This is the conclusion to the critical analysis of Moriah. You can find the first part 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.
LudoInitially, the Mountain and the way it structures play may seem like the engine of the game; however, the trials demanded from the pilgrim form the game’s framework, through which every situation is read and pacing established. The dice themselves are the engine of play.
The game empowers dice as the ultimate manifestation of the arbitrary nature of Gods and Kings, and why we delegate such decision-making to them or other tools rather than forcing that into our friends and other social relations; it plays almost like a companion experiment to Federico Sohns’ thesis statement on these matters.
So, the dice set up pacing and progression across the challenges laid out by the framework picked by the players. So far, so good: nothing that games have not done since forever. And interacting with the game involves manipulating the dice and the results they define. Alright, alright, this is all very familiar. What positions it as a capable engine?
Because the math rocks are sacrifice rocks; they feed on blood and keep making sure your pilgrims offer them. The dice belong to the gods — interwoven with them in such a way that any distinction between them is only for the benefit of feeble mortal comprehension.
Difficulties for the challenges are fixed1, and a (relatively) known quantity at the beginning of the game. You try to overcome them by adding the numbers of all the dice rolled collectively. You can nudge the results, but for that, you need to have dice — and even that must be earned.
Someone has to be sacrificed to the Mountain for you to even get the privilege of dice to roll, of gods to torment you with their whims. Each surviving pilgrim gets a d4. Each time another pilgrim is sacrificed, the dice of the survivors are upgraded — d4s to d6s, d6s to d8s, and so on. The challenge is also overcome.
Personal sacrifices can also nudge the dice. A sacrifice of a body part gives you a temporary increase of a dice size and a reroll; sacrifice of memories, skills and relationships adds a flat bonus to the result. By combining both, one can hopefully make enough other sacrifices to avoid costing another life.
Or sometimes a life is all one has left to give.
This back and forth between the capricious, cruel die and sacrifice keeps the game going on and the tears flowing alongside blood.
BradEvery so often, the Mountain gives back, and grants you a moment of respite. These moments demand you give context to the journey, and I think help flavor the whole damn thing. It reminds the pilgrims both present and departed as to why they began what others may think of folly and helps create such a solid gameplay loop.
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.
LucréciaMoriah should be pretty straightforward and not need prep. However, content organization is made for a striking first impression and not always the clearest in laying out procedures, so we should do it.
Brad Read the book twice and then snap right in.
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?
LudoThe game can have pacing issues, as it relies almost entirely or how arbitrary the dice are. While some of this is entirely a limitation of the framework, a lot of it comes from the difficulty of setting challenge difficulties. There are no real guidelines and drawing from the published roads and challenges, one does not get a grip of how to properly set Demands — especially how to adapt this based in the number of players/re-adjust as pilgrims keep dying.
This is also one of the only levers the Voice can pool. There not many tools for “GM” roles to interact in interesting ways with the game: Voices and Whispers, the players once sacrificed and relegated to angry demanding divinity, pale in godly expression compared with the DICE. Vocal in particular seems not much of a fun to be with; Whispers at least can interact as themselves during Respites. Considering one player always becomes a Whisper when the game begins, and is thus denied the use of all options of character they had in life, it can be a poor substitute in a longer game.
Which brings us to the other possible stress point when playing the game. The game can have anything from 10 to 40 challenges. 10 is a fine number and the game works with good pacing and satisfying bits; it starts to show stress at anything more than that, 30 is aspirational and the game is not prepared at all for a 40 challenges marathon.
BradHonestly, Ludo here hits all the nails pretty flawlessly on this.
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.
LucréciaThe game says a lot about sacrifice and how and what we reward, how to find a new covenant of harmony with the earth and once again unite humanity with it. I could not stop thinking about how it does through roleplaying and dice something similar to what Inscryption does through its video games mechanics — specially Act 1 and the finale. Sacrifice starts as an hostile force, but understanding it can make it feel like returning to an old friend.
The way Moriah manages to know what roleplaying games can do as art and how to use it for maximum effect by centering it in establishing the space of collaborative storytelling is worth spending the time with it, playing, learning and practicing.
BradSo, Moriah resonated with me, tales of sacrifice and loss always do. Lucrécia told me it would be a treat, but its rare that I leave a game feeling so much better for having played it. Moriah is a great game, and honestly, if you are going to play a game about going on a life-changing journey, play it.
Except for small variance to accommodate pilgrim/players numbers