This week, Sam talks with Greg Soper AKA sporgory about Divine Favor, one part of the dice pool mechanic from Agon second edition by Sean Nittner and John Harper. Some topics discussed include:
Having a family drama stapled to your character sheet
Greek Gods: bad parents
What makes hacking Divine Favor hard
~HACKING LIVE ON AIR!!!~
Games mentioned:
You can find Greg on Twitter and itch.io at sporgory
You can find Sam @sdunnewold on Twitter, dice.camp, and itch.io
The Dice Exploder logo is by sporgory (!!), and the theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey
Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!
Transcript
Sam: Hello, and welcome to another episode of Dice Exploder. Each week we take a tabletop RPG mechanic, grind it down into a fine powder and scour the dust for meaning. My name is Sam Dewald and some housekeeping up front this week. This is the sixth of eight episodes in this first season, after which the show will be going on break while I finish recording season two. I have already started recording season two, so I don't think it'll be like a super long break, but just fyi, only this episode plus two more are left in this season.
But do you want more? Is this the worst news you've heard all week? Can you not imagine a life without more exploding dice? Then tell a friend about the show.
I have been so excited by the reaction and support that season one has gotten from people like you listening. And I'm excited to make more of the show. Clearly, I'm literally already doing it. But what would make me really motivated to finish that second season more quickly is more people clamoring for it.
So tell a friend who you think might like it. Come by the Dice Exploder discord and talk it out with your friends, and enjoy this week's episode.
My co-host today is Greg Soper, AKA sporgory.
Greg is I think, best known as the Agon guy, Agon second edition specifically, being John Harper and Sean Nittner's game of Greek heroes doing The Odyssey in the style of the Fast and the Furious.
Greg's adored this game as long as I've known him. He runs the fan discord for it. He's made several hacks in the Paragon system. Great pun guys. And he's a ceaseless advocate for the game. Every designer would be so lucky as to have a sporgory championing them. That passion is why I wanted to have him on the show. That, and I've run an Agon campaign and love the system myself.
So it's no surprise this week that we are talking about divine favor from Agon, a deceptively simple bonus dice mechanic with the weight of a millennia old soap opera embedded inside it. We get into all the little wonderful things that can happen when you staple the cast of a dysfunctional family to your character sheet, why Divine Favor is notoriously hard to hack, and thoughts on how Agon's "roll first and then act" resolution mechanic redistributes a ton of agency from GMs back to the players. It's a great ride.
So let's get into it. Here is Greg Soper with Divine Favor.
Greg, aka sporgory. Thanks for being here.
Greg: Yeah. Super excited to be here. I'm really excited about the prospect of this podcast. I love the idea of more diverse concepts and discussion and uh, not the, not diverse. We're two white guys. I, I meant like two diverse in terms of like ways to approach RPGs and discussion about RPGs, especially for mechanics. I'm a, I'm a big design nerd.
Sam: Absolutely. Okay, Greg. So what have you brought for us today?
Greg: We are gonna be talking about divine favor, originating from Agon second edition by John Harper and Sean Nittner.
Sam: So normally in Agon you have yourself a dice pool. You take the top two dice that you roll, and you add those together, and that's your result.
But with divine favor, it's an extra little d4 that you add to your dice pool that gets added as a third die to the final roll. It's that little extra boost of a god kind of pushing you over the top in your results. So once you get into the recitation of deeds, when you're describing how you do your cool thing when you succeed or like fail horribly.
Then you have to include how the god kind of helps you or maybe like pokes you in the eye because you use the divine favor on the roll. So divine favor, there's a bunch of ways to get it. You start with some, obviously you get two with your favored god who you pick during character creation, and you get three more that you get to distribute amongst the rest of the gods.
And then during an island, which is like an adventure and Agon, you're going from island to island. The strife player, the GM can say that any given contest you're undertaking is , Particularly interesting to a god. So if you're out there hunting, maybe Artemis is there, like watching over you. And if you do really well, she's gonna be like, nice, I like hunt. Here's a free divine favor. So the GM can kind of hand out divine favor like that.
