The joy and pain of council meetings

Council Meetings are what separate cycles of play. They establish a lull of downtime between one series of conflicts and the next series of conflicts. They are a time for mages to restore or improve both their covenant and themselves. But they’re still just as rife for interplayer competition as a conflict.

One of the primary ideas behind Quadrivium is the Tragedy of the Commons. The idea that the actions of a given individual when in competition with others for a shared resource can negatively impact the resource and thus diminish its utility for all users (including the individual themself). Covenant Resources are the shared resource and players are forced to balance the good of the community and their own long-term good against the short-term utility of using the resources to win conflicts.

The meaning of Harm

All character and community resources which can be expended to perform an action in the game, can sustain Harm (i.e. Magic, which cannot be expended, cannot be Harmed). Harm reduces the ability for a player to utilize the affected resource, effectively lowering the value of the resource until the Harm is removed.

Harm can arise from a Conflict (as part of negotiated Conditions) or by player choice to continue to utilize a resource after it has already been exhausted.

Council votes by the numbers

This is the roughest part of my design so far. And as it forms one of the primary currencies that drive play, it’s going to need a lot of playtesting and revision before it will likely be perfect. So I’m going to post my initial ideas, my concerns, and my thoughts all in a jumble here for now.

The only way to generate Council Votes “ex nihilo” is by participating in a Conflict on the side of the Antagonist.

Antagonism for fun and profit

Something I’ve mentioned previously but not discussed in depth is the link between Antagonism (providing opposition for other players in Conflicts) and Council Votes.

Council Votes are a player currency that act at a meta level of the game. They have no direct role in the shared fiction – the story that is constructed by the player’s play.

In many roleplaying games a single player acts as a moderator or arbiter. This role, commonly know as the Game Master (GM), is responsible for orchestrating challenges or presenting non-player characters for the rest of the players and their characters to react to or interact with.

The vicious cycle of magic

From my previous posts, it easy to see that initiating a magic contest is a ready way to prevent a character from losing a trick. After all, you can add up to a +20 rank bonus to a card with a magic contest – that’s pretty hard to beat.

But, the more power magic you invoke, the greater the chance that you will fail and the greater the consequences if you fail, in the form of Taint points.

Taint points do two things. They have a guaranteed, immediate, and temporary effect on magic ratings. They also have a non-certain, future, and permanent effect on Trick card rank value.

Feats of Magic

As I described previously, Quadrivium deals with mages as the main characters. And we can’t very well have mages and not have some way for them to perform magic.

However, the game as a whole is somewhat abstract about how things occur. I’m fine with that, but it means that the magic system necessarily can’t be as specific (and thus as flavorful) as the source of Quadrivium’s inspiration, Ars Magica. I love Ars Magica’s magic system, but it’s way too arcane (in all senses of the word) for use in Quadrivium.

The way I’ve decided to model magic is very simple. Magic adds a rank bonus to a Trick card, the amount of which varies depending on the strength of the magic used.

Actions and Resources

Actions are operations that can be invoked by a player by expending player, character, or covenant resources. Actions, depending on the resource involved, may be performed at any time or only during a conflict.

Player resources include Council Votes and cards in hand.

Character resources include Traits (Vigor, Craft, Influence, Insight), Companions, Items, and Assets.

Covenant resources include Servants, Coffers, Relations, Archives, and Essences.

Playing out a conflict

One the parameters of a conflict are defined, it is played out in a series of tricks until one party (protagonist or antagonist) wins the requisite number of tricks or one party yields.

If a question ever exists of who should act first in a trick, the protagonist should act before the antagonist.

Each trick is played in the same sequence:

An example of starting a conflict

Let’s now put the general description I discussed previously in context using an example of a conflict of the shared fiction.

Assume player A is playing a mage named Argrave.

Argrave wishes to marry the daughter of a local noble. Player A hasn’t stated that this impacts any traits, but the result could make for interesting character development for Argrave.

Player A announces aloud to the table that he intends for Argrave to marry the noble’s daughter, and asks if anyone opposes. By default he assumes the role of the protagonist, since he is initiating.

The nature of conflict

Now let’s talk about conflicts. There’s a lot to dig into here and I’ll probably break this up into several posts.

Conflicts are a way of resolving disagreement between players about what should occur in the shared fiction. Winning or losing this conflict determines whether, or how, the shared fiction changes.

It’s also a way the game enforces quantitative results that impact the covenant and the magi. If a player wants to affect a trait of the covenant, another player’s mage, or their own mage during play a conflict must be played out. Winning or losing this conflict determines whether the trait change occurs.

Both these types of conflict are played out in the same way.