Design Journal III: Markets and Flexible Economy in Fate

This has been another one of the tough nuts to crack in my design thinking.

The problem, is that Fate is a narrative and story oriented game.  It is about people's choices more than it is about the crunchy bits of simulating physics or maths.  On the other hand, economies and markets are entities of many parts and can be very complex indeed.

Part of what makes stories of clever traders, tricky fixers, and cunning grifters interesting, is that there is enough of a tip of the hat to these entities to the audience that they can vicariously feel clever too when the score is made honestly or otherwise.  Even so simple a scene as THIS is interesting because of the details.  Now the scale of the political game I have in mind is quite a bit larger, but through the faces of the player state, this kind of trading should be possible.  Though there are few films that tell the stories, much of my interest in the history of trade and virtually all my interest in economics has to do with the constellation of mad, daring, world spanning adventures, schemes, and adventurers who at the end of the day just wanted to make a buck.  The clever trading may not be the meat of the story, but it is the culmination.  But then too, is the gamist satisfaction of "winning" in a way that directly supports the narrative.  This is not a market simulation, but it should have enough complexity to make daring a journey half way round the world to bargain for a shipload of cheap goods that can be sold for a fortune back home.

My favorite part of the board game version of Civilization, was not the tech cards or the war part; it was blind trading three cards for three, two of which had to be truthful.  Skins for dye... gold for wheat.  Trading is a fun side business to raiding in Sid Meyer's Pirates! too.  Several of my favorite non-fiction books are histories of trade... Nathaniel's Nutmeg, Scents of Eden, The Devil's Cup.  The idea of a ship of adventurers looking to make a king's ransom with one big score leading to a war from a rival nation that ends in a peace treaty that grants an island territory on the opposite side of the planet... is just too crazy not to be ripe for fun.  HERE, and HERE we can learn about Port Royal, a city chock full of murder hobos, a veritable Babylon of the West, in which the continuous fencing and resale of cargo to (more) legitimate merchants (for a commission) is a setting in which some level of mechanical detail beyond a single die roll to support the narrative might be in order.  There should be some way beyond mere hand-waving to get some fun out of this kind of story focus.

So, I have two levels of resolution that I'm looking at.  One is a much simpler Fate style challenge mechanic that can make less important trade, or more uninterested players move smoothly past trade to play in which ever ring of the political circus game they prefer.  But I have been racking my brains trying to figure out how to explode this into a satisfactory fractal that has the right level of granularity to feel like a live, dynamic market economy, but still not get outside of the Fate play space.

I think the editing process for the 200 Word RPG contest kick-started my designer brain again, and I had an epiphany this afternoon.

Ultimately, it goes back to economics 101... Supply and Demand.  I will have to expand a little more on the acquisition of resources later, but the core of the exploded, Fate fractal market starts with goods.  There has to be a quick way to get an idea of some relative value of goods in order to give trading some verisimilitude.  The simplified version will merely abstract this, and transactions will have no markers for the value or quantity of goods in trade; they will merely be narrative flavor like a created advantage or stunt.  Transactions will be a contest of trade between the player merchant and the target market (PC or NPC).  However, the fractal version determines the value of goods based on a quick calculation from three stats (R, F, L)

Raw Materials:  - Common                   1
                           - Uncommon              2
                           - Rare                          3

Finished Goods: - Few materials          1
                           - Many materials        2
                           - Complex materials   3

Labor:                 - Basic skill                1
                            - Advanced skill        2
                            - Specialized skill      3

So for instance, Wheat is stated as R 1, F 0, L 1, for a (V) value of 2.  Quick intuition can figure out that it is a raw commodity (seed), it is not a finished good, and it takes basic labor to put in the ground and to gather at harvest.  There is obviously a fair amount of abstraction in the modeling of farming, but it gives a fair narrative model.  Compare this to Iron ore (R 2, F 0, L 2, V=4) which can be turned into Iron ingots (R 2, F 1, L 2, V=5), that is used to make Armor (R 2, F 2, L 3, V=7) for values of 4, 5, and 7 respectively.  Quick, easy, and can pretty much apply to anything that can be traded in scale.  This gives a relative value between a load of Wheat at market, and a load of Armor.  You could hand wave this if there was no narrative importance, but just the fact that one has more value than the other mechanically (though possibly not precisely as a simulation) gives 1) some relative narrative importance to which wagon matters more to the story of the guards, 2) a model for further market value that can also contribute to an abstract but still dynamic market for the merchants.

