Over the February 20th weekend, six gamers from Ottawa, Detroit and Toronto converged on an unsuspecting suite hotel in Toronto to consume sushi and to playtest Paul Czege's Acts of Evil. Previous to the weekend, we generated & selected starting Terrenes (we ended up with pre-great purge Stalinist Russia, the drug-soaked world of 70s Rock Stars and the antediluvian city of Jericho during the reign of king Cadmus; we cast aside Victorian England and Egypt during the reign of the Pharaohs.) We generated our Occultists via email.

There were a number of irregularities about this playtest as compared to a more traditional setup. However, the greatest of these differences was undoubtedly its duration. We played for what must have been 10+ hours, with breaks for lunch and dinner. During the post-game feedback session, Paul revealed that the session's duration was difficult for him – he had only prepared a given amount of situation for each Terrene, and he had chewed through it by approximately the 2/3 mark.

None of this is surprising (nor does it require "fixing" – I can't see a marathon session worth designing around.) However, it got me to thinking about a specific frustration I had during play. The current iteration of Acts of Evil empowers the GM to frame a scene more or less as he likes; the only real restraint is that the GM should frame a scene that he thinks will be interesting to the Occultist. It is the Player's responsibility to explore that scene from within the Occultist's shoes. This combination of GM & player duties is a direct rebuttal to an observed style of play from an earlier rules-set (those rules tended to engender non-productive competitive play.)

Here's the problem: in any given scene, my mind's racing ahead to the next scene! I'm coming up with cool ideas for stuff I'd like to do with my character. This spontaneous idea-generation clashes very powerfully with the GM-as-sole-scene-framer paradigm.

I feel almost as strongly as I do about revising the ligature rules that the scene framing rules need retooling. The thought that pops to mind as I type is to allow the players to frame the occasional scene as a creative outlet. By all means, keep the GM-framed 'exploratory' scenes in the game! However, there needs to be a balance between GM-framed and Player-framed scenes.

Here's a thought: Player-mandated scenes can only occur with NPCs with existing Purpose. Furthermore, the scene framing must either: 1. establish/drive towards a Soul's Desire or 2. antagonize an existing Soul's Desire.

Hmmm...
Darcy

Hey Darcy,

Player framing of scenes is pretty much out of scope for Acts of Evil. (The one small exception is the rules for Afflicting, but if I can figure out how to make Afflicting work without player scene framing I'll eliminate it entirely from the game.)

How might play of Acts of Evil deliver what you need if it can't be via scene framing?

Paul

Hey Paul,

Well, if I can't frame the occasional scene for myself, you'll need some sort of a check valve for the players' creative energy.  Otherwise, you'll end up with the cock-blocking behaviour that I exhibited in the scene where Vyascheslav attempted to recruit me into the conspiracy to extract Rasputin.

Hmmm...

What if the players have the authority to introduce/requisition individual NPCs into the situation you present?

In my case, I would have been all over Vyascheslav's proposal like flies on shit if the following conversation had played out:

Paul: "So, Molotov's trying to get you to go to Siberia with him to lure Rasputin out of a bear cave."
Darcy: "Hmmm.  I'm not at all interested.  However, if you could put Olga into the equation -- maybe as an obstacle? -- I'm in."
Paul: "Who's Olga?"
Darcy: "Oh.  She's the girl that I just sicked Molotov's NKVD goons on, or tried to."
Paul: "You mean the one that you used as a Ligature with the 70's Rock Scene?"
Darcy: "That's the one."

Is there an up-to-date text for the game somewhere? I'd be interested in checking it out. No real opportunity to play this spring, though, what with my own projects going full blast.

I like GM-only scene framing. Makes the issue considerably cleaner. Are individual scenes supposed to have strong continuity, or should the players orient themselves to take each scene essentially as separate vignettes?

Eero, my working text is currently a mess of inscrutable deletions, changes, and marginalia on the ashcan text of almost two years ago, probably understandable only by me. I will do a full rewrite before asking anyone to look it over.

Darcy, what I mean by how do I "deliver what you need" is how do I get you from playing the game with an author mindset to playing from a character discovery/exploration mindset? How do I get you to relax and enjoy your occult powers and the serendipity of the circumstances you find yourself in?

Paul

Hey Paul,

Why not the Trollbabe rule which is also implicit in Sorcerer? Any player can request or suggest a scene (in the brute sense of starting time and place, not in terms of content once it starts), but the GM and only the GM has authority over opening and closing scenes.

That way Darcy can say "How about?" and you can feel a little less one-man heat late in play, without giving up the crucial GM-only role.

Best, Ron

Hey Ron,

Can you give some examples of what you consider acceptable permutations of "the brute sense of starting time and place, not in terms of content once it starts"? Is, "how about a scene with Alexei (a player's character) and Olga (a previously seen NPC) before she leaves for the ballet" acceptable?

Paul

Having been in a couple early playtests I'm glad to see this still being worked on.

Paul, can you share some of the design choices behind the no-player-scene-framing hard line approach?

My instinct says that an occult leader is like a spider in the midst of his web...the puppeteer pulling the strings of other people's destinies...the master mind driving towards his cosmic scheme.  All of that is delusion but its a powerful delusion, I think.  For the player to feel like an occult master mind, don't they have to at least be able to pretend that they're in the driver's seat sometimes?  And isn't the easiest way to give the player some of that feeling to allow them to frame some scenes...aha...at last my grand plan is coming to fruition?

Hey Darcy,

Back when the Michigan contingent <a href="http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=8682.0">played EPICS, a game that aims to be about initially sketchy characters getting defined through play, we saw players chewing past or ignoring situations and NPCs (that in retrospect they would say were interesting), in an effort to move quickly to something else, in an effort to find specific storylines and themes for their characters.

What I realized as the problem was players not having actually created sketchy charaters. They had created fleshed out characters, with some embedded themes, and then pared them back to the limited requirements of chargen.

Is this what you did?

I admit that my prep wasn't well suited to the aristocracy vs. Stalinism interest that you had clearly baked into your character, but even so, would you have played differently if you'd been starting with a genuinely sketchy character?

Paul

Hey Ralph,

(Yeah, I can't get the damn thing out of my head.)

