Hey Man, well this is Babylon

This morning I hit what I think might be a minor breakthrough in the design blocks I’ve had lately on this project. A lot of my process as of late has been held up with a lot of inner conflict on what kind of play template I want this game to support. I have a few previous posts on this subject. This morning, a new idea came to me, involving splitting the meta-game functions among all the involved players.

I’m calling them Roles of Authority, and every player gets one – maybe more – at the beginning of the game. These roles assign various functions and authority domains to each player that extend above and beyond their standard character-focused realm of game control. For example:

The Mistress of the Rules: Her Role gives her the authority to make rules calls mid-game. She is responsible for reading the book, keeping tabs on the rules, and cutting short any rules arguments or look-ups that happen in a session. When she makes a call, the players must accept it and then return to the story.

The Master of the Many: This guy’s Role gives him the final call on any involvement of “The Many.” In this game, “The Many” is a term applied to any multitudinous force in the game’s setting and story: Noble Houses, riotous mobs, wild tribes, the Unwashed Masses, and more. Any player can involve The Many at any time during their narration, but the master of the many has the final say on such things, if he chooses to execute it.

The Master of the Action: His authority is over the framing and establishment of new scenes. While everyone has the ability to introduce new scenes and add elements to their framing, the Master has the final say, and is responsible to taking all the input and assembling it into something initially cohesive.

Mistress of the Fates: This player is responsible both for calling all ties and for inserting an element of the unexpected into scenes and challenges. Whenever the variables of a challenge are declared, the Master of the Fates can choose to insert one unexpected element into the middle of things, if so inclined.

I have a handful of others as well. The Roles are intended to be broad (mostly) in spectrum. I want there to be gray areas of contested authority. In those cases, anyone with a legitimate claim should speak up, and the authorities should work together to design an outcome.

I’ve read a handful of gaming blogs and campaign-mastery essays online which recommend doing things like this in most every game you play, but my intention here is to incorporate these roles into the very rules of the game, and have them directly affect the atmosphere of the mechanics themselves.

This is good. This breaks my current stalemate with myself. I like this, as it allows me to more freely distribute “central meta-game authority” to everyone at the table, and move back to the subject of actual in-game mechanics and flow.