How balanced is the Spending Strife: Simple Contests?

[Dirk Ackermann]

Hi!

We played Agon for four evenings and most of the time we had mucho fun! To end our latest quest we had to plug (to occlude?) a whole vulcan in order to make the giant, 200 m big living statue, Atlas vulnerable. A true herculaen act! And the fight with the Atlas-Head, swimming on the lava, spitting fiery lava on the heroes, while they tried to keep standing on the swimming broken lands on the lava was a nail-biting-thing!

But!

Opposition Dice. Virtually every time I buyed for 4 or more the dice showed 1 or 2s!!! Meaning, easy earned glory!

We thought that more dice, lets say more d6 combined with "one" high dice would be more sufficient.

What do you think?

MfG

Dirk

[Darren Hill]

I'd say you were just unlucky. My experience is the reverse - I often hammered the players when I spent Strife to raise the dice.

[Dirk Ackermann]

Hi Darren,

I no what you mean. But the inconsistence within a dice like a d12 is just too steep. In our case it seemed that these lucky rolls benefitted only one guy in special. Of course he got far ahead in the race of glory!!!

To minimize this I would like to see another dice procedure. Maybe there was one in the playtests...?

MfG

Dirk

[Darren Hill]

Obviously you can fiddle with the dice if you like, but the dice system is pretty heavily integrated into the system - no-one's going to be able to suggest anything that would allow for an easy change.
In any case, I wouldn't worry too much if one player happened to be lucky with glory. Glory is easily gained, and the relative levels between players can change pretty dramatically. It'll correct itself in time - either due to other players picking contests that the lucky guy is bad at, or more likely, the glory gained from battles dwarfing those simple contest awards (and those battles will be unbalanced, since the lower glory guys will try harder to inflict the bigger wounds and gain glory that way).
For instance, in a battle, if you have only two NPCs, and 4 PCs, the pcs should be getting from 5-20 glory each, or even more, and the way glory is gained for damage inflicted ensures this will be unevenly distributed. It takes a LOT of simple contests to outweigh battles!
I would, though, recommend using not too many high strife simple contests - I stick with d6 and d8 contests most of the time, d10's usually only a couple of times a session, and some sessions didn't see any d12's come out (though if they did, they were always combined with harm!).

[John Harper]

Hey Dirk,

One detail that might be relevant, if I'm reading you right. (If not, no big deal, and you can just ignore this)

The Antagonist only rolls once and compares that result to all the heroes in the simple contest. If the d12 is "unlucky" and rolls low, then most of the heroes will probably beat it. The highest roller will get an extra point of Glory, but that 1 point isn't going to let them run away with things.

Anyway, the antagonist doesn't roll separately against each hero in a simple contest. That would result in some bigger swings and "unfair" challenges.

[Dirk Ackermann]

Thanks for those answers.

@John: we played it right, the one player was just on a very lonely mission...

I think we have to play it more often. So things will even out and the best player will win!

Thanks for this absolutely cool game.

MfG

Dirk

[Darren Hill]

"the one player was just on a very lonely mission"
If this means one player was making contests that others weren't, there are two facts you may not be aware of:

1) If a player is in a contest alone, I think he only gets 1 glory for succeeding and none for failing. No glory is gained for being the highest roller - because there is no competition with the other players. (John, do I have that right?)

2) Any player can always immediately jump into a contest, even if their character was previously established to be somewhere else. The player simply describes how his character happened to turn up just in time, or describes how he is able to influence events at a distance. This is radically different from a lot of games, so it's important that the players realise they can do this.

[John Harper]

Yep, Darren, you're right on both counts.

My post above is a little weird. I talk about an "extra point" of Glory for the highest rolling hero, but that's wrong. I meant to refer to the extra Glory the highest roller gets based on the difficulty of the contest, which would be (for example) 7 points for a 2d12 contest. Just in case I managed to confuse anyone. :-)