What if the game isn't about proactive "spider in the web" characters with grand plans. What if it's about power, and pain, and living and reacting in the moment, and not about long term plans at all?

How do I get players out of the planning mindset? My advice to "live in the moment and express your curiousity from a position of confidence in your power" hasn't been equal to the task.

Paul

I found in our campaign that the way to work with long-term planning is to allow the characters to make their plans, but frame scenes according to the rules anyway. So a character might be big on corrupting the Council of Trent, but the next scene happens in modern Ukraine. WTF? Nothing prevents us from providing a brief segue - the character already completed his plans in Trent, or this is a flashback/forward, or whatever. And the GM could frame back into Trent later if he felt like it - and most importantly, if there were some important NPCs there. We didn't find any great difficulty in playing like this, it just added to the fantastic, disjointed wibe of the game.

Of course, I don't know if that sort of logic works if you remove the scene framing constraints and just allow the GM to frame whatever he wants. Then it becomes more of a GM control issue, as he runs over the Trent plan with his fascist jackboot. From this viewpoint I wouldn't mind having some sort of mechanical support for the GM who needs to determine whether the next scene continues a given story, say, or jumps onto something else. Could be literally that - some resource constraint or dice roll or something determines whether the current story continues or whether the GM needs to jump into something else for the next scene.

Well, I'm not sure that the way to make the game about one thing is to block and deny everything else.

I think more of a bait and switch strategy would be more effective.  I think in that scenario people would accept your advice as making the switch palatable and the bait would allow them to get their creative juice on.  Even in movies where the movie isn't "about" a thing...if the audience expects to see that thing, its shown just long enough to establish it before moving on.

Hey Ralph,

"I think in that scenario people would accept your advice as making the switch palatable and the bait would allow them to get their creative juice on.  Even in movies where the movie isn't "about" a thing...if the audience expects to see that thing, its shown just long enough to establish it before moving on."

I'm not following. What advice? Eero's design advice? Some advice from the hypothetical Acts of Evil GM to his players? My advice to players to "live in the moment and express your curiousity from a position of confidence in your power"? If so, what's the bait?

You're responding to me? Or to Eero?

Paul

Sorry, yes, your advice to "live in the moment".  I think players are thinking one thing when they hear occult leaders...cults...cultists...and you have to let them play in that space a bit before guiding them elsewhere...to get it out of their system so to speak.

When I hear "power, and pain, and living and reacting in the moment" I get nothing.  No ideas bounce at at me, no characters bounce out at me, no archetypes come to mind,  no scene ideas pop into my head.  I don't yet know how to BE that character.

When I hear "cult leaders inflicting pain on innocent victims to pursue their occult studies"  I get lots of stuff.  I get characters, I get scenes, I get images and visions. 

I think there's probably a need to let players indulge in what they see for awhile.

Hi Paul,

Crap.  Get the 'flu and everyone has an opinion.

I will be back to this thread ASAP -- both to answer your 2 pending questions (2!) and to comment on Ron and Ralph's points.

Sorry,
D

Paul wrote:
What if the game isn't about proactive "spider in the web" characters with grand plans. What if it's about power, and pain, and living and reacting in the moment, and not about long term plans at all?

How do I get players out of the planning mindset? My advice to "live in the moment and express your curiousity from a position of confidence in your power" hasn't been equal to the task.

Hey,

DWeird wrote:
As far as I can gather, you're looking not so much for a general way to show what play is about as much as to show what *specific* way of being evil your game is about... If that's about right, I think the disctinction you're looking for is between the Magnificient Bastard and the Chessmaster.

To help find the answer it might help to articulate what about this "live in the moment and express your curiousity from a position of confidence in your power" makes it so important / of so much interest to you.  If you're working this hard to avoid the chessmaster in favor of the magnificent bastard there must be a very compelling reason.

Perhaps the act of articulating what exactly it is you find so useful / appealing / desireable / important to the entire purpose of the game in this distinction will help drill in on the missing piece of the puzzle.

Hey Ralph,

Two reasons, I think:

1. One of my design goals for Acts of Evil is to make a game that trains me to be better at prep. That is, it's an intensive course in creating cinematically compelling settings and situations. And basically with the current mechanics I've achieved this. And I love it. I don't run My Life with Master much anymore, because I've learned what it can teach, but I remain excited about prepping Acts of Evil. Except if the players don't live in the moment, as magnificent bastards, then in play I'm not leveraging my prep, I'm improvising. The hobby is increasingly full of no-prep/lo-prep story games. Acts of Evil is about prep.

2. The secret inspiration for the equations that define the actions of the player character occultists in Acts of Evil are my personal perceptions (and frustrations) with corporate entities. And although I'm aware of corporations that have planned and executed some pretty evil shit over the long term, my most direct and frustrating personal experiences with evil by corporations is that it accrues from self-absorbed tactical tunnel vision and ego-based decisions. In retrospect it might seem like a grand malevolent plan, but in reality it's the gameplay of an escalating series of tactical decisions gone amorally amok. Anyway, even if this isn't true, Acts of Evil makes the argument that it is.

And I think designing the game has captured and held my attention (when other projects of mine have idled) is because those two goals are so congruent. The magnificent bastard needs compelling situations and circumstances to react to, and upon which to explore and discover his occult identity. And the GM interested in developing his prep skills needs characters interested in growing and developing upon the energy he bakes into his situations.

Are we drilling in?

Paul

Yes...I will reread this a few times to let it gell a bit.

In the mean time, remind me how the initial character creation and setting creation works in brief (I forget what those unique setting instances are called). 

Dang lack of edit button...

...Also upack "prep" for me.  What sort of prep are you excited about, want AoE to recquire GMs do.  There are, of course, significant differences in prepping NPCs with agendas vs. prepping plotlines.

The settings are called Terrenes. The player characters may all start in separate Terrenes, but likely at least a couple of them will start in the same Terrene. Regardless, they are all members of the same Onset, which is a group of occultists with true potential for chthonic godhood who are all somewhat aware of each other, even if they're strewn throughout time and space.

A starting character sketchily consists of a name, numeric stats, and a one sentence public description representing the entirety of what the other members of the Onset truly know about you.

