Most Trusted Advisors at the table

A few posts ago, I said how much I was looking forward to playing Most Trusted Advisors. How did that work out?

As this was my regular group, we were playing online using Discord and Trello. We play for about two hours – more than that, and I get tired. (This seems to be an issue online, I can cope with longer sessions when face-to-face.)

Character creation

Character creation took us 90 minutes, which was longer than I expected, but I think that was an artefact of playing online. The playbooks seem straightforward to me, and I copied the key sections to Trello. However, a couple of my players struggled with some concepts, and everything took longer than I expected. I’m sure it would be quicker if we played face-to-face.

Our characters were:

• Margrave Hildegard of House Kolero (The Marshal) – a Zobian Traitor
• Earl Mikolas the Just of House Arachnia (The Treasurer) – an Inquisitor
• Count Lorentz the Surreptitious of House Blackgammon (The Blackguard) – a member of the Sky Chamber

Session #1 (what’s left of it)

With 30 minutes left, I kicked things off with the Liege bringing worrying news to his advisors: he’d heard the ruler of arch-rival Zobia has two birthdays. So he wanted another birthday, with the next one in two days’ time. Arrange it!

The Treasurer suggested a three-day holiday, which the Liege liked very much. (Actually, the Liege might have misunderstood the Treasurer, but three days it is…)

So, rather than raise money for the celebrations (which haven’t been decided yet), the Treasurer bought all the beer on the docks (to sell it back to the inns later). The beer is now in a marquee on the dockside, which is where we ended the session.

I felt it was a bit of a rocky start. I’m not sure why, but my players seemed to struggle with their characters. Although I felt they had lots to go on (character creation created plenty of links and agendas), it took a while for them to warm up. I don’t know if that was me, the game, them – or a mixture of all three.

After the session, I looked through their characters. I pulled together a short list of events, based on what came up during character creation, that I could use in future sessions. Where things were undecided, I filled in the blanks.

For example, the Marshal had the following agenda: “A notoriously lecherous and gullible noble knows a vital state secret. Discover it by any means necessary.” I decided who the noble was (Sir Oscar) and what secret they knew. Then, I added an event to my list: a message from the Zobian traitors asking for an update on progress.

I’m glad I took the time to do this, as it’s not something I could have done easily on the fly at the table. If I ever run this at a convention, I will need to think of how I do this. (I suspect the answer is to use cards. The game has tables, but cards are a physical reminder to refer to.)

Session #2: Planning the birthday

In session two, the advisors determined the outline of the birthday party. Day one will be a blessing of the realm, day two will be a tournament, and day three will be a grand ball. The players start to slot their various plans and machinations into the celebrations.

The Blackguard persuaded the wife of Lord Hawett (Lorentz's bitter enemy) to host it at their enormously extravagant mansion on the outskirts of the city.

The Treasurer’s money-making scheme worked (ish), but dockers complained about the high prices, and the innkeepers were unhappy. The Blackguard tried to steal the money, but The Treasurer spent a twist and foiled it.

I pushed an agenda by appearing as the Liege and asking that Father Brian (whom the Inquisition wanted to stop spreading radical messages of kindness and tolerance) speak at his birthday service. The Treasure arranged for Father Brian’s death, but this backfired by turning him into a martyr! (The roll was a partial success).

The Blackguard then spent a twist to get the Treasurer’s execution order and blackmailed The Treasurer with it in return for details of a secret passage into Lord Hawcett’s mansion.

Finally, the Marshal contacted the Zobian ambassador to arrange for the finest Zobian food for the birthday celebrations.

Session #3: The Blessing

Session #3 flowed smoothly as everyone’s plans started coming together:

The Marshal failed to negotiate down the quote for the Zenobian food, and the ambassador challenged the Marshall to a duel. It will be settled at the jousting.

The Blackguard, in disguise as Father Honeyfeather, gave a blessing on day 1 of the birthday celebrations. (I asked the player what he planned, and he gave such a long and detailed description of the service that I didn’t have the heart to make them go through it all again, so we cut straight to the end of the service.)

At the following cheese-and-wine event (held on the prince’s pleasure barge), Judge Strauss handed The Secret History of the Sky Chamber to the Treasurer. The pages were blank, but the Treasurer successfully concocted a potion that revealed the text. 

Over cheese and wine, the Marshall convinced Sir Oscar (see above) to reveal his secret: the name and location of the true Liege! (That the Liege was an imposter had been decided during character generation.)

