thread: 2006-09-27 : Fate in Agon
On 2006-10-02, Sydney Freedberg wrote:
Tom: If that's the case, then your last sentence could just as easily be re-written as: "You play the game to find out how far your Hero can get before bad die rolls bring him down". In that sense, it doesn't seem terribly revolutionary. The same could be said for D&D.
Vincent: that's not what I'm saying. Fate in Agon accumulates steadily, plus there's some semi-optional additional accumulation if you feel like dodging some consequences. It's when your fate goes off the top of the scale that your guy dies.You hasten your demise, but you get to be more effective until then.
Having never played Agon, I must quiver with glee as I point out: It's all about the feedback loops.
In D&D, the longer you avoid the bad die rolls taking you down, the less likely it is that any one bad die roll will take you down, which means the longer you can go avoiding bad die rolls taking you down. It's a positive feedback loop as you level up and get more powerful. At the real-human-being-playing level, which is (lumpley principle/Big Model) all that really matters, what you get is only one incentive: get stronger, live longer. No dilemma.
In Agon, apparently, it's a complex kind of negative feedback loop, with Fate expenditure having only beneficial effects in the short run but leading to catastrophic collapse in the long run—which means you have conflicting incentives and are torn between "I want this thing right now" and "I want these other things later on." That's a dilemma.
I think dilemmas—choices for the real person playing about things the real person cares about, even if it's only game points of some kind of fictional characters, and where a best-of-both-worlds solution cannot be easily optimized—are the heart of both "gamist" and "narrativist" play (ugly terms that they are). I suspect they're simply in the way for "simulationist" (ugh) aka "celebratory" play, where they keep forcing the focus back on the real person and forcing stop-and-think choices, when the point of this style of play is to focus on the fictional world and characters for their own sake and immerse so smoothly you never have to "break character" and think "what next?"