For prep, the text instructs you (the prospective GM) to go to Wikipedia and read about the Terrenes chosen by the players, and to follow whatever links capture your interest. (Wikipedia turns out to be the game's killer app.) Let your reading inspire you to imagine an endeavor of occultism specific to each Terrene; NPCs with a different understanding of the supernatural and the occult from the tradition of the player characters are up to something.

As an example, one of the Terrenes in a recent playtest was the middle of the English Civil War in the year 1646. I prepped that Royalists, including Prince Rupert of the Rhine, were endeavoring to raise the corpse of William Laud, the Archbishop of Canterbury beheaded by Parliament, so that he could invest King Charles with the sword Excalibur, which Rupert had brought home from Normandy in secret. They believe the Royalists can win the war if Charles leads the army bearing Excalibur.

And in play you don't keep this occultism secret. You reveal it via establishing narration (sort of a "what is going on" dramatic monlogue when the GM frames into a new Terrene) and roleplay of NPCs. The intended effect on play is to naturally position the Manaster tradition and actions of the player occultists in interesting apposition to other occultism.

So the hard data of prep for a given Terrene is the endeavor of occultism, the names of NPCs you might use in the Terrene, and a few rough ideas for situations involving the NPCs into which you might frame the player character. Likely during a session you won't per player need more than three or four scenes in a Terrene. You'll prep more characters and more scene/situations between sessions, basing them naturally on how things have played out.

Paul

Excellent, thanks.

I've got idea #1 starting to form in my head...I'm gonna sleep on it and revisit.  Look for it sometime this weekend.

I've got idea #2 as kind of a vague notion at this point.  I'll let that slosh around a bit, but to feed into it, let me ask one more question.

Thinking from a fictional perspective (not a mechanics one, or a player's interest one) what causes an PC occultist to care about Rupert and Charles and Excaliber?  What's their fictional motivation for getting mixxed up in that mess?

Hey Ralph,

I think there are two ways a player gets engaged.

1. I'm a character with true power over my flesh, voice, imagaination, and memory in interesting and exotic circumstances. If the GM frames into a bullfight arena in Pamplona in 1923, I want to participate. I want to grow horns and lock horns with the bull. If he puts me into the Vatican, I want to steal the Shroud of Turin and sweet-talk the cleaning lady into making it into a shirt for me.

2. I chose England in 1646 because I'm interested in the setting. Though I'm not a protagonist the GM engages me by having the situation treat me as significant, same as in Trollbabe.

Human beings like to think they have rational reasons for the choices they make. In reality a lot of our choices are heavily fueled by neurobiology. The presence of possible rewards (attention, power, respect, thrills, new experiences) in an environment triggers our pursuit of them. So the in fiction reason for getting involved is because the occultist is responding to the presence of possible rewards.

Paul

Excellent.  Ok.  Again, not thinking of mechanics or hooking the player, how do those actions translate to reward in the fiction.  Wearing the shroud of Turin as an undershirt is cool and all...but what's it get me (me the occultist in the fiction).  How do I (in the fiction) translate that into personal gain / recognition / prestige.  I'm assuming that some sort of notoriety or infamy or attention seeking is the real pay off here for these sorts of people.  How does that work in?

I'm not sure. Being installed with a Manaster is like winning the Lotto. It changes your identity. You know that game everyone plays, "What would you do if you won the Lotto?" What rewards you pursue is the game's authorial void. And it's not a game about getting even for past scores. It's not about who you were. It's about discovering who you are now.

Are we still drilling productively? The goal is putting together the puzzle that makes the "magnificent bastard" work for the players.

Paul

Well, as far as educating the players goes, there's no real reason to limit yourself to any one thing - gameplay explanations, colour-text, examples from TV/comics/anime, putting the characters in a situation where long-term planning is impossible, etc.

'course, the more interesting question is always not how to stop your players doing something but how to get them to enjoy the sort of play you want the game to be about.

If you want this game to be about ego and power, a way to do this may be to incorporate a sort of "I dare you to..!" mechanism into the player dynamic. Wearing the shroud of Turin is cool, but it gets cooler if I can boast right there on the table about doing it. Establishing some sort of fluid pecking order among the cultists, one that allows players to boss around those below them, could also help this.

Power is fun, but playing a character who's supposedly powerful according to rigid rules may not be. The above suggestions would help the irrational reasons for wanting power to be present right there at the table.

Which may not be what you want - the atmosphere would likely get a lot more heated (for better or for worse), and you'd probably have to fill your setting with Things That Go Boom instead of carefully crafted encounters.

Dunno if that helped.

Ok, so here's idea #1.

The flow of play you want from the game is for the characters to take more of a reactive role vs. a proactive role.  You don't want them coming up with their own master plans and then seeking out opportunities to drive them forward.  You want them living in the moment where the primary purpose of play is seeing how they respond to external stimuli.

I'm a big believer in trying to make the experience of the players mimic (at least on the level of approach and feel) the experience of the characters.  So that leads me to suggest that an effective approach to AoE would be to put the players in a position of being primarily reactive rather than proactive.

The expectations new players have towards a game will often be set early on during their first contact with actual play of the game.  How they interact with the first part of play, will be how they expect to interact throughout play.

The first part of play is establishing the Terrenes and making characters.  Here's where I now think you have a disconnect between the design and the goals.  The first part of play has the PLAYERS creating the Terrenes and then the GM reacting to that by going off to prep stuff for that.  So if the very first thing players do in the game is to say "this is what I want, now Mr. GM go and find a way to deliver it to me" it probably shouldn't be a surprise that you're seeing a fair level of that same expectation in the rest of play..."here is the scene I want, now Mr. GM go and frame it for me". 

I'm thinking instead, you want to establish right from the very beginning that the players' job at the table in a game of AoE is to react to what the GM gives them.  "You can respond anyway you want...but what you're responding to...is THIS".

So.  Here's my suggested potential fix #1.  Reverse the way Terrenes get made.  The GM comes to play with a number of Terrenes equal to the number of players already selected.  When the initial rolls of the players give them the result that in current-rules would allow them to invent a Terrene, instead that result lets them choose which of the GM's Terrenes they'll be in.  The players who don't get to create a Terrene in current-rules would still (if I'm remembering this right) have to choose to be in one of the other player's chosen Terrenes.

