tl;dr
(Triangle Long; Derails Reviews)
This one is gonna be kind of a long one, and because this ties to the point I'm making I'm actually just gonna give you the thesis right up front: even people who are very smart suffer from fatigue trying to process large amounts of rules text, and if they are people who have lots of experience engaging with games analytically, they may not read closely enough to see when a game is trying to teach principles to players that they themselves already understand and have formed opinions about. Additionally, I find that many people who have trouble understanding Triangle Agency's whole deal simply do not zoom out far enough to consider the metacontext - you cannot Death of the Author this game, and you need to be ARG-brained about it.
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| xkcd.com/917 |
DISCLAIMERS
Before I begin, I'd like to preface this by saying that while this post is not in direct
response to any particular video review or essay, I would say that it is in
conversation with the
Quinns Quest review, the
Dead Letters discussion,
A.A. Voigt's video essay (who I would argue is probably the closest to Getting It, but we'll get to that) which I will reference in very limited capacities, plus some general rumblings that have been floating around since the game got into the world. I respect Quinns and Aaron and Sam (and while I do not know anything about Misha and Walid, if Sam keeps their company I would extend that same respect to them) and their opinions on games immensely. I feel it important to note this because I'm about to spend a lot of words talking about how I feel that all these people who are very smart completely missed the point of the game to varying degrees whereas I, known dumbass, am somehow the One True Enlightened TTRPG Blogger. This post is going to spoil so, so many things about media over the last few decades, so please be warned.
I'd also like to disclose that I've been a fan of
Triangle Agency from well before I fully understood what it was going for - you will find my name in the rulebook under the list of people who had way too much disposable income at the time
Triangle Agency was funding, which has led to me not only getting to play the game with Caleb but also having some personal chats with Caleb about how to run the game before I ran it for
The QueerXP and then later for the cool kids over at the Tabletop Book Club for a private game after they'd
reviewed the game on their podcast. I say all this because I need you to know I have experienced all three sides of this triangle - I've read the game, I've played the game, I've run the game. I'm not an expert in much, but I feel pretty confident I know what I'm talking about here. Too often, people confuse their passion for something with an understanding of it, and that point of ego is something I find to be a big stumbling block for most people in these spaces. As I have said before, none of us know where we are on the Dunning-Kruger graph, not even me.
Finally, if you've never actually played a game of Triangle Agency, I'd really like to point you towards the bonus episode of The Department of Variance of Somewhere, Ohio where the crew played Triangle Agency and which then led to two connected mini-campaigns run by some of those actors over on their D&D channel BlackwaterDnD. I think they are excellent examples of play of the game, and interestingly they represent the game at different parts in its release so consuming that entire plotline lets you see the evolution of the game itself which is its own kind of reward if you're into that kind of thing. Which you should be.
Triangle Agency? Doesn't Look Like Anything To Me.
In the HBO Westworld series, one of the subplots revolves around the AI robot hosts of the park interacting with a particular maze puzzle as well as one of the human characters trying to figure out why it kept popping up around the park in all kinds of weird places. When some of the hosts figure out its purpose, they make a point to tell the human character that the maze is not meant for him - which, of course, infuriates him and causes him to go on further violent sprees against the hosts. That struggle - that is, of entitlement - is a core theme that Westworld the show wanted to highlight, but the actual purpose of the maze is something quite different. It is, essentially, a test for the AI to solve to achieve actual sentience and free will outside of their programming. The human characters don't need the maze - they've already got that built in as a factor of being a human being, and in fact them interacting with the Westworld park is the ultimate extension of this. But, of course, in a universe where you can go to a theme park and are told you can do literally anything you want, to be told that something isn't intended for them is its own clash of free will and personhood as defined within the rules both of the show and of the theme park within the show. Let's put a pin in that for now.
In China Miéville's The City & The City, an investigator is called in to investigate a murder and must go to a neighboring city to do so. This neighboring city is unlike any other - it is functionally co-terminal with the city he starts in. They are geographically the same place, and the façade of them being separate cities is held in place by cultural tradition, extensive mental programming to unsee the things present in the other city, and the threat of some kind of organization that will disappear you if happen to breach between the two cities. (Also there's some kind of weird object that might be magical involved? It's been just south of 20 years since I've read this book, forgive me. Also, oof owie my bones, I did not need to remember my mortality like that.) Much of the later part of the book involves intentionally invoking that breach to solve the mystery while dealing with the fallout of directly breaking the social contract these "two" cities have established to keep themselves "separate."
