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.

Randomized Starting XP

I was thinking the other day - I kind of want to start a game around the 2nd level range.  But I was having trouble settling on the precise XP number.  If you start at 2000 to get fighters to 2nd, MUs are only 1st.  If you start at 2500 to get MUs to 2nd, thieves are already 3rd.  So picking a single ideal numerical solution is hard.

It is also a little weird when all the PCs start with exactly the same amount of experience.  We already admit significant variation between PCs in terms of ability and starting gold - why not XP?  Particularly in an open-table situation, where it's expected that character level will vary within a party.

3d6 * 200 starting XP seems like a promising amount, averaging just over 2000, and never high enough for a fighter or MU to hit 3rd.  The interesting question is whether you roll it before or after committing to a class.  If you let it inform class choice, then you might get some interesting choices, where a stat line which is otherwise mediocre for a particular class gets played as that class because the XP roll is good for it (like low int, high XP to MU) or even worse otherwise (like a low XP roll where you can get 2nd with thief or cleric but nothing else).  I suspect that taking a high XP roll and using it for thief 3 instead of MU 2 or fighter 2 would probably not be a frequently-chosen option.  So this might be a great way to get a pretty consistently 2nd-level starting party, outside of very low rolls that don't even crack 1200.

On the other hand, a simulationist argument in favor of rolling XP after choosing class might be that it would be weird if nobody ever started a 1st-level MU.  Although maybe if you roll less than 1200 XP, where you're at 1st regardless, maybe MU becomes a real option again.  One sleep per day is one sleep per day...

(And then once we're rolling starting XP, clearly we need some rules for risking terrible injuries in chargen in order to potentially gain more starting XP...)

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?

Wilderness Movement Speed - Wooded Hills as Default?

There's a funny asymmetry in the way we deal with numbers.  Dividing is tricky; you often have leftovers and have to deal with rounding and it's just a slow operation.  Multiplication is relatively easy.

Maybe it makes sense to reframe the "normal" wilderness movement speed based on wooded hills, sort of the default background terrain for D&D unless otherwise specified, and then have multipliers relative to that baseline rather than setting speed based on the best possible terrain, flat plains, and then dividing.

In ACKS, wooded is x2/3 and hills are x2/3, so if you are in wooded hills you multiplty those and get 4/9 which is close enough to 1/2 for government work.  Which, conveniently, is also the speed multiplier for mountains, swamps, and a variety of other terrains.

So then this looks like:

• 120' speed -> 12 mi/day, 2 hexes
  
• 90' speed -> 9 mi/day, 1.5 hexes
  
• 60' speed -> 6 mi/day, 1 hex
  
• 30' speed -> 3 mi/day, 0.5 hexes

Being able to just divide speed in feet per turn by 10 to get miles per day is pretty nice; it's not that the arithmetic was tricky before, but 10 is a super-easy constant to remember.  Riding a medium horse with 180' speed?  18 mi/day, boom.  And as long as combat speeds remain multiples of 30', wilderness speeds will remain multiples of half-hexes.

Then if you're on a road, or in flat clear terrain, multiply by 2.  If both, multiply by 3.

The 9 mi/day is a little annoying, but "three hexes per two days" isn't too bad.

Forced march is also a bit annoying, since multiplying say 1.5 hexes per day by 1.5 gives you 2.25 which is not a multiple of 0.5, but I suppose one could go with "cover two days' distance in a 16-hour marching day, then have to rest for two days"?

Having a table that handles rounding or dropping fractions could also be a reasonable approach for dealing with odd situations like "we have 90' speed and we're forced-marching (x1.5) through scrub hills (x1.5, if you wanted to re-introduce the increased speed for not having the forest penalty), we move 3.5 hexes".  Or just don't worry about it and find workarounds that let you multiply by 2 instead.

Flying also becomes quadruple speed instead of double, since speeds were halved.

I think I like this proposal a lot more than my movement points idea.  Sure, it loses some detail (doesn't distinguish between hill forest and flat forest, for example), but ultimately...  I'm not sure that's worth worrying over.  Differences in terrain speed make computing optimal paths more annoying, but if you don't show your players the map of the wilderness, they can't compute optimal paths anyway until they've been there and back and done some exploring.  So you shouldn't be losing too much gameplay here, and what routing "gameplay" you are losing wasn't really fun, so...  sounds fine?

And returning to the wilderness as dungeon metaphor, I guess instead of using soft-walls of slowing terrain types where you have to stop and think about routing all the time, you can instead use hard-walls like impassable ridgelines and rivers to break up "rooms" and only occasionally include slow and fast terrain to mix things up.  Just like in dungeons, where most dungeon floor is just...  floor, with standard speed, separated by walls.

Having 12mi/day as the standard is also pretty close to Arneson's 10mi/day (thanks for mentioning this, DHBoggs!).

Still Dwarfhackin'

This is a bit of an unusual post for me.  Usually I post rules proposals, but this is more of a log of stuff I've been working on.  Sort of funny - blog was short for web log.  Maybe I haven't been properly blogging since the last time I ran a game and was posting session logs.

Work on Dwarfhack continues.  Had a crisis of faith, an "is this really worth working on" this week, but then I decided that it would be sort of neat to actually finish something for once.

Classes:

• Men: low levels are finished, need to fill in the mid-to-high levels still (and decide whether I want to be giving out free mercs)
  
• Vaultguard: needs flavor text and mid-to-high levels
• Fury: have a lot of ideas here but nothing concrete for changes; wrote up a Slaying ability like Favored Enemy crossed with Backstab, thinking about giving them something sort of similar to Diehard.  Still not sure whether I want to give them Leather+Swashbuckling to make the low levels more survivable vs the current double-Swashbuckling where their low-level AC is worse but high-level AC is better.
• Delver: Haven't started
• Runesmith:  Haven't started building the class, just the spell list
  
• Wizard: Haven't started really writing stuff down, but I think something like Turning plus cleric spell progression should work as the core
  
• Elf: Haven't started really writing stuff down, but I'm thinking Magical Music / ability to calm beasts as their first-level "solve a limited set of encounters" ability parallel to Turning, and then cleric spell progression after that
  
• Hobbit: Haven't started
• Considering using Iron Heroes style HD - d4+1 instead of d6, d4+2 instead of d8.  Less swingy.
  

