This idea for refining Agora came to me in the carwash yesterday.

In order to get the game to better address how shall we live? I’ve come to the conclusion that the PCs need to be working in/for/on a common population. Everybody doing their own thing and only interacting when they get around to feeling like it means the “we” part of the central question doesn’t really ever come up. It’s more exposition than interaction, and that’s what novels are for.

So my current model, which I know is too heavy-handed and will need to be retooled, is that the PCs are the members of the governing Council of a colony. They all still have wildly disparate agendas and beliefs; they’re just ostensibly working together. They are “on the same side” exactly as much as the Democrats and the Republicans are. I figure at some point I’ll figure out how to get armed hostilities and civil war jammed in there for good measure. In any case, the colony has a set of common Ideals and Resources itself that everybody can use. To be crude, the “goal of the game” is to reform the colony’s Ideals to be more to your character’s liking.

How it Works

Okay? So now the rules fiddling. Scrap the ‘on my turn, I do something and somebody sets up opposition for it.’ Little interaction, lots of mental stretching to figure out opposition, cludgy rules for when players are involved and on which side. All that? Trashcan.

Play takes place in a series of turns. A turn can be a month, it can be a year, whatever.

Phase One: What I’m Doing The first phase of the turn, everybody explains in short form what they’re doing, their plans, et cetera. This is pretty much just short-form exposition at this point, but I might retool it to be some sort of casual roleplay / kibitzing as the “Council” convenes.

Phase Two: Secretly Propose Conflicts Then everybody takes a 3×5 card and writes down a potential conflict. It can be based on somebody else’s plans; it can be wholly uninvolved. So “Morgan’s factories are sabotaged by ecoterrorists” works, but so does “Citizens are kidnapped by unknown assailants!” You put all these potential conflicts in a pile, shuffle them, and set them in the middle of the table, face down.

Phase Three: Draw Obstacle Cards Go around the table to figure out who will be running obstacles. Players may choose to take a card off of the stack. If you pull a card, you’re volunteering to run an obstacle. If you don’t like the card you pull, or if it’s not quite enough for you, you can pull a second card. You can either choose one or combine them to create your obstacle. You can keep pulling cards up to half of the deck. Go around the table until at least two players have cards they’re happy with (or the deck is exhausted).

Phase Four: Split Up PCs The players running obstacles then describe the very first hints of the problem that they will be running. The first reports of kidnappings, for instance. Or they can play coy and say that it’s just time to inspect the newly-built factories. Everybody then discusses who will go where, and the PCs split up to address the different problems. Additionally, the opposition players explain why their player character can’t possibly address the obstacle that they themselves are running. If you’re running an obstacle, your PC is obviously going to go address one of the other obstacles.

Phase Five: Address Conflicts Play then splits up, with a series of back-and-forth scenes. First the inspection party arrives at the factories. Roleplay a little there, and then switch over to the kidnapping investigators interviewing the first eye witnesses. Do that for a while, build up to something, and then switch back over to the factories. The opposition players run the obstacle in one scene and their characters in the other; maybe they can farm out NPCs to other players who don’t have PCs there. If you’re running an obstacle, you get more resources for each card you make use of. So if you’re just using one card, you get X dice. If you’re using two cards, you get X+Y dice. If three cards, X+Y+Z dice. And so on. Your goal as opposition is still to get the other players to roll in as many ideals as possible.

Players attempt to resolve the situation however they’d prefer: conquering it, convincing it, subverting it, whatever. They accrue fallout as before, and fallout may force them to rewrite their Ideals. If they succeed (ie, opposition die pool exhausted), they can harvest resources off of the obstacle and they can roll their burnout in order to rewrite the colony’s Ideals using keywords from their own Ideals. (You have, in effect, ‘proven’ that you’re right.) If the players failed, the opposition player might rewrite the colony’s Ideals or may force more fallout on the players (haven’t decided). Lastly, players can pass some of the harvested resources along to the communal colony resources (there will be no “bank”).

Phase Six: Clean Up And then there needs to be a winding-up phase where PCs can come together and bicker over each other’s actions. Obstacle cards that were not used are returned to their owners, who get a little recompense (and can use them again next turn; reused cards bestow more dice if used). Somewhere in here, perhaps in this clean-up phase, perhaps elsewhere, I want to have a ‘lock out’ mechanic where the players can deny each other the communal resources. So if I screwed up or blatantly pursued my own ideals at the expense of the colony’s welfare, you all can gang up on me and say that I can’t use the squadron of hover tanks any more. (I half-suspect that the civil war rules will be a heavy elaboration of the resource-denying rules.)