Benefits:

1) if one of the design goals of AoE is for the GM to enjoy prep, then the game should ensure that what the GM is expected to prep is something they find interesting.  So letting the GM select the Terrenes, will help make sure that those settings are something the GM is curious about learning more about.

2) If players select the Terrenes, often times they are going to select settings that they have a bit of knowledge about already.  I might pick Ancient Egypt, or Reconquesta Spain, or Napoleonic France because these are periods I know something about.  As a result, the following two things are likely to be true:  a) the player probably will know more about that setting then the GM, and b) the player...in true fetishist fashion...will probably be very interested in showing off that knowledge.  It is difficult for the GM to be proactive in a setting where the player has superior knowledge, and players will tend to be more proactive then you wish them to be because they have the knowledge necessary to say "I want to go here and meet him and do this thing".

Therefor, by having the GM pick Terrenes...especially if there is advice to pick Terrenes that your players aren't likely to be amateur experts in, the situation is reversed.  If the GM knows more about the setting then the players do, then the players really can't be proactive.  They don't know the world, they don't know the culture, they don't know the power structure, they don't know what's going on.  They become reliant on the information the GM feeds them.  When the GM is in the position of being the player's eyes and ears, then the GM is in the proactive chair and the players are reacting.  Even if they want to be proactive and go do something, they'll likely have to ask for more information first like: "Is there a person who does X is this culture that I can talk to?".  And of course questions like that are once again cedeing the initiative back to the GM.

3) The psychology outlined above I think is very powerful.  If the first thing the players do is react to the GM, then they'll be in the mind space that reacting to the GM is what you do in this game.  If the first thing the players do is take ownership of what they want, then they'll be in the mind space of taking ownership throughout the game.  I don't think it will work to expect them to take ownership over here but then not over there.

I think you can probably take it even further for maximum effect, not just having the settings to choose from, but also the initial character concept as well.  Like "you are the son of a merchant family being squeezed by the local potentate.  Your family is rich enough to attract the potentate's attention, but not rich enough to be untouchable.  You've just swallowed the Manister, now go create your character".  Taking a strong hand like that definitely establishes that this is the game where the GM is setting up the situation that the players are expected to perform in.  That puts the focus where you want it...on the performance...not on where you don't...on deciding where and what to perform.

In a similar fashion, I'd go through the rest of the rules and uncover all of the places where the the rules say "the player decides this, or the player creates that, or the player determines how this other thing will be" and perform the same test.  Does the granting of player authority in this instance indirectly encourage proactive player behavior? And if it does, reverse that and reposition the players into a more reactive posture.

4) I also found a bit of analysis paralysis coming into play with having no great understanding of the genre and being asked to decide on a Terrene from scratch.  I don't think your #2 point above "I chose England in 1646 because I'm interested in the setting." can be relied upon.  I think "I chose Engand in 1646 because I was put on the spot and had to think of something quick, and that's the first thing that popped in my head" will be at least as common.  Choosing from a limited set of options I think would be much faster and more comfortable.

That's idea #1.

Idea #2 is still pretty foggy.  Your answers to my last couple of questions threw me a bit.

Hey Ralph,

Your most recent questions, "what causes a PC to care" and "what are the in fiction rewards, the in fiction pay off for the PC," are essentially what we're trying to figure out, right? What does it mean to inhabit the desires and motivations of a magnificent bastard? So my answers are my thoughts about the desires and motivations of a magnificent bastard. But if you have an alternative perspective, I'm open to it. What's important is helping the player achieve creative engagement with playing a magnificent bastard.

Paul

Well, where they threw me, was your answers are hitting around the edges but not really hitting the bullseye.

You touched on WHAT you want the players to be doing...but not why.

Ok...I'm in Pampalona, it would be some cool imagery for me to fight with the bull...but why?  What does it actually get me to do that?  Wearing the Shroud as a shirt...again...cool imagery.  But what's the point?  What does having done that get me?  Is there some international affiliation of my fellow occultists who are going to be awed by my chutzpah?  Did my prestige amongst my fellow practitioners just go up?  When word gets out into the proper circles of my latest coup are legions of wannabes going to be knocking on my door begging me to teach them the mysteries of the universe?  What's the payoff?

If there is no payoff, then you're relying primarily on the Vandal's Instinct:  "Why did you throw a brick through the stained glass window?", "for the thrill of it, I mean...what the hell right?  Why not?"

I think motivating players using the Vandals Instinct is alot harder.  My design instincts say that that sort of motivation relies more heavily on the GM's ability to deliver the thrill then the actual game design.  I mean at the end of the day, determing which formula applies to the conflict at hand, running some math, and rolling some dice...isn't really that thrilling.  Getting the players to react requires bait.  Bait that relies solely on a game mechanic reward can work, but often seems rather flat.  Bait that delivers an in-fiction reward that appeals to the player's sense of achievement and accomplishment is typically the most compelling.  Bait that relies on the GMs ability to set up and describe situations that by their nature are so thrilling and exciting that players will want to jump into the bull ring and wrestle with a bull just for the fun of it...pretty difficult to recreate reliably, and more of a GMing technique issue than a game design issue. 

So if that's what you're after, your efforts will need to focus on GM techniqes.  Which I'll not is distinctly different from GM advice.  GM advice tells GMs what they're trying to do.  Techniques tell them effective ways for doing it reliably.

But again, this is all very half formed vague, thinking out loud stuff.

Idea #2, I think is much more solid and thoroughly imagined at this point.  I'm still working on idea #2.

As far as motivating characters goes we didn't encounter any problems when playing. It's pretty clear, isn't it? The characters are all members of an Onset, they're essentially manipulating the rest of the world and competing with each other in a great game, like Immortals in Highlander - the prize is godhead, of course.

