Continuing my posts about The Seven-Part Pact (7PP) and some of its nifty mechanical design ideas, I want to discuss this game's approach to authority.
This is, of course, a pretty huge topic in RPGs. There've been tomes written on different models of authority you can build a game around. GM-as-god, GM-as-player, GM-as-umpire, rotating authority, location-based authority, etc. In classic Jay Dragon fashion, 7PP doesn't even have a GM, instead trusting everyone to share the responsibility of adjudicating the rules and simulation.
But the notable thing about 7PP specifically is that it's not just a simple "everything is adjudicated by consensus" kumbaya. So much of this game is about struggling for power. Against the world, against the other Wizards, against the other players, and against the system itself.
Wearing many (funny) hats
As with previous parts, let's start by reading the text found in the game:
When you play The Seven-Part Pact, you embody three roles, to varying degrees at various times. They are:
- Player of the Game, the person who is spending time with their friends and doing a fun activity together.
- Wizard of the Pact, the powerful character who is struggling to hold their world together in the face of intrusion.
- Keeper of the Celestial Audience, the numinous being playing as the world outside the Wizards and mediating between the desires of the players and the reality of the wizards.
Your Wizard may bellyache and groan when his evil schemes are thwarted, but as a player you may be delighted and thrilled. As keeper you may lay out a monstrous trap for another wizard, causing him tremendous grief and misery, but the whole time the two players are high-fiving about it. As a player you can understand that a system in which only men are wizards is faulty and useless, but as keeper you may be the one enforcing it onto the wizards, or as wizard you may act as a horrible person in order to maintain that same system.
When you're not in a scene, you play as part of the Celestial Audience and fulfill your Keeper role. If you're in a scene, you can hand off your Keeper role to other players in order to obtain their perspective. Sometimes when speaking it can be useful to make clear who is speaking and why — are you making a request on behalf of your Wizard, on behalf of the Chain-Keeper, or on behalf of yourself as a player?
All RPGs already have the player vs character divide that you have to navigate. This is just one more role for you than normal. So let's talk about that role of being a "Keeper" rather than a Wizard. There are three main things you have to provide:
The first thing is about crunch. As I mentioned before, the various mechanical subsystems are divided between the group, each Wizard codex elaborating on additional rules not found in the core rulebook. This means that no one participant has the burden of learning the whole system ahead of time. When a procedure comes up for the first time, the player who's responsible for it can simply cut in, teach the rest of the table, and then play proceeds.
This makes the game easier to jump into, and it can often result in funny surprises. When our group had its first combat, I stepped in to explain the rules and act as referee, and half the players said, "woah wait what? This game has combat mechanics??"
The second thing is your authority over one of the game's principle themes. Your codex includes a brief overview of that theme and how it takes shape in the game world, but also leaves it a fairly open-ended prompt for you to flesh out as you see fit.
For example, whoever is playing as the Hierophant also takes on the role of the "Flame-Keeper" in the Celestial Audience. The Flame-Keeper's theme is, "all Wizards are lonely." Their codex provides an explanation of the common folk of Isha, of the place Wizards occupy within Ishanian society, of the difficult lifestyle of Wizardry, and of the rules for Companions. In the end, you are instructed thusly:
You make the final call. Within the Celestial Audience, you rule absolutely on all matters of your Domain. If there is any uncertainty around the behavior of any common person from any member of the Pact, you make the final decision. Refer as much as possible to the Rules for Companions on page XX to govern this process. If you feel ill-equipped or too biased to make that decision, you may deputize another member of the Celestial Audience to decide for you.
"You make the final call." Though most of the game is governed by consensus, every now and then it's helpful to have a tiebreaker. Someone who's job it is to make a firm ruling, absolving the rest of the group from the decision and moving the game along swiftly.
If you don't like a Keeper's final call, then guess what? You also have some aspect of the game that you get to be the authority on, so you can't claim that any one participant has too much power. Conversely, if you yourself don't feel like you can fulfill your responsibility in an impartial way, you can just delegate. Remember, everyone is serving as the "GM" simultaneously.
In good ol' D&D, the GM couldn't just outsource the decision of the villains to a player. There would be a conflict of interest, right? But in 7PP, everyone has that conflict of interest, and everyone is privy to "GM info" of some kind, so we're all struggling with the balancing act together.
The third thing is a short list of things to prioritize and push. Let's keep going with the Hierophant as our example:
When you're operating as part of the Celestial Audience, keep an eye out for the following:
- Instances where one's actions negatively Impact the common folk of Isha. Whenever this happens, add a Rank I or II Problem to represent their Impact.
