Five Torches Deep: Homesteads Review

At the end of my long series reviewing Five Torches Deep, I joked that I should review their Homesteads supplement.  I skimmed it over lunch a bit ago and by the end a review seemed unavoidable.

Homesteads has some nice ideas but there is at least one gaping hole in its implementation.  Like a "did they really just spend a sixth of the product doing setup for a subsystem and then leave all the actual mechanics as an exercise to the reader?" gaping hole.

Homesteads is twelve (12) pages including the cover and the table of contents, so ten pages of content for your $4.  I was startled by the short pagecount for the price.  I thought 5TD's core's 36 pages of content for $10 was steep, and this is an even higher price per page.  We get half a page of intent and overview, a page and a half on farms and crops, two pages on upgradeable town structures, a page on improvements to farms and town, a page with a table for adventure hook generation, two pages of carousing table, one page for another rubik's cube generator, and a final page with how to customize this material.

Unlike 5TD core, no playtesters are listed in the credits.

The first two pages, I was pretty much on board.  5TD as written seems like it is in need of a gold sink, and giving people XP for spending it on town stuff is reasonable (ACKS gives XP for spending on castles, as another example).  Their numbers for medieval farm productivity were in the realm of the reasonable.  I was surprised to find an incomplete sentence under the heading "The Homestead" - I think the text in this product is not as well edited as 5TD core's text was.

Page 2 gives us the abstraction of plots, approximately 5 acre areas of land sufficient to be worked by, and to support, a person.  It suggests that in order to support more people, you can buy upgrades like oxen and plows and such.

Page 3 talks about crops.  It is suggested that crop types should have different viability based on terrain of plots.  Crops have a numeric measure of quality, which it is suggested should be impacted by a couple of factors.  And there's a table of possible semi-magic effects that crops could have, like giving you a bonus to certain rolls for a day or healing a couple HP.

And then we hit page 4, which abruptly switches to town buildings.  This was where I went "hold up".  They don't provide anything concrete in the farm rules.  There's no mechanic for determining quality of a given crop.  All these factors like seed quality and crop rotation and terrain type that they want you to take into account never get turned into numbers.  Spoiler: the farm improvements on page 6, like plows and irrigation, don't have any concrete effects or concrete prices either.  Neither do any of the building or town improvements.

At first I thought my pdf reader had glitched out and failed to render a page, but this is consistent with the table of contents.

There aren't even tables for generating crop types, which seems like it would've been a reasonable thing to have.  Two d6 tables per terrain type, one with some plant names and the other with some effects that make sense for that terrain type (swamp plants more likely to give you bonus to saves vs poison and disease, mountain plants more likely to give you bonus to climbing).  Is that too much to ask?  Instead every DM is left to fend entirely for himself in inventing fantasy plants.

As an exercise, I wrote a draft of what I would've expected to see.  Not necessarily those particular details, but that level of effort.

I think I've learned something about myself here - one of the things that I value at a visceral level in an RPG supplement is adding new subsystems or refining existing subsystems.  Subsystems that lazy DMs can use to generate emergent behavior, and subsystems that give players informed choices with consequences, subsystems that they can play with.  There is a subsystem-shaped hole (fertile ground, if you will) in the middle of Homesteads, and it bugs me a lot.

On to town structures.  Each structure has a tier, 1 to 5.  Upgrading them costs money and takes time and makes them give you better stuff.  I rather like the art for the buildings.  There are lots of little details like the guy passed out drunk on the patio in front of the tavern, and the layout on the forge looks pretty reasonable.

It's really weird that they keep referring to Goods in bold caps like they do Supply.  Goods are mentioned in the introduction as "tools and services" but this is never expanded upon.

Smithies can repair damaged arms and armor and craft mundane equipment (though not martial weapons or heavy armor without upgrades).  When upgraded, output improves and they can specialize into producing certain kinds of things (allowing eg martial weapons and armor) and masterwork items.  Notably, smithies produce items much faster than most characters can.  A specialized smithy can produce an item in two days, which is equivalent to never failing a check under 5TD's crafting rules.  So it seems that NPCs are playing by different rules than PCs.

Lodges let you butcher monster corpses into Supply, and can hunt for Supply if you don't bring them anything.  It's weird though, because the total weekly output of the lodge is the same either way, but the text says that Supply from monsters can be used for crafting and spell components, while Supply from hunting and foraging is "mixed food and components".  I don't know what to make of this.  Is Supply a unified abstraction, or are you supposed to track different kinds of Supply points?  But if they're not different kinds of Supply, then why would you ever bother hauling monster corpses back to town if the total yield is the same either way?

I guess the crop mechanics already sort of break the unified abstraction of Supply - if a farm is expected to produce a certain surplus Supply of a certain kind of crop, then Supply must have types.  Maybe that's why they didn't actually develop the crop production mechanics to their natural conclusion?

The lodge also has a mechanic for going out in the woods and finding mundane plants and animals for you.  Maybe you're supposed to use it to find seeds for native crops?  I thought it was funny that their example was a banana slug.  I don't know why you'd pick that.

Taverns improve your natural healing rate and generate rumors.  The healing rate scales up exponentially, so a tier 5 tavern lets you heal 16 HP per night, which is a lot in a system where a max-level dwarf fighter only has about 51 HP in expectation.  Upgraded taverns attract potential retainers and let you heal ability score damage at a rate of 1 point per week.  Aha, a clarification around recovery of ability score damage from maiming!

The market's main function of attracting merchants who sell useful stuff seems kind of useless in the absence of a table of prices.  It is interesting in that this suggests that you should be able to buy equipment, but "weapons" are an example of "specialized or exotic" equipment that requires a specialized vendor who takes up a market stall and may or may not be in town on any given week, and you can only have one of those per tier.  PCs can also invest in markets, yielding a 5% return per tier every 1d6 weeks thereafter.  There aren't any limits on this mechanic, although I don't think you can get your principal back.  Exploiting the power of compound interest is left as an exercise for the reader.

The fifth building isn't a building with mechanics, just a bunch of suggestions filed under the name "Oddity".

Page 6 is the no-op improvements that I mentioned in my complaint about farming.

Page 7 is a table of farm-related adventure hooks, a table of town-related hooks, and two tables for determining relationship between NPCs and reason for it.  I like that a rival adventuring party raiding the town is on the town hooks table.  This is a marked improvement over 5TD Core's random encounter table.  "One structure's expert has a week of incredulous productivity" was very funny though.  The NPC feelings tables can generate some results that don't make much sense, and if you used them heavily the ensuing network would probably lead to very inconsistent characterizations.  But hey, people are complicated.

Pages 8-9 are a d% carousing table.  Spend 1000 gp for a roll.  1-40 are bad things (up to including "you seriously injured yourself, roll in the maiming table", "you fell into a coma", "you lost all your treasure", and "1d6 random structures burn down", which could be up to 90kgp in lost upgrades), 41-60 are mostly minor except for waking up enslaved, 61-100 are good things (up to and including "acquire an artifact", "gain a class feature", and "all structures improve one tier").  I think my favorite is "Access a hidden part of the dungeon."  ...  while carousing.  What's the intent here?  You wake up hungover in a hidden part of the dungeon?  Or you accessed it and returned and now you know the route, but a whole bunch of gameplay got skipped?  So this is a very high-entropy table and not necessarily a very associated table.  The negative consequences cannot be mitigated and are severe enough that I would not expect my past players to use it (certainly not regularly), because they were risk-averse.

I thought it was cute that the carousing art included a cat with nursing kittens.

d'aww

So I started looking at the carousing art more and then I realized that there was no meat, not even a bone for the dog.

Hey human you got anything worth eating?

I dunno, I figure if you drop a thousand GP a head carousing, you probably get a whole hog each and have something to spare for this poor pup.

Root vegetables: the repast of heroes.
You'd think that if your job is killing monsters, you wouldn't have any qualms about eating them.

Page 10, we get another rubik's cube generator for the layout of towns and the areas around town.  Describing anything in rural medieval fantasy as "suburban" seems odd to me, and it also seems odd that you could end up with two "dense urban cores" distant from each other, but whatever.  The art for the town and region maps is quite nice.

Page 11 has a table for "stuff that happened while you were out adventuring" (though some of the town hooks table entries also seem to fall into that category), and some reskinning advice, most of which is pretty trivial.

And that's it.

So what do you get, really, for your $4?  Two pages of usable mechanical content (the buildings), one page of decent tables (the hooks tables), a couple pages of tables that I don't think would be very useful (the carousing table), the Assembly Required farming bits, and some padding like the no-op improvements.  That's...  kind of ridiculous.  Is this standard for third-party 5e-adjacent products?  About three pages of useful content for $4 in pdf rather than paper, with a 4.5/5 star rating and Gold bestseller status on dtrpg?  I need to get me an artist and get in on this racket.