So putting that to practice, when I've framed scenes, it's not been difficult to set it up so that the goals of the characters and the challenges facing them have been pretty obvious. "Your fencing teacher has promised to teach you the Riddle of Steel if you'll stay after the class tonight" is an OBVIOUS frame, considering that these characters are occultists who want to wield occult power. "The tomb of king Arthus has been found under the Glastonbury Tor, you'll probably want to be there for when it's opened" is similarly unequivocal. "You've been thrown to jail after your murder attempt on the king. The execution'll be in a month, you'll probably want to escape before then. Your cellmate is a crazy philantropist" is similarly simple. The player characters in this game are thin and predictable, that's their point - they are not protagonists, just give them some hint of occult or temporal power, or endanger them somehow, and watch them run. This was when the rules still oriented individual scenes towards certain types of NPCs, mind, but the same principles should apply.

Valamir wrote: I'm still working on idea #2.

I suppose.  But its going to tracking down the same direction of establishing what your goal for the game is and then looking at the rules to see how that's being delivered, was #1 helpful?

Paul, your game excites me for a funny reason; the intensity of constraint (from my perspective) coupled with your enthusiasm for making it work makes this design problem zing like an oscillating p orbital.

Here's the kind of constraint I'm talking about, the forces pulling it in different directions:

The manifesto component of the game, the thing it says about the world out there, that's about paving the way to serious evil with a thousand bad intentions.

Weirdly, I can't help wondering if your target audience is the most Nietzschien of power gamers, and so calling it acts of evil is a massive turn off for them. If you called it "absolute power", or something to do with beating the world down with your own awesomeness, then your starting to go in that direction. Lionel from smallville doesn't care about being evil! He's about being strong and coming out on top in the end, and that kind of attitude leads to the flips that kind of character goes through. Evil is a by-product, so people look at what they have produced as they joined the dots and hopefully shrink back in horror, or more likely, go "dude, that's harsh!".

But if you want people to move on, you need to stop the "crush him" reflex, which is a natural reaction of the more vindictive or reputation concerned villains. So how do you take that out? Firstly make the external reputation less than irrelevant: "Let people cross me, I'll take them on. No prob!" secondly give them new arenas to leave their mark on, like graphers spreading their tags as widely as possible.

Now with all that, to make the point you want, you need to consider how to join those dots, and that is a listening function.

In other words it cannot just be prep, as before prep they have said nothing, so you can't rely on them to make a prearranged pattern. I've already suggested one way to keep them moving, avoid personal cruelty, get them in globe trotter mode, but that just stops them making a larger theme on purpose, you have to get them to make one by accident. I suspect you will have to use all the flexibility the system allows and some considerable improvisational skill just to make the next scene make sense after the first. But if you can do that, and your theory is true, it should add up in the end to a bigger picture. The tricky bit, and a big tension of your design, is how to pull back that interlocking improvising to it's most minimal or teachable form.

On my own view, I'd say it needs to build, with the current situation gaining echoes of the last, but that is still a more passive form of improvisation, a more historical approach I suppose.

Hey Ralph,

The initial Terrenes currently get determined before chargen. Each player suggests a time and place from throughout human history from which he'd like his occultist to have emerged. Once all the suggestions are on the table, players can switch if they like someone else's idea better. Players start with Resistance (a problematic character stat) equal to Clarity (an advantageous stat), but reduced by one point for each other player starting in the same Terrene. So you're slightly incentivized to make your suggested Terrene compelling, because if other players choose it then you all end up with a lower initial Resistance.

As GM I like the dynamic of players suggesting the initial Terrenes quite a bit. What happens is that a player either chokes and suggests ancient Egypt, or they suggest some time and place that I know little about. And then my Wikipedia reading and web searching is creatively pretty exciting. I'd rather not lose this from the game. Your suggestion #1 is well rationalized. And it's useful and I appreciate it because it pushes me to explicitly consider some social dyamics I wasn't examining.

That is, you've got me thinking of changing how the intitial Terrenes are established. The change would be that every player suggests a Terrene, but if you choose to start in the Terrene you suggested your starting Resistance is equal to your Clarity, and if you choose to start in a different Terrene your starting Resistance is reduced by one point for every other player who decides to start in the Terrene you suggested. This would chip away slightly at your concern about players having greater expertise in their characters' Terrenes than the GM does; it would slightly incentivize players starting in Terrenes they aren't so familiar with.

This would be a minor change. I don't think it would solve the problem. But I'm not sure even the major change you propose of players not getting to specify starting Terrenes at all would solve the problem.

For Darcy's Stalinist Russia Terrene I'd prepped the 1936 return of Alexander Kerensky to Russia from his exile in France; he'd learned from Rosicrucians in Paris that Rasputin was in fact a fallen angel (maddened and tortured by his divine senses, of the needs and suffering of the humans around him), and that he was alive and living in a cave with bears in Siberia. Kerensky had come to believe that Stalin had to be stopped, and that the only one who could stop him was Rasputin. So he had returned, intent on finding him. Also, a female Catholic Pope from the future had come back in time, infiltrated the NKVD to learn of Rasputin's whereabouts, and was headed to Siberial to slay him, to prevent something horrible that he would do in the future. Darcy ignored all this stuff and instead pursued his own themes and plans of powergaming within the Party.

Even if I were to specify the starting Terrenes I'd still need the quick character concepts from the players in advance of prepping for play. This means players would have the opportunity and time to get attached to specific themes and plans for their characters. Whether they're doing this by envisioning it during chargen (Darcy?), or after chargen and prior to play, the effect is the same. The necessary time gap for the GM to prep between chargen and play means it can happen.

One of the players in the Toronto playtest did make an interesting comment during the post-game conversation. She said she liked the game because it felt like being given a pre-gen character in a convention game and then working to discover an expression of that character during play. This is exactly what it should be like.

But I've already removed a lot of player meta-power from the game since you playtested it (players no longer request scenes by specifying NPC type; the GM just frames what he wants), and as a result a greater share of the responsibility for shaping stuff rests with the GM. So I'm disinclined to go whole hog with pre-gen characters and players not having input into starting Terrenes.

What I need is players to create truly sketchy characters, with no attachment to specific themes and plans, and to play to discover an expression of the characters during play, just as if they were playing a pre-gen character.

Paul

Hey Joy,

JoyWriter wrote: "Evil is a by-product..."

"...give them new arenas to leave their mark on..."

...avoid personal cruelty, get them in globe trotter mode..."

