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.