And finally, between islands, when you're sailing around on your boat, you all make a big sacrifice. You light some pig on fire or whatever, and the gods find you worthy. And then they send down some extra divine favor that you can kind of divide up amongst yourselves.
And that is divine favor. I missing anything?
Greg: Uh, No. No, , that is how it works. There's lots and lots that like tie into this and that divine favor feeds back into but yeah, that's, that's the core of it.
Sam: Yeah. So something we were kind of talking about before we were recording was that idea of how you incorporate divine favor into your narration. You wanna talk about that a little bit?
Greg: Yeah. So , the really interesting thing about these Agon roles is that just every player who wants to participate in this like whole table roll that's how every, Dice roll happens, everyone gets a chance to their dice pool with all the different little pieces on that character sheet. every player who participates, they roll the dice without really thinking about what they mean. But then when it's time to narrate, they're responsible for incorporating that narration in into their results, into the, into the ongoing story and conversation. And so just with, with with this divine favor, it's just a really interesting chance for the player to in some aspects of the, the story that aren't explicitly tied to their character. Like they're, they might have used their strong muscles and their big sword to, to do something really cool, but now they also have this omnipotent God coming in and aiding them in some way, either in a really abstract way or maybe just like a a gust of wind comes in and like moves that arrow aside from hitting them right in the head.
Sam: Yeah. Maybe Athena makes you a little bit smarter, or maybe Athena like comes down and hands you a huge spear and then that's the spear that you go use to fight the hydra
Greg: yeah. Yeah. Or like, , one thing that the Gods love to do is just like, come in and possess you and like, Hey I'll, I'll be you now. And you, Athena, as you might, might do something like make the greatest battle plan ever and lead, lead an entire army to victory.
Sam: victory. Yeah. And then just kind of like, fuck off.
Right? . Like
Greg: And then she's like, okay, bye.
Sam: I mean, this is, we're already getting into what I think is the most effective part of this mechanic, which is how it takes this huge roster of NPCs, this like whole soap opera that an entire mythology is built around of the family of Greek gods and like puts it into your game.
It puts it onto your character sheet, and every time you use divine favor, you tap into the narrative of that soap opera and bring it to your table. And because we're all like a little bit familiar with the Greek god personalities to begin with, at least here in America, it's, it's just such an easy, great little priming of story.
It's just an extra little salt that you get to like put in there a little spice to make things a little bit better.
Greg: Yeah, I think it's just really cool also how like every single character sheet has the same cast of Gods on them because that means every player has some authority over. Who these gods are how they manifest in this version of the pantheon.
For this table specifically, players will probably remember how you used Zeus what kind of flourishes you gave them, what kind of personality. I mean, it, it, it also gives players, I'm sure some tables that the, the players might actually get to be Zeus. Like they, they get to do his voice, they get to do some dialogue if they want.
It's not all just up to the strife player. So so that's just, that's just really fun and kind of dynamic in a, in a really cool way. It's, it's really specific to this fiction. Like if, if these were these beings that are all powerful, we can just pop in and out whenever that's very much Greek. Greek mythology type of plot device that is going to be hard to replicate in another type of game, even in the Paragon system.
So
Sam: more of that later, but, but the, the other piece of this I really wanted to get into right away is how having this cast of characters on your character sheet like this and having them recur from island to island basically makes that family of god's soap.
The like meta plot of what is otherwise a pretty episodic game, and especially when you're talking about how characters like you can be the kid of a god, you just say as much when during character creation. but So everyone has these familial connections to the gods and then this family drama that you are very much a part of just follows you from island to island. And suddenly when you are calling on the favor of Zeus, you're saying, dad, can I get some help? And like you have to bring that flavor into the roll and that is just so juicy.
It's so much fun.
Greg: Yes. Yeah. Yes. It's, it's really great. There's also like lots of like hard coded moments for the, this dynamic to keep popping up over and over. Like you mentioned the, the sacrifice in between the
islands. Players and the strife player being able to like, invoke the, the gods or like, hey, they're, we're
watching now.
