A major design objective for me with Acts of Evil is that the non-occultist NPCs have a chance to emerge via play as characters of interest, protagonists to the relatively static antagonism of the player characters. The "post-Utrecht reformulation" aims the game more purposefully at this objective by:

1. Making Traits a factor in the killing on non-occultist NPCs
2. Dangling before the players the hope of a possible "happy ending" for a non-occultist NPC, that an occultist might confront Ephactha, fail, choose option #1, and then elevate a Victim with a bunch of traits to a Nobody.

But this is all for naught if players just slaughter each other's characters at the earliest opportunity.

So, I could rework things to keep the player characters alive longer. Maybe when a player fails a roll and you have Direction you can't just kill the character outright, but rather you pay Power on a point for point basis to reduce one of their Aspects. And they die only when the average of their Aspects is less than 1.

But I think that would produce rather protracted and dramatically uninteresting play. You work to get an Aspect up, and another player chips it back down by a point or two. Blech. Characters would advance slowly and painfully. The game could last forever.

And besides, I think I rather like the outright killing. It nicely delivers the message of individual cosmic insignificance.

So I've been thinking about the Tragedy of the Commons. The problem in Acts of Evil is that the duration of the game is a jointly held property. And that for the individual, the rational course of action is always to kill the other player's character when the opportunity presents itself.

"The action of self-interested individuals cannot promote the public good."

So as it stands, Acts of Evil is very nicely modeling the behavior of the corporate entities that inspired it. They pursue their own self-interests so singlemindedly that they find themselves dead and dying on a degraded resource landscape. No one wins.

Except sometimes. Left to their own devices, sometimes a corporate entity does lay waste to the competition.

But how? The Wikipedia article suggests that potential solutions to the Tragedy of the Commons are: privatization, polluter pays, and regulation.

The solution of corporations left to their own devices to the Tragedy of the Commons is...price fixing...monopoly...illegal agreements to carve up the market...basically, privatization of the jointly held property.

Anyway, that's what I'm thinking about. The jointly held property is the duration of the game, as threatened by the deaths of the original group of player characters. Can I mechanize conflict over the privatization of that property, in a way that preserves the cosmic insignificance of abrupt death, but also creates duration for play?

I'm definitely interested in suggestions.

Paul

Paul,

I have to say that I come to this problem from a rather... different direction. Question: why is it that player characters are necessarily and constantly antagonistic towards one another? I don't see anything in the rules to cause this, apart from a lack of anything better to do (which is the root of the pseudo-gamism problem mentioned in the other thread). Are you sure that this is a central conceit of the game? I would imagine that the characters would be distracted by a multitude of other things.

It seems to me that the simplest direction of research for you would be to think of constructive interactions between the occultists. After all, there is a reason for the existence of those social master-rival-underling ties, and the whole idea of an occult tradition is predicated on some kind of social cooperation. So it seems to me that the unmitigated aggressivity is a phenomenon of end-game, and should be a matter of a suitable build-up of tension. Looking at it from this direction, you shouldn't be trying to figure how to keep the game together if the characters are killing each other; you should be figuring out what else there is to do in the game! Social warfare, attrocities, magical rituals, occult archeology, travel to hostile dimensions and all that stuff is necessarily lame and paper-thin if they are not rewarding in themselves, and the player is only doing them because he has to narrate something while waiting for the opportunity to kill the other player's character.

That being said, if killing each other is the point: you'll need a healthy dose of Highlander, for starters ;) After that, focus on limiting aggression. Give the characters only limited venues of attack. This is the "corporate aggression" in metaphor: the only difference between corporate aggression between individuals or institutions and pure violence are a number of laws and limitations those parties are unwilling to break, forcing them to treat each other with surface civility. Translated into the occult metaphor: the occultists are in deadly competition with each other, but also bound by strict rules of engagement, preventing them from annihilating each other directly most of the time. The most important such limitation is of course the chronospatial displacement they suffer from most of the time, but there might be others: vows of obedience or taboo, magical services that cannot be coerced, "the society of magi" overlooking the individuals, magical laws that make magic potent only in suitable situations, and so on. In the magical metaphor the positions of the planets and strands of hair from the victim correspond to secret merger deals and hostile takeovers of corporate law: both are a layer of insulation between human civilization and pure warfare.

Furthermore, if the point is, indeed, privatization of game duration: for your analogy to work, the individual benefit of killing other characters should be larger than the threat of looming game end. However, this is only the case if the players do not want the game to end, in general. It seems to me that this is emphatically not the case with your typical roleplaying game; players very much drive towards game end. Thus I fail to see how this is a Tragedy of the Commons situation. It could conseivably be made into one if you figure some way to make all players suffer from the game ending...

It's rather possible that I'm discussing matters greatly besides your point, but that just goes to show that I'm not following your development logic here.

Translated into the occult metaphor: the occultists are in deadly competition with each other, but also bound by strict rules of engagement, preventing them from annihilating each other directly most of the time. The most important such limitation is of course the chronospatial displacement they suffer from most of the time, but there might be others: vows of obedience or taboo, magical services that cannot be coerced, "the society of magi" overlooking the individuals, magical laws that make magic potent only in suitable situations, and so on. In the magical metaphor the positions of the planets and strands of hair from the victim correspond to secret merger deals and hostile takeovers of corporate law: both are a layer of insulation between human civilization and pure warfare.

