It's been a while since my last Ordinary Angels post, partly for reasons I'll cover in my next post. I've only really discussed the core mechanics and premise so far (mostly in the comments, here and here), but this weekend I've been working on one of the major aspects of the game - the pacing mechanics and the Plan.

The Plan is the Divine Plan, laid out by God to the angels instructing on them on how to spread the word and carry out his work. Thing is, the Plan is fairly vague and not everybody got a copy, so much of it is left wide open to interpretation on the fly and in the field. In game terms, the Plan represents the progress the angels are making towards their immediate goals as part of their current case (called a Chapter).

At the start of a new Chapter, the GM and the players work together to set the game up, splitting a number of plan tokens (I really need a more evocative name than that, but it'll do for now) between different types of obstacle (mystery, adversary and intervention, roughly mapping to investigation, physical confrontation and social interraction conflicts) as part of a briefing scene. The players all take it in turns to spread the tokens about, and as they do so they narrate an aspect of the case.

So, for example they might say something like, "the soul we're looking for is a dead junkie named Maurice, but we don't know where he is" and place a couple of mystery tokens down on the Chapter sheet. The next player might step in and say "we don't know where Maurice is, but we've got a lead on one of his former associates - a demon named Birgazal" and then plonk both an adversary and an intervention token down. And so on, until all the tokens have been assigned and the GM has a pretty good setup for the game session.

So how does this feed into pacing? Well, in the same way as Strife works in AGON or Budget works in PTA, when the GM wants to do stuff, he spends these tokens to create mechanical adversity for the players. So to buy in to a conflict, the GM spends tokens and gets himself dice. He can also invest tokens into making a more robust obstacle, such as a big bad Fallen or a really nasty mystery. Conversely, when the players win conflicts, they get to take some of these tokens off the Plan as their reward (I'll discuss what they do with them in a later post).

When all the tokens are gone from the Plan, either because the GM has spent them all or the players have earnt them all through winning conflicts, that's that Chapter of the Plan closed, for good or for evil depending on how the PCs did!

When we ran through a playtest of this way back when I allocated 5 tokens per player and the game clocked in at about an hour, which I had thought too short until drivingblind reassured me that with this sort of pace you could string a couple of chapters together for a pretty satisfying session.

Anyway, they seemed to work nicely in play, although it remains a little fuzzy as to exactly how and when I should be spending them, and whether the players could help themselves to a token or two over the course of the game to complicate matters for themselves too.

I know it's 10 years old, but I've been reading this fascinating article at work today about the mythologies woven through the stories told by homeless kids in Miami. If taken as gospel (pun intended), it'd make a great setting for Ordinary Angels, especially one set after the events of the film. 

Here are some particularly choice and tasty bits:

The War in Heaven

"On Christmas night a year ago, God fled Heaven to escape an audacious demon attack -- a celestial Tet Offensive. The demons smashed to dust his palace of beautiful blue-moon marble ... No one knows why God has never reappeared, leaving his stunned angels to defend his earthly estate against assaults from Hell."

Spirital Dispatches

"Spirits appear just as they looked when alive ... but they are surrounded by faint, colored light. When newly dead, the spirits' lips move but no sound is heard. They must learn to speak across the chasm between the living and the dead ... Spirits have a unique function: providing war dispatches from the fighting angels."

Angelic Guerrillas

"There is no Heaven in the stories, though the children believe that dead loved ones might make it to an angels' encampment hidden in a beautiful jungle somewhere beyond Miami. The secret stories say the angel army hides in a child's version of an ethereal Everglades ... Says Phatt: 'But they take care of a dead child's spirit while he learns to fight. ... and when I do good, it makes their fighting easier. I know it! I know!' ... It is the most necessary fiction of the hopelessly abandoned -- that somewhere a distant, honorable troop is risking everything to come to the rescue, and that somehow your bravery counts."

Powerful and evocative stuff, and exactly the sort of mythology and imagery Ordinary Angels seeks to capture - the mythic, the divine and the celestial, right here on our streets and neighbourhoods.

Lots of Ordinary Angels stuff to report today, although very little of it concerns the game.

First off, and most importantly, the dvd of Ordinary Angels is now available to buy from the indie film outlet, Film Baby, which is to indie films what IPR is to indie games. I've yet to see the film, although having read the script, watched the trailer and talked to Todd endlessly about it, I know it's gonna be good! Me and Todd have talked about selling a double pack containing both film and game, but don't hold back buying the dvd now!

Secondly, the website for the Ordinary Angels film is now up, complete with an faq and a new trailer. My favourite bit from the website is on the faq, which asks the question "did anything freaky happen during shooting?" The answer, of course, was yes:

"90% of the crow sounds were caught on location during the actual takes and occur as if on cue. The church bells ringing on Lucifer’s exit were caught during the actual take. The weather did exactly what we needed it to do on the day. A stage photo of the director’s deceased wife made it into the background of the deathbed scene (unbeknownst to everyone on set). And one actor was mugged the night before he was to shoot, sending him to the emergency room and necessitating the inclusion of production designer Caleb Long as the angel Gavreel."

