[In a Wicked Age ...] Best interest diagrams

[Ron Edwards]

Hi,

A quick note before I start: I'm revising the forum's image policy. You can use images now, as long as they aren't so big they exceed the boundaries of the ordinary reading window, and as long as you really do integrate them with explanatory or other relevant text. So no looking at one-ninth of an image and having to pitter-patter down and across to see it all, and no long strings of a bezillion images. I'll revise the main sticky soon.

I've been thinking back and reading over my old notes for our game of In a Wicked Age. I was the GM and the players were Tod, Maura, and Julie.

Our first story used The Unquiet Past, drawing the oracle entries:
The secret central shrine of a temple to forbidden gods.
A treasure seeker, following the whispers of a slave spirit.
A knowledge-mad sorceress, delving into ancient secrets.
The guardian of a tomb, a statue cast in silver with ruby eyes.

To make a long story short, we figured that the shrine and temple are deep in the old, now-underground foundations of the city. The body in the tomb is that of a legendary hero, but the tomb's location is itself a secret (actually probably legendary). The tomb is actually in and under the temple, but the cultists don't know it's there either. The forbidden god is Nur-Ayya, with a variety of cultists including their chief, Ekurzakir, and two women, Asha and Parya. The statue is animate and called Awshalim. Julie said she'd like to play the statue's creator and named her Jila; Maura said she'd play the sorceress who's doing "just what it says on the tin" in the oracle toward the tomb; and Tod said he'd play the treasure-seeker and named him Adar, but that he was the descendant of the guy in the tomb and is trying to protect it from a nasty tomb-robber guy, with the help of an ancestral-type family spirit named Simta. I made up Jesper the tomb-robber and named some cult members, giving them some interests in there as well.

We did not handle the best interests all that well. This was my second try at playing the game and I felt more confident about the resolution system this time, but did not understand certain aspects of this step. So I thought I'd share how I think this step affected play.

Specifically: this is a terrible diagram! I get a headache just looking at it.



There are a couple of small problems, neither of which is too terrible by itself.

One of Aurya's best interests, "Rule the place," was so general that I figured its arrow would point toward anyone who got in her way. This worked out OK in play although ideally it would have been more specific and personal toward someone.

Jila's best interests are a bit odd. If the tomb is long-forgotten and so secret that even the cult doesn't know it's there, then who could recently have commissioned a magical statue guardian for it? Also, Jila wasn't described as a cult member, so why is she interested in honoring Nur-Ayya? This one didn't work out well at all and was basically dropped out of play.

But those were both isolated problems and easily fixable, conceptually. What's really wrong with the diagram is that a lot of the listed special interests are nothing more than reactive opposition to best interests that were already stated. Two, in fact, are solely between NPCs, which is a bad idea too.

These are more than mere diagrammatic details. This session showed us that a best interest "to stop him from doing that," or more generally, one which is contingent upon something else being done first, is pretty crappy, especially for player-characters. The reason is that you found yourself running off to do something because it's a best interest, or throwing yourself into combat with someone, all without any in-character or in-situation justification, because it's a best interest. It's railroading yourself! This led to all kinds of stalling out within the resolution system itself, and although I quite like these mechanics when everyone at the table gets them, they definitely snap to No Fun when they're improperly applied and stall out.

Especially, look at that mess among Awshalim, Jesper, and Adar. Who's doing what to whom? Who's starting it off?

With special interests like this going on, play can devolve fast into the characters running around competing for in-system but not in-fiction advantage for its own sake, which means the charcters are effectively behaving spastically. As if that weren't bad enough, it can even turn into competing for player control over the back-story as the players scramble to make sense of what their characters are doing.

The concept behind a solution is obvious: the characters need to arrive at thinking "this is what I want to do" regarding their best interests, right there in play. It's easy enough sometimes, e.g., Adar is already seeking his ancestor's lost tomb, and that's fine. But most of them will require a more organic, in-game justification, or if you will, conception and development.

I can think of one solution which I consider remedial at best: the GM hurls new information and frames confrontations immediately, so the story begins 90% finished. I don't rate that very highly; I came to play, not to force play to conclude.

So, what to do? Time to re-draw that diagram, and not a moment too soon, as looking at it is making my head hurt worse by the minute.


So much better. This makes it much easier to organize my GM-thinking for what to do, given that a given NPC will behave proactively right out of the gate if they have an arrow going toward someone, or will be ready to react when they have an arrow pointed at them - and in those cases, the PC is already primed to do something, so I don't have to force anything.

Now, with a couple of exceptions,

1. Every arrow has a player-character on one end of it
2. Each best interest is proactive, so I can either say what the NPC does or ask the player "What do you do?"
3. Opposition is implicit without needing redundant arrows

One exception is Adar's best interest pointed at Jesper, which is better than before because it's not made of four bizarre best interests centered on Awshalim, but is still reactive rather than proactive. Today, I'd ask Tod to re-state it as something Adar would do to someone trying to interfere with his ancestor's body. Even "stop intruder" is better than what's there. As GM, it'd be important in this case to get Jesper into visible action as soon as possible.

The other exception is Jila's best interest toward Asha, which similarly requires that Asha is already doing something regarding Nur-Ayya that gets in Jila's way. What makes it better than the previous version is that clearly Asha has to be dishonoring Nur-Ayya in some way, which at least gives me something to do with her and in fact inspires any number of ways for this to be stirring up trouble in the cult already, even before Jila gets there.

The difference between the diagrams also ties strongly to setting up the dice rolls for the resolution system, especially a complicated one, but I want to know what you think so far. Questions, comments, feedback? And especially, how did you do it - this particular step - and how well did it work?

Best, Ron

P.S. My earlier threads about the same game were [In A Wicked Age ...] Particular strengths accumulating through the stories and [In a Wicked Age ...] Out-of-sequence episode play, both of which isolated very specific features of the system, and I've followed that same strategy here.

P.P.S. I'm going to get better at file formats for images, I swear.