The Corruption of Power

I read The Man Who Was Thursday recently.  I'm still not sure what I think of its answer to the question of theodicy, but there was a bit that seemed ACKS-relevant:

The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all. Aristocrats were always anarchists, as you can see from the barons’ wars. 

Whether you agree with Chesterton, it makes an interesting premise, particularly if one accepts his double-meaning of anarchy as not just rebellion against temporal governance, but against natural law.

What if power corrupted, in one's campaign world?  What if personal power and rulership tended to drive people to Chaos?  What if kings with the epithet "the Good" were rare exceptions for a reason?

Tolkien's answer to the question "why do we need adventurers?" in The Hobbit seemed like apathetic or negligent rulers.  But if the typical ruler is wicked, it is even less surprising that the plight of the peasants whose goats are being devoured by gryphons is ignored by the powers that be, and they are left to petition adventurers.  It also explains why in OD&D lords shake down adventurers for magic items, and archmages and high priests geas/quest them for the same.

It provides a great justification for PCs to overthrow existing rulers and take their stuff, while posing new hazards to be navigated.

 

The naturalistic take is that when people acquire power they gain the freedom to indulge their vices and to surround themselves with people who won't stop them.  There is also a Sword of Damocles angle, where rulership is insecure and so rulers tend to grasp at any and all means of holding on to power, including dangerous ones.  Selection effects and the Iron Law of Bureaucracy could play a part as well - those who rise to the top are those who are willing to use all means available to amass power, not those who are honest and just.

The McLeod Company Hierarchy also springs to mind 

To some extent we already see this happening to player characters without codifying it.  PCs have a notorious tendency for wanton disregard for NPC life and property.  Want of money is the root of all evil, and money gives XP, so...  the incentives line up.  We also see it a little as a side effect of the Tampering with Mortality table; gathering XP is dangerous and many PCs have close calls which lead to some spiritual deterioration.  And certainly I have seen PCs rule their domains with secret police and iron fist.

It's funny, that I think this was actually the first I ever heard of Seeing Like a State, and it was about strategy gamers behaving badly.

Mechanically, how might we rig the system such that rulers tend to be bad?  One simple approach is to flip ACKS' random alignment generator, which was on a d6, 1 Chaotic, 2-4 Neutral, 5-6 Lawful.  But maybe for rulers, you do 1-2 Chaotic, 3-5 Neutral, 6 Lawful.

Renegade Crowns' prince generation system tends to produce rather flawed characters.  It is possible to generate one who is a decent person, but rare.  Renegade Crowns' domain engine also turns domains into a source of trouble, hence into temptation to seek additional power to keep a lid on things, maybe without reading the fine print. 

If you like numerical corruption point accumulation systems, you could certainly wire one up so that leveling incurs corruption.  I don't like such systems, personally.

AD&D suggests a less dissociated alternative - for high-level assassins and druids, leveling is a zero-sum game, where you have to go topple the previous Master of Assassins or Arch-Druid in order to level up.  Zero-sum games always bring out the nastiest in people.  A very Damocles situation for the current Master, one in which he is strongly incentivized to accumulate as much power as possible to secure his position, and one in which challengers are likewise encouraged to play dirty.  Imposing similar diegetic requirements at lower levels could be an option.

(What else could we make zero-sum?  Spell acquisition, by removing copying?  Magic swords, by removing crafting entirely?)

Dark Sun and ACKS suggest another angle, with the ability to surpass the limits of human power by abandoning humanity through undeath, apotheosis into a dragon, etc.  If you lower the limits of human potential to, say, 9th level rather than 14th (or even down to 6th), committing crimes against the natural order to surpass human limits becomes much more pressing.

What does a world built with this idea as a premise look like?

Kings and princes are fearsome and dangerous and mostly view people as means, as tools to be used.  Their servants and courtiers and lieutenants may be complicit, or scheming and striving, or just doing what they have to do to get by, or believe that though what they do is repugnant, it is for the greater good.  Down at the bottom, the peasant, the pickpocket, the bartender, and the guard at the gate are basically decent.  They have no power, and so no corruption.  There is honor among thieves, as long as they are little thieves.  But if they get too big, then the knives come out.

Maybe loyalty score modifiers for hirelings based on level could use some changes to match these assumptions. 

But I think this is an important differentiator from grimdark.  In grimdark, even the little people are often basically bad - untrustworthy, cruel, vicious, spiritually ugly.  Needn't be so.

What do gods and churches look like in such a world?  If your high priests are cynical and power-thirsty, are the gods ambivalent about the moral qualities of their priests?  Or are the gods themselves caught in the same traps as high-level characters, perhaps even just ascended mortals?  Do even "good" gods demand great sacrifices of their worshipers to maintain their position against their divine adversaries?  Are they just so alien that they recognize neither natural law nor human morality?  Are they demiurges, tasked to maintain the work of a now-absent creator deity but falling away from their original purpose and natural law over eons of hard decisions and unsatisfiable constraints?

Guilds and Freedom of the City

Today I stumbled upon wikipedia articles about the livery companies of the City of London and the notion of "Freedom of the City".

It's very fun, almost Pratchettian, that they have a guild for everything.  The Worshipful Company of Makers of Playing Cards?  The Worshipful Company of Human Resource Professionals?  You can't make these up.

I will confess that I have been pretty down on adventurers' guilds.  Does it make sense to have enough wizards in a city to warrant a guild?  Or for thieves to have an officially-sanctioned, chartered liveried company?  Does it make sense to have a single guild for all of the adventurers, despite their divergent interests and the danger to stability that concentrating all that firepower into a single organization has?  Maybe not (then again, maybe the thieves' guild just has a front company).  But it is probably fun, particularly if you have a city government where guilds elect the Lord Mayor and your wizards' guild candidate is running against the haberdashers' guild's candidate (backed by the thieves' guild, perhaps).  There's probably room for an amusing variation on ACKS' senate rules for guilds electing city leadership, if you're into that sort of thing.

The choice between guilds specific to a particular city vs cross-city guilds like the Hanseatic League is also an interesting one.  An inter-city guild provides for players wherever they may happen to be, while a single-city guild without reciprocal privileges elsewhere ties players to a particular place; it creates a home base.

This home basing effect ties somewhat obviously to halls and refuges.  Freedom of the city also ties nicely to some of the ideas from the halls post.  Someone (or a military unit) granted freedom of the city can do things like carrying arms in the city.

There are a number of rights traditionally but apocryphally associated with freemen—the right to drive sheep and cattle over London Bridge; to a silken rope, if hanged; to carry a naked sword in public; or that if the City of London Police finds a freeman drunk and incapable, they will bundle him or her into a taxi and send them home rather than throw them into a cell.  

Obviously a relevant and desirable status for adventurers!  And one which a city council might be careful to grant!  A good motivation for quests - "if we help Edmud the Haberdasher with his missing shipments, maybe we can secure his vote to get freedom of the city."  Basically: citizenship, but of a particular city.

This provides a potential non-mechanical form of progression or campaign progress.  As does progression from freeman to liveryman of a particular guild (with voting rights in city elections).  And then across cities.

This idea of medieval cities with independent governments whose freemen are not tied to feudal lords is also an interesting deviation from ACKS' assumptions about the relation between cities and high-level fighters, where cities are largely subsidiary to a particular domain.  An independent city council and Lord Mayor might come into conflict (open or otherwise) with adjacent feudal domains-holders.

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.

Rival Parties and Replacement Characters

Every now and then there's a discussion about bringing in replacement characters in OSR games.  There was one recently on the reddits that brought this back to mind.  The consensus is that you should find excuses to get new PCs into the game.  But the poster points out that this distorts the resource game, and then people amend their position so that obviously you should have replacement PCs come in with partly-depleted resources.

As for me...  I'm thinking this sounds like an awful lot of DM fiat.  I eagerly await the "rulings, not rules!" in the comments.  But seriously, there are a lot of things that I don't like about the...  3rd?  4th? wave OSR but one thing I do like is the focus on little rules subsystems, "procedures".  See also Arbiter of Worlds' discussion on rulings establishing precedent and evolving into rules.

Anyway.  What would a system for adjudicating the arrival of new PCs look like?

