Of Iron Heroes and Art

Alex ran an Iron Heroes game this last weekend, so I've went back through the IH player's book working on a berserker.  One thing that jumped out at me this time was the art.  It's seriously grungy, black-and-white-and-lots-of-grey stuff with skulls everywhere.  The monsters are grotesque and the weapons look like things you'd catch Pathfinder's goblins using. 

Top, second from left: the Ugly Stick

The PCs look not like chivalrous and upstanding citizens who you'd run to for help; they look like people you'd be afraid of if you ran into them in a bar.  Most of them are festooned with knives, their clothes are tattered, and almost fully half of them are wearing either skull emblems or literal skulls on their person (berserker has a skull flail and bear skull cloak with one eye still in the socket, executioner a skull pendant, man-at-arms a skull belt buckle, thief a skull cloak pin, and arcanist hanging skull censer-looking things).  They're a very motley bunch; some of my favorite touches include the armiger's jagged shield, the hunter's lashed-together axe, the man-at-arms' bare-midriff armor (on a male, lampshading trope).  And that's just in the character classes chapter. 

He's a good guy.  Honest.  Don't mind the skulls.

 
The NPCs that appear in the combat chapter mostly look like what I'd expect chaos cultists to look like in Warhammer Fantasy; spiky bits abound on the bad guys, while facial pox and warts and floppy leather hats are common among 'townsfolk'. 

Snakes for the snake god!  Skulls for the skull pyramid!

The buildings in the town art look closely-built, the streets uneven, narrow, and guttered, the signs just symbols, telling that no-one is literate.

Home, sweet home...

The art throughout the book just does a fantastic job of showing us the default setting of IH.  It's not bad at depicting the game, either.  This piece:

says to us "This is a game about standing shirtless and mohawked on the fallen corpses of your misbegotten enemies and howling your defiance to a Mad-Maxian world."

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why I play berserkers, every now and then when I get the chance.

Associative Action Points

And now, something that isn't Traveller!

Thinking about Trailblazer and d20 a bit, I realized that one of the issues I have with both standard action points and their stronger Trailblazer derivative is that they're completely unexplained in the gameworld; to use the Alexandrian's terminology, they're a dissociative mechanic (caution - loooong series of posts on the other end of this link).  No justification is ever given as to why the PCs have them and NPCs don't, except that "Well, they're PCs and they're special."  This doesn't quite cut it for me.  Even worse is that the resourcing mechanism on the standard implementation is similarly completely dissociated; your pool refills when you gain a level.  But the action of gaining a level is typically the culmination of a long, gradual increase in power in the gameworld, which only manifests it in mechanical benefits because the numbers we use in D&D are quantized integers, and it would be a huge pain to implement it otherwise (I have seen a d20 variant that allowed gradual levelling actually; Buy the Numbers.  The authors really really liked partial sums).  But action points, which are largely uncorrelated with level in their function, need not be assigned in giant chunks at level-up, and it rather strains my suspension of disbelief.

So that's the motivation for this post - I'm displeased with the lack of explanation of action points, though I have no real problem with the mechanics themselves except for their recharge.  Thus, the real goal of this post is to attempt to justify action points within the game world, and to provide alternate recharge schema following from those justifications.

The first solution that comes to mind is True20's Conviction, which operates similarly mechanically to action points, and is justified as deep reserves of willpower and energy as a result of a holding strong convictions.  It's actually a very similar system to Vampire the Masquerade's Willpower mechanic.  In both cases, characters have a nature, and behaving in accord with their natures generates Conviction / Willpower.  The fun thing with True20's conviction is that each character's nature includes a virtue and a vice; acting in accord with either restores conviction, but the existence of a vice allows a DM to 'tempt' players with conviction for doing terrible deeds, while the virtue allows DMs to reward them for acting well.  This worked pretty well in practice, though because it depends on DM fiat as to whether an action was a sufficiently strong expression of a virtue or vice, it can be tricky.  On the other hand, this allows DMs to tune the power level of their game based on their stinginess with conviction, or even to alter the tone of the campaign during play - when you're fighting the good fight against all odds and holding the line against the hordes, conviction might be easy to come by, but when you're wrongly accused, outlawed, stripped of your lands and titles, cursed in the sight of gods and men, then perhaps he backs off the granting of conviction.  So that's a bug or a feature, depending on which side of the DM screen you're on.