I think bringing more Stardew Valley into D&D is a promising idea.  I think playing grounded, agrarian "heroes of the wee folk" embedded in a community, with rules to back that up, would be a really interesting alternate direction to take D&D, away from both the superheroism of later editions and the traditional OSR domain game.  I would love to see it executed well (arguably Beyond the Wall is aiming at these themes, but I don't love the coming of age bits).  Five Torches Deep: Homesteads might be a decent beginning in that direction, but I think it doesn't deliver and it's overpriced.

I will not read Duels.
I will not read Duels.
I will not read Duels.

Five Torches Deep Review, Part 6: The Principle Unemphasized, Conclusions

I've spent a long time talking about some of the things that are wrong with 5TD's subsystems (most recently magic).  I wanted to say "all the things wrong with 5TD" but sadly that's not true.

Most of the issues I've talked about so far have been because 5TD went overboard on making life suck for player characters.  But eventually it dawned on me that they missed a central part of the OSR play experience while they were focusing on some of the peripheral mechanical elements.

It's right there in their list of OSR design principles: "Travel and Resources".  When I first read that it struck me as not quite wrong, but not quite right either.  Travel is a thing that happens in OSR games, yeah, and so is resource management.  But that's not the whole story; those are just fragments of a bigger principle.

I'm not sure I've quite nailed it down either in terms that a reader from a 5e rather than an OSR background would get.  The closest thing I have is "player-driven exploration".  Some might say "agency" and that would be more precise but less clear unless you already know what they're talking about.

OSR play is typically site-based rather than plot-based.  You have an unexplored adventure site, like a megadungeon or a 1200 square miles of wilderness mapped on a hex grid.  It's usually big - way too big to be cleared in a couple sessions, maybe too big to be cleared ever.  Players might have some objectives in that area, but generally not much of a fire under their ass; no saving the world, probably no deadline.  They choose where they go, how they get there, and how to interact with the locals on arrival.  They have to explore the area to locate their objectives, get strong enough to take them, and then get them home safely.  All of this happens over the course of many sessions within the same site.  Players gradually build up knowledge of the area, which allows them to better plan their next adventure.

So yes, you have to travel.  And yes, you have to manage resources.  But there's continuity and discovery and non-mechanical progress within a site.  Travel is something you get better at as you discover better routes, and it's very much part of gameplay, not handwaved at all.  Resource management is something that you get better at within a specific site as you discover places to recover resources, or shorter and less dangerous routes that get you to your objectives with more resources to spare (Dark Souls does this well).  Players are faced with lots of strategic choices, and they benefit from paying attention over the course of a campaign and making good plans based on what they've learned.  It is up to them to choose what risks to take, where to explore next, when and where and who to fight, when to flee combat, when to call off the expedition as a whole.  Their fates are very much in their own hands.

5TD's DMing advice touches on considerations of choice and exploration on page 43.  I disagree with some things here - "Making sure choices are meaningful demands complex and dramatic situations" is, I think, simply wrong.  A meaningful choice is one which has foreseeable, significant consequences, and where no option is unambiguously superior (so not a null choice).  Drama has nothing to do with it.  I also think that "[5TD] does insist that the game have a sense of exploration, discovery, and wonder" sells exploration far short.  Only a sense of exploration?  What I'm after is to pose players with problems and choices analogous to those their characters would experience during exploration; in effect to create the experience of exploring.  I think this is a good heuristic for mass combat and domain rules too - are you making players make the same sorts of choices that trouble generals and kings?

But by and large the principles on page 43 have the right idea.  The trouble is that the rest of the book doesn't back any of this up concretely.  Hence, a principle recognized, but unemphasized.

There's no advice on building adventure sites for long-term use, none of the standard tricks like jayquaying (though this might emerge sometimes from their generator system) or restocking or empty rooms or danger gradients / dungeon level or random encounter tables as a means of characterizing a place.  One might reply that most OSR systems don't explain these things either, and that's true - but most OSR systems come with paint-by-numbers rules for building dungeons that tend to achieve these properties without the DM having to understand the theory.  The example dungeon for 5TD's rubik's cube generation method is nine rooms.  This would be small indeed by OSR standards.  It's only one page so one can only expect so much, but it could certainly give newer DMs the wrong idea.  My typical dungeons are closer to 100 rooms, and many OSR dungeons are much larger.  The example adventure they give in the DMing advice has the players choosing which of three points of interest at a site to investigate, not crawling the site with strict time-tracking during exploration, and while it does strongly suggest having multiple factions in each adventure, it also suggests forcing players to choose between them.  That's not how player-driven games work.  If a faction has something that they want, players will naturally align with them out of self-interest.  You don't need to impose a "time-sensitive choice that compels them [players] to go down one (potentially) irreversible path," especially not every session like 5TD's DMing section suggests.

I think we also see this lack of interest in choice and exploration-type gameplay in the mechanics.  The mechanics for exploration and traversal of dungeon environments are lighter than even B/X's.  Trapfinding requires DMs to provide environmental clues about the presence of a trap and suggests forbidding players from rolling dice unless they propose specific things that they're trying, which is well and good.  And there're rules for different amounts of lighting, though their effects are mostly on combat.  But there's not a damn thing about secret doors or stuck doors or listening or smashing locked chests or spiking doors shut or non-combat movement through the dungeon.  There's certainly no mention of the players drawing their own map of the dungeon or the wilderness as they explore it!  While 5TD has overland movement rates modified by terrain and weather, the only other wilderness systems are foraging for Supply, ration consumption, and the same random trouble table as in the dungeon - not even rules for getting lost.  Timekeeping rules are present, but the unit is the hour (both in wilderness and dungeon), and "As a rule of thumb, a GM can count every 3-4 scenes, rooms, or encounters as one hour."  This is very loose.  5TD's equivalent to the random encounter roll is also very loose - rather than being a table of monsters, it has some vague suggestions about escalating danger level at different rates.  Looseness in timekeeping makes it hard for players to make good plans and take informed risks, and it certainly doesn't put them on the horns of dilemma in deciding between spending a turn listening at a door or saving that turn and just going for it.  I could see it sort of working for a node-based dungeon where moving between nodes takes an hour, and dealing with a node takes about an hour.  But that is hardly representative of the way dungeons are typically run.

In effect, non-combat dungeoneering gameplay is largely ad hoc in 5TD, rather than being a systematic game-loop as in OSR games of D&D lineage.

Involved fix: graft B/X's exploration rules, noncombat movement, and timekeeping onto 5TD.  This also addresses issues with encumbrance and resilience penalty gradients.
Involved fix: provide better dungeon-building advice.
Involved fix: provide better DMing advice [1][2]

In closing: I have said all that I aim to say about Five Torches Deep.  I think they chose bad design goals and then implemented them heavy-handedly.  I think they also missed at least one of the defining features of the OSR playstyle in implementation.  I think a much better OSR/5e hybrid is very doable.  I hope someone will make it.  For my part, I think I am not the one to make it, as my familiarity with 5e is too limited.  If someone reading this does take up that cross, I would be happy to review your draft or otherwise consult.

Thank you for reading all of this.  This review is right around 10000 words, or 20 pages in a word processor under default settings.  It's been about a three-week project.  The text-heaviest of 5TD's pages are about 700 words, and there are 36 non-art pages, so this review was conservatively 40% as much text as the product itself, which is a new one on me.

...  maybe I'll just take a peek at Homesteads.  I did already pay for it...

Five Torches Deep Review, Part 5: Haphazard Magic

Last post, I discussed issues with Five Torches Deep's fatigue, disease, and maiming systems.  Today I will discuss issues with its spellcasting system.

I have played my fair share of casters in systems with unreliable casting.  I had a sorcerer using Dragon Magic back in 3rd edition who risked sucking the party through a hole into the astral plane to get free metamagic.  I had an arcanist in Iron Heroes who failed his roll to make the tank stronger and made him weaker instead.  I had a psyker briefly in Dark Heresy before he combusted.  And in the OSR space I've read, but not played, Dungeon Crawl Classics' system (for which it is well-known), and the ACKS heroic fantasy book's system (which remains obscure).

The main problem with 5TD's spellcasting is that the mishap rate is extraordinarily high.

A 1st-level caster with a +2 casting stat modifier (not unreasonable on 3d6) has a +4 total on checks to cast, and the DC to cast a 1st-level spell is 11, so they need a 7+.  If they fail the roll, then they have to roll on the mishaps table, and they lose access to 1st-level spells until the next time they can safely rest (ie, between adventures).

So they're going to generate a mishap about 30% of the time.  At first level the result on the mishaps table that does 1d6 damage per spell level has a 50% chance of killing (er, maiming) you.  Other results on the mishap table may induce TPK depending on circumstances of casting.  So you're going to want to cast very selectively.

Surely it gets better at high levels?  At 9th level, your caster probably has +3 or +4 in their casting stat and +4 proficiency bonus, call it a total of +8, so now you only suffer mishaps casting 1st-level spells on a 1 or 2, so 10% of the time.  Casting a 5th-level spell, though, your mishap chance remains 30%, because the DC has risen just as fast as your modifiers.