Proficiencies: I think I'm just...  not going to use them.  Classes get what they get, the rest of your stuff comes from hirelings and magic items.  Considering giving classes slightly more stuff as a result; sort of like getting the same number of profs but they're pre-picked.

Magic:

• General rules of magic: slightly-tweaked Fibonacci spell points, spell point recharge rate (slow), spend half the spell's cost on declaration before initiative is rolled and the other half on successful completion, no casting the same spell more than once in a given day
• Considering a mechanic where you have to roll to cast in combat, and on a failure you complete the spell next round.  But I'm already sort of worried about casters having a hard time solving problems during combat.
  
• Rune magic: Have some general ideas for the rules of rune magic and have a bunch of spell ideas.  I can't tell if they're too weak or too strong for the levels that I want to put them at, in part because they work weirdly - paint runes on weapons, discharged on first hit or after a duration, or paint protective runes on people and they discharge when they protect you from the thing that they work against.  So the action economy / burst potential for a prepared party is really high - paint everybody's gear before battle and then all your fighters and your caster can go hit people with spell effects.  But the ability to save the party's bacon during a combat that is going badly isn't there, because you need to spend at least two rounds, one to cast (potentially two with the roll-to-cast) and then one to hit people, and it could take a while for someone to hit with the runed weapon.  So I dunno.  Maybe it's OK to incentivize preparation?  Is it boring to play a "wizard" who does most of his work up front?
• Elf magic: Flavortext is lacking, but I have a provisional spell list for 1st-2nd and some bits for 3rd.  3rd is where I really need to make a decision about whether I want to start introducing spells that solve wilderness-level problems.
• Wizard magic: I'm happy with the flavor text and the 1st-2nd level spell list.

Adventuring:

• Healing: boosting natural healing rate a bunch because magical healing is much more scarce (only elves have it, so a Proper Dwarf Party won't have any at all but still needs to be able to survive). 
• Speeding up natural healing and slowing down spell point recovery puts fighters and MUs on similar footing in terms of "time to total refill" of their relevant resources (HP for fighters, spells for MUs) at low levels, but spell point cap grows faster than HP; an empty high-level MU will end up spending more time to recover to full than their fighter buddies.  Magic is something to use sparingly.
  
• Should still work OK for the low-level dungeoneering case where you go in, burn all your resources, go home, and rest for a week or two.  The place where it will matter most is in the wilderness, where MUs can't just drop their entire spell load every day.  Remains to be seen whether conserving resources on a wilderness trek out to a dungeon is now too challenging.
  
• Death and dying: at 0HP, choose to either go down (and maybe survive) or die fighting (get an extra round or two but then definitely die).  I think I want to handle the "going down" case with "save vs death with a couple circumstance modifiers, on a success you get a minor maiming, else you die"; with the minor maimings being similar to 11-20 results on ACKS' Mortal Wounds table.  With saves improving with level, it might work out that the main way high-level characters end up dying is making voluntary last stands; an acceptable outcome.
  
• Tracking: set some stuff up to make it interact with the Wilderness Evasion / chases rules.
  
• Rations: switching over to one stone per week like in Simpler Logistics.  Changed foraging to require staying still in a hex but increased its yield.  Parties relying solely on foraging end up treading water / breaking just even in expectation if they don't have anyone with bonuses to it.  So then the tradeoff with hunting is better odds of food in exchange for random encounter chance.
• Random encounters: considering a rule where it's a 1-in-12 chance of a random encounter each turn (or each day in the wilderness).  This prevents you from banking on "no encounter" on even turns or days.  On the other hand, this means rolling more often, maybe the forced gaps between encounters exist for a good reason, and you will occasionally get two encounters back-to-back which could be very bad news.  So I'm not sure about this.
  

I am also running into some issues resolving divergences between source material - do elves eat the flesh of sentients like in Dwarf Fortress?  Is the balrog a Forgotten Beast or a demon?  Do I need corruption mechanics like for the ring, or should I just not worry about that?

Call Allies

I was fiddling with spells for wizard for Dwarfhack and got to thinking - you know what would be a good spell?  Call Demihumans, where you get a group of friendly humans, elves, or dwarves from the nearest settlement to come help you.  That would be very on-theme for wizards; "a group of friendly rangers happens by and Gandalf happens to know their leader; they're hunting the same orcs that you are.  What a fortunate coincidence!"

When the wizard does his job right, people won't be sure he's done anything at all.

Under ACKS' spell-building guidelines, we get something like this:

Call Allies

Arcane or Eldritch 2

Duration: 1 day

This spell calls two 1HD humans or demihumans (elves, dwarves, hobbits, gnomes, ...) per caster level to aid the caster.  When called, they travel dismounted from their lair to the caster's location at their wilderness movement rate.  If this spell is cast in a wilderness hex which is native terrain for them, they arrive in 1d6 turns.  If this spell is cast in a hex to which they're not native, the time to arrive is increased for each hex that they have to traverse in order to reach the caster's location from the nearest hex of native terrain.

 

Speed -> Turns per hex:

60' -> 24

90' -> 18

120' -> 12

 

If called while the caster is unreachable (in a dungeon, for example), they will travel as close as possible and then wait in the vicinity.  For the duration of the spell, the demihumans will serve as the caster's loyal companions and friends.  The spell ends when they are slain, the spell is dispelled, or one day passes, at which time they depart.  If the spell is cast again when they are about to depart, they will remain for another day.

Spellcasting math: 2HD per caster level is 150 points (per HFH), 1HD limit is x0.15, general class of monsters is x1, 1 day duration is x1.25, calling delay is x0.66

It's really interesting that this works out as a 2nd level spell, because you could make it a special power comparable to a proficiency and make it usable once per 8 hours with a casting time of 1 round, which would let you maintain 6x your HD in 1HD followers, wage-free!  This seems like a promising angle for retinue-calling abilities like Call the Cousins; if you make it available at 5th level, then it's a perfect "welcome to the wilderness levels, laddie" ability giving you a platoon.  Give a second copy of it around 9th or 10th and then you have four platoons for a company.

ACKS Class: Warrior-Poet

 Each word led me on | to another word, 

 Each deed to another deed. 

