(I cross-posted this to my lj too a few weeks back, for those that are following it there)

I've only really discussed the core mechanics and premise of Ordinary Angels so far (mostly in the comments, here and here), but this weekend I've been working on one of the major aspects of the game - the pacing mechanics and the Plan.

The Plan is the Divine Plan, laid out by God to the angels instructing on them on how to spread the word and carry out his work. Thing is, the Plan is fairly vague and not everybody got a copy, so much of it is left wide open to interpretation on the fly and in the field. In game terms, the Plan represents the progress the angels are making towards their immediate goals as part of their current case (called a Chapter).

At the start of a new Chapter, the GM and the players work together to set the game up, splitting a number of plan tokens (I really need a more evocative name than that, but it'll do for now) between different types of obstacle (mystery, adversary and intervention, roughly mapping to investigation, physical confrontation and social interraction conflicts) as part of a briefing scene. The players all take it in turns to spread the tokens about, and as they do so they narrate an aspect of the case.

So, for example they might say something like, "the soul we're looking for is a dead junkie named Maurice, but we don't know where he is" and place a couple of mystery tokens down on the Chapter sheet. The next player might step in and say "we don't know where Maurice is, but we've got a lead on one of his former associates - a demon named Birgazal" and then plonk both an adversary and an intervention token down. And so on, until all the tokens have been assigned and the GM has a pretty good setup for the game session.

So how does this feed into pacing? Well, in the same way as Strife works in AGON or Budget works in PTA, when the GM wants to do stuff, he spends these tokens to create mechanical adversity for the players. So to buy in to a conflict, the GM spends tokens and gets himself dice. He can also invest tokens into making a more robust obstacle, such as a big bad Fallen or a really nasty mystery. Conversely, when the players win conflicts, they get to take some of these tokens off the Plan as their reward (I'll discuss what they do with them in a later post).

When all the tokens are gone from the Plan, either because the GM has spent them all or the players have earnt them all through winning conflicts, that's that Chapter of the Plan closed, for good or for evil depending on how the PCs did!

When we ran through a playtest of this way back when I allocated 5 tokens per player and the game clocked in at about an hour, which I had thought too short until Fred reassured me that with this sort of pace you could string a couple of chapters together for a pretty satisfying session.

Anyway, they seemed to work nicely in play, although it remains a little fuzzy as to exactly how and when I should be spending them, and whether the players could help themselves to a token or two over the course of the game to complicate matters for themselves too.

So, on paper at least does this sound like it might work? Is an hour for a game too quick? Is 5 tokens a bit too arbitrary?