Oh this is SO the game for my test group. Cops and Angels is a very powerful juxtaposition of themes. And I know they would wet themselves about the testimony mechanic at the end. When you have the feedback from this playtesy assimilated, if you want to pop a copy across to me I'm sure we will be able to do something external for you. (vodkashok at gmail dot com)

Cheers
Neil

That's really kind of you to offer Neil! I thought angelic/demon-themes would tick a few boxes for you.

The game is a little way off being playtestable externally as most of the rules are in my brain! I'm hoping to get it all down on paper today and tomorrow though so will send you a copy when it's done.

Are you at Furnace? I'm thinking of running a game of it there.

So, I was one of the players in the playtest and figure that I should probably give my perspective on the game.

First off duties; you're right, they need some real work and thought. They felt too broad and yet never came up in play until right at the end (mind you, we didn't face a Fallen so mine weren't going to, although Ba-Ulgara should probably have been a Fallen rather than a Demon, a difference that we didn't note until it was too late.) I worry that they might make gaining Faith a little too easy as well, Dave grabbed 5 Faith back at the end of the session, likely enough to see him comfortably through the following session. I guess it depends on how readily available you want Faith to be, which might depend on the tone of a game, and how much you want to push the players towards gaining Doubt.

Speaking of which I don't know how relevant the session was in terms of testing the spending of Faith/gaining of Doubt. As a one-shot Dave and I were pretty liberal with throwing the Faith points about and I had run out by the end of the session. Dave only had 1 left before he gained 5 back for defying the Plan as well. (Jan was more conservative but that's just in his nature as a player, even in a one-shot.) That would have left me in trouble next session and I would likely have been forced to resort to gaining Doubt to get things done. Equally, though, if it had been a campaign I would probably have been more careful about spending what is a limited resource.

I think you might need to make it relatively easy to regain single points of Faith and much harder to regain large amounts (although no more that 1 Faith gain per scene)... Actually that was something that, on reflection, seemed odd to me. You gain Faith for defying the Plan? That seems counter-intuitive to me. Surely you should gain Faith when the Plan works and coincides with your Duties as dictated by your place in the order of things. Or is Faith supposed to represent something much more personal? If so wouldn't the seeming flaws in the Plan (i.e. it forcing you, or trying to force you, to do things directly in conflict with your divine Duties) be likely to make you lose Faith, not gain it? (Or gain Doubt rather than Faith.) As I say it just doesn't feel right to me as described, perhaps I'm reading Faith wrongly though?

Anyway, onto pacing and Plan tokens. There weren't enough, not for a proper 3-4 hour session anyway. It was fine for the 1 hour playtest but we burned through them all pretty quickly and could probably have gone even faster were we really pushing it. I think that you need to really focus on just how they are spent or won, and also about who gets them. By the end you had none as the GM, indicating that the Plan had gone off perfectly, but it hadn't; Dave's character had defied it and hidden that fact from Zag and Leliel.

Not only that but I ended up with about twice as many tokens as anyone else. Given that you stated that they were to be tied into XP gain in some vague, handwavey, undefined fashion that concerns me. First off it seems too easy for one player to grab the limelight and hog the tokens and, therefore, the XP gain. Secondly I'm really unclear on quite what XP gain would translate to. You only have your 3 Beliefs, your Duties, your Faith and your Doubt. Faith and Doubt aren't related to XP and are gained/lost in an entirely separate mechanic. Duties are unchanging, at least based on the way that it was described at the time. That leaves your Beliefs and being able to pump those up too much would be seriously open to abuse and would make gaining Doubt MUCH less scary.

One last thing, triple 6's gaining you Doubt works. It makes sense as well, your strongest Beliefs are the ones most likely to come up short when you need them most. You have a lot of Faith in Man? (i.e. more dice and higher chance of rolling Triple 6's) Well Man is very capable of shaking that Faith, probably more so than affirming it to be honest, and causing you to begin to Doubt. So, yeah, it works both thematically and mechanically. I'm not convinced that you need a mirrored mechanic for triples 1's, I think that the fact that would count as 3 successes is probably powerful enough ;o)

Thanks for posting this Geoff - it's very useful hearing your thoughts as a player. What was your overall impression - was it enjoyable? Did it work for you?

