Agon was the game I left GenCon most wanting to try with my group.  It offers a pretty solid combination of features, not the least of which is an opportunity to get away from some of the heavy narrativist issues juggling for a while and have fun just killing bad guys.  In Agon you don't even need a reason for killing the bad guys...the gods tell you who needs killin.  Nice and straight forward both from play and prep perspectives.

Our game took place on the Island of Halavra.  The players decided to go after the mercenaries and restore the rightful king to the throne. 

To make contact with the royal family who were living in the midst of the captured city they decided to use nothing but bravado to brazenly enter the city and march on to the palace. My game prep had consisted of contacting the royal family as the first objective and establishing how difficult it would be (2d8 Harmful Obstacle Contest), and some suggestions as to which abilities might be tested based on what the players decided to do.  In the game difficulty starts at 2d6 for free but can be bought up with Strife (GM currency) and 2d8 is a moderate difficulty.  The Obstacle Contest means that instead of pass/fail, success is guarenteed (the players WILL overcome the obstacle) so the contest is just to see how much resources it takes to succeed.  This is a nice feature because it means you never have to worry about a roadblock shutting a quest down. 

I had the heroes test Spirit for the attempt and they rolled horribly.  Every single hero failed the test and took Impairment and (since I'd made the Contest "Harmful" as well) Wounds.  I narrated how the mercenaries showed no respect for the greeks, hurling insults and chamber pots at them and treating them as so inconsequential they didn't even try to stop them.  It might have been an opportunity for some Hubris, but as the first contest of the game I don't think anyone was thinking in those terms yet.

After getting cleaned up at the palace, the widowed queen sent them on a mission to recover the royal crown which had been smuggled out of the city to keep it safe from the mercenaries.  I had this objective set up as a 2d6 Simple Contest.  Since there were many different options as to how the heroes could find out where the local hero Brison had taken the crown I didn't make it an obstacle test.  If they failed, they'd just have to try something else.  As it was they succeeded, and followed the trail to the woods where they found the body of Brison tossed in a ditch with the Crown missing.

Here Keith asked to make a Hunting test to discover what had happened and rolled ridiculously well netting 8 total Victories in the process.  I had a bit of fun playing "CSI: Ancient Greece" using the high roll to justify explaining every little thing that happened to Brison including the exact cause of death and the number of creatures currently sneaking up on the party.  I had to ad hoc a bit of a rule here.  In the game Victories convert into Advantages that can be used in the future, but the table only goes up to 3 (i.e. 3 Victories = 1d10 Advantage).  The rules don't say what to do with 8 Victories, so I just gave him two d10 and a d8 to be used in the upcoming attack by the Shadow Apes who begain tossing rocks from the trees.

Here's where things bogged a little bit.  A combination of rules learning curve and not knowing yet how many minions make for a good fight caused the battle with the Shadow Apes to drag on well past the time it had stopped being interesting.  Additionally there are a few rules that proved too fiddly for my tastes in practice and some modifiers that led to a bit too much whiffing against minions who are supposed to go down quickly.  The rules set a limit for how many minions can be in a battle, and for this party the limit was 20.  I only used 10 but that was way too many.  With that many minions it should be a question of how many a hero can kill in a single round, not whether or not the hero can even hit one.  Luke had talked about some issues with whiffing in This Thread and while I pointed out numerous ways built into the system to avoid whiffing, the numerous negative modifiers proved to powerful for most of those ways and caused more whiffs than I like to see.

So here's what I've decided to try for next week's game:

Armor penalties gone.  In Agon there is no money, you can take whatever you want and the balance comes in from the tradeoff between bonuses and penalties.  Armor gives you the ability to shrug off damage, but comes at the price of penalties to attack.  Sounds good, but in practice adding in penalties to every attack roll proved annoying and contributed to the whiff factor.  So, I'm going to replace the penalties with Advantage Dice.  If you have armor your advantage comes from being able to avoid damage.  If you don't have armor your advantage comes from being more manueverable.  Being "more maneuverable" is represented in the current rules by simply not getting hit with armor penalties.  I'm just going to hand out Advantage Dice inversely to the Armor Dice.  0 Armor gives no Armor Die and 1d10 Advantage Die. 1 piece of armor gives 1d6 Armor Die and 1d8 Advantage Die.  2 pieces of armor gives 1d8 Armor Die and 1d6 Advantage Die.  3 pieces of armor gives 1d10 Armor Die and no Advantage Die.  The Advantage Die can be used once per battle (like all Advantage Dice) on Attack, Defense (dodging), or Positioning rolls.  Not only is this easier to manage but eliminating the built in penalty everyone was suffering should help with the whiffing.