- Odin, the Hovamol, Stanza 142 

I was thinking the other day about how Inspire Courage is a great ability, and that despite that bard just doesn't see that much play, probably in part because the bard just has a long-running frivolous reputation.  It occurred to me to give Inspire Courage the Varangian treatment - stealing it and putting it on top of a fighter with d6 HD.  Working in the Varangian vein, I originally was going to call it Skald.  But I was reminded of Morrowind and its Buoyant Armigers, and figured maybe I would generalize it a bit.

Warrior-Poet

Prime requisites: Strength and Charisma

HD: d6

Maximum level: 14

Warrior-poets cut their enemies with both word and sword.  They are able fighters, advancing in attack throws and saves at a rate of 2 points per 3 levels.  They gain a +1 bonus to damage at 1st level, and every third level.  They save as fighters of their level and may use magic items usable by fighters.

Warrior-poets train broadly with weapons and armor, but their training is not as complete as that of fighters.  Warrior-poets may use all weapons and armor, and fight with a weapon in both hands, a weapon in each hand, or a shield, except as restricted by their chosen style / cultural background:

• Skald: Not trained with armor heavier than chain.
• Zen Swordsman: Not trained with shields.
• Minstrel-Knight: Not trained with bows and crossbows.

Regardless of culture, warrior-poets are able composers and reciters of poetry (as the Performance proficiency), and often practice other arts as well.  They are well-versed in protocol and courtesy (as the Diplomacy proficiency), and their exhortations can Inspire Courage in their companions and followers (as the bard ability).  Finally, as allegory and allusion are their stock in trade, each warrior-poet accumulates an armory of legends and lore (as the Loremastery proficiency), to which he can refer on a throw of 18+, improving by 1 point per level after 1st.

By 5th level, the warrior-poet's presence and prowess inspire his followers without needing to speak.  Troops and henchmen whom he personally leads gain a +1 bonus to morale throws.

By 9th level, the warrior-poet's hospitality and courtly manners are widely known.  Should he construct or otherwise come into possession of a fortress, mead hall, monastery, or other property, 1d4+1 x 10 0th-level mercenaries and 1d6 warrior-poets of 1st-3rd level will soon arrive seeking to enter his service.

XP	Level	Hit Dice	THAC0	Damage bonus	Loremastery  Throw
0	1	1d6	10+	+1	18+
1850	2	2d6	9+	+1	17+
3700	3	3d6	9+	+2	16+
7400	4	4d6	8+	+2	15+
14800	5	5d6	7+	+2	14+
29600	6	6d6	7+	+3	13+
60000	7	7d6	6+	+3	12+
120000	8	8d6	5+	+3	11+
240000	9	9d6	5+	+4	10+
360000	10	9d6+2	4+	+4	9+
480000	11	9d6+4	3+	+4	8+
600000	12	9d6+6	3+	+5	7+
720000	13	9d6+8	2+	+5	6+
840000	14	9d6+10	1+	+5	5+

Sorry, generating level titles that made sense across all three of Skald, Zen Swordsman, and Mistrel-Knight didn't seem reasonable.

Class proficiencies (28):

1. Alertness
2. Art
3. Bargaining
4. Berserkergang
5. Blind Fighting
6. Combat Reflexes
7. Combat Trickery
8. Command
9. Disguise
10. Dungeon Bashing
11. Endurance
12. Fighting Style
13. Gambling
14. Healing
15. Intimidation
16. Leadership
17. Manual of Arms
18. Military Strategy
19. Performance
20. Precise Shooting
21. Prophecy
22. Riding
23. Running
24. Seduction
25. Skirmishing
26. Swashbuckling
27. Weapon Finesse
28. Weapon Focus

Notes: This class makes me feel sort of bad about Fighting 2 / HD 1 / Thief 1 class builds.  For an extra 450 XP to 2nd level over bard, it gets better saves, better THAC0, fighting damage bonus, and almost full weapon and armor proficiencies.  And if it didn't have Performance (which is sort of a dead-weight proficiency), it wouldn't have to make a fighting value tradeoff, and then it would only be at 300XP over bard to 2nd.  Meanwhile it gets two of the bard's main abilities (though it loses out in the mid-levels, but by that point the save and damage bonuses are bigger).

I considered differentiating skald, zen swordsman, and minstrel-knight further, adding a second restriction to each and having them provide a second proficiency (probably berserkergang or fighting style: shield, alertness or combat reflexes, and riding), but couldn't figure out what else to remove from each.  That would've put the XP up to 2k to 2nd anyway, which didn't seem worth it.

A/X: Call the Cousins

Kicking around fighter mercenary-summoning abilities in the presence of Money Up Front:

At 5th level (Sentinel), the Dwarven Vaultguard's exploits have become known in the mountainhome.  All dwarves who he personally leads gain +1 morale in battle.  Additionally, he may choose to call his cousins to fight by his side with promises of treasure and glory.  If he does so, he may choose a dwarven unit type and have a squad of them arrive and enter his service by the beginning of the next adventure.  However, he owes them the promised treasure, of a value equal to their cost if they were a mercenary unit.  Failure to pay the cousins at least a third of his personal share of the treasure towards this debt every adventure will force a loyalty roll.  Should a cousin perish, another will come to replace the fallen one once he has been given a proper burial and his arms and armor returned to the mountainhome.  Should no cousin in the vaultguard's service remain alive, he is absolved of his debt to them but may not summon another unit of cousins until he gains a level of experience.  Should a vaultguard ever kill one of the cousins, or in bad faith cause one to be killed, he will be branded a kinslayer.  A kinslayer's cousins desert immediately and no more may be summoned thereafter.  A vaultguard who has satisfied the treasure expectations of all cousins currently in his service may call an additional unit of cousins; this may be done multiple times.

Nice things about this: it feels very dwarf, it gives you seven dwarves (or thirteen if you pay off the first squad), it disincentivizes betraying them, and it totally works around market class restrictions for replenishing them, which is nice because availability of demihuman troops in human markets is pretty lousy (but replaces markets with the need to retrieve the bodies and possibly travel).

OK things: this is probably a smaller retinue than human fighters will get, but it's OK because dwarven troops are better.

Less nice things: it requires tracking the state of the debt (but it's a fraction of earnings so if you have a bad session you're not going to end up underwater, you just have to pay them based on what you earned).