These are outside of the scope of divine favor, but just in agon, they, they really know how good this mechanic is and how good juicy this soap opera is.
And they keep giving it reasons to come up again and.
Sam: and again. Yeah, something you just kind of skimmed over there of like the strife player's ability to mark a contest with divine favors on the line here is a really nice tool to be able to sort of like inject some extra tension in what other bio wise might be a pretty low stakes contest and that's really cool.
That's really powerful ability to like, as a player, the strife player might be able to note. Things are kind of dragging a little bit, and we're still like a couple of contests away from like, the climax of this thing. What if we just bring down Artemis for this one? You know, what if Aries just like happened to care as a way to spice things up?
Like that's, that's another really nice sort of side effect of this mechanic. Yeah. And,
Greg: And the, the exciting thing about that too is that, like you said, that's kind of ongoing story in this episodic story. So each, each session of the game might be, have some really specific climax and stakes that are tied to that island. But the frame story of this.
these gods might have trapped these heroes in these mye strife fill downs in the first place, which is a dick thing to do,
Sam: Classic Greek god.
Greg: Yeah, that's classic classic in the most literal sense It's also up to, it's also up to the gods in a pleasing the gods to even get to go home.
And that's what you're trying to do as the hero. So by it, it's high stakes in a way that's very different. if the gods didn't care about this contest, like if you were just saving some people and the gods were looking the other way. With that has its own, own narrative hef to it. But yeah, this contest now all of a sudden might make it harder for us to even get home. or It might help.
Sam: the other thing that I find just really interesting about this whole conversation is we're talking about how this mechanic is so cool because how it interacts with the characters in the cast and how it gives GMs the tool to like spice up a given contest when like fundamentally, on a very mechanical level.
This is just like you get a bonus die on this role. It's just like a tiny little bit of candy, and it's really remarkable to see how much, just like, here's a, here's a little small reward that maybe can push you over the top, like can echo out through the entire game design and really fundamentally change the tone of the game and like, like support everything else that the game is doing.
Thematic.
Greg: Yeah. Yes. And that kind of like tells me that. This mechanic doesn't actually need to be tied to bonus. Stice specifically, like this could be tied to anything on the character sheet. That's just how it happened to manifest in here, and it makes a
Sam: Yeah,
Greg: But I'm sure you could find all kinds of ways to bring that in.
Sam: yeah. Yeah. It's easy to imagine a, like version of a game where, you know, maybe you get divine favor and you. And Divine VAR is more like xp, where you like get some at some point and then you can spend it to like ask Dad for help and then you get bonus dice to do better on this role, or you can like hoard it and then you're advancing more yourself and gaining your own experience.
So that would be a
very different game. It'd be very different dynamic, but it like a, a different way. You could take the same concept just by tweaking the
mechanics.
Greg: Mm-hmm. And in Agon already you can get bonds with these gods as well. And that's the, that, that's just kind of another avenue that these, this relationship with this broader.
Sam: Mm-hmm.
Greg: in and the, the gods have very big advantage bonuses for having a bond with them.
Sam:
Yeah. Cause bonds with other players are sort of like how you're assisting each other, but when you get a bot hunt with a god, suddenly it's not like, Hey, like I'm praying to god to come and help me with this.
It. Hey bro, you owe me one. You wanna like calm down and like win this cool race for me or whatever.
Greg: yeah. Outside of like maxing out your glory track and becoming an epic hero with a d12 name dice. I think it's the only way to consistently have a d12 dice a contest. So that, that's a big deal mechanically
and
probably the most leeway to say, Hey, now Athena does appear and fights the battle for me.
But more than anything in the, in the, in the game, although you could do that whenever you wanted, it's a really loose narrative game.
Sam: That kind of also ties back into, a section of the rules I hadn't read before when I was reviewing the book to, to prep for this episode, which specifically calls out how divine favor I I'm gonna just read this section from the game quick. So,
Divine favor represents the capacity for superhuman achievement by calling upon the precision of Artemis, the insight of Hekate, the cunning of Hera and others.
