Listen, true story: I almost didn't release Partners. Then we thought, okay we'll put it out but just quietly. No Kickstarter. Maybe one or two people will care. Why? Because it's REALLY weird. It's a kind of "roleplaying" that's pretty out there. I don't know if anyone cares.

Journaling games, thankfully, have nudged us in this direction. I'm autistic and weird which means I was like four years ahead of that trend (go buy The Tin Star, it's awesome). https://tinstargames.itch.io/the-tin-star 

Maybe I'm early on this too. I hope so. Because for me, what I want out of RPGs is not to be the person who says what happens. You know how the (not very) old rule goes: play to find out what happens. And so many RPGs don't let players do that.

GMs are always supposed to ask questions: "what do you do about this?" "are you going to stop them?" "tell me how you're doing it". And I'm like "You know what, I don't know. I want the SYSTEM to tell me what my character does."

About 20 years ago I began exploring this idea with my Firefly RPG which used a derivation of the Passions rules from Pendragon. Caught between two poles of your values, what will you choose? Roll a die. Find out.

Characters in that had stats like "Make money howerver I can 1 2 3 / 4 5 6 A poor man but a good man" and you'd roll to find out who you were when an offer got made. I think that's realistic. I think a lot of us don't know who we are until we're tested.

You can see this a bit in my first proper indie RPG, Daughters of Exile, where the bride-bots have to roll to see if they can do unladylike things, against their programming. You don't know who you are until you get on the frontier and push.

The amazing Prime Time Adventures uses this idea as well. You don't know if you will get what you want or give into your base nature until you turn over cards, every single scene. It's dramatic and powerful and lets you feel incredible tension.

What's more, you are both audience and avatar and author all at once. Because like the audience, you don't know what's going to happen.

So much of the Disk Horse says never "deprotagonise" your players. I say ALWAYS do it. It's where drama lies.

Like I say, I gotta be special. Anyway, The Tin Star takes this to the next level: you don't know what the next scene is going to be about until the cards tell you. Which characters are going to take the stage? What are their goals? You honestly have no idea.

And that's exciting to me. This is also how it works in Two Faces. Which is free! https://tinstargames.itch.io/two-faces 
I love playing this game because I have no idea what the story will be.

When I was a lonely teen I spent hundreds of hours with my Palladium books, rolling up characters. I would start with a blank page and end with an incredible story. In a way, chargen has always been my favourite part of roleplaying. And I love books like Central Casting!

Central Casting (and its sequels) were books of nothing BUT chargen. Lifepaths, backgrounds, everything on hundreds and hundreds of nested tables. Delight! Random chargen is the BOMB.

So what Partners is, is: what if that WAS the whole game?

What if you sat down and randomly generated what each scene was? With random words to ensure constant curve balls so you could never "cheat" and tweak it the way you wanted? So it was always a surprise, just like watching TV and reading a book - only more so.

But to do that, well, I break the unbreakable rule. I take away all your control over your characters. And I don't expect a lot of people to LIKE that.

It's also a lot of WORK. It's easy (for most people) to just go "I go into the dungeon" or whatever.

So I honestly spent about a year going "who wants this game? Does anyone but me want to play this?" Even some of the playtesters said no. I wasn't even sure I should put a price on it, let alone kickstart it.

They say that autistic people are often poor leaders because they're actually way too far ahead of the curve. They think too many steps ahead. So maybe, just maybe, there's going to be more of these kind of games coming along. Maybe Partners starts a trickle that slowly builds

Or maybe it gets mostly ignored and then four years later it's all the rage and I'm like OH DEAR NOT AGAIN.

Or maybe it gets entirely ignored. I'm the weirdo. We rarely get famous.

But if we are very very lucky, we get cult hits.

Or maybe, I keep hoping, there's more weirdos out there, and we get a thousand backers. TV crime writers love it. Somebody gives a copy to Steve J Cannell my goddamn hero, and it smashes into the public consciousness.

I dream of such things. Hope hurts, but I can't stop doing it

So far, 44 of you are weirdos like me. And all I need is 200 or so to get over the line.

We weirdos, we do it bit by bit. One person at a time.

Just one person....is how we do it. Over to Ms Peters who says it better than I can.