…But Will it Work?

So basically we’re talking multiple, rotating GM roles coupled with communal property/setting. I’ll try and beat the rules to the point where a single turn takes about an hour; a generic session can then involve a handful of turns. This should work best for four-to-eight players (with groups of two to five PCs for each obstacle). It should work passably for two and three; at two players, you’re just trading opposition, which can be fun; at three players, somebody’s always going solo hero. This restructuring may make it harder to play online as Thomas Robertson has been (sorry, Thomas), but I may look at some variant rules or something similar to preserve that aspect, since it’s pretty keen. If nothing else, there’s little reason why the “council” has to be the same set of people each turn.

The players still work as intermediaries between the world (embodied by the obstacles) and the colony (encoded in its resources and ideals), which is a cycle that I like. Players are proposing elements of the world/setting and then incorporating them into the overarching story of the colony. So there’s all kinds of yummy collaboration going on, guided and channeled by the game procedures. I may ditch the obstacle library, since any obstacle can “return” when somebody suggests it as a potential conflict. I don’t see any reason to maintain their initial sets of resources and positions for when they return.

I’m really excited about this retooling; I’m hoping that this will bring Agora more towards the ‘game’ end of the toy/game spectrum.

Just started the bid process for FLFS. There’s really nothing like sending out a batch of emails which make tons of people all over the world start running around crunching numbers so they can get back to you. Kind of cool.

Also, somebody’s started leaving spam comments where they quote a bit of the article, then say, “I disagree. My response is here.” Clever. And annoying. Especially since the website is supposedly for apartments in Warsaw.

The natural state of man is barbarism. Rendered thus, man is a beast like any other, content to feed and sleep and rut and little more. If such a man thought, he would be plagued with worry over his next meal, cower at the uncertainty of his nightly shelter, despair at the loss of his children to the other beasts of the wild. Barbarians rove in packs like wolves, a brutal hierarchy built of savagery and witless strength, where even the alpha is but a breath away from being torn apart and left for dead at the feet of his conquerers. But he does not worry, for thoughts rarely disturb the bestial mind. Thus is the life of the barbarian.

If a barbarian is lucky, he will lose in battle against Greeks and be taken as a slave. Slaves are brought into civilized lands, live in civilized homes, and enjoy the benefits that civilization offers: safety from hunger and senseless rabid violence. In exchange, the slave performs labor for his masters as he learns the ways of civilization. The labor may be menial, but this is not necessarily the case. Slaves do all manner of work, from backbreaking labor in the fields to playing music in feasting halls to educating the young to overseeing the affairs of an entire household. A slave may own property and after his duties are done he may work for pay.

If a slave is industrious, he will earn his freedom and become a thetes, or citizen. Many thetes work for others, performing many of the same tasks that slaves do and in fact working under slaves in some cases. Others practice a trade such as ceramics, smithing, or ropemaking. More than mere labor, however, thetes can participate in city government. They may vote for public officers, although they cannot be elected themselves. Their favor and business is curried by the elites of their city, who employ and patronize them to prosper the city’s industry.

If a thete is successful, he will come to own land and beasts of burden, thus becoming a zeugitai, or landowner. The threshold over which a man must pass to become zeugitai differs from city to city. Some require a certain amount of land; others require a breeding pair of oxen; still others require a quota of grain to be produced. Whatever the definition, the sense is that the zeugitai is a self-sufficient economic entity, capable of clothing and feeding an entire estate and all who live and work on it. Zeugitai are financially secure, and enjoy the leisure and freedom that comes with that security. They own slaves and employ thetes; they may be elected to office (although rarely to high office). They make sacrifices to the gods on behalf of their household. They may enter into contracts for trade and commerce. The prosperity of the city is generated by the zeugitai.

If a zeugitai is determined, his estate will prosper to the point where his finances can afford him a suit of armor and a warhorse. If he elects to do so, he becomes hippeis, a defender of the city, and indulges in the pasttime of warfare. In addition to being an independent economic entity, he is now an independent martial entity, and is not to be trifled with. He can back up his will with arms. He can join armies and pledge his arm to others. The success of the army on the battlefield, the stature of the city, and the glory of its patron diety depends on these men.

If a hippeis is canny, his alliances will elevate him to pentakosiomedimnoi, or oligarch, a leader of the city. Proving the nobility of his character through word and deed, the oligarch is far more likely to be elected to the high offices of the city. He may collect oaths of arms from hippeis, extend and call on favors to zeugitai, employ thetes, and will own many slaves. He can sponsor temples and festivals so that the city may honor the gods. He has become an independent political entity, a force to be reckoned with, and an essential element of the city. Everything that the city does will be influenced by every oligarch within it, which often leads to complicated and delicate arrangements between them. The success of the city rests on their shoulders.