"...but that just stops them making a larger theme on purpose, you have to get them to make one by accident."

Hey Paul,

I agree with JoyWriter that the name may be a part of the equation in how players are approaching the game. A rose by any other name might smell just as sweet, but I bet that if they were called "Granny Blossoms" instead that they wouldn't be given between lovers and partners in nearly the same abundance.

Evil-as-byproduct is much more interesting to me than an evil-on-purpose setup, but the name of the game is already a suggestion, before I've even approached the system or play, that I may indeed be performing acts of evil. That's going to put me in a particular mindset that I may or may not be able to modify (or even understand that modification is required) to get the most out of game play.

-Chris

Hi again,

Paul, you now have 3 questions awaiting answers from me.  Here we go!

Paul wrote: Darcy, what I mean by how do I "deliver what you need" is how do I get you from playing the game with an author mindset to playing from a character discovery/exploration mindset? How do I get you to relax and enjoy your occult powers and the serendipity of the circumstances you find yourself in?

Paul wrote: What I realized as the problem was players not having actually created sketchy charaters. They had created fleshed out characters, with some embedded themes, and then pared them back to the limited requirements of chargen.

Is this what you did?

Paul wrote: ...Darcy ignored all this stuff and instead pursued his own themes and plans of powergaming within the Party. ... This means players would have the opportunity and time to get attached to specific themes and plans for their characters. Whether they're doing this by envisioning it during chargen (Darcy?), or after chargen and prior to play, the effect is the same.

Consider:
Pre-made characters.
Trollbabe-style superficial character creation that draws attention away from internal things. Replace horns and hairdo with magical relics.

The occultists are empty things in and of themselves. They only have theme: this is the guy who's all into Buddhist imagery, this one wants to bring on the Christian Harmageddon, this one thinks that he's the last heir of an Atlantean civilization. But this is all occult dross, not content; just different masks for the same entity. This is natural, for the manaster has removed his soul and poisoned his humanity. What need is there for character creation? Heck, I'd seriously consider whether those characters need a name, even; might be just the thing to get the players out of their expected character-relationship frame if the player characters didn't have a name at start. And when they get called names in the story... who's to say which one is the real name?

Hey Darcy,

Darcy wrote:
...you just need to solve the enjoyment of occult powers side of the equation.  Here's what it would take for me: make my occult powers matter. Within the fiction, they don't.  They carry no mechanical impact whatsoever.

Hi Paul,

Your notion that the occult powers matter as much as other colour in other games is kinda screwy.  Sure they matter as much as stuff that's just colour (or, non-incentivised colour.)

How about these instances of incentivized colour:

• rerolls in Trollbabe• Stories in Black Cadillacs• cyberwear in Cyberpunk• things held dear in Grey Ranks• any given trait in Dogs

The strongest instance in that list as far as I'm concerned is Trollbabe -- the other example serve uses other than colour, too.

As it stands right now, the strongest use of colour in Acts of Evil is to angle at a specific Aspect for a roll.  However, this doesn't matter that much. There are very few formulae that include Aspects, and the actual aspects are so open to interpretation that it's pretty easy to always angle towards the one you want anyway (which isn't bad per se, but it does tend to 'pigeonhole' characters as to what aspect they use).

Armoured, coloured and flavoured,
D

You know I know how to incentivize Color. (Check out the Intimacy, Desperation, and Sincerity dice in My Life with Master, the special tokens in Thy Vernal Chieftains, and the bonus die for Fetishizing in Acts of Evil itself.) But something in my gut tells me that in this case I ought not be baiting the players to use their badass occult powers. Using the powers is the fundamental creative act of the player. They should "matter" to the player not for some tacked on effectiveness bonus, but for what they allow the character to do. I don't know why they don't.

Paul

Eero,

This is very thought provoking:

Eero wrote:
Trollbabe-style superficial character creation that draws attention away from internal things. Replace horns and hairdo with magical relics.

Have you considered calling it:

On the Backs of Innocents

A game of Occult Supremacy

?
It's so overkill as to be stupid or perfect!

I see where your going with the power thing, but I don't quite see yet how that adds up over time. If you litterally tied power to harshness of effects, say with a rule like "no holding back", then it would amp up over time, but that's not really what I mean:
Systemic effects are basically when plurals misbehave, the single units don't sit neatly side by side but instead get involved in each others business. This I think can only be done in the way that conflicts overlap, or relate to each-other.

Now I'd like it that when players step back, a broader pattern would reveal itself, but I don't want that to be by fiat, like suddenly revealing a connection that you made up on the spot. Instead I reckon it's better to encourage the GM to seed links between the different stories, for the players themselves to muck up. The form of those seeds should allow one wound to impact in another place, and back again, but always within reason given the setting.

Hi Paul,

Right. I wasn't doubting your understanding of incentivized colour so much as I was making sure we were both on the same page.

OK – it's a design choice not to use 'tacked on' mechanical incentives to encourage players to indulge in their occult powers. This actually makes a lot of sense – cyberpunk edgerunners do criminal badassery, trollbabes get all mucky with trolls & humans, and investigators stick their noses into cyclopean mysteries best left untouched. By rights, occult masters should be reveling in all their woogie powers.

Here's why I think I didn't do it. Winning rolls in Acts of Evil is fucking hard. Moreover, the majority of the rolls in the game are de facto competitions – it's enshrined in the language (when I hear terms like "Reduction of Teachers", the game is fucking on.) This means that winning the rolls, not just enjoying the outcomes for what they are, matters to me. Couple that with the fact that winning the rolls matters in the fiction – "Do I get Olga under my sway?" and you've got a pretty powerful setup for a significant whiff factor when rolls go south. (Addendum: please note that this desire to win rolls is divorced from the whole race to kick Ephacta's rubbery ass. I want to fucking dominate these insignificant pricks, and the dice keep getting in my way!)

So what?

Well, a roll or two in, and players stop caring as much. I noticed it in Toronto – I was more engaged early on than I was later on. I wasn't the only one who made "get ready to flub this roll too" comments during the game. If I'm less engaged in play, then I'm less likely to enjoy my occultist's shoes.

As I've been writing this over the better part of an afternoon, another idea has crept into my head.

