Deathmatch Island (Part 2)

Finally, A TTRPG Where You Play To Find Out

You can find the first part of this critic here.

5. Disassemble Engine

Games have a flow, which, when you hit, the game pretty much runs itself. It is extremely satisfying. After examining the interactions of game elements, we single out the most important - the one that sets the pace of sessions, or even campaigns. We focus on how that engine works, how it makes the game move along, and what to do to make it do what you want to do - and how to keep it running clean.

Ludo

AGON and PARAGON is very much the opposite of BitD and FitD. PARAGON is easy to design for, invites transformation, and even minor changes depart wildly from AGON; in the same vein, AGON is serviceable bland at best¹, uninteresting and derivative at worst, so it begs for the ingenuity brought by PARAGON hacking.² As such, there has not been a single PARAGON game that failed in the use of PARAGON and/or the reworking of AGON bare-bone mechanics. PARAGON Hacks also benefit from being small games than AGON. Deathmatch Island is not an exception among PARAGON hacks.

Deathmatch Island maintains the same “loop” of go to an island, do stuff, get rewards from AGON. However, the engine is nudged from the inside to the outside of this loop by a couple of changes. Get advantages, get more dice, get better at challenges, get more rewards, get more dice, get better at challenges.

Cleverly, Deathmatch Island draws more from video games than reality shows to neatly split the acquisition/exploration pat from the final battle royale, allowing a sense of escalation and mystery for each island. But the engine is pushed away from the cycle of acquisition/expense and towards to the journey between the three islands of each season. That is when characters are able to discuss what happened, give context to what they experience, reframe it and then establish the stakes and expectations for the next island, have flashbacks to previous events and change their relationships based on it.

A game that draws Lost as a major touchstone would succeed or fail by how well of a Mystery Box it manages to construct — and that is why the engine is the movement between islands. You have to make your own alternate reality game of your own game, building theories and voting on them. These theories will give new levers for the game master to use, allowing them to introduce new elements in the next island, and feed four different theories.

Brad

The time between islands is the engine of this game, a brief moment of rest for your characters between the horror and carnage of the other islands.

First, you mark down the leader of the last islands challengers, then you spitball conspiracy about the mysterious game masters of your death game, then you vote who the best in the various categories are, and then you get to discuss and reframe both events and your relationships therein.

This continues the thematic echoes of Lost and it’s inspiration Survivor, the idea that you get to see who’s the best and how the best matches up with everyone else.

Followers as a stat can be a sort of fool engine, they look and sound like they should drive the game engine as any casual viewer of reality television will tell you, but in truth, they are simply an explanation for how the Name stat works and can be safely treated as weak set dressing for such.

6. Essentials For Session One

So, you got this game, you going to play it, but you don’t have the time to read everything. Or even worse, your have read it and now it is all jumbled together. Here we break down the things that you absolutely want to try to get right and/or hit during your first session, so you get the felling of what makes this game stand out from similar art.

Lucrécia

A single snapshot of this game is difficult to get in a single session, even with well-oiled a one-shot. It is like trying to get what was the big deal with Lost and why everyone was glued to it in the first seasons, but your only reference is the summary from Wikipedia VS watching the show as it came out and digging into the alternate reality games between episodes.

That said, you can do a pretty good “battle royale PARAGON” even if it is not quite Deathmatch Island and drops the Mystery Box entirely.

• First, read the Paragon SRD

• Go through the Glossary, as it contains new concepts and the changes to the system unique to Deathmatch Island (pg.16)

• Read the One-Shot Prep suggested. The 2nd Island is pretty much an echo of the first and can be cut for time (pg. 102). I do not recommend skipping phase 2 of islands despite what these guidelines say; it is the part that is more interest compared to baseline PARAGON³.

• Refer to the games procedures (pg 15, pg 45-46. pg 54).

• End game (pg 180) is run as described on this chapter.

You do not need to bother much with preparation for players: characters are dice randomized and assigned by the game master; the resolution mechanics are simple enough to explain with an example during play.

Brad

I think that Lu’s advice is essential. I attempted to run the game without it, and it was a struggle. It is a bit of a shock, considering how much of the game's effort went into its graphic design, that even with several charts dedicated to explaining the cycle, it just didn’t quite click with my group.