For comparison, under DCC's system, generally a failed roll to cast causes you to lose that one spell until end of adventure, and only on a natural 1 do you lose the spell and generate a mishap.  Mishaps are also described per spell, so a mishap with Fireball might make a big mess but a mishap for Read Languages might be subtler and more playful.  Under ACKS' unreliable casting system, mishaps are only generated on two sequential natural 1s in a row (ie, you roll a natural 1, the spell fails, you roll another d20 to see if you get a mishap, and on a natural 1 you do), but mishaps are generally quite severe (similar to rolls on the maiming table).  In Lamentations of the Flame Princess, magic isn't unreliable but a lot of spells have weird or gross side effects, but never just straight-up failure-to-cast-and-horrible-mishap.

I think it is fair to say that these systems are fairly typical OSR implementations of weird and unreliable magic.  5TD's system blows them away for unreliability.

If I recall my Dark Heresy rightly, casting was rolled on a d% and you got a mishap whenever you got doubles (so 11, 22, 33, 44...).  So you might successfully cast but also get a mishap in addition to the spell effects that you wanted, which was neat.  But that only gives us a mishap rate of 10%, versus 5TD's 30%.

Casting a spell in 5TD is much less reliable than using psychic powers in Warhammer.  Reflect on that for a moment.  Is that what you want in your D&D?

The only system that compares for caster unreliability that I have seen is Iron Heroes, where one of the design goals was to make a fighter-centric game and to make wizards bad.

I think the best archetype ability in the game might be the wizard's ability to reroll mishaps.  The cleric's ability that gives allies advantage on rolls on the maiming table is sort of ridiculous (and here I thought a 1-in-20 chance of death was too low; 1-in-400 is just comical), and the fighter's action economy thing that lets you turn a move action into a standard action for an ally is also strong (strong party comp: one cleric with Reforge and advantage on injury rolls and then a pile of fighters who can turn move actions into standard actions for allies, and who use it on each other to give extra full attacks once you can make multiple attacks with a standard action, every round because the rules don't say how often you can use it).  But those are gravy abilities, while rerolling mishaps means that you can do the main thing that your class is supposed to do and you might not even kill everyone.

It would be one thing if 5TD's spells were wildly good, so you were taking a big risk in hope of a big payoff.  But I don't see that here.  Sleep scales up better in terms of hit-die limit than it does in OSR games so it probably remains viable across the level range, but you have to roll to hit with it now and I don't think the HD limit is high enough that it will ever be a straight-up encounter-win.  Magic Missile scales up a bit faster than usual but again there's a to-hit roll now.  Fireball looks bog standard.  A lot of spells now require Concentration in 5TD that don't normally.  The healing spells look stronger than I'm used to, and there are a few other stand-outs on the divine list, but overall most of these spells don't look as punchy as their OSR equivalents, for the level when they become available.

Back in third edition, we had a rule of thumb that any spell that required an attack roll and also gave that target a saving throw needed to have a really big effect, because it was probably only going to work a quarter of the time.  Phantasmal Killer followed the same logic - save or die as a 4th level spell was OK because it required the target to fail two saves based on different ability scores, which meant in practice that it almost never worked.  The same is true here - any spell in 5TD that requires an attack roll needs to be really punchy, because it's going to fail (and blow up in your face) a third of the time on the roll to cast and then half the time on AC.

Quick / minimal fix: spellcasting only generates mishaps on a natural 1.  Failing to cast a spell causes you to lose that spell until your next safe rest, not all spells of that spell level.

I'm not really sure this is enough to save 5TD's spellcasters.  They also have to deal with spell components, at a rate of two Supply worth of components per spell level.  So even under the default system, an 18-Int wizard can only carry 9 spell levels worth of components.  That sounds like a lot at 1st level, but even if you're pouring your stat increases into Int you're only getting 21 at 9th level which doesn't go very far with 3rd-5th level spells.  And that's starting with 18 Int!  If you're playing an Elf, your 13 Int gets you six levels of spell components, and if you put all your points in Int you'll get nine levels of spells at 9th level.  And may the gods help clerics with low Int, who still need the same amount of supply in spell components.

There is a note about "focuses", orbs and staves which obviate the need for spell components entirely.  But as there are no treasure tables, distributing these is left purely to DM fiat.

Quick fix: make spell components 1 SUP per spell level.  This is a band-aid.

It isn't 100% clear to me whether components are consumed on a failed spellcasting check, but that would be a worthwhile clarification to add.

Anyway, as far as I can tell this spellcasting system is dramatically worse than anything I've seen in the OSR.

Next, last post in this series: the critical thing that 5TD misses about OSR play.

Five Torches Deep Review, Part 4: Resilience, Corruptions, and Maiming

Previously, I discussed my complaints about the supply and equipment systems in Five Torches Deep.  Today, issues with the resilience system, maiming, and corruptions.

Is this even a review anymore?  Maybe I should've titled this project "Fixing Five Torches Deep".

If you've been reading the previous parts of this...  series, several of my issues with Resilience should be predictable.  It sets a cap based on a stat's score, and sometimes you're gonna roll low and it's going to really shorten your adventuring life.  With 3 Con, you can only adventure for 3 hours before you have to start making Resilience rolls (at -4 from your bad Con, so you're going to fail about 2/3 of the time), and when you fail one, you're done.  You're going to be dead before the rest of the party even has to start rolling Resilience.  The penalty-gradient is even more severe than 5TD's Encumbrance's, much steeper than the fatigue rules in either 5e or any of the OSR clones that I'm familiar with.  Typically in B/X-derived games you have 10-minute exploration turns in the dungeon, and you have to rest one turn out of every six (sort of a short rest per hour), and if you don't take it, then you take a -1 penalty to attack and damage.  Skipping multiple rests causes the penalties to stack up, and -1 to damage is actually really significant since most weapons only do d6 damage and there are few modifiers.  But B/X fatigue 1) escalates slowly, and 2) doesn't slow you down, so you can still escape from encounters, whereas 5TD's resilience system goes straight from functional to immobile.

Easy / minimal fix: set Resilience to 10 +/- Con Mod.  This will cluster the party closer together in Resilience scores and cause them to fatigue out closer to the same time.
Easy / minimal fix: exhaustion reduces your speed by 20' instead of setting it to 0'.  This means you slow the party down a lot but they don't have to leave you behind.  Having it reduce speed instead of setting speed makes it interact with encumbrance.  Keeping disadvantage to all checks for being exhausted is alright; it's a lot more justifiable / reasonable than giving disadvantage to all checks for being encumbered.
Easy / minimal fix: allow players taking an hour-long unsafe (ie dungeon) rest a Con check or something to remove exhaustion.  I don't know that you need all three of these but this would be one way to make it less of a one-way door to death, and would help prevent splitting parties when someone gets exhausted.  Leave it so that safe rest always removes exhaustion.  Unsafe rest also doesn't necessarily need to reset your Resilience all the way back to full, maybe it puts you back at half-Resilience on a success.  I dunno, there's space to work out something reasonable here that isn't "you pass out in the dungeon so the party leaves you behind because Nothing Can Be Done."

A couple of other things bother me about Resilience though.  One, my understanding of one of the purposes of making resources capped linearly on ability scores is to make those scores more important.  But Resilience is based on Constitution.  Were people really dump-statting Con in 5e?  I guess that's consistent with what I've been hearing, that fights are slow and people are spongy?  But it doesn't seem like HP are that much higher than 3e (but damage does seem lower).  Were they still doing it in 5TD playtests after hit points were reduced from 5e's baseline?  I guess 5TD only actually reduced the fixed starting HP at first level, and didn't increase damage that much.  I dunno, it just kind of boggles my mind that people might have been dumping Constitution, The Stat That Keeps You Alive, often enough that this seemed necessary.

Maybe reducing HP further would've been a simpler way to achieve the same purpose?

Easy / simple fix: remove Resilience entirely and drop HD by one step for at least fighter, zealot, and mage.  I've never been a big fan of having Thief on d4 HD and they probably need the help.  But as I said before it's silly to worry about dumpstats if you have no control over your stats, so this is probably unnecessary.  But it would be consistent with 5TD's goals of Danger is Real and Weaker PCs, and it would lead to more decisive combats.

The other property of Resilience that bugs me, which I touched on above, is that individual characters fatigue out at different rates.  Besides tending to split the party, this is much more annoying to keep track of than having the whole party fatigue at the same rate.  It's also unclear if Resilience is intended to only be used for PCs or if it should apply to their retainers too, but switching to a system where everyone fatigues simultaneously and independently of Con means that retainers can fatigue too without even having to have Con stats for them.

Involved fix: bring back 10-minute exploration turns from B/X and directly replace Resilience with B/X's fatigue system.  I already wanted exploration turns for Encumbrance anyway, and this gets me "everyone fatigues at the same rate" and "gradually escalating penalties".

