# RPG A DAY 2025: Day 22 - Ally tags: #thoughts #thoughts/RPGaDay/2025 ![[RPG a Day 2025 (illo).png]] Let's talk about allies in **[[Ironsworn - Starforged|Starforged]]**. No, I don't mean the in-game characters who exist in a supporting role. Those are companions, and there are asset cards for that. No, I mean the possibility of other players who would be playing alongside you, whether it be co-op and same side or in a more classically architected guided role as the GM or facilitator. The game gets discussed a lot, and perhaps primarily because of its solo capabilities, which is perfectly reasonable. Games that are so strongly supportive of solo play used to be very, very thin on the ground. Today, they are somewhat more common. So how do you play with allies? Doesn't that seriously change the dynamic of the mechanics and require them to do something else? Interestingly enough, the answer is no. The mechanics just work. They do the job the same way that you would expect playing solo. For the most part, everyone understands how this works for the vast majority of play because it's exactly the same way as you would expect in every other game. The player understands that they want to change the world in some way. They envision how the character acts to do so. They express it. That triggers a move. The move has mechanics. The mechanics get executed. The results get interpreted. What differs here is an increased consciousness of the fiction as a first-class entity, being the thing that the player interacts with directly in order to, "trigger," the moves, and thus activate the buttons and levers of the mechanics. It's not the mechanism that differs, but simply a change in the focus of the method by which it's invoked. That brings us around to one of the things that is largely axiomatic within the context of play, and that is if you make a move that provides a mechanical benefit, only the character who made that move gets the mechanical benefit. But if it creates a fictive benefit, that is a change in the narrative space that provides an advantage, then everyone can benefit from the narrative success. This is kind of obvious, really, when you think about it. It goes along with the understanding that the acting character is also the one who will take any mechanical impairment as a result of an outcome, though their fictive change to the situation may well put everyone else at a fictional disadvantage within the narrative. The exception is when one of the characters triggers *Aid Your Ally*, which means that they are actively involved in whatever shenanigans are underway and are legitimate targets for sharing the negative mechanical impacts. I like examples, so we're going to go with a bit of an example here. --- Alan and Bernard are working their way into a precursor vault. In this case, that vault is a relatively modest ship, which they discovered crashed on a planet they were surveying. Of course, precursor vaults are full of delicious and very valuable technology, which could go a long way toward paying off the cost of their survey ship. They are not going to pass up on this opportunity. An EM scan shows that the ship still has interior power, which is both good and bad. Good because a running power plant could be worth more than a small space station, and bad because this is a power plant that apparently has been running for at least 3 million years. Nothing good can come of that.[^1] The exterior has been breached in several places, but one of the airlocks appears to be slightly ajar. Perhaps all that's necessary here is proper application of sweat, effort, elbow grease, and just a little bit of luck. Bernard steps up to push hard on the door and try to dislodge it into the niche behind as Alan pries at it with a convenient piece of alien rebar. The characters are acting on the fiction at this point, so they have triggered a move. The players decide that Bernard is the one that's applying the most force and thus taking the risk, but Alan wants to help out. That triggers a move: *Aid Your Ally*. We know how it is envisioned that Alan is helping, so this triggers a following move: either *Secure an Advantage* or *Gain Ground*. Because there's no combat going on here, that means this is *Secure an Advantage*, logically enough. Alan is bending his strength to help out, so we roll +iron and see what shakes out. > **Secure an Advantage** > **Strong hit**: 4 + 2 (iron) = **6** vs **2**, **3**. Fantastic. A strong hit gives Bernard the mechanical advantages because that's what *Aid an Ally* does, thus handing over +2 momentum and +1 on the next move, which is going to be working on opening the door. Because this is technically a precursor vault, Bernard is going to actually trigger *Undertake an Expedition*. He gets to do so with +1 from Alan's help, and we get to find out what happens as a result of him opening the door, or failing to. Though, in this case, opening the door might actually be worse than not opening it, depending on what's inside. > **Undertake an Expedition** > **Weak hit**: 1 + 2 (iron) + 1 = **4** vs **6**, **3**. A weak hit, as usual, means that success comes with a cost. Even with the additional momentum, Bernard can't burn it to improve enough to get more than a weak hit, so they have to choose whether to take a -2 suffer, two -1 suffers, or face a peril. Since Alan was