So, I've had to contact a lot of people about their Agenda design. That I've had to do this a lot means I've messed up in communicating, but we'll try our best to fix this.
Agendas in The Madman Theory serve the conceptual purpose of representing what your Superpower cares about, and what makes them act. Most people seem to understand this part well enough, so let's talk about what that means mechanically.
Agendas Are What Let Me Change Your Orders
By the far the most prevalent issue with Agendas as provided is that when I would change your orders is poorly defined. When you put something into your Agenda at a given priority, what it means is that if something were to happen during turn resolution that I think runs counter to that Agenda item, I should start cancelling your lower priority orders to make a new order doing something about it. This is a significant exercise of GM power over the turn orders which you submit, and I don't want to do it unless I'm pretty sure you'd be okay with it - and I don't want to be pinging you on Discord for whether it's okay, because that introduces communication lag and a pseudo rolling turn.
Let's take the example from the end of the rules post. When a turn is processed, your Agenda and Actions are put together to create a set of instructions for me, the GM.
> Agenda
N/A - 10 Effort Second Strike: Asteroid Rain
13 - Protect Haven (Sanctuary/Cult Of Minor Powers)
12 - Survive
10 - 3 Effort Action: Keep Haven afloat and malicious Superpowers out.
8 - Hide your newborn son and his powers from others.
7 - 5 Effort Contingency: If the USA/an allied Superpower attacks Haven, Then throw Florida into orbit
6 - Protect Those With Weaker Powers
6 - 10 Effort Action: Intimidate the USA with a Haven flyby over New York into rejecting the Power Registration Bill
4 - Advance Progressive Policies
3 - Be Cool
2 - 2 Effort Action: Make A Cool Lightshow Over New York
Absent any interference, what happens here is Haven flies over New York, the US government is appropriately shook, the Power Registration bill is defeated and further political consequences play out in the USA, many good, some unintended. A cool lightshow commemorates the occasion.
What are some ways this could change?
Well, if some other Superpower had an action like 'stage protests against the lightshow', maybe that would trigger Be Cool to turn off the lightshow in favour of something else. Maybe Heavy decides to do some mass food delivery, since the lightshow was poorly received. Since the lightshow is the only action with Effort that has lower Priority than the Agenda item, the 'new action' which results will only have 2 Effort. Lower priority Agenda items I'm less stringent about, since most of the time they should only be impacting relatively minor orders. Okay, but what about 'Advance Progressive Policies'? Well-
Honestly, 'Advance Progressive Policies' is not an ideal Agenda item for processing. That's not to say I won't - broadly speaking, any Agenda item which is phrased in terms of advancing some cause, entity, et cetera will be interpreted by me during turn resolution as preventing major setbacks. So, for example, if a bunch of Nazis stage a march while the flyby happens, maybe Heavy decides to indulge in some fascist bowling rather than his lightshow.
However, this isn't necessarily something clear between myself and the player, and that's kind of what the Agenda has to be - a compact about when I get to fuck with your orders. Again, for a relatively low Priority item, that's not a huge deal - the worst I'll do is turn off Heavy's lightshow. When it comes to a high priority item narrowly scoping when I should say 'yes, every action with less Priority than this might have to be cancelled to respond' is important, since it would be quite unpleasant if I did it when you didn't want me to do that. If you have an Agenda item 12 or above and a First Strike occurs that I feel contravenes it, you're getting involved in a fight to the death - this is why Survive is presumed to be Priority 12. If you have an Agenda item above Survive, then it's theoretically possible that you decide dealing with a threat to it is more important than protecting your own life. (Having Actions higher than Survive is even riskier, since the Effort is already committed.)
Heavy's Agenda above is pretty good on this score. Haven is effectively a point target, so having it as high-priority means it will essentially only get triggered upon a direct attack or invasion, essentially a second Survive trigger. Hiding his son is also a pretty specific goal, liable only to get tripped by attempts to infiltrate Haven. Protecting Weaker Powers is also specific, an anti-hate-crime trigger which might get flipped by a specific Superpower doing shit or if the GM decides FEMA has spun up camps.
How Can This Go Wrong?
Well, let's take the Etienne Priority. Essentially, one could model Etienne Lux with a single Priority 15 'Be Ethical'. Let's pretend Heavy has this priority. Well, even granting intimidating the USA is ethical, there's going to be a number of Superpowers doing things which may, or may not, qualify. Two powers doing Effort 6 actions that would be considered unethical, perhaps even unethical in excess of what Heavy hopes to prevent in the USA - one power expanding a cult with some help with mind control, another brutally suppressing a revolt - suddenly means nearly all of Heavy's effort is retasked into preventing these actions, possibly dragging him into conflicts with them.
The other possibly is an agenda which is too narrowly tailored, though this is relatively uncommon and - in my opinion - less of a risk to player enjoyment.
So what if FEMA has spun up some camps for people with powers? Well, here we run into a mistake I made. They probably shouldn't be the same priority. The rules don't actually handle that. That said, if I were to receive these orders specifically, what would happen first is that the Effort from the lightshow would get reprioritized. This would happen even if some Nazis were marching or someone said he was Uncool. Stopping hate crimes is the highest priority Agenda item being violated, and the lightshow is the lowest priority action - Effort flows from the bottom to the top.
