Soulflayer Canyon and One-Way Doors

I picked up Dragon's Dogma on the steam holiday sale and it's been a refreshing reminder of something one of my old bosses told me - "You can innovate on the technology, or you can innovate on the business model, but as a small company you probably don't have the resources to do both."  Dragon's Dogma declines to innovate in its setting.  The enemy roster is pretty much all classic D&D monsters played straight - they even have a beholder with the serial numbers filed off.  There's a quest where you rescue a princess from imprisonment in a tower and literally carry her across bridges and over gaps.  There are plot holes large enough to ride a griffon through and plot-agency is pretty negligible (why am I working for this asshole duke anyway?).

But the core combat gameplay!  Maybe for Capcom the combat gameplay isn't really innovative.  But taking the language of fighting games, of grabs and throws and parries and knockdowns, and applying them to giant fantasy monsters, played totally straight rather than FromSoft-style "everything is corrupted and weird", is just...  a lot of fun to fiddle with.  To say nothing of the pawns.

But I'm really here to talk about the design of one particular dungeon in Dragon's Dogma - Soulflayer Canyon.  It's a real piece of work.  "Criminally vicious", as the Tucker's Kobolds guy would say.

Spoilers beyond this point.

Soulflayer Canyon has a number of pretty vicious encounters - a cockatrice, ghosts who possess your henchmen (backed up by camouflaged lizardmen), a cyclops on a narrow bridge whose club will absolutely fling you and your hirelings down a long fall to your deaths, harpies who try to grab you and pull you off ledges...  But the thing that makes it really nasty is that it's full of one-way waterslides, rock slopes with water running down them that you can descend but not ascend, where you can't see what's at the bottom until you go for it.  Topologically, the dungeon is mostly a loop of one-way slides (with ladders in between to make up the height losses) with a couple of branches (one is to the treasure, another is to an exit from the dungeon).  I'm not sure it's possible to exit the dungeon by the door I came in through once you've entered the main loop.

There came a point where I'd basically cleared the dungeon and was faced with a choice between three slides.  One went to the treasure, one back into the loop, and one I think to a terminal fall.  I chose the loop and had to re-run the dungeon, some of which had restocked.  Dragon's Dogma has enough mundane resource management of healing items and lantern oil for this to be a really worrying twist if you were already running low.  The cockatrice's lair is also at the bottom of a one-way slide, and while there is a climbable rock wall that you can use to get back out, you probably have to go through the cockatrice to get to the exit.

So anyway, it's a wild dungeon.  The other dungeons in the game aren't like this (mostly).  It's like they took all their most vicious ideas and put them into this one zone that only sidequests point you to.

I had been thinking about using one-way doors in gauntlet dungeons, so it's been interesting to see them in action here.  One thing I like about these waterslides is that they're pretty telegraphed.  They're not a literal door that closes behind you but is indistinguishable from a two-way door until crossed.  It's probably worth thinking up more types of clearly-one-way "doors".  It was also interesting to see a dungeon with a single main loop composed primarily of one-way doors; I had been thinking about one-way doors used sparingly in the context of dungeons composed of multiple intersecting loops, where there are almost always multiple paths to any point.  But Soulflayer Canyon goes all-in on them and it certainly makes for a memorable "level".

Vermintide 2's Special Enemies and Encounter Design

Status: D&D related, possibly obvious

Vermintide 2 was free on steam the other weekend and my brother and I have been playing it together.  We've been trying to play it with the mechanics unspoiled to keep a bit of sense of wonder/surprise in it.

Something that stuck out immediately was the special enemies.  This is really a common design pattern in team horde FPSes - Left For Dead and Deep Rock Galactic both have analogs (and I like DRG's term for them - "disruptive" enemies).  These enemies either deny you terrain and visibility (with, for example, a big cloud of poison gas) or suppress/disrupt an individual player (for example by grabbing a character, preventing them from attacking, and dragging them away from the party) until either the target or the special enemy is killed.  They aren't especially tough and their damage output isn't enormous but they require pretty immediate action or they can seriously degrade the party's ability to fight the horde of fodder enemies who usually accompany them.

Vermintide got me thinking about this from the D&D angle for two reasons - first that unlike DRG it is low-ish fantasy, and second because it makes these special enemies very high-visibility.  The player characters call them out in game (at least on the difficulty we're playing), many have literally high-visibility glowy bits, and killing them is mentioned in the post-mission statistics screen, which makes it clear that they're thought of as a class or category of enemies.

(The other two called-out classes, Elites and Monsters, also bear consideration.  Elites we think are tougher versions of normal enemies; they may be better armored or hit harder and bear special consideration on those accounts but they're not especially disruptive to party cohesion / positioning.  Monsters are creatures much larger than a man like trolls or rat-ogres that, as least as far as we can tell, require pretty much the whole party to fight them concurrently, with lots of HP and a boss healthbar, and often a combination of multiple damaging attacks, throws, grabs, area denial, and other abilities that you might expect of a Special but on a much beefier frame)

Meanwhile, in OSR D&D, we have critters that have disruptive abilities like a Special but we're mostly not using them in combination with regular enemies.  Consider mummies.  Mummy paralysis is a big disruptive ability and anybody left with freedom of action has the onus on them to kill the mummy immediately (or at least bait an attack out of it) to end the paralysis.  But mummies are their own monster type with their own lairs and if you're stocking by the book you're never going to get an encounter with 15 zombies or skeletons and one or two mummies - the fodder+special combo.  Or, if mummies are too high-HD and durable and fall closer to the Monsters category, 15 zombies and two ghouls.  A gelatinous cube plus a bunch of skeletons would be an encounter to remember, but it won't ever come up in prep (though it could potentially happen in play through a combination of a fixed skeleton encounter and a lurking threat cube making its move as the party is dealing with the skellies).  The best we've got are witchdoctors and shamans with beastman lairs - and those are wilderness lairs, not dungeon encounters, and if you're rolling random spells for your witchdoctors they're usually either duds or TPK threats instead.  In beastmen too we have something like Elites in champions and chieftains.

But the fodder+special combo seems like the sort of thing you'd want to use if you were building dungeons to challenge your players.  And this whole line of thought also ties back to breaking up the phalanx - enemies who deny choke-points, grab front-liners, or bull-rush through them, all seem like good tools for diminishing the power of the shield-wall in the dungeon, but I haven't been thinking of them as a category.

