Diplomacy in Wrath of the Autarch

I'm still thinking of ways to make the diplomacy mini-game in WotA a little more flexible.  Currently, what I have involves the players taking turns trying to gain support from leaders of an opposing group, while under time pressure in the form of a hard limit on the number of turns.  The more outlandish the request, the more support is needed from the leaders.  This is monitored by a support track that each leader is placed on.

The WotA diplomacy mini-game has been pretty fun, but it has a number of tricky elements.  One is that it's pretty rigid, since it involves only opposing leaders with whom you are trying to gain support.  I think that element will always be there - diplomacy is about coming together and gaining support.  However, there are occasionally other people involved (third party antagonists), who serve mainly to gum up the works and create obstacles.

The other element that is tricky is balancing the mini-game for different numbers of players.  As it stands, if there are more leaders than players, they can use the Create an Advantage action to make it very difficult for the players to succeed.  I accommodated this by adding extra turns if there are fewer players, but they still can get overwhelmed pretty easily.

There are other options out there - for instance, Fate Core's conflict rules can handle social conflict.  I'm not as fond of using the conflict mechanics, because it just feels like "fighting with words", and I would prefer a different aesthetic.  What I have does feel a little more like diplomacy, since there are issues raised and addressed, and overall support levels calculated.  I also feel like it's close to being right, so I may do some more fiddling before looking at larger overhauls.

Really, the "third party antagonist" issue and the "scaling for players" issue may be closely related.  It might need to be solved by having a limited pool of actions for the GM rather than one action for each character the GM controls.  If the number of actions was based on the number of players, that might scale it pretty well, while also giving flexibility to having different sorts of opposing characters.

All the players could take their turns, then the GM gets to activate one character for each player - either leaders raising issues and debating or a malevolent third party intent on obstructing the character's intentions. Or, actions could be taken in order of the Society skill as they are now, but the GM would still only get some number of characters based on the number of players.

So, setup would consist of selecting opposing leaders as well as interested characters from third parties (like the Autarch).  Each leader would still be placed on a separate track, and if their support is gained, some amount of Influence is added to the total support.  Depending on the mission, the amount of total support gained after the number of turns has elapsed determines success or failure.  The key thing about diplomacy is that it's less about success or failure than about building relationships and setting up potential future problems.

The Fate Fractal and WotA

Over the weekend, some of my friends and I took a look at balancing the strategic elements in Wrath of the Autarch.  That is, the longer scale strategies of deciding which sorts of missions to undertake, and how that feeds back into the overall balance and structure of the game.  It's a very difficult process - something that WotA inherits due to its aggressively gamist core.  There's a lot to talk about there, but that's a separate post.

Anyway, the fate fractal came up again, but outside of the aspects for the factions, I'm just having trouble seeing how it fits into the current design of kingdoms.  I also looked at Legends of Anglerre again this weekend, and it very much embraces the fractal.  Kingdoms are characters, with skills, aspects, stress, and stunts.

However, after refreshing my memory on how LoA works, it doesn't seem like a direction that I'll take (or at least, I don't see it at the moment).  I think LoA opens up a very abstract way to play, which supports a more open toolkit approach.  For instance, a huge battle could be resolved by rolling a particular kingdom's Arms skill against an opposing kingdom - and then dealing stress.  Or a thieves guild could roll their Assassination skill to take someone out, etc.

Early on, though, one of my design goals was to create a game that was fairly easy for a GM to prep for.  WotA isn't a simple game, but it is a low prep game.  The way I'm accomplishing that is by sketching in many of the details for how the various factions interact.  I think that open toolkit approach doesn't really make for a game that's easy to prep for.

In WotA, if the players choose to infiltrate a faction and steal their secrets, there is no Security skill that's rolled against.  Instead, all action is zoomed in - the characters undertake a mission against resistance listed in that particular faction's chapter.  Some societies are better at stopping that sort of thing than others.  This is pretty much the case for all the various skills I could come up with for kingdoms.  Rather than rolling a skill, there is a mission to undertake for that season.  The missions are the abstract currency of the game.

So, aside from heavily relying on aspects for pretty much everything - factions, aspects, relationships, etc, I'm going to put trying to use skills with factions on the backburner.  I'll probably keep stability and population as the only main values that get tracked, and continue to key off of those.