A hero may reach beyond their limits. Divine favor is powerful, but unreliable. The favor of the gods is not. Pathos, another mechanic entirely that I'm not gonna explain, represents the inner fire of perseverance that a hero draws upon to endure hardships where a lesser person would fall. A hero stands strong, driven by their passion.
Pathos is not infinite. However, when it burns out, the hero enters agony and slips closer to their ultimate fate. By empowering the heroes with divine favor and pathos, the game highlights the essential duality of the characters. They are passionate people striving for glory against the strife of the world, blessed by the gods to set things right.
I had never really seen that in the game before about how much the game is sort of about. Push and pull between the god-like and the mortal about, are you a demigod? Do you belong on Olympus, or are you just kind of a guy doing your best? Oh I think that's really interesting. And I think divine favor really highlights that.
Greg: Yeah. Yeah. It's a really fundamental part of the fiction, and they, John and Sean really, really recognized that when they're designing this. Something that came to mind for me too. I can't remember where this is in the book, but. but They actually kind of lay out a scale for what all the different die sizes represent in terms of the, the narrative, like the epicness, so like a d6 is just a normal person, maybe like a, a like a captain of an army or a, or a hero like yourself.
But d12, only the gods can enjoy that. And then there's d8 and d10, but like, You through this game, you, you, yourself, as a hero are growing your epic name dice to potentially d12. So it's kind of like not only are you part of this family of gods, you're on a, a track, you're, you're a baby god right now. You might become a full god sometime in the future or just an epic hero that is on, on par with a god. And, and it's up to you, like whether or not you want that or for your character can, you can, you can decide what exactly that means, but like yeah, there's just this, cast of god characters is just very fundamentally tied to every single part of this game and how the, what the player's basic motivations in every contest.
Sam: Yeah, absolutely. So I ran like a 14 session Agon campaign a few years ago, and I'm curious if you had the same experience that I had with it, which is that the game really quickly became about, wait, do the God suck? Actually, in the same way that like, you will come of age and figure out that your parents don't have it all figured out.
You know that you'll realize that the peop you know, never meet your heroes cuz they don't actually know what they're talking about, Like you mentioned earlier, the, the fact that the reason you're traveling from island to island is that the gods won't let you go home. And why is that?
It's just cuz they're kind of like mean, I don't know, and like, maybe they'll still come down and help you because they, they kind of like you too. You're kind of interesting. But they, they're just kind of assholes.
Greg: Yeah. Yeah. I'm also very classic. Great god. But yeah,
Sam: I think
Greg: it, more than anything, they're just bored and need heroes to be entertaining and epic for them, and want to see your full potential, even if that means threatening a bunch of innocent lives on these poor islands. But yeah, no, totally.
Sam: Yeah. Maybe, maybe now's a good time to also mention that, like today as we are recording this, which is probably like three months ago by the time you're listening to this, they. Released like an a, creative comments, SRD for Agon, so you can make your own hacks,
Greg: Full standalone games. Prior to this, it was all it was all this playset format where thinking with the assumption that the rules of Agon are very straightforward and simple and the book is short. Uh, You could only make these documents that reference changes to the rules if you wanted to make a Battlestar Galactica hack or a Transformers hack or a pirate hack or whatever.
Sam: We should talk about how... So originally I know John Harper set up that kind of play set system specifically because he thought hacking Agon would be a really good sort of first hack for a given designer, which I think is really true.
It, it is, as you say, a very simple game. It's not that hard to just kind of relabel everything and have a new product. That's probably pretty cool, but also, notoriously, most of these hacks really struggle with divine favor and what its deal is, think the, like the, the first time I tried to hack the game, I was gonna do like a, a James Bond thing before I decided that I didn't wanna be that favorable to the British and American governments, but like in a, in a kind of like spy goofy kind of game, it was very obvious that like gadgets would be the thing that you would have as these little extra bits that pushed you over the top of limited use.
That's even what they use in the SRD as an example of what you might have, like a jet pack instead of the favor of Ares or, or what have you.