The next possibility is something like the Glory Points system from Mastering Iron Heroes, where you get 'action points' for sacrifice and good deeds.  These are pretty easily justifiable as Good Karma, with spirits and the universe watching out for the PCs who behave well / in accordance with the natural moral order.  This also explains why Joe NPC probably doesn't have any; he's unlikely to have held the gates against the orcs to buy time for the women and children to escape.  The trouble here is that evil PCs may get shafted; again, depending on who you ask, this may be good or bad.

A third possibility is suggested by the Martial Prowess variant of Glory Points, also from Mastering Iron Heroes, for use in more morally ambiguous campaigns.  With Martial Prowess, Glory Points are earned for defeating mighty foes in combat.  The karma / spirits justification works here, too, provided that the natural order is violence (which, for something like a Viking campaign, may be true).  A word of caution, though - we tried this once at home.  The party fighter and the party barbarian got into a competition to see who could earn more; I think we got into the low 30s.  We were pretty overpowered, though, and never spent them, because we were hoarding them for the competition (plus we just kind of forgot).  Good times.

A final possibility, which is kind of a synthesis of the above 'guiding spirits' and the Ancestor rules from Legend of the Five Rings, would be that each PC has a notable ancestor whose spirit watches out for them and provides them with strength in their hours of greatest need.  Here, the actual action points represent the strength of their bond with their ancestor, the strength of the ancestor spirit, and how strongly that ancestor favors them.  Retake your family castle?  The spirit approves, +1 AP.  Spend a month studying his fighting style, slay the descendant of his nemesis, or retrieve his sword?  +1 AP.  Accidentally drop said sword into a volcano?  The spirit is not amused...  -1 AP.  This also plays beautifully with Trailblazer's action point enhancement rules, which are abilities similar to feats (gained every 3 levels) which effect how you can spend action points and what they can do for you.  As you level, the enhancements you take are representative of the knowledge and power the spirit can grant to you as a reflection of its own character; a warrior ancestor might grant Mythic Smite, while a cunning thief ancestor might grant Mythic Luck.  Some of the abilities involving passing action points around the party would still be tricky to justify, but possibly workable.

From ancestor spirits, we could also branch out to deities, with action points serving as a measure of your deity's favor, and enhancements serving as a reflection of the boons your god is best at granting to his chosen.  Heck, you could even use them to model something like demonic possession / temptation (as with the good Doctor Bones in my last Traveller game - he'd have the Prophecy enhancement, methinks) or the god-in-flesh of a character like Fool Wolf.  As long as there's some kind of supernatural entity interested in the character and which acts through means other than direct spellcasting, action points could work, with refresh happening when you particularly please that entity, and the flavors of entity not necessarily the same across characters in the same party.

This approach leaves 'unbound' characters in the lurch, though.  What do you do with the grim, atheist warrior who clawed his way up from farmer ancestors, the thief who pays lipservice to many deities but worships none, or the wizard who seeks godhood for himself?  I don't have a perfect answer to that yet.  Something like conviction would probably be most appropriate for such characters, since the ancestor / god / demon system operates on similar principles in terms of awarding AP.

Release Updates (also Iron Heroes)

From the list of releases I'm watching for:

Starmada Nova: Cricket publicly released a finalish-looking draft of the first 11 pages of rules of the new edition.  It's very similar to the early draft that I mentioned previously, but there are some interesting differences.  In particular, on page 5 under Sequence of Play, there's a note that if one player outnumbers the other by 2 to 1 or more, they move or fire with two ships for each one that the outnumbered side fires with.  OK, nothing new there.  What is new, however, is that if you get to activate two or more ships per activation, your opponent chooses one of the ships for you to activate.  That's a hell of a tactical wrinkle under alternating movement and with damage being resolved during firing rather than at end of turn.

There's also an interesting note about Partial VP on page 11; it's like the crippling rules we used during our campaign, but better - you need to take a ship down to 2/3 hull to get half its value, rather than 1/2 hull.  Also nice that it's just a standardized rule now, rather than something we hacked on.

Finally, we got a confirm from Cricket down-thread that fighters will have their own reactive movement phase.  Oh well; probably for the better.   The new enemy-forced activation rules would really mess with fighters by allowing them to force you to activate your fighters early during ship movement, which would be quite a waste.

Mongoose Traveller Campaign Guide: Released to pdf this last week, the Campaign Guide looks pretty interesting, actually.  It's about as long as the Core, but full of random tables and whatnot for GMs.  I'm tempted to pick up a copy and do a review.