Finally, the game is zipping along, stalled only by me being ill this week. The rules are slotting into place and I've finally got most of them down on paper. I'm angling for another playtest in the next month or so, all going well. Expect a rules update in the next few days!

And that's about it I think!

The Ordinary Angels movie premiered this weekend at the Dragon*Con film festival in Atlanta. My good friend Todd, who wrote and directed OA, talks more about it here, here and here. Dragon*Con sounds absolutely wild, especially the 300+ stormtroopers!

If you've got any interest in indie films or film making in general, check out TD's posts about hot films to look out for.

OA seems to have gone down very well indeed, and Todd mentions that there's even a bit of buzz and interest generating around the game. Better get a move on then, hadn't I!

So yesterday I had some friends over and we had a quick playtest of Ordinary Angels, my game of angelic cops. Me and

drivingblind talk about it quite extensively here.

We were going to play it on saturday night but I suggested we watched the Prophecy to get in the right mood (for those who haven't seen it, it's Christopher Walken chewing up the scenery as a bad-ass Gabriel) but it proved to be such a big turn off we ended up playing something else. So sunday afternoon, with the Prophecy fading in our memory, we tried again.

Crossposted to the Collective Endeavour

Ok, so Six Bullets seems to be on hold at the moment whilst I wrap my head round some of the issues with structure and narration. So Ordinary Angels has swaggered forwards to fill the gap. I know what I want the game to do, and I have a check list of rules that I want in it, but I'm having trouble piecing all the pieces together.

But first a bit more about the game, which is based on the film of the same name by my good friend, Todd Downing. It's a cop show or police procedural, thematically and stylistically similar to the Shield or the Wire, if you've seen those. Oh, except the cops are angels, the criminals are Fallen and the victims are souls caught between the two sides.

You play a cell of angels making hard choices between doing what's right (saving humans, killing the Fallen, trying to make the world better) and what's necessary (reaping souls for the War, making concessions and deals with the Fallen, and sacrificing humans in line with the Plan). Each session is a "day in the life" of your cell, as though being filmed by a documentary crew, a la Cops.

So here's what's in so far:

Dice mechanics

• 3 stats - humanity, will and belief - rated by a number of d6.
• when you make a roll you roll a combination of all 3 stats, although i'm not yet sure how or why you might want to.
  rolls are opposed, with 1-3 being good, 4-6 being bad.
• triple 6s are super bad, and triple 1s are super good. So the more dice you roll, the more likely you will be to get a triple in some capacity. Not sure what happens on a triple yet, but probably some sort of manifestation/narrative FUBAR.
• i'm toying with borrowing slightly from Don't Rest Your Head and having whichever stat rolls the most successes "colouring" the outcome in someway, or putting a restriction on the narration. So if your humanity comes up trumps, the narration will be grounded
• in mundane reality, whereas if belief dominates it's likely to appear full-on miraculous.

Faith & Duty

• on the next layer up you have faith, which is a pool of points that you can use to perform supernatural stuff with, either by spending some to create an effect or introduce a story element, or to add additional dice to a conflict.
  
• you get faith back by acting in line with your duties.
• Duties are very much like keys in TSoY, set responsibilities coupled with restrictions on what thou shalt and thou shalt not do. Acting in line with them gets you faith back, but obviously the more complicated the situation you end up in as a result the more faith you get.
• Breaking your Duties puts you on track to Falling, although I'm not sure if there should be a mechanical incentive for neglecting them too - perhaps bonus dice too?

The Plan

• The Plan is the spine of the game, a measure of opposition and progress, inspired by Agon's Strife mechanic.
  
• The various elements of the game are each assigned a number of points from the Plan, be they mysteries, Fallen opponents, plot complications or whatever.
  
• Whenever the angels solve or accomplish one of the elements from the Plan, those points are discarded. When all the points are gone, the angels accomplish the Plan and the adventure is successful.
  
• I'm thinking the angels can go "off plan" by burning faith, allowing them to ignore or overcome an element of the Plan in some other fashion.

Testimony

• The to camera monologues by Afriel are one of the best bits in Ordinary Angels, and I'm hoping to do something similar in the game, very much like Testimonials in InSpectres. I'm not sure what game effect this will have yet though.

So, there you have where I'm at at the moment, which is 4 separate mechanics that only tie loosely together. I'm hoping the Plan will tie neatly in with Faith and Duty somehow, and those in turn link in with the trinity of stats. Where Testimony fits in I don't know, but I think it'll be the players way to tweak with the Plan.

I don't think my dice mechanic is funky or interesting enough just yet though - am I missing something obvious I can do with 3 pools of 3 stats?

Is it too fiddly? Am I trying to squeeze too much into it at the moment?