- Opportunities to remind the Pact that All Wizards are Lonely, and to invoke the Rules for Companions.
- Space to describe the daily rituals of Isha, the life of common folk, the ways the people of the archipelago celebrate the sacred truths of their lives.
When you play most RPGs, as a GM, you're struggling to keep in mind a million different things simultaneously. Things slip through the cracks pretty often. But in 7PP, you have permission to focus in on one thing, because you know the other "GMs" will pick up the slack elsewhere. Thus, we get to have seven major themes of the game each receiving the attention and energy of one entire whole human committed to reinforcing that theme.
This sounds like chaos!
And yet, it's surprisingly harmonious.
For one thing, RPGs already rely on a social contract premised on, "we're all pretty chill and reasonable, right?" That everyone at the table possesses common sense, and that when our intuitions disagree, we can smooth it out with a brief discussion at least 90% of the time. Remember, RPGs rely a lot more on the invisible rulebooks at the table than the visible ones. Everyone has a library of information in their brain, and through discussion we can benefit from the aggregate knowledge of all those libraries.
If your concern is, y'know, "who should be speaking right now?" then worry not. One player (whoever has the most familiarity with the game) is still designated as the facilitator. Even if the traditional GM's power is being distributed around the table, the responsibility of facilitation is still best kept to one key voice. One moderator managing the spotlight, keeping the conversation productive, calling on people to speak, etc.
In my opinion, the real concern is more subtle. "Even if anyone has the right to object to something declared by another player, who gets to declare it in the first place?" Like, I don't have any problem with how the dragon's appearance was described, but why did so-and-so get to describe that? Who decides who gets to decide? As a matter of fact, resolving this concern is actually where a huge percentage of the game's text comes from.
Firstly, the game itself has already filled in many of the gaps. 7PP is a capsule game, meaning it covers both game design (system, rules, mechanics) and level design (setting, scenarios, content). What does the map of the world look like? It's in the Mariner's materials. What is the king's name? It's in the setup instructions for whichever Age your group has selected. What does your Wizard's sanctum contain? There's already a baseline description provided in your codex.
Where there are gaps, the text tells you who gets to fill it. It's possibly the most common type of "rule" in 7PP. "When you do XYZ, add a so-and-so NPC into the game. Give them a name and a short description."
One last concern I can see has to do with uncertainty. Ordinarily, an RPG's players face uncertainty from their GM, who is both occupying a (loosely) adversarial role and has access to lots of secret info. But if we're playing a game where everyone has the same information and everyone is cooperating as the Celestial Audience, where does uncertainty come from instead? Well, there are three main things:
- The very stars above! At the center of the table lies an orrery, and every in-game month you update the current position of the planets and the sun. Then, everyone consults their codex for how to read the stars, updating various bits and bobs throughout the game accordingly. Based on the new positions of each celestial body, that tells the Mariner how to update the current weather patterns across the archipelago, the Warlock how to update the current standing of each noble house in the royal court, the Necromancer how the souls of the dead advance through the afterlife, the Sorcerer how the various NPCs throughout the world make use of magic, and so on.
- Various additional randomizing variables. Many of the domains include a shuffled deck of this-or-that element to draw from. For the Faustian, it's actually a deck of traditional playing cards! Surprisingly, I don't think any of them involve rolling dice.
- Consequences from other players. One of my absolute favorite parts of 7PP is how, if you're doing poorly at managing your domain, it usually doesn't result in greater difficulty for you. Instead, it impacts the other Wizards' domains. It's not uncommon for another player to walk over and say, "hey, sorry, uh, I gotta add a problem to your board game. The Devil made me do it."
Between all these things, the system itself provides basically all the uncertainty you'd need. Like a clockwork GM, simply following the rules will generate scenarios and challenges and worldbuilding as you play. And sure, there are countless solo RPGs and board games that have already pioneered this area of design. But good god, I can't think of a single one this expansive.
Of course, the motion of the heavens is perfectly foreseeable if you just take the time to work it out. This is exploited in a few key parts of the game's design. For example, the king's birthday happens when the sun is positioned in whatever his birth month is. Duh. If you choose to play with the Age of Awakening setup (the recommended starter scenario), the king's birth month is in the house of Gemini, and the game begins in the house of Pisces. Thus, the king's birthday always happens in the 3rd month of the game. This gives every campaign in the Age of Awakening a shared major plot point early on.