7. Playing The Game Wrong

Games are played wrong. Rules will be misunderstood, interactions will be confused, the importance of certain tech disregarded; etc. This is good, and it is good to acknowledge for: you cannot have the designer at your time, and even if they were, they would be just another player - and entitled to play it wrong. After identifying stress points of the game, things that don’t connect that well, we think of the things that are more likely to be (our have been) “played wrong”. What happens when you forget a line in page 273 clearly saying this is impossible?

Ludo

Part of the reason we pushed Deathmatch Island to come after Triangle Agency, is that both games are unremarkable unless you play them for a longer time than most people will spend with them. In conversations about Triangle Agency and in reaction to the article, many compared the two games based on our experience with it and/or critic.

This is pretty much where similarities begin and end: both games text expects long-form play.

Deathmatch Island ends up suffering from this in various ways. PARAGON lacks sustaining power, as its system does not lend itself for more than 1-3 sessions of play, and while excelling at those, quickly overstays their welcome if pushed for more; it takes some ingenuous hacking for the PARAGON games that break this trend, and for a game that ways you to play into New Game +, Deathmatch Island does not do enough mechanically interesting to keep you playing. And that is the biggest thing against it: the game expects not only you play through a single season of the murderous reality show, but through *various*, running into New Game + as survivors of previous games try to compete again in order to sabotage the show. And anyone familiar with this kind of art, knows where it is going and when it gets interesting: once the jig is up.

Where it compares positively against Triangle Agency need for long-form, is that it has tools to manage this issue. There are no shortcuts in Triangle Agency — to experience its true artistic awesomeness, you have to play it and play it and play it and play it. Deathmatch Island lets you start immediately at New Game +, condense the experience into a one-shot and has theory crafting mechanics that act as constant reminders, at least once between islands, that you should be questioning what just happened and yes, there is definitely something going on⁴.

As I mentioned previously, examples for how Deathmatch Island can be confusing on their own, and become much easier to understand with a familiarity with AGON and Paragon. There are sections and diagrams where the original AGON terms are used.

The reason I was so hard with the non-lethal mode is that well, it does not work, and it undermines the whole of the game, and the artistic strength of its themes. To the point where I really have to wonder if there are any themes deeper than a vague corporate-creepiness aesthetic. And why? Because itself seems to treat cooperative storytelling as an aesthetic experience.

The non-lethal mode wants to avoid the “grotesque depictions of violence”, which are nowhere explicitly or essential and that could be done away with safely — with Nickelodeon Goo Paintball. It is again, visual, aesthetic, surface level — keeping everything else but replacing blood and injury with orange dye. This is baffling unhelpful for safety and comfort in TTRPGs, there are no depictions of those in the layout and illustration of the book other than some blood splattered polo shirts (and those are not replaced, if those are the infractions), and comes off as purely performative. And does it offer anything else to Deathwatch Island? I think not: it does not pull out being weird and unsettling as it proposes itself to be; it just feels disarming. Consider: half of your game time will be spent getting boons you will use later; the other half is breaking down into tense pre-battle royale actions, where you set the stakes, try to nudge advantages, and try to decide who is safe, who can move on and who will die — and the battle royale where you have to throw everything you have because is forsaken if you lose. Non-lethal mode replaces pistols with squirt guns but is not interested in how to keep the deadly tension and adrenaline race through the island when the risk of injury or death is removed. Just being covered in orange paint and dragged away does not hit the same — there is not even the economical horror of what losing this game means, because you are amnesiacs with only the vaguest sense of what you are in the game to do, so it relied entirely on the threat of death. Disarming half the game, well, more than half the game: it does not interact well with Fatigue and Injury, and those hang like a sword during the early exploration phase too, tempting you to risk hurting yourself to even the odds later.

It just does not feel adequate to Deathmatch Island or a TTRPG. It is a goo-washing of the game and it feels like you are playing a lesser version of the art, rather than true accommodation that respects itself, you, your safety and your comfort. I brought this up the first part about queerness, but the same apply to other themes and subjects: you choose what you make your art and games about; there are themes and subjects that you cannot approach properly or safely without accepting they are challenging, dangerous and uncomfortable — and thus, you must work to give people the tools to maneuver safely and comfortably, not wash it away so easily detachable that one is left wonder how important the theme and subject is for the art you made. Why were these the choices made? Are they going to be surface-only to be a coat easier to remove? Why are they not sticking to their guns on anything their themes and premises claim to center?

Despite the game wanting you to play New Game +, the engine of the game — between-locations theory crafting — is not designed for New Game + and there are no guidelines on how to adapt it to returning players (keep old theories? do new ones? how to reconcile returning and new players theories?). As such, the New Game + goes better if you remove the Second Island every replay, and remove theory crafting altogether. You loss little, as the Second Island is designed to be an echo of the first one.

