MORE THINGS EXPLAINED

From an email conversation with +Pearce Shea about the AGENTS HANDBOOK (GET IT FREE HERE ON MY BLOG)
Pearce's stuff can be found at http://gameswithothers.blogspot.com/ - i been following him since he posted monsterparts, which is the d&d where you play as mystery kids and everything is terrifying.

I sent Pearce one of those feelers asking for comments on the book, and he wrote back...

a. As a fan of Hobbes-the-person, this was cool
b. comments enclosed are mostly stylistic
c. core considerations for me are:

          i. what is the game's object? It seems like something between RPG and wargame, which is cool. 

         ii. because like, this is a cool thing, but I'm not totally sure how to use it.

         iii. I said this a few times in a few ways, but this would also benefit from a little more content. I like that you've not added ponderous paragraphs on Nightblades and Assassins but a little more might be useful (Encounter Critical does this well). 

         iv. it may become more apparent if i or ii is fleshed out, but I didn't get a good sense of win or fail states other than character death. (alternatively, is character death necessary? If this is a PvP thing, could you have the PC slink away in defeat until, say, they've lost health?)

         v. how is combat adjudicated? damage dealt? just a touch more in that respect would be helpful, but maybe that's a GM's book thing.

          vi. who controls the non-player agents in the PC's retinue?

d. The writing is really good and the layout is really crisp. nice work.

e. I think this might benefit immensely from either an example of actual play or something like a scenario with various missions and deeds attached to it (if that's how this is meant to work).

f. there is a lot of other stuff I liked on which I didn't comment (because it got boring and too time consuming to add a comment saying, "great" over and over again. So, like, assume that if I didn't say anything about it, I liked it, a lot (and I liked nearly all the things on which I did comment, too).

(he suggested a bunch of stuff here I don’t have yet: a sort of MISSION STATEMENT for the game itself, an EXPLANATION OF STRIPES, an ACTUAL PLAY SCENARIO, (but I think instead I’ll write a adventure module, the DOGLANDS) an in-depth EXPLANATION OF MISSIONS ANS DEEDS, I should consider writing these soon)

what I wrote back was:

no worries. i havent read your attachment yet but just addressing the things in your email:

a. my understanding of hobbes is limited, but hes on my reading list. as a post-enlightenment thinker i am always in the dark for not having read all these enlightenment guys [ edit: honestly im a little embarrassed about not having read hobbes. I want all references to leviathan throughout human history to be veiled metaphors for this LEVIATHAN, so hobbes is an obvious guy to read. ]

ci. it's a babushka-style russian nesting game for d&d (ie wizards and warlords and knights and knaves and dungeons and dragons are supposed to nest together nicely but also work in isolation.) i guess knights and knaves: extended is the wargame and wizards and warlords is the story game.

cii. i want it to be accessible to new players and useful as an alternative to lamentations, old school hack, holmes basic, or new basic. (not that i have any huge issue with any of those. my main issue with new basic is it is not basic enough) it's open, so i want people to fork it and make their own local variation.

ciii. im not familiar with encounter critical. some stuff is left vague or wild to encourage the reader to want to write stuff in.

civ. i want DEFEATED (one stat reduced to 0) to be the slink-away [and maybe lose a level] state and SLAIN (two stats reduced to 0) to be the retire your character state. also death is not strictly the end etc. most groups have local rules for death and dying (etc) so i only really want to put rules that are either essential or new; not published elsewhere.

cv. your collected ability scores are your health. all failed checks do d6 damage to one of your stats. combat is contested stats checks. each stat regens at a rate of one point every day. (again you could replace this with something more d&d but i dont want to put that explicitly in the book, the book is d&d-agnostic.) [this needs to be more explicit in the text.]

cvi. in my game i'd let the player control one dude and travel with 1-3 other dudes,depending on how big that makes the whole group, with a more limited player control over the secondary dudes. the other guys (not on the adventure) are your backlog. again i want this to be vague because everybody has their own hireling rules and this seeems fine to me.

d. thanks

e.i dont like those actual play chatlogs i never read them. but i should write an adventure that uses the leviathan system. maybe if i write some good adventures, people will get excited about it.

other things i got planned.... arnold k asked for a big table instead of all the paragraphs describing populations and upkeep and that sounds right to me. i want a page that just has pixel art sprites of every class; an upgrade tree.

Okay yeah I need a BIG TABLE and an UPGRADE TREE. I also want at least one PAPERLESS ECONOMY page for each level of agency.

Pearce also put comments inside the word document, so responding to some of those:

[re: ELF KINGS and WITCH QUEENS] gender - mostly just for flavor, i wouldnt stop someone from playing any class as any gender. i guess the elves are nonbinary [I should say, they are coercively assigned human at birth but their real gender is ELF] and the humans and dwarfs male-centric [patriarchy in human civs and two men to each one woman in dwarf populations]. i dont want to be too explicit with it.

TALKY, CRAFTY, SMELLY, STEALY - i havent defined these terms at all, i'd like to know if you think this is okay. I think dms and groups can determine locally what is and isnt TALKY or whatever.

why keep track of which item is in which bag? so the dm can say 'alright he steals your bag number (roll) 2'

thanks for your feedback this is very useful.

also

ci. the object of the game is to expand the late-game stuff old school d&d promises and push it into the basic game. i like how at level 10 you get a castle and  bunch o guys but the games i play in all focus on lv 1-4

and Pearce’s reply:

"I haven't defined these terms at all," yeah that seems OK because they're pretty obvious (ad)verbs and there isn't a ton of overlap. How do you envision the players and GM wrangling what does and doesn't fall within one of these four buckets? Or is there no wrangling and the GM just includes a list of things (which seems preferable).

in re bags. I might include a short line about, "the life of an agent is tumultuous, and bags may be lost, damage or stolen" or something. I dunno. I just know that I've played in games where I had to say what was in what bag and then it never really mattered other than carrying capacity. A smart player will ask why they're deciding what's where, but a smart, tired or smart, distracted player may not...

in re object. OK, I just think you need to come up with a couple of sentences to describe that to players (if the player handbook is something they're meant to take and read and not like _just_ a workbook they use at the table.

To which:

"I just know that I've played in games where I had to say what was in what bag and then it never really mattered..." hm i know how you mean, ive had the same problem.. ill have to think about it more