Although not seen this way by its creator Michael Haneke, Funny Games (both the original Austrian 1997 film and its 2007 English-language shot-for-shot remake) is a horror film in which two teenagers begin torturing a family on holiday and it is revealed that these characters are aware of the audience and can break the fourth wall. This is mainly the reason it's not seen as a horror film by Haneke - the horror isn't the point of the film, it's the complicitness of the audience by partaking of the film itself allowing the torture to continue. You, the audience, may at any point stop watching the film and the torture of these fictional characters will end - but you, the audience, are here to watch a film. You're not going to stop watching, will you?
So let me tell you about Homestu- no no wait! This is important! It's even listed on the Triangle Agency Kickstarter page as an actual inspiration unlike those other things I mentioned, see?
Homestuck was a piece of
hypermedia wrongly called a webcomic by many that persisted over the entirety of the Obama presidency that followed an ever-expanding cast of characters as they began playing a game that gave them strange and unique powers. Throughout the run, we follow these characters as they develop their powers, understand the rules governing the world they live in as well as that of the parallel universe full of other characters whose choices influence their own lives and whose lives they can also affect, as well as multiple divergent and "doomed" timelines containing alternate versions of each of these characters, characters who exist outside of these universes, and the direct and explicit author insert character. It was also a story that was notably influenced by people outside the universe of the story by way of donations and funding the creator - while of course technically everything added to the story was done so by the person writing and drawing it, the outside impetus for certain changes or additions came from the collective agreement that if you paid Andrew Hussie for a certain thing at a certain time in a certain way, it would be reflected in the story. (Also,
Homestuck carried forward
the bit from Hussie's earlier work
Problem Slueth where a completely innocent object was actually a very lethal weapon until it was addressed directly by the narrative. [See: the art for the Gun anomaly.] Neat!)
Trad? Neotrad? A secret third option?
If you're here, I'm going to make the assumption that you already have at least some kind of broad understanding about what
Triangle Agency is. Whether that assumption is actually correct is something we'll get to in time, but at the surface you know that it's a game in which you play a character who works for the
Triangle Agency because they have bonded with a supernatural entity called an Anomaly that gives them weird powers and that you're tasked to go and neutralize other Anomalies. Cool, right?
Actually that's already wrong: you're not playing a character in the world of Triangle Agency, you're playing a character who works for the Triangle Agency who is playing a game of Triangle Agency in which they are playing characters who work for the Triangle Agency. We're never actually introduced to this intermediary character you play - it might even be easier to think of them as a Gamertag Profile because there's a little bit of information that sticks to them as you play: how much of the rulebook you've read, and the Demerits you gain from reading them. Aside from various entries that give you Demerits for reading them, just based on the instructions on page 30 where it tells you you earn a Demerit for every "illegitimately observed page" you see between after reading what's in Playwalled Document A1. Depending on your interpretation (although remember: per the rules on page 4, you're not allowed to interpret rules), that might just mean any other Playwalled pages (there are 92 other pages aside from A1) or it might mean literally every other page in the book if you decided to look at anything else before coming back to page 30 (there are over 300 pages in this book). If you decided to just decided to read the book through in one shot rather than following the instructions, you'd start accruing Demerits once you hit page 201 and just wouldn't stop until you eventually ended back up on page 30. That would apply to you any time you played Triangle Agency, forever. That is, as long as you remember to alert your GM when you make your next character - and you'd tell them, right? Right?
There's also the point of order about the GM - because, again, it very explicitly says that one of the members of your Field Team assumes the role of GM and dictates the story, meaning that the person facilitating your game is just as much a player as anyone else at the table, but the GM (player) is playing the GM (character) who is playing all of the NPCs on that layer of reality. This isn't me wanking about the game being deeper than it is - this gets called out in the rules, explicitly in the beginning of the GM Tool Kit section:
And this character isn't safe from harm either - aside from being explicitly called out as never leaving the Triangle Agency branch office, which means they physically exist inside of the world of the game, there's also a result on the Weather Events table which just kills them!