Before designing one, it's worth checking whether we already have such a system in place but have failed to recognize it.  And I think Wandering Monster tables that are heavy on demihumans and "rival" adventuring parties could easily serve this purpose.  I have never had a good explanation of the point of having 30% of B/X's dungeon level one encounter table be demihumans and humans.  But maybe these encounters are intended to be a source of replacement PCs.  Then the deeper you go, the less frequent these encounters become and the harder it becomes to replace your losses in the dungeon.  Using the first level's friendly table to gather reinforcements pairs interestingly with using it as a safe haven to rest in for expeditions down to the second level.  The sharp drop off in potentially-friendly results on the encounter table as you level is interesting - maybe by the time you're going into the third dungeon level, you're expected to have hirelings rather than "living off the land" for replacement characters.  And then again, in the wilderness you have the Men table, but usefully-leveled results vary in frequency by terrain type.

So what's the procedure here?  Roll a random encounter with demihumans or adventurers, get a reaction roll better than Hostile, and then you can smuggle your replacement PC into that game that way?  And maybe they come in with fairly complete resources, but you had to take a significant risk (an encounter roll) to get them.  And if you're a party with multiple members down, maybe you make a bunch of noise to provoke encounter rolls in the hope of friendlies rather than the conventional wisdom of quietly trying to escape.  It's a high-risk double-or-nothing play but...  having that choice, between the quiet approach and the loud approach seems like it could make for some interesting gameplay.

The wildly-diegetic angle here would be to roll NPC parties completely straight, and then if they're not hostile on the reaction roll, allow players to pick an NPC to start playing.  Might be exploitable if you go on "recruiting" expeditions in high-level areas though.

I guess I'm not convinced that some delay on the arrival of replacement PCs is an ultimate evil, particularly if you let players who are out of characters continue to contribute to the party's problem-solving discussions (voicing someone else's henchmen, perhaps).  Particularly if a caller is being used, where people aren't acting out on their own behalf.

Solving First Level - Resting in the Dungeon?

The natural product of two recent lines of thinking - figuring out how first level is "meant" to be played, and monsters that counter resting in the dungeon.

Notably, in Moldvay there really aren't any monsters on the first dungeon level's wandering monster table who hard-counter resting in a room where you've secured the door.  This means a first level party with only one sleep a day actually has a lot of leeway to recover that critical spell.  Traverse the dungeon to the stairs to the second level, hole up and recover the sleep if you had to use it to get there, go down to the second level and look for unguarded treasure, pop back up when you've spent the sleep and recover it safely near the top of the stairs...

Your ability to take out a lair is still quite limited, since your max sleeps per day is still only one, but your ability to survive wandering monsters is much improved.  And then rations and water become a limiting factor on the duration of your dungeoneering expeditions - though camping in pitch blackness in a sealed room in a haunted underworld certainly sounds...  demoralizing.  Not that torch smoke in an enclosed space sounds much better.  You start out with torches and fresh rations and then upgrade into lanterns and iron rations as you get the money for them...

There are probably amusing tradeoffs in waste management too - a 12-person party produces a fair bit of excrement per day.  If you leave it lying around it might attract vermin and molds.  If you pack it out with you then it costs encumbrance and might attract monsters with strong senses of smell.  Dare you use the dreaded dungeon bathroom, based on real FLGS bathrooms?

Oozes and Other Bunker-Buster Monsters

There was a discussion on the osr subreddit the other day about players resting in the dungeon, and it occurred to me that if you iron spike or bar a door shut so you can rest but roll an ooze on the wandering monster table while resting, it might just be able to get through under/around the door and disrupt your sleep.

Thinking about whether there were other types of monsters that could do something similar, incorporeal undead and swarms also spring to mind.  Maybe vampires if you let them go gaseous voluntarily.  Any of your burrowing enemies like ankhegs, grey worms, purple worms, thoqqas, and xorns, though those will mostly be loud and noticeable.

There's an interesting parallel with Deep Rock Galactic here, where they introduced several enemies (the bulk detonator and the oppressor) explicitly to counter the strategy of building bunkers.  These enemies can "force the door" by digging and are either difficult to damage from the front or explode massively.  It kinda makes me wonder whether some of these classic D&D monsters that might plausibly pass through doors were originally developed as counters for resting in dungeons.

I think this has interesting implications for how you build random encounter tables for dungeon levels.  If there's a "bunker buster" monster on your table, then the party is at risk of having their sleep disrupted if they barricade-and-rest on that level.  I went looking for AD&D 1e's tables but still haven't found them.  In OD&D Book 3, there's only the Ochre Jelly on the 3rd level table (though there sure are a lot of MUs who might be able to knock in a door).  Moldvay / OSE is much more interesting through this lens, with the following levels container the following potential bunker-buster monsters:

1. Nothing really (green slime isn't motile so doesn't count)
   
2. Grey Ooze.  Pixies hiding in the room you're bunkering in to prank you in your sleep would be pretty funny but I'm not sure it really counts.
   
3. Ochre Jelly and Shadows (Gelatinous Cube too but it probably can't fit under doors?), Basic Adventurers potentially
   
4. Grey Ooze, Ochre Jelly, and Wraiths.  Rust monsters too, depending on how exactly you do your spiking.  Expert Adventurers also possibly.
   
5. Black Pudding, Ochre Jelly, Spectres, Expert Adventurers, possibly White Dragon
   
6. Black Pudding, Purple Worm, Vampire, Expert Adventurers, possibly Red Dragon.
   

By the end there a solid quarter of possible wandering monsters are possible bunker-busters.  But holing up in the top levels of the dungeon is probably pretty safe!

If players quietly rest 8 hours in the dungeon, they'll get 3 wandering monster rolls per hour, or 24 total rolls.  Since the probability of a monster on each roll is 1 in 6, you expect four wandering monsters.  So if a quarter of your table for a given level is bunker-busters, then resting will usually fail.

ACKS has heuristics for building dungeon wandering monster tables, with one-third beastmen, one-third mindless/animals, and one-third "men and monsters".  It would be interesting to add a heuristic around bunker-busting enemies as well.  If you have one on a 1d12 table, then it won't come up in 70% of rests (assuming 4 wandering monsters are rolled; there's a long tail of bad luck in the wandering monster checks).  Two out of 12 means something gets through the door in 52% of rests.  At three out of 12, the door only holds in 32% of rests.  I think I kinda like 2 in 12 - you can do one ooze and one incorporeal undead, swarm, or burrower, so there's some variety, and rests are pretty close to a fair 50/50 shot.  Or if you count Rival Adventuring Party, then the interruption isn't necessarily unfriendly, but it might still be an interruption.

Surviving Fifth Level: The Heist Hypothesis

In another instance of recording bright things people have said in the ACKS discord, Arbrethil had some thoughts in response to Surviving First Level: The Heist Hypothesis and since he still hasn't started a blog (hint hint), I guess I'll record it here.

My players often break your assumptions (hiring lots of henchmen) [ed:to be fair, this is Moldvay's position and I'm just trying to solve it], but I've also definitely seen heist type play happen.  And I think when it does, it's often in the wilderness, where treasure hauls are bigger and random encounters are checked less often.  Certainly the odds of winning a wilderness fight are worse, but evasion lets you get away most of the time if it's not a fight you want.  And if you can find a good lair - stupid ogres that you can distract and bamboozle, or a lone dragon that can't both pursue pesky adventurers and guard its lair - that can be enough to level the thief on its own.  The other piece of the puzzle that stands out to me is the utility of a massed spear charge. Even if only three of your five characters can make a spear charge, if you win initiative you've got solid odds of cleaving through a dungeon-sized band of beastmen.  Once you can hire a few additional characters, a high AC PC-led dungeon phalanx trumps most any random-encounter sized band of beastmen on dungeon levels 1-2 even without magic support.
So I think your analysis of them going down to 2nd level pretty much checks out, and wilderness heists are like that but in every way moreso.