With that scratch-pad reckoning, that gets an idea of market value at the point of origin.  But cost must also figure in getting it to market.  At point of origin, silk in China was far cheaper than by the time it went thousands of miles west to Roman markets.  The cost at every transfer port increased price.  As such, zones are taken into account based on the difficulty of crossing from one zone into another zone.  Essentially, you could travel a thousand miles across the Asian steppe in summer and it would be one zone, as there is little challenge between entering the zone and crossing into the next.  Zones are measured by their final borders in other words; you can come in for free, but it costs to succeed in leaving (passing through).  But, crossing the Tarim desert might count as a zone change calling for a +3 difficulty to pass through, and moving from the Tarim into and over the Tian Mountains along the Northern Silk Road is yet another zone change calling for a +4 difficulty before moving into the Steppes (easy enough... call it a +0 difficulty).  So the basic distance mechanic calls for a +1 to the base value for every full +3 of difficulty in crossing zones to market.



So a load of silk in the Roman market at Antioch would be scratch pad priced thus:

Silk: R 1, F 1, L 2 (V=4) + shipping (quick estimate +4).  It is an exotic item indeed, to Roman wives at a (C) cost of 7.

But while all of that deals more with the supply side of the market, there is also the demand side. This was also a tough part to crack, but I ultimately simplified it into a value based on how much the item is needed (or wanted enough to not distinguish a difference), and subtract the cost from that, dropping the integer to make a difficulty number to overcome by the merchant at sale.

Need:  - Few need it     1
            - Many need it  2
            - Everybody      3

So again, in the case of Wheat (V 2) / (C 2) everybody needs it (N 3).  N - C = -1, drop the integer, and you get 1, so the difficulty in selling wheat in a local market is +1.  That means that the merchant has to overcome that difficulty to make a profit.  Selling a load of Silk (V 7) imported from afar however, may prove harder.  While most people would certainly like silk, probably you could judge it to have N 1.  N - C = -6, drop integer and difficulty to sell it is +6 simply because it is exotic and expensive... most people simply can't pay the price.

Now the third ingredient mechanically, is to take into account a dynamic market.  If you flood a market with wheat,  the value of wheat is going to drop drastically as the supply outstrips the demand.  Or if you can increase the supply of silk on the market, you can lower the price, and more people will be able to buy, which means that you can make up the profit over time.  Since this is Fate though, we don't want to track a hundred commodities in real time, only the ones we are interested in for our story.  So we need a way to put a lens on that.  Thus, markets all have a stress boxes and consequences.  In effect, the merchant player is attacking the market, and taking the stress as profit which goes back into replenishing that player's Resources stat, which I will discuss in another post.  But if you attack the market too much, you put a narrative consequence which mechanically has enough detail to provide verisimilitude.

So in one last example, suppose your character sent a caravan east to bring back a load of silk to begin a trade monopoly so you could get filthy rich enough to buy the armies you need to keep your northern border safe from the stinky barbarians.  The caravan does return from the daring venture (a whole separate series of sessions of story in play).  Having cleverly used two create-an-advantage boosts (The Softest Clothes in the Empire, and Everyone Important in Tyre is Wearing Silk) to overcome the market in Antioch, ticks off two shifts of stress, and gives a consequence (Demand for Silk is Up) which allows an extra invoke the next time a silk shipment is in.  Suppose another consequence came up though, and the market had so much silk that even the senior servants are wearing it?  You might have the moderate consequence be Silk Demand Down.  Anything important to the story about the market can be adequately, intuitively, and pretty realistically dealt with in this fashion.

So next, I need to deal a little more with Resources.

Here is a cool map that shows a little about the markets along the classic silk road.  Too Cool!

Design Journal II: Geography and Politics

I am thinking through just what how much narrative weight to give to geography in my design. Furthermore, how much mechanical weight would it need then, and what mechanics would best support that idea?

At a glance, I am looking at some other design takes on political games, and none of them include geography as an element, and I'm sure that these games work well enough for the lenses and filters the writers chose.  However, I have been thinking about what sort of game I want to play for a long time, and through to the current incarnation in a Fate framework, I keep coming back to the land as the stage for the play, and the stage the players play on matters to the kind of stories I am looking for.

I mean, imagine right off the top, Dune without the starkness of Arakis.

In real history, geography matters... a lot.  Russia is a vast country and was even before the Soviets began gobbling up even more, but much if Russian history in the last two hundred years (and longer) has been shaped by the need for a port that didn't freeze in the winter.  This was critical because in order to keep up with the advance of the industrialized world, it behooved Russia to not be land-locked into a backwater.  The Russo-Japanese wars contributed to Japan taking control of Manchuria which was the springboard for the invasion of China decades later.  The Soviet bear licking it's chops after the appetizer of eastern Europe in 1945 was not lost to the rest of the allies who saw it ready to gobble up some or all of Japan after the Japanese were defeated.  More recent scholarship has given credence to the notion that the atomic bomb was at least as much to stop the advance of the bear as to beat the Japanese.  All for want of a port...