The Weather Events table, by the way, is the table you roll on when your players start leaving too many Loose Ends after missions - reality begins to unravel. This all ties into the metaplot of Triangle Agency, which also ties into where I feel like I always see people starting to get things wrong.
Here are some things that are true:
- Players, when advancing their characters (or their characters' characters, as the case may be), will make choices and unlock abilities and trigger scenes that allow them to focus on seeing that character's personal story advance in a way that they want that the GM does not plan ahead of time - although, depending, the player may not know what those changes are ahead of time either (unless they've been reading ahead...)
- GMs are creating missions for the character('s character)s to go on, using either their own writing or pulling from pre-written missions to tell the story they want to tell and which all of the character(s' character)s have no real say in - and at the GM's whim (and Chaos expenditure), may involve or outright kill any character in the game to keep the plot moving, including ones important to the players/characters/characters' characters.
- There are meta influences on the state of the characters' characters' game world - the Weather Events table, any abilities they may have unlocked and directives from the Agency or the Urgency or the secret third narrator, but there are two more: the desires of you, the player, and of your character. Not your character's character, your character. Remember, information you learn from the book sticks to your character - which means if you go play with someone else, all those Demerits come along with you, which might trigger a conversation with everyone right there about what's about to happen in game.
There's one more point I want to make before I get into the topic of conversations at the table, and that's the OTHER thing I see most commonly misinterpreted: the Ask The Agency roll, also known as the way your characters' characters interact with the world when they're not using their Anomaly powers. I'm actually just going to yoink these two pages directly in here for a second:
Ask The Agency allows you to rewrite the reality of the game world by defining something that has not been established previously and making a roll. To put that another way, it gives the Field Agent characters the just about same degree of narrative control over the world that the GM's character has. And again I do mean the Field Agent characters, not the characters' characters - because they live in the same layer of the world that the GM character does. Ask The Agency is those characters
and their players going "Hey, we think this is a reasonable chain of events and you haven't said anything about it, so we're establishing it now." While this can technically fail, it still ends up establishing something about the universe. If a GM wants to have more control over the world, they simply have to be more detailed in their descriptions of the world - but by the same token, if players want to use this ability rather than the Anomaly power their character's character has, it means they need to be clever and work on some on-the-spot worldbuilding. Honestly, extremely clever players may not ever have to engage in any kind of appreciable combat at all if they're able to tell a convincing enough story - and it's not like this game really encourages combat anyway considering Anomalies don't really have HP or anything like that.
Actually, hang on a second. A game that encourages problem solving collaboratively, one that encourages you to find answers that aren't on your character sheet, one that actively disincentivizes players from rolling/encourages GMs to get players rolling since when they do, more bad stuff can happen? A game that lets you declare something and then make what is essentially a luck roll to see how true it is? Where have I heard all of that before? Why does all that sound familiar?
I can tell you why: it's because...
TRIANGLE AGENCY IS
A DEPROGRAMMING TOOL
FOR TRAD/NEOTRAD GAMERS
One of the reasons I think that One Night At The Shelterwood Inn is the perfect introductory module for Triangle Agency is that it ACTIVELY makes you look at what is different from more traditional games like Liminal Horror. It's adapted from an old module for the Warhammer Fantasy RPG, and it does very much feel like a dungeon crawl - in Liminal Horror, you're a bunch of folks - whether paranormal investigators or just hapless fools who stumble into spooky nonsense - who have to go explore and try and stay alive when weird stuff happens. You've got your standard loadouts, you're managing items and health and all that stuff. Classic dungeon game things, even if it's a modern setting. Meanwhile, the TA side of the adventure flips this on its head - you are Field Agents who need to neutralize and contain an Anomaly and some civilians have stumbled in with camera equipment, which means you need to manage both containing the problem and making sure they don't turn into Loose Ends - by any means necessary. Of anything else in this ramble, I legitimately don't want to spoil too much of this one, but I do want to show you some creature stat blocks out of context to see how you can use them to understand the differences between games:
The
LH stats are exactly what you'd expect - basic stats you need to know to try to fight it, and what it does to fight you. Meanwhile, almost everything in the
TA statblocks is focused on the narrative - because while both games tell you what it's doing to interact with the world, one of them tells you mechanical effects and the other tells you the narrative effects and I think on the player side of things, if you were to play the
Liminal Horror version of this and immediately play the
Triangle Agency side to see how things are different, some very big gears would begin to turn if you'd never played a more narrative focused game.