Emphasis mine.  I think the points about spear charges and high-AC phalanxes are good ones in ACKS specifically, though spear-charges can also work against the players if they encounter organized and appropriately-armed opponents.  The really interesting point (and one which cuts across both ACKS and OSE/B/X) is that that low-wilderness-level play is often very heist-like.  My Bjornaborg game was very treasure-map-centric once it got into the wilderness levels; get to the treasure, kill whatever's guarding it (if anything), and get back to town with it, avoiding encounters whenever possible.  And intuitively, it seems like there should be some parallels between low-dungeoneering-level and low-wilderness-level play, in that you don't have all the tools for either yet, under a theory of spell/class design where new abilities tend to be appropriate for the phase of the game where they become available.  To gather intel, you don't have Invisibility at 1st, and you don't have Wizard Eye at 5th.  To slow pursuit, you don't have Web at 1st, and you don't have Wall of Fire at 5th.  So it sort of makes sense that a style of play appropriate to the early-dungeon phase might re-appear in the early-wilderness phase, because you're in a similar lacking-tools situation.

This might also have something to do with my players' frustration with low-wilderness play.  I have never run 1st level before.  They've never played 1st-level OSR games before.  So we've never had to "solve" 1st level.  Hence, having to learn 1st level's lessons at 5th level instead.  But by 5th, you're more invested and the stakes are much higher; if you're learning heist play at 1st and you mess up, oh well, new characters are easy.

I wonder if this is the whole root of the problems I've been having with running wilderness game for literally a decade at this point.  It would be pretty funny if for all my theorizing about wilderness as dungeons and hiding maps and resource models and microsandboxes, the real answer was "make sure your players have had to survive 1st level."  A simple, practical, culture-of-play thing with unexpected consequences being the answer would be so perfectly on-brand for the OSR that I wouldn't even be mad.

But since, we're here and theorizing - there are some important differences in the resource model between 1st in the dungeon and 5th in the wilderness.  Fireball is pretty analogous to sleep - except that often in the wilderness you can regain fireball most days.  So that's a tremendous difference in your ability to deal with repeated encounters in a single expedition.  On the other hand, there's still some similarity in tackling lairs; one fireball isn't going to win a wilderness humanoid lair fight any more than a single sleep is going to win a dungeon lair fight.  And this is what drives the back to the heist dynamic - it's really about inability to take lairs head-on, since that's where the treasure (hence XP) is.  On the other hand, the ability to replenish fireballs daily opens up Fabian options for gradual lair reduction during a single expedition not available in the dungeon at 1st level.

The mercenaries-and-hirelings situation also bears examination through this lens.  Mercenary troops in the low wilderness levels probably serve about the same function are hirelings at 1st level; you're not going to be able to acquire and finance enough of them of high quality to rely on them alone to take out humanoid lairs, but they can even your odds against humanoid encounters, and at least help hold the line, pin the humanoids, and help prevent you from being overrun.  I'm really curious whether Moldvay would push against the use of mercenaries in the low wilderness levels in the same way he pushes against hirelings right out of the gate, so that players learn to do without them rather than using them as a crutch.  It seems worth considering to me; we certainly had fights in low-wilderness that my players "cheesed" with massed troops and then I got butthurt and wrote a long post about it.  I guess maybe I should go read Expert and see if Moldvay expresses an opinion on this.

In any case - thanks again Arb for pointing this parallel out!

1e's Time in the Dungeon

The introduction to the AD&D 1e DMG mentioned that it's reasonable to omit random encounter wandering monster rolls if you understand the purpose of random encounters and it doesn't apply.  It doesn't tell you what that function is, though.  So I went looking for it and sadly didn't find it.

Instead, I found the table of how long various actions in dungeon exploration take.  It's split across a page boundary (pages 96 and 97) so I have reproduced it in text here rather than as a screenshot:

• DOOR - search for traps: 1 round
• DOOR - listening for noise: 1 round
• ROOM - mapping, and casually examining a 20'x20' area: 1 turn
• ROOM - thoroughly searching after initial examination: 1 turn
• SECRET DOOR - checking for by simple tapping of floor or wall, by 10'x10' area: 1 round
• SECRET DOOR - thorough examination for means to open, by 10'x10' area: 1 turn

I was very surprised to see the time-costs of some of these actions listed in rounds (which in 1e are minutes, 10 per turn, not 6-10 seconds) rather than turns.  I went back and checked and B/X (well, OSE) simply doesn't have times listed for any of the interactions with doors, and doesn't distinguish between types of searching - it just says that searching a 10'x10' area takes a turn.  I think I had been running listening at doors, searching them for traps, and searching for secret doors as taking a turn each.  I'm not sure how I feel about breaking the atomicity of the exploration turn and allowing it to be subdivided further into rounds.  I also find it very amusing that on page 97 shortly after this table of suggested times to perform these actions, Gygax complains about players who search everything and listen at every door.

Assume that your players are continually wasting time (thus making the so-called adventure drag out into a boring session of dice rolling and delay) if they are checking endlessly for traps and listening at every door. If this persists despite the obvious displeasure you express, the requirement that helmets be doffed and mail coifs removed to listen at a door, and then be carefully replaced, the warnings about ear seekers, and frequent checking for wandering monsters (q.v.), then you will have to take more direct part in things. Mocking their over-cautious behavior as near cowardice, rolling huge handfuls of dice and then telling them the results are negative, and statements to the effect that: “You detect nothing, and nothing has detected YOU so far —“, might suffice. If the problem should continue, then rooms full with silent monsters will turn the tide, but that is the stuff of later adventures.

But...  my brother in dice, you set the time cost to perform these actions so low that players would be stupid not to search for traps and listen at every door.

Maybe it's stupid to require a turn to listen at a door - but it works well and it's an actual choice!  And if it takes a turn to listen at a door, search it for traps, or try to pick a lock, then maybe you really don't need the no-retry clauses.

This does force me to consider that maybe I should give the party "free" attempts at finding secret doors in passing, assuming that they're tapping as they go because it's quick, and then make a successful turn-length search primarily for finding the mechanism of action / trigger.

There is also an interesting bit in here:

A gnome, for instance, must remain relatively quiet and concentrate for a turn to detect facts about an underground setting. Likewise, a dwarf must work at it. An elf doesn’t detect secret doors 162/3% of the time by merely passing them unless he or she is actually concentrating on the act. A character with a sword must have it out and be thinking about its power in order for the weapon to communicate anything to him or her. To sum it all up, DON’T GIVE PLAYERS A FREE LUNCH! Tell them what they “see”, allow them to draw their own conclusions and initiate whatever activity they desire.

Emphasis mine.  I think grouping in the use of magic sword detection abilities with these inherent racial abilities is telling about the expected frequency and ease-of-use of sentient swords.  There are no swords with detection abilities on table III.G. Swords on page 124 - swords with detection abilities only arise from the Sword Primary Abilities table for "unusual" (sentient) swords on page 167.  In conclusion, further evidence that the sentient sword rules are significant and have a purpose.

Surviving First Level: The Heist Hypothesis

I'm still trying to figure out what a reliable or intended strategy for surviving 1st level is supposed to look like.  In part so that I can design a dungeon that supports it, or at worst not design a dungeon that accidentally hard-counters it.

Assume for the sake of argument a Big Four party of fighter, MU, cleric, thief.  Total XP required to get them all to 2nd is 7200.  Assuming stats roughly typical for 3d6, with +5% prime reqs all around and not much else, bringing us down to about 6850 XP.  Assume also that we're following Moldvay's advice to not let new players lean on hirelings as they learn the game.

A single dungeon encounter of 2d4 (average 5) goblins is a pretty fair match outside of the party's one sleep per day.  3d4 (average 7.5) skeletons are liable to get messy if the cleric fails the turning roll.  And those are both bite-sized random encounters with pocket change at best for treasure.  Lairs are much bigger, and dividing and conquering them requires shared languages, decent luck with reaction rolls, and ideally multiple humanoid lairs to pit against each other - but we can't count on getting that from the stocking tables.

Fighting monsters for their treasure seems like a pretty bad idea at 1st level.  You don't have any healing resources and your one sleep might be best used to survive a fight that you didn't want to be in, rather than offensively to win a fight that probably won't have treasure.  Oil and war-dogs are great and all, but...  is that really the intended solution?

