra, or the situation you’re in.
It may look like curing a Wound is very hard, as you can’t hit the 10+ on anything but the D10 or D12 segments of the track. Remember, though, you should have a couple Aces banked to steer things in your favor, and if you don’t, you should have a couple of ways to generate them during this phase.
Once you’ve Cured all of the Monster’s Wounds, the Monster is healed and no longer under the effects of the False Gold.
During much of the design, we always intended for there to only be one control track per encounter that refreshes as you heal Wounds. Very late in production we hit on the idea of each Wound having its own control track that you could vie for control over. It’s a little too late for us to implement this, as we’d need to rework great chunks of the game to adapt it, but the idea is so good it would have hurt to leave out, so here it is; do with it what you will.