If an oligarch is trusted, he may become a tyrant, an executive officer created in desperate times, when the city must place all its trust in the hands of one man. The tyrant often leads armies to war, but also regulates trade and industry, conducts sacrifices on behalf of the city, institutes law, and in all other ways serves as its figurehead and lord. Tyrants may be temporary, rising up to lead the city in overcoming some danger or threat, and then abdicate their power when the threat is no more, becoming an oligarch again. Other tyrants, however, may perform their duties so well that the city will not let them abdicate, and they serve as tyrant for the extent of their life.

If a tyrant is favored by the gods, they may be revealed as demigods themselves, with the blood of the gods running through their veins. Their parentage may be discovered to be false, a story to hide their divine heritage, or a distant ancestor may be discovered to have been a god travelling in disguise. Their heritage may be discovered while they sit on their tyrant’s throne or long after they have let that power pass. Whatever the cause or circumstance, the revelation of their demigod status thrusts upon them a direct relationship with the gods, and they are often called thereafter to serve as intermedaries, representatives, and champions for both sides.

If a demigod is victorious, he may become basileus, or king, of a central city, its surrounding lands, and vassal cities pledged to support and fight alongside their home. He may win his dominion through military conquest, economic savvy, religious proselytism, or any number of means. Only a man who counts gods in his lineage, however, can hope to maintain such power and loyalty. As basileus, he serves his domain as a tyrant serves his city, the executive and figurehead of all manner of business. He leads armies, institutes rites, regulates trade both internal and external, and codifies law.

If a basileus is loved, he may become a god. The support, adoration, and worship of his people allow him to ascend the slopes of Mount Olympus and prove his divinity by trials and tasks. His concern extends to cosmological significance, adopting some sphere of influence as his purview, watching over the lives of men, and meting out justice on the disgraceful and wicked. He will sip from the cup of ambrosia and live forever, the apotheosis of mankind’s potential, harnessed and disciplined and applied to rising above barbarism and into the dazzling reaches of the empyrean.

—
What is it? I have only the barest ideas. I can tell you this, though: it won’t see completion until 2008.

So I’m going to start with an axiom that may or may not work for all of you: people roleplay in order to experience things that they would not normally be able to experience. At its most oversimplified, I’m saying, “RPGs let you be Frodo.” To be all nuanced and erudite about it, I’m saying, “RPGs let you experience what it would be like to enter a liminal state where you interact with the apotheoses of significant influences in your life, whether they be oppression, intolerance, compassion, stress, camaraderie, or many others.” But I’m going to stick with Frodo cause that’s easier.

Now, the root of all that is the experience — the context, here imaginary, of people and places and events. That’s what we’re after. So we read The Lord of the Rings and we think to ourselves, “I wonder what it would be like to visit Rivendell while on an epic quest to save the world.” It’s the “what it would be like” that we’re looking for.

Direct Experience

Now, the obvious way to go about getting the “what it would be like” is to take a single point of view (we call it a character), start at an arbitrary time and place (the ’start of the adventure’), and imagine sequentially what that character might experience and how they’d react to it. What the character does helps determine what things we experience (Frodo goes out the door, we experience what’s out in the hallway). In addition to these in-character cues, however, we also respond to conscious and subconscious out-of-character cues (like, “I wonder what’s outside the Shire?”) and engineer means to manipulate the experience to get us what we want (chased out of the Shire by ringwraiths!).

So, guided by both in-character and out-of-character cues, we experience all the stuff we can’t in our regular lives. I’m going to call this direct experience since we experience the hot desert town by visiting the hot desert town and getting sand in our imaginary shoes. I also identify this with immersion, but — and here’s my big disclaimer — I am not an immersionist and have had some sincere problems grokking immersion, so I may be way off. Point being, this approach takes the short, direct, and obvious route to connect us to ‘what it would be like.’

In my experience with this kind of play, your Frodo tends to be a little more prosaic than the one in the book. The reason is obvious: the book portrays the characters talking as spent dinner dishes are swept away. In the pursuit of experiences what that’s all like, we want to have the dinner as well as the conversation. We want that context, and we want to directly experience it. This applies to the rest of the game, too: instead of griping about an argument with a merchant, I want to have the argument with the merchant. Instead of explaining that there were guards at the door but they’ve been taken care of, I want to actually sneak up on and take out those guards. The whole point here is to experience everything directly, usually in chronological order.

