First play - a transcript and some questions

[Felon]

I ran my first Agon session last Saturday with two players, both also new to the system. I knocked up a quick one quest island as an intro, which is supposed to lead to the first real three quest island. I also used the opportunity to try as many different ways of doing battles as possible.

The quest was for Athena who wanted the heroes to steal an amulet from a temple of Poseidon and take it to her temple on another island.

The background situation was that a marriage celebration going on between two great families on the island. Prince Bacis is marrying Metis, and the decadent hedonists of Ikaria are going into overdrive. Parties, dancing, banquets and orgies fill the streets.

The idea was for the heroes to encounter Athena during the festivities, but they chose to visit the temple of Poseidon of their own accord to give thanks for a good voyage to the island. There they saw the amulet, which was guarded, by an Amphisbainai, a massive two headed snake, one head on each end.  The players were all for leaping straight in and I had to emphasize the size of the monster to discourage them otherwise they would have found out about monsters immunity to mortal weapons the hard way!

Eventually they encountered Athena who gave them the quest and a free bit of divine favour to empower their weapons and then they went and fought the serpent.

I used two markers for the snake, one for each end; the snake had multistrike and two lots of swords (fangs). It was a 10 strife d8 named monster and seemed to be a reasonable opponent for two heroes (both of which had opted to be semi-divine)

After getting the amulet, they had two find a ship, a fairly difficult task with the festivities in full swing but in the end managed talk a ships captain round. The amulet has the power to calm the sea and this convinced the captain that these two heroes were in the employ of the gods

By this time, Poseidon had discovered that the amulet was missing and sent a Strife 13 giant octopus after them.  This was a Strife 5 beast with 6 minion tentacles (2 of them are needed for the beast to walk of course!). The octopus design was inspired by the Hydra NPC by Darren Hill on this forum. The tentacles used a range 0 wrestle equivalent attack and had the Hold power – which I forgot to use! The tentacles got beaten quite quickly, the heroes backing off and using javelins to pin them to the deck. If I had remembered the Hold power maybe it would have been tougher, oh well next time!

I used strife now and again to add 1d8 difficulties to assist the beast, rocking the boat, pulling down sails etc – not sure if that's following the rules precisely to do that within battle, but it seemed OK.

After defeating the octopus they sailed on to their destination, the sea becoming rougher and rougher, but the ship protected within a circle of calm water, until at last Poseidon sent a tidal wave, which broke at the edge of the protective circle and finally swamped the boat.

The next encounter was against an NPC monster – the Raging Sea. Immune to mortal weapons obviously! I used no counters for the sea but placed the players at one end of the range track – their objective was to get to the other end (the shore). They used Might and Grace as weapon dice (swimming), whereas the sea had sword (wave) attacks, at optimum range all the time, quite weak but with multi-strike. As they couldn't hurt the sea, the heroes where applying there successes to getting position bonuses for the next exchange, one of the heroes getting close to the shore quite quickly, whilst the other floundered. At this point the hero furthest from the sea called on his deity to grant him aid and empowered his natural weapons and proceeded to half kill the sea before finally getting defeated!

The other hero was close to the shore when I invoked the sea's power of Reposition. I had numbered the rows on the range strip from 1 to 8, and had the heroes roll for their new location rather that dropping counters (I have used the shield symbols from the resources thread, printed out and stuck onto 2 pence pieces, so they are fairly weighty – and bronze like! Don't know what the equivalent US coin would be for size or metal). My downfall was that as I asked them to roll the dice for their new position, when the hero rolled to go back to the start, he used divine favour to re-roll the dice and ended up in a better position!

I then allowed him to expend a god oath to get a free move to get ashore – seemed like a reasonable request.  The hero then rescued the other defeated one with fishing nets – a difficult, potentially harmful contest in which he succeeded.

After a couple of interludes (more Strife for me!), they looked about and discovered an invasion of the island was taking place and the walled city in which the temple of Athena was located was under siege.

By mingling with the attackers, fighting through and then turning round to join the other side, they got in (a number of difficult harmful contests rather than a battle), although not without injury. This is all background for the main three quest island comming later.

Then it was a simple matter to get to the temple where Athena met them again and they delivered the amulet.

Cheers all round, except from Poseidon!

Game questions...

