Design Notes: 3 Layers of Play

I'm gonna be trying something new, which is posting periodic design diary entries on Seven-Part Pact as I continue to work on it. I'm constantly musing on this-or-that aspect of its design, so I figured it would be cool to chronicle my musings for Patreon in ways people can revisit someday down the line. I'm not gonna put that much work into editing for clarity, so if they feel a little confusing, please just ask questions!

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In a conversation with the provocative and frequently very cunning Sam Sorenson, he (citing older other scholars) offered me three levels of a game at which play occurs. They were:

• The Exogenous: The table with people at it, existing and discussing the game as people do. Rules here are about table culture, etiquette, and existing with each other in community.

• The Endogenous: The abstracted systems of the game, implemented by the players. Rules here are about stats, numbers, mechanisms, the text, as it were.

• The Fictional: The universe we're putting together through everything else. Rules here are laws of fiction, laws of common sense, how our characters would behave. 

Seven Part Pact is a game about all three of these layers. 

• The Players themselves are the Exogenous. You, at the table with your friends, playing Seven Part Pact. The Players are motivated by your desires as a human, your goals and fascinations.

• The Celestial Audience is the Endogenous. You, floating overhead, enforcing rules and mediating the great clockwork mechanisms of reality. The Celestial Audience is motivated by what is interesting, what twists and turns push things forward, what produces action.

• The Wizards are the Fictional. Our avatars for moving through the great diegetic waters of creation. Wizards are motivated by your own impulsive desires as beings, what is true to the character above all else.

Each layer disrupts each other layer, and also itself, and in doing so produces the game that we're playing. Disruption can be thought of as like … are you being forced to do something you wouldn't do if you were on your own? That's disruption. You're cool with it, though. That's the point of playing with other people.

• The Players disrupt the Celestial Audience by arguing about rule interpretations, disagreeing about how to implement mechanics, or by introducing new and unexpected mechanics from some dark corner of the book.

• The Players disrupt the Wizards through socially-mediated limits, "Lines & Veils", and other moments when a player needs something to change for some reason in order to ensure the health of the table. 

• The Celestial Audience disrupts the Players by shaping how they talk to each other, by escalating conversations and arguments, by giving certain players dominion over certain aspects of the world, and in doing so prompting disagreement.

• The Celestial Audience disrupts the Wizards by doing their job: creating consequences, giving gifts, introducing future baddies, and all the other functions of the GM and the rules in the game, that social order enforced through game rules.

• The Wizards disrupt the Celestial Audience through magic. An entirely fictional incantation reaches up into the stars and fucks with the precisely balanced machines of the gods.

• The Wizards disrupt the Players with bleed, by producing unexpected emotions, by acting in a way the player didn't anticipate, all the thrill and joy of a character taking life on their own.

The reason I'm thinking about this right now is that basically everywhere these components disrupt each other, the game would benefit from some kind of guide rails to help make sure in low-trust (or even high-trust but low-emotional-intelligence) groups, the game doesn't get fucked up. Here's some examples of that:

• When the Players disrupt the Celestial Audience, mediation is provided by the rest of the players in rules interpretations, and the facilitator provides that support. Having a player in charge of those specific set of mechanics ultimately helps resolve those debates.

• When the Players disrupt the Wizards, "lines & veils" (or the Palette mechanic I'm working on) makes sure that these limits have been pre-discussed and are easy to implement.

• When the Celestial Audience disrupts the Players, it would be good to have a "hmm finger" (from Wickedness) to help ensure that the Celestial Audience member isn't getting talked over by other Wizards. 

• When the Celestial Audience disrupts the Wizards, this is all governed by the damn rules themselves already. So much support is here by default.

• When the Wizards disrupt the Celestial Audience, this is also governed by the rules. This is the whole job of the Tome-Keeper — to balance the Wizards and the Celestial Audience in their fuckery.

• When the Wizards disrupt the players, this is both beautiful and ultimately not something you can plan around. The best you can do is ensure breaks so people can rest, and if high-bleed groups are playing it you just gotta hope they know how to handle bleed. Maybe there should be a section on bleed.

So the four "Lesser Magi" (Necromancer, Hierophant, Warlock, Mariner) are entangled deeply in the interplay between the Fictional and the Endogenous, abstracting their fictional world and then seeing it impact the narrative through that. The Faustian is very concerned with specifically how the Celestial Audience fucks with the Wizards, through Consequences and disaster. They are the true "antagonist GM." The Librarian is very concerned with how the Wizards fuck with the Endogenous, through magic, and also how Players interpret the rules of the Celestial Audience. They are functioning as a "rulekeeper GM." 

The Sorcerer balances the feelings of the players, the feelings of the Celestial Audience, and the feelings of the Wizards. He's a real Wisher from Wisher, Theurgist, Fatalist. He's been the hardest to design, because his whole deal is about how everything moves across the three layers, and the unity of them. It's hard to make that sort of design not just be very "soft."

We can calcify these interactions into three principles that govern how I'm interested in how people interact. Maybe something like:

• We play to find out the fate of our Wizards. (Fic -> Exo -> Endo)

• We play to discover the secrets of Magic. (Fic -> Endo -> Exo)

• We play to imagine the world of Isha together. (Endo -> Exo -> Fic)

This would obviously be very convenient for me, because it would mean the three principles of play correspond to the three Great Magi of Seven Part Pact (the Faustian, the Librarian, and the Sorcerer, respectively). So the Faustian is in charge of finding out the fate of our Wizards (i.e how they are doomed to fail). The Librarian is in charge of discovering the secrets of magic (how it works and how we implement it). And the Sorcerer is in charge of imagining the world of Isha together (uniting everyone's visions and sculpting their own).