Comments on: Another conspiratorial cluster

By: Beeker

Beeker — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 18:30:59 +0000

The terminology is much better Brad. Vice, Force and Legitimacy are much closer to what I envisioned when we debated these a couple of weeks ago.

One bonus I get from having playtested this twice is that clusters haven’t been reused yet. Agents come in, deal with a (potential) situation and then move on to the next crisis. At best one (or maaaaaybe two) node(s) would carry over to the next crisis point.

The Agency goes where needed to clean up the mess of others.

One week Detroit, the next week Damascus.

By: Roger

Roger — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 18:28:02 +0000

So sounds like we require:

Entities with mutually-exclusive goals

and, because we don’t have all day

An untenable status quo

I know that’s on a more generic and abstracted level than you’re at right now, but I feel like I want to start more foundationally. But if this is all old news to you, keep on trucking forward.

By: halfjack

halfjack — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 18:05:58 +0000

Yes, conspiracy is the wrong word. I only want a complicated relationship that creates missions.

By: Roger

Roger — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 18:01:55 +0000

I’m not trying to sound like pedantic jerk but I don’t see how any of that seems related to a conspiracy of any sort. Which makes me a bit sad, because I like conspiracies, and I like what you’re doing, but I don’t see the connection.

By: halfjack

halfjack — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 17:00:08 +0000

I dunno. I’m tempted to preserve at most a single entity that proved memorable in the last game and then build a new cluster around it, applying some simple rule to progess it based on prior play or randomly. For randomly, a fudge check on each stat with negative reducing by one, zero not modifying, and positive increasing by one is probably sufficient.

By: GeorgeH

GeorgeH — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 16:55:49 +0000

That makes a lot of sense. How will you deal with cluster re-use? Presumably you’ll want to reuse many of the same entities for the next Mission, but simply rerolling stats seems obviously wrong (legitimacy isn’t going to change from +3 to -2 overnight). On the other hand, some things will certainly have changed, including likely from the effects of the mission from last time.

By: halfjack

halfjack — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 16:51:31 +0000

Good thoughts regarding the city, George — I think the idea of a white collar crime unit is indeed a better representation for the low force result.

As for vice, mostly I’m trying to keep it as simple as possible — this isn’t intended to provide a complete description of all that’s going on, but rather focus on something that will create a mission for Agents to resolve. So all interpretation of stats could have the caveat of “in the context of this mission”. Consequently the force can be read as “the force that the entity can bring to bear in the context of this mission”. And so vice becomes “the vice that is relevant to the context of this mission”.

Money is such a universal that I’m loathe to represent it. I think I prefer it become part of an interpretation for vice or force or both as needed.

By: GeorgeH

GeorgeH — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 16:36:38 +0000

I like the general framework. Two thoughts. One is that giving the City of Detroit a -5 on Force needs some explanation — why does the City not have access to its police force, which is presumably a positive Force entity? Maybe the box labeled City of Detroit should really be a subcomponent of that, like a white collar crimes unit inside the DA’s office or some such.

The second is that using only one variable on Vice seems… incomplete? Seems like many entities will have both a demand side and a supply side, perhaps in different vices — a drug cartel supplies drugs and demands guns, for example. And how does money play into this? Money isn’t illegal, but in many cases the obtaining of it will be…

By: Toph Marshall

Toph Marshall — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 14:10:53 +0000

So this is pretty cool. “Force” is interesting. I wonder if it is in the nature of all economic units to use force, but perhaps the scale is active/passive: -3 means that the unit tracks any records of you it can, monitoring your activities, while +3 means it’s sending people to your door.

There’s a lot to think about here. Fun fun.