Played the sixth session of the Agora v2.8 rules this evening. We managed three scenes in three hours, which is better (we’ve been managing two scenes in three hours) but not where I want the game to be. For all of its complexity in play, I am trying to make it relatively quick — I want scenes to range from 20-40 minutes, not an hour.

And so this is the place, right, in game design where you have a relatively functional set of mechanics, but it’s not firing on all the cylinders. You playtest and playtest and playtest, making rules tweaks and adjustments, and you keep plugging away at the playtests, and eventually you start to lose sight of the target. The game generates play, sure, and you become very familiar with the type of play that the game is (presently) producing… but that’s not it, and you’re not really sure what “it” is supposed to feel like any more.

And then you wonder if there really is an “it” that you were aiming for when you wrote the original version of the rules three years ago, because at this point you can’t remember what the impetus was, except that part of the rules started out as a little mental exercise, a joke really, and kind of grew from that, and maybe that’s all the game really is: a joke grown out of proportion. Was there ever a game? Was there even an idea of what the game would look like?

And you look at your sales record, and you look at all the avalanche of games that are now being produced, and you wonder if the effort you’re putting into this is worth any expected payoff — not just in terms of sales, but in play and players and fellow-gamers and sharing something that you think is cool. Because, if you can’t remember what that thing was that you want to share, what are you even working towards, here?

…

And then you notice that it’s two in the morning, and you should probably be in bed already, and you should take it on faith that you’re not a moron and there is an experience that your game is pointing at, and you’re probably missing the forest for the trees at this point. The playtesters keep coming back, right, so the game is entertaining enough — just with rough spots that need smoothing out. And after the playtest, you had some really thought-provoking discussion and you took good notes and really, you should come back to this in the morning with fresh eyes.

And you tell yourself that, but you don’t get up and go to bed. You sit and you stare at your notes and the character sheets, and you keep wondering: what is this game supposed to do?

So last night we’re playtesting Agora, and Alex and Judson are all, “Man, goals should be, like, more important. They should be, like, derived from your ideals.”

To which I responded: “Well yeah, they should… oh wait, I didn’t actually write that down, did I?”

No wonder my players were not playing like shark movie victims!

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.

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…

My, what a clever-looking game! Let’s play.

Phase One: Set Up
“I shall play Tory, and wear this fashionable wig. You patriot scum get those tricorn hats.”

Phase Two: Tutorial
“Um, so I’m playing a club, so I have to say something clever, right?”

Phase Three: Competence
“I’m getting the hang of this. Check out how awesome I am.”

Phase Four: Explosion!
“And then I ride the moose through the stained glass window and onto the zeppelin below!”

Phase Five: Gloating
“Ah, the electric feel of victory. Bite me, rebel scum!”

Many thanks to Meghann, Ryan, Vernon, Morgan, Turo, and Selene!

The first printing of Sons of Liberty just arrived, and I’m really digging on how they look. Here, let me gush and share:

(Click on any for a ridiculously larger image.)

And of course, plug plug, the preorder is still open, until the release on February 15th!

Yesterday I came home to find the proofs for Sons of Liberty, and they looked pretty good! To share the excitement (and gloat a little), here’s a couple little pics:

Yes, that big block of text on the bottom of the credits page is all the playtesters!

They asked for a diagram of play; they got one. Ph3ar my Illustrator skizillz!

Unfortunately, they didn’t send me a bound proof, which would have been nice, but I did review for those last remaining typos, checked the trim and bleeds, and saw what the paper stock looked like.

We start printing tomorrow!

The following is the 100% true account of William Franklin, Ben Franklin’s bastard son, who conspired to take control of the thirteen colonies in the name of King George. He’s one of many Tory figures you can play in Sons of Liberty.

For an illegitimate son born to Benjamin Franklin and a “low woman,” William Franklin has done rather well for himself. Applying the honest skills of his father to dishonest ends, he has flattered his way to wealth and prosperity, ascending to the governorship of New Jersey and reaching beyond. No colonial uprising is going to deprive him of what he’s spent his lifetime building. If he’s lucky, it will give him the opportunity of a lifetime.
A year after his birth, his father formally recognized William as his son. The elder Franklin and his common-law wife Mary Read raised him with their own two children. William was raised as well as his father could afford, educated in the best schools and a common sight in Philadelphia society. At 16, he enlisted in the 60th foot to fight in King George’s War and was recognized for bravery and promoted to captain of the grenadiers.

