Agora playtest, and reworking a narration/mechanical interface
June 19th, 2009
I’m quite interested in this game Agora, because in part it emulates the fiction of stuff like Alpha Centauri, and hell that was part of why I was trying to hack on Governor for so long. Some SGB folks played it, and it hasn’t gone so well. Some of the issues: – mechanics: relatively heavy, unclear “tutorial”/Descent instructions, not entertaining at the mechanical level – lack of fictional buy-in for the “genre” of the game (especially problematic because this game requires you to create TONS of ad hoc fictional material and care about it) – lack of attachment between the mechanics and fiction
Let me talk about the third issue. When I played my Descent phase, I did feel a strong fictional attachment. I think this is half because of my excessive buy-in for the fiction, but also because I injected my own procedure into things (which my well be playing it wrong, or it may have been filling in the gaps). I’m curious if that extra (implicit?) procedure makes a difference. Or perhaps, it was only my reading into things that kept things interesting.
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Resources and Ideals are defined by a die-size and a number of dice. There is some relationship between this representation and fiction, but sometimes it’s weak.
Example from play: I create a resource, Council of Eden (2d4). It’s potent (smaller dice are better) but it’s fragile (only two dice, and smaller dice are more likely to get used up). This reflects what I imagined for a Council: an elite circle with influence but living at the very edge of their power being swept away. (However, going from 2d4 to 3d4 doesn’t feel really strong at all, and I must admit 2d4 to 2d6 is similarly a marginal change, which means the fictional change is minor.) [1]
One option during your turn is to reroll your Resources pool (possibly adding a new resource to the mix). A consequence of this is that you may damage some of your resources as a result. This should mean that in rerolling my Resources pool, I have to describe how I’m deploying/reallocating my advantages in order to get closer to my goal, but it has to be in a way that compromises my resources, and if damage occurs, I have to reflect that damage on the resoucces that are damaged. I’ll reroll/add to my Resources in pursuit of a win, but also because I want to see if I have to bear the consequences of a risk I take (and that is because I want to see if I’ll have to learn to run my society without that resource).
Example from play: I called upon my Council of Eden to address a growing famine. My narration was a little lame (“they give a speech”) but really, they needed to do something that actually puts their power at stake. Perhaps have an in person appearance in the city center to hand out supplies. In the resulting roll results in burnout, and clearly I should describe how the food never gets hear, the rioters storm the barricades, and the Council needs an emergency evacuation, painting them as cowards before the entire City. Their influence has been damaged.
While that reroll was part of the process of securing victory, part of it is that I wanted to see if, fictionally, the Council of Eden was able to be part of the solution in this new world, or if they’d find themselves up against the wall. Is my story one where the Council reigns from the shadows and grows their new colony, or one where the old guard was rendered obsolete by a new order? (On one level, I was probably shooting for the latter, but clearly that hasn’t yet happened.)
One option – either during your turn or in reaction to another player trying to complete a goal – is to reroll your ideals dice, possibly invoking another Ideal. Here there are consequences again: you may have to reprioritize your Ideals, or possibly alter them. The kind of narration that could work is describing a counter-maneuver that risks (or more explicitly, contravenes) your stated ideals.
In play, my narrations here were weak, but to use this as a guideline: “Send in our cyborg guard; they can never conquer our enhanced might!” could be a challenge to my “we must upgrade ourselves to become invincible” ideal; perhaps, even if my blocking maneuever is successful, our cyborg traits were rendered useless, forcing me to question that ideal. (However, you can see that it’s a harder to come up with examples like these.) [2]
One option during your turn is to place your dice, claiming a goal. I didn’t see a clear thing to narrate, and I notice that there aren’t real consequences for trying to place. It either completes a victory, sets up a future victory, or is blocked by your foe. You could do some narration, but here more than other places it seems to lack consequence. [3]
(Possibly related: Fictional Consequences and Mechancial Bonuses, “How we decide to make decisions in games like Dogs in the Vineyard”.)
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[1] Idea: maybe instead of adjustable numbers/die-steps, there should be a few discrete mixes of die-size and quantity that reflect a certain kind of resource. 2d4 sounds right for depicting “Powerful group that’s at risk of being swept away”, and 4d8 is good for “Big block of resource, you can rely on them and they’re not going away any time soon”.
[2] Idea: a reroll of Ideals could be a West-Wing-style talking heads scene, as the demogogue debates the nature of their Ideals with some NPCs/lieutenants in the course of plotting a countermaneuver. Narrations that may work: – “This plasma cannon represents the work of our best engineers. If it is compromised, it is a compromise of our entire science program.” (So, this stakes your ideal on whether the other player will ultimately succeed.” – “I know what our constitution says, Senator, but if we do not override the union veto, then there will be no constitution left to protect.” (So, showing stress/weakening of an Ideal.) – “Understand this: the Trade Union understands coercion but it does not understand the nature of subversion. I have already sent spies within the ranks of their PsyTroopers. No soldier can turn down a chance at survival.” (So, I’m presenting my pro-survival ideals as a prediction of why their forces will fall from within. I’m either right or wrong.)
Still, not everyone loves that talking heads stuff, and it requires coming up with a mini-scene, on the fly, which is non-trivial.
[3] So, what should happen to the “Place” action? On one hand, you could start the turn with an overwhelming set of dice and say “I take it”; you narrate how your various maneuvers have succeeded (“Within hours, my engineers carve through the bedrock…”), and quickly move on.
Or, it has to be a gambit of some kind: you take a single action that will either provide a decisive advantage or a major setback in this conflict. This is also easy enough to narrate: I describe the setup for the gambit, you roll to counter, and either we describe it going all wrong, or I narrate a flawless victory as above.