There are of course some pros and cons to this approach.  One of the cons is that it's really difficult to design - each faction has an identity in the game, and your Stronghold is defined by who your allies are just as much as it is defined by various developments you build.  It also makes for a rigid system.  WotA is very much not a toolkit.  I'm sure it could be mined for ideas - but it's built in order to take advantage of all the particular elements at work.  One the plus side, I do hope it means that there's a wealth of directions players can go, each of which don't provide all that much work for the GM to prepare for.

Embracing the Fate Fractal: Building a Fantasy Kingdom

After about ten or so really solid playtests of the Wrath of the Autarch, I feel like much of the play experience has come together.  However, the area that still might need some work comes from how to represent the factions, regions, and resources which form the backbone of the long term strategy in the game.  To this point, I haven't really embraced the Fate fractal for those elements - that is, the idea that everything can be represented as a character, with aspects, skills, stunts, stress, and consequences.

It's probably time to revisit how well the Fate fractal works with the strategic elements in Wrath of the Autarch (factions, regions, and resources).  I'll start with the most important part of a kingdom building game: the kingdoms themselves (also called factions in the rules, since they might not literally be fiefdoms).  For WotA, the two most important factions are the Autarch and the Stronghold (the faction the players will control).  Although, there are five other minor factions constructed in identical fashion.

Factions have aspects, which can be used in play as per normal - essentially functioning to help flesh out the society and give a global pool of aspects all the characters can access.  Fate fractal in full effect.  Other than aspects, they also have developments, which are very similar to stunts.  The provide benefits for all of the characters attached to that faction, in more or less concrete ways.  Sometimes they make getting other developments easier, or help in defense.  But, the parallel is definitely there - and I like the idea, so I'm not interested in changing that around right now.  That said - only the Stronghold really gains new developments over time, the other factions are basically static in terms of developments.

However, the last two key attributes for a faction are stability and population - and these aren't very Fate friendly.  Stability is very important - functioning as the lifeblood of a society.  If it drops down to zero, the faction collapses.  If such an event happens for the Stronghold or the Autarch, the game is over - one side is victorious.  This is represented as a number from 0-40.  Population is also represented on the same sliding scale, from 0-40.  It's pretty unlikely population will ever drop down to 0, but it would have the same effect of ending the game if it happens to the Autarch or the Stronghold.

These are the only two values tracked for all the different factions.  For the Stronghold, they function to determine how easy it is to build developments, and fluctuate somewhat independently.  Population can increase in response to a higher stability, and stability goes up and down in response to wars, threats, as well as successes in building certain developments and dealing with threats.  Besides these areas, population and stability determine how many units the Stronghold has available during military missions - or when using the military to deal with threats.  For the other factions, these attributes mostly inform units raised in warfare, and can be affected by the Stronghold.

So, taking a more Fate approach, stability and population could be modeled as stress tracks or skills.  Initially, I did take a skill-centric approach, and each faction had a number of skills (security, military, diplomacy, etc).  However, they slowly became obsolete, because of the mission based nature of WotA.  It didn't really matter what a faction's diplomacy was - because if you wanted to set up a deal with them, then that was a mission onto itself, not a roll.  So, I moved away from using skills.  Legends of Anglerre is a fantasy fate game which takes that approach, and it might work for a more abstract treatment of factions.  It may even work in a more limited fashion here, but I haven't fully embraced it - it doesn't quite create the effect I'm going for.

Another option is the stress track approach.  In some ways, this seems like a better fit.  After all, if losing your stability means the kingdom has collapsed, that does fit the stress track/consequences idea very well.  Maybe population and stability could be rolled up into one stat for all the other factions (just track stability).  After all, it's really stability that matters, not population.  That also allows the creation of consequences - always a fun way to narratively detail just how a kingdom is going into decline.

There are a few details, though, that get tricky:

• Taking Stability Stress: It seems like stability stress would only come in small amounts, for the most part.  It also isn't really variable - it's a byproduct of threats or war, and the way it's calculated is fixed.  Small, fixed amounts of stress don't seem to fit the stress track idea as well.  Warfare could feasibly cause a chunk of stability losses, though.
• Building Developments: Currently the stability score feeds into "build points" for the Stronghold to create developments.  By making it a stress track, I don't know how to keep that idea.  It functions more as a skill in that case - as in, rolling to make progress building a development.  Maybe population could be a skill for the Stronghold, and stress consequences can be freely invoked to lower the rolls somehow?
• Funding War: Finally, stability factors into how many troops are available for factions (including the Stronghold).  This again, feels more like a skill than a stress track.  I guess I could re-introduce a skill like Warfare for attacking with troops, and like in the building developments case, the stability stress would somehow impact it.