Is this too 3e a thought?  Is this something 4e did explicitly?  Does this place too much emphasis on tactics of individual combats in OSR games where combat options are relatively scarce so parties may not really have any means to respond to disruptive enemies - games where the emphasis is generally on the expedition as a whole anyway?  Is this even worth considering in prep or is it good enough if it can happen randomly in play?  I really don't know.  But it might bear experiments, and seems like a useful schema / category with which to think about monsters in tabletop games.

Beastman chieftain abilities might be a really easy place to start with procedurally-generated fodder+special combos.  One could design abilities with the special/elite distinction in mind, and then push them down to subchieftains so that they start showing up in dungeon lairs.

Maybe another angle to consider is strategically-disruptive enemies: expedition-disruptors rather than single-combat-disruptors.  If the focus of the game is on the expedition and we're worried about there being too few in-combat options, maybe it makes sense to shift one level higher.  The Crypt Thing might be a really good example of this - its teleport doesn't just take a character out of a particular combat temporarily, but disrupts the expedition as a whole by scattering the party throughout the dungeon.

But what does combining expedition-disrupting enemies with fodder look like?  Maybe just random encounters being triggered by a disrupted party taking more time to recover.  Maybe nothing at all needs to be done and OSR D&D is just fine the way it is.

Productively Repressed Novelists

Executive summary: Write stories about things that have already happened in your world prior to the PCs' involvement.  Cut those stories into bite-sized chunks and scatter them around adventure sites for PCs to find.

I've been playing a lot of Grim Dawn recently.  Possibly an unreasonable amount.  It's an ARPG in a "Victorian+magic" setting that has recently had an apocalypse.  Grim Dawn's main story is...  thin.  It's kind of a checklist of "oh no we've discovered a new threat to the surviving humans", with occasional choices in how to handle humans you meet on the road.  Most of these choices are reducible with experience to their mechanical outcomes.  In practice it's an excuse to go interesting places, vaporize monsters, and take their stuff.  This is fine by me - never let a narrative get in the way of gameplay.

Where Grim Dawn succeeds at storytelling is in its lore notes.  You find them scattered around the world and they give you many more perspectives on that world.  The baddies plotting, your NPC allies realizing apocalypse is coming, refugees fleeing the capital, regular folks turning to dark powers to survive, stubborn farmers refusing to leave their land, a civilization collapsing to a previous apocalypse, all of this stuff that happened before the game starts is delivered to the player in written notes.  It's the polar opposite of the exposition-dump; rather than getting a single long, boring account of the world from a third-person narrator, it's delivered in bits and pieces by a multitude of (sometimes unreliable and conflicting) in-world sources.

Grim Dawn does a couple things here that might be worth noting and stealing for tabletop RPGs.  The first is that notes are short and often serialized.  Rather than dropping a 12-paragraph story on you, they'll cut it up into four notes each of three paragraphs and scatter them around an area.  When you find part three first and read it, and realize there's no closure, you know that there must be more before and after.  It encourages you to explore the world to find the rest of the series of notes.  It leaves gaps for you to speculate into - to imagine into.  You wouldn't just show them the map - don't just show them the full lore!  (Does it strain disbelief to have pages of a diary scattered over a half-acre?  Maybe.  Is it worth it?  Probably, I think)

Reading lore notes in Grim Dawn also gives you XP.  I don't know that this is quite the right thing for a game like D&D, but selling lore notes to an historian for GP, by which you earn XP?  Hell yeah.  Some players may be excited about finding lore for its own sake, some may need a more concrete reward, but as long as the table as a whole's reaction to finding a lore note is "score!" you're headed in the right direction.  Make finding them gameplay, and reward that gameplay.

Finally, Grim Dawn is never pushy with the lore notes.  When you mechanically "read" a lore note and get the XP, it gets copied into your quest log and remains available there.  Maybe you only have an hour to play tonight and you need to grab that next portal, so you're not doing any reading.  No worries, it'll be there next time when you've beaten the boss and are taking a breather in town to rebalance your gear.  This is kind of a confident move on Grim Dawn's part; when a game makes you sit through cutscenes and exposition, it is because they're worried about what will happen if you miss something.  Grim Dawn says "whatever man, if you miss a lore note or never get around to reading all the ones you do find, it's fine.  My core gameplay is strong enough to bear it."  Just so - don't read lore notes to your players like boxed text!  Pass them a paper copy and make the page on the campaign wiki visible to them.  If they want one guy to skim and summarize, fine!  If they want to read it aloud, fine!  If they just want to pass it to the one guy who cares about lore (who becomes the party archivist), fine!

Taken all together, Grim Dawn's approach to lore notes strikes me as an eminently appropriate attitude for lore-delivery in tabletop games, especially OSR games.  In exploration-driven games, it is a given that players will miss stuff - you have to be OK with that anyway.  In a game that keeps AD&D's apocalypse, having surviving lore in the written word rather than being able to ask people questions about the world makes sense.  And stories about the past of the world don't step on the toes of player agency; you can have your well-structured narratives and character development, just separated from your emergent narrative by time.

In conclusion: if you must novelize, OSR DMs, serial-novelize the history leading up to the PCs, not their current actions, and scatter your serial in adventure sites.

Winning at D&D, Domains as Endgame

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reflections on Rimworld and Dwarf Fortress

This is not really a D&D-related post, except inasmuch as a lot of my OSR gaming has been Dwarf Fortress inspired.  It gets vaguely D&D / philosophy-of-games related below the bolded line.

I picked up Rimworld recently and it's almost very good.  My impression is that someone spent a lot of time playing Dwarf Fortress, thinking about all the things wrong with Dwarf Fortress, and how to fix them.  And then they went and did a very competent, moddable implementation job of it.

They're both sort of top-down city management games, where you have a set of characters who have their own likes, dislikes, skills, happiness, and quirks, who you can sort of manage but not really control.  In Dwarf Fortress, you start with 7 dwarves and your fortress can grow up to a couple hundred.  But I've always felt the sweet spot in Dwarf Fortress was closer to 30; with 30 dwarves, you can keep track of everyone's quirks, you have enough people to cover most of the necessary job functions and skills, and it isn't an insane amount to manage.  Rimworld compresses that population range, starting you with 3-5 people and capping out closer to the 30-50 range, right in that sweet spot.  Rimworld also makes this lower population viable by compressing the total number of available skills - in Dwarf Fortress, brewing beer is a separate skill from cooking is a separate skill from butchering animals; in Rimworld those are all just the Cooking skill.  So this means that you need fewer people to cover your needs competently and redundantly.