5e: No official news via EnWorld in the last two weeks.  However, this last week Monte &co spent most of their blog space talking about "high-level play", and how it always breaks down in previous editions.  Arguably in 1e/2e it was least bad, but casters were king (but, they had earned it by positively sucking for the first, oh...  long time).  In 3e, it was way too complicated and combats took six hours, despite the fact that they were only two rounds of game time.  My understanding is that 4e core high-level / epic combats also take a long damn time because monsters have ridiculously high HP and AC (er, defenses).  So, I say to Monte and Company: Get thee to a playtest!  That's been the issue with both iterations of Wizards D&D (as opposed to TSR D&D before 3e) - high-level play was horribly under-playtested.

Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be what they're focusing on; rather, they're looking at whether the play experience should change at high levels.  Me, I'd love to see kingdom building and ascension to deityhood as things on the high-level agenda.  "Epic dungeon crawls" make very little sense to me, and frankly seem somewhat dull.  Unfortunately, that seems to be what they're looking at; it's all about the artifacts and the plane-hopping.  While planar travel might not initially sound like code for dungeon-crawling, it pretty much is.  What is the Abyss but an infinite dungeon, full of an infinite number of high-level monsters with corresponding treasure, in addition to serious environmental trap-like threats?  It's the biggest dungeon ever.

And artifacts.  Argh.  So many artifacts these days are just big shiny swords with more bonuses than you could normally get.  3.x exemplars of this problem are the Hammer of Thunderbolts and the Saint's Mace.  While these are very nice weapons, they don't feel like Artifacts with a capital A.  Artifacts, to me, must bear an element of risk or sacrifice.  The Hand and the Eye of Vecna, the Sphere of Annihilation, and the Deck of Many Things all feel like artifacts.  Powerful evil intelligent weapons (Blackrazor / Stormbringer, for example, or our own instantiation of the trope, Mavrilith) definitely qualify, too.  The Orbs of Dragonkind also have the nice drawback that all dragons now hate you.  That's pretty acceptable, as far as drawbacks go.  But those shiny +6 keen goblinoid-bane throwing dwarven waraxes?  Not so much.

Trailblazer Monster Book:  Not a whole lot of progress on this front.  Still working on lycanthropes and layouts, I guess.  I found their gnoll art, though; it's pretty sweet.  The werehyena's good, too.

VBAM 2e: Still in editing.  They did post an update a while back with some draft supply, facilities, and loyalty rules, but I have not yet perused them.  Going to wait until they put out a combined playtest draft, I think.

ACKS:  Not actually something I'm waiting for a release on, but something I'm seriously tempted to pick up, especially given reasonable pdf prices.  Their mapping system has been getting some attention in the blogosphere of late (at Grognardling, with a series in responses at Untimately), and from Untimately's review (part 1 and part 2), it sounds a lot like "Traveller Meets 1e", with the 1e side favored in the mechanics.  I also got quite the Iron Heroes setting vibe off of the publisher's website:

Enter a world where empires totter on the brink of war, and terrible monsters tear at the fragile borderlands of men; where decaying cities teem with chaos and corruption, nubile maidens are sacrificed to chthonic cults and nobles live in decadent pleasure on the toil of slaves; where heroes, wizards, and rogues risk everything in pursuit of glory, fortune, and power. This is a world where adventurers can become conquerors – and conquerors can become kings.

 See, 5e devs, that's what high-level play should sound like.

If nothing else, I should probably pick up copy of ACKS to compare against Fields of Blood, which is what I'd probably use for high-level 'realmy' play presently.  Though now that I think about it, Iron Heroes + Fields of Blood would fix / ignore a lot of FoB's high-level caster problems...  hmm...

Some of the token mechanics would get weird in mass combat, but it would probably be OK.  If the Armiger, the Berserker, or the Weapon Master engage in mass combat, they come out with piles of tokens.  Heck, this would be the best time to play a Weapon Master; usually combats are too short for them to build up to their finale / combo moves.  The Archer would convert well, since it's just based on aiming time, and mass combat turns are long.  Executioners and Hunters would do the worst of the token classes, I think.  Hunters could do OK via Tactics / Lore feats to provide wide-areas bonuses to their units, but their class abilities are too small-scale.  Executioners could do the same unit support stuff via Lore, but they're really most useful for engaging single high-value targets like enemy generals and heroes.  Harriers just get the running-around bonuses all the damn time, and Men-At-Arms are as versatile as ever.  Thieves...  not so much for the battlefield, but the Social feats would make them master spies.  And Arcanist power is sufficiently limited and sufficiently dangerous to use that applying it is actually a question, rather than "Yeah, I'm a 9th-level wizard, I'll go stop the invading army single-handedly, be right back *teleport*."

