Hi,
Through playtesting after publishing the ashcan I did ultimately evolve the mechanics of Acts of Evil to solve my goal of the NPCs emerging as protagonists. But I was never able to achieve my goal of players immersing themselves in the situations the GM preps for the terrenes. And as a result the activity of play just wasn't very much fun for the GM, or for the players.
Acts of Evil is about player characters pursuing personal occult godhood across time and space. You advance your character stats through conflicts that use equations like My Life with Master. When you hit a certain stat level you can fight an occult god. If you win, you replace him. And then you narrate the destructions of the other player characters at the hands of your exalted minions and you describe how you remake human history in your own image.
In playtesting it became clear that being able to create your own occult godhood like that is a pretty compelling reward. Ultimately it was so compelling that players did very little roleplaying. I wanted the game to be about the characters getting involved in surreal occult activities across time and space. Think of the Hellboy comics. But what happened in playtesting was that players would bomb into some situation and aggressively pursue the specific type of conflict with an NPC that would give them the next type of stat increase they needed, with just the minimal roleplaying necessary to trigger the die roll, and demonstrating no interest in the situation that the GM had prepped. The game became entirely about flogging your way through the stat increases.
So, despite that the players would all agree that the most interesting characters weren't the ones that overtly flogged their way from equation to equation down the path of advancement, that the most interesting player characters were the ones who would inhabit a curiosity about the NPCs and the occult activities the GM had prepped, that the most interesting player characters weren't the ones crudely portrayed as wholly evil just to trigger stat rolls, but the ones whose evilness emerged from the expression of curiosity about NPCs and situations and personal self-absorption, the players couldn't help themselves. They did this anyway.
And despite talking about the problem with a lot of other designers I respect, I never managed to solve it. Ron Edwards has asserted that "gamism trumps narrativism". What he means is that if you have some players interested in playing competitively, and the game supports it, that their competitive play will make narrativist play impossible. So I think Ron didn't believe I'd ever solve the problem with Acts of Evil. Luke Crane suggested that possibly the advancement path was just "too bald". I think Luke believed that after playing the game just a little bit that the strategy for advancing yourself became obvious, and that an obvious complex pattern is a distraction to the human brain. Our brains are pattern recognition machines. Once they recognized the patterns in the game, the players couldn't not focus on them.
Bacchanal, however, has a competitive element, and I think the competitive element makes the game more intense. I think the game doesn't trigger Luke's "too bald" pitfall, because although the strategy for winning is clear, the dice rolls are uncertain enough that it's not possible for your brain to become absorbed within the pattern for pursuing it. So I think that competitive elements can be a part of narrative games. But making it work is definitely a challenge. You have to avoid having players with different agendas, or the narrative agenda will be trumped by the competition. And you have to avoid having "too bald" of a complex competition, or perhaps also too simple of a competition, or the creative activity of the game will be boring.
Matteo, I have given owners of the ashcan
a license to finish and publish the game. If you solve the problem and finish the game, I will license the English language translation rights from you
Paul