And it's this particular point - the "if you've never played a more narrative focused game" point that I really want to hammer down on, because it ties into why I believe I understand Triangle Agency in a way that many of the people who reviewed it simply do not. In the Dead Letters episode, there's a whole big discussion about halfway through where Sam and Misha and Walid all go "Yeah, I like the premise, but actually I would just remove all of these things in it that I find unnecessary so I could play a grounded game because I don't need this." And then right around the 59 minute mark, there's a comment about a game that teaches players to break the rules can be useful even if you can't actually break the rules inside of it and Sam goes "I don't agree, I don't think that works in practice" and as I was listening I just started screaming at my phone because yes, that is precisely what this game is for because I HAVE BEEN DOING THAT SINCE I READ TRIANGLE AGENCY. As someone who had up to the point I played Triangle Agency essentially not interacted with anything that one might refer to as a "story game" (or even any OSR content really, and I'll come back to why that matters in a bit), realizing that Triangle Agency was teaching me how to have conversations both with the GM and with other players about collaborative storytelling was mind-blowing. I had been a GM for a very long time at that point, but the idea that players who weren't the GM could - and SHOULD - have narrative control over a game? The idea that yeah, actually maybe it's fun if people suggest something that might be beneficial in the universe and to roll with it rather than just ruling with an iron fist and not letting anyone suggest changes while we were playing? It seems stupid to me now that I'd never realized it, but once I saw it in action it was so painfully obvious and I literally have not stopped doing it in any other game I've played in or run - because once you learn how to have that conversation in a way that isn't annoying (i.e. you're not bugging the GM about something to bail your Special Little Guy out of trouble, you're talking with the table about something that would be narratively plausible and interesting even if there are consequences for it) it's something you can use to enrich every game you're in.
And it was precisely at this point that I realized why it was that Quinns and Sam and all the rest of them bounced right off of this - because they didn't need the kind of lesson that this game can teach. They already have their thoughts about game design - they don't need to be given permission to challenge the text of a game, to navigate negotiating with a GM in a productive way. They've already played thousands of hours of different games! They've already got successful careers as people known for being good at games. You know who does need this kind of handholding to learn this lesson? People who have not played games where they have any degree of control over the narrative outside of character creation. The maze was not for them. It was for people like me.
I'm So Meta, Even This Acronym
On the subject of challenging the game, I'd like to pull in one more point that ties to this and which I feel was the only stumble in A.A. Voigt's very excellent video essay - the purpose of the third narrator, the "yellow voice." As a reminder, The Agency speaks in the text with red text (or white text on a red background), The Urgency speaks with blue text (or white text on a blue background), but then there's a third voice that speaks in yellow (or black text on yellow background). The yellow voice is tied to your Reality track - and it unlike The Agency or The Urgency, this voice isn't talking to your character or your character's character, it's talking to you, the player. To keep with the naming scheme, and to reference the final ability on the Reality track, we'll call this voice The Emergency.
While pursing your characters' Anomaly or Competency paths, you may receive certain abilities that instruct you the player to do them for a certain amount of time, or forever. These are, basically, things that get stuck to that intermediary character that I referred to as your Gamertag Profile. These can be anything from permanently altering your rulebook (a la many legacy games) or forcing certain things to happen within the game world, but some of these (like the Sponsorship Die ability in G3) are now supposed to take place in any game you play that requires use of the die granted from that ability. What I find fascinating about the Reality track unlocks is that in contrast to Competency's tendency towards giving a character new doodads to play with from The Agency or Anomaly's tendency towards giving your character new abilities to push them towards becoming a character like The Urgency in your own right, all of Reality's focus on protecting the story that you've played out with your friends. The Emergency gives you abilities that are selfless - whether they involve you literally borrowing a d100 from someone not playing the game with you to protecting your favorite in-game characters from coming to harm from The Agency or The Urgency. They are the reminder that when you are playing a game that demands you choose between two factions, you can Kobayashi Maru your way out of it and do something else - and in doing so may even be able to save some of the other characters in the game world by going so far as to literally rewriting everyone else's character sheets. It is your reminder to touch grass. It is your reminder that it is too easy to get caught up in character optimization and following upgrade paths blindly without thinking about the story you're playing out.