When the Roman Republic went to war with Carthage in the Punic Wars, what started as a local squabble in Sicily, brought Rome and Carthage on opposite sides initially to settle things.  The initiating powers were ultimately eclipsed by the Republic and the Empire who clashed for the first time, but not for the last.  Ultimately, of course, multiple wars led to the fame of Hannibal, the Carthagenian who unimaginably marched an army including war elephants over Alpine passes difficult enough to traverse for experienced climbers, to harass the Romans for years before his defeat.  That story matters in large part because Sicily was a cosmopolitan island crossroads, and the Alps an absurdly imposing obstacle.

Denmark and Sweden sit at the mouth of the Baltic Sea.  In the era of the Hanseatic League, proxy wars with pirates were fought partly because control of the mouth of the sea gave the trading edge to whoever could safely enter and exit into the North Sea, and from there, on to business with ports in the rest of Europe to the warm and sunny south.  Just add some chrome.  Times change, people don't.  And landscape matters to how people maneuver.

I have also recently been reading the book Revenge of Geography which I thought might be another fun study to add while I'm writing.  So far there are lots of interesting points, including more on Russia.  Being a huge country of vast steppes in the south and vast forests in the north, it faced the conundrum of being mostly indefensible whenever it wanted to expand civilization out of the forests into the warmer and more farmable southern expanses.  Sure it could grow wheat down in the Ukraine, but then it had wave after wave of barbarian horsemen pillaging it over and over again, which aspect of geography led to a more aggressive expansionist way of expanding civilization.  The book argues that the need to push back the frontiers for safety was part of what shaped the brutality of the modern Soviets.  Greece is a mountainous region with very limited space or soil to grow grain, but suitable for growing tougher olive trees and grape arbors which grow in more marginal conditions.  Also, the region is just full of excellent harbors.  Becoming far reaching, inquisitive maritime traders with ships laden with wine and olive oil seems to have been destiny.

England and Japan, both island empires at some point, became so because they faced the choice of being annexed or relegated to insignificance by their larger neighbors if they did not take to the seas.  They had both the benefit of a maritime buffer for safety, but not at such a distance that they could not easily trade with their neighbors if they became capable naval powers.  The opportunity to enjoy the safety to grow, the need to capably expand and control other territory by a variety of means, and the access to the thassaline highway all made them the nations they became.

Now I want a good many other things to provide lenses and filters for my game, but this does explain why I think geography should not be left out, and furthermore, why it makes the stories better because it provides very tangible motives and methods and locations for interesting action.

Design Journal I: Looking at Fate from the inside out

Design decisions in setting the dials

I'm working on designing for Fate, and so I've been breaking down the system to its screws and gears.

By default, Fate Core has 47 discrete mechanical elements to keep track of:  five aspects, three stunts, two refresh, ten skills, twenty skill points, and two two-box stress tracks with three consequence slots.  Fate Accelerated has 32 discrete mechanical elements to keep track of:  five aspects, three stunts, two refresh, six approaches, nine approach points, and one four-box stress track with three consequence slots.  So an ideal goal in designing an equally simple, elegant setting for Fate, is to have no more than 32-47 discrete mechanical elements to build from.

If you break down stunts into further quanta, you find that the default character in Fate Core has two physical and two mental stress boxes, with the potential for up to two more of each.  However this breaks down into a base of three shifts of physical and three of mental for a total of six stress shifts before getting to consequences.  If the character has a third stress box in one or both, they have a total of twelve shifts, and if they have four stress boxes in each they have a maximum of twenty shifts of stress.  Six, nine, twelve, sixteen, or twenty shifts… that makes the potential for a lot of granularity if you break down Resources into individual stress boxes, and makes it possible to connect Resources to treasury and storehouse type stress or conditions depending on how you design it.  That was a key issue in my decision to break up stress into individual single stress boxes; see FST 60.

So, what's the point?

As a mechanics light system, Fate requires a whole lot less to digest the crunch, and a whole lot less bookkeeping than say Pathfinder, or GURPS.  That is neither bad nor good in and of itself, as both of these are very well designed games, and both have a lot of thought behind their extensive mechanical crunch.  It is however a difference that is very important to my present taste in games, as spare time is much more precious a commodity for me at this time in my life.  But here's the problem; I am working on designing a political game and Fate is the engine I want to use.  However, a political game can be very much a very large wheels-within-wheels affair, and the level of mechanical complication could potentially add up very fast.  That is something I want to avoid which is what brought me to dig Fate in the first place, and yet I want the ability to account for many of those wheels within wheels anyway because I like verisimilitude.