Moving on to corruptions.  I wasn't a big fan of Lamentations of the Flame Princess' disease rules and these seem to be a pretty direct port.  Ability score damage is a pain in the butt because you have to recalculate stuff every time it happens.  This is less bad in 5e/5TD/OSR games than it was in 3e where I picked up this aversion, because there are fewer things to recalculate, but it's still a hassle.

I guess I don't really see a good gameplay reason for any disease/poison system more complicated than [easy fix] "you get a save (or Con check).  If you make it you're fine.  If you don't, then you have disadvantage to everything for a certain amount of time because you are sick as a dog.  After that make another save / Con check.  If you fail it you die and if you succeed then you get better."  This still puts players under time pressure but you have to do fewer numerical updates and you waste less time rolling.

A more fundamental issue with porting Corruptions from LotFP's disease rules is that in LotFP, all of your saves get better as you level, regardless of your class, so high-level characters are better able to survive poison and disease than low-level characters.  It kinda makes sense that if being high level lets you survive combat better, it should let you survive other things better too.  In 5TD, unless you are proficient in Con checks or have been spending your scarce ability score points on Con, your odds of surviving a disease are no better at 9th level than they were at 1st level.  You probably won't even survive any longer, because the ability score being damaged hasn't increased much if at all.

(This lack of progression on off-saves is, I think, also part of why in 5e, all of the spells that were traditionally save-or-die either deal damage or are gated on HP - most characters' Con saves don't improve with level, but everybody's HP improves with level.  I think this is fairly clever - it really leans into HP as an abstract resource representing luck and ability to barely avoid things that should kill you, rather than HP as the number of times you can be stabbed in the chest.  But the consistent thing to do with 5e's philosophy of save-or-die and hit points would be to make diseases deal damage over time.  And I don't think this would even be incompatible with OSR philosophy!  Some OSR systems (ACKS) already have starvation and thirst deal small amounts of damage every day and prevent natural healing; there's no reason dysentery shouldn't do the same.  Mummy rot in B/X is already about halfway there)

Mummy rot brings up an interesting issue with Corruptions - if Corruptions are the expected way to implement curses, that may discourage the development of subtler, more creative curses (like "no healing" or "marked for death, disadvantage to rolls on the maiming table" or "haunted by insects, go through rations twice as fast because your food is always full of bugs").  As with 5TD's approach to encumbrance penalties, Corruptions are a big heavy-handed hammer for curses that will stop you dead, as opposed to curses that make adventuring challenging but might be workable long-term.

In any case, I think this disease system will behave differently, have different consequences, in its new 5e-based context, which will make it even nastier than it already was in LotFP.

Finally, maiming.  I run ACKS (well...  ran, and now blog about, ACKS), which among other things (understatement) is known for its Death and Dismemberment table.  5TD's maiming table misses two big points of having a maiming table at all: associating penalties to an in-world narrative cause, and ensuring that characters are afflicted fairly.

First, the outcomes on 5TD's table are about an even split between ability score damage, losing a body part, and needing bed rest, with death on a natural 1 and getting back up with some HP on a 20.  This means that if you lose a body part, you don't take ability score damage, and if you take ability score damage, you don't lose a body part.  The problem here is that (in ACKS, say) losing a body part provides an in-world narrative justification for a penalty, which slightly dulls the negative response from players to being stuck with that penalty.  It's something you can picture - "oh yeah I guess if I'm short an eye a ranged attack penalty makes a lot of sense".  5TD provides very weak in-world description of its ability score losses on the maiming table, which I think would cause them to be resented more - they're purely mechanical penalties and don't provide you with the opportunity to picture your character wearing an eyepatch as a consolation prize.

The second problem with 5TD's maiming table is that if you roll body part loss, it is explicitly the GM's choice which part you lose.  This is awful design which is bound to lead to strife, bad blood, and either accusations of unfairness or to the system being rendered toothless.  If you as a DM choose to take a body part that should logically inflict penalties, and you inflict those penalties ad hoc, you have set a precedent and any future deviation from that precedent is legitimately unfair.  If someone else loses a body part, you have to figure out some penalties that are about as bad for them as for the first guy.  So the safe solution for DMs who don't want to deal with that is to softball it and just inflict cosmetic damage (scars, a few lost teeth, maybe a finger, etc).  This is exactly the sort of contentious thing, which players care a lot about, that warrants a random table of body parts lost and appropriate penalties, and results on that table should be rolled in the open where everyone can see them so that no accusations of unfairness can be made.

I dislike that 5TD is wishy-washy about how long it takes to recover ability score points lost to ability score damage results on the maiming table, while ACKS provides provides clear-cut mechanics for trying to get yourself fixed up (though there will be side effects, so it's a choice rather than a default). I also think that a 5% chance of death seems a little low.  But those are minor complaints.  There are also some nice emergent features of ACKS' maiming system, like encouraging healers to take risks to stabilize people in combat instead of waiting until after combat, but those aren't critical.

What I'd change: roll on ACKS' mortal wounds table with a +4 or so on the d20 with nat 20 getting result from 26+ row.  Fix up results that don't make sense with 5TD mechanics (eg -2 to magical research throws -> -2 to spellcasting checks).  Write the fixups down so that they are applied consistently.

Speaking of spellcasting checks: next post is haphazard magic.

Five Torches Deep Review, Part 3: Supply and Equipment

Previously, I discussed issues with encumbrance and dump-stats in Five Torches Deep.  Today, issues with supply and equipment.

Supply is almost a good idea and I want to love it.  I've been kicking around ways to make dealing with mundane equipment simpler and less book-keeping for some years now and something like Supply crossed my mind, under-specified adventuring equipment that you can make into concrete equipment during the adventure.

But this particular implementation of Supply is tied tightly to an ability score with an in-world justification that I really dislike, and it's highly dissociated.

As with Encumbrance, tying the resources you can bring into the dungeon linearly to an ability score means that if you rolled a low stat you're SOL and there's nothing you can do about it.  Only being able to pack 3 Supply is probably slightly less crippling than only being able to carry 3 Load, but you can't go over your limit with Supply in exchange for a penalty.  3 Supply is three fights worth of arrows, or three torches, or 1.5 spell levels worth of spell components, or three fumbles worth of weapon durability.  With a low Supply limit, I'm not sure what class options are really viable besides melee fighter.

Easy fix: set Supply limit to 10 +/- Int modifier, as with Encumbrance.  I think this might hurt mages pretty badly though, since they need to carry a lot of supply for spell components and on the high end you're going from 18 Supply to 14 Supply, so you're losing a second-level spell's worth of components.  So I don't think this is a great fix and think it might have unintended consequences, but it does make low Int less crippling.  I'm not really sure that spell components are necessary to limit casting under 5TD's default paradigm anyway, so maybe you solve this by removing spell components too, but more on that later.

Claiming that the Int limit on supply represents the character's ability to plan and pack really grinds my gears.  I strongly dislike the use of Int to represent general cognitive ability, versus magical talent and maybe education.  I think that this "Int=IQ" line of thinking leads to all kinds of horrible metagaming ("well my/your character wouldn't think of that") and runs counter to player skill and agency as pillars of OSR play.  Players should always be free to make the best decisions that they can given available information, and that includes being free to pack their gear for the trouble that they foresee.  Make low Int characters illiterate, fine.  Forbid them from knowing Church Latin or Draconic, and from taking Book Learnin' skills, fine.  But don't stop their players from making good decisions.

So I think the given justification for Supply springs from a pathology, and that almost all mechanics justified in this way delenda est.

Easy fix: don't relate Supply to Int at all.  The limit on the Supply you can carry is encumbrance and gold that you can spend on it.  I am not confident that this wouldn't have knock-on effects.

Finally, this Supply implementation is very dissociated.  5 Supply weighs 1 Load, or about 5 pounds.  The supply costs of items vary depending on rarity, value, and bulk.  It costs 5 Supply to replenish an antitoxin, not because of bulk but because of value and rarity.  How does that work in-world?  Did you pack a vial of antitoxin in 5 pounds of padding?  Is it a two-liter bottle of antitoxin and you have to chug the whole thing?  Are you brewing the antitoxin and then discarding the spent coffee grounds or solvents or whatever (presumably no, because that would be crafting, which has separate rules)?  Is Supply magical, allowing it to violate conservation of mass?

What happens if you convert a monster with a shatter ability and it gets used on someone carrying Supply that might be antitoxin or might just be torches?

And if crafting is the justification for turning 5 pounds of Supply into a vial of antitoxin (and I think this is defensible from the text on the basis of the Foraging rules - you're certainly not just finding a 2L bottle of antitoxin in the woods), then there's more explaining to do - how long does it take to turn Supply into stuff in game-time?  Why the distinction between crafting a new thing and crafting a thing you already have a copy of ?  I would not generally expect having a copy to yield much insight into how to make more of a thing - buying and drinking a beer imparts no knowledge of making beer (alas!).

Easy fix: haven't got one. A sensible (associative, mass-conserving) Supply implementation sounds like it would take some thought.