Is it possible that you're meant to spend first level skulking about, looking for trapped or unguarded treasure and avoiding almost all encounters?

Well...  I'm not sure the math works out.  In ACKS, the expected value of an unguarded treasure on the first level of a dungeon is 870 GP, so you'd need about 8 unguarded treasures to get everyone to 2nd, for that cure light and extra sleep per day (the thief, incidentally, will level after only about four such treasures).  Buuut between trap rooms and empty rooms, about 9% of rooms (1 in 11) have treasure but no monsters.  So on average you'd need to explore 88 rooms on the first level of the dungeon to level by unguarded+trapped treasure, and that's assuming no casualties to traps, random encounters, stumbling into lairs, etc (granted, also assuming no monster XP - but if you're avoiding lairs and start heading for the exit when you've burnt your one sleep on a random encounter, you're talking maybe 25-50 monster XP per expedition). 88 rooms is huge for the first level of a dungeon - when I'm building standalone non-mega dungeons, I often have about that many rooms across three levels.  But it's sort of plausible that one could build a ruin that large, all of dungeon level 1.  88 rooms is also going to take quite a lot of play time to get through - my players in Rat-hell were exploring maybe 10 rooms per session, so we're looking at 9 sessions without any resets from casualties.  That seems like a long time to spend at 1st level.

The situation is much worse in OSE.  It's still 9% of rooms with treasure but no monsters, but the expected value of that treasure on the first level of the dungeon is a paltry 160gp - about a fifth of what it is in ACKS.  So you'd need to explore over 400 first-level dungeon rooms to level everyone off of unguarded treasure in OSE.

Is the answer to go deeper?  If you're already adopting a Robinsonian posture towards monsters, and the unguarded loot is better at lower levels, maybe this isn't crazy.  And traps don't necessarily scale up when you go down; ACKS' list of traps is the same for 1st-3rd dungeon levels, and OSE doesn't specify.  2nd level unguarded treasure in OSE has an expected value of 492 gp (about triple), while in ACKS it's 1491 gp (almost double).  And many of the random encounters on the 2nd level dungeon table are still susceptible to sleep - 5 2HD lizardmen vs 9 HD affected on average by sleep, for example.  So a 2nd level random encounter isn't necessarily any more of a game-ender than a 1st-level one is...

With ACKS' treasure numbers, I could see a dungeon with 30 rooms in the first level and 30 rooms in the second level yielding enough unguarded/trapped treasure to get a party to 2nd.  'course, in those 60 rooms you've got about 20 monster rooms, of which probably 2 are lairs...

There is also the question of surviving the traps.  In 60 rooms, we're talking about 20 traps (of which 6-7 have treasure).  Most of the "treasure traps" are threats only to whoever interacts with the treasure, but some of the "room traps" are threats to the whole party at once.  In 20 trapped rooms, we'll probably pull the "room fills with poison gas" one at least once, and it could easily happen twice.  Saves at 1st are pretty bad (we should expect ~1.5 survivors based on saves).  Finding and Removing Traps at 1st is also pretty terrible.  The Trapfinding proficiency in ACKS is actually a huge boost at this point in the game, almost doubling the thief's chances of successfully finding or removing a trap (granted, it's 15% chance of success to 25%, which is still not great).  ACKS also removes the poison gas room trap, though the falling bricks from the ceiling for 2d6 is arguably worse at this point since Petrification and Paralysis saves are slightly worse than Poison and Death, and its average damage is still going to be enough for the vast majority of 1st-level characters.

On the other hand, when you frame Finding Traps as "15% chance to detect non-monster TPKs before they fire", thieves start to sound pretty good.  It's not a high chance, but it's better than nothing.

Half-Levels

So I've been thinking about running a game at the office in the spring.  And I'm contemplating starting it at 1st level.

I have never run a game starting at 1st level, in any edition, that I can recall.  And I'm worried about the wild fragility of 1st level characters, and that 2000 XP is a lot if you're taking regular casualties.  You could easily end up having to earn something like 5k XP each before getting any particular character to 2nd level, losing it all over and over again.  I don't know that I want to spend that much time running super-low-level dungeons, never mind trying to retain players during massive attrition of PCs.

Reserve XP is, of course, an option, particularly with the interpretation where it isn't spent when you bring in a new character.

But another thought that occurred to me was that we could instead make 1st level more granular.  The big difference between 1st and 2nd is that your HP doubles, in expectation.  And you'll always gain at least 1 HP.  What if, at XP halfway between 1st and 2nd, you gained 1HP?  And then when you hit 2nd, you lose that 1 bonus HP but instead gain a rolled hit die?

1HP doesn't sound like much.  Even for a fighter it's 20-odd percent on average.  And for a 1st-level wizard, it's a 40% increase in HP, on average.

So it's kinda like 1.5th level.  And then Arbrethil on discord pointed out that going from 2nd to 3rd is also a really big power bump, between 2nd level spells and a further 50% increase in HP (even without ACKS' fighter damage bonus increase).  So maybe we need a 2.5th level too...

(If we did Iron Heroes-style hit dice, where d6 got turned into d4+1 and d8 into d4+2, we could be even more granular - could cut 1st level for fighters into four segments, one with d4+2 HP, then d4+3, d4+4, d4+5, and then finally 2d4+4 at 2nd level)

It also occurs to me that, in light of the big increases in survivability already taking place from 1st to 3rd level, maybe it's actually OK to delay improvements in saves and to-hit until 4th like B/X does.  I don't know that continuing to do big jumps in to-hit and saves every couple of levels makes sense after that point, but at the very beginning it almost seems defensible.

But I'll probably chicken out and start them at 2500 or 3000 XP like I usually do.

Goblins and Digging

Thinking back to tribal goblins, I still like the idea of having goblins operate primarily in the Morlock Model, hiding in underground dens during the day and then emerging to pillage the countryside at night.  This makes rooting out goblins clearly an adventurer activity rather than a problem you can throw mercenaries at - you can fight them in their holes or you can fight them at night, but either way you're gonna be fighting them in the dark.

 

But something I'm still fiddling with is how viable it is for goblins to get established.  Say you've got a warband of 30 goblins and you're sent by your chief to go start digging a warren near a human town.  How do the numbers work out in ACKS?  I'm not aiming for perfectly ACKS RAW-compliant here so much as plausibility-checking.

Per Domains at War: Campaigns page 81, digging 20 cubic feet of slapdash unpaved underground tunnel costs 1 gp in labor.  Depending on whether you factor in their poor encumbrance, goblins might have either 0 labor rate or 1sp/day, so optimistically with your 30 goblins and appropriate tools you can dig 3gp/day, or 60 cubic feet.  A 10' cube is 1000 cubic feet, so 16 days to dig one of those.  If you go with 5' ceilings instead and assume a sleeping goblin takes 12 square feet of floor space at a bare minimum, you need 360 square feet of floorspace, 1800 cubic feet, 90gp, 30 days to house just your lads very uncomfortably.  That's a long time to be sleeping in tents on the surface where random encounters can eat you, or where a nearby domain's garrison might discover you by reconnaissance rolls if you're in the same 24-mile hex.

We might consider the possibility that goblins are good at digging, or at least goblin pioneers are selected for their digging ability, and give them the Labor proficiency, bringing their individual construction rate up to 2sp/day or 6gp/day for the warband as a whole.  (If we give goblins Labor as stock, this also explains why orcs and hobgoblins like dragooning them into doing grunt work)  So then we're back down to about two weeks to dig a reasonable shelter.

What else could we do to bring the digging rate up?  The answer, naturally, is workbeasts.  The rules on using non-sentient workbeasts for construction projects in Domains at War aren't entirely clear.  One optimistic interpretation would let you use a workbeast as a number of unskilled laborers equal to its encumbrance over 5st, maybe with a handler.  So for example a mule is worth about four guys, which seems plausible if part of your work is hauling rocks and pieces of wood to use as supports.