So how do I get the big machine without big maintenance?  How can I get something that feels as big as reading Dune or A Distant Mirror or watching Game of Thrones?

Currently I have copies of two published Fate world books that beat me to print on settings that include a political angle (Romance in the Air, and House of Bards), but fortunately, they each fill a different niche, and neither one fits the niche that I want to design for.  The first assumes nations are important to the narrative, but they act in a distant canvas backdrop shaping the context for personal drama.  The second puts the point of view characters in the position of wheeling and dealing for influence in the districts that compose a large city.  I am looking for the middle ground with the faces and factions that push the action across the broad canvas.  As such, I need to address issues of not only personal and party political power, but all the tools of power from diplomatic to legal, from production to foreign trade, from spies to warfare.

The dials for this build are five aspects, five stunts, three refresh, and six approaches one of which includes a separate stress track.  In addition, there can be a number of extras in play at any given time that may regularly change, and multiple issues that are shared by some or all.

The prime movers in my design thinking should be the factions with their associated faces, and the treaties, accords, and compacts that provide soft leverage in the game.  Through these should be backed by the various tools of power from the soft power of diplomacy and trade to cajole, to the hard power of spies and armies to threaten, all backed by the factional agendas and signed treaties.  I did not want to have a massive amount of book keeping (I don't want a tabletop game about number crunching) but I wanted lots of options available on an ad hoc basis since cities and states have a lot more than individuals.

I chose five aspects for many of the reasons that Ryan Macklin discussed in Fateful Concepts: Character Aspects.  However, I knew that I wanted to create a stronger funneling mechanism for conflicting agendas which is why two treaty aspects each of which more or less inverts the more conventional crossing paths aspects in the default phase trio by creating links of conflict rather than cooperation.  Another design benefit of this decision, is that it dovetails nicely with the fact that the stunts dial is increased above standard, while the refresh dial is still default; there had to be a way to create more opportunities for compels to fuel the fate point economy, and at the same time, it encourages more use of the create an advantage action which is in my opinion, the most narrative oriented action which encourages more colorful story moments.

The resource stress track seemed to be an important consideration as I wanted to provide a more solid mechanical hook to hang the concept of abundance and destitution; this needed to be something that feels realistic and sometimes antagonistic in political decisions, without requiring a lot of mechanical book keeping.  A full treasury can directly add to your power to bargain, trade, and wage war, while the lack of resources can mercilessly drive your people into a morass of despair, desperation, and anarchy.  Mechanically in game, this also provided a neat way to essentially pay for ad hoc extras that are more or less equal to a stunt or aspect in play for that scene or season, and can then be disposed of to clean up the book keeping until you want or need them again unless you pay to keep them active in play.  An active trade fleet, assassin, or diplomatic mission, or army should be able to do a little more than the single use of an aspect or one refresh stunt, but still be disposable.  Thus, they are paid for by a combination of a successful created advantage supported by resources depending on their level of capability.  They should be disposable, so that other players can screw with you by pirating your ships, and sending your diplomats heads back home in a basket.

On the other hand, another factor in my design thinking, was trying to think of how to crack the nut of a problem that I had from the very first time I tried to make a political game:  the players almost immediately resorted to war as the most expedient method to get results.  In reality, war is costly and should as one Prussian general observed, be kept as diplomacy carried to its furthest extreme.  I wanted keeping armies to be a headache unless you really had burned all your other bridges.  By making armies expensive to keep, and factions and faces essentially free, the players will naturally discover that they can get more done for less that way… unless they have no more leverage with factions and faces and are backed into a corner.  War is very possible here, but costs a lot to keep up.

One thing I did not want was a vast amount of mandatory book keeping that has no immediate effect in a scene, but still give the feel of real capability and consequences in each arena of decision making as represented by the approaches.  That is why I settled on fire and forget or fragile economics, warfare, etc.  Armies, caravans, gold mines, and even patriotic movements are all as maintainable as you want and easily disposable when you have no more interest in them by making them largely ad hoc aspects introduced by create an advantage, and maintained by resources or simple overcome actions as long as you need them.  More important examples of the same can be promoted to stunt level elements which essentially equate to a permanently accessible invokable aspect in mechanical terms.

I plan to add more of my design thinking as I go.

Design Journal: New and Improved!

This is where all my design work for my political legacy game for Fate will go.  For design purposes, I will call it Fate of Thrones, but that is just a working title.  There is of course some influence there in tone, but that is just one small facet of this project which has been in ferment for years.