Currently Messiah has four stats:

• Create
• Destroy
• Control
• Teach

Taken out of order, Destroy is your ability to attack other players.  Control is your ability to defend.  Create is your ability build yourself back up.  Teach is your ability to manipulate the Messiah’s message.

They all have a purpose, but yet in actual play, not all stats are that useful.  Create seems to be the whipping boy.  Despite the fact everyone tries to use it and it’s the key most people’s secondary victory conditions… everyone seemed to think it was useless.

Teach, on the other hand, everyone seemed to think was overpowered.   This may be in due to a large part of me perhaps having found an optimal strategy.

Ultimately, there are two ways to win.  Get more influence than everyone else or someone draws an Ace or a Joker and then whoever wins their secondary victory conditions wins.  However, currently both ways to gain Influence are tied to teach.  I think I need to change that.

My guess is that Destroy will be used to gain Influence (tear down the Messiah’s influence.)

I am also trying to make sure that Control (defense) is still important.  That part is still a little bothersome to me.

This, to me, is one of the three keys to make Messiah pop.  (The other two being how to model the world and how to give players meaningful actions and by extension inter-actions.)

My original idea was something like this.  Messiah is a round-robin style game with players taking their turn doing something interesting, typically influencing the Messiah, gaining/breaking alliances, snipe other Faction’s key personnel, etc.  (Well that’s hope anyway…)  Ultimately though, whowever won the conflict in a scene won narration of what the Messiah was going to do.

So the workflow sort of looked like this:

1. It’s my turn.  I decide to improve my relationship with the Commerce Guild, annother faction.
2. I state my intention and start my role play.
3. Anyone who wants to help/hurt this action can buy into the scene.
4. There’s conflict.
5. I win.
6. I then say well because of this, the Messiah decides to so X and rolls for the Messiah to attempt some grand miracle.

I can actually hear you yawning.

Plus, I wanted to give the Messiah a go so every time around, the Messiah got to do some action.  I was actually to the point where I was going to package a CD-ROM with the game that had a program that would take the Messiah’s four stats and generate an action.  This solution made me reasonably unhappy, but I was unsure how to tackle a four dimensional matrix to create an optimum solution otherise.

So I was talking to Clint Krause about this problem and he struck upon the answer: a deck of cards.  Make the Messiah draw from a deck on its turn and have each card relate to an action.

That was pretty good…then I decided to take it one step further.  At the start of EVERY faction’s turn, they draw a card.  That represents what the Messiah is going to unless the Factions stop or help the Messiah.

This gives a feeling that the Factions aren’t really in control.  The Messiah is going to do what it can, all the factions can do is damage control.

So far, this feels pretty satisfying.

“The Messiah has come to break the world, but who will break the Messiah?”

For the Ashcan Front 2008, I have decided to enter my latest creation, a game I call Messiah.  Messiah is a pretty readical departure from my comfort zone and the game I have been concentrating on recently, Mecha (formerly Neoborn Genesis Honor Blade), which is a much more traditional anime mecha game, but I am really enjoying the creative challenges each poses.

Anyway, the basic premise behind Messiah is that the Messiah, the actual avatar of god has come back to the world to bring it back inline with the teachings of god.  The players each take on the role of a faction who has a vested interest in either maintaining the status quo or by slightly modifying it.  These factions each see the arrival of the Messiah not as a change for spiritual rebirth, but rather to remake the world in their own image.  The Messiah is but a tool and one that can be disposed if the Messiah becomes inconvenient.

Messiah is based off my game chef entry (also called Messiah) which can be found here: www.canonpuncture.com/games/Messiah.doc

And the feedback (which was helpful if not overwhelmingly positive) is here:
http://game-chef.com/af2008/comments.php?DiscussionID=553&page=1#Item_27

The thing that everyone said across the board was that there was something interesting about the premise and that there were pearls in what I had.  So that gave me some hope.

I also took the feedback to heart and have decided to make Messiah GMless.  Which is a pretty radical departure from where I’m at as a player/designer and it also presents a very interesting set of design challenges.

After talking with Paul Czege, I committed to doing the game as an ashcan.  I really feel like what I want to do is going to need a lot of outside comment and feedback, so I feel like its the right decision.  Now I just need to get the game from 30% to 90%.

The issues I am dealing with right now:

1. How do make the Messiah an independent entity without a GM?
2. How do I govern the interaction between Factions?
3. How do I measure the influence a faction has on the Messiah?
4. How to I offer the players an interesting and mechanically relevant set of options?
5. Can I add NPC factions which can influence the Messiah or be allies to the PCs.
6. Is it okay that I am not going to ship the game with a setting?  Does that hamper the game.
7. How do I model a game world in a way that is mechanically relevant.

I’ll attempt to answer each as I go along.