Pentasystem: Influence

Here's an expansion of something I talked about in my last post. It's strongly inspired by an idea in the version I saw of Tony Dowling's Mathematica (now retitled Principia: Secret Wars of the Renaissance). Tony has a thing - I forget whether it's an ability or a Secret, I think a Secret - called rank (and a parallel thing called wealth) which is about a character's position in society. I was going to call mine Scale, but I've already used that term; I think I'll call it Influence for now.

(Fair warning, by the way: the terminology of the Pentasystem, and the names of a good many things in Underground Railroad, are likely to change. For example, the game Sufficiently Advanced, which is coming out soon, has something called Twists which are completely different from my Twists. I'll probably rename Twists as something like Rollups and Rolldowns - generically, Rerolls, which is what they are. As for UR, the onomastics are totally screwed up and suffer from incipient Bad Fantasy Name Syndrome. I need to sit down and figure out how little work I can do and still create believable languages as background.)

So, Influence. Like everything else, it's rated on a 5-point scale and is an attribute. However, you can specifically have Influence of 0. This happens if you're a peasant, a salaryman, a serf, a rank-and-file, a private soldier, a proletarian or otherwise on the bottom of the food chain. As an individual, you have 0 influence; your voice will not be heard, except maybe, hopefully, by people of influence 1 whom you know.

Influence 1 means you don't have a recognized official leadership position in the prevailing hierarchy, but you have some local influence as a person of good standing - a prosperous peasant, a lawyer, a minister, a valued employee (perhaps a supervisor, but not necessarily) - someone generally who has some wealth and knows how to talk and will know people with influence 2. In the Army, you're an NCO. (OK, that's official leadership; some hierarchies are more official than others.) In the Church, you're a vestryman or something.

Influence 2 means you do have a recognized position at the local level - you're the mayor, line manager or what-have-you. You know people who have influence 1; you are willing, generally, to meet with people of influence 0, though you may dismiss their concerns quite lightly; and you know people of influence 3. You're a lieutenant, maybe a captain, in the Army. In the Church, you're a local priest.

Influence 3 means you have some kind of regional significance inside the hierarchy or are a minor celebrity outside it. You know people of influence 4 (you can kind of see a trend developing here, yes? In general, people know people with one more or one less rank of influence; they are generally willing to talk to people with two ranks less, and can get to see people two ranks higher by special arrangement, usually through a person of the intervening rank). You're a major or a colonel in the Army. In the Church, you're a bishop.

Influence 4, you have national significance; anyone in the country who knows the names of people who are important knows your name. You have direct access to the highest level of influence. You're a cabinet minister, a general, a major celebrity, a captain of industry in the Bill Gates or Richard Branson kind of class, a vice-president if we're talking about a corporation, a Cardinal if we're talking about the Roman Catholic Church. Because, of course, Influence is not just an on-off kind of thing; you may be at the top of one pyramid (Bill Gates, influence 5 if we're talking about Microsoft) but only partway up another, and still further down a third. A general is Influence 4 nationally, but Influence 5 in the Army, where a brigadier is Influence 4.

Influence 5, obviously, is where you don't have a boss, you are the boss. Again, this may be limited to a specific context. It also doesn't mean that you're not accountable to a Board or Cabinet or College of Cardinals or whatever. But the buck stops with you.

On the Board/Cabinet thing, in fact, a general principle of influence is that a group of people who are at the same level has influence one level higher as a group than they do as individuals. So a mob of peasants has Influence 1, a deputation of respectable citizens Influence 2, a regional mayors' conference Influence 3, and so forth.

The mechanical implication of Influence is that you command a certain quantity of resources. I haven't worked out the exact details yet, but my starting point is that you command a certain number of people one level down, who in turn each command a number of people at the next level, and so forth, and their resources are, theoretically, your resources (inasmuch as they fall within the context of the hierarchy in which you have the influence). These levels also insulate you from people more than two levels below you, as a rule, though you may sometimes deign to speak with a peasant if you are a king, or a line worker if you are a CEO. You're unlikely to pay much attention to what they say, though, if you let them say anything at all.

Concretely, if you're a king, you may in theory command the whole country, but in practice in a given situation you may only have a squad of the royal guard with you. I need to work on the whole scaling thing, but that's the principle: the more influence, the more resources, other things being equal.