Anyway, I would like to really embrace the fate fractal as much as possible, but when I set about doing that, it seems like I might end up with something even more fiddly, which certainly isn't what I want.

Effects of Infiltration Missions

The recent playtests involving the Infiltration mini-game (used during Espionage and Sabotage missions) have been really fun.  However, an area that still needs more work is the overall campaign effect of Espionage and Sabotage in terms of benefits to the Stronghold.  This is an area that needs work on the whole, but is particularly poorly defined for those two mission types.

I had envisioned Espionage as primarily making it easier to build certain developments (the "tech tree" stuff that builds the kingdom up), essentially by stealing information from the target faction.  This would most likely translate to some sort of build point bonus (build points being units of "work" necessary to create a development).  Coming up with an exact number might require some revisions, but it should be good enough to merit attempting the mission, such as reducing the cost by half or something similar.  It's also possibly to get added build points by using Diplomacy with a faction, and having them directly aid your Stronghold.

It seems like not every development would benefit from Espionage (although, just glancing through them, I can justify some benefit to stealing secrets for all of them).  The specific effect of Espionage might need to be development dependent.  That also opens the door to effects besides simple build points.  For instance, maybe using the Espionage mission on a target castle plants a mole there - a mole who might be able to lower the defenses at a critical point during a future military campaign.  Similarly, it might be possible to learn some sort of forbidden lore through an Espionage mission.  That opens up the idea that one development might have more than one type of Espionage mission attached to it.

For Sabotage, the general idea is to inflict damage on a development, rendering it useless.  This is a little more problematic for the factions - since the GM doesn't keep track of their developments, and many of them really have no function for the faction.  Factions are really only described by two main attributes: stability and population.  Factions also have regions, with resources, although the resources aren't spent on anything - rather they exist only as locations to fight over.  A faction also has leaders.

So, most Sabotage missions function to lower the target's stability or population or both.  It's possible to assign some stability loss to developments (for instance, taking out their Improved Mining doesn't affect any resources, but drops their stability by some amount).  Another option for Sabotage might be a mission to assassinate a target leader, which would also have lasting consequences, to both Warfare and Diplomacy missions.

In order for this method to work, each development would need a list of all results of Espionage and Sabotage (could be none), as well as a general level of difficulty, which is used to add adversaries in the Infiltration mini-game.

Here's a sample development entry using this method:

• Mages Guild
• Build Points: 240
• Mana: 8
• Ore: 9
• Timber: 8
• Luxuries: 2
• Prerequisites: Mana Forge (Advanced), Expert Casting, Expert Channeling
• Effect: Caster may double effect of all mana expenditures (spending 4 mana now as the same effect as spending 8).
• Infiltration:
• Steal Secrets (Security: High) - Gain 120 BP toward building a Mages Guild.
• Destroy Ancient Library (Security: High) - Faction loses 3 stability as well as all effects of Mages Guild.

Most of the complexity in WotA comes from the choices available between missions, and this continues that pattern.  So, while play is fairly straightforward, it will probably be necessary to include some rough strategies to expose players to a few of the options that are available.

Depictions of the Autarch

In working on Wrath of the Autarch, I've been primarily focusing on mechanics to this point.  While there are six important factions in the game (including the Autarch's), my goal is to walk a line where the factions are somewhat fleshed out, but not excessively so.  That is, I would like to "leave space" for creativity and collaborative worldbuilding, but also provide sketches and snapshots to help creativity during play.

However, I vastly underestimated how much concrete detail needs to be understood when creating the art.  The indomitable Doug Kovacs is doing much of the art, functioning as a collaborator and designer.  I have also badgered my friends for help as well, which certainly hasn't been uncommon to this point.

Anyway, one of the first orders of business is to really think about the Empire, and the Autarch in particular.  I had written up a snapshot in the book - they're a plutocracy of sorts, where heads of numerous guilds form a collective senate and rule.  The Autarch is somewhat a figurehead, a historical position that is selected and put in place by the guilds.

