GenCon Review: Agon

Posted by JonathanWalton on August 15, 2006 at 11:46 AM

So I wanna seriously review all the games I played and demo'd at GenCon, giving not just heaps of praise but also real criticism and suggestions (which hopefully will be of use to someone) as well as thoughts on recent developments in design and play. I was gonna do this on my own blog, but thought that this might be a better place, so others could offer thoughts as well. If other people want to review some of the other games before I get to them, that would be awesome.

First up, John Harper's Agon, which does everything I was planning (and failing) to do with Argonauts in a concise and clear way and then kicks it up a few notches to create something new and exciting. The book continues to surprise me as I delve into the text more. It's also hella fun to play.

For those who are unfamiliar with the term "agon" (Greek: αγών), like I was, Wikipedia informs us that it is "the ancient Greek word meaning contest or challenge" as well as in Greek comedy "a formal debate which takes place between two characters, usually with the chorus acting as the judge."

In the game, you take on the roles of ancient Greek heroes of legend, charged by the gods to perform difficult and sometimes contradictory tasks.

The basic resolution system is to roll a character's Name die (which measures their fame/power) and Ability die (from a list of various abilities) vs. either the GMs dice (which I'll discuss in a minute) or the dice rolled by another player.  In any die-rolling situation, the highest single number wins, though rolling the highest possible number on a die (a 4 on d4, 6 on d6, etc.) allows you to "explode" it up, adding a re-roll to the original value.

Mortal characters start with d6 Name, while demigods (the children of Olympians) start with d8. The size of your Name die increases as you gain more Fate, a seperate "damage" track that indicates how far your character is from their ultimate, tragic end. So demigods may start out stronger, but they burn out like rockstars. Characters gain Fate after finishing a mission, but can also gain a point to block all damage from an attack, staving off death but moving closer to their DOOM!

One of the most valuable things about Agon is how it brings the Player-versus-Player aspects of Robin Laws fantastic and understudied Rune roleplaying game to the indie community. Though Agon doesn't adopt the rotating-GM system advocated in Rune (though, thinking about it, this would be an easy option for John to mention in the text), it does have the same kind of point-based challenge creation system, whereby the GM is given limited resources to construct enemies and other obstacles for the players to fight/face. This even applies to the dice that the GM rolls in simple resolution.  The base GM die roll is 2d6, but more resource points can be spent to raise the difficulty.

The GM is actively encouraged to try to frustrate and harm the characters to the best of her ability.  But her limited resources keep this from being abusive and, besides, the characters can also take more points of Fate to stave off death (in fact, when I told John that some of the characters in our game had to accumulate some Fate during combat, John said: "Good, that means you're doing something right"). Interestingly, the GM also gains more resource points when the characters rest and rejuvenate, leading to some slight tactical choices in that regard ("Do we fight the monster now or try to heal first?").

Like another of this year's indie games, Tim Koppang's Hero's Banner, Agon is set up to be a "generational" game. Since characters are liable to meet their DOOM! after a handful of session, especially if the GM presses them hard (which seems to be what John intends), players are encouraged to create new characters once their old ones die and recieve half of their completed Quests in free dice during character creation. I'm not sure what this means for long-term Agon play, in which subsequent characters will get increasingly powerful, and whether the challange building system is currently set up to compensate for this, but I like the continuity across various characters (something that I also really excited about seeing in Shreyas Sampat's Torchbearer, once he finishes it).

One of the other major design innovations that John gives us is abstracted, symbolic miniatures combat (which, interestingly enough, is also a major feature of Kevin Allen Jr's Primitive). Extended contests ("bring down the pain") take place on an index-card divided vertically into 7 bars. Character and monster pieces are then arranged in various spaces and move around during the course of combat or another kind of extended contest (an atheletic event, a dance, social manuvering, warfare). Various weapons and abilities are best used at certain distances and, perhaps coolest of all, players are allowed to move the pieces of any player that rolls a lower "positioning" roll than they do. In our play, monsters that rolled poorly were regularly pushed around by the players to manuver them into vulnerable or less optimal positions. We thought that was pretty sweet.

One of the most inobvious mechanics is Glory, which characters gain by besting the GM's challenges. At first it seems like a simple experience system, where characters earn "advances" for every ten points of Glory they accumulate.  But players can also earn extra Glory for their characters by not just beating the GM's dice but rolling the highest of any hero in a particular task. This encourages inter-player competition and backstabbing while not explicitly setting this up with the kinds of trust mechanics that we see in Tim Kleinert's The Mountain Witch and Malcolm Craig's Cold City. Since the characters often serve different gods and the gods also want different things, this means that fights breaking out among the heroes should not be entirely uncommon.

Another neat mechanic is Oaths, which are debts other characters owe you which you can cash in to gain their aid. Characters trade Oaths before play begins, in a series of pre-game scenes reminiscent of Vincent Baker's Dogs in the Vineyard.  Oaths are also gained during play and characters can even be owed favors by the gods themselves.

There are plenty of other neat mechanics to talk about, but I wanna skip to what isn't entirely clear or precise in the current version of the game (we've already discussed most of this stuff with John Harper and he's currently considering ways to make the text more helpful in certain regards).

One of the biggest current issues is figuring out how to hurt monsters, which are invulnerable to non-magic weapons unless you've discovered their special weakness. Players can spend 5 resource points to make their weapons magical, but often only 1 or 2 heroes are likely to have enough resources left by the time they encounter the beastie, which makes the fight significantly less fun for the other players (who can aid in the battle in other ways, but aren't like to gain any Glory from it). Also, the text is pretty unclear about how to discover a creature's weakness and when you should try to do this. In our play, Thomas Robertson was expecting a kind of Shadow of the Colossus approach, where you learned a creature's weakness during combat, but that doesn't seem to necessarily be what the text intends. Some pacing guidelines, recommending that you initiate a kind of "discover/acquire the weakness" plot before the monster appears, would fix a lot of this.

Also, in our play, characters often wanted to put themselves into the gods' debt, Oath-wise, in order to gain their aid in the present. If the gods accept this bargain (and they are surely fickle and cruel, so no guarantee), there seems to be no method of recording that debt. I'm also not sure what that would mean mechanically, since the gods can already command the allegiance of heroes without needing to call in Oaths.

All in all, though, Agon was probably my favorite game of the con so far (though I haven't digested or played through all my other spoils yet) and John Harper is even more impressive for having completed the entire game in two months. Props to John for being a brilliant madman.  Oh yeah, and you can get the game for $20 from the man himself. Worth every penny.