There's an ambiguity looming around acquiring new equipment in 5TD.  The only explicitly-stated ways to get equipment are character generation (determined by your class and rolls on the Sundries table) and crafting.  None of the weapons or armor (or misc gear) have gold-piece prices.  The only things in the book with gold-piece prices are Supply and retainers.  Are you stuck with your starting gear forever unless you craft?  Plus whatever you can capture from things that you kill? (not that monsters have gear listed either, just attack damage which might not correspond to any weapon)  Are you really putting parties at the mercy of the random equipment rolls that they made at 1st level indefinitely?  What if nobody rolls a light source?

Torches aren't even on the sundries table (though lanterns are), nor any of the class' starting equipment lists.  Is it just assumed that everyone has torches?  Or do I need to craft torches?

I wouldn't be so worried about this if the crafting system weren't lousy.  Four independent chances of failure per crafting attempt, each of which takes half a day, and failure on any destroys all of the materials (but the price of materials is unspecified anyway).  easy fix: Why is this not a single roll at DC 20 or so that takes a single day on failure or two days on success?  That would be pretty close to mathematically equivalent and would save a lot of wasted time rolling.  I can't tell if this is overcommitment to "DC11 Core Mechanic" or to "toiling".

Maybe the intended way to buy gear is to hire Laborer retainers and have them grind away at the crafting system in the background while you adventure.

Maybe the intended way to get new gear is by either handwaving it, or by using prices from some other book that you were converting monsters from anyway.  Maybe I'm being too hermeneutic about all this - but this is a review of the text and its implications.  I feel like the existence of the crafting system, in such a short and terse book, is evidence against that proposition.  The crafting system gets as much space as two full levels of mage spells (not just spell lists, full spell descriptions), as much space as XP and Leveling Up.  It ought to be important.  But it's not great.

Easy fix: import item prices from other systems, make it explicit that players to buy items in addition to their starting gear, and ditch the crafting system.

Finally, weapon and armor durability.  If I were to compile a list of red flags for bad tabletop systems, having to repair your weapons and armor due to normal wear-and-tear would be on it.  Weapon durability can exist in two kinds of tabletop RPGs.  If bolted on to D&D like it is here, it's an isolated demand for rigor which is badly mismatched with the rest of a combat system that is operating on the level of abstraction of hit points and armor class.  If part of a system where everything is operating at the same level of detail / realism as considering the durability of weapons, where it isn't an isolated demand for rigor, then you end up with things like hit location tables and armor by location and attack-maneuvers with names like Morderhau and Zellringen (although that system is actually more like an isolated demand for rigor in techniques, while still using high-abstraction HP and AC) and every combat takes four hours.  Neither of these states is desirable.

I get why this is here.  The authors said they wanted a Souls-like game and Dark Souls has weapon degradation and repair.  But Dark Souls is a videogame and there is a computer to track that shit for you.  Of all the parts of Dark Souls worth copying, that was the one you picked?  As a DM, am I supposed to track durability for all the weapons and armor used by NPCs, because players operating in an equipment regime where they can't buy things and where crafting takes forever and where equipment degrades will be desperate for any source of equipment they can get?  Is it at all reasonable to assume that (say) orcs keep their weapons in good repair?  I've got enough on my plate already and now you want me to think about the durability of every weapon in the game that is not currently in the hands of a player character?

To which DMs from a certain school might reply, "What no, humanoid monsters and NPCs don't have lootable weapons or armor, just look at their stat blocks, there's nothing listed," to which the cranky OSR DM might reply "That doesn't make any goddamn sense, are they supposed to be doing d12 damage with their bare hands?  If my players make friends with one of them and hire him as a retainer, is he still doing d12 damage with a weapon that never degrades?  What if a PC dies and their player wants to take over the retainer as their new PC?  Does his gear suddenly magically start degrading?  Internal consistency is important! Where do you draw the line and how can you justify its existence other than laziness?  I'm lazy too, but I don't think you need to sacrifice consistency for it."

In conclusion, I will never condone a system where tracking weapon and armor durability is a normal part of combat (not the product of rare Sunder special maneuvers that almost never get used).  If you want to have weapons save-or-break on a fumble, fine.  But don't ask me to track an extra unsigned integer on every item in the world.

Easy fix: on a natural 1 on attack, Dex check or weapon breaks and can no longer be used.  When opponent scores a crit, Dex check or shield breaks and can no longer be used.  If you want, let metal weapons have Advantage on the check, and magic weapons have double-advantage (roll three times and take the best).  These same rules apply to monsters and retainers breaking their weapons.  Having armor go from totally functional to totally broken doesn't make much sense and doing it well is more hassle than it's worth.

Next post: Resilience, maiming, and corruption

Five Torches Deep Review, Part 2: Encumbrance and Dumpstats

Continued from part 1, where I ran through the contents of Five Torches Deep and provided an overview of its subsystems.

As I noted there, I do not like Five Torches Deep.

There are two types of failures: failures by excess, and failures by deficiency.  5TD's failures by excess are more glaring so I will talk about them first.

5TD is over-committed to "toiling Souls-like grindhouse" / "travel and resources", to "no dumpstats", and to "magic is haphazard", I believe to its detriment as a game.  I would have less of a problem with these over-commitments if 5TD were unlikely to be mistaken as representative of OSR thought; then it would be merely a system which is disagreeable to me, of which there has never been a shortage, instead of a system which worries me.

Just about every element that 5TD borrows from the OSR, it makes more punitive than I would consider typical for OSR systems.

Mechanics that 5TD adds to 5e that I have significant complaints about:

• Encumbrance
• Supply
• Resilience
• Weapon and armor degradation and repair
• Crafting
• Maiming
• Corruptions
• Haphazard magic

...  might have to break this up into multiple posts.

Encumbrance: The encumbrance system has two problems.  One is that it is unusually bad for characters with very low Str scores.  The other is that the degradation of capability for being over-encumbered is too steep and overly broad.

A character with 3 Str in 5TD can carry 3 points of Load - a one-handed weapon and leather armor, or fifteen points of Supply, or some combination thereof.  A character with 3 Str cannot generally carry his starting equipment without being encumbered and suffering Disadvantage to all rolls.

I think this is a consequence of an excess of No Dumpstats.  I feel similarly about the other systems that rely on ability score values as limits (Supply and Resilience - lack of Retainers from low Cha seems less crippling).  As far as I'm concerned, the objective of No Dumpstats was achieved as soon as stats were rolled on 3d6 in order, and anything beyond that change is overkill.  If you don't have the means to dump a stat, to make a choice to sacrifice a stat that you don't care about in order to boost another, how can dump-statting be a problem?  Only humans have any capability to dump a stat in 5TD, and even that is very limited - if they're using the swap to move a bad stat to somewhere that hurts them less, they're probably not using it to move a good stat to somewhere that enables a class that they want to play.  It is a much more constrained problem than either point-buy or roll-and-assign.

They also have to roll a bad stat in the first place, and given a bad stat roll, it has to go somewhere.  This is another reason that I think 5TD's changes aimed at No Dumpstats are misguided.  Nobody chose to take a 3 Charisma to get more points to put into other stuff; it's uncompensated.  A low stat is something you get stuck with and have to deal with.  What purpose does making the game more punitive of bad starting luck serve?

Easy but unnecessary fix: remove the ability score swap that humans get.  If you want to play a particular class, or to have relatively safe and predictable stats, play a nonhuman.  Playing a human is a gamble and you never know what you're gonna get.  This removes any possibility of dumping particular stats.

I think that OSR systems generally understand better that if you are going to roll stats in order, game systems should not be too punitive of low stats.  A 3 Con is pretty crippling because of low HP, a 3 Dex is quite bad for low AC and init, but other than that, a 3 in any one stat is usually workable.  And I think that's good.  It's the dual of "cunning over crunch" as applied to high modifiers: you shouldn't trivially win because of high numbers on your character sheet, but you shouldn't trivially lose because of low numbers either.

(It's worth considering OD&D's approach to dumpstats for comparison with 5TD's.  In OD&D, you rolled your stats in order and then picked your class.  Str, Int, and Wis each only gave you bonuses in combat if you were a Fighter, Magic User, or Cleric, respectively (no, really - no Str bonus to hit and damage for Clerics), with little to no penalty to members of other classes for having a low score, while Dex, Con, and Cha gave bonuses and penalties that were intended to matter about equally to characters of all classes.  This meant that you could almost totally ignore / "dump" two of the six stats, depending on your choice of class - in expectation one of Str, Int, and Wis would probably be around 13, one around 10, and the last around 7, so you pick the class that you rolled best for and ignore the other two.  I tend to think this is a decent design, and it certainly doesn't lack for OSR credentials.  Then the Thief was introduced and ruined everything forever by making a class based off a stat that was meant for everyone)

In comparison with 5TD's encumbrance system, no OSR system that I have seen ties encumbrance to Str nearly as strongly as 5TD does.  Old School Essentials (and presumably B/X) and Lamentations of the Flame Princess's encumbrance systems don't factor strength in at all.  ACKS and Swords and Wizardry's encumbrance systems tie it in just a little.  Dungeon Crawl Classics' encumbrance system is "here's a comic making fun of people who carry unreasonable amounts of stuff, don't be that guy".  OSRIC was the one on my hard drive that cared most about Str, where a 3 Str character can carry 35 lbs less than a 10 Str one...  but a 10 Str character can carry 150 lbs, so a 3 Str character can still carry 115 lbs, which is very playable, and about 70% of what the 10 Str character can carry.  A 3 Str 5TD character can carry only 30% of what a 10 Str character can.