But you know what has more carrying capacity than a mule, is more tolerant of low ceilings, fits goblin aesthetic, and eats garbage?  Giant beetles.  A giant fire beetle has 30 stone of encumbrance, so it's worth about six guys.  And adding some fire beetles to a goblin warband is not massively more terrifying for low-level PCs, like adding wargs, giant shrews, or ankhegs would be, if you want to use a goblin outpost under construction as an adventure site for 1st-2nd level characters.  Plus, having some beasts of burden to carry supplies from your point of departure makes a lot of sense; assuming goblins eat as much as a man, you're looking at 30 stone of supplies per week, which is conveniently the carrying capacity of a single beetle.  And it isn't totally implausible that you could train the beetles to do the actual digging, versus hauling dirt like you'd get with mules.

So let's say we add five fire beetles to our warband; a large encounter or a small lair, depending on how you look at it.  A trained fire beetle has a labor rate of 6sp/day based on its carrying capacity, so the five of them are another 3gp/day.  Even if we have to allocate a gobbo or two to supervise them, we have about doubled our digging power for a relatively small increase in required footprint (the beetles are only 2.5 feet long and being bugs may be able to rest in weird spots like on walls and ceilings.  Being 2.5 feet long, I imagine the pack saddles for carrying 300lb must be quite silly-looking, which, again, is pretty goblin).  With trained diggers and some beetles, we can get up around 9gp/day, which lets us dig a 10' cube every 5-6 days, and get a minimal shelter up in a similar timeframe.  In a second week, you could have cramped room enough for a second warband, and then they start digging too...  If you have a 6-warband village, you could have space for all your soldiers in a couple weeks, and then space enough for your noncombatants in a couple months.

Another interesting question, I suppose, is about linear distance.  If you wanted a long tunnel you could move 3 1/2'-tall troops through single-file, maybe you go down to 4' ceiling and 3' wide, so 12 cubic feet per foot of linear distance, or 0.6gp of labor.  Assuming you let that parallelize so they can bring their full power to bear on that 12 square foot surface, your digging crew with 9gp/day could dig about 15 feet of tunnel per day, or a 1-mile tunnel in a year.  So inter-hex tunnels probably aren't constructible in the timeframes of a typical campaign, even under the most charitable assumptions.  Maybe for a project like that, linking up to a well-established "city" type lair, you bring out the giant tiger beetles, with 250st carrying capacity and so 5 gp/day construction rate each.

In any case, I feel pretty OK with having goblins digging burrows and tunnels during the course of a campaign provided they have some helpful arthropods along.

Magic Swords, Proficiencies, and the 1e DMG

This is actually like three short posts about magic swords rolled in to one.

• I've been thinking about trying to organize some in-person D&D, and OSE is probably an easier sell than ACKS in this part of the world.  So in the absence of proficiencies, my previous post about magic items in place of proficiencies has been back on my mind.
  
• If I also wanted to keep cleaving in an otherwise mostly-stock B/X game to give fighters some of their OD&D multi-attack mojo back and help them scale into the high levels, that might also be a good thing to attach to magic swords.  At first wag, something like three cleaves per round per point of bonus seems likely to keep pace with 1 cleave per HD at least up to name level.  This has a number of other interesting properties:
• Fighters and thieves almost certainly get cleaves sooner than clerics as a consequence of the treasure tables being magic-sword-heavy.
• Non-champion low-HD humanoids are unlikely to cleave.  Might want to grant bigger monsters some inherent cleaves, much like how they have magic weapons for the purpose of damaging other invulnerable monsters.
• This also creates an interesting qualitative distinction between "mooks who could easily be humans in rubber masks" and "supernatural monsters who can kill everyone in a mead hall in a couple rounds".
  
• Mid-level rival NPC parties with magic weapons are cleave threats.
• On the downside, antithetical to "Steel isn't strong, boy.  Flesh is stronger...  What is steel compared to the hand that wields it?"
  
• Second, there was a discussion in discord recently about sentient swords.  Thinking about magic swords through the lens of "class proficiencies for fighters and thieves that clerics and MUs don't get", sentient swords are actually a restricted form of spellcasting for non-caster classes.  I think they're really important, that using them should generally not be a hassle, and neglecting to roll for them is a contributing factor to caster superiority.  The whole ego / conflict of wills mechanic is to keep high-level powers out of the hands of low-level fighters, and to keep fighters from amassing too many spell-like abilities by having multiple sentient swords. 
• I've been skimming the 1e AD&D DMG recently, because it also keeps coming up in various discussions.  I went and looked in the treasure tables because I was curious about how it handled sentient swords, and several things struck me:
• 25% of swords are "unusual" (sentient).  This is in the same ballpark as B/X's 30%, but much higher than ACKS or later editions.
• "All abilities function only when the sword is held, drawn, and the possessor is concentrating on the desired result."  This isn't "ask the sword nicely to use its powers".
  
• AD&D computes willpower score differently - sum of a character's Int and Wis scores plus their level (with the level bonus reduced by damage taken).  This means that cap for character willpower/personality score is basically unbounded!
  
• A "typical" random sentient sword has about 13 Int, empathic communication, two detection abilities and an Ego of 3 or so, and is reasonably useable even by a low-level fighter of average mental stats.
• "N.B. Most players will be unwilling to play swords with personalities as the personalities dictate. It is incumbent upon the DM to ensure that the role of the sword is played to the hilt"
• har har
  
• Reading the 1e DMG's magic swords, I was also struck how a number of them had effects that activate on a natural 20.
• This wraps back around to limiting the scope of proficiency-like exceptional cases by making them magic items.  Rather than taking Weapon Focus in order to get the ability to crit, it's a property of some swords.
  
• Making crits a property of magic weapons means monsters aren't critting PCs, which is the usual trouble with critical hit rules.  Except for that tiny subset of monsters with eg Swallow Whole abilities that trigger on a 20 - it's probably OK to have it as an exception for, again, big scary supernatural monsters.
  
• It also means you can have a variety of critical hit special effects, like vorpal's save-or-die vs the sword of life stealing's level drain on crit, without needing a complex critical hits table or system.  These effects can also be quite fantastical, since they're magical in origin.
• This might also be a reasonable way to handle combat-maneuver like effects.  Magic hammers that sunder weapons on a natural 20, axes that break shields, rapier of disarming, magic shield that knocks foes down when they nat 1 against you, ...
• Magic swords might also be a reasonable way to sneak backstab multiplier scaling into B/X, where even a max-level thief only does x2 damage.  idk whether I'd want to make just particular backstabbing swords that boost it, or something as simple as "a thief backstabbing with a sword +1 multiplies the die roll by x3 instead of x2, +2 -> x4, +3 -> x5".
  

Material Components in the Wilderness Levels

I wish I could say this was my idea but I'm happy to give credit where credit is due and just preserve/propagate/expand it.

Olle Skogren had a proposal in discord recently about requiring expensive material components for spellcasting in ACKS, their prices scaling exponentially with spell level.

This is both meant to make magic a non-free resource, which normally is wasted if you don't use it daily, to differentiate profane and sacred magic [by the different types of components required] and to make lengthy adventures logistically problematic for casters as you need at first backpack space for reagents, then a mule load and finally cartloads.

Emphasis mine - as that was the bit that most caught my attention.

I could take or leave the exponential cost scaling.  I think just having material components with mass that you have to haul into the wilderness seems like a super-viable solution to my issues with the spellcasting resource model in the wilderness game [1][2], where spellcasters can dump their full load onto any wilderness encounter because you very seldom have more than one encounter per day.  Material components are a resource that is attritable on scales of weeks; they create a limit on total spells expended during a particular expedition, without reducing the total amount of spell-power an MU can bring to bear in any one tactical engagement.  And they're super-associative; they're object in the game-world, no need to impose wonky spell-point recovery systems that operate differently in the wilderness and civilization, or argue about what constitutes an adventure for purposes of spells-per-adventure.  And since they're items-in-the-world, they interact with market mechanics, and their encumbrance introduces tradeoffs around speed vs preparedness.

At the bare minimum of complexity, where all components are an abstracted "spell components" item just measured in weight with a fixed cost per stone (maybe arcane components and divine components), it would not be hard at all to add to the wilderness logistics spreadsheet.  And then you could set up the material component costs of spells by level, so that maybe 1st level spells don't use them (so MUs have something always fall back on), and then component-mass required ramps up with spell level.  Or set up material component costs per spell, like Wolves of God does with its spellcasting system (I forget what he calls the points expended to cast, but spells of the same level cost significantly-varying numbers of points) - so sleep and fireball could have their high utility balanced by having to expend component-mass, whereas your lower-tier combat spells like burning hands might be free or just inexpensive.