Positioning Penalties gone.  The positioning rules are pretty cool, and will become more so as we start to figure out the interrelationship with weapon ranges and the like.  This game there were too many detracting factors going on for the players to really see the potential in the system.  One of the detracting factors was Positioning Penalties.  If you get within optimum range for your weapon you have no penalty.  But outside optimum range you get hit with -2 or -4 on your attacks.  When you are rolling mostly d6s with the occassional d8 and a rare d10...-2 is HUGE and greatly contributed to whiffage.  Its also a bit annoying to have to perform math (even simple math) when the core system (roll a bunch of dice and take the highest) is so elegant and simple.  So, once again I turn to the existing Advantage system.  If you're one step outside of optimal range instead of getting a -2 to attack, your opponent gets a 1d6 Advantage die to their defense.  If you're two steps outside of optimal range instead of getting a -4 to attack, your opponent gets a 1d8 Advantage to their defense.  While the advantage to the defense still makes attacks more difficult rolling an extra 1d6 is much less of a issue than getting hit with a -2 to your best roll and so should help reduce the whiffing.  Plus it should be relatively easy to implement, simply pick up an extra die with your left hand before rolling.  No math involved.

I had some thoughts regarding the minions too, but I hate to change too much at a time.  If the whiffs are curtailed, minions might start going down quickly like a good minion should, so that issue may well take care of itself.

My primary plan here is, as much as possible, to replace instances of modifiers to the die rolls with Advantage Dice using the core Advantage Dice system.  Less math, more consistancy, and I think a more reliable probability curve less prone to whiffs.  I'm tempted to do the same thing with the Hero Abilties (since they are currently +2 in many cases) but they are HERO abilities, and so the actual bonus putting you above the range of mere mortals seems a desireable feature at this point.

So the above two changes are what I'm going to bring to the table next week and see how it goes.

[edited at the author's request to fix link - RE]

It sounds like a fun session, especially the heroes being scornfully pelted with crockery :)

Valamir wrote:
Additionally there are a few rules that proved too fiddly for my tastes in practice and some modifiers that led to a bit too much whiffing against minions who are supposed to go down quickly.  The rules set a limit for how many minions can be in a battle, and for this party the limit was 20.  I only used 10 but that was way too many.  With that many minions it should be a question of how many a hero can kill in a single round, not whether or not the hero can even hit one.

Darren wrote:
I don't see Minions the same way. Since heroes usually only attack once a round (unless using divine favour), the above section in bold doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

It's perfectly reasonable to me to have players try to kill minions in a round and fail - they can put up a good defence, but even with the maximum number they are not going to kill the pcs.

I can easily believe that there's a better way to handle armour, but I do see problems with your advantage die system, because of the way you can change your armour level between combat rounds (during the Break). So, I might start off with no armour, get the d10 advantage die and use it, then immediately jump to full armour. Also, if I'm playing a reasonably competent fighter with a d10 weapon and a d6 or d8 name, I see only two worthwhile options: the d10 advantage die and no armour (maybe!), or the no advantage die and full armour - with the emphasis on the last. I think you'll see a lot less variety in the stuff people wear. (My players tend to dump their armour once it gets to a d4 rating.)

While this can be pretty tiring in a very long battle with lots of opponents (or facing foes with plenty of abilities high enough to use for Creative Abilities or Helping each other), I think it would have been a lot less fun if the victories had been easier. More importantly, the cost for those rerolls, leading to impairments, affects the game's strife economy. Making players successes easier has a knock on effect there - the Strife bonus for taking Interludes should probably be increased in that case, since players won't need to take as many.
(After that last mega-fight, one hero had 13 impairments!, and several had 3-4 wounds.)

Likewise, I'm not keen on the Advantage Die system for positioning. It seriously weakens the need to make good use of positioning. Dropping the penalties by half is about as far as I'd go, or maybe: On Position +1, out by 1: +0, Out by 2: -2.

But I'm reasonably happy with it. I think frequent failure is actually a feature of the system. The so-called whiff factor heightens the tension in the PvP part of the game, where players are jostling to be the one who delivers that 5 or 6 point wound, and a lot of that tension will diminish if you can make it a lot easier for them to hit when they really need to. In the system as it stands, so the archer can be praying that the main villain, with one wound remaining, will survive all those attacks by sword and spear wielders - and he just might! Player behaviour - the way they divvy themselves up between opponents - will change if they can hit more reliably.

