Red Bank Summer Y1 - Festival of Illusions

Mission (Festival of Illusions - Diplomacy Mission, Difficulty 4) : The Amber Hand raided Echo Lake, and the leadership of Red Bank chose to ignore the problem, letting the locals deal with it. This resulted in a loss of stability for Red Bank and a lack of goods coming from Echo Lake. Instead, Thea, Fuscus, and Viator headed out to Burgan Vale to find the location of Thedda's Palimpsest, the legendary book of arcane lore.

Part of this decision came from a desire to see diplomacy in action. But raising the disposition of Burgan Vale would be really nice as well.

Heroes taken on mission: Thea "Speaker for the East", Fuscus "Master of Coin", Viator "Courtier of Candlelight Keep"

The spotlight character was Fuscus. Fuscus had a connection within Burgan Vale: Childric, the washed up mercenary captain. Both Childric and Fuscus were from Southkeep. This would be a recurring theme for the mission.

Build Developments: Lacking the resources from Echo Lake made things difficult, but still managed to obtain Great Casting, thus unlocking the possibility for a Mana Forge in the fall.

Challenge Phase: Preparations for the Festival of Illusions, the annual celebration of magic in Burgan Vale, were underway. Thea took the opportunity to make contacts and meet up with old friends, while Fuscus and Viator undertook efforts to find information that could be used as leverage by Red Bank.

Challenge Scene: An Unseemly Past - Diff 5, 2 Suns, 1 Moon, Disguise / Thievery / Stealth : Fuscus and Childric did all sorts of morally questionable things on the streets of Southkeep when they were growing up. For insurance, Fuscus and Viator decided to dig some of this up on Childric. Playing innocent, asking around, and using some measure of deception let them find out that Childric didn't come to Burgan Vale under the most honest of circumstances. His past as an enforcer for the Empire was not something he wanted to get out. Should the situation arise, such information could prove useful.

Advantage Scene: Alda's Hopes and Dreams : While Fuscus and Viator were busy, Thea spent time with Alda, the horsemaster for Burgan Vale. She took the time to better understand and relate to Elisa's granddaughter on a more personal level. This culminated in the creation of a mission aspect with two free invokes.

Challenge Scene: Structural Weakness - Diff 3, 1 Moon, Engineering / Wits : In the tower of Arankh, Thea and Fuscus met with Marellus to go over security within Burgan Vale. Leveraging information from Fuscus' past, the duo exposed some weaknesses that the Autarch may be able to exploit. Marellus was grateful for their aid.

Challenge Scene: Bending Elisa's Ear - Diff 1, 1 Sun, 2 Moons, Society: After an initial difficult challenge, the rest of the scenes proved fairly easy. The final challenge scene showcased Thea following Elisa about while Elisa performed various preparation tasks for the festival. Thea took the opportunity to get closer to Elisa.

Advantage Scene: Favor of the Blue Robes: Finally, Fuscus and Viator worked to gain the favor of the Order of the Eye. With Viator's magical knowledge and Fuscus' charm, they were able to create a campaign aspect with two free invokes.

Diplomacy

Conflict Phase (Diplomacy): The three envoys from Amber Hand worked carefully and methodically in addressing and discussing issues that came up for Burgan Vale. Marellus hammered on the history of Red Bank, the questionable relationship with the Amber Hand, and whether or not Red Hand could really be trusted with the knowledge of the Palimpsest. Elisa completely charmed Thea, using magic to put her in Burgan Vale's pocket for quite some time to come. Thea ended the conflict with both a moderate and a severe consequence reflecting this attraction to Elisa! In the end, the heroes narrowly completed three issues.

Mission Status: Success! Disposition with Burgan Vale increased by one. However, Red Bank had two campaign consequences with one free invoke each, Questionable Past and Watched by Elisa.

Stability: Stronghold: -1 (The raiders of the Amber Hand took their toll.)

