Deathmatch Island Episode 5: Post Mortem

I think that those specific lows can be addressed with experience rather than structural change but fundamentally like i am predisposed to like this system and furthermore because i was thinking about what you were saying skyler about the difference between like what's a fiasco play kit of deathmatch island and deathmatch island's difference and it really comes down to deathmatch hinging on the agon system the way that you build your name occupation you know you collect these like skills and then you roll dice there's still a dice there's still statistics there's still that kind of like desperation for success in the luck of the role and like building this pool and i think that like slight mechanical addition gives a sort of tension of success or failure, which Fiasco, I feel like,

does not.

The thing I want to highlight for the Aegon rule set, it took me a little bit of getting used to at first because it's a new and pretty specific sequence of order for how you build and then resolve a dice pool.

But I really grew to love it over the course of the game.

And as you get familiar, it's easier and easier to continue to do this.

In Aegon, there's a big point made about like, you are announcing your character is getting involved.

Aegon, in its system, is trying to embody a mythopoetic past.

It's giving, like, Achilles in his tent, and it's a big moment when Achilles emerges from the tent, and the gods herald his arrival upon the battlefield.

That transposes into Deathmatch Island to be, like...

the establishing shot that this competitor is here on the scene.

You know, you get to play in Deathmatch Island with the fictive camera in a lot of ways that I think are really compelling.

We already are very drawn to the language of cinema to describe how we interface with the narrative secondary world.

We talk about zooming the camera in when we slow down.

We talk about zooming the camera out when we speed up.

We associate space and time together in that way.

And then this game says, when you are choosing to get involved, when you say my character is going to have a narrative and mechanical impact in this moment, the game says to do so before you can start building your dice pool, you have to announce your character is here and thematically do it.

You have to give them the kind of opening shot with a little rider line on the bottom announcing their entrance, maybe an announcer shout out that gives them some hype for the audience.

That's a necessary step of building the die pool.

And then building the die pool itself, it's pretty involved.

You know, you're grabbing multiple things.

There's a little bit of jockeying with the GM of like, oh, does my occupation apply here? We're giving a little broke wizard's energy there.

And all told, it means that the full arc of resolving a single die roll is several minutes long.

At first, I chafed against that a little.

I thought, oh, you know, couldn't this be a little more efficient? Couldn't we resolve this a little faster? Until it clicked in my head and I realized, no, because this arc of I announce I'm here, I build the pool, I roll the dice, and then in order of lowest to highest, we all narrate the results...

structures the play exactly like how the pacing of like a challenge in Survivor is shown on television.