Towerlands' Power 19
From AdamWiki
From Troy Costick's Power 19... Text emphasized with italics are planned changes that are not yet written. I'm basing it on the rules in Twenty with a bunch of changes.
What is your game about?
Towerlands is about balancing responsibilities in the face of different demands.
What do the characters do?
The characters are notable figures in a small kingdom, called a towerland. They serve the towerland and protect it from enemies. They also may serve various factions, like priesthoods or orders of knight or secret mystical societies, each with its own agenda. They also serve the interests of their (often noble) families.
What do the players (including the GM if there is one) do?
They guide characters through tough dilemmas, choosing how to risk their character's resources and lives and for what. They create characters and aim to put them into situations that will hit on key themes to earn advances.
The GM provides adversity and narrates for all non-player characters. The GM earns dice for his encounters by hitting on player flags (traits).
How does your setting (or lack thereof) reinforce what your game is about?
The setting is A Thousand Towers, a large area full of competing mini-kingdoms. New kingdoms spring up all the time. This is a world coming out of a terrible war. Splintered family trees, broken states, and secret societies abound. Power is the world's currency.
This reinforces the game by creating situations in which characters often need to make tough choices of allegiance. Opportunities to strengthen one's king's hold on a territory or gain an important charter for your family's mercantile company may conflict with one's own beliefs or goals. Or a character might belong to more than one faction and they might have opposed goals in certain areas. The setting is rich with fodder for such dilemmas.
How does the Character Creation of your game reinforce what your game is about?
The factions that players select during character creation ally the characters with different groups. Each faction comes with obligations of service. Each player also comes up with goals for his character's factions and these let the GM throw obstacles in the way and force the players to make tough decisions. The player fleshes out his character with traits, each of which is "powered" by the faction.
Design note: Rename keys to factions and add player-authored obligations.
What types of behaviors/styles of play does your game reward (and punish if necessary)?
The game rewards dilemma play and taking on responsibilities. The game discourages taking risks for no reason.
How are behaviors and styles of play rewarded or punished in your game?
Whenever a player chooses one faction over another, he earns an advancement for traits related to that faction and weakens the traits in the faction he ignored. The rules also allow the GM and players to negotiate obligations, a mechanic for recording services owed to one another. These obligations give additional traits, so they're a type of reward given for taking on additional responsibilities.
Simply beating a dragon doesn't earn advancements, but beating a dragon to protect your family (a faction) does earn advancements. This punishes players for taking meaningless risks.
How are the responsibilities of narration and credibility divided in your game?
I'll answer this in a different way and discuss how Towerlands apportions authority[1].
Content authority largely belongs to the player who created it. Players own the stuff on their characters. The GM owns the stuff on his characters. When characters lose an exchange of a conflict, they submit a small amount of content authority to the other player, who gets to write a burden (negative trait) for them. The players have the authority to create content in the world, such as new families and factions, secret societies, places, and so on, simply by writing it on their sheet and making up a setting card for it.
The GM gets a lot of content authority for the setting, in that he gets to create the keys and traits that are available to players for creating their characters.
Plot authority (how the story goes) is shared by the players and GM and emerges as a property of play.
Situational authority is guided by the players through their choice of factions, obligations, and traits, which become "flags" for the GM. Ultimate authority here is owned by the GM, though, but he tends to use the tools given to him by the players (setting cards and so on) to get dice.
Narrational authority is shared by the players and GM. The player (or GM) who is winning a conflict (using the resolution mechanics) gets first chance at narration. The next highest roll gets to narrate second, and so on, but no one may contradict prior narration thus each person's narration is stacked on top the previous player's in a logical way. In fact, the earlier narrator can veto the narration of those who follow if they don't think it fits into the spirit of what has been narrated already.
What does your game do to command the players' attention, engagement, and participation? (i.e. What does the game do to make them care?)
Each player has invested in the game by creating a character and connecting it to the world through factions and keys that they care about. Further, they may have created new setting content via a setting card and that strengthens their engagement with the game world. The character creation process is essentially a process where the player records what he cares about.
