Agon 2nd edition

[pemerton]

When I roll for the opposition, I set the d20 to that number so the players can see what they need to achieve. it’s not rolled — just used to mark a number. It was actually a little small and numbered cards would have been better, but I don‘t have any.

Cool, makes sense.

(typo by me in the above — I meant roleplay, not roll-play. Hope that wasn’t a source of too much confusion)

It wasn't - I picked it as a typo because the literal reading just wouldn't have made any sense at all!

This is an easy game to minimax; it won’t work with players who like to get every strategic advantage possible. They can add their good domain to every roll, make sure they can maximize aid for tough fights and so generally, if they want to ensure victory every time, it will be hard to run a challenging game. So it needs the players to buy into the roleplaying aspect. If you are trying to persuade a lover to return to his estranged family, you want to use domains and other modifiers that make sense. Mechanically, you can pay to add the fighting domain, invoke the help of Ares and win the conflict. But when the Minotaur (one of my players’ characters) has to roll oration, and none of his gods will help, it makes the challenge both trickier and more real. Of course, if they have a clever idea on how to use a different domain, or they invoke a god in a subtle way, that’s even better! But the game needs that to be the way that challenges are approached for it to be really fun.

Thanks. I'm curious how this will go with my group - or to be more precise, I'm wondering if the revealed player behaviour will match my mental predictions across the players! (There are some similarities to what you describe here in other systems we play like Cortex+ Heroic and 4e out-of-combat.)

For me, it was a simple call. For each island I looked at which gods had any interest in the island, and if they would be happy with the outcome. So, early on, the players reunited a pair of lovers and stole things from birds sacred to Zeus; they also supported one leader who reduced the power of a temple to another god. Pretty obvious.

I think once when I stated what I thought the gods’ reactions were, that the players disagreed and I changed my mind, but mostly it was pretty clear. In fact most often the players would state that they expected it as they took action.

OK. Did you do much handing out of Divine Favour as an immediate consequence of a contest?

For me, the trickiest part of the game was deciding when something was a contest or not. I’d usually have a few definite contests in my notes, and by default most other situations were resolved without contests. But I like contests and so would add them occasionally, which inflated XP rewards per session and so escalated the game faster than I intended.

I think our Prince Valiant game is probably awarding Fame at twice (or thereabouts) the rate per session that the rulebook envisages; but given the (in)frequency of our sessions that's not a problem. So if the same thing were to happen in Agon I'd probably be OK with it.

But another question I have related to contests is when you use a place as the opposition (eg scaling a cliff). On a quick read of some of the islands (I don't want to read them all in case we have any shared GMing) most of these don't seem to have epithets. Would you just make one up in that case?

 

[GrahamWills]

OK. Did you do much handing out of Divine Favour as an immediate consequence of a contest?

But another question I have related to contests is when you use a place as the opposition (eg scaling a cliff). On a quick read of some of the islands (I don't want to read them all in case we have any shared GMing) most of these don't seem to have epithets. Would you just make one up in that case?

Here’s a note from a custom Island I designed — this may answer both the above questions:

————

Forest​

The forest has many raiders, but poorly organized and they do not attempt to attack you. However it is also inhabited by Harpies. You find the discarded clothing of two young persons and bare footsteps leading deep into the forest, followed by booted prints of the pursuing raiders.

• Craft and Reason to find the lovers in the forest (Antio and Xestra)
• Minotaurs get a d8 advantage in the maze of trees
• d8 dark forest; d8 raiders; d12 (sacred) harpies; d12 Ares
• Success: Divine favor of Aphrodite for all

————

This was on an island that was being sacked by seas raiders (previously the players had only partially succeeded with uniting an Island, so I made that island united as a piratical haven — this was the result). It’s about the most level of info I defined for a simple encounter with minimal consequences. For the challenge, I had 3 ever-present epithets; the raiders who were under Ares’ personal protection, and Zeus‘s harpies (they had his wrath almost all the campaign and in this finale island he was out for blood). For physical challenges I’d usually pick a single feature and assign a difficulty to that.

This was a pretty hefty challenge, but in fact the players went to a temple of Zeus earlier in the session and sacrificed to him successfully, so the harpies were withdrawn. Since the players had previously united in the worship of Ares, they actually all had some good favor with him, so they used that on this challenge. Greek gods have no problems playing both sides …

i didn’t usually give flavor in the middle of an island, but this was the final session, so no point doing it at the end! On reflection, when I next run AGON, I’ll probably do more of that.