What if, as a counterpoint to the GM's authority in scene framing, the player had a corollated authority? What if the player could unlock an entirely different set of resolution rules by indulging in his occultist's woogie powers? The obvious option would be to make the alternate resolution easier for the occultist, but I don't think that that would be ultimately satisfying. I know that there's something else going on in play that would be more rewarding, but I can't put my finger on it. Perhaps it's as simple as woogie-power-rolls are narrated into the SIS post-roll by the player, regardless of success or failure.  Maybe it's targeted at agonizing NPCs.  This stuff all falls squarely under "...or in some different way, in order for players to enjoy them..."

Is this helpful?
D

Going back to Darcy's first post:

Here's the problem: in any given scene, my mind's racing ahead to the next scene! I'm coming up with cool ideas for stuff I'd like to do with my character. This spontaneous idea-generation clashes very powerfully with the GM-as-sole-scene-framer paradigm.

I read this thread quickly, so other things may occur to me later. I'm rather liking the stripped down creation process, particularly nameless occultists that are just a collection of external impressions, with no meaningful past. Biographies are things for lesser mortals.

I do recall that the whiff factor on rolls has been very high in all iterations of AoE. I know this is supposed to drive players to ruin more Nobodies and Victims in search of power to make the rolls easier. But successfully getting that Power is hard, too. And risks ending your scene, to boot, IIRC.

What about changing the power-getting mechanics to a sort of "and a side of fries" paradigm? That is, the normal resolutions against Teachers, Rivals, Underlings, etc. proceed as they are, but you can also seize Power from Nobodies and Victims as an additional roll that can't possibly end their scene.

Personally, I wouldn't even make it a roll to start. Go with "the first one's free" paradigm. When you first seize Power from a Nobody, you should just do it. Maybe describe using and Aspect, but no dice involved. Then, they start to build up a dice pool to make it harder-and-harder to seize Power from them, but also more-and-more rewarding if you do seize it.

To me, that would incentivize players to say "I want to put this annoying Teacher in her place. Therefore, I'm going to nonchalantly use my occult badassery to ruin the life of little Timmy, because I need the fuel of Timmy's screams to do it. It's nothing personal, Timmy. It's just business."

Since the dice make the race for godhood so UNreliable, making the process of seizing power MORE reliable will put more emphasis there, and make it more of a tool--right where you want it.

After all, aren't these corporate evils fueled by profit--that it's easy and reliably effective to treat people badly?

Hey Joy,

Can we talk about this:

JoyWriter wrote:
Systemic effects are basically when plurals misbehave, the single units don't sit neatly side by side but instead get involved in each others business. This I think can only be done in the way that conflicts overlap, or relate to each-other. ....The form of those seeds should allow one wound to impact in another place, and back again, but always within reason given the setting.

Hi Paul,

Can I offer a suggestion?  I haven't played and I haven't read anything beyond the ashcan, but when I did I had sort of the same reaction as Darcy: because you have to narrate to use an occult aspect, and because the specifics of the power chosen and the narration has no effect on the role, it feels like the player's occult mastery is devalued.  It may change the story, but it doesn't (seem to) change anything about the ongoing struggle.  Compare with simulationist games, for example, where the specifics of the powers chosen and the effects narrated are highly consequential for the outcome: the difference between I chose to turn into a killer whale made me win and I won because I did an acceptable monkey dance to allow me to use my flesh score.  One is about mastery and one is ... not.

So I think problem number one is making the choice consequential in some way that empowers the players, maybe not in a specifically mechanical way, but in a way that has the same sorts of effects on the fiction as ligatures and concomittance.  How about when you use an aspect you also make a statement about and describe the effects on a particular Terrene: past Terrenes for Memory, future Terrenes for Voice, present Terrenes for Flesh, and cosmic Terrenes for Imagination.  You can only do so if there is another character in the relevant Terrene.  Hopefully, as a result, this will create a jockeying for position amongst the occultists in the onset, as they position themselves relative to each other in order to use the abilities they desire, and at the same time force narration (and maybe some small penalty) onto a chosen rival character.

I think this relates to a more general observation: if you want players to revel in the opportunities presented by their occult powers as opposed to plotting and planning, then you have to deliberately make both options available to them and assign incentives appropriately: small, measurable but incremental gains from building, large, exponential gains from stealing or appropriating the resources of others.  Right now (at least in the ashcan), at least half of the actions are incremental building actions: making a Victim, for instance creates a resource which it would be better to steal.  If you want the characters to revel in their powers, they should be encountering victims made by NPC groups, and taking advantage of them.  If you want opportunism, you need to provide opportunities which really allow them to go to town.

Holy shit, Piers!

Paul -- what Piers said, but not quite!

That's it.  That's the magic bullet for me.  When I use my woogie powers, I don't get to just narrate what the woogie powers are, but what the fuck happens in the fiction because of them.

It's a tiny bit of directorial power -- and the GM will have to clamp down fucking hard on how much leash I'm allowed.  Big ol' caveat: that directorial power can't obviate any of the formulae-based rolls.

Yes.
D

Paul...

That last post was a super-excited, bouncing up and down in my seat, knee-jerk reaction kind of post. This is a still-bouncing, still-excited, but with time to reflect kind of post.

What if other players got to say how my woogie powers affect the fiction?  What about times when more than one other player wants to?  I'd say that players outside of my Terrene get to do it before players in my Terrene. That might help increase player involvement & interest in each others' scenes, too.

Smells delicious.
D

Piers,

Piers wrote: Right now (at least in the ashcan), at least half of the actions are incremental building actions: making a Victim, for instance creates a resource which it would be better to steal.  If you want the characters to revel in their powers, they should be encountering victims made by NPC groups, and taking advantage of them. If you want opportunism, you need to provide opportunities which really allow them to go to town.

Paul wrote:
Yes I'm thinking the game needs exactly what you suggest, a connection between player use and enjoyment of their occult powers and the serendipitous production of "opportunities" inspired by your example of players encountering victims made by NPC groups.

Do you have ideas how you might structure player use and enjoyment of their occult powers precipitating opportunities like newly available Victims? Should it be done in a way that isn't quite as Directorial as Darcy's suggestion?