1.   Tied position rolls  - this has already been answered on Story Games forum by John Harper, after being asked by one of the players. I'll include John's reply here for anyone who hasn't seen it..."The book doesn't say what to do in that case. Sorry about that. The Antagonist should go first, followed by the player. If two players are tied, they act in order of Weapon skill. If they're the same, compare Grace to break the tie. If they're still tied, have them roll off."

2.   Use of Strife – can the Antagonist use Strife in a battle e.g. buying divine favour on the fly for the NPC's or on advantages? It seemed to work out OK in the game.

I have to say, it was an excellent session, and we even delayed getting the Chinese takeaway order so we could get a good conclusion!

Nice rules, clear and concise, well laid out and the Strife system stops you feeling sorry for the players!

[John Harper]

You just made my day! This post is so awesome.

Felon, you *totally* understand this game. All of your rulings are spot-on. You used the system perfectly to cover the cases that came up in your game. This AP is like a template for black-belt level Agon play.

I'm just blown away. I can't stop grinning. The battle against the sea is so cool!

Oh, and to answer your question #2:
Absolutely. You can spend strife during battle (or any time) to make things tougher. You shouldn't spend Strife directly on the NPC if it will take it over the NPC limit, though (obviously). But yes, if you want to buy extra d8s (or whatever) to make things harder here and there, go for it.

[Cam]

Exelent and cool sounding play, gratz!

How often you use Battle comparing to Simple contest?

-cam-

[mysterious hu]

I was one of those brave/foolhardy/thoughly hosed and railroaded heroes.

We had three battles with the postion track - one versus the two head snake, one versus the octopus and one versus the sea (I half killed the Aegian Sea you know - ask me about it sometime). We had a couple of simple conflicts - convincing the captain to take us to the other island and making our way through the enemy camp and into the beseiged city.

Over all we spent about about 5 hours playing, which was perhaps a bit long without a break. However, we only really started to flag towards the end and that was lack of food rather than boredom (although I did manage to see off two tubes of Pringles and eight pints of diet soda; so maybe I was suffering from salt/artificial sweetner poisoning).

I blew through a lot of my skills in the fight against the snake. I kept on taxing my skills to try and get advantages against the monster, and never really recovered. We were too worried to spend much time in r&r as we knew that this would give our nemisis extra striff to throw at us.

Next time we play I will probably use more devine favour and less skill use (I can't remember what it is called - when you roll another skill to try and boost your result and take a point level of exhaustion on the rolled skill). It became clear that a quick bit of prayer could recover lost devine favour a lot faster than I could recover multiple skills; of course, a better Music Skill would have helped; but then what does Sarkophagos, son of Deimos, grandson of dread Ares, grandnephew of almighty Eris, need of the effeit art of music?! Fear me!

All in all, a fun game and the sense that we were battling against a balanced challenge gave a sense of structure often missing from other rpgs. I did find the fiddling with a fist full of dice a bit wearing over time; however that could be easily assuaged by taking an occassional break to rest the brain.

[mysterious hu]

Re-reading Felon's post I think the question he was asking is was it okay that he spent Strife to add extra dice directly to monsters' rolls - for example spending a few points to add an extra die to an attack made by a tenticle minion. Whether this affects the effective Strife Cost of the monster and pushes it over the limit?

One thing I noticed in the game was the clear "grass is greener" effect - where Felon moaned about the feebleness of his monstrocities while we quailed as they rolled a torrent of dice at our exhausted Heroes. Simply because we were not suffering direct injury, it seemed to appear to him that we were sailing thorugh the encounters. From our side of the creeping barrage, we could just view our tattered armour and exhausted skills and wonder if we had the where with all to make it to our next rest stop.

The fact that both sides felt they were being put upon is probably a convincing argument for the system being balanced - however, Felon did admit that he still had 19 strife left over when the dust cleared and Athena told us we had suceeded in our mission. This just makes me think that he eventually let us win - maybe this is the secret to our future success; we just have to withold his food until he gives in!

[John Harper]

Ah, I see. Adding extra d8s directly to a monster's roll isn't technically allowed. What you can do, though, is buy an advantage, and then add the advantage d8 to one roll during the battle. Maybe that's what Felon was doing. The difference is, advantages are specific in-world things, so the heroes could do something clever to make them hard to apply (like running on shore to nullify a 'at home in the water' advantage).

If Felon kicked your butts and also ended with unspent Strife then he is playing very well. :-) Now the gauntlet has been thrown. Can the heroes stomp all his stuff next time and make him run out? That's a special kind of victory.