Session #4: The Tournament and the Grand Ball

Our last session, and the players seemed to really enjoy themselves. Key moments included:

• The Blackguard married his many daughters off – some successfully, others less so.
• The Marshal killed the Zobian ambassador in a duel.
• The Treasurer foiled a plan by the Blackguard to steal The Secret History of the Sky Chamber.
• The Treasurer created false documents implicating the Zobian ambassador’s widow (who was getting much too cosy to the Liege).
• The Blackguard created a scheme to poison the wine for everyone except for his rival and the Zobian ambassador’s wife, then prevented that plot to turn himself into a hero and expose his rival and the ambassador’s wife as enemies of the state. The plan succeeded, although sadly, some nobles died because they were too eager to drink the wine.

We ended the game there, finishing with the PC’s legacies:

• The Treasurer became the Witchfinder General.
• The Blackguard became known as the famous figure in folklore, “The Black Count.”
• The Marshal changed the political system by installing the true heir to the throne.

Finally, we played ten minutes of How’s it going Geoffrey? This short minigame explores recent events from the perspective of the unluckiest peasant in the land – my players enjoyed this immensely.

So what did I think?

We enjoyed Most Trusted Advisors. We played for about five or six hours (excluding character generation), over four sessions.

While it started slowly, once my players got into their characters and pursued their agendas, things motored along smoothly. I suspect there’s more I could have done to get things going at the start, but at this point, I’m not sure what.

We found it extremely collaborative, with the players chipping in suggestions throughout.

I had a few issues with the rules.

Action ratings: I struggled with action rolls because, often, there wasn’t an appropriate action rating that suited what we were trying to do. Some examples:

• The Treasurer implemented a plan to kill a troublesome priest and make it look like the Marshal was to blame. This was carried out by underlings, as obviously, the Treasurer wouldn’t dirty his own hands. However, there isn’t a “scheme” action rating. We used Ruin for this action, but at a few times, we scratched our heads trying to work out what action rating to use.
• Our characters persuaded NPCs to do things several times. However, there isn’t a “persuade” action rating. We fell back on Appease and Bluff rather too often.

Maybe we were playing it wrong, but it took less than an hour of playing for us to hit some of these issues. So following session 2, I changed the action rolls:

I replaced Ruin with Scheme, merged Survey into Study, and introduced Persuade and Scheme. I grouped the abilities by “base ratings”:

• Physical: Balance, Duel, Shadow, Skulk
• Mental: Bewitch, Concoct, Study, Scheme
• Social: Appease, Bluster, Disdain, Persuade

The players put 3 points into the base ratings (Physical/Mental/Social – no more than 2 points in any one base rating) and then 3 points into the specialisms (no more than one each). Their action rating was their base rating + specialism.

Doing it that way meant that if there wasn’t an appropriate specialism, I could use the base rating. This system worked well – I had no problems with dice rolls for the rest of the game. 

Twists: Twists are powerful; they let the players avoid conditions and introduce new elements into the game. Players started each session with three, but because our sessions were short, my players always seemed to have plenty. Next time I will reduce the number of twists.

Conditions: I found the conditions suggested in the rules (angry, bankrupt, scandalous, etc) hard to apply to our dice rolls. I found it easier to create story-based misfortunes and complications, but I didn’t ever inflict a condition on a PC (although the players used twists to avoid a couple).

While I felt the rules were okay, they didn’t support play particularly well, and I was fighting them before I changed action ratings. 

Scenes: I recently ran a couple of games of Hillfolk at AireCon and have been thinking about the difference between the two games. While I don’t think Most Trusted Advisors needs Hillfolk’s dramatic focus, I wonder if it would benefit from scene discipline. I ran it as I would a traditional TTRPG, and in hindsight, that may have been a mistake.

Revisiting the pdf, I discovered today that Most Trusted Advisors uses the word scene liberally (“scene” appears 25 times in the pdf). But it never explains what it means by “scene”, nor how to set/frame/close them – and whether scenes are framed by the players or the GM.

So what works best? A fluid trad-like approach, or defined scenes? Next time, I’ll try more formal scene framing.

(Bizarrely, even though I’ve done scene framing in other games, I didn’t think to try it. I’ve only thought about it now. I’m not sure what that says about me.)

Overall

For me, Most Trusted Advisors wasn’t quite as good as I had hoped. While the characters and background and secret societies were wonderful, I found two areas let it down:

• Getting started: It took us a while to get properly into our stride. Was that the game, or was that us? I don’t know, but I think the game could have done more (or offered advice) to get things going.
• System: Given its lightness, I found the system fiddlier than necessary (and that’s aside from making a mid-game patch). 

I can’t imagine ever running Most Trusted Advisors as anything other than a one-shot (even though we took four sessions, I regard our game as a one-shot), and it could be simpler and fine-tuned to make that easier.

Most Trusted Advisors

You can get Most Trusted Advisors from the creators’ page on Itch.io, here.