Greg: Mm.
Sam: when you change divine favor to items, you'll lose all of that personality of other characters that we have talked about as the real benefit of this mechanic.
Greg: Yeah. And to clarify, having just simple strength or gadgets or whatever is totally feasible and workable. And
I don't want to put any designers off of, of hacking this thinking that they need to, need to think of some brilliant alternative to the Greek pantheon.
Sam: my,
Greg: one of the most
foundational
Sam: yeah, my opinion is like, you don't even need to include an alternative to divine favor in your game at all. You can just kind of cut it and like, you know, fill in the space of your setting with other parts of your game.
Greg: Yeah, I've actually, I've had a quite a long history of trying to hack this mechanic. It was actually the, like, like you said, it's notorious.
It was the first big roadblock I came up against when I was making a longtime dream power game of mine. Which was for years trying to get into forge from the dark. But with the release of the original Agon licensing, I thought, oh man, islands, boats, epicness, this is, this is perfect. I gotta take my shot.
And it turned out to be like a dream. And also, like you said, a great first full product. I could get it out pretty quick, but the Divine Favor was pretty tough. Like Greek gods, and I mean, you could have pirates that for some reason worshiped the Greek gods.
I came up with stars, but in reality, they're just different.
They were just things like squash, buckling, and skullduggery, abstract, narrative genre, genrey
terms
But yeah, so that, that fell into the same just kind of easy out of like, I don't have an answer for this right now, but I, I think, I think it's so tough to hack because it just requires you to answer so many questions about the fiction
Sam: of your
game.
Mm-hmm. and
Greg: and that's, that, that's a really worthwhile thing to do, but it just takes a lot of work and it, it's tough to know when you should break away from the framework and constraints that Agon divine favor presents you. When does your fiction start to just be totally unsuitable for that? Or when can you maybe tweak. Uh, adjust your fiction to fit into that mold.
Uh, I I think both are pretty valid ways to do
Sam: It's really easy to imagine a game that loves the Agon contest mechanic at large and does not want a family soap opera sort of going. And it's also really easy to imagine a game that once a family soap opera going on, but doesn't necessarily want the like contest structure of agon.
And I think the idea of cutting divine favor entirely, because you don't need a pantheon, you don't need like a cast of characters that's gonna be following you around in your game is underrated. And I also think it's underrated for other games, maybe not even Agon Hacks at all, to just have a cast of characters stapled to your character.
Boyds in the dark kind of does that with your friends and rivals.
But, but there is something special about tying in more of a mechanical benefit to it too.
Yeah.
Greg: And, and something that
Sam: that,
Greg: like called on in, in any given role potentially, and in Blades in the Dark, those are mostly prompts for just kind of at a campaign level just to like have NPCs ready to go and not, not require some separate resource
Sam: Yeah, they can, they can give you bonus dice on downtime actions, which is nice. I, I really like that mechanic, but it is much more in the background than divine favor is.
Greg: Yeah. Yeah. And that, and that's, that totally works for that game. I don't, I don't think you need to have your boxing friend show up in the middle of a heist that why would they be there? But
I, I think, yeah, it's worth to talk about just various approaches people have taken with, with these. There's a Star Trek pack that uh, member of the Agon Discord has has made called Endeavor. That's the name of your USS Enterprise or whatever it's called in the, in the game.
But instead of divine favor, the crew tracks these alien cultures on each planet. I know, so Tim, who made Odyssey Aquatic, the Life Aquatic hack of Agon, which still a brilliant out of left field idea that I don't think anyone would've thought of except him
Sam: Blew away. Who, let's, let's take the Greek myths, Fast and the Furious game and do a Wes Anderson movie with it. But then it works. It's really beautiful.
Greg: I, I think, I think the common thread they have is that these really van glorious marine biologists, oceanographers, share a lot in common with flawed Epic Greek heroes.
Sam: You're sort of following in the footsteps of giants except one are the like scientists who came before you and one are the literal Greek gods.
