[Agora] IRC Playtest

[Josh Roby]

Alright, it took me forever to post this up, but it was a messy file that needed a lot of cleaning up to make it readable.  Now it's pretty!

Agora IRC Playtest from April 15, 2006

Shreyas, DevP, and Vaxalon gave Agora a whirl a couple weekends ago.  We uncovered a lot of textual concerns and clarified some rules questions, so it was good stuff.  I'll post some more comments and questions here later tonight, after dinner.  If any of the participants or anybody else wants to chime in, by all means, don't bother waiting for me.

[Ben Lehman]

Interesting stuff.  I was totally disinterested in your game but now I think it's cool.  It also makes me want to go find a copy of AC.

yrs--
--Ben

[Josh Roby]

Such is the glory of playtest!  Shreyas took a rules system that I had been thinking of one way and then took it in a totally new direction that I hadn't even considered.

It's also gratifying to see the players dealing with the dice with difficulty at first, and then getting the hang of things and moving right along later.  You get that mad-scientist vibe where you want to throw your hands into the sky screaming, "It works!  Live, my creation, live!" ... Ahem.

Rereading through the playtest document, I'm further convinced that I need the Cliffhangers that we're talking about in [Agora] Providing Structure.  There needs to be some story-meat that connects what Tamin was doing with the censor to what she'll be doing in a later scene.

One generalized question I have for the masses is the roll-then-narrate or narrate-then-roll question.  I prefer roll-then-narrate for reasons I laid out during the playtest (in Shreyas' Descent), but I can see some glimmer of validity in the narrate-then-roll camp, too.  Is it more important to know how effective you're going to be before you open your mouth, or is it more important that you contextualize what you're going to roll with actions in the fiction?

I'm also curious as to what folks think about the disparity between Shreyas' Descent and Dev's Descent.  Shreyas' was a long and prolonged struggle that ended in defeat; Dev blew through his opposition like tissue paper.  Since it was a Descent, they both had equal resources at their disposal and the obstacles they faced were also equal in terms of dice, so this is a property of the resolution system itself -- with all things being equal, one conflict can be a rout and the other a crushing defeat.  Is that a problem?  I'm not too sure.

[DevP]

About Shreyas's vs my own Descent scenes, what got me is that aside from some slightly poor dice (but not all that poor), he Shreyas really did all he could and he was out of resources with which to exert influence over that scene; he really had to just take the lumps. The thing I'd watch for is to make sure there aren't other dice situtions where one side gets such a lock on the situation that the other side just has to suck it up. (On the converse side, I almost think that's what happened to me, but the other way around.)

[Shreyas Sampat]

It's an interesting case. I had a fun time watching it in action, but I felt like, playing it, it was needlessly frustrating; it wasn't possible to accomplish anything.

I don't know what to do with this (I still don't have a strong mental picture of the system as a whole); were it me, I would want to enable players to make small, immediately visible victories (less abstract than dice erosion) even during conflicts that they are losing. That way, I cn feel like I lost, but it was worth it.

[Josh Roby]

Can you give me an example of what you mean, Shreyas?  Like when you were dealing with Hosten the Censor, would you have wanted to intimidate him for bonuses in later conflicts with him, or the like?

[Shreyas Sampat]

That's basically it.

Maybe I can explain better by drawing an analogy - it took me this long to reply because I couldn't devise one for the Agora context.

So we are playing Cold Hands Cold Hearts, a game in which the players are dwellers in a village preyed upon by a vampire (or many). I am at the vampire's castle and he is trying to turn my best friend, Lajos, against me. The dice have fallen so that I know he will almost certainly succeed, but I want to make that victory cut him. So when the vampire tells Lajos that I killed his daughter, I tell Lajos that it was because of the mark of the Beast. She was a vampire too.

So now I have admitted the killing and lost a friend forever (that is, the vampy won his stakes), but I have turned him in the vampire's hands, and now Lajos is the enemy of my enemy.

[Shreyas Sampat]

Man, I left out the pivot of that post.