You also have a lot more control over when and how you get new guys.  In Dwarf Fortress, migrant waves arrive seasonally, and the number of migrants you get depends on your fortress' wealth.  They arrive with random skills and often they aren't what you need.  I have distinct recollections of getting waves of migrants that were like 60% fishermen or cheesemakers.  In Rimworld, you don't have this problem, because you recruit mostly by taking prisoners in combat and then convincing them they your settlement is actually a nice place to live.  If you capture an adversary whose skillset you don't want, you just release them.  Or let them bleed to death in the field.  Or make hats out of their skin to send as gifts to their tribe.  Either or.

(While Dwarf Fortress' developer has always been somewhat uncomfortable with the emergent atrocities committed by the playerbase, like capturing and farming mermaids to butcher because the value of their bodyparts was very high, Rimworld's dev seems to take a different view.  Rimworld makes it straightforward to do cannibalism, organ harvesting, and manufacturing addictive drugs to dump into native markets - but there are almost always consequences.  Most colonists are pretty unhappy about cannibalism and organ harvesting.  Some colonists have tags like Psychopath or Cannibal that let them ignore the happiness penalties from doing these things, but they come with their own penalties; Psychopaths, for example, don't get mood boosts from socializing.  As for drugs, some colonists have a tag that makes them ignore you drug policy and do drugs for fun, even when forbidden, so if selling meth to the natives is your business of choice, that limits your selection of colonists to adopt).

The graphics are an obvious change from Dwarf Fortress and part of the reason that I did not initially recognize it as Fortress-like.  They aren't ASCII.  They're not fancy, still just two dimensions, but they're a little fancier than even the fanciest of Dwarf Fortress tilesets, in part because the engine was built with them in mind.

There is no digging / vertical elevation component to Rimworld's maps.  This is a definite simplification and I'm mostly OK with it; it would be hard to make a simple 2d interface clear with elevation levels (and two dimensions with no z-axis was how older versions of Dwarf Fortress did things anyway).  Not being able to dig defenses is an interesting change and not one that I have really adapted to yet.

The combat system is better than I expected.  There is some weirdness in it (such as bolt-action rifles having only about 1.5x the range of a pistol).  Much of the anatomical detail of Dwarf Fortress combat is still there, but a lot of the jank around inventory management and ammunition is gone.  You also don't draft by squads, which is nice; every colonist is draftable independently, so if you just need one marksman to come deal with a rampaging alpaca you don't need to call up the whole crew.  It also isn't tick-based like Dwarf Fortress', but the slow/normal gameplay speed is quite slow so it's easy to pause, issue an order, unpause, wait for it to be completed, and then pause again before something else goes wrong (there are also some faster gameplay speeds, which are nice when you're waiting for stuff to happen, vs Dwarf Fortress' fixed clock).  The gameplay of moving your shotgunners and melee guys forward from cover to cover while your riflemen pin down enemy ranged units, or of moving your melee to intercept enemy melee while your riflemen try to evade, is quite good.  I do wish you could give your guys secondary weapons though.

The job management UI is excellent and a big part of why I feel like Rimworld's developer must have put some time into Dwarf Fortress.  It's a big grid, with a row per colonist and a column per job type, and you can put priorities in each cell.  It's very similar to Dwarf Therapist, a third-party tool that presents comparable grid-like UIs mapping dwarves to functions, but then edits the memory of running Dwarf Fortress processes to actually apply changes.  Managing large fortresses without Dwarf Therapist is excruciating.  In Rimworld it just comes stock, no memory-editing required.

One unpleasant surprise I had was around deconstructing buildings.  In Dwarf Fortress, when you demolish a workshop, say, you get all of the materials back that you put into building it.  This is not the case in Rimworld.  This is especially bad because there's a big bottleneck in the early-midgame economy around Components, little bits of precision-manufactured metal and circuits.  Many buildings need a couple of Components, and demolishing these buildings does not get you all of the Components back.  I found myself in a Components crunch in year 2 and had to take some risks to get myself out of it.  It was interesting gameplay, but lossy construction and deconstruction is an unforgiving surprise on new players in a game which is otherwise much more approachable than Dwarf Fortress (there's even a tutorial and then an in-game system to continue to show you tips for quite a while after).  Sure, you can savescum (another affordance present in Rimworld and absent in Dwarf Fortress), but did you save at just the right time in your construction effort?

In order to get out of my components crunch, I had to figure out how to use the caravan system.  This is actually rather neat; it lets you send out parties onto the world map, to go to destinations and trade with (or raid) them.  I had a good tailor, so I picked my colonist with the best speaking and shooting skills and sent him across the map to sell hats to the nearest friendly village and buy their components.  He did, in fact, get ambushed en route home, but fortunately was able to fight his way out.  I also set up an orbital trade beacon and was able to buy components from a passing starship.  This beacon cost me components to build, but paid for itself and more.  I like that I had to take some risks / make some calculated gambles here.

So what don't I like about Rimworld?

Rimworld has an AI "storyteller" system as basically part of its difficulty settings.  The storyteller setting (mostly) determines how often threats to your settlement appear.  Two of the three settings alternate between windows when major threats can appear and windows when major threats can't appear.  Under the third setting, all events are on the table at random at all times.

These "threat windows" became apparent to me after some time in game.  There's a graph you can look at of colony wealth that also shows when you were attacked by raiders, and there was a clear pattern, an interval, at which I usually got two raids in fairly close succession.  The only time I didn't get a second raid in that window was when my caravan was ambushed instead.  It wasn't tied to the logic of the game-world; it wasn't about in-game seasons, or having accumulated wealth (though that influences size of raiding parties I think), or having repelled the previous raid with different degrees of success, or having befriended particular tribes.  You can make friends with all the tribes but one, you can kill all their raiders every time, and they're just going to keep raiding you at the same frequency they always did.  It isn't like they figure out "oh this settlement is a hard target, we need to wait a while and gather our forces and then make bigger but less frequent raids rather than squandering our manpower piecemeal".  It just...  doesn't feel right.  It's very obviously artificial.  I found myself anticipating the trouble window and planning around it, and not enjoying it.

I get why it's there; the amount of strain you put on the colony is tightly-controlled and you don't get stacking catastrophes leading to cascading failure as much as you do in Dwarf Fortress.  But that graph annihilated my suspension of disbelief.  So say what you will about Dwarf Fortress' obscurantism, but the fact that there is no graph of when the goblins attacked might actually be a really important feature for sufficiently anal players (who are probably over-represented among players of this genre...).