One could, of course, go the traditional / AD&D route, where particular spells had particular components and they weren't interchangeable.  This would be an interesting avenue to introduce a layer of Vancian-style planning on top of ACKS' spell repertoire system.  And then non-consumed/focus components (like the amber rod and rabbit fur for lightning bolt) dictate how many parallel/simultaneous castings of a spell your collected MUs can drop in a single round.  But I don't know that I need that degree of precision to solve my wilderness-level problem.

This seems like the sort of thing where I should jump up and down and yell "Gygax knew!"  This is exactly the sort of "crufty old mechanic that nobody uses turns out to be critically important" thing that this blog was started on.  Gygax's Fence, if you will.  But I'm actually not sure.  The 1e DMG's encumbrance section (page 255) notes that material components aren't assumed to encumber unless they're unusually bulky.  I guess that yeah, if you're going to have spell-specific components, that would be a lot of paperwork.  And then I suppose the limiting factor on number of casts worth of a particular component that you'd bring on a wilderness adventure was cost, maybe?  Maybe in the misty dawn era before the shared Google Sheet of party encumbrance, it was hard to get players to actually honestly track it, whereas gold was an easier thing for a DM to keep account of, since you know how much each PC earned each adventure, and you can know how much they spend on each transaction.

But the age of the spreadsheet is come...

Market Availability and Diminishing Returns

Status: speculative proposal

From another of Rick Stumps' posts that I enjoyed:

Most of the light sources in the Mountain ended up being torches, then candles because they bought all the oil in the region and the few torch makers couldn't keep up with demand. Food prices in Esber skyrocketed because they bought all the smoked ham, salted fish, and cheese to be had for ever-increasing prices. They also stripped the area of oats and sheep tallow, making the local favorite breakfast (unleavened oatcakes fried in sheep tallow) rare and angering many...

The party also hired factors (merchants that buy and sell for you) in 5 towns and cities, bought an inn within Esber as a base and storehouse; met with the local Baron and Bishop to smooth things over  with them, and; gave generously to the poor affected by the lack of food...

If I simply said, "Don't worry about food, water, light, or time. Let's just play." None of that happens. They don't have ties to NPC factors in five towns and cities (that have already triggered 3 more adventures), no meeting with the baron and bishop, no interaction with farmers, or the beggars, no long argument with the muleskinners about if they should get paid as much as light infantry if they also fought the kobolds, no stash of 3,000 gp worth of gear on Level Three, none of it.

Obviously, any ACKS enthusiast is on board with limiting the amount of stuff available for purchase in a market every month.  But except for mercenaries, there isn't really a system for having prices rise as a result of buying up particular goods.  What would such a system look like, with a minimum of book-keeping?

ACKS' equipment availability table is a reasonable starting point for availability without any price increase.  Just at a wag, after buying all normal availability for the month, we might let players roll availability again, but now the goods cost twice as much per unit.  Then triple, then quadruple, up to a hard cap of say x10 (one of ACKS' underlying assumptions is that adventurers generally only have access to about 1/10th of the market).  The next month, take the highest multiple paid for a particular good, decrease it by 1, and that's the new starting multiple.

For example,

 

A mule is 20gp.  A class 4 market has one of each item between 11gp and 100gp per month.  So the first mule costs 20 gp.  The second mule costs 40 gp, the third 60, etc.  The party ends up buying 5 mules for a total price of 300gp - which would've been enough to buy 15 mules if they hadn't been in a hurry.  Next month, they return to the same market and a mule still costs 80gp, and even if price were no object, only six can be bought (at 4x, 5x, 6x, ... 10x the normal price).

One wrinkle here is substibility of goods.  If the party buys up the entire stock of plate mail and drives the price through the roof, people who would buy plate are going to buy banded mail instead, and smiths who would make banded are going to make plate instead, and prices for banded are going to rise too.  So it might make sense to put goods in buckets, and raise prices for the whole bucket.  In Rick's example, "food" is the bucket.  But on the other hand, a lot of goods aren't really substible; a light riding horse and a medium riding horse fill quite different needs, even though they're both mounts.  So maybe it isn't worth worrying about - the players themselves are likely to think hard about substituting banded mail for plate when it's a quarter the price.

Open questions:

Is it worth it to track price multiples across months?  Should the multiple decline differently based on how "connected" the market is to trade networks?  Is linear price growth right, or should be it exponential or something?  How do price multiples interact with hiring henchmen?  Could switching to per-season availability or something lessen the book-keeping here?  Is this competitive with just commissioning goods (the stock ACKS way to circumvent market limits)?  How does the venturer interact with this (maybe he just gets you access to extra goods at one lower price multiplier)?  Heuristics for effects of standing price multiples on domain morale, or a system for having them queue trouble?

Everybody / Nobody is Wizards

 I was kicking around a setting pitch recently, something like

The fire from the sky has ceased, and the earth has mostly stopped shaking.  In the isolated hamlets and manors that escaped the destruction, peasants and nobles alike dare to hope that perhaps the Wizard War is at its end.  The ambitious wonder what treasures and lore lie ripe for the taking in ruined towers, while the wise worry what warbeasts and fell engines have yet to be released.

Such a setup seems like it would have some nice properties - it fits the post-apocalyptic assumptions of old-school D&D by making the apocalypse explicit.  It gives me a lot of liberty to place fantastical ruined environments and landscapes close to utterly mundane surviving settlements, rather than having to go hard on realism/consistency in my dungeons like I do in most ACKS campaigns or having to go interplanar like in the Rathell campaign.  It's a good excuse to not have any class I or II markets, which in turn prevents the accumulation of large numbers of spies to break hijinks, makes it hard to sell magic items, etc.  And it supports a rather Iron Heroes relationship between player characters / civilization and magic; magic can be rare and scary.

It got me thinking that maybe it would be interesting to treat magic user as a side-class.  It's not something you can start with; all the master wizards were involved in the Wizard War and are dead or worse.  You gotta go dig up a book and read it, and that lets you become a 1st-level wizard as a side class (and that book becomes your spellbook).  Then to advance further as a wizard, you reverse-engineer magic items, destroying them to gain XP.  It would be appropriate to have reading tomes grant XP, but then if you have multiple wizards in the party they could pass them around and that gets ugly - destroying items has a finality to it.  Plus you can get still new spells reading tomes, so it's not like books aren't useful.  And if you make reverse-engineering items take time (like a couple weeks in-game), then your wizards will have more down-time than your non-wizards and will end up with less adventuring XP in their main class, even though they're not actually splitting that earned XP between their classes.

And then because nobody likes wizards (not even other wizards!) you get a reaction roll penalty scaling up with level.

Practical complications here: no sleep to win hard fights for 1st level parties.  Need XP values for items.  If thief is a side-class and wizard is a side-class...  are you only left with fighter and cleric as your "base" classes?  Or do you make cleric also a side class (maybe that also gets XP for destroying "profane" magic items).  Do I want to deal with fighter/wizard/thieves or just limit to one side-class?  How does casting in armor work if every wizard is also a class that gets armor?  If you have a very limited set of base classes, what do you do with with stat-lines that have eg bad Str and bad Wis?

Week as Wilderness Turn

Last post, I noted that the distances and times involved in wilderness travel in The Hobbit were so great that a game in that style might want to use 24-mile hexes as its smallest unit, and a week as its "turn" of wilderness travel.  What does it look like if you take B/X's or ACKS' rules for wilderness travel and rescale them this way?  What would you probably have to change and what could you leave alone?

If you're taking a week as your base unit of time, then you no longer have to worry about taking a rest day per week, and can just bake it in.  So you're scaling up your movement or actions per "turn" by a factor of 6, since you get six working days.  Using 24 mile hexes vs 6 mile, you're scaling up your unit of distance by a factor of 4.  So movement will be ~1.5x more hexes per turn.