A long-time partner of his father’s many projects, William accompanied him to England. He left his fiancée behind, promising to return after he had assisted his father and gained his law degree. Plans, however, changed. His colonial tutor Joseph Galloway had given him names to look up in London. William, ever the social networker like his father, was quick to establish acquaintances with the Earl of Bute and John Pownell, the Secretary of Trade. He met, courted, and married a wealthy young woman named Elizabeth Downes, daughter of a sugar plantation owner. Their son William Temple Franklin was born scandalously soon after. Despite that, William became quite popular in London, and even more popular when he changed his politics from Whig to Tory. He sailed back to the colonies in 1763 with a commission as the new Royal Governor of New Jersey.

Franklin proved an able administrator, especially when it came to making connections with figures of wealth and power. As William’s network of Tory friends grew, his father pled with him to support the colonial, and then the revolutionary, cause. William played along long enough to discover intelligence on the patriots’ resistance. When he betrayed this intelligence to General Gauge, the two Franklins had an explosive conflict at the palatial estate of Joseph Galloway. Neither has spoken to the other since.

William maintains his hard line on the Stamp Acts and loyalist support as the Royal Governor for thirteen years in the face of increasing unrest. In June of 1776, he is placed under arrest and held in solitary confinement for eight months. Still he refused to recant his office and remains loyal.

When he is exchanged for patriot prisoners in 1778, he finds himself at home in British-occupied New York, filled with Tory refugees. Under a royal charter, Franklin organizes the Board of Associated Loyalists. This body bands together the disenfranchised colonists under a paramilitary jurisdiction separate from Clinton’s military forces. The Board is enjoined to harass, loot, and spoil the property of rebels throughout the colonies. They sponsor privateers and raiders whose depredations were so atrocious that American forces are ordered to execute them without trial. Franklin plans, after this uprising has been properly put down, for the Board to be granted administrative control over all thirteen colonies — with him at its head.

Sons of Liberty is available for preorder now!

Have you ever had Alexander Hamilton wind up your clockwork power armor, jump out of Thomas Paine’s ornithopter, and land in the middle of the Battle of Yorktown to punch General Cornwallis in the face?

No?

Well… would you like to?

The Sons of Liberty Preorder is now open. Take on the role of the Founding Fathers to kick ass and take names for truth, justice, and the American way in the only Roleplaying Game of Freedom and Badassery.

The game’s fast-paced card mechanics ensure high-action madness and revolutionary heroics. If you are playing Benjamin Franklin and you aren’t swinging an electrified kite over your head to clear the streets of redcoats, then you are playing it wrong.

View the game’s Patriot Sheet, Tory Play Aid, and Objectives Sheet.

Play Sons of Liberty in three different modes: Battle Mode, Campaign Mode, and Versus Mode.

In Battle Mode, you and three or more friends play
through one secret “battle” of the Sons of Liberty. One player takes on the role of the Tories, while everyone else picks a Patriot figure to portray. A single battle takes between two and three hours to play.

In Campaign Mode, you and your friends string together a series of battles to tell the whole, secret story of the American Revolution. Each battle features different Patriot figures, and the role of Tory player is traded to a new player each time. Scheduling is simple since the group of players need not be the same for each battle – if Jim can’t make it one evening, there’s just one less Patriot and more badassery for everybody else.

In Versus Mode, you and one other player can each take on the role of one of the Sons of Liberty after the Revolution has been won. Once comrades in arms who founded a nation, the task of actually building that nation often set these men and women at odds. It was their impassioned struggles with each other that formed the nation we know today.

Read the Sons of Liberty Design Blog at Ludanta Retero.

Sons of Liberty will be released on President’s Day, February 15th, Election Year 2008 at OrcCon. Preorder and receive the Full PDF Preview in January in addition to the softcover in February!

The Sons of Liberty preorder is $25 and is available through Kallisti Press website.

A good gentleman named Dain hosted a Battle playtest which prominently featured a naked Benjamin Franklin. Dain did an absolutely stellar job with his retelling, providing a treasure trove of detail and information. This was profoundly awesome! Dain picked out a number of clarifications and edge cases that need to be clarified in the text.

Seth Ben-Ezra performed not one, not two, but four battle playtests, and a versus playtest, and told his story at the Forge. This is also a good thread to see the value in beta playtesting. A table procedure which I had chalked up to optional and table-specific turns out to be rather essential to successful play. Seth’s first game bottomed out without the procedure, and later games with that procedure worked much better. So that one’s going directly into the game text.

Thank you so much, guys; these playtest reports are awesome, and incredibly useful!