Hey Piers,

I've been thinking about it. The idea I've been toying with is that maybe some player usages of occult powers trigger conflict resolutions between NPCs that play out as quick vignettes, thereby populating the terrenes with ongoing drama and newly available types of NPCs.

Though I'm not quite sure what would trigger it, how or who would make the creative decisions, and actually whether it's exactly what the game needs.

It seems to me what would work better is if a player's creative use of Aspects somehow serendipitously triggered the dramatic discovery of opportunities. A new Victim shows up in the scene, or a new Rival; stuff has clearly changed off-screen, and the occultist player, without having been ejected from his character play into Director stance, is discovering it, and knows that the discovery is related to his creative use of occult powers.

Paul

Yeah, that mix of choice and unforeseen consequences is exactly what I wanted to get across:

The player should know that the choices s/he makes will have different effects on the fiction, but that exact outcomes are outside their control.  The results should make sense, while also not (usually) being something they aimed for.  And these effects should sometimes be within their Terrene and sometimes in other Terrenes.  You can implement this in a variety of ways, but I think those should be the basic principles.  I do like it when one character's actions will often have positive or negative repercussions for other characters.  (I like the idea that some groups are present in multiple Terrenes: say you kill the Templar's leader in this Terrene--now the Templars in the future Terrene are up to something different.)

Focusing on the choice between Aspects, the activity the character is engaged in and the configuration of the group with which they are interacting (partially held secret by the GM) should produce enough randomness that the results seem serendipitous.

I think the second part, here, is that you have two parallel systems systems of advancement: the basic structure for pursuit of Godhood by planning (like the current one, but perhaps a bit more difficult), and then a series of advantageous situations where much more effective sorts of advancement are available: an character begs you to be his teacher; two rivals are fighting each other; etc.

Hey Piers,

The thing that's stuck in my head is how all of your examples map so strongly to the game's four possible NPC status changes. So I keep toying with the idea of letting players frame their characters into situations where they're enjoying their occult powers (standing on a hilltop during a storm, enjoying the lightning strikes and consequent near death visions) and that somehow these events produce NPC status changes (maybe a roll of Aspect vs. Resistance, and the GM chooses an outcome -- someone sees you on the hilltop and decides he wants to learn from you). But:

It's like gambling. It's like drawing multiple cards from the Deck of Many Things. Even better because there aren't any consequences. Players would do it much to the exclusion of the core occultism, gambling they might produce a desired NPC type rather than taking the real risk of an undesired Variant Outcome of trying to actually status change an NPC.

And it's a tacked on addition to the game; it doesn't solve the problem of helping the players play differently, like Magnificent Bastards, in the existing game, in the context of the existing equations.

Paul

Hi Paul,

Paul wrote:
The thing that's stuck in my head is how all of your examples map so strongly to the game's four possible NPC status changes.

Paul wrote:
So I keep toying with the idea of letting players frame their characters into situations where they're enjoying their occult powers (standing on a hilltop during a storm, enjoying the lightning strikes and consequent near death visions) and that somehow these events produce NPC status changes (maybe a roll of Aspect vs. Resistance, and the GM chooses an outcome -- someone sees you on the hilltop and decides he wants to learn from you). But:

It's like gambling. It's like drawing multiple cards from the Deck of Many Things. Even better because there aren't any consequences. Players would do it much to the exclusion of the core occultism, gambling they might produce a desired NPC type rather than taking the real risk of an undesired Variant Outcome of trying to actually status change an NPC.

And it's a tacked on addition to the game; it doesn't solve the problem of helping the players play differently, like Magnificent Bastards, in the existing game, in the context of the existing equations.

As I see it this idea of affecting the other terrenes while solving problems has quite a bit of what I meant; you deal with one situation and just manage to come out on top, but the effects re-appear somewhere else. Now I'm still a little woolly on the scene order; the GM sets out a train of scenes, and the players follow them. Presumably this train is justified as being their path to godlike power.

Now can this train jump from terrene to terrene? If not then players will always be producing effects in areas their character will not go to (apart from with flesh). It also limits how much they actually interact. Now here's what I see as good: The "evil corporation" likely never sees itself as evil, but looking at it from another angle we can see that it is, because of the build-up of effects that are invisible to it. If we see the effects of characters through other characters eyes, perhaps each occultist gets a better view of the others than they do of themself.

My idea is that basically you set up events for other players, which are related in fiction to your actions, show your character in a bad light.

Here's the problem; I'd like to make it about guilt and opportunity, guilt for the originator and opportunity for the receiver. The problem is that I can't see any way to make the memory skill invoke guilt. Say you follow Pier's formula for effects and say that voice effects the future, you could say that somehow it has messed up some people indirectly producing useful but damaged NPCs for any player in that terrene.

But how do you make memory say something about the character? The effect of characters surely must be limited to after them! How they use a memory might lead to side effects, but I'm not sure about causing side effects in the past. It would be like saying that historians caused the 100 years war or something. But I wonder if there is some way to wangle the "occult" business to make it seem somehow their fault.

So here's my idea in different form; characters directly compete to get better first (and possibly compete directly if they can move to the same terrene), but they also act as mirrors for each other, showing up (to the players) dodgy parts of their effects they can't see, and benefit each other because of the way that people can take advantage of evil effects in this game.

Tying the effect to the person who created it is tricky, but I think this method is better than just putting the effect in the next but one scene that character is in, because from a character perspective they probably wouldn't notice the link. In contrast, if you are an occultist and people appear showing the
effects of experiencing a shapeshifter (say they are going on a witchhunt to find more "werewolves"), then not only will you tie it to another occultist (with the player digging at the other if he works out who it was), you will smugly laugh at their lack of mastery, that they caused these effects they were not aware of, with the irony that you are doing exactly the same thing to them.

This way they are not acting in parallel, but forming this tangled web where all their actions reference each other. Hopefully this should create enough systemic effects without seeming arbitrary.

Hey Paul,
Just catching up right now.

You said,

Paul wrote:
So I keep toying with the idea of letting players frame their characters into situations where they're enjoying their occult powers (standing on a hilltop during a storm, enjoying the lightning strikes and consequent near death visions)