Classic Traveller: Snapshot

The recent transfer of Traveller to Mongoose caused me to finally get off my butt and get a CD order to Far Future Enterprises in for pdfs of a whole bunch of Classic Traveller materials.  Mongoose's FAQ said that FFE would continue selling CDs but hey, the future is a big place and things can change.

I was particularly curious to get a look at some of the "alternate combat system" CT boardgames like Mayday and Snapshot.  I have heard that Warhammer 40k has some roots in early Traveller material (Games Workshop had the license to publish Traveller in the UK in the early 80s; I don't think it's a coincidence that the Imperium of Man looks a bit like the Third Imperium with the madness dial turned up to 11), and when I heard that Snapshot is a game of close-combat boarding actions using action points, well, I couldn't help but think of Space Hulk and was very curious to see if there were any resemblance.  I think there's some GW Traveller material on the Apocrypha 2 disk that I look forward to taking a look at (and even some Judge's Guild Traveller material!)

Anyway, Snapshot.

It's a surprisingly-short rulebook, only 43 pages in pdf including cover material and reference tables.  Two pages of introduction to the premise and die-rolling conventions, five pages of basic rules covering the action economy, facing, and movement, four pages of rules dealing basically with resolving attacks (to-hit and damage, including several sources of circumstantial to-hit modifiers like firing in zero-G), and two and a smidge pages of "special rules" for things like encumbrance, autofire, and darkness.  After that we move basically into scenario setup (including character generation).  So the core of the game is really only about 10 (dense) pages.

This density leads to some brevity, and there are definitely some points that I'm not clear on.  How much damage does it take to breach a wall?  (aha, it's in the section at the end on reading the starship maps)  Are explosion markers purely informational or do they have effects?  What about casualty markers?

The "cover" action is implemented in a very interesting way, where you place a "target" marker to indicate the line of sight that you are covering, and then you can take attacks on enemies crossing your line of sight to the target marker.  But there are some curious edge-cases here too - you can fire on any number of enemies crossing the line (up to your available ammunition), but you can only fire on each enemy once, even if they're eg advancing up the line of fire directly towards you?

Generally I think the action points here are maybe a little too fine-grained.  An average character has 14 action points per turn (the sum of their Dex and End scores)!  That's a lot.  Many actions take fairly large numbers of points - aimed-firing an automatic weapon costs 12, opening a hatch is five, and reloading is a variable amount depending on your ability scores.  It all seems rather fiddly against Space Hulk's single-digit numbers.  On reflection, since Space Hulk came out about a decade later, it makes sense that even if it were descended, we should expect it to be more polished.

On the other hand, with 15-second rounds, 14 action points per round means that an action point is about one second for an average person.  Which is an interesting concrete point of reference.

The initiative / action order system is also a bit curious.  The character with the fewest action points goes first, but any character with a higher action-point total can pre-empt them and take their turn before any character with a lower action-point total.  I think this is roughly morally-equivalent to Domains at War's strategic initiative, where characters with high initiative act first but can delay down to an initiative count equal to -1 * their initiative score.  But framing it as pre-emption rather than delay is an interesting choice; the order starts out inverted.

This action-point-economy and initiative system seem like the main changes over stock Classic Traveller combat (well, that and putting it on squares instead of loose range bands).  Damage is largely the same as in CT (damage to ability scores) and there are big tables of weapon-vs-armor and weapon by range band to-hit DMs.  It's possible that there are subtle differences here from CT's tables but I am unlikely to find them or to appreciate their full effects.

Moving on to character generation, there's a one-page simplified chargen system which deals purely with combat skills (randomly-rolled on one of two chosen tables, naturally) and physical ability scores.  It's actually rather neat to see generation of broadly-Traveller-compatible characters boiled down this far.  There are also very cursory rules for stats for animals who have gotten loose in the hold or who are the pets of crewmen.

Four scenarios are presented in some details over a couple pages, plus short sketches for a few more.  I don't envy the player who has to go up against pirates in combat armor with some deckhands with shotguns and pistols.

There were a couple of omissions here that surprised me.  Sneaking is an action you can take that inflicts a to-hit DM on fire against you, but there doesn't appear to be any hidden information here (besides "are these guys in combat armor pirates we should fight or actually customs agents like they say?") even though I could certainly see some interesting gameplay arising from information asymmetries between eg a crew with a guy watching cameras from the cockpit and a bunch of boarders who don't know the layout.  There's also no psychology; no morale, no panic, no hesitation.  It's an interesting contrast with the finely-detailed timekeeping; the characters may fumble to pick up a weapon off of the floor or whiff a shot, but they never hesitate to turn a corner into gunfire.  It's also particularly strange with the animals rules; they're played much the same as humans with different stats and have no instinctive behavior like fleeing / recoiling from gunfire.