Potential extension points: cousins level up to elite 2nd- or 3rd-level mercenaries when the Vaultguard hits certain levels.  A similar ability to call dwarven henchmen?  With a bonus if you have Dwarven Brewing, making it a useful proficiency?

A/X Mercenaries: Money Up Front

Been thinking more about open table ACKS lately.  Stumbled on this old post and read through some of the session reports from the Shieldlands campaign, that best of open-table ACKS games.

I think the session needs to be a relevant unit of time.
Markets refresh per session (roughly).
Spells refresh per session (roughly).
Domains provide passive income per session and no XP (and may be a source of trouble; clocks can run in them, and they're part of the world in the structure of "session begins, players attempt to do a thing, pizza break, a thing happens in the world")
More explicit structure for sessions - Market Phase, Planning Phase, Adventure!, Treasure Phase

Going to need to scale things down a little from ACKS' defaults.  I'm OK with a 9th level fighter having 30 mercenaries and a run-down fort - this is exactly what you'd expect from the Men, Brigands monster entry.  So if you're 9th level and you have a wee baby domain that nets you 250gp/session and a handful of mercs, that's OK by me.

I've still been kicking around how to simplify mercenary bookkeeping.  I think I may have hit a potential solution.

First, hire them as units beneath a sergeant, like I've been saying for a while.
Second, pay them up front.

ACKS has this concept of "the magic ratio", which comes up repeatedly in its economics and is tied to the rate of return on capital in fantasy Rome (bear with me).  Most investments are expected to pay for themselves in about 30 months, and characters in the world are assumed to have about 30 times their monthly income in assets.

So if you want to hire a mercenary and not have to deal with tracking his monthly expenses, pay him 30 months of wages up front.  Better, do it through a sergeant to handle a whole squad and if any one guy dies, the sergeant will take the pay pre-allocated to that guy and use it to pay some other poor bastard that he dragoons in the next market you pass through.

So if a light infantryman costs 6gp/mo in wages, then you can hire a squad of 6 of them for the foreseeable future for around 1100gp.  And then mercenaries become sort of like a magic item - they can go on your character sheet instead of in a spreadsheet, because you don't need to pay them monthly.  "The Yellow Saddles, Light Cavalry, 5/6 men".  Easy.  And they replenish between sessions subject to market class (possibly derandomized, because I don't want to have to roll for merc availability all the time).

And if you want them to replenish faster, we could base something on the commissioning items rules to let you raise the effective market class, and then either give fighters free virtual gold to spend on this every session (or let them write recruiting costs off on their living expenses), or give them a venturer-like ability to replenish mercenary units as if the market were one size larger.  This also provides an incentive to visit markets during adventures, to heal your mercenary units.

Now, I could see some sticker shock at 1100gp for six measly light infantrymen.  It's 2200 for heavy infantry, 2700 for bowmen, 5400 for light cavalry, and 10800 for heavy cavalry.  Those are not small chunks of change, and my former players would probably want to be banking that money towards building a fortress.  But if you change how domain acquisition works, from "build a fortress" to "domains are immutable, go capture one", then these changes complement each other - the money you aren't spending on castles can be spent on mercs, and the mercs are how you "buy" a castle.  And honestly, with domains out of the spending picture - would you rather have a +1 spear, or six knights who respawn between sessions?

Ooh, and this works out beautifully - a 9th level fighter has 250,000 XP.  He got about 200,000 of that from GP.  200,000 GP in permanent mercenaries is about 180 knights, which would be big for a bandit encampment but is in the realm of the reasonable (he probably spent some money on other things too).

So I don't think this is a totally crazy plan.

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

ACKS: Orc Chieftain Abilities

As I've mentioned before, Shadow of Mordor is kind of a terrible game.  But one thing it does do well is that its orcish captains have character and variety.  So let's steal the good parts, shall we?

Orcish subchieftains get two rolls on abilities and one on weaknesses; orcish chieftains get three abilities and one weakness.  You could give champions one ability, but there are too many champions.  A warband's champions will usually be equipped in the same way as their subchieftain and are often assembled as a bodyguard (to match PC action economy).

Orcish abilities:

1. Mad Dog: Berserkergang, Fighting Style (Two-Handed), two-handed weapon
2. Impaler: x2 damage on charge, Fighting Style (Polearm), polearm
3. Whirlwind: Fighting Style (Two Weapons), Running, Swift Sword 1/day, two weapons
4. Ironhide: +2 AC, -1 damage per die from nonmagical weapons
5. Scarred: +2 AC, Savage Resilience
6. Strong: +2 to hit and melee damage
7. Ogreborn: Giant Strength 1/day
8. Trollkin: Regenerate 1HP/round, can only be killed with fire or acid
9. Deadeye: Precise Shooting x3, arbalest
10. Warpig: Dire boar mount, Riding, lance
11. Duelist: +1 to hit, damage, and AC, Combat Trickery (Disarm), Combat Reflexes, challenges PCs to single combat
12. Crustacean: Plate, shield, Fighting Style (Shield)
13. Packmaster: Beast Friendship, 2d4 wolves
14. Firebrand: 6 flasks military oil, torch, Fighting Style (Missile), Resistance to Fire continual effect
15. Chosen: Divine Blessing, Protection from Good, Prayer 1/day
16. Evil Eye: Bestow Curse 3/day
17. Howler: Fear 1/day (deaf targets unaffected)
18. Ambusher: Ambushing, Naturally Stealthy (-1 to opponent surprise rolls), Sniping, arbalest
19. Rhymer: Inspire Courage, Military Strategy, Leadership, might even be literate
20. Second Sight: See Invisible constant effect, Alertness, Combat Reflexes
21. Pestilence: Divine Health, unarmed melee attacks do 1d4 damage and save vs death or contract disease (as reversed Cure Disease)
22. Leaper: Acrobatics, Jump constant effect, Skirmishing
23. Arrow-Catcher: Protection from Normal Missiles when not flat-footed / surprised / unconscious
24. Manhunter: Tracking, Land Surveying, Endurance
25. Elf-Eater: Arcane Dabbling, Sensing Power, Elven Bloodline
26. Leech-Keeper: Healing 3, healing herbs
27. Nightstalker: +30' infravision, Silent Step constant effect, Ambushing, attacks at night when possible
28. Poisoner: Alchemy 2, Naturalism, 3 doses of hellebore poison
29. Treacherous: Always behaves as if friendly, regardless of reaction roll, until opportunity arises.  Ambushing.
30. Cannibal: Black Lore, ghoul claw/claw/bite and paralysis, slain opponents rise as ghouls

Looking at that list, I figure most of those average to about half a * each for XP purposes.  There are some that are closer to a *, and some that are much weaker, and I'm OK with that.