A lot of this makes sense when you realize that Caleb was a professional GM before writing Triangle Agency. A lot of design decisions feel like things that would frustrate you if you played with a bunch of random people all the time - how do you make people care about each other? How do you give people enough things to keep them interested? How do you somehow cater to every playstyle while also giving them one game to play together? The answer is: you teach them. You give them the tools, you let them make discoveries however they see fit - whether they break the rules by reading the rules, or whether they discover things organically through play. But you hold your hand, you teach them, and you elevate those players to become more thoughtful contributors to the games they play. And if these players don't want to buy into what you're selling here (as it seems perhaps that the players in Quinns' game did not)? That's okay too - because like I said in "Stop Just Playing Games You Know You Like," sometimes you'll try something out and you'll find you just don't enjoy what it's trying to do, and that's good because it means you're able to better articulate the things that you do like. Not everyone likes secretly being taught how to be a GM. Some people don't like games where you keep secrets from other players. Some people don't like games where you are forced to care about NPCs because they are plot relevant to you. Some people just don't have the capacity for mentally juggling several characters at once. But you don't know unless you try.
OTHER GAMES OF THIS ILK
While Triangle Agency is certainly the first game I personally interacted with that challenged me to think about the act of playing TTRPGs in the way that it does, there are many other games or genres of games I've come to love in the intervening time that do similar things. I think Ryuutama, as a game also written by someone who had been a professional GM for many years, does a similar job of trying to distribute the GM's duties to the other players in a way to encourage them to be courteous to one another and to the GM. I think His Majesty The Worm use its Bond systems to a similar effect by different execution - Worm uses Bonds with other player characters to encourage certain kinds of roleplaying and is rewards them with recharging powers rather than Triangle Agency using a more esoteric approach by tying you to NPCs. Belonging Outside Belonging games similarly encourage roleplaying with the other player characters by way of generating tokens by being vulnerable or selfish and spending those tokens on abilities that affect the narrative (lookin' at you, Hellwhalers). Many OSR games explicitly include a "Die of Fate" mechanic for when you propose something that hasn't been established to see if it can be true. Trophy Dark and its many cousins have Devil's Bargain mechanics that involve the whole table in crafting the consequences for invoking it. And finally, I think for reasons I cannot in good faith discuss but which will become obvious, Deathmatch Island is probably both graphic design-wise and meta-design-wise the closest game you'll get to Triangle Agency. There are all kinds of games out there that can teach you the same things that Caleb and Sean were trying to, and if they're more accessible to you and your playgroup, I encourage you to go take them for a spin.
CLOSING REMARKS
So there we go! That's why I think people who review Triangle Agency get it wrong - they've already learned the lessons it is trying to teach, and thus they come at it unable to perceive exactly what it is doing and layer their own assumptions atop it. I probably could have just said that and left it, right? Hah! Oh well. It's taken you a few minutes to read all that, it's taken me a few days to write all that while I should have been doing something else, but I guess we're done now. Don't look at your scroll bar, you can >Go Back to what you were doing before this. Thanks for reading!
No really, that's it! You don't have to read anything else! There's nothing else here for you.
Alright listen here you little shit. You really want to know why I think people don't get
Triangle Agency? It's because none of you motherfuckers want to play games with people who openly admit to having read
Homestuck. Sure, you can point to
Control or The SCP Foundation as key touchstones to what makes
Triangle Agency be what it is, and that's certainly not wrong. But it's all a ruse! A sneaky bit of misdirection! Because
Homestuck is what REALLY makes up the bedrock of this game, and since you're here now I have to tell you why.