Other Media

Now, that’s not how things are presented in movies, or books, or newspaper articles, or in fact any other media besides the most honest and completist journal ever written. In other media, we as audience experience the people, places, and events portrayed indirectly instead of directly, and in necessary order rather than chronological order. To continue on with Frodo, we don’t know about the White Tree of Gondor until the characters in the book are standing face-to-face with the tree dying in its planter on top of Minas Anor. Before that, it wasn’t necessary for our experience as audience to know that there was this thing called the white tree. We don’t know about “Strider’s” heritage until he’s musing over his broken sword, because up until then all we needed to know about him was that he saved the hobbits’ heinies. Or going back into The Hobbit, we don’t know that the ring is actually really really bad through that entire book, and continue in our ignorance until the beginning of Fellowship when it’s necessary that we know that it’s bad.

There’s a number of reasons for this. The first that should be mentioned is that when Tolkein was writing Hobbit, the ring was just a bit of nifty treasure and the author himself didn’t know what he was eventually going to do with it. Whatever the “reality” of the fiction, the ring was just a useful device to both the author and the audience. Secondly, and perhaps relatedly, is the simple fact that the world in the fiction doesn’t actually exist, and is being created in your head as you read. So if you only ever read The Hobbit and preclude the possibility of ever reading the rest, the ring is, always has been, and always will be a nifty bauble that Bilbo uses to get out of trouble.

Now, audience members are actually profoundly smart. They are more than capable of continually incorporating new information into their understanding of the status of the fiction, continually revising and retroactively uprooting and reworking the world in their heads. This applies to kids reading Harry Potter just as much as it applies to fans of Dr. Who. We’re all very capable of revising the worlds we create in our heads as we go. It’s the fundamental act of reading and film-watching because it’s the fundamental act of living our lives. We’re all capable of saying, “What? You weren’t at that party? Man, I wonder who that was!” We do the exact same thing when watching or reading a fictional story. “What? The ring’s actually a big evil artifact? Man, I wonder why Gollum had it!”

Implied Experience

To drag this back into the world of RPGs, it’s more than possible to approach our experience-getting goal with the same strategy. Instead of creating all the details of a character before we begin experiencing the game, we can start with only those things we need established to begin the experience. This is actually very, very little — a description of what the characters look like (so the players know what they’re looking at) and a description of their immediate surroundings (for similar reasons) is about all you need. Then you can jump right into play, introducing new elements of setting, character, and situation as you go. You can reveal to each other that the ship is heading towards Planet Doom, that the life support is failing, and that one of the passengers is a spy. You didn’t need to start with any of these; everything can be “revealed” (read: created) in play.

As new elements are introduced into the running experience, they will continually redefine that experience by implying new information about the experience. I’m going to call this implied experience to contrast with the direct experience above. Now, this is very much not the obvious point-A-to-point-B approach to getting our goal of “what it’s like.” This is, in fact, probably about as circuitous as possible. I am seeing this strategy with increasing frequency in story games and the Forge end of the indie pool. I also see it a lot in short-form games produced in design contests and challenges. Two obvious reasons: (a) in games that seek to prioritize story, it’s an obvious decision to coopt the strategies used by stories in all other media, and (b) short-form games often leave the onus of creating the setting and situation with the players, and create-the-world rules start leaking from pre-play prep into mid-play procedures.

Now, I will say, again with disclaimers, that this approach looks really poor for immersion. Starting with only what is necessary for the experience means that character motivations and histories are often created midplay rather than preplay. This means that characters often start as blank slates, and it’s hard to get into character when there is not yet any character to get into. And if the game is primarily about creating from wholecloth, people who are interested in detailed piecework are going to be disappointed. It’s good for some stuff, and bad for others.

As direct experience play tends to make your game a little more prosaic, implied experience is like giving your game crack cocaine. Characters are incorporated in the setting and situation quickly, powerfully, and often inextricably. Actions and stunts become grand to the point of excessive. Stunning reversals and byzantine plots are commonplace. Which isn’t better, I want to state very emphatically and very up front. It’s very, very easy for this kind of set up to create a torrent of too much, too fast that tears through stuff that may be better approached with a more measured, sedate, and nuanced approach. To dodge away from LotR for a moment, this approach does not create Star Trek and Stargate; it makes Battlestar Galactica and Dr. Who.

Actual Play: Sailing for Atlantis

In the recent Reversed Engineering Design Challenge, I wrote a little snippet of a game called Sailing for Atlantis, and this game is the germ of most of this article. Note that most of what I’m about to talk about are totally emergent effects, not intended when I wrote the game; I’m not trying to toot my horn, I’m saying, “Oh my god, look what happens when you do this!”