Ally Disposition: Burgan Vale +3, Crescent Hold +0, Gravewood -1, Lily Manor +3, Sunriders +2

Stronghold Developments:
Great Channeling
Great Casting

Regional Income:
Red Bank (Capital): 1 food, 2 timber, 2 mana
Echo Lake: 2 ore
Tarrydale Farms: 2 food
Green Vale: 1 food, 1 ore
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Total: 4 food, 3 timber, 4 ore, 2 mana, 1 luxury

Schemes: Skirmish One! The Autarch was causing problems on the frontier. Ignoring the scheme would mean a campaign aspect for the Autarch.

Scheme Pool

These are special dice pools used for the solo version of WotA.

Diplomacy Schemes: 1
Infiltration Schemes: 1
Skirmish Schemes: 1
Warfare Schemes: 1

Region Threats: None

Faction Threats: Lily Manor, Diplomacy difficulty 6. Lily Manor is nervous about the push toward gaining the Palimpsest. This worry could fester.

Rules Musings:

Used the same basic structure for diplomacy as was used for skirmish: each opponent has a chart which determines their action and the resulting total. It worked pretty well! It was difficult, probably on the border of being too difficult, but I enjoyed the fact it was kind of in doubt. It would be pretty fiddly if played solo, though. It's not as bad with a group if each player controls one of the opposing leaders as well. That kind of reduces the amount of info that's needed to track.

Also, it would be nice if the charts didn't need the character skill numbers at all. Currently, they do. That will make things a little redundant, but it's another way to be less fiddly. Used the complication and invoke rules tweaks from last session, and that went much better!

All in all, it worked fairly well. The biggest issue is probably going to be in terms of developing the info so that it's easy to track.

Next Session:

Not sure! Given how tough a difficulty 4 diplomacy mission was, the difficulty 6 mission to Lily Manor probably isn't going to happen. So that disposition is going to drop. And it doesn't really seem worth it to try to stop the Autarch's skirmish plans. Early on, they aren't that bad.

Most likely it will be an exploration mission to either Sunset Isles (diff 4) or the Gray Forest (diff 5). It would be good to ping-pong a few times between skirmish and diplomacy for playtest purposes, before moving on to infiltration and warfare. Probably choose Sunset Isles as Gray Forest looks pretty tough.

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.

Diplomacy Revisited

A big part of Wrath of the Autarch are the threats which harass the heroes on their path to remove the Autarch from power.  In considering the threats which the Autarch may employ, one that considered fun might be targeting a faction in order to lower their disposition.  In essence, swaying a faction to become loyal to the Autarch rather than the Stronghold.

Unfortunately, the current Negotiation mini-game doesn't handle this very well.  Thinking a little more about it, it may be possible to make the mini-game a little more generic, and allow some interaction like this.

Currently, the Negotiation mini-game models a barter - two sides haggling over a final price.  This threat would be two sides trying to sway a third side.  One possibility would be to use the main pieces - tracks for each leader from the faction - and a total support track.  But instead of representing barter, the end total support would map to disposition (either gained or lost).  The leaders could still be placed on tracks, such that moving them to a supportive side aids the Stronghold, while putting them on an unsupportive side aids the Autarch, etc.

It may be possible to make the "raise an issue / address an issue" actions more generic as well.  There are already the "create an advantage / overcome an obstacle" actions present in the narrative scene and the Skirmish.  These would map to issues.  Then it becomes the basic aspect mechanics in play.  The concept of magnitudes would be lost in Negotiation - but Fate core brings that back a little bit by having succeed with style create multiple free invokes (which makes the aspect essentially have a magnitude).

A third type of diplomatic interaction could occur in the game during a Conquest mission, when the heroes are trying to persuade a native population to join the Stronghold.  This fits better the barter model - although maybe not in terms of trading this-for-that.  Instead, it might just be a set of difficulties that the Stronghold must hit, the result being a net population which joins the Stronghold.