Weaknesses:  Come in sort of three flavors - exploitable personality flaws, old injuries, and phobias.  Injuries work just like permanent wounds from the mortal wounds table, and have a 75% chance of having been inflicted by some other (still living) orc subchieftain or chieftain in the region, who the injured orc holds a grudge against.  Phobias cause an immediate morale roll at -2 when the orc is exposed to them.

1. One-eye: Missing eye (-2 to missile attack throws), may have grudge
2. One-ear: Severed ear (-1 to hear noise and surprise throws), may have grudge
3. Mute: Severed tongue (cannot speak, -4 to reaction rolls; if was Rhymer, becomes Howler), may hold grudge
4. Limper: Lamed leg (-30' speed; if was Leaper, becomes Warpig), may hold grudge
5. Meathook: Severed hand, replaced with hook, may hold grudge
6. Fear of fire: checks morale at -2 when takes fire damage
7. Fear of spiders: checks morale at -2 when confronted with giant spiders
8. Fear of eagles: checks morale at -2 when confronted with giant birds
9. Fear of elves: checks morale at -2 when confronted with elves
10. Fear of magic: checks morale at -2 when is the target of a spell
11. Fear of undead: checks morale at -2 when confronted with undead
12. Fear of riders: checks morale at -2 when confronted with cavalry
13. Contemptuous: never takes or interrogates prisoners, just leaves enemy wounded on field of battle
14. Sadistic: after battle, sets up camp and spends one day per wounded prisoner torturing (max 1 week) rather than pursuing
15. Vengeful: always pursues retreating parties when possible
16. Greedy: all PCs may use Bribery against this orc, who may be tempted to do stupid things by promise of wealth
17. Simple: not very smart, even for an orc; -2 Strategic Ability, tends to take others at their word
18. Old: -1 to hit and damage, +1 Strategic Ability, easy to convince other orcs to challenge for dominance
19. Sot: always up for a drink; often hungover, easy to poison.
20. Addict: has a craving for that dank halfling pipeweed, will go to great lengths to get it.

So what does this look like in practice?

Let's take two camps each of 5 warbands and see what we get.

Village 1:

Chieftain: Gorgum Nightstalker - Strong, Nightstalker, Leech, Vengeful

Subchieftains:

• Naftar the Tongueless - Howler, Second Sight, Mute, not inflicted by an orc in this region
• Urmok Trollkin - Trollkin, Poisoner, Fear of Undead
• Kragog the Old - Trollkin, Ironhide, Old
• Snagog One-Eye - Arrow-Catcher, Evil Eye, One-Eye, inflicted by another orc in the region
• Mugrik the Tower - Crustacean, Arrow-Catcher, Fear of Fire

Village 2:

Chieftain: Drugak the Dog - Packmaster, Pestilence, Ogreborn, Simple

Subchieftains:

• Lamush the Loud - Howler, Scarred, Sot
• Mugrish the Mighty - Strong, Ogreborn, One-Ear, inflicted by another orc in the region
• Lagrat the Limper - Impaler, Rhymer, Limper, inflicted by another orc in the region
• Gnarosh the Foul - Pestilence, Whirlwind, Fear of Magic
• Chugash the Chosen - Chosen, Scarred, Contemptuous
• Enok Elf-Eater - Elf-Eater, Arrow-Catcher, Meathook (inflicted by elves, of course)

Rolling some d12s, we find that Snagog One-Eye lost his eye to Mugrish the Mighty, who in turn lost his ear to Kragog the Old, sowing the seeds of some good inter-village enmity.  Lagrat the Limper, however, had his injury inflicted by Enok Elf-Eater, of his own village - wonderfully exploitable by PCs.  Another thing, looking at those villages, is that Drugak and Mugrish are both Ogreborn and might be related; likewise Urmok and Kragog with Trollkin.  I am a little sad that I didn't roll any Mad Dog, Firebrand, or Warpig; oh well.

Guess I really ought to write a name-generation table too; wouldn't be too bad, you basically have a list of valid first syllables and a list of valid second syllables.

One possible issue with this approach is that orc subchieftains rapidly stop being serious individual threats by like 4th level; I feel like giving them another hit die or two (4HD is a hero, after all) and expanding their threat range into the midlevels would keep all this work rolling abilities relevant for longer.  On the upside, there are some abilities that stay relevant into mass combat (like Howler and Prayer) even if the subchieftains themselves are pretty weak.

ACKS: Beot

I haven't actually read the current / near-finished (?) ACKS Heroic Companion draft yet, but one thing we really enjoyed from a previous draft many moons ago was the Warrior Code rule.  Warrior Code provided a bonus to XP earned for obeying certain virtuous restrictions, modeled after the old pagan virtues (things like bravery, hospitality, and loyalty...  not so much mercy).  This was a great rule (though the honesty condition did have the awkward effect of making some henchman the Party Liar, so that everyone else could avoid the stain on their honor and the loss of their precious XP).  In a similar vein, of "turning old-school pagan-appropriate behavior into XP bonuses", I think a rule for beot could be a lot of fun.  Make a boast of a suitable Mighty Deed you will personally accomplish this adventure; if you succeed, +10% XP for the adventure!  If you fail, -10% XP for the adventure.  Maybe just -5%, to encourage people to actually use the option.  Bonus points for multiple party members with the same boast who have to compete for it.

