But I’m not so sure that’ll suffice, now, or at least not as the only goal. I think players need more by way of orthogonal goals to keep things juicy, and more reasons to make other characters beyond the Monarch targets for wrath, revenge or overthrow.

So what might motivate characters to participate in Intrigue? Stealing from Apocalypse World (Hx at chargen rules) and The Mountain Witch (Dark Fates), I’m envisioning handing out cards to players (or maybe just letting them pick from options for their character) along these lines:

* You are an elder, illegitimate child of the King/Queen with (name other character) and as such are the true heir to the throne! Name a character – they know the truth.

* You are an elder, illegitimate brother/sister to the monarch and as such ought to be the true monarch! Name a character – they know the truth.

* Your parents/lover/sibling were killed by (name a character), whether through malice aforethought or neglect of friendship, loyalty or duty. However, they do not realize this! You swear revenge.

* Despite your separation in rank and title, you and (character) are lovers.

* Your are in unrequited love with X.

* Secretly, you are not who you say you are. You have assumed your current identity to avoid prosecution for your crimes.

* Someone dear to you is imprisoned in the palace under sentence of death. You wish to seem them be granted mercy, be proved innocent, or escape.

* You owe someone a vast quantity of money. You must find a way to acquire this sum.

And so on and so forth.

Each will then have fiction-conditional rules attatched, e.g. for the illegitimate heir:

IF you can give testament to your bloodline in open court, construct strong legal argument as to your legitimacy, and the Monarch is dead, you succeed to the throne.

But I don’t want the game to be all murder all the time. There should be ways to try and get one up on the opposition without killing them. Some possible options I’m considering:

Imprisonment: both false and just, potentially. A character imprisoned can potentially escape (again, roles for the architect here, and for the captain of the guard), or even just be influential from their new location. At least they’re safe down there, for one thing.

Discrediting:  attack people’s credibility, legitemacy, trustworthiness, and motives. Particular characters would be weak to particular kinds of attacks: it’s be relatively easy to accuse the vizier of treachery, perhaps; everyone trusts the word of the archbishop, but if he’s demonstrated to have lied, it goes very badly for him…

It’s a display of group knowledge, for one thing. He’s here; she’s there. Perhaps most importantly, he isn’t there, so it’s safe to move to here.

It defines, more discretely and definitively than is likely with imagination alone, how far apart things are and how they relate to one another in space. I like the idea that an event could occur and players on opposite sides of the palace would be racing to get to it. (A master architect character, who knows shortcuts and secret passageways, could gain some strong bargaining power in such a scenario). I also like the idea that accessing cerayin rooms typically requires passing through other rooms – rooms you might not necessarily want to go in.

It certainly stresses that motion about the palace, in and of itself, is an important aspect of the game. Do I want that?

(One perhaps obscure boardgame I rather enjoy, Mystery of the Abbey, has a board game environment (the titular abbey) which the player’s monks roam around in. Rooms have different functions, and there are rules for what happens when monks encounter one another. I’d like to capture some of that feel).

It certainly emphasises that the palace, and only the palace, is the location of the game (I was already strongly tilting toward having some fictional rationale for all characters being broadly confined to the palace and its grounds.)

* If the king is distracted when you present a matter in which he has no direct interest, he will do whatever you suggest.

Keep in mind that both the vizier, invoking this rule, and the king, being affected by it, are player characters. (I think this is a GM-less game. Did I mention that? As a frequent GM, I like GM-less games.)

So in order to apply this rule, we have to answer the question “is the king distracted?” and also “is this a matter in which the king has no direct interest?”. I want to focus on the first of these questions for now, because it’s a little clearer as an example.

How do we decide that the king is distracted? We read the fiction. What was narrated about the king recently? Has his courtesan just arrived and is she dancing provocatively? Is he in a furious rage about some other matter? Was itching powder poured down his shirt earlier?

It is my great hope that questions like this can usually be answered without controversy. But I think it is inevitable that conflicts of interest, especially in a game with competitive elements, will arise. The king’s player will be all “nuh-uh, I am TOTALLY NOT DISTRACTED”. So, does my game need a mechanism to make the decision about the fiction when there’s controversy?

Vincent Baker, over at his blog, has referred to this decision as “a moment of judgement”. He also describes “the problem of biased judgement” I’m concerned about her, and describes two solutions. One involves creating tokens and systems – something I don’t wish to do. The second involves farming out the decision to a (hopefully disinterested, but invested in keeping the fiction believable) third party. But if this game is GM-less, do I have such a third party?

Maaaybe I can just hope that everyone rubs along.

Let’s kick off with a really juicy example.