Upon further reflection, though, IH characters have huge numbers of abilities geared towards small, discrete bonuses in skirmish combat which cease to be applicable or are otherwise too granular for mass combat.  Granting an extra flanking bonus to an ally via War Leader, for example.  The scale on that is just far too small to be useful in mass combat.  One tempting option, however, would be to provide a second scale of tokens.  Mass Combat $TYPE Tokens are earned as normal tokens of their type via more-or-less equivalent actions in mass combat.  They can then be spent to provide bonuses on that scale to units which the PCs are secunded to.  The berserker works his men into a frenzy, the archer directs the volleys of his bowmen with great precision, the armiger organizes a shield wall, and the hunter exhorts his troops to capitalize on fortuitous terrain.

Weapon Master and Executioner get kind of stuck here, though - sheer weapon skill is hard to provide to people, and martial units tend not to be particularly sneaky, nor deft at backstabbery.  It might be reasonable for certain types of units, or for units which are officially under the command of the WM / Exec; if you're a light scout unit and your commander is the Lord Assassin, you might pick up a few tricks.  Likewise, the 4th Northbridge Pikemen, having been drilled extensively under the harsh tutelage of the Pikemaster, might be able to pull off some impressive feats of pikesmanship (quiet, spellchecker).

Frankly, though, I'm not really sure I have a problem with Executioner, Berserker, and Weapon Master not being ideal line-unit commanders.  They seem more likely to be best for either cutting swathes through enemy units on their own (Berserker and WM), or seeking out and disabling or dueling enemy leaders (Exec and WM).  Armiger, Hunter, and Man-at-Arms all gain Tactics Mastery, and are frankly not as suited for one-on-one confrontation with strong enemy leaders as the more offensively-powerful classes, nor to cutting though massed troops unsupported like the Berserker.  Archer and Harrier are tricky; they make most sense as commanders of specialist units (archers and cavalry, respectively).  And Thieves...  saboteurs, infiltrators, and general-purpose commanders, I suppose.  They certainly have the skill points to put into Command, even if it isn't a group skill.  Honestly, the Thief shines in diplomacy, not on the battlefield.

One additional promising avenue of research here would be to convert the Fields of Blood prestige classes (where applicable) into mastery feat trees or class abilities.  Warlord's abilities fall under Tactics mastery (possibly merging Warlord and Warcrier into one mastery feat), Master Mason's under Siege Lore, Living Legion's under Power or Armor, and Hordemaster's look a lot like Berserker rage abilities.

Finally, if I were to attempt such a game, I think I would likely use Hong's Hack, which fixes a great many things in Iron Heroes (though not the armor problem, which is frankly less of a problem in mass combat.  Neat).

And so we see that I don't actually need any more books, as long as I can be still be inspired by the advertising copy.  Why am I writing a post about new and upcoming releases again?

Quotes from 5e Devs, and Starmada Next Fighter Firing

A few aftershocks of the D&D 5e announcement.  EnWorld has a news aggregator up here; this is pretty standard for them with new editions (the site was initially created as a news site for 3e during its development, then developed forums during the Third Age which persisted through its coverage of 4e).  Currently it's mostly little soundbites from the lead devs, but a couple of them look fairly promising (all credit to EnWorld for gathering these):

"The new edition is being conceived of as a modular, flexible system, easily customized to individual preferences. Just like a player makes his character, the Dungeon Master can make his ruleset. He might say ‘I’m going to run a military campaign, it’s going to be a lot of fighting’… so he’d use the combat chapter, drop in miniatures rules, and include the martial arts optional rules." - Mike Mearls

This is a nice idea, though one that might make life difficult for the players during character creation.  It does, however, suggest that the supplement treadmill may be stoppable by DM fiat; if he doesn't choose rulebases from other supplements, then you're good.  It may also eliminate the Grapple Problem - the existence of gross, annoying subsystems that nobody really wants to deal with.  Make 'em optional, and then they're not problems.  Final point here is that miniatures / grids may be optional, rather than required (as they were in 4th and basically were in 3rd for adjudicating AoOs).  Sweet.