Downtime

In the ACKS repo, I'm working on a branch to change the way downtime works.  One of my issues with ACKS is that it doesn't really support open-table play well outside of low levels.  Domain XP slows down (or stops) level convergence within the party, and characters with domains tend to monopolize out-of-adventuring time and DM attention.  My intentions with these changes include:

• Give everyone across the level range useful things to do during downtime.
• Reduce overhead / level of detail / granularity in tracking downtime (two-week "downtime turns")
• Create a structure / cycle of play around downtime, such that it happens in regular, predictable chunks alternating with adventures rather than "OK, Mr. Mage needs three months to make his item and we dare not go adventuring without him, so we're all gonna sit on our butts for three months."
• As a side effect, reduce the variance of magic research by cutting it into multiple downtime actions and allowing partial progress
• TODO: standardize monetary outlay between spell research and magic item creation
• Add some mechanics which accelerate the convergence of low-level characters to the party mean (mentorship bonus)
• Throw some bones to players who miss sessions (extra downtime actions)
• Mix up the general proficiencies metagame.  Currently, a handful of general proficiencies (Healing, Alchemy, Bargaining, and Diplomacy/Intimidation initially, then Navigation and Riding in wilderness, then Military Strategy and Leadership when mass combat starts happening) typically dominate discourse and use in play in my groups.  Unsurprisingly, these are the general proficiencies that actually do useful things.  The trick, then, is adding really utile uses to some of the job-type general proficiencies.  So far, this has mostly been by increasing effective market class for goods related to the proficiency practiced, or by adding ability to find henchmen of certain classes (and possibly outside the typical henchman recruiting level range).
• Relatedly, reduce the pain of operating in small markets and deprecate/distribute the Venturer / Varangian's core ability.
• TODO Art - ???
• TODO Labor, especially Mining - bonus to detect traps underground (probably only +2, smaller than dwarf bonus or Alertness), high-risk-high-reward downtime activity, ability to recruit dwarf henchmen.
• TODO Profession, especially Lawyer - bonus to rolls on sentencing table
• TODO: make sufficient quantities of carousing a downtime action, make the carousing table canon (that table was a regular source of fun in the first campaign)
• TODO: rework mercenary hiring, rather like this.  Mercenary wages, henchman wages, and cost of living need some thought in open-table mode.
• TODO: integration with Apocalypse World-style clock system, for easy running of living worlds.  I don't need to know a whole lot of details, just that this disgruntled NPC is going to try to come after the PCs in N sessions.  I'll fill in the rest when things get closer.
• TODO: fix / redesign hijinks to provide adventure hooks and intel on running clocks.  Spying actually makes sense when people worth spying on are doing secret things in the background.
• TODO: simplify domains.  Starting for now by taking this and working it into the Campaigns chapter, and by removing domain XP (mass combat XP can stay - that's combat.  XP from sacking domains can stay - that's treasure earned adventuring).  I have some vague notions for some Lords of Waterdeep-style mechanics, where domains and guilds provide you with anonymous, disposable "adventurer" resources that you can send on quests to delay clocks, but I'm not sure how to make it mesh with ACKS-as-it-is, nor how I really want it to look at the end of the day, so I'm going to put that one off.

ACKS SRD forked on github

Once upon a time, I wrote a post about all the things I'd want to change in Traveller if I were to run it again.  The other day (...  or month), I started to draft a similar post for ACKS, in part in response to the ACKS 2e proposal that was floated on the Patreon.  In general, I dislike the direction ACKS seems to be headed; as I said a year and a half ago - "ACKS' continued development seems to be away from its slick, usably-abstracted B/X roots and off into what the forums jokingly call Advanced Adventurer Conqueror King, with more detail and more rules.".  The 2e draft reinforces that perception.

I considered digging through the pile of retroclones to find something that better suits my desires, but I find my patience for reading rulebooks has fallen over time, particularly with all the duplication that you tend to see in retroclones.  I found myself wishing that retroclones were just published as changelogs, as patchnotes, or in proper version control systems.

And then I remembered caphiend's ACKS SRD on github, and went "what the hell, somebody has to start this."  So here we are - a version of the ACKS SRD with a growing selection of our group's conventions, houserules (or proposed houserules), and clarifications integrated into it.

Player-Controlled XP Allocation

A friend of mine asked me to give a talk on DMing, so I've been writing and rewriting endless cycles of notes on that.  One theme that I know I want to hit is putting players mostly-in-control of the difficulty of the combat that they face, by giving them free rein to scout the dungeon and avoid dangerous monsters.  Another theme is that really strong play often requires submission of the individual party member to the interests of the party - the wizard has to hold on to his one spell carefully rather than using it early for personal satisfaction, the thief has to expose himself to substantial personal risk in order to find traps so that they don't kill anyone (or everyone) else, and fighters are sometimes called upon to die for the party so that everyone else can live.  Clerics, of course, are clerics, and have always operated been expected to operate "in service" to the party as a whole.

But when you take these two ideas, players collectively in control of their destiny and subordination of the individual to the party, and combine them with XP for treasure, a funny possibility arises.

Under a certain reading of the rules, you earn 1 XP per GP that you receive from the adventure.  If the party as a whole determines (by vote, say) that some player failed to contribute and to pull their weight, by (say) fleeing from combat, the party as a whole need not allocate any GP from the treasure to that player, and hence he will earn little XP - just the monster XP portion, which is around 20% of XP on most adventures.  A persistent problem player who regularly earns 20% XP will eventually end up about 2 levels behind the rest of the party.  A player allocated only half a share of gold will tend to end up one level behind.  This is, obviously, not a form of censure that should be used lightly, but it is one that should be considered.  I suspect that, as with PC death, this is not something that needs to happen often for it to modify player behavior substantially.  The knowledge that it is a possibility encourages cooperation.

The reverse also applies - if you have a new player join a group and he's playing a class that you really need, the party can allocate greater than a share to him.  If someone's fighter died in a heroic rearguard action to cover the party's retreat and now they're playing a henchman and a level behind, you can allocate them greater than a share until they come up to level parity.  The trivial, common case is that a PC is 10 XP from leveling with standard shares, and a tiny reallocation might push them across a threshold.

Unfortunately, henchmen complicate this XP allocation scheme, for one because they receive an odd share size, and for two because traditionally they receive their shares straight from the party pool, but if a player receives an odd-sized share, do his henchmen too?  In the case of a problem player, it seems reasonable to dock his henchmen as well; in the case of a hero player, it seems reasonable to award his henchmen extra as well.  But this all complicates the accounting, or raises again the specter of "the pay for your henchmen should come out of your share of the treasure", which I suspect most sensible parties will reject on the grounds that a player with many henchmen is of great value to the party as a whole.