Maybe.  You could be absolutely right and I just don't have the patience for long drawn out combat-by-attrition any more.  One of the other ideas on my back burner is reducing the wound levels to 4 to make things (and heroes) go down quicker and resolve the combat in fewer rounds.  I'm not going to do that until I see how the above goes, but its in my quiver.  Why?  Not because there's anything broken with 6 levels...but for me (and even more so for the majority of the group I'm playing with) battles that go on longer than 6 rounds result in glazed over eyes and boredom. 

With 4 heroes, 1 NPC and 12 Minions there are:
6 Positioning Rolls (one per hero, 1 per NPC, 1 for the Minions as a group)
8 attack rolls (one per hero, 1 per NPC, 3 for Minions in groups of 4) and
8 defense rolls (1 vs. each attack).

Thats 22 dice rolls per exchange. 
In 6 exchanges that 132 fist fulls of dice hitting the table...

that's the extreme limit of what I'm capable of maintaining interest in.  Thats not even counting time spent on making the Positioning moves, figuring out the attack order, and dicing off for order ties.  No matter how cool the monster or dramatic the encounter 132 dice rolls justs sucks the excitment out of anything for me.  That's not saying anything bad about Agon...but it is saying something about what I need to do to keep my players interested in it.

Minions are a resource hog for the heroes. Yes, you need to spend Divine Favor and take Armor hits to face their attacks. Then you cut them down like chaff (that's what "attack again" is for). If the heroes manage an ambush, they should kill 3 minions per hero on the first exchange. That's six divine favor, sure, but it saves you a lot of grief, and getting divine favor back is the easiest thing in the game. Your 4 heroes should reliably kill 8 minions right off the bat, if they're spending their resources well.

So, yeah, I agree with you. Minions can be nasty. Too nasty? Depends on your tastes, I guess. In my games, they die by the score and the heroes rarely take a scratch -- minions have never come close to defeating a hero. But my guys go through divine favor like water. That's what it's there for. Minions most often end up costing an Interlude to sacrifice, maybe a wound or two, and that's pretty much it.

Now, my super awesome minions with all kinds of gnarly powers... those guys are gonna kick ass. But they can hardly be described as "mooks" at that point, can they?

Having said all that, I'm always open to ideas about improving the minion rules (and Ralph has been full of awesome ideas for this game). I'm not saying they're perfect as-is or anything.

Valamir wrote:
Minions don't even get names of their own, so to me whether you call them minions or mooks is semantics.  They're there to make the heroes look good.

It's perfectly reasonable to me to have players try to kill minions in a round and fail - they can put up a good defence, but even with the maximum number they are not going to kill the pcs.

You playing with the same rules as me?  The current ganging up rules have 6 minions rolling 7d6+6.  That's statistically pretty darn likely to roll a 12 attack.

If you have  4 heroes killing 1 minion for certain per turn each, they'll almost certainly suffer (barring Favor, Armor, or Fate)  5+4+3+2+1 = 15 wounds...

I'm not ready to change the minion rules yet until I see how the other changes go, but I had 4 heroes against 10 minions and the battle went on far too long and I had the last 6 minions run away because the universal player opinion was they (and I) were tired of rolling.

Well, I'm not a big fan of the change armor between rounds rule anyway, so I'm not too bothered by it.  I don't see the logic in having the hydra stand around waiting while a hero futzes with the straps of his greaves.

the breastplate,   Just throw that option out and problem solved.  I don't understand your less variety comment at all.  Currently 1d8 armor is the most optimal option as players are highly motivated to avoid whichever piece gives them the attack penalty to their favored weapon.  If I'm melee fighting I'll wear helmet and greaves, and if I'm missile fighting I'll wear breastplate and greaves.  ESPECIALLY if you let players switch armor around between exchanges, why would I ever voluntarily eat a -1 attack?  So its not like all 4 options are equally usefull currently.  But aside from that, I'm not following your logic with my trial rule.  Why is 1d8 armor 1d6 Advantage any less optimal than 1d10 armor 0 advantage?

I'm going to reserve detailed comment on the Stife system until I finish up a complete Island.  Without seeing the full cycle its impossible to tell whether Strife is too easy or hard to come by or just right.

Pure luck and spending Favor will win the day if I lose the Positioning game...that doesn't sound fun to me, and in practice I didn't find it fun. 