Exploration movement speed : 24 mile hexes / week

• 30' : 1.5
• 60' : 3
• 90' : 4.5
• 120' : 6
• 180' : 9
• 240' : 12

So that's rather inconvenient, having to reckon in half-hexes.  I suppose we could do something like this, taking woods or hills as the default and multiplying everything by 2/3, so we get 1 24-mile hex per week per 30' of speed.  Which would be pretty clean, until you're on plains or road.

Nautical and aerial distances covered get quite large when you look at them on per-week timescales.  The lowly rowed canoe makes 4 hexes per week, while sailing ships with good winds might make nearly 8 hexes per day, or north of 50 hexes per week (assuming no weekly day of rest under sail).  Aerial travel gets pretty nuts when you multiply it all by 1.5 as well.  These modes of transport are fast enough that you probably don't want to track them hex-by-hex on a map on weekly timescales. You use sailing ships to move between maps.  You fly Eagle Airways for a couple of hours, not for a solid week (and still might get to move a hex or two).  Getting a personal, permanent flying mount is a phase-change event where you have outgrown thinking much about wilderness travel.

Since forced march is only one day of extra speed, followed by a day of rest and no speed, if we're dealing purely in weeks you might be able to just remove the option.  On the other hand, I like leaving this sort of option available to players; trading off now vs later is always interesting.  Maybe the right way to handle forced march on this scale is through something like strategic initiative in mass combat, where when you have a wilderness encounter, you can choose to forced-march to maybe gain a terrain advantage, bonus to escape roll, or surprise bonus at the expense of fatigue if brought to battle.

The right way to handle getting lost / failed navigation rolls is probably that they reduce your movement for the turn.  Maybe halve it; you spend a couple days wandering around within hexes that you were traversing, but going 24 miles out of your way is hard.  Could do hunting the same way; spend the whole week hunting, don't move at all, and get two rolls, or spend half the week hunting, get one roll, and half movement (and then if you also get lost that week, you end up still in the hex you started in).

Rations might actually get simpler, at a stone per man per "turn".  And fresh ration decay could be simplified too; you could just have all uneaten fresh rations go bad every turn.  Then hunting and foraging can work entirely within a single week; if you find a week's worth of fresh rations, that's a stone of iron rations that you can skip eating and carry over into next week.  So then you only need to track one number: the stone of iron rations you're carrying, which might also be thought of as your buffer against foraging failures.

As far as combat resources go...  for a Hobbity feel, you really want some refuges in the wilderness where you can recover hit points.  I still think recovering spells there too (not every night in the wilderness) makes sense, provided some reworking of mid- and high-level spells.  But I could see going the other way with it too, where you're pretty much always going to have full spells for any encounter.  This lends itself to very large encounters where you need lots of spellpower to bail the party out.

Wilderness encounter frequency definitely gets weird.  You probably don't want to have to roll a pile of d6s every "turn", and having multiple encounters per unit time is awkward.  I could see having one encounter per week, with the difference between terrain types being "roll n encounters and pick the scariest / biggest one".  Or just a quantity multiplier like dungeon level, where if you're in mountains you get 3x as many goblins as if you were in plains.  But this also doesn't quite square with the frequency of wilderness encounters in The Hobbit, where they can go a couple weeks without an encounter.  I could see having some <100% chance per week of an encounter, but when there's an encounter, it's always a lair - a kingdom of elves, a whole cave system of goblins, a big honkin' pack of wargs, a gang of trolls with accompanying cave full of magic swords of elven make.  On the time-and-space scales you're dealing with here, you might encounter a warband from a lair initially, but within a week they'll report back (or be noticed missing) and you'll be dealing with the whole village shortly.  Maybe winning surprise lets you only deal with one warband initially.

Domains get...  maybe a little messy.  Clearing a 24-mile hex is a lot of work.  You could do something like wilderness lords, where every wilderness hex already has a "lord" of a sort, and if you can knock him and all his monsters over that's good enough, the rest migrate or fall into line.  This is particularly plausible in a setting where everything talks, but might feel a bit strained after the third or fourth time, and maintaining relationships between all the "lords" of neighboring hexes is a lot of work.  Another approach might be clearing to capacity; if you want to build a village, you have to displace a number of HD of monsters comparable to a village of goblins.  This is what you might expect in a wilderness that is at capacity, saturated.  But this isn't the wilderness we see in The Hobbit, which is as post-apocalyptically empty of monsters as it is of men.

Maybe that's an answer - "clearing" a wilderness hex just means dealing with any already-known lairs in it, and then the real game is dealing with wilderness random encounters, which could have wandered in from nearby hexes, or could be from unknown lairs in the hex.  Taking land is easy; holding it is the hard part.  This creates a sort of "the dungeon is too big to be cleared" feeling, and is also consistent with the incomplete clearing of eg Mirkwood by the elves.  It pushes domain rulers into the same sort of reactive posture of incomplete control in game that they held in the fiction.

Switching to 24-mile hexes changes visibility somewhat, in that the edge of the hex is over the horizon.  You could spend a week exploring within a single hex, easily, and unless the next hex over is elevated, you might not know what terrain type it is until you enter it.  Finding a dungeon within a hex might take a while, but that's consistent with the fiction too, where they can't find the back door into the mountain.  They have trouble finding Rivendell too.

This mode of play doesn't seem terribly well-suited to 1:1 timescales, if most weeks you don't have an encounter.  I could see doing two turns per week of real time though, to make sure there's time to resolve wilderness encounters without too many more piling up.

ACKS Budget Dungeons: The Wages of Wizardry

Last post, I talked about the idea of designing dungeons under constraints.  I noted that designing dungeons using an in-world budget would be kind of a pain, but sleeping on it, ACKS does give us the tools to do that - there's the table of structural feature prices (shared with OSE), putting a 10x10 square of dungeon corridor at 500gp, and ACKS' heuristic that a character with n XP has earned about 80% of that from GP recovered, plus the section in Domains at War: Campaigns on using magic to assist construction projects.  Though looking over the guidelines there, it seems like using magic for underground construction would be tricky - Transmute Rock to Mud carries a collapse risk, Move Earth only works on earth and not stone, and Wall of Stone is dispellable.  Most of these spells only increase the construction rate of manual laborers, rather than contributing value directly.  Honestly Disintegrate might be the choice here for carving out dungeon cubes - but if you have a wizard with Disintegrate, pricing dungeon corridors gets weird, because they're free in money but not free in time.

In any case, to conclude that tangent, magic construction techniques might not be that useful for dungeons, but we can still get a decent estimate on how much dungeon a wizard could build based on their lifetime earnings, at 80% of their earned XP in GP.  Sadly this breaks down in ACKS specifically at high levels because of the domain XP threshold rule, where you can earn GP from your domains but don't get XP for it.  Fortunately, wizards earn the vast majority of their domain XP from spending money on magic research projects, so for now I'm not going to worry about this.

Let's consider two edge cases: the newly-fledged 9th-level wizard, and the biggest, baggest archmage who ever archmaged, 14th level.  310k XP and 1.06 million XP, respectively, for lifetime earnings of 248 kGP and right around 800 kGP.  Presumably some of that will probably have been spent on towers, libraries, workshops, henchmen, research projects, etc - 20-25% on a dungeon seems reasonable.  Let's call it 50k GP dungeon budget for the newly-minted wizard and 200k for the archmage.  What does that get you?

Well, at 500 gp per 10' cube, about 100 10' cubes for the wizard, assuming nothing else.  A 30x30 room is 9 cubes, so that's about 11 such rooms assuming no hallways, maybe 10 if you leave some budget for hallways and doors and such.  If 30% of dungeon rooms contain monsters, then we should expect about three monster rooms.  Given typical % in lair chances, we might see one lair or we might not.  Going down to 30x20 rooms as your standard size gets you 15-16 rooms instead with some slop for hallways, which is still about 5 monster rooms, one of which is a lair.  So that is not a big dungeon.

And then in the archmage case, you're working with quadruple the budget, so something on the order of 40-60 rooms, with 13-20 monster rooms of which around 3-7 are lairs?