Ending with a baffling one that may defy player expectations. Even if it is not a video game, Deathmatch Island has grenades as pathetic as they are in your average run and shooting game. I understand why video games do this, but come on. This is a TTRPG.

Brad

I struggled with this section because Deathmatch Island begs for long play and sings the enchanted song “We have to go back!” I think it might be better to end a season early.

Deathmatch Island struggles with its themes. I went into it expecting Survivor Meets Squid Game, a game of life and death that could easily skewer modern life and have something to say about an aspect of the human condition. As I read it, I started to see Lost meets Hunger Games, a dramatic story about beautiful people on an Island trying to gain a deeper understanding of the world they didn’t make.

I don’t think Deathmatch Island could accomplish any of that. It tries so hard to do all of these things, and I think that it ends up choking on its own ingredients. There is too much vagueness to dig into what the meaning behind it all is, and not enough mechanical meat to spend several seasons drilling down a large mystery into understandable bits.

I was frequently left wondering why all of these elements had to co-exist, why they weren’t optional, and why there weren’t options to tone down or edit elements without having to extensively homebrew and change the cycle of play the game is built around.

The characters inherently have no memory of their time before the island, which leads to a question, why should I work against the other characters? the game assumes you’ll spend the first cycle fighting each other and then only work together afterwards, but placed in a situation where you have no outside motivation to turn on your fellow participants it is a struggle.

The Game-Master is intended to provide you one, a secret one you keep which prevents you from even having a saccharine moment of televised “I’m doing it for my sick grandma!” let alone any internal melodrama.

You are expected to kill these people, to fight to the death, after doing icebreakers and getting to know each other. You are expected to kill these people with only a vague sense of a goal. I know I want money, and I need to kill for it, no greater reasoning, no memories defining why I want this, just this urge.

This is just one example, but it makes the whole wagon significantly shakier and leaves me wondering, as to they solution to play this wrong.

8. What to Steal

Experiencing good art is the most important step in making good art. We look back at the things that worked and did not work about this game, see what we learned for design work, interesting tech and just a general overview of things that we will take from this game and bring into others. Or more honestly: since many of us may not play this game and we have it in our library, this way we can get some use out of it.

Lucrécia

Deathmatch Island is a masterclass in Mystery Boxes; this may be the best implementation of the concept into cooperative collaborative storytelling as of the writing of this article. If this is a kind of storytelling you’re interested in, this is a must get. It is also a reminder that Mystery Boxes kinda need to play to people’s expectations than focus on “subverting expectations”.

Every Paragon game is a good, low-commitment, option for some tense action roleplaying fun. With all its nice paper toys, Deathmatch Island is a good addition to your library of “we need something quick to play”, even if you run at is a one-shot. Actually, if all you want is some “PARAGON Battle Royale”, running this game as one-shot is the best way to achieve that.

Now, there is nothing wrong with being a focused game, that knows what it is doing, excels at doing it and provides plenty of support to do it. FIST, for example, is a game that does this and because of its commitment to what it is and what it does, is a great game of fine craftmanship and care. Deathmatch Island is at its best when it does just that — and at its weakest when it wanders off. Where it is strong and where it drifts meekly, it a strong study material for any designers.

Brad

Honestly, Deathmatch Island is terrifyingly strong where it is strong, and incredible art direction, wonderful handouts, and a strong authorial voice should be your inspiration for future wonder. There is something to be said about policing your themes, and how sometimes less is more.

1. I never found AGON that interesting mechanically — definitely not when compared with the other amazing design work of Harper, — and the trappings of faux-hellenistic are poorly implemented as represent a poor understanding of the mythology and cultures it draws upon, being uninteresting American-slop tier Jason and the Argonauts/Edith Hamilton at best and borderline offensive at worst. It is all pastiche, zero substance. The mechanics were pretty solid when it was one-page, but AGON 2e really drags them out — but it has given us PARAGON, so I cannot complain.

2. Where they are both the same is that they were killer games when they were small, focused games and have suffered from overdesign, feature bloat and unfocused revisions.

3. That still makes into the One Shot mode, that is.

4. Of course, there is also the payoff being so different between the two games. In one, the reward from pouring yourself into the game over and over, is as unique experience to tabletop games has been created in the past five years. The other rewards your investment with a Mystery Box with only what you brought to it and the cathartic destruction of a production studio.