At the end of the day, one of the interesting facets of this game not present in more modern editions is that it is in many ways an experiment in small-scale self-governance, civics, and organizational behavior.  And yes, the gaming community seems to have settled on very regular norms regarding the allocation of treasure and XP, but one of the joys of transgressive/retrogressive gaming, allowing things like PvP and uneven allocation of treasure, is an opportunity to reinvent those norms (with good stories and object lessons about why we have those norms), or to arrive at new and strange norms.  And isn't that what the OSR is all about?  Rolling back the clock and seeing the other possibilities that could have been, not merely in the rules of the game, but in the rules of the group?

ACKS: Figuring out the Barbarian

The other week I was looking at writing a Powergamer's Guide to Fighters in ACKS, in the vein of this 3.x-era gem of a book.  Ultimately the analysis I did deepened my conclusion that sword-and-board is generally optimal, but I'm not happy with the rigor of that analysis yet.  One other thing that came out of that 8000-word draft post was that I was looking at doing a rating for each fighting-type class, and I spent some quality time looking at the Player's Companion barbarian class.  I think I sort of figured out what it's supposed to do, why it doesn't do that super-well, and how to fix it.

Barbarians get d8 HD and fight as a fighter of their level, have prime reqs Str and Con, and trade a bunch of weapon proficiencies and ability to use plate away for a pretty strong stealth ability that penalizes enemy surprise rolls, a bonus to init and surprise rolls, ability to roll twice for mortal wounds and choose, and a proficiency based on land of origin, which also determines which weapons they can use.  Options include viking (Climbing, gets two-handed melee weapons), nomad (Precise Shooting, gets lance and composite bow), and tribesman (Running, gets...  pretty crappy weapons).  Unfortunately, all those Fighting Value tradeoffs mean they're at 2600 XP to 2nd level.

Between the lack of plate and the slow leveling, my players have pretty much dismissed this one.  The thing here is that compared to other fighter-variants like assassin, explorer, and spellsword, it's not really clear how barbarian is supposed to fight.  Explorer is supposed to do archery, and they have tremendous synergy built into the class so that they're good at it from 1st level (granted, Prof Tax for Precise Shooting, but that's a separate issue).  Spellsword fits naturally into a second-row spear-and-sleep in plate role right out of the gate.  Assassin's a little weirder, but it's pretty clear that you're supposed to be sneaky out front to get in the backstabs (but we rarely use them that way, because we consider plate a prerequisite for front-line).

Barbarian sends mixed messages.  The Con prime req, d8 HD, and Savage Resilience suggest that you should be out front taking the hits, but you don't have plate and party healing resources are limited, so this seems like a Bad Playstyle.  The surprise modifier suggests that you should be trying to get the drop on people, which certainly benefits from being on the front line.  The three backgrounds bring Climbing, Precise Shooting, and Running, which are not good, solid front-liner abilities.  Sure, Climbing can help you get into position to surprise people, but then you still need to capitalize on that.  Precise Shooting doesn't synergize with surprise well at all; if they're surprised, they're probably not in melee yet.  It lets you follow up surprised ranged attacks once melee is engaged, if you want to roll dedicated archer...  but then you should've been an explorer for the faster leveling, Dex prime req, and crazy-good wilderness stealth.  Running lets you close or get out, but generally combats start at pretty close distances so it's most likely going to be used for escape, which requires the rest of your party to accommodate an aisle of retreat through the phalanx (and even then, how often is that little bit of extra movement going to make the difference?).

So I think this is how barbarian's supposed to work:

• Be in the front line
• Enemy fails surprise about half the time because you are naturally stealthy.  You, of course, do not fail surprise much because you have Combat Reflexes
• In the surprise round, you charge in with a spear or two-handed weapon and Ambushing and try to cleave up a bunch of guys in the surprise round and force penalized morale rolls
• If that works, then they flee and you win
• If that doesn't, they whale on you, Con and Savage Resilience keep you alive until the party can recover you or you can disengage.
• If you don't get surprise, you are sad, possibly fall back into the second row.

It's sufficiently-impetuous for a barbarian.  It's sort of skirmishy, like Keegan's History of Warfare would lead us to expect of primitive peoples.  It's a much more aggressive way to play than our typical fighter, higher-risk and higher-reward; when it goes right, it's a combat-win in the surprise round, and when it goes wrong, you're out a bunch of healing.

The thing here is that Ambushing is clutch for capitalizing on those "surprise, barbarian!" moments.  And indeed, the suggested template for Barbarian has Ambushing.  The only other class proficiency which seems to me to really compete with Ambushing is Armor Training, which gives you plate and turns you into a slow-leveling fighter with Savage Resilience.  Ambushing just completes the class' natural synergy.

Which is why, if I were to redesign Barbarian, I'd get rid of the origin proficiencies, give all Barbarians Ambushing, and standardize a weapon list with: polearm, lance, spear, sword, composite or longbow (the important weapons), javelin, dagger, battle-axe, short-sword, two-handed sword or greataxe.  Possibly vary weapon list with origin, or maybe do away with origin entirely.  Then for your first-level class proficiency, you have some real options:

• Fighting Style: Shield in combination with a spear boosts your defense after the charge - run in for d8x3, then switch to one-handed spear and draw your shield (as a free action).  Also scales nicely as magic shields become available.
• Berserkergang lets you double-down on the ambush; if they're all dead or fleeing before they get the opportunity to attack, the AC penalty doesn't matter, and the to-hit bonus stacks up ridiculously with Charge and Ambushing (seriously, +8 to hit is a lot).  For best results, combine with polearm for d10x3.
• Combat Reflexes or Alertness mean you're never surprised, can always capitalize when the enemy is surprised
• Skirmishing or Running to get back out
• Sniping if you want to do bow-ambush from the second row on surprise, then switch to polearm or spear once melee is joined (this feels like a very solid way to play a first-level barbarian)
• FS: Two-Handed and FS: Polearm continue to be mediocre at first level - the two-handed damage bonus is small, and the polearm init bonus is outdone by Combat Reflexes 

In the wilderness, get a horse and a lance and continue to charge from ambush, then disengage for horse-archery or more charges.  In mass combat, your synergy breaks down; you can get Command and leads troops OK, but surprise doesn't really work.  You might still be able to use Ambushing in commander-duels if you bring potions of invisibility, but generally I'd expect a barbarian with typical magic gear (chainmail, shield, sword) to lose to a fighter of equivalent level with similar magic gear (plate, shield, sword) in a straight-up fight.  Maybe I'm discounting the Con bonus you probably have from the prime req, though.  Polearms get much worse at high levels because magic ones aren't on the treasure tables, and even two-handed swords are sort of DM's discretion with the sword table.  Magic spear (+ magic shield) is probably your best bet, if you can find one.