Even when I was on the winning side I didn't find it fun.  Its a trivial matter for the Antagonist to design NPCs and Minions that will stomp all over the party in the Positioning game.  d10 Athletics, d10 Cunning, Ambush, Swift, and 3d8 worth of Advantages are all pretty darn effective at making the range anything I want it to be.  If the bad guys are armed with Javelin based weapons and the heroes aren't the Antagonist will be able to keep most of the heroes at a positioning disadvantage pretty easily.  Swift is particularly nasty in this regard as it can be used any time.  With the positioning penalties being so high using anything but a Javelin is a crap shoot. 

Darren wrote: But I'm reasonably happy with it. I think frequent failure is actually a feature of the system. The so-called whiff factor heightens the tension in the PvP part of the game, where players are jostling to be the one who delivers that 5 or 6 point wound, and a lot of that tension will diminish if you can make it a lot easier for them to hit when they really need to. In the system as it stands, so the archer can be praying that the main villain, with one wound remaining, will survive all those attacks by sword and spear wielders - and he just might! Player behaviour - the way they divvy themselves up between opponents - will change if they can hit more reliably.

Ralph wrote: Maybe.  You could be absolutely right and I just don't have the patience for long drawn out combat-by-attrition any more.  One of the other ideas on my back burner is reducing the wound levels to 4 to make things (and heroes) go down quicker and resolve the combat in fewer rounds.  I'm not going to do that until I see how the above goes, but its in my quiver.  Why?  Not because there's anything broken with 6 levels...but for me (and even more so for the majority of the group I'm playing with) battles that go on longer than 6 rounds result in glazed over eyes and boredom. 

I considered dropping the wounds in TSOY to 4 for the same reason, and - if I was playing a long campaign - I could see that being an option that I used for Agon (while keeping the 6-wound fights for the important, pre-prepared battles). I think something like this might be a better solution than altering positioning. Armour, as I mentioned, I'm not sure about: my players don't seem to mind the -1 attacks.
Alternatively, since the positioning phase is the real heavy-thought and time-draining part of the game (all those dice rolls seem to fly by pretty quickly in comparison - for me at least), maybe you might look at adopting the Non-combat Battle positioning system, or some variant of it. It does completely change the dynamics of the weapons, but I'm sure variant rules could be worked out to maintain some of their key attributes.

Oops - messed up the quotes at the end there. The last paragraph is part of my reply.

Getting away from discussing positioning and minions for a moment, I remembered something else about that big fight with 2 NPCs and 10 Minions.

During the fight, as I marked off the latest use of Might/Wrestling to negate a hit on Protus, one of the NPCs, one of the players, Gary, looked upset. "How did he do that, he's used it about five times!" I had the impression he was suspicious of some GM illusionist technique (without using that vocabulary) to make the fight last longer. I explained how it worked, and he looked mollified, but still a little frustrated.
Later in the fight, after Protus had ran out of Might & Wrestling (eight uses!), he called on his leader, Doreis, who used his Athletics to help him evade another blow. At which point the players groaned, but in a fun way, as Gary said, almost joyfully, "they can help each other, too!"

After the fight, Gary's hero had increased his Name die to d10. "Of course, that makes you the bad guys prime target, now," I told him. "What! Why?" he said, with a look that said, that's not fair!
I told him that if I, the Antagonist, can Defeat him, I get a number of Strife tokens equal to his Name die - and he's worth more than the other characters now.
"Ah!" he said, smiling. "That makes sense. Bring them on!"

Both of which go to show that if a game provides clear mechanical justifications for the GM to act like a bastard, the players will accept it, and even embrace it!

Darren wrote:

A couple of things you're overlooking are: Positioning and Attrition.
if you have bands of 6 mooks, they aren't going to stay together long. Only 1 or 2 PCs need to beat the  mooks each round, in addition to killing 1 or 2, to wipe out a mook groups effectiveness. Now opposition of, say, 3 groups of 6 minions will be frightening for a few rounds, but it's a safe bet that close to half of their hits are going to be negated by armour for those early rounds, and some of them are still going to be low enough to be cancelled via Helping without too many resources.
I've done three big mook battles, two with 15-16 Mooks, and another with 10 Minions and 2 NPCs, each against 5 PCs, using Mook groups of size 4-6, and the same thing happened in all of them. The first couple or few rounds the Mooks were frightening, inflicting wounds where the PCs were relying on armour to cause them to glance off, or spending resources to maybe just reduce the level of the wound (a questionably practice in my view).
And each round after that the mooks became less and less of a threat, struggling to regroup into useful numbers.
Also, my players didn't use Divine Favour to get extra attacks in the early round, though as they fight more mooks, that idea may occur to them.