It leaves me feeling like I can't expect Rimworld to yield reasonable consequences for any of my strategic / macro decisions now.  I was leery about settling near roads because I expected that having a site that is easier to get to would lead to more raids.  But now I'm pretty sure it doesn't (nor more visiting merchants).  I chose to settle near the headwaters of a river instead, because what sort of sensible person, given the choice, wouldn't want to settle near a nice clean water source, for drinking, for cleaning wounds, for irrigating crops, for fishing, for disposing of waste, for carrying bulk cargo downriver in canoes?  And who wouldn't be nervous about settling too near a river, due to possibility of flooding?  But it turns out that rivers don't do any of those things.  Rivers are good for 1) building water wheels for power, 2) slowing down melee enemies trying to cross it, so you can shoot at them more easily, and 3) giving your dudes the Soaking Wet mood penalty.  That's it.  There are mods to make rivers do most of the things that I expected them to do, but none of that is in the base game.  I can forgive when Dwarf Fortress omits things like that, because Dwarf Fortress isn't (and hopefully never will be) finished, and I have faith that the Toady One wants to do those things eventually; he just hasn't gotten to them yet.  But Rimworld is a complete, finished, game, and also not free like Dwarf Fortress.  It makes these obvious omissions less forgivable.

What I want from the "AI storyteller" subsystem isn't a predictable pattern of rising tension interspersed with breaks.  It isn't the total randomness of the third storyteller mode either.  I want it to take the state of the world as input and make sensible things happen.  If I settle up near a bunch of hostile villages, I should get raided more!  If I settle out in bumfuck nowhere, I should get fewer visiting merchants!

My other complaint is likewise around a macro mechanic: difficulty levels.  Besides the three storyteller settings, Rimworld offers a list of difficulty levels to choose from, which influence resource production, injury infection chance, baseline colonist mood, raid size, etc.  I can see why Rimworld has them - the existence of easy difficulty levels makes the game accessible, while hard difficulties exist for the deep fanatics.  But reflecting on Dwarf Fortress, I think I like its approach better.  Dwarf Fortress has no difficulty settings.  Instead it has a wider variety of biomes.  If you want an easy game of Dwarf Fortress to learn how to play, you settle in a mirthful (blessed) temperate forest far from goblin towers.  If you want a stupid-hard Dwarf Fortress game, you settle on a haunted glacier near a necromancer tower with no source of flux for making steel.  So the range of difficulty is there, but it's purely within the game-world; it isn't messing with things like infection chance or goblin raid size.  Or when it does mess with goblin raid size, that's because you settled near a goblin civilization and it's decoupled from everything else.  There's a certain...  reality to Dwarf Fortress.  Dwarf Fortress is opinionated.  It's not afraid to say "these are the rules of the game, the rules of the world; here is the minimum bar for any fortress in any biome."  It doesn't bend to you, and I think that's part of why people admire it (and its developer).  Part of the magic of Dwarf Fortress is that when you conquer Dwarf Fortress, even in an "easy" biome, it feels like an accomplishment, and you're like 80% of the way over the difficulty curve.

Maybe it's weird to say that you "conquer" Dwarf Fortress, since every fortress falls eventually.  There is no win condition.  But you can feel that you have put the fortress into a stable state, one where it can resist, say, any two concurrent shocks (like a goblin siege and a forgotten beast at the same time).  Such a fortress is likely to survive until you get bored.  Rimworld adds a win condition.  I haven't gotten there yet, but I'm not sure how I feel about its existence.  Dwarf Fortress was kind of a stoic exercise, or a zen garden; you spend all this time and care building this fortress and minding the troubles of all these little people in it with the full knowledge that it will eventually burn down.  And at a certain point in your life as a player of Dwarf Fortress, the burning down becomes the most interesting part.  That's where the surprise is; you have dealt with all the typical threats and then some combination of circumstances sneaks up on you and you go "Oh!  It's time!  I didn't expect it to happen like this!  Neat!  Let's watch it all unravel."  Having a win condition...  I don't know, it sort of feels like it changes the meaning of the game.  The Rimworld is something to be escaped, something to achieve a lasting victory over, rather than just something to be survived for a while.

Maybe that's suitable, really, for a science fiction game; the theme that things could be otherwise, that they could improve, as opposed to the fantasy of return to myth, of recurrence, the perpetual turning of the wheel of Armok.  I haven't actually played Dwarf Fortress in a long time; every now and then I open it, generate a world, pick an embark site, and then get to gear and skill selection for my dwarves and go "no, no I don't think I want to deal with this again today.  I stand reminded."  It is very much a cycle.

I suppose in ultimate judgement, it might be fair to say that Rimworld is probably a better game than Dwarf Fortress, but a worse simulation.  It thinks about things like narrative structure, rather than trying to simulate a fantasy world (in excruciating detail) and letting interesting stories emerge from the randomness.  It is certainly more accessible, more humane, more marketable, with finer attention to the core gameplay loop, but...  there's a certain elemental quality, a primal sincerity that Dwarf Fortress has that I think Rimworld lacks.  Dwarf Fortress strikes me as the better device for building character in its players, while Rimworld's focus on creating tuned challenges is more gamist, more like my thoughts on creating dungeons intentionally to be challenging, rather than to make sense in the world.  But if I have difficulty respecting it because it is too transparent about that game, maybe challenge dungeons are similarly misguided.

...  apparently it was Valentine's Day today.  Ha!

Deep Rock Galactic and the Random Lair

I've been playing Deep Rock Galactic recently.  It is a game about exploring dangerous environments as a team to recover valuables.  Since D&D is also a game about exploring dangerous environments as a team in order to recover valuables, Deep Rock Galactic is therefore D&D.  Q.E.D.

While Deep Rock Galactic is not actually D&D (although you do play dwarves, and the biggest baddest bug in the asteroid does breathe fire and have a certain draconic facial structure), some things have stuck out to me as relevant to the D&D experience.

1) Their cave generation is very strong, and dear god trying to communicate directions in a cave with your teammates, or trying to hold a cave layout in your head, are way, way harder than dealing with rooms, even when you aren't trying to construct a map of it.  This ties to observations about legibility in the wilderness; just like we (me and my players) don't have a shared language of wilderness navigation in D&D, we (me and my DRG teammates) don't have a shared language of cave navigation.  This is especially noticeable in the mission types that do offer easy hooks for shared language - escorting a drilling machine, it's easy to refer to things by their direction relative to the machine, and when doing oil refining, you can reference the pipeline numbers.  Realizing these hooks for shared language was sort of an "aha!" moment.  I think the real conclusion here isn't that wilderness navigation is some sort of blind spot in our shared language; it's more that our shared language is only any good for navigating/describing human-organized spaces.  Wilderness isn't the exception; it's the rule, and there's a whole gamut of types of wildernesses that each need their own ways of speaking about them.