(To be fair with credit where credit is due - at least 5TD did what ACKS and LotFP did with encumbrance, where it's tracked in bigger quanta than the pounds that the AD&D-lineage games used)

What I'd change: set encumbrance limit to 10 Load plus or minus Str modifier. This allows low-Str characters to still carry their starting gear generally, while keeping the total amount that a party can carry very close to the same in expectation.  Also pare down starting equipment lists to about 6 Load, except Fighter's which is probably reasonable to leave around 10 Load.

Being encumbered in 5TD is also much worse than being encumbered in OSR systems, where generally it just reduces your speed.  Reduction of speed is really important strategically, because the faster you go the fewer random encounters you have, but you can still win fights if you're slow.  Disadvantage to all checks is both a severe combat penalty and somewhat dissociative - being encumbered makes it exactly as much more difficult to command my retainers, decipher an ancient inscription, or pick a lock as it does to leap over a chasm, dodge a trap, or climb a wall?  Does that seem right to you?

Easy fix: being encumbered applies disadvantage to Str, Dex, and Con-based checks.  It's still a blunt instrument but hey I did say it was an easy fix, not a good fix.

To put disadvantage in perspective: it's about a -3 on a d20 roll in expectation.  Going from 1st to 9th level, your proficiency bonus goes up by 2 points and you might get another +1 or +2 on a check due to stat increases.  So it you compare a 1st level character and an encumbered 9th (max) level character, their numbers on proficient checks are going to be similar.

You can't even count on your casters to save you if the party is fighting encumbered, because they have to roll to cast.

The way in which 5TD imposes the encumbrance penalty also strikes me as odd.  Up to Str score, you're fine.  But if you go a point over, bam, disadvantage to everything, and then the speed penalties scale up gradually after that.  This strikes me as the sort of penalty-gradient which will mostly incentivize players to just carry their Str score in stuff and avoid being encumbered at all.  By comparison most OSR systems don't make "how much should I carry" such an easy choice - encumbrance penalties begin at much lower weights and scale up gradually.  The question is less "should I be encumbered or not?" than "how encumbered should I be?"  Shallower penalty-gradients seem likely to produce more nuanced and thoughtful play than very steep ones like 5TD's.  These sort of difficult choices are especially seen with treasure in OSR games, where you've toppled a lair and taken their stuff and now you have to make hard choices about how much treasure to leave behind to avoid random encounters due to the speed penalty increasing the time it takes to get back to the exit.  It is very much gambling; do you take more treasure and hope to get lucky with the extra encounter rolls that result?  5TD players probably don't have this dilemma to the same degree - any fight with disadvantage to all rolls is something that you badly want to avoid, so if there's any possibility of a random encounter on the way out, you just go up to your Str and maybe dump some Supply points to make room.

Easy fix: instead of imposing disadvantage when encumbered, give a penalty to AC or initiative or something per Load over max, in addition to the 5' reduction in movement speed.  The problem with this solution is that both movement speed and AC/init matter nearly-only in combat, whereas the old disadvantage to all checks penalty makes being encumbered relevant to non-combat tasks in exploration.

Good fix: bring higher-granularity time-tracking to exploration and have encumbrance gradually reduce inter-combat speed, generating the classic OSR tradeoff with random encounters.  This preserves the relevance of encumbrance to non-combat tasks, but limits it tightly to an area that makes sense (movement speed) and also allows it to scale up gradually.  This also relates to one of 5TD's failures by deficiency.

5TD's encumbrance penalty is just... unsubtle, ham-fisted, not fully thought out.  I feel like a lot of 5TD's systems share this characteristic.

Next post: problems in supply and equipment

ACKS: The Ability Scores Are Too Damn High

But seriously - the way we have historically generated stats contributes to several pathologies in play, because the stats generated are too high.  These pathologies include:

• The imbalance between melee fighting styles
• The inadequacy of the thief
• The breakdown of the reaction roll mechanic
• The long-term supremacy of first-generation PCs, and resulting party cohesion problems

How are ability scores generated?

ACKS' default character generation process is 3d6 in order, choose a class that you qualify for, and then you can trade down non-primereq stats to boost your prime req, at a rate of 2 points from one stat for 1 point of a prime req, down to a minimum of 9 in stats traded down.  There's also an optional rule, "Generating Multiple Characters", where each player rolls five sets of 3d6 in order and chooses one to play and two backups.  We've always played with this optional rule and it does what it says on the tin - "gives players a variety of characters to choose from."  It's also fun, if a little time-consuming.  As a side effect, though, it raises mean prime requisite a lot.

Consider: you're starting a new campaign.  Four players players show up and are rolling characters.  You are probably going to want a mage PC and a fighter PC, classes for which high prime requisites matter a lot.  If you each roll one set of stats, the best Int at the table will be (in expectation) right around 14 - enough to get +5% and one bonus spell known.  The best Str at the table will also be around 14, for +5% fighter XP and +1 to hit and damage.

For a single-prime-req class, there are five other stats, distributed independently, each of which has a 23% chance of being an 11 or 12 (which can be traded down without reducing a bonus).  So we should expect 1.2 points of obvious / no-real-cost prime req boosting via trading down.  So the best PC fighter in an "average" party will have a Str of 15 and a +1 bonus in one other stat that he might trade down to bring it up to a 16 for +2 to hit and damage and 10% XP (and, incidentally, among his other four stats, probably 2-3 +0s and 1-2 -1s).

In the case where the optional Generating Multiple Characters rule is in effect, each player rolls five sets of stats, for 20 sets total.  In expectation, the maximum strength rolled is something around 16.3, before any tradeoffs are made.  There is a 9% chance that the highest Str statset has an 18, and 23% chance that the highest statset has a 17.  If tradeoffs are in effect, there's around a 33% chance that the highest Str set can be made into an 18 without having to compromise any other bonuses.  If you're willing to compromise other bonuses, you have about at 86% chance of a 15 or better, which you can probably turn into an 18.

OK, fine, rolling more stat sets gets you higher scores.  Nothing surprising there.  The trouble is that really high peak stats mess some parts of the game up.

Melee Fighting Styles

Previously, I did some analysis of the comparative power of the three melee fighting styles: sword-and-shield, two-handed weapon, and two-weapon fighting in ACKS.  The results supported my players' general impression that sword-and-board is superior under most circumstances across the entire level range.  Two-weapon fighting has better cleaving through masses of weak opponents at high levels, and two-handed weapons have a better chance to one-shot and be able to cleave through 2HD foes at low levels, but the superlinear utility of increased AC outstrips these benefits most of the time.

That analysis was conducted under the assumption of 16 Strength for the fighters.  With 18 Str, shields are even more dominant by that set of metrics.  Increasing strength is an effective increase in fighter level (since the main benefits of leveling under consideration are increased to-hit and damage), which tends to favor shields because the marginal utility of a point of damage decreases as you get more of them.  At 16 Str, going from 1d6+3 damage to 1d10+3 damage increases your hobgoblins-per-round from 0.34 to 0.44; 10 percentage points and about 33%.  At 18 Str, going from 1d6+4 to 1d10+4 only increases your hobgoblins-per-round from 0.44 to 0.5, 6 percentage points or 13%.  These numbers are before cleaving is taken into account, but look pretty similar - the gain in killing power with cleave from the d10 weapon is still around half as good with 18 Str as with 16 Str.

While running these analyses, I discovered a magical place at the other end of the Strength scale, where sword-and-board and two-hander are almost perfectly balanced.  That place is Str 10 against orcs, with a +1 Fighter Damage Bonus.  Two-weapon fighting still doesn't hold up.

Reducing maximum prime reqs solves a limited subset of the Fighting Style problem, at low levels.  At high levels, fighter damage bonus and magic weapons fill the role of 18 Str in minimizing the benefit of two-handed weapons compared to shields (which also get better with level due to magic).

Thieves

Why do thieves suck?  Who ever thought this class design was a good idea?

My understanding is that, under OD&D rules, thieves were not that much worse in melee offense than fighters.  At that point in the development of the game, Str did not give you a bonus to hit and damage - it served as the prime requisite for fighters, for an XP bonus, and did little else.  With no fighter damage bonus and no Str bonus to damage, the thief was inferior to the fighter in melee offense only by dint of a slightly weaker THAC0 progression, which was partly made up for by backstab's to-hit bonus (and both could use magic swords for slowly-scaling damage bonuses, which put them ahead of clerics in offense).  The relationship between the OD&D thief and the OD&D fighter was much closer to the relationship between ACKS' assassin and ACKS' fighter.

