So in Agora, when you roll a 1, something happens. When you roll a 1 in ideals, that die goes immediately to your fallout pool. Since 1s never reside in your ideals pool, you can’t auto-counter 1s that your opponents place. You can use your single roll in your counter in the hopes of getting a 1; if you do, you counter… and any die that rolled 1 goes into fallout. You want to have the largest ideals pool, because then you can identify new opportunities, but going after the largest pool too lustily can lose you all your dice to fallout. So the ideals 1s work. I like ‘em.

Contrast with rolling a 1 in resources. That die goes into your burnout pool, which is a little more heinous than your fallout pool. You will probably lose that die off of your character sheet. In order to balance that consequence, 1s in resources are wild, and they place a wild token on an opportunity as they go to burnout. As noted above, these wild 1s are also harder to counter. This is all fine and dandy so far.

Except in the opening of a scene, when there are not yet any opportunities on the table. What happens when you roll a 1 in resources and there is no opportunity to place that wild token on?

The Old Way was that rolling a 1 in resources allowed you to, on your next turn, create a new opportunity if there wasn’t already one on which you could place your wild. This was an exception to the “owner of the largest ideals pool can identify new opportunities” rule. It was… clunky. I thought the clunkiness would be okay since this wouldn’t happen often, but no — it’s usually about 50% of the scenes have their initial opportunity identified by a 1 in resources rather than ideals pools. This makes it hard to learn the game, since you very well may be faced with a weird exception case right off the bat. Also, this annoys me.

So first, the No Opportunity, Die Lost fix goes like this: when you roll 1s in your resource pool, they are immediately applied to opportunities. If you roll more than one 1, you may place only one 1 on each opportunity. If you have any 1s left over, they are simply lost to burnout. This is the simplest fix, and it’s also the harshest. Players will be losing dice to burnout with no benefit to balance things out. This is a potentially crippling disincentive to roll dice, and it may stall the game as players try not to roll their resources unless there is a opportunity already out there, or they have the largest ideals pool.

Alternately, there is the Unused Wilds Hang Around fix, in which any 1s you roll in resources stick around in your resource pool, “locked” into the 1 result, and will be swept into your burnout pool at the end of the scene. You can place them at any time, and it’s to your plain advantage to do so, since you’re losing the dice so you might as well get some use out of them. This is slightly clunky, and diminishes the fun that I find in burnout dice — they are immediate flashes of self-destructive efficacy, the blowout that propels you forward in the short term at the cost of a long term loss. Keeping your exciting blowout around for use later deflates this a good deal. Also, keeping track of which dice in your resources pool are locked and which aren’t would be annoying.

This brings us to the Unusable Burnout Double Up fix, where, if you roll a 1 in resources and there is nowhere to place it, that die doubles into two dice, which you roll into your resource pool (without rerolling the rest of the pool). Any 1s that you roll also double. This creates a sort of ‘charging up’ thing. So this gives you a distinct benefit for rolling a 1, but it removes the disadvantage in rolling a 1 (since you’re not losing the die). Alternately, you could throw the die that rolled a 1 into burnout and then introduce two new dice, so your burnout pool is growing along with your souped-up resource pool… but that solution seems to be getting excessively fiddly. And all of this fix is introducing a whole new rule to the game, rather than changing the rules that exist so that this situation doesn’t arise in the first place. This rule would not be mirrored in ideals, which is also a symmetry problem.

I could also combine the No Opportunity, Die Lost and Unusable Burnout Double Up fixes so that you can place one 1 per opportunity out there, but any excess are subjected to the double-up process. If there are 0 opportunities out there, any 1s you roll double up. The doubling-up process would not be available to any player with the largest ideals pool, though, which is kind of an annoying disincentive to have the largest ideals pool — unless you are not obliged to identify new opportunities, which seems a reasonable middle ground.

Or, another slight twist, making simpler rules: 1s rolled in burnout either give you a wild to be used immediately or give you two additional dice. In other words, whether or not there is a goal out there you could place on, you can, instead, double up the die. This makes d4s kind of crazy, since seeding your resource pool with a couple d4s early in the scene means you’ll be getting 1s on them whenever you reroll your ideals pool. They can double up repeatedly, resulting in a ton of d4s in your pool — and also in your burnout pool. There would be a good incentive to place those dice (so they wouldn’t reroll and generate more burnout). This is also, though, a rule not mirrored with rolling ideals — unless ideals double up when they go to fallout, which may or may not be a good thing. The only way to tell? Playtest.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 11th, 2008 at 9:00 am and is filed under Agora: how shall we live?, My Books and Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.