(Fun fact: Alien came out the same year as Snapshot.  Coincidence?)

So, conclusions.  Would I use these rules as written?  Probably not; dealing with two-digit AP totals per round sounds like a tough sell.  It's an interesting idea though, and I'm told that Azhanti High Lightning is also a CT boarding combat game and improves on Snapshot, so maybe I'll read that next.  Also, is Space Hulk a knock-off of Snapshot?  No - if it is descended, it has definitely sanded down many rough edges and added significant innovations (like the hidden information of blips, board segments used to define flamer area of effect, and weapons and actions rosters cut down to the essentials).

Why Are Kobolds So Slow?

My players had a bad run-in with some kobolds tonight.  The party threw some flaming oil into a room where the kobolds were, killing two and prompting a failed morale roll.  The kobolds retreated out of the room and set up an ambush down the hall.  The players spent some time hemming and hawing before over-extending and rushing down the hall, causing the fighter to get surrounded and dropped by kobold spearmen.  It looked like the situation might spiral out of control but the party won initiative, allowing them to get the critical sleep off.

I hadn't realize just how slow kobolds are until I was retreating down the hall with them.  They're as slow as a man in plate but they only have AC 12!  It's kind of remarkable.

Goblins are also quite slow, at 60' speed.

One explanation, the in-world explanation, is that they're short and have stubby little legs.  But halflings get 90' speed in the monster entry (and 120' as PCs)...

I'm thinking maybe there's a game-reason.  Kobolds and goblins are the weakest and first humanoid monsters most players meet.  They're the ones players are most likely to over-extend into.  Their lack of speed limits their ability to pursue and punish player over-extensions - they might get the fighter and the cleric, but the MU and the thief might actually be able to outrun them if things go bad.

Orcs, on the other hand, have 120' speed - a big step up.  This might be a bigger deal than the full 1 HD in making them more threatening to low-level parties than goblins.  When you start meeting orcs, the training wheels are off and they can give a good chase even if you're lightly-encumbered.

It's kind of an interesting alternate lens on differentiating weak humanoids from my previous approach - maybe the significant mechanical differences are already there, and I've just overlooked them.

Swords Against Scheduling

I've been running my in-person game pretty open-table style.  Once a week I send out a four-question survey to my player pool asking "if we gamed on (mon|tues|wednes|thurs)day, would you make it?  Yes / no / maybe".  If we get three players for a given night, then we game.  I've been very surprised at the degree of flakiness; so far in ~six weeks we've had two sessions dip from 3 expected players down to 2.  I don't think I've ever seen a session-failure-rate due to flakiness anything like this before.  This post is speculating about explanations.

Many (most?) of my players are young men, early-career, between one and three years out of school with this as their first job.  It's been a bad job market in this field for the last year or two.  One of the more common excuses for flaking is that more work suddenly popped up and they're working late, in the hope that if they work hard now they won't get laid off next year.  In fairness, when I was their age, I dropped D&D entirely as a hobby for a couple years to focus on work.  So I respect the impulse to work hard early-career and solidify their positions, but the way in which they don't keep their commitments does bother me.

Amusingly, the players of chaotic characters have been flaking at a higher rate than the lawful guys.

Another hypothesis is a generational change in culture, perhaps arising out of differences in the pandemic experience between those who were in college at the time and those who were working at the time.

A third possibility is that maybe new campaigns / player-groups are always sort of like this and it's just been so long since I played with anyone but family or the Old College Stalwarts that I'd forgotten about it.  It may just take time to distill a core of reliable players, to winnow the chaff from the wheat.  The July 4th holiday certainly didn't help with building campaign momentum.

Finally, I must consider the possibility that this is all my fault.  Maybe my game just isn't that interesting or that fun.  Maybe by making it open-table, with no real penalty for no-showing and no social pressure applied by other players for people to show up, I've brought this on myself.  Or the opposite, that maybe I've taken too strong a hand in recruiting players and scheduling sessions, and really maximal respect for player agency would require them to self-organize in the West Marches style, at which point players would be applying social pressure to each other to honor their commitments.  If I do want to maintain my current role in recruiting and scheduling, I could probably also "solve" the problem of session-failure by either expanding my player-base (eg going from 8 total players on the roster to 12) or by lowering the bar and running sessions for two players, which also gets more viable as they level and get access to henchmen (as happened last week; only two showed but they were game to give it a go anyhow, and one of them had hit second level the previous session, so I allowed him to hire a 1st-level MU and they made good progress with three bodies in-world).