The basis of Atlantis is that you create both the situation and your characters in play. You define your character on the fly, and other players redefine your character as you go, as well. In fact, you start play with only one thing defined on your character sheet: what you say your destination is. You don’t even put your name on the character sheet. You are nothing until it shows up in play.

In our playtest, I started off without making any plans whatsoever for my character. He was wearing a military uniform. He gave his name as Astor. How was I to know, at 2pm that day, that by 11pm it would turn out that he was, in fact, a member of a centuries-old conspiracy to subvert the entire underworld in order to restore the monarchy of Atlantis and usher in a new Golden Age? That he was using his son — Jesse’s character — as a pawn in order to ensure that he’d have influence over both the world of the dead and the living? That he was going to marry a goddess and become the King of the Underworld himself? And that’s just jumping from the start to the finish. That’s skipping over the part where he went insane, or the part where he was the Fisher-King and his well-being translated to the well-being of the universe, and vice-versa.

Throughout the game I had very clear means by which I could influence the experience of the game for both myself and for the other two players. I also had some interesting “constraints” if you can call them that. I didn’t have a name. About halfway through the game, I stopped referring to myself by any name, except occasionally “King of the Underworld” and the other two players took to calling me “scaryfuck” or something similar. But because I had no name, I never felt compelled to maintain any sort of continuity with any “core character concept” and felt very free to completely transform my character as I went. Things that I had believed were true of my character and history early in the game I turned into lies and deception later. In fact, the only character-seed you start with is where you say you’re going, and this is almost guaranteed to turn out to be untrue. This in turn made everyone at the table distrust each other’s characters from the outset, and give players a bye for lying through our teeth. I mean, if even I don’t know if I’m lying, can you really blame me?

Which means we had free reign to utilize implied experience as much as we liked. We channeled, incarnated, and married a goddess, not because we knew all about the goddess from the start, but we introduced each step through the game mechanics. We didn’t even know there were goddesses to summon at the start! As we introduced things that happened, we also introduced the very possibility of those things happening. And if that happened, something similar or related might happen. Step by step, conflict by conflict, element by element, we constructed the entire context of a world and built up an experience unlike any other game I’ve played.

It was heady stuff, and I want to harness that power. It’s not a panacea, and it’s not appropriate for all applications. It’s like rocketfuel: good for rockets to the moon, bad for the car to the market. But for the over-the-top, dialed-to-11, make-up-the-crazy, this is good stuff.

Tomato, Tomato

All of which may sound totally uninteresting to you. We are starting to see some strains in the gaming community along these lines. As is so often the case, we gamers have been using one term to mean many things, and we’re surprised when it turns out that we’ve been talking about different things the whole time. When I said “roleplaying” and meant implying things about a fictional experience and some other guy said “roleplaying” and meant directly experiencing the fiction, we were talking past each other. I hope as the technique develops, we’ll start to see the distinctions better, and come to better understand and appreciate what our fellow gamers are doing.

Recently, Merten at story-games started a thread asking for clarification because he simply didn’t understand why Tony Lower-Basch wants to distill a complete storyline down to one hour of high-impact play. “What’s your hurry?” he asked, “Why can’t you savor the experience?” In responding to him, I realized that, to a large extent, I didn’t understand why he didn’t want these powerful tools to rock the story over the cliff screaming the whole way down. In the course of discussion, I think I understood a little better that he wanted to be there and experience events directly, and I hope he came to the point where he could see how some people weren’t so interested in being there as implying things about being there.

It’s also possible that these two methods — direct and implied experience — might find their way back together again. Perhaps we can peel them apart, write a few games about them, throw them around until we intimately know how both work, and then thread them back together into a better-constructed whole. Won’t that be an interesting game to play!

GenCon SoCal event registration is now up and running.

In addition to as many booth demos as I humanly can pull off, I’ll be running four scheduled games of Full Light, Full Steam, one on each day at various times. I’ll be using a set of six pregenerated characters and firing up the Situation Engineering rules to create four scenarios in different locations in the solar system — Mercury, Venus, Mars, and the Asteroid Belt. Consider them episodes in a non-continuous series.

To my utter surprise, the Sunday game (Venus) is already full. Thursday and Friday (Mercury and Mars) are half-full. The first day of registration. Insanity.

Doyce played The Princes’ Kingdom with his 6-year-old daughter, and she produced the Cutest Character Sheet Ever.

Awwww.

More gears is good. And a few more couples on the light tube so it looks less like a neon light.