Okay, so after 2 Effort is moved into taking apart the FEMA camps, is that enough? If it is, then the system stops. If it's not, then I look at the next lowest action: the Haven flyby. Haven backs off New York because Heavy needs to focus on tearing down the camps. Effort's drained from the flyby action to the new action until it succeeds. If the camps are being spun up by FEMA, with no Superpower backing it, it goes until I think it's enough, and then Heavy succeeds. The camps are gone, and maybe he has enough Effort left to do a bit of a flyby later.
If there is a Superpower backing it, what happens depends on their Agenda and Actions.
1) they can dedicate a maximum of 6 Effort to supporting the FEMA death camps - which means that the total effort in that Action and all lower priority Actions is 6 or less, Heavy ends up reallocating up to 2 Effort from the lighshow and up to 5 Effort from the flyby in order to win the confrontation. The camps are destroyed, Heavy still does at least some of his flyby.
2) they've already dedicated at least 13 Effort to supporting the FEMA death camps. Heavy realizes that this guy is monomaniacally genocidal and he's not ready for that today (the priority of his Stop Hatecrimes is less than half the total Effort it would be opposing) and he continues on his already scheduled plans. Maybe next turn he'll murder the asshole. Note: If the Agenda item were Priority 12 or higher, this sort of backing off would not happen.
3) they've dedicated less than 13 Effort to the FEMA camps, but have more than 7 between the effort already dedicated to the FEMA action and all lower priority actions, then Heavy will reallocate Effort until he has more Effort than the other Superpower or he has no more Effort to reallocate. The other Superpower does the same. After reallocation, the Effort for both powers rolls over into the next turn, as the Superpowers negotiate whether or not they're going to fight over this particular conflict.
Heavy knows the USA isn't a big fan of what he's doing. So he's made it known - via reckless statements in interviews - that should a real attack be attempted on him or Haven by the USA or its allied Superpowers, he will leave the country going into the next election with one less state. Either a player controlled Superpower or the GM has taken Heavy up on this and have tried to kill him. Emphasis on tried.
Two separate Agenda items are triggered here:
1) Survive
2) Contingency: Throw Florida Into Orbit
Survive draws Effort first, and starts from the lightshow as before. Let's say the First Strike was only worth 10 Effort - a weak effort, really. Heavy will reprioritize effort until he has 11 for the resulting violence roll-off. Violence is rolled with a slight advantage to Heavy, and the resulting damage to him and his aggressor is determined.
But he still has some - actually, specifically 1 - Effort left to try and throw Florida into Orbit. Now, this isn't particularly useful, since any Superpower which cares to could stop him relatively easily, since even after the Contingency bonus that's only 2 Effort worth of Florida Throwing.
Note: it's probably a bad idea to have a contingency whose trigger is already on your Agenda with high priority, particularly with triggers that are liable to be targetted with a First Strike, as this demonstrates. You don't have any Effort to enact the contingency. Another mistake I made drafting the original rules post. Let's consider two alternatives.
1) Your contingency helps with the Agenda item that triggers it. In this case, violence directed against the perpetrator of the Strike.
If the USA/one specific Superpower aligned with the USA does a First Strike then Heavy will defend himself and retaliate, preferentially removing a red state like Florida from the map.
Priority 14, Effort 12
Since the contingency is triggered, it's now a Priority 14 Action which needs 12 Effort. It will take it from the lightshow and flyby, and then multiply the total by 1.5, resulting in a minimum of 16 effective Effort for the Violence to come. If that's still not enough to exceed the First Strike, it will start taking effort from the Priority 10 Action holding Haven in the sky, up to and including leaving the city on land so he can focus on the fight. This effort will also be multiplied, resulting in up to 22 Effort for defense.
2) Your contingency is either not triggered by an Agenda item, or by one which is lower priority/less prone to draining your Effort.
If someone tries to pass a state-level registration bill then Heavy will send that state capital into orbit.
Priority 7, Effort 4
This contingency is higher priority than 'Protect Weaker Powers' and the flyby, so effort is taken from the lightshow, then the flyby, to the Tallahassee space program, until 7 effort is reached, and then will reprioritize as normal. Effort will be multiplied by 1.5, so the Effort 4 will turn into Effort 6 for the purposes of other people reprioritizing. If someone tries to stop you and both your efforts (after multiplication) are above 7, you will enter a conflict rollover as normal.
As part of the incentive structure of the game, players are encouraged to tie their actions into their Agendas. This understandably gets a bit more confusing if the Agendas are tailored narrowly to delineate what circumstances the GM should alter your orders. This could be solved by writing a broader Agenda item and then specifying the defensive interpretation, but the GM should also be allowing players to tie Actions to Agenda items more loosely than the GM should be reading Agenda items to alter actions. If you have a high priority 'Defend America Against Aggression' Agenda item, you can tie in an Action that, for example, serves mostly to frustrate China('s Superman). It's Great Power competition, we know the score.
Lower priority Agenda items, meanwhile, are more free to be flavour guides for the GM - the situations where Heavy will find himself needing to pivot to Being Cool are rare, and he probably won't have much Effort free to do it, but it being on his Agenda will inflect how the rest are interpreted and written.
14 - Ensure There's A Safe Sanctuary For Individuals With Powers (Protect Haven's Population From Violence)
12 - Survive
8 - Advance Pro-Power Politics And Culture (Prevent Major Instances Of Discrimination Worldwide)
5 - Advance Progressive Politics (Oppose Actions Expanding Authoritarian Policies)
3 - Be Cool (Refute Accusations Of Being 'The Man')
Has been added to the original rules post.