Also, and this is the important bit, if the main characters can get to you and win a conflict against you, they can get you to use your influence to change things towards the way they want them. You can't change the law of the land by winning a conflict with a peasant, only with the King (or the Royal Council, perhaps). You can get local things done by winning a conflict with an Influence 2 person, regional things with an Influence 3 person, and so forth.

Such, at least, is the principle.

O Hai, I Stoled your Dogs

So I finally bought Dogs in the Vineyard. I'm slowly, slowly moving towards maybe playing it, though having been a late teens/early 20s religious judgemental person I kind of shy away from reenacting that. I mainly bought it for the ideas I could steal be influenced by, and it was not a disappointment in this regard. Not at all.

I took notes as I read through the PDF, and here they are (slightly expanded). Some of them are me paraphrasing Vincent fairly directly, others are my thoughts triggered by things he says. Not all of them, probably, will actually get into the Pentasystem, but I suspect most will.

• If you think the element you plan on introducing could be controversial, ask the group.


• Attribute phrasings:
• A bit of personal history ("I once survived in the woods for 3 days without food or shelter").
• A simple fact: "I'm a survivor."
• A skill: "Survival".
• An attitude or catchphrase: "I can survive anything."
  
  
• Attributes are rated based on how interesting or important they are, not on how "good" they are.
  
  
• Character death (or even character injury) only happens when it is explicitly and voluntarily put in question [in fact this is not strictly speaking the case in Dogs; the dice outcomes can generate a conflict in which the stakes are "your character dies"]. The replacement character gets all the same resources of the old character, plus a bit.
  
  
• Set the scene, say what resources you're using and what you're attempting with them, roll dice, then start narration of actual actions.
  
  
• Possibilities in combat: Turning the opponent's action back (reversing the blow), defending against it (block or dodge), feeling it but going on fighting (taking the blow). Last always has consequences. (Margin of victory in each sub-conflict, I think.)
  
  
• Does the responding player get a response and then an opening themselves? At the moment only if they change the ground do they get to take the initiative. Perhaps they get a response (see) with their bare die roll, but if they bring in other resources (e.g. rerolls) they take initiative (like a raise).
  
  
• Can you hold back successes for follow-up conflicts if you Give in a Pentasystem conflict? I think not.
  
  
• Follow-up conflicts are such if the stakes follow directly from the previous conflict's resolution. They can't have the same stakes unless they have different participants (i.e. not identical participants), AND a different place, AND a different opening ground of conflict.
  
  
• Consequences for the inconsequential: if nobody cares what happens to a supporting character, instead of assigning consequences to that character, give the characters that everyone does care about some equivalent advantage.
  
  
• Relationships (enmeshment): becomes usable in a conflict when the conflict involves the target of the enmeshment as either the opponent (possibly in the form of a representative of that thing, e.g. organization), the setting (if the target is a place or the place represents the target, e.g. a church for the Church) or as what is in question or at risk in the conflict. Cause of the conflict would work as well (I'm in this conflict because of this enmeshment.)
  
  
• In multi-way conflicts, at each turn the person who has initiative gets to say who is affected by their actions, and all those people have to stay in by rolling or bail out by giving up their outcome. Maybe they get to respond in reverse order of the size of the dice they rolled in each round (so anyone rolling a 1 goes before anyone whose smallest die is a 2; if two people roll 1s, look at their next smallest die and so on; in case of ties, go clockwise). 
  
  
• I want to replicate the back-and-forth of sees and raises, but I'm not sure my die mechanic supports it. I've thought about "you cluster your successes that show the same number together, and that's a turn," but I'm not sure how it would work exactly.
  
  
• "A raise is something your opponent can't ignore." 
  
  
• Assisting: Your character has to be clearly capable of helping, it has to clearly be an action that would help, and if anyone objects that it's not reasonable, it doesn't happen.
  
  
• When assisting, you lose the successes you assist with from your own conflict if you are also in a separate part of the conflict.
  
  
• Setting what's in question: I think my as-yet-undocumented idea of "scale" enters in here, rather than Vincent's guidelines "GM should push for small stakes". (Basically, depending on how interested you are in something, more or less powerful characters will turn up to oppose you on that issue; if you beat a powerful character (who, of course, has more resources and so is harder to beat) you can make bigger changes in the world.)
  