It's because an advantage die only applies once per battle, and it's very cheap to get other ways (1 divine favour, a reroll from an ability your not that bothered about) .

Hey, I was one of the players in question.  First, some disclosure.  I'm measuring Agon against my game experience with Rune, Robin Laws' competitive Viking RPG, which I played with my former group in Erie.  Unknown Armies on Friday, Rune on Sunday.  Those were the days....  I bring this up both to establish my bona fides as being able to enter into and enjoy the sort of competitive play that Agon encourages and to establish the frame of reference from which I'm operating.

I'm also going to acknowledge that this was my first play of Agon, and I haven't read the rulebook.  Therefore, it's quite possible that there are strategies that I'm missing.

So, first off, I totally acknowledge your point when you say:

Both of which go to show that if a game provides clear mechanical justifications for the GM to act like a bastard, the players will accept it, and even embrace it!

Despite some of the rhetoric in the book, the role of the Antagonist is not to design opponents that can stomp all over the players. It's to provide a consistent challenge that the players compete against each other to do well against. So, you could (and should) design those "d10 Athletics, d10 Cunning, Ambush, Swift" NPCs, but if you're doing it too often the players have every reason to cry foul. (I've certainly been enjoying building some obscene NPCs.)

Valamir wrote:
There's a lot of Minions and if players are using their Positions to move individual Minions instead of themselves, they may break up a group or two but they aren't moving themself into optimum position for future rounds (except against maybe the one mook they moved) nor are they moving themselves out of optimum position for the Minions.

Assuming Minions can group and regroup freely (as opposed to having fixed groups) which the rules imply, Its not that hard on the Minions next positioning roll (either later than exchange if they rolled high, or next round) to get them back together.

Also, early rounds of my minion battles (except for the ambush against the PCs) have been dominated by javelins or bows, and everyone has been at optimum range for a round or two. They get a +1 to your roll (armour notwithstanding), and ties go with attacker, so even if the minions roll well for defence, there's still a good chance some of them get hit. I'm not sure this has been much of an influence, but I wondered if your players have been changing weapons or sticking with a particular weapon regardless of range.

Agon is not meant as a Rune replacement. Rune is an awesome game. It does many cool things and players looking for those things should play Rune.

One of the key differences is that the Antagonist is not competing with the players at all. Strife is a pacing mechanic, not a resource for GM vs player conflict. The Strife budget makes the GM solve a problem with scenario creation, namely, where does the hurt land? Will it be easy and then tough, tough then easier, or somewhat tough all the way through? When the GM makes an encounter very tough, then the heroes have to help each other more, and the PvP aspect may diminish (it might not, given a very cutthroat player). But that means that other contests will be easier (due to the limited budget) so the PvP will come out more strongly later.

It's worth noting that the Antagonist gets nothing for beating the heroes other than a little more juice to beat them up some more. That resource cycle is telling, in terms of intended game play. Heroes can never be killed, and even defeating a hero is very hard to do (fleeing is a great option). The Antagonist has the ability to put the heroes under pressure of various amounts, to force them to make hard choices about how to spend their resources in relation to the other heroes. Beating up NPCs is not the game. The NPCs will ultimately lose, that's a given. The game revolves around beating up NPCs in a way that maximizes reward for your hero and minimizes resource cost. Oaths, as has been rightly pointed out, are one of the key factors to this game.

It sounds like you guys faced a really challenging NPC battle as your very first taste of play. Since the various strategies (and rules trouble-spots) were unknown to you, I think you had to flail about a bit. Your experience with the positioning game, and the attendant "boring combat" issues are very different from my own experience and that of other players I've heard from. Interesting set-pieces and terrain use are a key part of Agon play, for example, but may not be as immediately apparent to first-time players.

Still, I do see some rough spots in the rules, in terms of stacking penalties. They can get kind of nasty at times. Against really tough foes, I can see how things could get frustrating. In Agon, it rarely makes sense to stay in a battle that you are losing that badly, though. Escape, planning for a tactical edge (and a few Advantage dice), some refreshment, and an ambush attempt later would have been another way to deal with the situation. The "locked in, to the bitter end" battle style common to many fighty RPGs is not always the best style for Agon.

Thanks for the detailed feedback, and I hope your future games of Agon go more smoothly.

Damn. I spend half an our writing a reply, and John has said what I was planning to say, more concisely.

One thing.

Flavorful Battle Sequences

John wrote:
Interesting set-pieces and terrain use are a key part of Agon play, for example, but may not be as immediately apparent to first-time players.