2) Lairs and random encounters are sort of swapped, I think.  When you're exploring area in DRG, you tend to run into small groups of not-very-dangerous enemies who do chip damage.  For several mission types (including the most fundamental / basic one), large waves of enemies (the sort that have a decent chance of taking out a player) are triggered by time.  So "random encounters" in DRG happen due to player actions in space, while "lairs" happen due to player actions in / management of time, whereas in old-school D&D, lairs are mostly by space and random encounters are mostly by time.  This flip seems like it could be fertile ground for a challenge dungeon level; if you really want to encourage players to be fast, to do scouting, to make good plans, then make the static opposition weak, the treasure mostly unguarded or lightly-guarded, and the dynamic opposition dangerously strong.  This also encourages players to make notes on good places to take a big fight, and then hustle back to them (whereas when a lair is in a fixed location, you fight at the time of your choice but not in the place of your choice).

(Yes, I am keeping a document of challenge dungeon level ideas.  Maybe someday I will make something of it.)

ACKS: Reserve XP By Class?

Thinking about Gygax's remarks in Book 1 that wizards are strong at high levels but weak at low levels to make up for that strength.

Reserve XP in ACKS gives players a way around this - level with a fighter, invest heavily in reserve XP, and then if you die you can bring in a mage at a level where they don't have it so rough.

That I have been playing Grim Dawn recently may have also contributed to this thought - it's very normal there to pick skills that make leveling up easy, and then to swap them all out at high levels.  I don't love it there either.

One solution is to just remove reserve XP.  But I like having a rule that provides some tangible benefit to partying hard (and doesn't require wrangling the Cost of Living table).  Some of my players do complain that reserve XP is sort of a trap option; I think I might do a more thorough analysis of it at some point.

Another solution might be to make reserve XP pools class-specific (or something like function-specific; fighter and vaultguard share the same pool, cleric and craftpriest share the same pool, explorer and assassin (maybe, I feel like assassin scales better while explorer starts strong), etc).  So you can't level as a class that starts strong and then convert your reserve XP into a class that scales better once you start stalling out.

I don't think this is totally crazy from the perspective of "XP is score, reserve XP is a way to preserve some score across death".  Score is already class-specific; why should preserved score not be?

A few possible reasons it might not be:

1) There are already other easy ways to bring in MUs who are past or almost past the Threshold of Deep Suck, namely hiring 3rd-4th level henchmen.  On the other hand, hiring henchmen who are in the 6th-8th range is hard; bringing in a character on reserve XP at those levels also requires commitment to the strategy, but seems pretty doable across multiple lifetimes of normal play.  I'm not so worried about henchmen who you level up, since you're already paying a bunch of XP and gold for them and having to keep them alive.

2) Tying reserve XP to a particular class works at cross-purposes to prime requisites, which (I think) are supposed to encourage players to play to the stats that they roll and try a wide variety of classes.  If your reserve XP is all fighter XP and you roll stats that are good for cleric, that reserve XP encourages you to shoehorn those stats into fighter and to play your usual type.

3) Given changes to some of the more powerful spells, is the balance between ACKS' MU and ACKS' fighter such that MUs are the most powerful at high levels?  Is this change senseless as a result?  I'm not sure.  But there are a set of classes in ACKS which are regarded as super-scalers by the discord.  I forget whether MU is among them (the bulk of them were in HFH I think).  And there are certainly other classes that have an easy time at low levels but cap out early.  So even if MU isn't specifically our example for scaling, there's still a somewhat exploitable mismatch here.

4) Extra bookkeeping, having to track reserve XP for a bunch of classes, especially if you rule that reserve XP is a floor and not spent to bring in new characters.

Figuring out Morrowind

When I was a kid playing Morrowind, I thought its leveling system was horribly slow and convoluted.  So I downloaded mods that changed how it worked and it was fine.

Returning to Morrowind via OpenMW as an adult, I re-downloaded and re-created a couple of simple mods that I had used, and played through the game.  When I finished, I was way overpowered and had a tremendous amount of cash.

I went and did other things for a month and came back to it.  I started a new game and one of the first things the first questgiver in the game does is give you some cash and tell you to get some training or gear.  I stopped and thought about that for a moment, and everything kind of clicked.

Training was the missing mechanic.

When I was a kid, coming from a 3rd Edition D&D background, Morrowind's economy made no sense.  There's hardly anything worth buying in terms of equipment - there are a few vendors in out-of-the-way places that carry high-quality items (the glass armor guy, the grandmaster alchemist), but all the good weapons can only be found by adventuring.  Spending money on leveling was immersion-breaking, incompatible with my 3E-flavored understanding of fantasy worlds.  So I just accumulated money and ground out levels.

Having seen the OSR, this "money for XP" thing now makes total sense.  Morrowind's development began in the mid-90s, and its descent from AD&D is apparent in its training mechanics and the relationship between wilderness and city.  Go to wilderness, get money and magic items, return to city, spend money on training.

And the heavy use of training changes the way the whole rest of the game works.  It tames the worst parts of Morrowind's leveling system, where you can raise ability scores based on what skills you raised during the level.  If you're not using training, you really have to grind skill uses to get good ability score boosts, and you're likely to incidentally raise some skills and waste some multipliers.  But if most of your skill points are coming from training rather than skill use, you eliminate the grind, and reduce the window for uncontrolled skill increases to mess up your ability score increase plan.  If a couple of skills rise while you're out on an adventure, you have to take them into account when you're spending your money on post-adventure training, but it's pretty manageable.

Heavy use of training also changes the utility of guilds.  Guild rank increases how much guild members like you, and if they're trainers that means they charge you less.  Getting about halfway up the ranks in guilds also opens up a second set of trainers, who usually have higher skills (and can train you to higher levels) than the first tier of guild trainers.  So heavy use of trainers increases the utility of guilds, because they make trainers more available and doing quests makes training less expensive.  This is nice, because a lot of the guild quest rewards in Morrowind are rather lackluster.

