Preserving Surprise, Preventing Blindsiding
So I’m hip-deep in Agora, these days, doing a long-term playtest that we are rebooting on Monday. We’ll be playing version two, draft eight, or as I like to call it, Agora 2.8. There’s so much about this game that I don’t really know where to begin.
So it is a very crunchy, very fiddly, very competitive dice game. You literally rip stats off of other characters and add them to your own sheet. The trick, of course, is balancing the different roles of this extended grudge match so that everything is fair, gameplay is enjoyable, and so on. That’s harder than it sounds. For instance, my most recent bugaboo was making sure that surprising turnabouts are surprising but not crippling. In a player-versus-player scenario, it’s all too easy to make blindsiding (surprise, you lose!) a valid strategy. Blindsiding is really fun, but being blindsided is not. It’s a good thing to do to NPCs, who don’t care. So the trick has been to pace things out so while you can get surprised, you can still react — and if you’re savvy enough, overcome.
Up until recently, I had split significance and consequence into two steps in an attempt to foster this pacing. In other words, in turn 1 you said what you were doing (the significance) and in turn 1+x you said what that meant mechanically (the consequence). So you’d first say, “I’m planting bombs in your fusion reactor,” and then later say, “This will destroy your Fusion Power Plant 4d8 stat.” Which worked fine, as long as all the players kept a really tight control over making sure their eventual dice spoils matched up with their initial goals. However, multiple goals would pile up on one opportunity, and when spoils were later applied, they often matched some of the goals but not the others. That, and this is a highly competitive game, so relying on the players to keep a focus on story… well, let’s just say that didn’t always happen.
Repeatedly, my playtesters kept asking to assign both significance and consequence at the same time, and I kept balking. A large part of Agora is pacing, drawing things out so that whole giant conflicts aren’t pre-played out of existence. I wanted the development of worry: “The luddites are infilitrating the nuclear plant! Oh my god, they have bombs! They’ve rigged it all to explode in cascade failure!” My initial idea was that, by delaying the consequence, you fostered a sense of suspense. You wouldn’t know what was up at first. So when I got asked if you could just do significance and consequence all at once, I said no. Many, many times over.
See, the thing is, from a game perspective, you want to know what’s at stake up front. In fact, perhaps not even want, but need to know. So the criticism was valid. From the perspective of the stories I wanted this game to tell, though, you don’t know everything that’s at stake up front. I thought I had hit one of those concept-killing contradictions until I realized that what looked like a contradiction wasn’t. There’s a big difference between knowing everything that’s at stake, and knowing what is at stake right now. Thus, escalation was born.
When you first start off, you declare what you’re doing (significance) and starting spoils for winning (consequence). What can be assigned as starting spoils is rather limited. So everybody knows what’s at stake right now, but they don’t know what might be at stake by the time the problem ends. Because, through the course of play, players can escalate things, piling on more dice and making the spoils more interesting. It’s now perfectly possible to start off with some innocuous-looking spoils and then kick things into high gear by roping in that nuclear power plant later. The development of worry is intact, and the information flow necessary for the game is there.
This was also one of those rules fixes that snaps a disturbing number of things into place. I had had a grab-bag of kinds of spoils, dice spoils (stealing other people’s stats) primary among them. I had no way of organizing them. I also had a play experience that sort of just… went, with no large-scale structure. And I had a ton of rules interactions — not so much a ton of rules, but a ton of ways that the rules interacted. Too many, certainly, for a new player to digest all at once. I worried about veteran players creaming and crippling new players in the first round. Escalation fixes them all.
You can escalate the same situation (the ‘opportunity’) more than once. Opportunities always start with dice spoils, but when you escalate, you can introduce all those other nifty kinds of spoils that were previously unorganized. And the different kinds of spoils are ranked, so you can only start affecting alliance memberships on the third and later escalations. You’ve got to build up to them. And — here’s the clincher — the number of times you can escalate an opportunity is limited by what round you are in. So those alliance memberships can’t be touched — can’t even be introduced into play — until the third round. And by the third round, all the new players should be familiar with the kinds of spoils they’ve been able to touch. The game unloads its rules element by element, piece by piece, with the result that — hopefully — new players won’t get creamed and crippled before they’ve even figured out how to complete a single goal.
Which is great! Except… it basically means restructuring the entire fifty-page rules document. I’m very excited by the possibility of clarifying so much… I’m just not looking forward to the massive editing job that’s in store for me.
At the very least, we’re going to playtest the damn thing before I spend hours moving blocks of text around…