Notes from Three Sessions of OSE

I've gotten a weekly-ish game off the ground at the office after work lately.  We'll see if it survives the 4th of July disruption. I've done a lot of theorizing since the last time I actually ran a game and figured it might be fun to keep a kind of scorecard around how well those theories are working in practice.

Wandering monsters as lurking threat - this has worked great.  I don't think they've met a wandering monster head-on yet; instead they hear doors opening and closing and motion in the distance and they haul ass to get away from it or hunker down and hope it wanders somewhere else.  There is one group of enemies who they have heard and seen tracks of but never met face-to-face, which have developed a fearsome reputation which may or may not be accurate.  The monster you don't see is much scarier than the monster you do see.

15-room dungeons - mixed success.  I've built two levels in this style with a third in progress.  Their exploration of the dungeon has been very slow; in three sessions I think they've seen seven rooms, so about half of the first level.  Consequently I have been somewhat lazy with prepping further material.  I do think 15 rooms is a good size to play with a theme without it overstaying its welcome, at least on the DM side; I can come up with 15 interesting ideas riffing on a theme, but 30 would be pushing it.  Whether it overstays its welcome on the player side remains to be seen I think.  I do think the 160ft by 160ft level/tile size that I proposed in that post is too small; the first level, which I built to that size, feels a bit cramped to me.  The second level is a bit larger, maybe 200x200 and feels more right, at least to my sense of how a dungeon level should feel.

How 1st level play is supposed to work - Seems accurate so far.  I started them off with 3d6x100 XP each, which made 2nd level clerics and thieves possible from the start but in practice nobody rolled one.  The cleric and thief just leveled at the end of this last session.  They have been playing very cautiously; in three sessions they have evaded three? random encounters, successfully retreated from two combats (one via closing a door in front of enemies without fingers, the other by blocking a passage with oil - they are learning), and only fought and won two combats (one via sleep and the other via strength of arms, at the cost of the life of one fighter).  The great bulk of the treasure they have recovered so far was from a special/puzzle room where one possible outcome was treasure and another was giant spiders.  So I think our limited impression agrees with the idea that first level is "won" on unguarded treasure.  It's been interesting to see how at first level, characters can be broadly divided into "MUs (with sleep)" and "everyone else, who are bags of HP, AC, and mundane equipment".

Resting in the dungeon - too soon to tell. I've provided securable areas to do this in, and have informed the players that resting in the dungeon will require rations and clean water if they want to go overnight and recover spells, but they haven't done it yet.  I'm still not totally sure how wandering monster rolls will work with this, but I do have one or two things on the table for the second level that may pose a threat to bunkering characters.

No henchmen - This is working well I think; players are assuming their own risks and playing more cautiously than the hireling meatgrinder games we had with ACKS.  I'm almost loathe to introduce henchmen now, but I think by the time PCs start hitting 3rd level, having 2nd level replacements on deck rather than having to go back to 1st will make a lot of sense.

Infravision and mapping - Too soon to tell.  I haven't allowed demihuman classes yet, since they weren't in the OSE quickstart rules.  We almost had an elf the other day; the fighter and the MU both couldn't make that day but we had a new player who rolled Int and Str both around 14.

Switching Initiative Systems

So I'm looking again at running OSE at the office after work.

On reflection I really do enjoy the chaos of ACKS' individual initiative system, and would be quite sad I think to adopt OSE's individual initiative, which is rolled once per combat.

I've been thinking some about multi-layered combat systems; combat systems as modules at different levels of abstraction which can be swapped between much like Traveller's mini-games.  Traveller has its main combat system, Snapshot at a higher level of detail, Striker at a greater scale...  We see this also in Chainmail, which is really at least three combat systems all in one book; the mass combat and man-to-man scale combat systems both use basically the same core mechanics, but then the jousting minigame is its own thing.

It has me thinking about under which circumstances one might choose to use individual initiative vs initiative by side (and, more generally, whether it makes sense to have another higher-detail combat system like AD&D's, Snapshot's, or Boot Hill's for single combat).

An even more amusing possibility than choosing between individual and by-side initiative for a given combat would be to move between them as a combat evolves.  Using initiative by side while the party is acting cohesively makes sense.  Once people start breaking morale and breaking ranks and the plan goes to hell, maybe it makes sense to switch to individual initiative.  As the combat becomes more chaotic, switch to an initiative system which evokes and adds to that feeling of chaos.  Maybe an encounter where the party lost surprise starts in individual initiative.  And maybe successfully rallying the party gets you back into by-side initiative.