Heavy use of training also changes the player's feeling about the Blades (imperial intelligence service) dramatically.  The Blades give out the first half of the quests in the main questline.  Without training, your interaction with the Blades is pretty much restricted to that one questgiver.  The Blades also have about six NPCs who are pretty decent early-game trainers (better than the entry-tier guild trainers, but worse than the second-tier guild trainers).  These trainers cover a wide range of skills, but not such a wide range that you can rely on them alone unless you have a pretty weird build.  Stealth is covered for thieves, but not short blades or marksmanship.  Long blades and shield use are covered for fighters, but not heavy armor.  Most of the magic skills are covered, but not alchemy, and the mage trainer who covers destruction magic is a bit out of the way.  It's really beautifully done; you can go a long way with the Blades trainers, but you're still probably going to have to join a guild to cover the gaps.  And when you seek these people out for training, and ask them about local rumors, they have unique (and interesting) responses because they're in the intelligence service.  It makes the Blades feel a lot more like an actual faction, rather than one inebriate spymaster with his one lonely operative.

At a certain point though, probably in the 60s-70s for your top skills, you're going to cap out on training from the guilds.  To make those last couple of ranks, you need to get a skill up to 80 or 90, which means finding the master trainers.  For each skill (except one), there is a master trainer who can raise it to the highest possible level.  They're mostly not in guilds; instead they're scattered over the continent.  Some of them are in ruins and you find them by adventuring; some of them are in taverns and you find them by frickin' roleplaying like you're some kind of human who occasionally unwinds by talking to people at the local watering hole instead of an unstoppable adventuring machine who only sleeps one hour a week when it's time to level.  I had no idea the utility of bars in Morrowind before, but it turns out they're full of trainers, most of whom are mediocre but some of whom are the best.

So if at low levels, the training system encouraged you to cycle quickly between local guild quests and training, at mid levels it sends you on the wanderjahr to find the trainers to raise your skills to their peak for guildmastery.  It's an interesting commentary on organizations, that you need insight from outside in order to rise to the top.  And when you do find a master trainer, they're about the biggest cash sink in the game besides the rare high-grade armor vendor.  If you have similar charisma and mercantile skills, it's plausible to drop 14000 gp to raise a skill from 60 to 80, and then another 18000 to go from 80 to 100.  For comparison, other big-ticket items in guild advancement are a stronghold and a wizard's staff, both of which are around 5000 gold.  This is a decent solution to the lategame problem of accumulating too much money, if you decide to master multiple skills.  Like all of Morrowind, it isn't too hard to break this (by boosting your charisma and mercantile skills), but you kind of have to try.

In conclusion: as with the OSR, the solutions to (some of) the game's problems are often already in the game.  It's the culture around playing the game that has forgotten about them, and subsequently mods its way to solutions.

Morrowind, Starcraft, Drafts

Been a while.  Currently procrastinating on writing binary patching tools for a big hacking competition coming up.  Gaming-relevant things I've been up to in the last...  oh dear, quarter I guess:

• Replayed Morrowind using OpenMW and the GoG version of Morrowind's data files.  OpenMW is a straight upgrade on the original engine and worked beautifully.  Looking at it now, the game suffers some pacing issues and the wilderness gameplay is pretty boring (hey, like my campaigns!), but by and large I still think it compared favorably to Skyrim outside of polish / graphics.  The learning curve is steeper, but there's actually complexity there to master.  I had fun.
• I also discovered that Kill Six Billion Demons was heavily influenced by Morrowind's Thirty-Six Lessons of Vivec, so that was neat and is probably part of what I like about K6BD.
• Got Starcraft 2 working in Wine, played through most of Wings of Liberty and the whole of the Heart of the Swarm campaign.
• Wings of Liberty was OK.  There was sufficient freedom in choosing the order of missions that the plot (such as it was) got kinda incoherent in the middle of the campaign.  I'm a little sad their portrayal of the strategic part of guerrilla warfare / revolt wasn't better, but this is forgivable because ultimately the campaign layer is a wrapper around a series of games of the RTS mode.  In comparison to the SC1 campaigns, it felt like there was less use of heroic units, and less...  emotionally-impactful events (worlds falling and being destroyed, betrayals and deaths of notable NPCs, things like that).  Many of the missions felt pretty gamey / had silly gimmicks.
• Heart of the Swarm was disappointing.  I did like that they reduced the freedom of mission choice, which allowed sort of coherent subplots to be carried out in close proximity / sequence.  It was, however, shorter than WoL, some of the same gimmicks were repeated, Kerrigan was way over-powered, and at the end of the day it just didn't feel very...  zerg.  Also I dislike the supernatural direction of things, with this prophecy and resurrected xelnaga business - psionics is always annoying to me in science fiction, excusable in small doses, but this is just turning into fantasy.  I have no intention to play the Protoss campaign.
• Did get me thinking about zerg / tyranids / bugs for Dirtside, though - worms for deep-striking, winged locust infantry, burrowed hidden units in attack/defense scenarios, there're just a lot of interesting thing they could do that mix things up.  Then again, given how well my last conversion attempt of bugs to a Ground Zero game went...  meh.  On the upside, morale is much less important in Dirtside, so that might simplify things a little.
• Woke up absurdly well-rested this morning, "as if I'd stolen sleep from whatever supernatural entity is responsible for its allocation."  Which would be an amusing adventure idea; characters cursed with nightmares, lucid-dreaming funhouse dungeon to kill or steal something to break the curse, and if you die you wake up (exhausted) and can try again the next night.  Reminds me of the 3.0 Manual of the Planes' dream-planes.
• Apparently one of our summer interns plays 5e.
• Re-read Dune.  Meh.  For a book so thematically concerned with ecology, they sure do neglect to explain what the worms are eating to grow to 200 meters / how they sustain the sort of energy expenditures observed.  It's a cool visual, but ultimately sort of dumb - swimming through sand is a lot harder than swimming through water.  Did find it somewhat interesting that most chapters (at least early) were structured around a single conversation between two characters.  Also interesting as an index for how much stuff I've forgotten over the last ten years (measured answer: most of it).
• I suppose one interesting, gameable note from Dune was that both of the mentioned mentats (Piter and Thufir) were also their respective lord's master of assassins.  Interesting ties to Strategic Thief?
• Titles of draft posts from the last couple of months that I haven't actually finished or published:
• Hired Help in the Wilderness Game - reducing ACKS' logistics hassle by hiring NPCs to handle it for you
• Do You Really Need a Whole Class for That? - A call for simplicity against ACKS' emerging glut of classes
• Morrowind, 12 Years Later - more complete reflections on Morrowind
• Eight Cliches, Viking England Edition - Against the Wicked City had a post on combining multiple cliches into a single, higher-quality adventure, so I was gathering cliches for Arthurian / Viking-Age England

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.

