WotA Tutorial 3: Campaign Aspects and Reincorporation

Now that the Wrath of the Autarch kickstarter is in full swing, I thought I would discuss some other aspects (heh) of the kingdom building game that might be of interest to Fate Core players. In particular, how Wrath of the Autarch handles aspects that have impact at different timescales.

If you haven't heard of Wrath of the Autarch, check out the kickstarter here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/295104591/wrath-of-the-autarch-a-kingdom-building-game

Aspects at Different Timescales

A Sunrider Visits Her Clan's Ovoo

Wrath of the Autarch has aspects which occur at three distinct timescales: minor advantages, mission aspects, and campaign aspects. As well as having varying timescales, the longer lived aspects typically have a more central role in the campaign.

• Minor Advantages - These are very short lived transient aspects, similar to boosts. They can be created as an action during either the challenge phase or the final conflict. Usually, minor advantages are not written down. Furthermore, they don't last beyond the end of the creating player's next turn.
• Flanked, Embarrassed, Hidden
• Mission Aspect - Mission aspects are created during the challenge phase as an action. They last until the end of the current mission (the end of the season). As such, they tend to be harder to create. Mission aspects are usually created during the challenge phase for use during the conflict.
• Wolfsbane, Heinrich's Password Convention, Curio for the Prince
• Campaign Aspect - Campaign aspects are created during the challenge phase as an action. They're written down on the Stronghold sheet and last the entire campaign (or until they're no longer applicable).
• Sword of Kynian, Contact within Autarch's Spy Network, Angry Hearts in Burgan Vale

Create Advantage as Scene Creation

Creating mission and campaign aspects is a bigger deal than creating minor advantages. These aspects can't be created during a conflict and can't be created if a character is in a challenge scene. Instead, the creation of these sorts of aspects is handled as their own scene. The Stronghold player who wishes to create the aspect sets the scene on their turn, then uses the appropriate skill to see if they're successful.

The opposition for creating mission aspects is equal to the difficulty of the mission. The opposition for creating campaign aspects is two higher than the mission.

Example: Rebecca is playing Varys, the silver tongued sorcerer from Aben's Hollow. He is deep within the Imperial library at Northkeep, looking for a particular book of Secrets. "Varys is trying to find the Whispers of Kynian, famed for revealing the secrets of the mind. I'd like to create a campaign aspect."

The mission difficulty is 4, so the opposition to create a campaign aspect is 6. Varys is using his Lore skill, which is 5. Rebecca gets a +2 on the check, success! She writes down the aspect Whispers of Kynian on the Stronghold sheet with one free invoke.

Reincorporating Campaign Aspects

By virtue of writing these aspects down on the Stronghold sheet, they become reincorporated over the course of the campaign. This is a particularly nice feature for Wrath of the Autarch given that there is no gamemaster. Typically, reincorporation of thematic content is one of those elements that gets forgotten without one strong driving force. By writing campaign aspects down they become important and explicit.

The Autarch player also sometimes is able to create campaign aspects to reflect negative situations - such as Angry Hearts in Burgan Vale. During a related mission, the Stronghold players could attempt to deal with this as an overcome action.

Fate and Mass Battles

So, yesterday was the first real playtest of the Warfare mini-game in Wrath of the Autarch.  It went about how all the other mini-games went when I first played them: a mixed bag.  In this mission, the players mustered their (pretty crappy) troops to withstand an attack from a limited strength Autarch force.

I went for a more Diaspora-like model of platoon combat as my basis, rather than something like the abstract model that Legends of Anglerre has.  My desire was to fight out units moving around zones, rather than having whole armies roll against each other.  There are many ways to do it, but that level of detail fits better with the rest of the missions already in place.

The narrative phase went well - but no rules have changed there for quite some time.  There were some cool scenes involving leaders from Bavin's Hollow (the Stronghold the players have created) pleading with some local farmers to get out of the path of the oncoming Imperial army.  I compelled one of the players to play to her character's nature and contradict what the other heroes were trying to do.

The Warfare mini-game, though, was a little slow and involved.  I think the mustering the troops went fine (that was pretty easy), and I had drawn out the zone map ahead of time.  But, there were a few issues that I've thought about this evening, and hopefully can resolve before the next playtest of this mini-game.

• The map was too big.  I had too many zones on the map, it was about 8 X 6 (in zones).  Of course, zones aren't grids, but that's still roughly how it was shaped.  That was too many zones.  The units moved too slow, and there was too much down time before it really clashed.  You need more zones than Skirmish (which only has four or five or so), but that was too many.
• A few of the players felt like their heroes didn't have enough options.  In particular, they wanted their bad-ass fighter heroes to be able to do bad-ass fighty stuff.  As it stood now - leaders (commanders of units), could Create an Advantage (makes aspects), Overcome Obstacles (remove them - or get around various static obstacles), or redeploy units under their command.
• Looking back, we weren't creative enough in the creation of aspects.  For instance, it's feasible a warrior could create an aspect which would demoralize an opposing unit simply by wading in and attacking.
• The players were interested in having the ability to attack a leader of the opposing force.  I'm not against this - so I'll probably put it in the rules.
• Too much Create an Advantage can slow things down.  This is sort of a byproduct of the previous issue.  The other mini-games have more options for the characters.  Most of them have a choice of Attack/Create an Advantage/Overcome Obstacle.  Because attack was gone (at least as it pertains to leaders) - that made it drag.
• I'm not sold on rolling for movement.  In Diaspora, each platoon rolls for movement.  In Fate as well, during Conflicts.  For this mini-game, though, it didn't seem to matter much.  It seems like a roll means you can spend Fate points.  But it felt like a lot of rolling for not that much benefit.  I'm thinking of just saying a leader and commanded units can move some base amount - depending on the slowest unit they command.

Those were the main issues.  That battle of itself, which I thought was going to be *very* lopsided, was closer than I anticipated.  The heroes, although they just had poorly trained militia on their side, also had some pretty serious spell power (it's one of their main focuses), and that helped tremendously.

So, it was interesting to see in action, but I have some work to do to make it come together a little better.

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.