The “gambit” approach is common, but I actually think it might not be appropriate. The players have already injected their fiction with their positioning rolls, and it’s hard to come up with context-less fiction for multiple placement moves, in my opinion. If the mechanics were changed, I imagine something like this: – I take my turn, positioning dice and describing how I pursue the Goal. I have an adequately strong showing (a “straight” or something) on my side. I say: “Advantage”, basically saying that I have the other player in “Check”. Whatever I’ve just done has just put my side near victory. (If we use the Council of Eden example above, perhaps the Council is tarnished, but the emergency rations are in fact airdropped a day later.) – The other player takes their turn. By the end of their turn, they must get out of the “check” I’ve put them in. Perhaps they can reposition the Ideals pool in a way to neutralize my Resource pool, or they can basically fold and describe my awesome crushing win.
8 comments on “Agora playtest, and reworking a narration/mechanical interface”
01
I actually really like your West Wing talking heads approach, but that would suggest that the game is much more about politics than I got from playing the game or skimming the text. I definitely thing it’s much more interesting if the different factions are the equivalent of political parties, vying for control over the same “public,” rather than different nations or ways of life with their own independent citizenries.
02
Hey Dev (and others)!
First off, thanks so much for giving the game a whirl. Feedback is precious honey, even when it seems like it’s all negative. And that is not the case here — this is very illuminating.
For most of your thoughts and suggestions, all I can say is YES. That’s certainly the spirit of the game, and all of the non-mechanical suggestions you give you could use in the game as-written.
I have one question before I go off and start assuming things — were you narrating before or after you rolled dice?
Jonathan, the game is (or perhaps becomes is better) intensely political. While you start play with everybody coming in from different directions, in the process of play those distinctions get fuzzy. Alliances blur lines. Often the ‘national’ distinctions collapse, and you do get something akin to political parties within the same nation-state. By endgame, if all goes as envisioned, the ideogogues (and obstacles) are factions operating in the same polity, that polity being the entire planet. Now obviously, all this should be explicated in the book — I have a ‘what to expect’ section planned in Mastery, and this will probably go there. But thanks for highlighting what needs to be included! :)
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Josh: I don’t quite recall. Me personally, I think I did a little bit both before and after. “I’m rallying the Council of Eden… (roll) ...and I guess the fuck it up!” For others, I only narration I recall is before rolling in a new resource, explaining (if necessary) how to the new resource would be used.
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[...] Purkayastha has posted some thoughts on the Story Games Boston playtest of Agora. I’m really happy that SGB — folks who tend [...]
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Something to highlight: first, my extra narrative procedure here would not be enough for some players to feel attachment.
Secondly, I think I want to emphasize the problem of tying mechanics to narrative without much at stake or consequence. When this breaks down, it’s sometimes called “parlor narration”, i.e. when the narration is separate from the mechanical move, and where they are not related. Whereas, say, a fictional “raise” in Dogs could have more influence than the mechanical weight tht goes along with it, I didn’t see a strong equivalent for some steps (such as placing). So, hence my suggestion to minimize the context-free narrations hooks, or to give them some other kind of hook.
06
Okay. It’s becoming plain that your narration, or at least the bulk of it, should come after you roll or place dice. The dice function best as a constraint to the fiction, so knowing what you roll is useful for what you choose to narrate.
I am also getting the impression that you had too much fictional significance loaded onto your positioning. Which is an error of the text, if it gave you that impression. When you take your turn to position, you aren’t doing anything — you’re getting ready to do stuff. Placing dice is where you’re doing and acting. So if you’re going in expecting your positioning roll to tell you how successful you were, you are going to be disappointed. At best, a good positioning roll will tell you if you are in position to complete a goal in X number of turns (your “I take it” suggestion is close to a lot of table chatter I have heard in playtests). So that’s another bit to highlight in the text — positioning rolls are for introducing elements of the fiction, not immediately using them.
I am not quite following you on the context-free narration hooks comment — or rather, I might understand what you’re talking about, but I’m not quite sure, and I don’t want to fall into a situation where we’re both talking past each other. Can you unpack a bit?
07
To be clear, this isn’t all playtest reports – in part (like discussing my narration of positions), I was proposing what would be necessary to make that a fictionally meaningful part of the proceedings, rather than a straight mechanics move. When we played, the position rolls were just a straight mechanics move, but that was perhaps unsatisfying? It was time taken up mechanically (“hah! i push forward a 5!!”) that wasn’t tactically rich and didn’t add to the fiction. (Hence, if it’s just mechanical, I want it to take even less time.)
I checked the play guide, and it does say that, after positioning, you “narrate how you are preparing to act”.
Let me explain the “context-free narration hooks” thing, which is simpler than I made it sound. Your rule explicitly says “do X; now narrate something”. But there’s a lack of fictional cue about what I’m narrating, or whether there’s a fictional or mechanical importance to what is being narrated. I know generally what I’m narrating – describe getting closer to your goal, basically – but continuing to narrate that sort of thing abstractly is exhausting after a time, and there really is no reason for it. This is why it seems to be in the “parlor narration” category, because there’s mechancis and there’s narration afterwards but it would be functionally the same regardless of what was narrated.
In DitV, the fictional “raise” is as important as the mechanical one, but that not the case with positioning.
08
One thing to note, if you put it a hook, it will limit someone; it will add an extra layer of dependence to the fiction. Now I wouldn’t assume that it must just be the player who plays it who gets restricted, it could be that he chooses it because it will restrict his opponent. In other words if you use a certain resource, then that effects how he can respond to it.
So certain kinds of attack against your council will only add to their power, so the other player might have to insure they listen to what your resource is to insure they can counter it, something like that!
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