But trying to control for other parts of the scenario similarly is a fool's errand. That's one specific variable that Jay deliberately arranged for, I assume by working backwards from that intended end point. The stars, the shuffled decks, and the actions of each player together comprise one mother of a chaotic system, becoming less and less predictable the further out you get from the starting conditions.
So yes, in a sense, the system literally is chaos. But the distribution of authority is actually they key to managing that chaos. A single GM alone simply couldn't handle it.
But is that fun?
Oh hell yeah.
If you like GMing, you'll still get to do lots of it. Or, if you aren't super comfortable GMing, this is a great way to get started, since you're part of a team.
Something I found delightful was how everyone felt comfy just casually chiming in bits of narration and roleplaying from the sideline. When you're in the Celestial Audience, you have to be ready to step up and fill the role of a non-Wizard character in any given scene. But even the folks who are just spectating still often feel compelled to speak for the minor characters filling out a scene, like an impromptu Greek chorus.
And because your Keeper role instructs you to focus on a particular aspect of the game, you're always bringing a unique perspective to situations. In this way, everyone in the Celestial Audience is spectating the same events, but they're all looking at them through a different lens. No two people will recount the game's events in quite the same way (and not just for the normal reasons).
But even as I say "this is a great way to get started," I'll admit that this hypothetical feels pretty unrealistic to me. I'm not the first to describe 7PP as a game where "everyone plays as the GM." But something probably more important than that is, "everyone needs to be a GM."
As in, your casual player who just shows up to the session with their character sheet and dice, goofs around for a few hours each week with a funny voice and some pizza, and then never thinks about RPGs for the next 6 days? Yeaaaaahh... I don't think this game is for them. And I think you already knew that, too.
But hey, fuckit. If you're reading this, you're almost certainly a forever-GM and a game design sicko, anyway. That's basically the only type of RPG hobbyist who keeps up with new releases or reads blogs or whatever. They're the ones most likely to hear about a game like this in the first place, and the only people they have to talk about it with are their fellow GMs. And people with experience GMing are usually better players, too.
So if you're looking to form a Pact, you'll be a lot more successful if you recruit from those who're most susceptible to Wizard Madness to begin with.
Implementing elsewhere
Of all the bits of design I've shared so far, this is definitely the most constraining.
Most story games are already halfway here, so they'll be fine. But challenge-oriented games like I usually prefer would have a hard time retaining their core experience under these conditions.
In a traditional adventure game, authority must be distributed so unevenly in order to maintain the integrity of the challenge. Struggling against the all-powerful, all-seeing GM is the foundation of all challenge in the game. In a game about exploration and discovery, the players need to not be privy to all the world info first, so that they have something to uncover. In a game about competing against adversaries with strength and cunning, the players need to not have a say in how those adversaries think, act, and perform.
And while 7PP can allow for those moments within individual Scenes, it's usually only for one or two Wizards at a time. In a traditional adventure game setup, almost everyone at the table is on a team, working together towards a shared goal, for pretty much the whole game. Almost everyone is too biased too often.
You could make the case that, hey, y'know, we've had plenty of those games at this point. Why not just make another game with 7PP's model instead? And uhhhh yes. I agree, do that.
But also, like, if you're still playing around in the more conventional model of authority, you can still take a lesson from this. Literally just distributing any game-running responsibilities more is always a welcome practice to me.
Make the players learn some mechanics and be ready to look up the details on the fly. Have the players populate a few areas of your world with some NPCs. Tell a player to maintain a historical record of the setting for the group. Ask a player to keep an eye out for something specific about the game or its world. "Hey, do me a favor: can I trust you to always be thinking about the slice-of-life stuff in our sci-fi space travel campaign?"
A final word
There's a lot of talk going on about this game right now, from big names making big claims about big ideas. As someone who's had a chance to play the game, I agree with basically everything they're saying. But I can only imagine what it must sound like from the outside. It's dangerously close to becoming a circlejerk.
In an effort to bring the conversation back down to earth, I figure we need to finally discuss some specifics. It's not just hype: I want you to see the individual mechanics themselves and convince you how innovative it is.
And more than that, I don't want those innovations to remain exclusive to this game. I know you're designing something right this very moment, and I want you to plunder Isha's treasures for it.
This is the last post on 7PP I had planned. I've been purged of Wizard Madness, for now. Hopefully, I was able to pass it on to enough other folks to get something going here.
-Dwiz
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