Like I mentioned earlier, the plot of Homestuck, such as it can be shortened into an easily digestible sentence, involves a small group of characters sitting down to play a game together which very quickly leads to them finding out that they are in a simulation, that there are other people also in the simulation (although they are not "people" as they understand them, but instead are Trolls who all seem to be hyperbolic versions of Types Of Guy From The Internet), and that in addition to the weird powers they unlock outside of the generic "interact with the world" kind of game powers that appear both in the game they start of playing but then also very quickly manifest in their reality, they are given a dedicated support character that they are able to shape the manifestation of, plus they have to maintain relationships with all the other player characters, PLUS they often have alternate timeline/universe versions of those characters that they're forming relationships with. (Yes, that is the shortened and easily digestible sentence version of Homestuck, believe me.) On the specific note of those alternate timelines/universes, there are certain actions that they can take in their world which functionally soft lock their timeline - meaning that that particular timeline becomes "doomed" since it cannot fulfill the "win" conditions of the game which allow the creation of a new universe. There's all kinds of instances of characters latching onto random NPCs and making them important, there's a whole major point in the last part of the plot about other players from outside the established game universe trying to destroy it, there's a particular toy that just keeps bouncing around through the universes, there's explicit retcons and things that are permanently changed about the comic panels from the day that they happened so you can no longer go back and experience the comic in its unchanged state (ignoring the current state of preservation of the media I mean - I'm talking about John putting his arm through the window which made it show up in a bunch of previous scenes specifically, but there are other things).
I'm just barely scratching the surface here, but yeah of course Homestuck is an inspiration - if you actually start playing the game on its terms, you find out pretty quickly that in order to achieve any kind of satisfying ending for your specific playgroup's instance of Triangle Agency it's going to take you multiple playthroughs, damning multiple characters to awful fates except for the ones you manage to smuggle out via what powers The Emergency provides. In fact, in the GM's advice section presented by The Urgency says as much and details a number of ways listed that the game can end (though, of course, because The Urgency cannot see the words of The Emergency, what happens in N2 isn't listed below):
Just like in
Homestuck, you and your players learning the ins and outs of
Triangle Agency is what will ultimately let you close the book on your game world, literally. You can all cheat and read the book cover to cover, you can discover it all through emergent gameplay, or you can take the third option and
never play the game at all. The only winning move is not to play - because also just like
Homestuck, once you start reading, this game is a part of you forever.
A FINAL NOTE ON TABLE BUY-IN
One of the things that really, truly bugged me about the QQ & Dead Letters reviews of Triangle Agency is that it's pretty obvious that neither group was really bought-in to the game. And I don't say that because that's their fault - if you haven't caught on by now, this is a game that will by default become tainted by a sufficiently informative Session Zero. The game is, to borrow a term from the SCP Foundation, an infohazard. You cannot properly explain the game to players without spoiling the game, and you cannot ensure that you will have the requisite buy-in on the full premise of the game without explaining the game. This is why I think it gets miscategorized as "a comedy game" or "a corporate horror game" - because without sufficient explanation, you can absolutely just play the game that way. If you are completely uncritical of the world of Triangle Agency because you don't understand it, you can absolutely just play all the Anomaly abilities for laughs. If you have no reason to critique the people giving you your assignments, you can absolutely just do a bunch of one-shots that rotate between mundane scenes at a kind-of-weird office to going to a frat party to try and capture an Anomaly fueled by one person's fear of peer pressure to do keg stands. It's not bad to play Triangle Agency that way, necessarily - to quote Brian Flaherty of My First Dungeon, if you're having fun you're already doing it right. But I think that perhaps something that prevents some tables from wanting to pursue the game further, or what makes people think they won't like and therefore prevents them from ever playing in the first place, is when players find out that the game isn't just a funny haha game, or it's not just doing missions to take down weird stuff. There's so much more to the game than that, and if you don't have the kind of players who are going to go all Pepe Silvia about your game then maybe they're just not going to get as much out of your time together as they would if you just played something like Liminal Horror or Delta Green or Monster of the Week.
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| But who IS The Emergency? Why does it keep talking in a plural voice?! |
THE TRUE ENDING
OK, that's actually all for now. Again, many thanks to folks like Quinns and Sam and Misha and Walid and Aaron for getting your opinions about this game out into the world - and thank you for being willing to play games you may not immediately understand. You don't have to like everything or agree with everyone, but as I keep trying to drive home to people, the more things you come into contact with that challenge you, the more you're able to refine your own tastes and opinions.
Stay weird out there.