The GM's job then is to place those things at risk or set them at odds with each other so that things the character (and the player) care about are threatened and the player must choose: this thing I care about or this other thing I care about?
What are the resolution mechanics of your game like?
The resolution mechanics elegantly can handle multiple players involved in orthogonal conflicts. Players go at multiple exchanges in which they tap their character's traits to get dice (several d20's usually) and roll them into a pool. The highest d20 in each pool is compared to the other players' dice, and narration (and narrational veto power) is granted in descending order. Each exchange, it gets harder to bring in traits (you need traits with increasing scores).
Each exchange, a player also has the option to take on burdens to make an opponent discard high dice. Each burden is a "punishment" in the form of a negative trait with a score equal to the die or dice that the burden cancelled. These virtual dice can be used against the character by opponents in later conflicts, until the character sheds the burden. A player can also assign a burden by voluntarily discarding high dice. This can be used to make continued conflict more costly and drive the opponent to surrender.
At any time, a player can surrender and forfeit the conflict. Surrendering can be used to avoid additional burdens.
Additionally, every character has several sources of special power, called wells, which allow the player to reroll low dice.
How do the resolution mechanics reinforce what your game is about?
Since the game requires difficult choices, the burden mechanics allow the GM to make conflicts costly. Without that cost, there would be no dilemmas, just meaningless decisions. Burdens make conflicts costly and force players to prove how much they care about their causes.
Factions and obligations have wells attached to them, so they encourage players to oblige their characters to various people.
Do characters in your game advance? If so, how?
Characters advance by taking on more responsibility. As characters satisfy obligations for one faction or another, they gain devotion points that they can spend on advancements. Advancements can buy new traits, add boxes to existing traits, and refresh checked trait boxes.
How does the character advancement (or lack thereof) reinforce what your game is about?
Since players must satisfy obligations to advance their characters, this focuses play on duty.
What sort of product or effect do you want your game to produce in or for the players?
I want the players to feel that they kicked ass and advanced the story in a meaningful way by changing the fantasy world through (ofter heroic) action. I want this to often feel like a painful compromise, though, like saving the world at expense of your family or selling out your kingdom to make your trading company rich. I hope it creates angsty stories like George R. R. Martin's A Game of Thrones.
What areas of your game receive extra attention and color? Why?
Punishment, in the form of burdens, gets some extra attention because it's important to create consequences for this kind of play. The five attributes (physical, mental, social, emotional, and spiritual) are closely tied to burdens. While the first three often appear in RPGs, Towerlands shines some additional light on emotional and spiritual attributes. This is to encourage more play about internal struggles and religious conflict.
There will be a number of "starter" factions to provide additional color. I want to bring the Towerlands to life and give the players and GM enough structure to start playing without straightjacketing them into my setting. Essentially, if you don't like the setting, it's not tough to jettison it and create your own by writing up a bunch of notecards with 5-10 traits on each one.
Which part of your game are you most excited about or interested in? Why?
I really like the dice mechanic and the burden assignment. Thanks to Dave Cleaver for helping me nail that. I like the addition of wells for rerolls, too.
I like the faction-driven play and how the GM has to hit on player flags to get dice.
Where does your game take the players that other games can’t, don’t, or won’t?
Not a lot of fantasy games really make a player choose: God or country? Kingdom or family? Ideals or practicality?
Towerlands may be unique in using factions to drive play. Groups like secret societies, kingdoms, villages, colleges, knightly orders, and religions suddenly have mechanical "teeth" to reward and punish players for different kinds of behavior (that they chose!).
What are your publishing goals for your game?
Free PDF with my amateurish layout, no art, and little GM/play advice and minimal examples.
Then, for purchase, a combination of print-on-demand small softcover with art, editing, layout, examples, setting, etc. and a Letter-sized PDF version of the same.
Who is your target audience?
D&D players who have been avoiding complex, tactical combat and want more Narrativist-style play. Indie gamer types who like Dogs in the Vineyard and Sorcerer but want a more generic fantasy role-playing game (in the genre sense) that focuses play on duty and obligation.
