Van Helsing and Lucy's Suitors see Dracula long before they get the killing blow. While horror often thrives by keeping the monster out of sight, its presence still needs to be known before we reach a story's climax.
In cinema, we can easily cut away from our protagonists to see the monster doing its thing, but in TTRPGs, generally speaking, the focus of the narrative tends to stay on our heroes. Again, that doesn't preclude an appearance by the monster.
Generally, as I've been conceptualizing Deathblow as a game, I've treated The Hunt as a period in which filling out your Tracking Points is crucial to finding the monster in order to fight them. But I think there's a bit of a problem in that, to begin with:
The longer you take to track down the monster, the more opportunities you have to find clues and, as we discusses in the previous post, gain Wrath to fight it with.
We need, then, to incentivize finding the monster faster. And we do this by coming up with a punishment: the monster kills again.
Again, my dream for whatever "monster book" the game comes with (conceding that this would probably all come in one volume) is that each entry has, yes, a stat block, but also an entire guide to building an adventure around them, including what sort of environment to run it in and literally how many NPCs we should be working with.
One of the reasons to have a set number of (manageable) NPCs is so that we have victims that can be killed off by the monster if the party takes too long.
Again, most of these stories take place in isolated locations, though even in an urban environment, it might be limited to a palatial townhouse or a slum in some neglected neighborhood. I'd like it if GMs could reasonably expect to know every NPC in the adventure environment, or at least give them a name and a one-sentence description ("Hob the Butcher, young man who took over after his father died, bit standoffish").
The Night Hunters are here to prevent more death at the hands of the monsters, so the threat of that "more death" has to be a thing.
Tracking time in TTRPGs can be difficult - it's one of my issues with, in D&D, effects that last an hour versus ten minutes, because functionally there's very little difference between them in gameplay. But there are games that have tried to solve this: Blades in the Dark introduces the idea of clocks, where players want to fill in clocks that represent their progress toward something, while they want to prevent bad clocks from filling up (like the guard becoming aware of their activities).
I think we can borrow something like this, but it will require that we be a little more mechanical with each of our "scenes." If we imagine that a PC going to perform some investigative task takes a certain amount of time, we can say that, success or failure, that adds a notch to our "Hunger" clock.
Indeed, this might be a way to incentivize the players to split up - if we use an initiative-like system to take turns performing Hunt tasks, the players might be able to find multiple clues before the Hunger clock gets a single tick.
This also solves another issue: penalizing failure in non-life-threatening situations. In Draw Steel, Negotiations give important NPCs a Patience score, which diminishes as the players make arguments. Successes can raise their Interest, and thus secure better outcomes from the Negotiations, but once their Interest is exhausted, the Negotiation ends. And what this does is solve a problem of players trying to get the perfect outcome by overcoming their bad rolls with insistent roleplay. I'm all for roleplay, but negative consequences for failure are important.
In this case, we could actually be more lenient with players who want to collect all the clues and might keep working at something for which they failed a check - say the Hunter failed their survival checks after discovering a set of tracks going into the woods, but they want to try to pick it up again - well, that's fine. You just fill the Hunger clock up on the same clue to try again.
What happens when the Hunger clock fills?
Well, I think that the most obvious thing is that an NPC is killed by the monster. But I also think that we have the potential for the monster to attack our Night Hunters.
There's risk here: it would be really anticlimactic for the party to fail their way into killing the monster. And I think for this reason, this kind of attack (we could call it a Monstrous Assault, maybe?) probably can only end with the monster fleeing, and not dying. I think we could maybe have the monster trigger its Escape immediately upon becoming Bloodied (at half Stamina).
The consequence here, naturally, would be the loss of Stamina, but also potentially the loss of Wrath that had been gathered previously, as the party will likely need to expend some of their Wrath to fight off the monster or heal up injured allies.
Indeed, I had talked about having lesser monsters appear on some Hunts where it makes sense (if we have some kind of Lich-like monster at high levels, they might have undead zombie minions) and while I think that these could exist as normal environmental challenges (maybe to get to the ruined shack on the island in the pond outside of town where some clues to the town history are held, you need to face off against the monsters that wait in the silt at the bottom of said pond) I also think that a Monstrous Assault might include sending minions to attack the party.
There could even be Discipline-spending abilities that help speed up one of these attacks - an Inquisitor might have a "Divine Abjuration" ability that can compel a monster of certain types (undead, demons, for example) to flee, which could just work instantly or maybe it raises the remaining Stamina at which the monster flees.
Again, the game doesn't have opportunity attacks, and uses a more narrative-based logic on how easy it is for a monster to run away from a fight because that's true to the genre. Monstrous Assaults should be harrowing encounters and not be seen as opportunities for the party to get a quick kill in - though we might still reward the party with Identify points, given how much information can be gleaned by glimpsing the monster.
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