Greg: yeah, yeah. The, the initial release of Odyssey Aquatica, that divine favor analog is more along the, the gadgets line. But Tim has indicated that he wants to change that, and I've had some discussion with him about it, but he wants to change it to the, these giants that came before you. The, the mentors of your oceanographers a, a big mechanic in that game is that you have these rivals, scientists, and researchers on other crews. But you, you might share mentors with them or a mentor of yours might be someone that another crewmate of yours has some bad history with.
So I think, I think, I think that's a great place to bring
Sam: bring. Yeah. Bring in the Jacque Cousteau and, and talk about that. Yeah. Scientific legacy.
Greg: Yeah. Yeah. And it'll be interesting to see how that plays out cuz like Jacque Christo's not gonna pop up and help. He might, he might. I, I dunno. But like the, it's not the same type of fiction as a Greek God. It.
You have to think a little bit more
about
Sam: gonna, you're gonna like flash back to when he was your mentor and he taught you something that you're using now, and suddenly you get a nice little character moment out.
Greg: Yep, yep. Totally. I, I'm really looking forward to those kinds of stories. Another, I'm making a sci-fi horror comedy game. It's probably gonna end up a bit like the, that classic game Paranoia, which I've never played, but it's called All Quiet, No Peace about indentured indebted uh, employees of this future hell Omega Corp needing to do terrible jobs in this underground facility. But I, I was kind of struggling and going back and forth on this for a while, but then I made a connection with the portal games and that you have these kind of omnipotent AIs over.
Uh, overseeing various parts of the facility over various tasks.
And you working for this brand, especially with the rise of like, you know, all, all the AI stuff in the world, right, right now I thought it would be fun to have these various branded ai that you need to contend with and, and Colin, and that the brands they represent, that the brands are in your own body as a synthetic body.
That's, that's replicatable over and over.
So I, I feel like I'm, it's gonna be able to enjoy all the same narrative freedom that a Greek god would, when that, when that computer screen can just pop up anywhere and
Sam: Yeah.
Greg: harass you.
Sam: Another thing I'd love to see more people do is take that cast of characters, but make it a little bit smaller than Agon's cast. Like with Agon, you have 12 Greek gods and you can kind of like on your sheet and you can kind of get away with it because they're the Greek gods. And we all have like a, we all played Hades, you know, we have a passing familiarity with what the deal is, but there's no reason you can't just have like four potential mentors in Odyssey Aquatic.
You know, six different regions, and AIs in, in All Quiet No Peace and
Greg: Yeah. I think, the reason there's so many in Agon is because the pantheons 12
Sam: mm-hmm.
Greg: gods and that probably not any more than that. Like I, I, I think, Agon itself could even work with less gods.
Sam: Yeah, absolutely. And and typically does, like typically a couple, you know, you pick a favored god, everyone picks a favored god and whoever you picked as your favored god is gonna show up a lot more. Not only because you have more divine favor with them, but because you specifically said they're my favored god, I want them to show up more.
Greg: Yeah. Yeah, and I, it's kind of like this, I don't know what the effect is, but just whoever you talk about first, like that's gonna be who you
talk about next. Probably like if you need to talk about the gods again, it's like
I know
this one.
Sam: well, it's, it's once you sort of have an emotional investment with someone, it's like, what are you gonna do? Pick up like a random new relationship with whoever? Or are we gonna like, dive deeper into the emotional thing we already are doing?
Greg: One, one plus of having a potential cast that wide is that just, each table might have a very different cast of favored gods.
Sam: Yeah. Yeah. I, in the campaign I ran on, in like the first session, someone said, I don't see Hades on this sheet. Can I like pray to Hades for help? But I was like, I, obviously you could pray to Hades for help. And suddenly, like Hades was just following them around demanding they pay a debt that they owed him.
And that was the whole campaign. It was amazing. Carron showed up and took someone away and, you know, Hades isn't even on the sheet to begin with.
Greg: Yeah. that, that's one thing I love about the favorite god spot in particular, is that it lets you put in whatever you want and it still ties in nicely with the rest of this, as long as they're a feasibly powerful god-like being, you can, you can keep 'em on your Agon character sheet.