Eero is right: the length of the game is not a common resource in the sense of a Tragedy of the Commons. It is not necessarily something that the players wish to maximise, and since the end of the game is also the limitation of the designer's power, I don't think you can easily turn it into something they wish to maximise. (Except by having a 'fun curve' for the game that increases as the game is played longer and longer, but that is undesirable for obvious reasons.)

So I see two basic questions. The first is: how do you keep the game from being ended too quickly? The second is: the Tragedy of the Commons nicely fits the thematic content of the game, so is there some fun and non-contrived way to put it into the game?

In keeping with the wisdom of Eero, who rightly keeps pushing for more substantial in-game content, the first question might be answered along the following lines:

* The rule for killing other occultists stays the same except that (1) you can only kill the other occultist when his roll was a status change he tried to impose on your occultist, and (2) you don't have to have spent the most Power, but you must have spent at least one Power. (So you can only kill my character when my character is trying to lower your status, and you cannot make yourself immune by gathering and spending a lot of Power. There's always a risk.)
* There is a significant benefit to having another occultist as your Underling, and a significant disadvantage to having another occultist as your Teacher. Perhaps only a Teacher can use/kill the other person's victims. Perhaps a Teacher can send his Underling on occult missions. Perhaps something else.

As to the second question - which I'm not sure at all is important to you, but I'll answer it nonetheless - the answer seems obvious. Everybody needs a lot of Power in order to become God. You can get a Tragedy of the Commons by: (1) ensuring that Power can run out, (2) ensuring that it is rational - at some point in the game - to take actions that make Power run out. In other words: limit the number of total nobodies which can appear in the story. Killing a victim gives you a boost you might need; but once the number of victims starts to dwindle, it becomes harder and harder to get Power.

However, I can see that this may hurt the 'cosmic' feel of the game, which in a sense is all about the non-existence of limits, so you may wish to just drop the idea of a Tragedy of the Commons. (If you do drop it, I'll have to make a game about it myself. ;) )

I hope you all feel the energy of this conversation. I think it's every bit as big a deal to Acts of Evil as the horror revealed conversation was to My Life with Master.

In considering the dramatic power of the stories of the non-occultist NPCs as a common resource, in the sense of a Tragedy of the Commons, that players (in their capacity as audience to the events of play) would wish to maximize if individual rational gamist decisions didn't come first, I came up with several different ideas for mechanics that would privatize or otherwise regulate when and how player character deaths could occur. One was a toggle that a player could set via a successful ritual style Resolution Against Underlings. Basically, have a ritual and death is now an option for all scenes, across all players. I'm sure you can see why I set that aside. It either fails to fix the problem, or it totally undercuts the theme of cosmic insignificance and the game becomes tedious and virtually interminable.

But I like the idea of the power of death being a resource that players can fight over.

Here's what I'm thinking now. The power of being able to kill other player characters is a potency. It is initially unpossessed by any of the player characters. And only one character can hold it at a time. A character can learn it (or whatever) if none of the other player characters currently hold it via a successful ritual, performed as a Resolution Against Underlings. If you have it, you can kill another player character, as per the rules, by having Direction over the other character's failure in a scene, and also by directly confronting the other character in a Resolution Against Rivals (or Teachers or Underlings, depending on your current status relative to the other character) and winning, regardless of who spent the most Power. If you fail the direct confrontation roll, the other player can either kill you, which returns the potency to un-held status, or can seize the potency from you.

Probably that needs some work. I'm thinking there needs to be a way to return the potency to un-held status even if a player never uses it in a direct confrontation. But you get the idea. I'm also considering a similar privatization of the ability to re-set Used Capacity to zero. Maybe one would be the "potency of the sword" and one would be the "potency of the coffer" or something. I'd do a couple of others if I could think of them.

So. More stuff to fight about. Additional value for Resolution Against Underlings. Make the game last a little longer, with some stretches of play in which the sword of damocles isn't swinging just above every character's head (but without undercutting the over-arching theme of cosmic insignificance) and maybe some of the NPCs have a chance to get interesting. I'm not at all against the Reservoir Dogs ending, with death across the board and no one even coming close to occult godhood; I just want to skew a little more in favor of the NPCs, so at least in some games there's one who really captures audience interest.

What do you think?

Paul

Here's the trouble. Tragedy of the Commons is, interestingly, one of the ideas that drove the development of Game Theory by Von Neumann et al. For it to be an interesting addition to a game, as Game Theory would teach us, you have to have two things, the common resource, and the other resource gained by exploiting it.

Now, here's the interesting thing. In a game that promotes narrativism, I'm not sure if you ever really have the sorts of resources that players want with the sort of intensity neccessary for Game Theory to apply. That is, largely, Game Theory works for gamism. Competition, basically, where the players are trying for an eventual "win" condition (even if in the real world it's short term being better off than the Jonses).

By far the best implementation of this idea in a game that I've seen is in Republic of Rome. In that game, the "resource" is winning or losing in each case. That is, you win by exploiting Rome. But if you exploit it too much, the game wins (and all the players lose as Rome is conquered by barbarians). This balances perfectly, of course, because the opposing sides of the equation reach equilibruim because they're all or nothing.

If the players don't care about winning the game, then it's not too hard to keep Rome afloat. See my point? If you don't have some "win" condition, I'm not sure that any of this works. If the players are playing collaboratively as they tend to in narrativism games, I'm not seeing the pressure coming out right.

What might work better is to chuck the narrativism, go completely gamism, and make the process of tactical play create inadvertent messages about the theme. Instead of trying to make the players complicit in creating those themes otherwise.

Mike