physically aiding Bernard, they can both be targeted by the fallout of this particular test and decide to *Endure Harm (-1)* each, representing a bit of exhaustion. Both get weak hits and decide to take the penalty to momentum rather than health. --- Notice that the fiction comes first in this example. The players decide what the characters are doing, and what the characters are doing then makes a difference to what moves are triggered. An ally can help you, though in doing so they open themselves to the possibility of harm. Perhaps the most pressing issue I see people bring up about **Starforged** is combat, specifically that there is no initiative system in the classic sense. Characters don't start a combat and roll to determine in what order they go. Instead, each character has what is essentially a binary state: *in a bad spot* or *in control*. This has nothing to do with how often they can act or whether someone else can go before they do in a very particular mechanical sense, and so nothing governs whether or not one player can act repeatedly to the exclusion of others. This is sometimes phrased as a negative thing. It's important to remember that in **Starforged**, there needn't be a GM. There's no GM to roll dice. All of the opponent's results are generated from the actions of characters, specifically in triggering moves. This includes negative repercussions. What happens when a player continuously acts, triggering move after move without letting anyone else get something in? It's very simple. They burn through their own resources. Someone else suffers the negative mechanical consequences of a move only if it is fictionally reasonable for them to do so. The more you act and act alone, the more likely you are to have negative repercussions that only you have to suffer. This does provide a certain level of freedom. If it makes sense for the character to hold the spotlight for a little longer, then that's what happens. If you make a move that sets up the enemy for a bad time and then want to immediately pay that off, you absolutely can and absolutely should. Being in a bad spot versus in control is about the fictive positioning to which you respond with moves. If you're in control, you are the one acting and the rest of the world is reacting to you. You are effectively going first. You are provoking reaction. If you're in a bad spot, the roles are reversed. You are being acted upon by the world and having to respond. It's for this reason that being in control versus being in a bad spot is something possessed by individual characters, rather than the group as a whole. One character can be very much in control of their situation, while another is in a bad spot. This is a good time for another example. --- Later, deeper in the precursor ship, Alan and Bernard find themselves standing sideways to their normal expectation of gravity on this planet, drawn to stick on the walls rather than stand on the floor, standing orthogonally to one another. All they can do is shrug as they make their way through this engineering area. Unfortunately for them, the relative warmth of the nearby power core has provided an excellent place for something to gestate its eggs. > **Creature environment**: Liquid. > **Creature scale**: Medium (person-sized). > **Creature form**: Jellyfish / gasbag. > **Creature first look**: Luminescent. > **Creature encountered behavior**: Apex predator. The flickering is the first clue. They almost don't make it out amongst the strange pulsing of the lighting in general, but when the bulbous body of the creature clears the debris that it was nesting in, it becomes rather obvious. Its long tentacles seem to echo the pulse of energy in the walls. At least there only seems to be one of them. Later, Alan and Bernard find themselves in a fight to the death with what they are calling the War Glow (*Challenge Rank: Formidable*). It clearly wants to kill them and use their corpses for something untoward, perhaps to feed the nest of gently radiating eggs behind the debris they first saw it in. Both Alan and Bernard are armed with standard exploration sidearms, so they're not unprotected, and they've gotten a few shots in on the thing. They've also decided the eggs have to be destroyed (*Challenge Rank: Troublesome*), and making moves to do so would probably distract the creature to some degree. Certainly worth trying. Bernard is *in a bad spot* while Allan is *in control*. Alan's player decides that it would be a good idea to make use of his fictional positioning to try and get something done, as he is dashing along the wall, jumping between the corner and the center in order to get a better position. He's rummaging through his explorer pack, hoping that he has a seismic charge. A small one would be perfect for this situation. This is exactly the sort of thing that triggers a *Check Your Gear* move, so that's what happens. > **Check Your Gear** > **Weak hit**: 1 + 4 (supply) = **5** vs **3**, **10**. That is not a problem. Plus supply gets knocked down to three, but the seismic charge is in hand. The smart thing to do here would be to toss the seismic charge behind the pile of debris and try to dive for cover while shouting to Bernard to do the same. Because Alan is in control, he can trigger the *Gain Ground* move. > **Gain Ground (Alan)** > **Weak hit**: 3 + 2 (edge) = **5** vs **10**, **3**. Since he's giving something a fling, he uses +edge and gets a weak hit, which is just fine. He gets to mark progress on destroying the eggs, which, because it's just a troublesome challenge rank, means that three boxes get marked. What does this look like? Alan leaps across to the other side of the room, even as he flings the seismic charge into the corner behind the debris, landing the charge directly amidst the nest, but it bounces slightly and ends up not perfectly centered. So when it goes off, the blast doesn't catch the eggs entirely, but now they are completely without cover, rubble from the blast scattered across the room. Bernard is definitely not in control of his situation. The War Glow seems entirely unaffected by gravity or whatever magnetic force is pulling the humans to the walls and lashes out with its tentacles aggressively, forcing Bernard to push back toward the corner where Alan has just landed, doing his best just to snap off rounds into the beast's body. Bernard is just trying to keep himself intact at this point, mostly focusing on evading than trying to land those hits, so he triggers *React Under Fire*. > **React Under Fire (Bernard)** > **Strong hit**: 6 + 2 (edge) = **8** vs **1**, **2**. Bernard gets lucky, and as he pulls back, the War Glow does not pursue but instead continues flailing around, hurt by some of the shots landing true and causing its glowing gelatinous body to ripple in a way that gelatinous things most certainly are not intended to. The strong hit has ensured that Bernard has put himself *in control* rather than *in a bad spot* for his next action, and he takes an additional momentum on top of it. Things are starting to look up for our boys if they can manage to keep themselves alive long enough to capitalize on it. --- Notice that Alan actually takes two moves before Bernard does. Follow the fiction when in doubt. There's no reason that Bernard couldn't take this opportunity to make several attacks in a row, changing the fictive position with each one until the horror is handled, or he is no longer in control. A change of state like that is a great time to consider whether it's time to hand over the spotlight to someone else. At any point, Alan can pipe up and claim the opportunity to do something himself. Combat in **Starforged** is a free-flowing set of situational changes that emerge from the mechanics and feed back into the fiction.[^2] If you're looking for a good example of what playing with allies looks like in **Starforged**, then you would be well served by checking out the Parenti Brothers on YouTube, who have done an excellent series of actual play, first starting with Ironsworn and then moving on to Starforged (through the proxy of Sundered Isles). They provide an awesome example of co-op play, and if I had any criticism, it's that they don't actually lean on the generation oracles as much as I would like to see. But they're doing an amazing job, and if you haven't seen their work, then you've missed an opportunity. Go check that out.   The very **Starforged**-friendly channel *The Bad Spot*[^3] did some excellent co-op play a few years ago, which is also worth checking out if you're interested in how gameplay with allies works.  If you're looking for an excellent solo game experience, **Ironsworn** and **Starforged** are going to come up in every conversation because they are awesome games, well-designed, which pursue and execute on making experiences involving solo play work extremely well. It's the co-op play experience even more so than guided play, which I feel is often given a little short shrift. Everyone knows how to play in a guided game. Solo play is relatively obvious just by reading the book, but co-op play is the sweet spot for people who only sometimes want to play with others. After all, nothing demands that you always play with someone else. The mechanics work perfectly well either way. If you can only once in a while get together with your friends and build a story together, there's no reason that you can't go off and play your own character, getting into trouble in their own little narrative space. Perhaps you and your friends only get together once a month to swap stories, catch up, go out and deal with something that requires or certainly profits from more hands on deck, and then you can scatter to the four winds again, looking for all kinds of excitement. *"When shall we three meet again in thunder, lightning, or in rain? Or just in two months in game time? See you guys then. You get the pizza."* If you haven't considered playing **Starforged** with allies, I strongly encourage it, even if it's just for a one-off. Share the story. Share the excitement. [^1]: Why, yes, I did roll this up on the spot from the oracles in the book. If you're going to have them, you might as well use them. [^2]: Perhaps not surprisingly, many of the games from the [[Powered by the Apocalypse|PbtA]] lineage have a similar approach to combat and sequencing. Because there is a layer of resource management which is strongly present—for example, in **[[Blades in the Dark]]**, managing stress in particular—taking more actions effectively means that you are going to be spending more stress. You want to spread that out across the group if you want long-term success or even short-term success. [^3]: Seriously, it's in the name.