Seven-Part Pact: Companions

Continuing my posts about The Seven-Part Pact (7PP) and some of its nifty mechanical design ideas, I want to discuss the rules for Companions.

It is well known that Wizards are lonely. But not for lack of trying. An important part of the game is maintaining a small social circle around your Wizard, up to four supporting characters called Companions. And I find this subsystem to be fascinating.

Seven-Part Pact: Time

We sometimes joke that blogging is a method of exorcism for the game design demons inside us. And right now, I'm possessed by the demon called Legion, for it is many. That's right, I speak once more of The Seven-Part Pact. I'm going to blog about this game until I've purged myself of Wizard Madness.

In particular, I think that most discussion of Seven-Part Pact (7PP), and the works of Jay Dragon more broadly, tend to focus mostly on themes. Which is all well and good, of course. There's certainly no shortage of things to say on that topic. That and the boundary-pushing formalist character of these works.

But let's not overlook the fact that Jay also has a remarkable talent for mechanical design. This is a theory slop blog. If you're reading this, you probably have a perverse love of systems. So I'm going to spotlight some of those parts of the game.

I won't cover everything of course, or even every part that I personally find interesting. I've just picked out a handful of design ideas that I think nearly any game designer should at least have in their toolbox. I expect we'll be seeing plenty more bloggers and critics writing about this game soon.

Review of Initiative Methods

After collecting as many initiative methods into one post as I possibly could, I offered to write a review of them. A few people were interested, and I like having an excuse to exorcise my blog demons. I'm not going to touch on every single method in that list, and I'm not going to give numerical ratings or thumbs up/down or anything like that. I'll tell you what I see as the pros and cons of each major category and whether I personally find them to be worth it. I'll also single out a few particular methods if I have a noteworthy point to make about them. Heads up if you want to follow along with the big list post: I'm not going to review the categories in the same order. You'll see why soon.

Before diving in, I also want to state up front: I frequently see people heaping praise upon an initiative method, calling it revolutionary and preaching to anyone who will listen to adopt it... but they mostly cite pretty unremarkable advantages. Things like, "the GM doesn't have to write anything down" or "there's no dice rolling needed." Uhhhh yeah?

I suspect that those people are probably just describing the first method they've ever encountered that wasn't the "default" option they know from modern D&D (i.e. turn-based, individual, randomized). This is a common phenomenon I've seen my whole life: an RPG hobbyist who's only ever played WotC D&D makes first contact with literally any other game and is immediately convinced it's the greatest game of all time.*

*For me, it was Fantasy Craft.

What I'm saying is, Popcorn Initiative really isn't that special, y'all. It's merely better than one of the worst options.

EVERY Initiative Method, Addendum

This is a follow-up to that one previous post. I'm glad to see it's been received pretty positively, and that I've gotten lots of suggestions for additions. One year on, I've finally updated that post with edits, but I'd rather save my own responses for a separate post so that it can still stand on its own without all this baggage.

All told, about 20 new methods have been added (depending on how you count them), plus quite a few more games acknowledged and, most interesting to me, some reorganization of categories. To put it another way, a post that was about 10,600 words long is now about 15,000 words long.

Now let me address some other things.