“If you can arrange to be alone with another character while they aren’t expecting you to be there, you can kill them.”

This would be a suitable rule for some sort of spymaster or chief assassin character. I really do want the game to be as brutal as this – it’s not merely a hefty modifier on a to hit roll, you really will die. The mere existence of this rule, fabulously, will make everyone extremely suspiscious of sending their characters off to be in rooms alone…

Note! It’s still not a done thing for our putative spymaster. He has to trick his target somehow, maneuvering them into position. It’s likely characters will always be travelling with retinues and/or guards (especially the important ones) or at least in pairs (partly because they’ll know about this rule!), and the palace is going to be lousy with servants and guards at all times – it’ll take a defined effort to genuinely clear any particular room and thus qualify as “alone”.

Another rule:

If you are in the presence of someone who has been coerced into doing something against their usual code of ethics, they will confess to you.

A great rule for a religious character (or perhaps an interrogator?). The existence of this one creates a cost towards involving others in your plans, particularly NPCs (PCs are likely to have codes of ethics which mean that this one doesn’t work on them, of course). It also gives you an incentive to try and get the archbishop on your side.

Each of these rules is going to require careful thought. I’ll also need to consider what happens when rules conflict (specific beats general wil be the usual pattern, I think).

The idea is to have courtly intrigue – people scheming, plotting and even killing for the throne, essentially. I’m assuming at the moment that all the players in the game, however lowly their initial position, will be competing to secure the throne for themselves.

A proper royal court has a diverse cast of people with different powers and positions. It’s this interface of differing abilities and weaknesses which is going to give this game much of the necessary diplomatic juice – for negotiation to occur, people have to possess something unique that the other party wants.

It’s also a great initial buy-in to the game – giving someone a somewhat defined character they can reach for, saying “I want to be THAT”. Vincent’s currently in playtest /Apocalypse World/ is my model here – he has these little playbooks, each of which contains all the rules for playing that type of character. And each character has a set of unique special abilities.

A court needs a king/queen/emperor/emir/whatever, of course. Not just to act as a target, either – I think the ruler could make a suitable PC, so long as they’re constrained by rules too.

A good role for this game will be:

* placed at a definite point in a palace hierarchy
* be based, if only loosely, on genuine types of court officers in history
* have unique powers, privileges or access that other roles will want
* have unique weaknesses, associated with their position

Certain roles suggest themselves:

* Treasurer – power over funds, can bribe other characters?
* Consort and/or Concubine – as the ruler’s chosen, has access to the ruler that no-one else can match
* Captain of the Guard – obvious violent power at their disposal
* Archbishop/other religious leader – word trusted above all others
* (my favourite) Head of household staff/majordomo/butler – starts in a lowly position, sure, but has the ear of all the servants, is easily forgotten about and has access to all the food and drink…

But what other kinds of roles might be juicy? I open up this Crying Wolfman comments thread for possible suggestions. What kinds of palace-court roles would appeal to you to play?

My next post will go into some early examples of roles and powers they might have, combining the insights from the previous two posts.

The rule is conditional (“if“) on some fictional state of affairs (“you have high ground”). This is as opposed to rules that are mechanic-conditional – (“if you spend 2 tokens, you get +2 to your roll”).

Another prevailing interest of mine is in diceless roleplaying, or rather roleplaying without any from of randomiser – “no-fortune” if you will. Dice have a proud tradition in roleplaying as creators of tension and uncertainty, but many game have  tendency to throw them in without reason, and the non-fortune space is comparatively less well explored.

These two principles should help promote the creative goals of the game:

* Fiction-conditional rules encourage the creation and execution of detailed fictional schemes – in order for characters (and players) to achieve goals, they will need to see to it that the details of the fiction help them as much as possible.

* No-fortune rules see to it that planning is definite and effective, as in chess or Diplomacy, and therefore absolutely worth engaging in. The uncertainty in the game should derive from how the other players act.

The theme is Intrigue, of course, and to me that means courtly intrigue: schemes, plots, affairs, assassinations. I had initially wanted to avoid a court setting, figuring it would be done by loads of other people, but I checked and there aren’t that many. In any case, sometimes the simplest ideas are the strongest.

A compelling scheme requires attention to detail. I want the feel to be that characters succeed because they prepared well in advance, constructing situations such that they would be advantageous to them, not because they possess innate power or because the dice land their way.

The challenge is to create a competitive game which encourages players to pay a lot attention to the fiction they create.

Inspirations:

Diplomacy.

Adam Cadre’s wonderful piece of Interactive Fiction, Varicella

Everything Vincent’s been saying recently about rules that go from fiction to mechanics.