AD&D 1e DMG: Combat

I've been thinking about initiative and combat maneuvers and decided to see what Gary had to say about them.

But first:

Are crippling disabilities and yet more ways to meet instant death desirable in an open-ended, episodic game where participants seek to identify with lovingly detailed and developed player-character personae? Not likely! Certain death is as undesirable as a give-away campaign. Combat is a common pursuit in the vast majority of adventures, and the participants in the campaign deserve a chance to exercise intelligent choice during such confrontations. As hit points dwindle they can opt to break off the encounter and attempt to flee. With complex combat systems which stress so-called realism and feature hit location, special damage, and so on, either this option is severely limited or the rules are highly slanted towards favoring the player characters at the expense of their opponents. (Such rules as double damage and critical hits must cut both ways — in which case the life expectancy of player characters will be shortened considerably — or the monsters are being grossly misrepresented and unfairly treated by the system. I am certain you can think of many other such rules.)

Emphasis mine.  Nobody escapes un-chastised - the mudcore misery-porn wing of the OSR, the ADHD gamers who never run sustained campaigns, the Monty Haulers, the "combat is a failure state" folks, the railroaders and agency-deniers, the WotC-era players for whom retreat is unthinkable, and the hardcore simulationists who want hit location tables.  And then a pleasant surprise to see that even this early in the history of the game, the disproportionate impact of crits on PCs was already understood.

Aaaand then we proceed to get a combat system with 6-second segments within rounds, fiddly initiative modifiers based on weapon speed (and sometimes multiple attacks if your weapon speed is faster enough than the other guy's?  But what if you take your first attack and then the guy dies?  Can you use your second attack on the guy next to him who had a faster weapon, against which you wouldn't've gotten an extra attack?), and pummel/grapple on percentile charts with lots of tiny modifiers that could've come from Boot Hill.

sigh

There were a couple of interesting bits though.

Surprise uses the best modifier in the party, rather than ACKS' "well the barbarian isn't surprised but the rest of you are."  Except for Dexterity modifiers, which apply to surprise but only for individuals.  So you do still get situations where the party loses surprise but the thief gets to act in the surprise rounds I guess?

This reaction roll table is quite interesting.  It's on a d%, and the middle band which would usually be "Uncertain, Ambivalent" on 2d6 is split into three bands, of uncertain leaning negative, neutral / uninterested, and uncertain leaning positive.  The middle band, truly uncertain, is half the size / probability of either of the two "leaning" bands.  This seems like a pretty good change really - nothing stalls an encounter like a Neutral reaction roll and the DM trying to figure out what that means in context.  (Tangentially, this also means that the reaction roll modifier from Charisma is percentile 

Dex modifier also applies to initiative but only when attacking with ranged weapons.

Damage is applied simultaneously for individuals acting in the same segment, much like ACKS 1e.  Except in ACKS 1e, the individual initiative roll basically determines which "segment" you act in, rather than an initiative roll per side modified by individual factors like weapon speed to determine when each individual on that side acts.

Spellcasters have to stand so still while casting that they lose their Dex bonus to AC.  A strict reading of "cannot use his or her dexterity bonus to avoid being hit" does not suggest that this also negates Dex penalties to AC, if any.

A clear explanation of what happens if you try to turn a mixed group of multiple types of undead: "you [the DM] may opt to disallow any turning or other effect if the most powerful member [of a group of undead] — in the example above, the vampire — is not affected by the cleric."

"Paladins, lammasu, shedu, ki-rin, and similar creatures of good alignment (or from the upper planes) are affected by UNHOLY WATER."  Cue Grandpa Simpson: Burned by unholy water?  That's a paladin'.

The rules for charging are interesting.  "There is no dexterity bonus allowed for charging creatures. Creatures with no dexterity bonus become 1 armor class lower, i.e. easier to hit. Thus an AC 3 creature becomes AC 4. There is no penalty to AC 10 creatures for charging, however."  The duration of the AC penalty isn't specified.  It still gives +2 to hit, but also "Only one charge move can be made each turn; thus an interval of 9 rounds must take place before a second charge movement can be made."  So that's an interesting take on limiting the power of charging, especially if it were applied to a system where you could get bonus damage with spears, lances, on the charge.

Clear rules on the probability for pursuing monsters to be distracted by food or treasure.