Sam: Yeah.
Greg: Another thing I wanted to talk about is just it doesn't even need to be a, a cast of characters or it doesn't need to be simple strengths.
What makes this cast of characters thing interesting at a foundational level outside of them being NPCs, is just that it gives the, the players of Agon a reason to narrate outside of just their specific character. The beautiful thing about this is that the players have some shared authority over a consistent set of narrative props. Everyone has the same prompts on their character sheet, and they can kind of shape what these mean. And that does not have to be Greek gods. It doesn't have to be speaking sentient beings. It could just be concepts or beliefs or, or anything.
Sam: There's, there's almost a way that it feels like it's, it's sort of splitting up the GM role a little bit. You see this in the way contests work in this, where when you succeed on a contest, you get full authority over how you like go forth and do the thing, as we were talking about earlier.
And that takes some traditional authority over from the GM where like if you're playing Dungeons and Dragons, it's expected that the GM is still gonna narrate what happens when you succeed on a, on a roll. And I think divine favor, what you were talking about here also plays into that sort of bleeding. Who has narrative control over what where whether it's the Greek gods or it's a jet pack, or it's your old mentors in the unreleased, theoretical, new version of Odyssey Aquatica.
Greg: Mm-hmm.
Sam: a set of toys on the table and saying, everyone gets a chance to play with these like this. This part of the setting is open for everyone to, to mess with, and. . I love that. I mean, I prefer sort of GM list play to begin with, and I, I like, as a GM asking my players for help and thoughts because I think it's really hard to come up with everything yourself.
And having these mechanics that support doing that and sort of subtly encourage you as a player to do that is really wonderful.
Greg: Yeah. Yeah, totally. And so the, the reason that some of these strengths or divine favor analogs, just don't necessarily have that juice. Even though we've said it doesn't have to be characters, it doesn't have to be speaking sentient beings. Is that something like if everyone has a strength on their sheet that says a knife that might be fun to narrate how you incorporated this knife in
Sam: mic in the contest. But
Greg: You, you technically would have , shared narrative authority over what a knife is with the rest of the table, but no one's, that doesn't mean anything really. Like, that's not going to be interesting to revisit that when, let, let's see how this player narrates their knife usage.
So it still requires you to be pretty intentional and answer lots of questions about the fiction and what, what is going to be the most interesting here? Something that these players can have shared narrative authority over something that the, the GM. wants to be excited about seeing the players get involved
with
and it's, it's usually just simple intangible objects or various skills aren't necessarily going to have lots of like narrative weight outside of that, in, in a way that you can keep, that get to richer as you keep revisiting that.
Sam: yeah, there is part of me that wants to, I, I'm thinking about this live on the air,
Greg: Live.
Sam: hacking in real. The, there's part of me that wants to take the divine favor thing we're talking about here and, and almost make it more like the kind of setting elements that you see in Dream Askew and it's associated hacks where the role of the GM is sort of divided up into discreet pieces.
you know, natural disasters, or like the Raiders who are outside of town or whoever, and each player has one of those sheets in front of them and they have, they get to be the GM for that thing. It feels like there's probably a way to do a version of divine favor that is sort of setting elements like that where you have, oh yeah, you can.
Draw on strength from earthquakes or you can draw on strength from like the internet, like whatever the other thing is that's going on, like the, the piece of the world that is interesting in your game and how you, you might bring that into your role and take a little GM ownership over it.
Greg: Yeah, I, I, I think it doesn't even have to be you'd need to give players reasons to want to do this, but like, I love the idea of this setting prompts here, but like, I think they could be even like people or concepts, or narrative points, or. Characters that are opposed to the player characters that could still be represented on the player sheet, like you, we said in the dark, has these rivals.