Dark Souls and Dungeon Design

Instead of doing anything productive this weekend, so far I've mostly been watching Joseph Anderson's youtube channel of videogame criticism.  I found his videos on the Dark Souls series quite interesting.  Figured I might as well extend my procrastination by blogging about it.

Caveat 1: I have never played any of the Dark Souls games, and it seems unlikely that I will any time soon.  Everything I know about Dark Souls has come second-hand from Anderson.  This is both good and bad.

Caveat 2: Given that it is hardly new, other OSR bloggers have probably already beaten it to death.  It sounds like something The Delvers might've talked about.  But, I do not care.

Here are some things that stuck out to me from Anderson's videos:

• Jayquaying - The sections of Dark Souls 1 that Anderson praises heavily are mostly thoroughly-jayquayed environments.  He rags on DS2 for switching to largely linear levels, and then has mixed praise for DS3 in this regard.  He notes that DS1 was jayquayed on two scales - both in local environments (eg, multiple paths and routes through a town), and in connections between environments (with links between, say, town and a valley full of dragons by way of both an aboveground road and a magma-filled cave below the mountains).  DS3 did a good job of jayquaying on the small scale, but not at the large scale.  Varying the level of jayquaying in megadungeon zones is an interesting possibility of looking at things this way - the megadungeon can have a nonlinear, loopful superstructure, with zones varying in their degree of nonlinearity.  It also expresses one of the problems I had with Rathell - the zone itself had an extremely nonlinear / loop-heavy microstructure, but the overstructure of the dungeon it was supposed to be a part of didn't (at all).
• Resource model - DS1 provided the player with pretty limited healing resources that could be restored by resting at selected "bonfire" locations, which also respawned all of the enemies in the level.  This leads to an expeditionary playstyle that sounds very similar to what we expect to see in the OSR, but with a focus on making it to a boss - you explore a level and get to know its monsters, gradually getting good enough at traversing the area that you can make it to the boss with enough healing remaining to win that fight.  DS2 added inexpensive healing-over-time items to allow players to fight larger groups of enemies, while DS3 just provided much larger pools of healing than DS1.  Similar changes to resource management have taken place over the editions in D&D.
• Investment - Anderson praises Dark Souls 1's system of investing limited resources in particular bonfires, which allows them to restore additional healing resources.  This is useful when there's a boss you're having trouble with; you invest in a nearby bonfire and can bring more healing resources to bear in traversing that zone and defeating that boss.  This is something that it seems like low/mid-level ACKS should be able to do a lot better than it does, with PCs investing in towns as bases of operation and receiving tangible, dungeon-relevant benefits for doing so.  Currently town-buyable, dungeon-relevant resources in ACKS fall into three categories: gear, personnel, and reserve XP.  None of these are really tied to the town itself; they're all pretty movable.  A decent approach might be to take commissioning equipment one step further and allow a lump sum to be spent to increase availability of certain types of goods permanently in that market (eg, acquire a little land, build a building, hire a guy, and establish Doctor Comfrey's Nursery and Garden Center to increase available quantities of healing herbs forever).  Have half the money spent count towards urban investment, and you add another link between the mid- and late-games.
• Predictable, Preventable, Decisive Damage - Anderson claims that damage in Dark Souls is largely avoidable, because enemies telegraph their moves, which allows the player to dodge / block / parry, but that when hits land, they hurt a lot (~3 hits to a player kill, usually).  This ties into the healing resource management game, where you only have to spend resources when you've made a mistake, and part of mastering a level to make it to the boss is learning the attack patterns of the enemies on that level.  Decisive damage is one of the things I like about OSR D&D (on a good day), but it does less well at predictable (ergo preventable).  Bad Trap Syndrome describes this issue in the context of traps, but combat damage is sort of unpredictable too - if you engage in combat without a win-button like sleep, turning, or surprise, damage is a predictable outcome, but the details are left to chance.  In a sense damage predictability is more nuanced in D&D than in Dark Souls - rather than making a mistake, you're taking a risk, and instead of a binary outcome you get a distribution.
• Training Wheels - Part of the reason that Anderson claims that Dark Souls is a mostly-fair game is that things are almost always introduced in a relatively safe way before being introduced in a dangerous way.  When you meet a new type of enemy, you probably only meet one of them; deeper in the area where they appear, you start meeting multiple.  When you enter the trap zone, you're alerted that it's a trap zone by a low-damage arrow trap triggered by a pressure plate, and then the traps escalate from there.  This process of gradual escalation that helps make damage predictable.  It is also something that I, as a table-driven DM, have not been doing well.
• Shortcuts - Another part of mastering a level in Dark Souls is finding and opening shortcuts - changing the environment open shorter routes to the boss.  Keys to locked doors, lowerable drawbridges, levers that move terrain, that sort of thing (one neat example was destroying structures that were shielding monsters along a route, thereby making it effectively shorter for resource conservation purposes).  This is something that makes sense in jayquayed dungeons, but usually rather than opening new routes from the other side they're used to gate entirely new areas.  In practice the closest my players ever came to developing a shortcut was clearing (or befriending) monsters on preliminary expeditions in order to open a route that was safe to move quickly on.  The trouble with building shortcut opportunities into an OSR-style megadungeon is that what counts as a shortcut depends on where you're trying to go, and player objectives usually vary per session, so what is a critical shortcut one day is irrelevant the next.  Dark Souls overcomes this with the focus on getting to the boss.  But...
• Boss Monsters - Bosses are something I always hate in videogames, but in tabletop games they can actually be kind of fun.  They're pretty well-supported by ACKS' worldbuilding guidelines (where every tribe has a chieftain and every warband of barbarians is led by a 9th-level fighter), and would work pretty well with megadungeon factions - kill the boss and the faction disintegrates, opening up space for others or allowing players recruit the survivors.  We saw the beginnings of this emerge in Rathell, where the Marrowgnawer (5HD nonmagic-weapon-immune giant rat) served as a "boss" of sorts of a ratman tribe.  As usual for D&D "bosses", Marrowgnawer died like a chump to a 3rd-level party, due in large part to...
• Action Economy - Curiously, this has been a persistent issue for the Dark Souls series too.  Anderson notes that in DS1, the best fights are one-vs-one duels, while any fight of multiple nontrivial enemies versus the solo player was usually quite difficult, and led to players using dirty tricks to isolate enemies, while in DS2 additional healing was made available to make these fights workable, and in DS3 healing was mostly-reverted but other changes to the combat system were made for this reason.  In D&D the same problem rears its head on the DM-side.  No bosses without bodyguards (and not chump 1HP 4e minions, either...), and also no bosses that don't one-shot henchman or two-shot PC frontliners.
• Gauntlets - In addition to nonlinear exploration zones and straight-line combat slogs, Anderson notes another sort of zone / level in the Dark Souls series, characterized by testing the player's ability to deal with some sort of complication that forces the player to reconsider and adapt their tactics.  Examples that he cites include a level that is heavy on harassment by ranged attackers, a level with darkness (which requires the player to use a torch instead of his shield), and a level with environmental damage-over-time.  Designing megadungeon zones based not merely around cosmetics/theme but also with a particular kind of tactical challenge in mind seems like a really good idea to me, especially because the shield-phalanx has come to dominate our games (of course, precisely because the shield phalanx has come to dominate our games, players are now reluctant to enter areas that require a change in tactics).
• "Explore cautiously, fight bravely" - I'm not going to go watch all the videos again to find the section where Anderson talks about this, but he claims that Dark Souls rewards players for exploring cautiously, taking it slow and not biting off bigger encounters than they can chew, but also for playing aggressively once combat is engaged, getting inside the reach of larger enemies, rolling behind them, and backstabbing.  I like this philosophy, even if I'm not sure how to produce combats that encourage it in ACKS.