You're right, they did seem to end up at one of two extremes, boom or bust when it came to recouping your faith.

I think part of the problem was my wording of them. I think I need to start off with them worded more like keys, and then build them up from there. So you'd have yours as:

I. gain 1 faith back every time you're in a conflict with the Fallen.

II. gain 2 faith back when you act against the Fallen, putting you or your unit at risk.

III. gain 5 faith back when you act against the Fallen, putting the Plan at risk.

Which is more specific and less wooly, but at the loss of being thematic. I think if you then bring in the ability for players to spend Plan tokens to bring about a scene or a complication, you can engineer these situations a bit better - at the very least, throwing an adversary token at the GM and announcing "just as the harvest begins, the shadows pull back to reveal a Fallen." Bingo, the situation goes crap for you, but suddenly you can bring your duty in.

I think a more long term test-run is needed to work that one out - at the very least one full belief/advancement cycle. I want the balance to be right so that you don't feel the need to horde your faith, but that there is a real temptation to take that point of doubt instead of spending your last faith token. If faith is regained too freely, that impetus is gone. Likewise if doubt is got rid of too easily.

Faith and duty are supposed to be far more personal. Faith, duty and the Plan are supposed to be in conflict some of the time, if not all the time. The Plan calls for angels to do certain things, most commonly harvesting souls, that at times bring them into conflict with their personal motivations and ethics. Such as when the Plan calls for a child to die - what does the player who is the Protector of Children do? If he follows the Plan, he neglects his duty. And vice versa. Hope that clears it up - I'll try to underline that distinction in the text.

Note that this shouldn't always be the case - sometimes you can both serve the Plan and your duty, in which case win-win. But, that's not quite as fun, is it? ;-)

Do you think simply having more tokens will help balance that? As in, would 30 tokens (10 for each player) lead to a game twice as long? We did skip over each scene fairly briskly, but would more tokens have lead to longer scenes, or more scenes?

Or do the conditions they're currently given out need tweaking?

You currently gain a token when you spend faith to narrate a discovery, when you win a conflict or when you defeat an adversary. The GM can also chuck one your way when he spends a token to introduce a complication. Likewise you can do the same to the GM, leading to him getting a token.

The GM gets a token when you lose a conflict, when you introduce a complication, or when you choose your duty over the Plan.

Agreed - I should have ended up with a few more than I did. Certainly Velon's defiance should have led to me getting a token or two instead.

I've just written that bit of the rules so can answer it less vaguely than I did at the weekend! As written they act very similarly to xp and advances in TSOY - you turn 5 tokens into 1 advance, which you can use to increase a belief by 1 (probably too powerful), buy an additional duty or make a manifestation permanent. You can also spend tokens alongside faith as part of a testament when trying to get rid of doubt.

It's a part of the rules that really will need testing, and is one of the reasons I normally stay away from any form of currency that needs balancing!

I've got it at the moment so that triple 6 increases your doubt and allows the GM to either add another token to the Plan, or take one for himself (or maybe take 1 from you?). Triple 1 gives you back 1 faith, and lets you take an additional token from the Plan (or the GM?).

And the 666 and 111 rules trigger no matter who rolls them in the conflict. So if the GM rolls triple 6, it's still bad times for you, and vice versa.

Thanks for taking the time to reply Geoff!

I enjoyed it as a session, with the caveats noted in my original post obviously ;o) . Thematically I like the premise and think that it works well as a situation for a roleplaying game. Angel cops trying to maintain the Plan and stop the depredations of the Fallen is a great idea, period. (Well done Todd, even if The Prophecy sucked.)

The mechanics seemed very fuzzy in a number of places, essentially because they were. As a first playtest I was cool with that, especially given that most of it was in your head. What you did have down seemed to work well although the giving out of Plan tokens seemed, as I noted, to need some serious work. I like the potential for the interaction of Faith and Doubt although a quick one-off session isn't the right venue to test a cyclical mechanic of that nature.

Overall though the game was fun.

Okay, I definitely prefer the wording of those. I'd need to see how they worked in AP to be sure but the more focussed nature seems to have a greater potential for bringing them into the game effectively.