Huh.  So I guess if you take "dungeons come from wizards" seriously, dungeons probably shouldn't be enormous, for any model of wizards where they're secretive rather than cooperative with other wizards.  Which seems a bit obvious in retrospect, but it's interesting to see just how small is really reasonable.

At the very high end, where you have a max-XP archmage who has spent 75% of his lifetime earnings on dungeon-building rather than 25%, you triple that again, up to 120-180 rooms, 40-60 monsters rooms including 10-20 lairs.

Looking back over price lists, one amusing consequence I could see coming out of this is in stairwells - a 10' wide flight of wooden stairs costs 60gp, while a 10' wide flight of stone stairs costs 180gp.  So a wizard cheaping out on stairs might use wood instead of stone, and that creates some amusing potential interactions with fire (and certain jelly-type monsters, I suppose).  Hey, you're a pro, you can Levitate, right?  Stairs are for chumps.

Wilderness and Attrition Revisited

Back in 2016, I wrote a post arguing in favor of shifting the resource model in wilderness adventuring towards that of the dungeon adventure, with spells recovered only in civilization.  I'm still not sure that that's wrong, but I have come to look at a piece of evidence that I used there in a slightly different light.

I noted that parties on foot were likely to have only one or two random encounter rolls per day, with less than one encounter per day in expectation, and consequently parties will tend to have full spells almost every encounter.  I have several new observations on this:

One: While this is true of ACKS, where entering a new hex triggers a random encounter roll, it isn't true of B/X (as represented by OSE) or OD&D.  In both of these, you only get one encounter roll per day by default.  Not sure about AD&D.  But in OD&D and B/X, parties on foot and mounted parties get the same number of encounters per day (less than one in expectation), and if you choose to interpret OD&D's spell recovery the way that most people do, this means you're at full spells every encounter there too.

Two: In ACKS, this might be viewed as a "circuit breaker" or comeback mechanic, where a party which is too poor to afford horses, or which has had its horses lost, stolen, or eaten, experiences a lower rate of encounters per day and is consequently more likely to survive.  Similar to how the wilderness evasion rules favor small parties, to make wilderness encounters survivable (but not winnable) for low-level characters who cannot yet afford mercenaries; if you just hit 5th and only have one fireball per day, you can still do wilderness adventures, you just have to take them slow and cautious.

Three: If going slow makes the resource situation easier, then hopefully it's a choice which should have tradeoffs.  The obvious resource being spent here is time.  Rations and starvation in ACKS are pretty forgiving.  So the main way time is expensive, outside factors like NPCs acting / clocks ticking, is costs-over-time of mercenaries, henchmen, and cost of living.  But linking in-game time to out-of-game time seems like it too would heavily discourage overly slow, cautious travel...  and I don't know that the bookkeeping would be any more onerous, really.

Winning at D&D, Domains as Endgame

I've been playing Grim Dawn lately, in addition to a little Deep Rock Galactic.  I'm getting up towards "endgame" in both of them.  I had never really considered "endgame" in the context of RPG-like games with leveling / progression systems (as opposed to, say, grand strategy games where "endgame" is when your strategy has come to fruition, your position is secure, and you get to coast to victory).  The way it seems to be used in Grim Dawn and DRG is that your progression stops or slows, but difficult and very time-consuming content remains, to interact with optionally.

Looking at Basic D&D through this lens of CRPG terminology, it seems like name level (9th-10th) is almost a soft-cap.  The XP to level changes from exponential to linear (with a steep slope), the rate of HP gain is halved, you've gotten most of the attack throw and save improvement that you're going to get, and you start getting access to new, expensive content on long time-scales: domains.

There are problems with this model, mostly around MUs getting access to 6th level spells at 11th, and some thief skills still don't get up into the 90+% range until 12th - but switching from 5% improvements to 1% or 2% improvements is a very soft-cap "diminishing returns" change of progression structure.  I don't think I would mind a variation that made this more explicit, by making 6th level MU spells ritual magic, and compressing thief skill advancement so that eg Hide in Shadows did get up around 85% by 9th level and then improve by about 2% per level thereafter.

Incidentally, having very-fine-grained progress on thief skills post-9th level might be the best argument I've ever considered for using percentile thief skills rather than d20 or d6.

I think it would be reasonable to conceive of making it into the 9th-11th level range as "winning" at D&D.  You've made it over the hump and fulfilled the default goal of accumulating personal power; further efforts to accumulate personal power will be slow going.  But now you have enough power to pick your own goals.  Or you could just retire to your tower and start a new character.

I've noticed among Grim Dawn players a sort of division, between players who enjoy leveling characters, and players who rush through leveling to focus on endgame stuff.  I think that (say) my past ACKS players also divided naturally into these two categories.  For some of them, domains were the game and leveling was just something you did to get there.  Others felt compelled to get domains just to keep up with the endgamers in terms of domain XP, but had no interest in domains as ends to themselves.

I think in a "MEANINGFUL CAMPAIGN" with very high individual-player autonomy, having a few players pursue the domain endgame is probably less disruptive for everyone else than in a high-cohesion tight-party game.  Particularly without rules for XP from domains.  And if domains are explicitly endgame content, and at that point you're already about capped-out on XP progression anyway, who cares if they give XP or not?  The passage of time that Gygax describes, where you're probably only passing a couple weeks of game-time per week of real-time, also seems likely to keep adventuring PCs at the center of the action, while PCs hoping to only do domain stuff will be stuck waiting a lot.

...  I wonder what the 1e DMG has to say about domains specifically?

Chesterton on Letting the Dice Fall Where They May (but Unseriously)

Continuing with Orthodoxy (chapter 7):

I could never conceive or tolerate any Utopia which did not leave to me the liberty for which I chiefly care, the liberty to bind myself. Complete anarchy would not merely make it impossible to have any discipline or fidelity; it would also make it impossible to have any fun. To take an obvious instance, it would not be worth while to bet if a bet were not binding. The dissolution of all contracts would not only ruin morality but spoil sport. Now betting and such sports are only the stunted and twisted shapes of the original instinct of man for adventure and romance, of which much has been said in these pages. And the perils, rewards, punishments, and fulfilments of an adventure must be real, or the adventure is only a shifting and heartless nightmare. If I bet I must be made to pay, or there is no poetry in betting. If I challenge I must be made to fight, or there is no poetry in challenging. If I vow to be faithful I must be cursed when I am unfaithful, or there is no fun in vowing... For the purpose even of the wildest romance results must be real; results must be irrevocable.

which reminded me variously of illusionism (where the results aren't real), and storygames (where the players are authorially unbound), and of discussions of agency.

On the other hand,

Pride is the downward drag of all things into an easy solemnity. One "settles down" into a sort of selfish seriousness; but one has to rise to a gay self-forgetfulness... Seriousness is not a virtue. It would be a heresy, but a much more sensible heresy, to say that seriousness is a vice. It is really a natural trend or lapse into taking one's self gravely, because it is the easiest thing to do. It is much easier to write a good TIMES leading article than a good joke in PUNCH. For solemnity flows out of men naturally; but laughter is a leap. It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light.

which reminded me of this post of mine, where I concluded "Perhaps the problem with my previous approach to RPGs was taking things entirely too seriously."  And that is not something I have remedied, really.  It reminded me also of Lurkerablog's excellent post on tiki and early D&D:

Thinking about it, the slow evaporation of the Tiki mood from DnD just might be what defines the edge between James Malichewski’s Golden and Silver ages. When DnD got its visual style defined as heavy metal it acquired metal’s earnestness – the wargamer tourists of the 70s gave way to a new player base of DnD natives who took it all very seriously and wanted to know just how heavy that axe was. Kitsch, whimsy, a lack intensity – these became signs of poor commitment.

It is an easy error to make, for irrevocability to become serious, for it to turn to grave plotting to limit one's risks.  But I do think my favorite ACKS players have been the ones who took irrevocability in stride, for whom it was not a deterrent to action.  "Ha, told you we'd survive!" (or "that was a really funny death, it's going to be hard to top that")  I don't know how I would encourage such an attitude though.

Maybe part of the problem is that ACKS takes itself seriously.  That's part of why it's good; because it was taken seriously during its creation.  But it's not without its costs.