 "I don't think 'requiring someone to be a healer' is a sacred cow, but having healers in the game is. I wouldn't want to see D&D do away with healing, but I don't think there's anything keeping us from exploring a version of D&D where players can simply play anything they want, ignoring concepts like role and function when putting together their party. To do so, we would need to take a serious look at the way player resources are allocated in D&D, and make some adjustments to the assumptions behind the design of everything from adventures to encounters to monsters." - Rodney Thompson

This reminds me a lot of Iron Heroes, which was another Monte Cook / Mike Mearls project.  In IH, you had a pool of Reserve Points with a cap equal to your max HP, and you could convert a reserve point into a hit point with one minute of resting.  This creates a dynamic similar to healing surges, but not in-combat and somewhat more realistic.  Healing, by skills or magic, added to your reserve pool, rather than to your HP, so it was useful in terms of extending combat endurance, but not a combat activity, and having a dedicated healer was not a necessity.  Healing was something that you could choose to pursue, but that 1) you didn't have to, and 2) you didn't have to make your sole specialty if you did.  And that was cool.  I hope they draw on IH for inspiration here.  'course, that was what I said during 4e development, too (also by Mearls), and look how that turned out...

Ignoring role and function is also a neat idea, and something we've seen to a limited degree in our Traveller games; sometimes you go "Man, we need an engineer badly", but then when you try to roll an engineer, you often get someone who can engineer, but is also an awesome hacker or ninja too (or all three plus sniper, in the case of Jared's character last campaign).  You're not constrained to your class / career, and everyone from the same career is just a bit different from everyone else.  Contrast with D&D, where if you're the fighter, pretty much all you can do is fight.  Classes in D&D serve as hard limits on the things you can do; in Traveller, careers serve as soft guidelines, where it's not hard to pick up some pretty oddball skills (Thief Remote Ops?  Really?).

 "We'll have more information on the GSL as it relates to the next edition in the near future. Personally, I have a copy of 'The Cathedral & the Bazaar' on the shelf at work.  From my days as a programmer and as a freelance RPG designer, the bulk of my work involved open platforms which did a lot for a game that relies so much on individual creativity." - Mike Mearls

This is good for two reasons.  First, it looks like the devs at least are in favor of something resembling the OGL or opensourcing.  Second, it's an interesting cross-cultural reference to we programmers.  However, Mearls is being really vague here, and it wouldn't surprise me if WotC's legal department got the final say on this one.  On the third hand, the era of D&D's greatest success was marked by the OGL, with the more restrictive GSL significantly decreasing third-party support and arguably sales, so maybe WotC legal will learn from it.  Time will tell.

In non-5e news, got a confirm from Underling on the sequence of actions in the next edition of Starmada here.  When I read the alpha core review rules, which contained no mention of fighters, the change to "all damage is applied immediately during sequential firing" immediately suggested to me that fighter firing could be rolled into the ship firing phase, with an activation being usable either for a squadron of small craft or a single ship.  Turns out I was correct, and Underling also confirms that under alternating movement, an activation can likewise be used on either a ship or a fighter squadron (which makes great sense, when you make alternating movement the default).  I believe that the primary advantage of fighters now will be their ability to move without regard for the Newtonian thrust rules; combined with their (expected) short range weapons, this means you'll probably want to move them last-ish.  This again mixes up the traditional order of movement employed in alternating movement games, as I discussed previously, that you usually want to move your fast, light things first and then move your slow, heavy hitters last.

The most important thing about this change is that it makes point-defense weapons / anti-fighter batteries potentially useful.  If the entire enemy fleet is fighters, and you only have ships with AFBs, you're no longer SOL like you were in AE, where you'd get mauled by the fighters before you had a chance to fire.  Now, they'll attack you, and you'll get a chance to attack back before more of their fighters get to attack.  This also creates an interesting tactical problem when you have a mixed fleet of ships and fighters - do you fire with the fighters first before the enemy gets a chance to fire their AFBs at them, or do you use your ships first?  Probably situational, but it's an extra wrinkle in a system where this wasn't even a question before.

So, I like this change a lot.  First, it simplifies the rules by removing the fighter phase.  Second, it solves the much-maligned AFB problem of the previous edition.  Third, it introduces an interesting choice or series of choices, which the game really needs more of.  Finally, I like being right in my predictions.  When I said back in December that I expected the new edition to fix fighters, this is exactly what I had in mind, and MJ12 has not disappointed.