But with fighter damage bonus and Str to hit and damage and PC fighters able to trade down other stats for higher Str, ACKS' thieves are left in a pretty marginal position for melee.  The higher the available Strength scores, the bigger that gap becomes.  As with fighting styles, fighter damage bonus is also partly to blame here.

Reaction Rolls

The reaction roll system is pretty easy to break in ACKS.  A 1st-level bard who puts his tradeoff points into Cha can take Diplomacy as his 1st level general proficiency, Mystic Aura as his first class proficiency, and probably pull +6 or +7 on most reaction rolls, at which point almost any intelligent creature encountered in the dungeon will be at worst indifferent.  Problems of this form are well-known on the ACKS forums, and have led to a wide variety of proposals, including switching to 2d10 for the roll, codifying per-monster reaction roll modifiers so that monsters that are "supposed to" be hostile are more likely to be, enormous tables of situational modifiers, and so forth.

But you know, 2d6 would be fine if 1) 18 Cha were rarer, and 2) the proficiency bonuses were maybe +1 instead of +2 and didn't stack.  Fundamentally this is the same problem as ability score generation with tradeoffs - we're taking a gaussian-esque distribution and adding a constant to it, resulting in a shifted distribution where extreme results are much more common than desired.  The solution is to reduce the impact of the constants being added (either by increasing the impact of randomness through bigger dice, or by reducing the constants themselves).

First-Gen Supremacy

These methods of stat generation provide a big edge for first-generation characters over later-generation characters, and also for rolled characters over henchmen who might be promoted to PC status.

What happens when a new player joins a game where the party generated stats using the "multiple characters" method?  He rolls five sets.  Among those five sets, the highest Strength will in expectation be only 14.5.  The same is true of Intelligence.  After trading down 11s, he may have a 16.  Regardless of which prime req you choose, in expectation yours will be lower than the highest one in the existing party, and you're stuck playing second fiddle (for classes whose prime req matters, ie everyone but clerics).  This analysis does make the assumption of efficient allocation of high stats by the Old Party (ie, you didn't roll all your high stats on one set, and not one player rolled all the high stats), but in practice that seems to happen.  The exponential structure of the XP curve is designed to help replacement or new characters catch up with the rest of the party, but you're stuck with the lower ability scores for the entire life of the character.  The situation is very similar with replacement PCs; if you rolled five sets, used the best one for your first PC, and got killed, your replacement sets are going to be weaker, and you're going to be behind on more than XP.

While rolled replacement characters are penalized by the "generating multiple characters" option, using henchmen as replacement characters is penalized by the trading-down rule.  To get a henchman with an 18 Str, you need (in expectation) to survey about 216 henchmen.  For campaigns in smaller markets, that is more potential henchmen than you will see over the course of the campaign.  The prevalence of 18s in characters generated in a large group with trading down is just dramatically higher than the baseline.  You are going to have a difficult time finding henchmen with comparable stats to replace them when they die, and most of the time using a henchman as a replacement for a first-gen PC will be a step down in terms of stats.

My players perceived this at a gut level before I did.  This feeling further contributed to their love of shields and plate, because they recognized that a first-gen 18 Str fighter was unlikely to be replaceable.  This supremacy of first-gen characters may also contribute to their intense love of Restore Life and Limb, which at least one of my players has commented negatively on ("People never stay dead, it's like friggin' superheroes.").

Solutions

Roll three sets instead of five per player, maybe (maybe even just two sets per player).  For a four-player party, three sets each gives you 12 sets, which puts expected max for any given stat just shy of 16.  Then also get rid of the trading down rule and you should stop seeing too many 18s and the big first-gen advantage (15-16 Str is very doable for a henchman without trade-down).  Maybe given new players joining an existing party more sets of stat rolls?

(edit from the future - or give players mulligans instead of multiple stat-lines.  This provides less information at each choice and less ability to choose "best of 20" statlines) 

You're still going to see 16 Str fighters, where shield is superior, unfortunately.  Maybe provide extra damage and to-hit bonuses to TWF / 2H with level?  Maybe reduce fighter damage bonus to +1 at 1st, +2 at 5th, +3 around 9th.  Maybe give thieves comparable damage bonuses, maybe get rid of both Thief and Assassin and build a Fighting 1.5 / HD 0 / Thief 2.5-ish class somewhere in the middle. 

Cut the reaction roll proficiencies in half; Diplomacy as a general for +2 is just ridiculous.  Do we really need five different proficiencies (Diplomacy, Intimidation, Seduction, Mystic Aura, and Bribery) for improving reaction rolls anyway?  Get rid of all of them and make a monolithic Diplomacy prof that gives you +1 with no situational caveats and can only be taken once, like Leadership, and you're 90% of the way to fixing reaction roll exploits (...  well, maybe we can keep Seduction; we are here for entertainment after all).

One thing that seems obviously tempting but that would be precisely wrong: Fighter Defense Bonus.  If you give fighters a bonus to AC, that means you don't need the shield as much and 2H / TWF are more viable, right?  No!  The more AC you have, the more valuable each extra point of AC is.  If anything, the right way to make shields weaker is to go full Viking Age and get rid of plate.  Limiting magic armor and shields to +2 would help too.

See also, however, a follow-up post and correction

Mad Ramblings - Wargames, Dreamworlds, Nihilism, Sandboxes

This is not a well-structured, carefully-pruned, cohesive post.

Sometimes I think the game I really want to be running is not D&D, a fantasy RPG with dungeoneering, but a fantasy campaign skirmish wargame.  Ditch hitpoints, switch to single-digit numbers of Warhammer-style wounds, use an armor save instead of AC, and make characters largely replaceable.  Remove character detail, improve speed-in-play, perhaps increase tactical detail (as discussed back in Starmada, there's a big difference between character-creation complexity and tactical complexity).  A lot of this would just be nice on the DM side - I don't want to think about how many HP this goblin has.  It's 1HD, it has 1 wound, done.  A shift to wargaming mentality also does some interesting things for party composition; each player builds a warband from some fixed pool of resources.  "Just one sixth-level wizard with no henchmen" and "a big pile of second-level fighters" both become valid, interoperable ways to play.

The primeval purpose of play, as seen in young animals, is training, for food acquisition, mating-fights, or flight.  What are we training for?  With a wargame it's pretty clear.  With D&D it's much less so.  Maybe we're training for everything, but when you defend everything, you defend nothing.

On the other hand, rather than "I want to run D&D as a wargame", it may be more true that I seem to always end up running D&D as a wargame, and making systemic changes would make my life easier, but not more satisfying.  I'm not really sure why my games seem to keep ending up as wargames.  I think I enjoy the tactical challenge of actually giving players a good fight (and a good fright).  I also feel that I have lost confidence in the quality of my creative output, leaving tactics as the only place I'm willing to go nuts.  The well feels dry more than it used to.  Part of this, I suspect, is that I've basically stopped consuming fantasy media.  The last fantasy book I read was Wizard of Earthsea about a year ago (I did read Beowulf and finally finished the Saga of Burnt Njal this winter, but those doesn't quite count).  In terms of videogames, I think the only fantasy stuff I've played in the last year was Skyrim (lousy) and Hammerwatch (arcade, empty).  Skyrim was a strong contributing factor to launching the last campaign, actually - "If as many people loved Skyrim as seemed to, the bar must be lower than I thought; maybe I should give it another shot."  In any case, not much fantasy input, not much to remix and quietly steal.  I tried tapping dreams and hypnagogic hallucinations - that's how we ended up with a mad city-dungeon open to the endless void of space, showered by metal shavings from the decrepit cosmic engine that burns the souls of the damned to spin the earth.  No seriously, that's where the copper pieces came from - they fell out of the sky and into the dungeon as the engine ground itself towards inevitable failure and the End of Days.  Really the embarrassing part is that I put something as mundane as ratmen in such a place.

Reflecting on that, I was remiss to omit that I began reading Kill Six Billion Demons some time last summer, and I greatly enjoyed its Planescape-ness, its strangeness.  Still do.  So I suppose perhaps that influenced me more than I thought, but I put my own spin (ie, Warhammer-esque) on it, and thereby took most of the strangeness right out of it.

What I have been reading has been mostly history and sociology, which are relevant to D&D but not in useful ways.  D&D (and RPGs generally) are fundamentally based around emulating stories; myth, legend, books, movies.  I have gotten very skeptical, suspicious, of stories.  Stories simplify the very complex into nice simple causal chains.  A good story is always simpler than the reality of the situation; it's an authorial duty to cut out parts, to simplify for human consumption (Venkatesh Rao argues in a very roundabout way that all human organizations are based on such simplifications, claiming that leaders create simplifying myths for their underlings to live within).  Making wilderness illegible, or making running a domain hard because of historically-reasonable administrative information shortages, is not conducive to producing any sort of resonant narrative.  They're interesting thought experiments, but probably terrible in practice.  Which is a better story, the one that people all know, that riffs off of will resonate with them: Arthur and the Sword in the Stone, or King William and the Census?

