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.

Wibbly wobbly stuff

Here's something weird about RPGs: time passes at the GM’s discretion. Strictly speaking, it moves at the speed of narration. If the GM says, “you spend an hour waiting for the sun to set” then just like that, an hour has passed in the few seconds it took them to say those words.

One of the most useful GMing techniques I know of is the ability to "zoom in" or "zoom out" the timescale throughout any given session of play. The party gets into a fight? We roll for initiative and time slows down. Every 6 seconds in-game takes us a few minutes to resolve out-of-game. The party embarks on a voyage between the stars? Well, a starship takes about 1 week to make a single FTL jump, so time speeds up. Let's all go around and say something our characters do throughout the next week while we're in hyperspace.

And yet, I find that a lot of GMs don't take advantage of that technique as much as they probably should. In my experience, it often doesn't occur to them at all. If the rulebook includes an explicit trigger for when to shift the timescale, then sure, they follow the rules. But without that, they might not recognize situations that call for a zoom-in or zoom-out.

For example, every GM knows that when initiative is rolled, it's time to slow the timescale, because there's a procedure you have to deploy. Likewise, when you play His Majesty the Worm and the party returns to the safety of town, that triggers the "downtime in town" procedure you remember reading in the rulebook, and you know it's time to speed things up and handwave the little details.

But if you don't play His Majesty the Worm, and you instead only play D&D, then you've probably never been told to keep an eye out for such a trigger. And suddenly, you're playing out every moment of the party's shopping and resting as though they never stopped crawling the dungeon!

Challenging our assumptions

What I think's actually going on is that most GMs have a "baseline timescale" they default to. A basic mode of play for all activities unless there's a specific reason why they should depart from that. An exception to the baseline. And for most GMs, this baseline timescale is a pretty zoomed-in "moment to moment" mode. Why?

Well, for starters, it's probably the most natural thing. You're essentially playing the game in real-time, more or less. Pretty straightforward.

For another thing, it's the optimal timescale for resolving character dialogue spoken in the 1st-person. And even if that's not how I like to handle most social gameplay, it is nonetheless far and away the most popular part of this hobby. Remember, for many folks, "roleplaying as your characters by talking in funny voices at each other" is their primary image of what an RPG even is.

However, I'm at a point where I wouldn't mind if the "baseline timescale" were just a little more zoomed-out. Where the default unit of time wasn't seconds or minutes, but hours or days. Hell, maybe even something bigger.

Many have pointed out how weird the pacing of modern D&D is. You can go from 1st level to 20th level in about 1 in-game month. And I'm just a little tired of it. Tired of playing out every hour of every day of my character's life. And yet also doing so entirely within an "adventuring" mode of play, like my character has no life outside of the quests we go on. As a consequence, our characters are weirdly productive, progressing through a massive sequence of significant events in a matter of days or even hours. Plus, the stories we're telling never seem to feature the changing of seasons or the aging of characters. At least, not without the GM throwing in a big "time skip" event.

Some games have successfully changed the default timescale. Pendragon treats every session as 1 in-game year, allowing you to progress through your knight's lifetime and eventually move onto their heir. But even now, it's still considered pretty radical. So what does 7PP do?

A wizardly lifestyle

Seven-Part Pact is played using a framework that I think threads the needle incredibly well.

At the start of each in-game month, every player decides how they plan to Spend Time that month. You have 4 tokens, one for each week (roughly). You can place these tokens on various people, places, and tasks. Place one on your Sanctum to spend time there, maybe change something about it. Place one on a Companion to spend time hanging out with them. Place one on the Grimoire to spend a week casting a spell slowly, patiently, carefully. Place one on your Domain to attend to your Wizardly duties (e.g. managing the wilds or advising the king or looking into the Dreaming or whatever it is you do). Etc. etc., many ways a Wizard can spend their time.

These represent the major stuff. The primary task you plan to focus on that week, the activity that'll receive most of your attention and effort. It's simply assumed that your character is still otherwise, y'know, living their normal day-to-day life and attending to mundane affairs.

Importantly, everyone is supposed to place one on the Wizardmoot, meaning that they'll attend the Pact's meeting at the end of the month. But, I mean, that's fully one quarter of your tokens you've got to spend just going to work meetings. You can surely miss one, right? But if you miss three Wizardmoots in a row, the Pact will have to address it.

Once everyone's placed their tokens, we begin resolving the next month of activities. Going around the table, one at a time, each player retrieves one of their tokens and resolves that action. If you're attending the Wizardmoot, leave that one for last. Once the only tokens left are for the Moot, we conduct the meeting and end the month.