  
• Good follow-up conflicts involve stakes which come out interesting either way (of course, but worth repeating).
  
  
• Conflicts which are too large will mean escalation is always the best choice.
  
  
• No hedged outcomes. They're outcomes – things that happen. Nothing should be said, in the set outcomes (what Dogs calls "what's at stake"), about how they happen. That's what the conflict is for.
   
• Conflicts arise because people want things. What do the supporting characters want? 
  
  
• Proto-NPCs or partially generated supporting characters – definitely needed. At least with pool points assigned and some ratings for a few attributes. Then match these with the necessary handles as required.
  
  
• Group-as-character, with an attribute for each person perhaps? This was an early idea I've been moving away from. Perhaps it's time to look at it again.

•  Demonic Influence acts kind of like the momentum of the situation – parallel to 5-act structure determining additional opposition or inertia for unopposed actions?

•  Anything the characters want to do is automatically OK until it conflicts with something another character wants. Then, conflict. (Roll dice or say yes.)

•  Don't keep the secrets, reveal the secrets.

•  Create situation, not plot; people who want things, not supervillains. Create situations where the characters will take sides. Then complicate whichever side they take. (Plot is how characters respond to situation. You can't know that in advance.)

•  Enmeshing with something says you want to be in conflict with (or about) it. Taking an attribute says you want to use that as your means of resolving conflicts.

And a couple of "structuring the book" points:

• Summarize after each major section – quick reference.
  
• Rules index! This is an excellent idea for a game with a lot of rules.

Commoditized cat is commoditized

O noes!

I r a shoping!

(If you are totally unhip and confused by this: http://icanhascheezburger.com.)

Meditations on the Tarot: The High Priestess

The High Priestess (or Papesse) in the view of the Unknown Friend is concerned with initiation, with "two-ness", and with wisdom. He contrasts the idea of an initiation which is depersonalizing (as taught by the masters before Jesus) with an initiation which, while leaving the personality in existence, fills it with God. If the first Arcanum, the Magician, is concerned with spontaneous action, this second Arcanum is concerned with reflection: "the transformation of the pure act into representation, of representation into memory pictures, of memory pictures into the word, and of the word into written characters or the book" (p. 40; emphasis in the original).

The Magician is standing; he has the practical method of mysticism, for he dares to do. The High Priestess knows, and so she is seated, so that she can project outward, horizontally (through the book) the descending vertical revelation.

The revelation descends in three steps, symbolized by the three levels of the High Priestess's tiara in the Marseilles Tarot. Mystical experience, of the God who is beyond names and forms, is the highest level. From this comes gnosis - mystical experience which is conscious of itself. This descends to magic, gnosis put into practice (of which he has more to say later), and finally to Hermetic philosophy - the book.

"Mysticism", says the UF on p.41, "is the source and the root of all religion. Without it religion and the entire spiritual life of humanity would be only a code of laws regulating human thought and action." Does that sound at all familiar as a description of religion? A tradition, he says, is only living when it is complete, when it is a union of mysticism (direct consciousness of God), gnosis (reflection on and some understanding of the experience of God), magic (putting into practice one's understanding, projecting it into the world), and Hermetic philosophy (making all of this to some degree communicable to others). A philosophical system by itself enslaves: a person who falls victim to the spell of a philosophical system "can no longer see the world, or people, or historic events as they are; he sees everything only through the distorting prism of the system by which he is possessed." He has similar harsh things to say about separated magic, separated gnosis and separated mystical experience.

He relates the four levels to the four worlds of Kabbala, and has an interesting thing to say about reconciling the various views of creation that are around. In the highest world, the world of emanations, pantheism is true; there is only God, and everything is within him. However, in the world of creation - once we leave uncreated eternity - theism is true. Further, in the world of formation, demiurgism - the idea of the Gnostics that physical creation was not the work of the true God but of lesser beings - is true. Finally, in the lowest world, the world of facts, naturalism is true. He uses this to illustrate the difference between the gnostic sense, which is a sense of wholeness or synthesis preceding analysis, with the Hermetic-philosophical sense, which is a sense of a differentiated whole, a synthesis after analysis.

And my reaction to this is what?