I know you mentioned players spending Plan tokens to bring about complications although I don't think any of us did it, did we? It wasn't entirely clear at the time how we were supposed to use them, although your example above makes it much clearer. It does, however, lead to the very real possibility of the players burning through the sessions Plan tokens rather more quickly than the intended pacing dictates.

You mentioned something about there being consequences of having no Faith remaining although I don't recall what it was. I think the potential penalties for being caught in a bad situation with zero Faith need to be severe enough that people will almost always take a point of Doubt rather than burning that last Faith. Of course it then needs to be relatively difficult to regain Faith otherwise it ceases to be a worry.

Okay, but in that case what is Faith? What's the definition? To me it feels like Faith would mean Faith in God/the Word, Faith in the Plan being right. Obviously that isn't the case given what you've said but you don't say what it is instead.

Yes, I'll be at Furnace and so will my group of gaming buddies too. I suspect I might get cajoled into running a game of Duty and Honour at some point in time. Oh the hardship.

Neil

Apparently we cross-posted, your second post to me going up whilst I was writing my second reply. This could get messy ;o)

That's a difficult one and something that will need further testing. Certainly more tokens should lead to a longer session, although whether it will be a 1:1 correlation or not I don't know. I think that more Plan tokens would give more scenes rather than longer scenes, which is fine. We did, as you say, skip over things pretty quickly but we couldn't really have wrung much else out of it, there weren't enough Plan tokens to do more scenes, even if we'd had the time and inclination to do so.

Looking at how the Plan tokens are gained by players, perhaps spending Faith shouldn't net you a token? You get to narrate your discovery, thus making things easier for you, at the cost of a Faith token and that's fine. I'm not sure that the Faith mechanic should feed into the Plan tokens like that. It would also reduce slightly the speed with which players gain them.

Also, perhaps the margin of success in a conflict shouldn't determine the number of Plan tokens that you get? Perhaps it should just be 1 Plan token for winning the conflict? I note that you say 'defeating an adversary' separately here, which is interesting. I recall that you 'invested' 3 Adversary Plan tokens into the BBEG in our game and, if I recall, it gave him bonuses to his rolls. I like that idea and agree that if you do so then defeat of said adversary should net all of the invested Plan tokens. You need to be careful to avoid 'kill stealing' here though. Degree of success should definitely matter in that case and should remove the Adversary Plan tokens based on that degree until none remain. Now, that was how you ran it at the time so it's all good.

Why, though, can you not do the same for mysteries, or 'allies' that you might have to best in a social conflict? What is so special about Adversaries in that regard?

Back to gaining Plan tokens, I like the GM clauses. Gaining them when the players bring in their Duties to regain Faith by adding complications should totally net you Plan tokens, as should their choice of Duty over the Plan, although you need some mechanical tie there. Do you just gain 1 or do you gain as many Plan tokens as the player gains Faith?

Heh, I don't blame you ;o)

Okay, that makes sense. It does not, however, ease my concern over 1 player getting the lions share of the Plan tokens as I did in our game. I could have done a couple of advances at the end of the session whereas Jan wouldn't have been able to manage any. That seems a little unfair as we were all equally involved in the totality of the session.

I agree that 5 tokens for 1 Belief is probably too powerful. That way lies 1 Belief going up per session and Doubt becoming something useful instead of something to be feared. I like the idea of making permanent manifestations; I'd have totally done it to my Dancing Angel Hand Cannon™! How would you use them to decrease Doubt though? Also, I don't recall you mentioning spending Faith to decrease Doubt in my Testimonial (probably because I had no Faith remaining... actually perhaps you can't have a Testimonial if you are down to zero Faith, i.e. you can't cast out your Doubts if you have no Faith, just a thought.)

Okay, I have no problems with the second part, 666 always bad, 111 always good seems fine. I thought, however, that upholding your Duties was the ONLY way to regain Faith, thus making them even more important? Should 111 really regain you Faith? I quite like the taking Plan tokens from the players/GM though... Maybe you succeeded but what you did wasn't actually part of the Plan? Or you failed but, well, you were meant to fail?

I briefly mentioned that the only way an angel could be killed was when they were out of faith. So I guess you'd have to ask yourself whether you wanted to be left open to that risk, or whether you take that extra point of doubt.

Okay, but in that case what is Faith?