This Autarch, though, is somewhat more savvy than those before her, and is less "figurehead" and more "get things done" - to both the delight and displeasure of various guildmasters.  I imagined her to be in her mid-30s, and we were giving her a slight Roman look (much of the Empire is inspired by Rome).

For the cover composition, we thought it would be cool to have her on a palanquin, held up by guards.  Surrounding her would be some sort of depiction of the seasons - hinting that it's a kingdom building game.  One idea was to have these seasons on a stone tablet, maybe showing the construction and destruction of a development (like a keep or a wizard's tower) through the seasons.

We also thought she should look a little elaborate - formal robes, a headband or icons of some sort surrounding her.  She's in "regal" attire on the cover - not in her more functional ass kicking gear.  In her hands are a magical ruyi scepter, cradled in her left, and a sword across her lap.  The ruyi scepter means something akin to "as you wish" and depicts prosperity.  Historically it was also a talking stick of sorts.  I really like that symbolism - as the Autarch is the wish granter and the one whose voice is heard.  The sword represents the enforcement of their will.  It has a nice blend of bizarre and formal.

I also really like the look of Byzantium color schemes and accoutrements.  The Empress Theodora, in particular, had a cool look, and might inspire the look of the Autarch - sort of a combination of Rome and Byzantium.
  

I think having some ornate robes is in order, with various bands symbolizing the importance of her station.  Although, I'm thinking of toning down the headgear a little - emphasizing the Autarch as someone who gets things done, and probably wouldn't be *as* comfortable with some of the formal restrictions, shying away from it perhaps more than her predecessors.

I also need to think of symbols for either her or the Empire.  I like the idea of a raven - symbolizing wisdom.  A bear also sounds cool.  We were thinking of using sun icons for the various depictions of the Stronghold (the protagonists) - since the Stronghold could look so many different ways.  Another option might be a stylized coin or something to that effect, further emphasizing the importance of prosperity and economy in the Empire.

OSR Analysis #12: Gamemastering as Probability Creation

So, I picked up Gygax magazine a few days ago and have been reading through it.  It has been a fun experience, probably a little heavy on the nostalgia department, but then most of the OSR strikes me as having a large component of nostalgia (nothing wrong with that).

The magazine itself certainly brings up fond memories of the heyday of Dragon magazine, when I was introduced to the hobby.

Anyway, I ran across a comment in an article by Lenard Lakofka.  "The DM has the final ability to rule and conduct the game.  If something a player wants to do is outlandish, give it a 3-8% chance of success, but if it's well thought out and doable make it 75-90%.  In those cases, where it is not a sure call in the DM's mind..."  Standard OSR boilerplate "Rulings not Rules" stuff, right?

But it got me thinking.  It strikes me as maybe the dividing line between old school and new school.  In old school, there are a ton of systems - all of which are completely optional (save for usually combat, which holds a hallowed place).  However, the one ur-mechanic which drives old school play is the ability of the GM to create a probability for any situation.  Indeed, that seems to me to be the defining characteristic.

But, what is going on here?  It's the GM's job to judge the worth of an idea, and assign a probability to it?  More than that, such probabilities seem to be neither 0% or 100% as a matter of course.  Is a really, really, really good idea worth 99%?  And a really, really bad one worth 1%?

Now look at a game like Dungeon World.  In that game, all the probabilities are largely fixed - good and bad ideas are going to make it into the mix.  They tend not to be tuned by probabilities, but rather by table consensus and other social factors.  Fiasco also dispenses with such probability assignment, favoring table consensus as well (although it is such a different model of design that there aren't many parallels).

Another new school game, FATE, is on the surface closer to that old school "let the GM judge the probabilities" method.  After all, the GM has a strong stance, and there are skills, with various difficulties assigned for success.  However, the escape hatch comes in the "Create an Advantage" action, which allows a player to put aspects into play.  With enough aspects that may be invoked for free - many actions become not just possible, but true.  In essence, a player is adding to the narration in exchange for success - also a marked difference from that old school philosophy of GM as probability creation engine.

Of course, the difference between old school and new school (to the extent that those nebulous terms even have a center) is much more complex than that, but that quote did strike me as a glaring exemplar of the old school mindset.