You can resolve your non-Moot tokens in any order. Additionally, once per month, you may move one of your tokens before resolving it, at any time and for no cost. So you have a little bit of leeway to reschedule things on the fly. In this way, players plan ahead but can still be fairly flexible.

So far, this might sound less like an RPG and more like a board game. "Alright, this week my Wizard visits the island of Ishana to recruit a Bard to join the king's Royal Court." Done. Next player. Turns go by pretty fast, which I consider to be an advantage. But when does it feel like a roleplaying game?

Well, let me tell you about...

Scenes

In addition to your four Spend Time tokens, you also get one star-shaped token. Wherever you place your star token is where you get to have a Scene. A Scene is exactly what it sounds like. It's the part of the game where we zoom in and start roleplaying as our characters moment by moment, speaking in dialogue, moving around rooms, casting spells, etc.

For most players, Scenes are the highlight of the game. But to me, it's important that they merely punctuate the game. They're an exception to the baseline mode of play. Instead of asking, "when is it time to zoom out and switch to a downtime timescale?" like in D&D, we ask "when is it time to zoom in and switch to a real-time timescale?" If we're resolving an event as a proper Scene, then that means it's important. 

Quoting from the rulebook:

At the start of each Scene, establish the following key details:

• Who is present in this Scene?
• Where and When is this Scene taking place? 
• What is each Character doing during this Scene? 
• Why is this Scene happening? What do the Characters present want from it?

...

Scenes can be as short as a vignette or a montage, highlighting a few key moments or a broad-strokes discussion of what may happen during it. Scenes can also be longer and more involved, featuring dramatic fights, passionate arguments, and many spells cast back and forth.

Frequently, it's good to begin Scenes en media res, cutting past any niceties and jumping straight to the most compelling parts. 

End the Scene the moment it begins to run out of tension, or if the Wizard who called for it has reached a conclusion. At the end of the Scene, the [rest of the players] can ask any clarifying questions about what happens next that they're interested in or that is relevant to their Domain.

Following these guidelines, each Scene can be focused and meaningful. Every player gets 1 star token, meaning that they'll have 1 Scene per month (by default). Additionally, the Wizardmoot is always resolved as a collective Scene, and some other miscellaneous game events might be resolved as a Scene (e.g. if you attend the king's birthday party, it will be a Scene no matter what, requiring no one to spend a star token on it).

With 7 players, you'll never feel like the game is lacking that D&D-esque "zoomed in, moment to moment action" mode of gameplay that you love so well. But you're also able to accomplish so much more, cover so much more ground, because you're only giving that level of attention to the stuff that really deserves it.

Implementing elsewhere

7PP is far from the first RPG to use a zoomed-out procedure for structuring the game. But this particular procedure has serious legs, I think. I could easily imagine an entire genre of RPGs built around this basic skeleton.

Could it work for a D&Dlike? Ehhhh it would be tricky. In 7PP, each player's Wizard is pretty independent from one another. While they're all members of a shared pact, they aren't, y'know, a party. They live in separate strongholds on islands miles apart, each with their own responsibilities and supporting cast. Every now and then two or three Wizards cross paths while doing their business, but the Wizardmoot is usually the only time that most of the Wizards are together. At the very least, a D&Dlike wouldn't start to resemble this until you hit domain-level play. Trying to contort a dungeoncrawl to fit within this shape is probably ill-advised.

But what about something like, say, Under Hill, By Water? If you're not familiar, that's Josh's cozy RPG about playing as hobbits who don't want no adventures, thank you. My group had a blast playing it.

But when I was preparing to run the game, I faced a conundrum. The book has no guidelines for, like, the basic flow of play. No overarching procedure to structure things. I could have always just run it like D&D, of course. But the sorts of activities it describes implied to me that a more zoomed-out timescale would be more appropriate. Doing your chores, crafting a dress or a saddle, planning a party, etc. The game accounts for holidays and seasons, and characters level up at the end of each in-game year. If we played out every activity moment by moment, we'd never get to experience the best parts!

So I improvised a timescale where every 24-hour day was split into three turns. Every turn, I'd go around the table and ask each player what one major thing they planned on getting done in the next 8-ish hours.

Sure enough, time sped up and we covered a lot more ground than we would in D&D. But not enough. After two sessions, my players cleared two weeks of time. That's way faster than the pace of our 5E game, but I admit that it still seems awfully slow to me. What could I change?

Now I know. If I run that game again, I think I'll adapt the timescale procedure from 7PP. Hell, if Josh makes another edition, I'll try to convince him to adapt it. And I have a feeling that, in almost every game I play from here on out, some part of me is always going to be thinking about adapting that procedure from 7PP. Because it really does tie together a session in a way I find so incredibly refreshing.

-Dwiz