To address some potential objections: it's true that this is a more generic conception of barbarian.  It doesn't have the origins, and it doesn't try to model three different historical societies in a single class.  I'm OK with that.  When D&D players hear barbarian, they're looking for reckless offense.  I'm OK with giving it to them.  This may not be Rage as expected, but it still plays like the barbarians we know and love.  It's also true that this barbarian class is slightly gamey; the weapon selection is strong, and the abilities synergize well.  I'm OK with that too - they pay for the weapon selection with the Fighting Value tradeoff XP, and abilities synergizing well is fine when explorer and assassin do it.

Compared to fighter, this barbarian has greater ability to end combats before they begin, but has to assume greater risks to do so.  Compared to assassin, barbarian is tougher and better able to deal with the ambush going wrong, and has stronger stealth at low levels but weaker stealth at high levels.  Compared to both of these classes, it levels more slowly.

Clergy Notes

I haven't been able to settle on an implementation of the cleric domain game yet.  Running the numbers on how much divine power a realm generates is pretty straightforward.  Garrisons of paladins are easy, and providing an NPC cleric to cast spells for the party is trivial by demographics of heroism.  The real trouble is "what do you spend divine power on?"

Magic item creation is clearly in-scope, but if the highest-level NPC cleric in the realm is below domain level, it's going to be unreliable and kind of lame.  At 500 families under church administration, you get a 5th-level cleric, who is 12+ on magic research throws, and 500 divine power per week (did I mention that divine power is hideously productive?).  He can attempt to make a Potion of Cure Light every week; 2000gp/mo input materials, in expectation 0.8 potions of cure light output.  Ehhhh (and that's assuming he'll sell to you at price to produce; NPCs in the domain are friendly, but not henchmen, unless so hired, which is much easier to do before they're in charge of things).  Further, figuring out aggregate potion production for deeper trees in larger domains (where you have more than one cleric of 5th+ level, or assisting 1st-level clerics) looks to be a pain in the ass.  Plus, high-quality item production really feels more like a dwarf / elf thing, or a wizard thing, than a church thing.

Ritual magic is really more like what I want, particularly Harvest, but smaller.  Bonuses to feudal troop morale ("Deus Vult"), burgher tax income ("Give Unto Caesar"), population growth ("Go Forth and Multiply"), extend supply caches during siege ("Seven Lamps"), reduce fortifications (Jericho), rain locusts and frogs, call or prevent plagues, part seas to march armies across, drop prophecies, summon outsiders to mass combat, ...  but at this point we're looking at a whole new subsystem of magic that has to balance size of effect and divine power cost and some sort of casting mechanism (I dislike the magic research roll mechanic, because it's very unreliable at low levels, but I do like the idea of rolling for divine favor, because deities are capricious).  I'm tempted to just make these spells that require normal cleric spell slots, but also cost divine power over time, with a Divine Favor 2d6+wis reaction-style roll with results including "works great", "you're cursed", and "demands more goats".

So you see why I might be bogged down.

So at a wag, we have roughly three "tiers" of play; 1-4, 5-8, and 9-14.  It might be worth breaking 9-14 down further, because scale increases quite a bit over those levels (company vs legion scale, for example).  Then we cut our rituals into those three tiers - least, lesser, and greater.  Least rituals are available at 1st level, lesser at 5th along with consumable magic items, and greater at 9th (er, 11th?  I dunno, my games never reach that level anyway).  Some rituals we can reuse across levels and change their scope - Least Deus Vult at 1st level affects up to a platoon (or so), Lesser Deus Vult at 5th up to a company, and at Greater Deus Vult at 11th up to a legion, with divine power costs growing accordingly.  Your realm-economic miracles like Give Unto Caesar, Go Forth and Multiply, Good Harvest, or whatever have the number of families that they effect capped based on caster level, and their divine power costs scale similarly.

This is a fine idea, I guess, but it's mighty fiddly.  Hard to strike a balance between our goals of "clerics can do something fun and interesting and relevant to the domain as a whole", "keep it simpler* than normal ACKS", and "make domains at lower levels viable."

The straightforward solution is to make realm-blessing binary / boolean; either your whole kingdom has Deus Vult up, or it doesn't, and the cost in divine power is per-season based on total number of Feudal families.  Then your one-off miracles like calling outsiders have flat / fixed divine power costs per casting (and maybe minimum caster levels).

A church family generates 1 point of divine power per week (12 per season), while a non-church family generates 1 point of divine power per month (just based on their tithe expenditures; 3gp per season), so in a balanced realm of the four main estates we'd expect 21 divine power per season per four families.  We don't want it to be possible to have all the estates blessed, because that takes the choice out of things (also: bookkeeping), so presumably we want costs of 7? divine power per family per season to bless an estate with eg bonus morale (I like the idea of this applying to estate loyalty rolls as well as troop morale, so it becomes useful for politics as well as war), bonus taxes, population growth, or protection from disasters (plague, city-fire, hurricane, drought, wizard-monster escapes dungeon, ...).

(A more ACKS-consistent solution would probably make heavy use of forum esoterica, like this and this)

Amusingly, I actually expect wizards to be easier.  The ACKS domain rules work mostly-fine for wizards; they support doing wizardly stuff very well.  You dump your money into libraries and workshops and every season there's a chance that a randomly-rolled new spell is added to the archives, where your PC mage can then learn it, and the domain provides wizard-troops during war.  Very straightforward.  Nobody expects a 5th-level wizard to turn a domain-scale battle, but a 5th-level cleric, is they prayed hard enough, conceivably (non-disbelief-suspendingly) could, because deities are powerful.  And that's what makes this tricky.