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.

Like a house on fire

First, I'll just copy and paste some of the relevant text in the rulebook. Not all of it will make perfect sense without the context of some other rules, but you'll understand it just fine:

Wizards are accompanied by Companions, who provide emotional support and tend to different parts of their lives.

Each Companion is in charge of a different area of a Wizard's Care, which is associated with a different Element.

• Your daily life, providing clean clothes, food, and a tidy Sanctum. (Earth)
• Your emotional life, providing intimacy, compassion, and comfort. (Water)
• Your private life, providing security, relaxation, and a sense of freedom. (Air)
• Your creative life, providing conversation, inspiration, and imagination. (Fire)

Each Wizard can only have 1 Companion for each of their Elemental Cares, and if that Companion is unable or unwilling to perform their Care for any reason, the Wizard is denied access to that care. He must spend time each month fulfilling that care (often in a self-destructive or unhealthy way), or else the associated Element is reduced to zero for the duration of the month.

A Wizard can Spend Time with one of his Companions to get +1 in that Companion's associated Element for the duration of the month. 

If a Wizard has a Scene with one of his Companions, he can ask them for a Favor. This Favor can involve casting a spell, acting as the Wizard's surrogate for a Week of Time, or any other Impact the Companion could reasonably provide. 

 

Meanwhile, tucked away in the Hierophant's Codex, there's additional rules and guidelines:

Each Companion possesses their own Need. While this Need isn't apparent from their initial creation, the more you play that Companion, the more you should strive to identify that Need and articulate it. Some possible Needs may include:

• Support, comfort, and camaraderie
• Intimacy, love, and tenderness
• Material wealth and glory
• Magical secrets and power

Firstly, I gotta say, this is a pretty strong foundation for social gameplay. My position on this blog is that games don't benefit as much from "social mechanics" as they do elements that foster social interactions. Which doesn't have to involve much work! Literally just the presence of an NPC in the player's life already gets you most of the way there. And I think these four "NPC archetypes" are a solid template to start filling out the cast.

But also, there is a mechanical component to this system! To explain that, I'll first have to talk a bit about 7PP's spellcasting rules.

Some bits about magic, briefly

The four classical elements are the closest thing this game has to "character attributes." Your wizard has a score in each element ranging from about 0-5. Then, every spell in the game offers four versions / conditions, corresponding to each element. Whichever is most appropriate to how you're casting the spell decides which element you use.

For example, the classic Illusion spell:

• Consult with Fire if the Illusion deceives one's vision, and is composed of light and shadow.
• Consult with Air if the Illusion deceives one's hearing, and is composed of sound and noise.
• Consult with Water if the Illusion deceives one's taste and smell, and is composed of flavor and odor. 
• Consult with Earth if the Illusion deceives one's touch or balance, or impacts another sense.

Get the picture?

To cast the spell, you roll a number of dice equal to your score in that element. So if were trying to create a visual illusion and my Fire score was a 3, then I'd roll 3 dice to determine the results of the spell.

What does this have to do with Companions? Well, let's return to the rules for Companions above. If you Spend Time with a Companion this month, you get +1 in their associated element. Makes you more effective at casting spells!

Conversely, if that need goes completely unattended, you have a 0 in that element for the month. This doesn't make casting impossible, mind you. It just means that you only roll with 1 die and must immediately accept the results, no take-backsies, no modifying it somehow. Which is... an ill-advised way to treat magic in this game.

In short, how well you're maintaining your Companion circle directly impacts how effective you are at casting magic. Not because magic is powered by social connections, though. Rather, magic is powered by your mind and your heart, which are themselves powered by the people you surround yourself with.

What this actually means

Without a Companion, you Spend Time to address that need yourself. This makes you less productive. Alternatively, let it go unaddressed. Your element will be 0, meaning that you'll lack any control over spells cast with that element. This makes you less effective. But in either case, you're less reliable to the Pact.

What I love about this is that, despite trying to maintain a balanced social life, the basic pressures of the game pretty much force you to inevitably trend towards becoming a weird and isolated creep. You either die in a magnificent explosion of arcane power or you live long enough to become a Radagast.

Sure, you start out with a pretty sweet situation going on, all your bases covered. But the demands of wizarding take their toll. At some point in their life, every wizard ask themselves that fateful question: do I really need to bathe?

Another brilliant way this shapes the game is by providing an obvious way to inflict consequences on a player without going so far as death. This is a problem I've complained about before, mostly in reference to the OSR but also just in general.