But like, I think if giving a player like a disadvantage or Wrath dice in Agon, if that's on their character sheet, and give them a reason to use that and say, Hey strife player, use this one. I think that is
supremely
interesting. I have a, another Agon hack I made as this Pacific Rim Kaiju versus Mecca one that I've kind of been toying with the idea of like, do we, do I really want them to be Mecca because like this whole genre has like, you know, this Power Rangers you, there's ultraman where you can just get really big.
It's also just maybe fun to be a kaiju . I just thought maybe I could have a, a shared list of Kaiju dice on there. And so the players get to bring in a Kaiju when, when they want to,
Sam: Hell
Greg: some of that cool
Sam: Just put the power of Godzilla on my character sheet. Fuck yes. That's what I want.
Greg: And even even if you're not Godzilla, it's, you can say, I want Godzilla to be in this contest. That sounds fun to me..
Sam: Be. Yeah. That's sweet. But
imagine imagine being like, oh no, I'm so hopelessly outclassed. I must call on the power of Godzilla, or.
I was thinking earlier, like imagine a world where, yes, everyone on the sheet is explicitly an antagonist from you, but like if you really think you need the help, you can go put yourself a little in debt to them to get their little bonus.
Like imagine instead of the Greek gods, you've got Hannibal Lecter on your character sheet, and it's like if you want to go to him for advice, he'll give you the extra D four, but then like you've got that mark on your character sheet. Now that. You owe Hannibal Lec one favor. Like, have fun
Greg: And now you've got, now you have to sit down for a session with
Sam: Yeah,
Exactly.
Exactly.
Greg: yeah, yeah. It like is, is it going to lead into more juicy narrative stuff? I think is. like, is interfacing with this resource going to lead with some, to some juicy setting character things that are not specific to my character, but that I'm choosing to engage with
Sam: Yeah.
Greg: in this moment? Yeah, man, that's exciting stuff.
Sam: I'm trying to think before we like actually wrap up, if there was anything else I wanted to get into. I do wish we. Like this is just like how this podcast is going, that it's like super about hacking games and I'm a little bit interested in trying to get into the, like playing games a little bit more, but I think it's a little late on this episode for that.
Greg: Yeah. Yeah. I think for playing the, the main thought is just like, I don't know how many other games are out there that would prime players for the style of role first narrate later, but just I wanna encourage any of your prospective players of Agon that when you do play. You can do whatever you want when you narrate and when you bring in this divine favor, that can mean whatever you want it to mean. Bring in Zeus or just the lightning bolt or just let his authority ring out through your voice and, and have lots of fun with it. Ask for ideas too.
Other, other people might,
might have
lots of great stuff.
Sam: The other thing I'd say to that, like, I've made the mistake before as the strife player, as the GM of telling people no, when they're narrating their successes or, or even telling them no when they're narrating their failures, that like, no, we have to take this in a particular direction.
I'm in charge now because you failed. And I think that's a huge mistake. Like I think as much as everyone at the table can lean into that, like you did the roll, you have to like lean into the results of the role, but like, do it however you want. I think that really flies really well.
Greg: Yes. Yep. players having like full authority over what their failure means and what that looks like. And letting them own that, I think is really important. The main place the Strife player comes in is just kind of how the opponent reacts to each player's narration. But outside of that, I think it's important to let the players have full,
full reign,
Yeah.
Greg super good having you on.
I loved it.
Sam: Thanks to Greg for being here. You can find him on Twitter and itch at sporgory, S P O R G O R Y. And hit 'em up on Twitter for a link to the Agon Discord. It's a real supportive place.
Agon itself is at agon-rpg.com and if you like the sound of it, I myself have a supplement of three Agon Islands called Even Further Islands that I'm pretty proud of.
And as always, you can find all my games at sdunnewold, and you can find me on Twitter and Mastodon dice.camp at sdunnewold. S D U N N E W O L D.
Our thumbnail was designed by sporgory. Hey, look at that! And our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Gray.
Dice Exploder is a production of the Fiction First Network, an actual play and podcast production co-op based outta the blades in the Dark discord. Come on by and join us. We'd love to see you there, and thanks as always to you for listening. See you next time.
Divine Favor (Agon 2e) with Greg Soper