Well, I like his emphasis on the necessity to work at all the levels in order to avoid the problems that partial understanding brings. "Creation science", for example, arises from a confusion of levels: a gnostic description is taken as factual. Inevitably it is mocked by those who reject the gnostic level entirely and live only at the level of facts, because it doesn't fit the facts. However, it's a mistake to conclude that this means that the biblical account of creation isn't true. It isn't true at the factual level, but at another level, it and not the factual explanation is the true one.

Only by being, understanding, acting and thinking are we complete in any of those four.

Potentially, you could also relate these to the four Jungian functions: mysticism is sensing, gnosis intuition, magic is feeling (connecting the self and the world), and Hermetic philosophy is thinking. Roughly.

Meditations on the Tarot: The Magician

This is the start of a series of reflections, containing my personal responses to the book Meditations on the Tarot by the "Unknown Friend". Some of it will simply be summaries of the points in the book I find memorable; other parts will be new insights that the meditations have led me to.

Since I turn 40 today, I now fulfill at least two of the traditional conditions for studying Kabbalah (I'm also male), which makes this a good day to begin this series.

The Magician, in the Unknown Friend's view, represents the key to all of the Major Arcana. He acts with effortless concentration and transforms work into play. He knows the underlying unity of the world, and experiences that unity in the silence of his soul. "Truth", says the UF, "has no other meaning than that of the reduction of the plurality of phenomena to an essential unity", recognising that everything is connected.

Because everything is connected, it is possible to reason by analogy. Analogy is found in the realm of symbolism; this is the vertical analogy: things below are as things above, their prototypes. Analogy is found also in the realm of myth; this is the horizontal analogy: things present are as things past, their archetypes.

The Magician has achieved balance between spontaneity and the unconscious, and deliberate action and the conscious. His practical lesson is concentration without effort, and his theoretical lesson is intellectual vision without effort, but these are based - the UF warns - on prior practice and discipline, without which we become charlatans.

My milestones - let me show you them

This seems to be a time of significant events for me.

Two weeks ago I gave my first paid-for professional hypnotherapy session.

Last week I gave my "Change Your Mind" seminar for the first time. It went really well. It helped, of course, that I knew most of the people who came, but I felt (and apparently appeared) confident, I got great feedback, and even though I'd advertised it as a free course (because it was kind of a trial run), people gave me completely unsolicited money. Almost $175 of unsolicited money, in fact. At the end. Which is a pretty good indicator of perceived value.

Yesterday was the company I work for's last day in the offices that have been my workplace for over 10 years, since I first went there in September 1996 for a two-month contract (and never, up until now, left). We start at brand-new offices, specially fitted out for us, on Monday.

I have spent more than a quarter of my life so far working in that building. It's a crappy building and I don't adore my job (though I don't despise it), but that's still significant.

And that's the other thing: a quarter of my life. I turn 40 in less than two weeks. I'm now older than my mother was when I was born; I've had half my average life expectancy and a third of the currently conceivable maximum. I'm choosing to see this as a start rather than an ending: I am starting on the most productive, most satisfactory decades of my life (though the 30s were pretty good, especially since I got married at 32).

So in closing, I would just like to say:

BRING. IT. ON.

Underground Railroad: Setting Design Principles

I'm starting to come up with some principles for designing the Underground Railroad setting. As I said in the Story-Games RPG Fantasy Setting Wishlist thread (which I am so mining, oh yes I am):

Setting stuff that isn't just "Montanus exports opals and wool and is
dry and cold" but gives you a reason to be a character from Montanus
and tells you what that means in terms of who you are likely to be in
conflict with, what your abilities are likely to be, what you probably
care about...

So every place will have at least one thing about it that makes it a cool place to be from, and one thing which makes it a cool place to set a story or part of a story. Every institution, every setting element generally, should have at least one thing which makes someone say, "I want that in my game." Otherwise, why is it in the setting material? And always, always looking for the potential conflicts. Always.

And subsequent to that, of course, I figured out why you would want to be from Montanus. Because some people from Montanus ride flying horses. Which also fits in to Daniel Solis's request in that thread, in response to several people saying "Airships!": "More flying in general."

Why am I putting so much flying in a setting called Underground Railroad? Because flying is cool, that's why.