I really like challenge-based games, and true challenges require both a meaningful chance of failure and a meaningful consequence of failure. While I think the risk of death is a very good consequence of failure, it bothers me that so many games rely on it as the default, sometimes only, consequence. It's, like, the top shelf maximum penalty you could impose for failure! Surely we can have lesser consequences as well, right?

In 7PP, your Companions are more likely to be targeted than your Wizard, which is both impactful and serves to fuel further gameplay. If you fuck up, or someone fucks with you, you might lose a loved one. Maybe you alienate them, maybe they betray you, or maybe they get killed. In any case, they ground your Wizard in serious, tangible stakes despite otherwise being all-powerful. The man who has everything also has the most to lose.

Implementing elsewhere

Okay so I know I was just saying that this system trends towards your character inevitably devolving into a weird little freak, buuuuut...

The truth is that, in mainstream adventure games like D&D, almost all adventurous player characters are weird little sociopathic freaks. That's long just been the norm, rarely ever questioned. True, some people flesh out the personal lives of their player characters, grounding them in the world and its NPCs and whatnot. But the vast majority of D&D heroes just... live a never-ending lifestyle of vagrant questing. Going from town to town, getting hired to do odd jobs, earning experience and acquiring power, etc. They almost never have something you'd call a "lifestyle." They may have NPCs they like, but rarely do they have family, or, like, responsibilities. It's fucking weird.

So yeah, I think that 7PP's Companion rules are a very simple framework you could bolt onto most games if you want to ensure just the bare minimum amount of "normal-ish believable human lifestyle" out of the main characters. 

But beyond that, I think there's also lots of potential to iterate further!

You may have noticed that, as written, these relationships are extremely one-sided and, to be blunt, unfair. As a Wizard, it's simply expected that others will pick up the slack for you, do the work of maintaining your life, perform emotional labor for your benefit alone, etc.

This is, of course, entirely fitting for 7PP. Its major themes involve constructing and interrogating patriarchy. Of course Wizards get to outsource all the shit they don't feel like doing to people who are their social lessers (often women). Their jobs are so important, you see. They don't have time to be doing frivolous things like "cleaning their laundry." That's women's work!

Of course, do you want to retain this dynamic and its themes in every other game that makes use of the Companion system? Probably not. My Wizard may be an entitled man-child, but that doesn't mean I want all my characters to be. What would it take to modify the Companion rules to be less skewed and more mutual? Helping others instead of only ever receiving help.

The most obvious idea to me is that PCs should be able to provide these roles to other PCs. Personal care is not merely outsourced to "lesser" characters. Even an adventurer can and should be putting in the time and effort to care for their homies. Imagine the party's Warlock and Cleric spend some time hanging out, discussing theology, and debating the nature of magic, and then they receive a mechanical benefit for it.

The generous version would be if the costs and benefits were purely mutual and symmetrical. We both spend time and we both gain a buff. That would be pretty good!

But of course, the juicy part about 7PP is weighing tradeoffs, of deciding what you want to prioritize. I think the potential for selfish behavior remains fertile ground for our intra-party social gameplay mechanic. Force the players to determine how much they're willing to spend supporting one another, and who, if anyone, should be the highest priority to give or receive support.

Alright, but do you want to hear a weirder pitch?

Some of you may feel this is a corruption of Jay's beautiful game. Forgive me.

Tell me this wouldn't be the perfect system for a superhero game.

Specifically, comic superheroes moreso than movies. Where story usually places a lot more focus on the hero's supporting cast, their day-to-day life, their responsibilities and worries, etc.

We all know the trope: when the bad guys come for them, it's far less likely for the hero themself to be hurt than their loved ones. The burden of being a supporting character in the life of a superhero is a classic source of drama, and routinely exposes the hubris of the superhero fantasy.

Honestly, a superhero hack of all of 7PP feels bizarrely appropriate. Great and powerful characters with huge responsibilities, struggling to maintain a monopoly on power and violence, nonetheless constantly seeking to fulfill their personal desires as regular human beings.

Even the Spend Time system I described in the previous post feels like a pretty good framework for a supers game. Investigating a criminal empire takes weeks or months! The superpowered-fights are few and far between, punctuations in the story. Hell, we can even preserve the Wizardmoot in the form of a monthly superhero team meeting.

It's way too perfect, right??

-Dwiz