At any rate, I suspect my nonfiction reading has made me a worse ACKS DM.  Played in a more typical D&D fashion ("band of roving murderers saves kingdom"), things like administrative information shortages could be turned into reasonable narratives, but when it comes to players looking at rulership, it gets mighty tedious to have to maintain both a true set of information for my own use, and a plausible false set of information to feed players.  In the case of an NPC governor deceiving an NPC king, I don't have to do the latter.  Frankly I have little desire to do the former anymore either.  I need all of my paperwork tolerance for taxes this season.

You know what else I'm starting to hate?  Character levels.  Having mechanical advancement be a thing that the system does means that players (well OK, people like me and my players) will aggressively optimize for it.  ACKS has this problem where the level of risk you have to take in order to make enough money to level at any sort of reasonable* pace results in levels being attritted away by casualties faster than they are earned.  I like the exponential XP curve; I really do.  It means that you can bring in 1st-level guys and they catch up, provided that any XP at all is being earned.  Domain XP breaks this, by providing XP only to the high-level characters in the party, and leads to the gap opening rather than closing.  The real problem with the OSR's XP curves (for us) is that they're build to support loooong-haul campaigns that run for multiple years of real-time.  That's something that we never do; in the six month duration of my typical ACKS campaign, players tend to get from 3rd or 4th level to 7th or 8th level.  Calibrated on 3.x, my players are frustrated by this slow progression and unwilling to take the sort of risks required to accelerate it.  ACKS dangles the domain carrot, of safe monthly gold and XP, and they really want to skip getting beaten with the wilderness stick (having labeled it as a poor risk-reward balance previously).  This is frustrating for me, because I feel that we haven't even scratched the surface of wilderness play (for example, tactics in the wilderness), while I find domain play tedious / boring so far.  It's kind of funny if you interpret it in a certain light: as adolescents the fantasy was to kill the dragon and win the princess, but as adults the fantasy is to be the guy at the top of the hierarchy who collects taxes from the safety of his castle while other people do the dying and the dirty work.  I miss Tim's meandering / anti-domain style of play.  Probably I should switch to some other retroclone, but I suspect my current playerbase (such as it is) has been accumulated in part by the allure of domains.

It would be an interesting experiment to bring a bunch of PCs in at low domain level (8th or 9th or so) and say "OK that's it, no leveling, all advancement will be Traveller-style through gear and hirelings and domains and achieving ends-in-the-world" (or just lower the level cap to 9th across the board...).  I've also been thinking about how poorly the leveling system as it currently exists does at supporting common narrative tropes.  The characters who start the weakest, the farmboy and the squire, have the greatest potential, while the characters to start strong, the knight and the wizard, rarely gain.  Lancelot and Merlin and Han Solo never get any stronger; Arthur and Luke do (though I guess this could also be interpreted as a game with a lower level cap).  What if you had the option to start at a higher level, but your maximum level was lowered accordingly?  This is a much more interesting use of level limits than demihumans; make it correlate with age at the beginning of the campaign.  Starting older gives you XP, but limits the new tricks your old dog can learn.  What if henchmen simply couldn't outlevel their masters - they could continue accumulating XP, but without adequate mentorship, they can never reach their full potential.  There are lots of interesting things to try in this space.

In any case, stopping or capping leveling suddenly introduces a gaping existential hole - why play?  I had hoped that ACKS, by making the domain game mechanical and providing XP for interacting with it, would encourage players to interact with the world on non-mechanical terms.  This was foolish; if you have mechanics for interacting with something, it will be interacted with mechanically at the exclusion of non-mechanical interactions (for another example, see 3.x Diplomacy hacks).  This is the underlying logical crux of the OSR's "rulings, not rules" stance, and its opposition to skill systems.  It also relates back to old thoughts on reliability and aim-of-playing, which loops back to "why play?".  Last spring, when I quit, I had been reading Interaction Ritual Chains, which discusses the process by which sacredness is manufactured through ritual (by which is meant routine, roughly-weekly interactions where a set of participants gather, isolated from the rest of the world, and waste resources).  I observed that this description fit the weekly D&D game perfectly, and was left very conflicted and disturbed about it all.  It left me asking "why do we really play?  Sure we have our surface reasons, that we like to kill monsters and gain levels, but is there another level of motivations underneath it where we value the game in itself?"  I observed that this potential treatment of the game as lightly-sacred was consistent with my behavior on one occasion, where I wrecked my bike on the way home from work and wasn't sure whether I'd sprained or broken my wrist, but went to run the weekly ACKS instead of to the hospital (I ended up there the next morning when the pain woke me up at 0430).  That is not the sort of thing that rational self-interested actors do.  Past-me is an idiot and the ACKS ritual made me so.  There is something weird going on here.  There is also a conflict between Interaction Ritual Chains and Rao's schema here, in that Rao doesn't believe that the organizing myth-makers get caught up in their own myths.  When I was reading Interaction Ritual Chains, I was elated, that now I understood how to create values, and the keys to power, to binding man, were in my grasp.  It was not until later that I realized that I could not help but become caught in those values myself, at which point I destroyed all of my social rituals (except the inescapable lunchtime at the office) and strove for hermit-hood, moral freedom, and the rejection of fantasy.  Success has been mixed; habits, personal rituals, are hard to break, and it is draining work.

I did not viscerally understand nihilism / moral relativism until Interaction Ritual Chains showed me how the sacred sausage is made.  It is one thing to be told "all morality is constructed", and another to be told exactly how it is constructed and at what cost.  I'm still not sure what to do with that information.  I suppose I can link this back to the bit above about leveling by noting that removing explicit / absolute mechanical objectives (like XP / leveling) is killing god (to borrow Nietzsche's phrase and meaning) and exposing the players to that same paralyzing freedom, of "all is permitted but nothing matters; freedom, and futility, are the only absolutes."  This ties back to the article by Rao, where political leadership requires simplifying political realities for human consumption.  It is also true that moral leadership generally requires simplifying moral realities for human consumption.  XP and reward system is essentially a moral choice (albeit a laughably small one), and delegating that choice down onto players is probably not what they're looking for.  They are here to play a game, to escape the spirit of gravity and the burdens of life, maybe for some occasional catharsis, but not to stare into the abyss.  Sandboxing in general has this problem.

One reasonable response, though, is that while the sacredness of moral norms may be an emergent property of social organizations rather than a reflection of any cosmic significance, that doesn't invalidate their usefulness.  Sacredness and morality formation are a mechanism for something (probably social cohesion and ingroup predictability) - if they weren't worth their cost in "wasted" resources, they wouldn't have emerged over and over again, in every society across human history.  Now granted, they may provide a fitness advantage to societies in competition with each other rather than to the individuals within those societies, who are materially poorer as a result of ritual expenditures (but the success of those individuals' genes and memes over the long term is tied to that of the society in which they live).  In any case, my response, cutting out all sacredness without really reflecting on its function, was like that of the D&D3.0 group that removes attacks of opportunity or the XP cost from creating magic items, or bans grappling because it's complicated, without understanding the effects that these will have on the system (spellcasters even more overpowered than normal).  Chesterton's Fence applies here:

In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it."

But enough of that.

I also miss the competitive-cooperative nature of the first ACKS campaign.  I've been reading some game theory stuff lately and there is a category of "non-fixed sum" games that describes observed player behavior during that campaign well.  It also helped that there were a variety of vigorously-argued value-systems / player utility functions present in that campaign, rather than a tacit convergence on the "whatever maximizes GP/XP" utility function that I see more now.  There's no playfulness anymore, and this is probably my fault for setting lethality high and leveling so slow.  I keep hoping that we'll hit the point of fatalist playfulness - "we're all going to die, so better to die for something, heroically or entertainingly, rather than waiting for the eventually-inevitable lame, random, or cowardly death" - but I think character advancement, and specifically the risk of falling behind the rest of the party, discourages this.  So I suppose there is still some competition, but it's boring, tacit competition that drives inaction, rather than entertaining competition that drives action.

I've come to the conclusion that the Death and Dismemberment table just isn't worth it.  It's funny about 10% of the time.  The other 90% of the time it just sucks - either you get an injury that doesn't matter for your class, or you get one that does and then you repeat the same "hope for effects that don't matter" procedure on the RL&L table.  If I were to build a new one, I'd probably just make it a roll between "mission killed" (out of action for the rest of this adventure), "multi-mission killed" (out of action for a couple adventures), and "campaign killed" (maybe there's enough left of you to retire, but your adventuring days are done), and leave details up to players.  I really want to make the bedrest mechanic work.  It seems like a good way to encourage players to maintain stables of characters and to swap out for mission requirements.  It sort of works for henchmen, but if a PC is out for bedrest, adventuring is often delayed, because playing a henchman risks being outleveled and because PCs are the highest level (hence most useful) and missing out on XP for a PC means falling behind on already-glacial leveling.

In conclusion: great dissatisfaction!