Anyway - this setting of Lajos against the vampire is, in the example, mechanically significant; it denies the vampire access to him as a resource or something. Maybe there's a closed set of mechanically significant characters, and now I've made one of them inaccessible.

[DevP]

Another case to consider: in Dogs, either side can fold to the stakes, and in doing so gets to keep the highest 1 (or 2?) of their remaining dice for the next followup conflict, if there is one; this is an incentive against dragging a conflict out unnecessarily, and a reward for folding on a conflict on your own terms. Is this something like a mechanical version of what you're saying, Shreyas?

[Josh Roby]

Dev -- if you surrender a conflict in Agora, your opponent picks one of your Ideals and boosts it up a die.  This is, incidentally, the only way to ever boost the power of your ideals -- by losing.

Shreyas -- if you won, you could have taken as your spoils a relationship to Hosten and/or a relationship to the governing junta or, technically speaking, you could even take Hosten, and make him one of your Lieutenants.  If you lost, one of your ideals would have been increased by one die.  Do any of those options fit into what you're talking about, or do you mean another sort of player-resource that you could acquire in the middle of a conflict?

[Shreyas Sampat]

Let me preface this by warning you that I'm speaking from the perspective of Tamin's second conflict, which on reflection I decided had stakes I shouldn't have agreed to; this affected my play significantly! (It was the phrase 'wage slave' that did it; I didn't object to Tamin working, but I couldn't play Tamin working without dignity.)

What I'm fumbling around saying here is that I'm in some conflict. I generally don't want to lose the conflict. It's dragging on and I'm fighting tooth and nail to regain competitive ground. What I (think I) need here is for the system to see this and throw me a signal: "Look, you're gonna lose this, but all your efforts are not wasted." Then it punctuates the conflict with something immediately visible, and I can say, "Stop here," without disengaging totally. Or, I can continue, but the conflict hasn't been buzzing along all this time without doing anything; it's already produced some output. (This is connected to my feeling that breakdown and epiphanies are very abstract and their delayed effect makes them less useful to me as indicators of a conflict's pace.)

So, the "your ideal increases by one die if you lose" thing is half there - it does give a valuable incentive to drop a conflict. It doesn't structure the conflict so that I can say, "I have lost the war but this battle is mine."

[Josh Roby]

Shreyas, what if you took all your Burnout dice and could assign them to a one-shot bonus for use later?  Like "Intimidate Hosten 3d4" -- unsure of exactly how they'd interface with the conflict system, but something like that?

And you can only Pull Out after a Challenge/Stand exchange, so there's no realizing you're going to lose this exchange and pulling out before you get whalloped.

[Shreyas Sampat]

It's worth a try; certainly looks less abstract when it generates some kind of named entity. I can't really say more without playing it, at this point.

[DevP]

How often in the dice system to we get cases where a player can make a strong Stand/Challenge but still lose thereafter? That's basically an example of winning some small battle but not the war. (Another analogy is making a strong raise in Dogs but still not winning the stakes.) I suspect that in this dice system, generally if I can pull ahead of my opponent for a given Stand/Challenge, I can stay in the game - the converse is true, and that's the problem.

Here's a proposed mechanic: "Line in the Sand". For a player's Stand or Challenge, after she has rolled in new dice and rerolled others, she may choose to have another reroll of her dice; however, she immediately surrenders to the conflict after she makes this Stand and Challenge.

So what happens here? Give another means for a player to win an exchange but still have been losing the general stakes. The incentive to do this is to make a statement in the fiction, even if there's not a die-mechanical backing. I say "line in the sand" to suggest that you're making some Challenge or Stand that is very important, enough so to lose the larger battle on these terms. If I use this rule in a conflict, I may be losing stakes I care about, but I still have narrated facts about other events that matter to me.

[Josh Roby]

Thing is, Dev, I'm not sure what that Line in the Sand actually accomplishes -- very rarely will that give you a win for the stakes, and will only succeed in you possibly getting a little more Fallout/Burnout for your trouble.

And actually, it's very possible to start off strong and have your nice block of 2s get blown away by epiphanies.  I thought that this would be a rare occurence, but it's actually pretty common once you get into the swing of things.