Space is a Desert

I've had Homeworld on the brain recently.  There was something remarkable about the atmosphere of Homeworld, and I've been struggling to put my finger on it.

For all that space resembles an ocean, and is full of cruisers and such, in Homeworld space is also a desert.  The backgrounds are often bright nebulae, red and orange and purple, rather than the starry blackness one associates with space games, and visibility is sometimes restricted in a way that resembles dust more than anything nautical.  Names like Seljuk and Sojent-Ra, peoples organized not in states but tribes (eg Kith Somtaaw).  The combat music is drums and pipes and horns, not at all space-age.  The storyline of Homeworld 1 is accurately summarized as "Exodus on a spaceship", and the Garden of Kadesh is full of religious fanatics.  The juxtaposition of the ancient and the futuristic is powerful; technology may change, but people don't.

There is a certain  desolateness and desperateness about the whole affair.  A whole lot of empty, and of salvaging.  There's a bit of post-apocalypse in it as well; your small craft can run out of fuel and be stranded, and the ruins of the ship graveyard tell of fallen empires of immense power (those are capital ships he's panning around).

And it makes sense.  The universe is a desert.  Space is big, and empty, and inimical to mankind.  It is very hot and very cold.  There is nothing to drink, nothing to eat, nothing to breathe.  Beautiful in its starkness and vastness.

So the question on my mind is, how do I bring that feeling to Traveller?  I mentioned Classic Trav to the group the other day, and ultimately realized that there's a bit of confusion about what you're supposed to do in Traveller.  Part of this is that the source fiction is not stuff familiar to us (Space Viking?  The hell is Space Viking?).  It's from a completely different era of science fiction than we are.  It's pre-transhumanist, pre-Singularitarian, pre-cyberpunk, practically pre-Star Wars (I recall seeing stats for "Luke Starkiller" in the Classic Traveller book of NPCs, but he's a farmboy pilot with no psionic powers, from when Star Wars was the name of a single movie rather than a franchise).  Probably the closest things I've read were Dune and Foundation, and neither of those 1) seem like particularly plausible futures to us, or 2) are particularly gameable.

Another part of the problem is that Traveller does not have the clear progression you see in D&D, from low to high levels, or adventurer to king.  There are lots of little subsystems that let you do all kinds of different things but it's not clear what you should do.  So I think, if I were to run Traveller, that some sort of objective function would be a welcome addition.  Absolute freedom paralyzes absolutely.

But anyway, some thoughts for "Space is a Desert":

Rare Oases: Gas giants 1/3 as common as usual, jump uses 1/3 as much fuel as usual.

Despoiled Gardens: Most planets were never going to support human life.  The ones that were, humanity did to as humanity does, and now they barely support human life either.

Babylon: An empire collapsed or collapsing as a result of its hubris, decadent sin, and barbarians at the outer reaches.

Your money is useless here: If the universe is shattered into little isolated autonomous clans, and there is no faith in the Imperial Fiat Currency, suddenly Traveller's trading minigame actually matters, because you have to carry your wealth in goods that you can trade when you arrive.  Pretty good bets: spare parts, food and hydroponics, chemical air filters, maybe weapons.

The Ruins of Empire: Sometimes spacers run out of fuel, orbital stations suffer a life support failure, and colonies die out due to plague, inbreeding, wildlife, civil war, environmental catastrophe, or whatever.  Loot, ho!

Life Support: There's actually a rule about shipboard life support, and we have traditionally ignored it.  Wastewater is easy to purify given fusion-heat and CO2's pretty easy to scrub chemically, but the complex organic foodmolecules required to sustain human life are much less common in the cosmos than the hydrogen required to power the reactor.

Light Cavalry: Emphasis on high-speed light units; in the space context, fightercraft.  Maybe not sensible, but traditional.  Paint some heraldry on that fuselage and make ready your particle-lance.

Swords: Nothing says Ancient Future like some bloke trying to cut your vacc suit open with a scimitar.  If the orbital habitats aren't as sturdily-constructed as is typical in Traveller, firing a gun indoors may be a one-way ticket out the airlock by civil convention, and melee combat the norm aboard ships.

Hokey Religions to go along with your Ancient Weapons: When the situation gets grim, people go crazy and start hearing gods.  Always have, always will.

No Pirates: There will always be those who seek to use force to take things of value, but "pirate" is too naval a term.  Brigand or bandit might serve.  Homeworld used "Turanic Raiders", and I could see using barbarians. Unfortunately no really evocative word that means quite what I want is springing to mind.

If I were to steal a little more from Homeworld, rather than just thematically, I might throw in:

Back into Space: The players' home planet has been cut off for a long time, and recently re-discovered jump drive.  The PCs are the first out to do reconnaissance, and are Astronaut Material (former test pilots with two PhDs, you know the type), which might have some effects on chargen...  and then there's an exploration game, where scientists are useful for eg looking at exoplanet spectra for atmospheric composition to see if there's a gas giant in-system before jumping in.

Fleet Command: The trouble with using Starmada in Traveller typically is that it's too deadly, but if you have multiple ships, that problem diminishes.  And Stars Without Number has such tempting rules for building battleships as a PC activity...  There's a lot of other good stuff in SWN that I should steal, particularly on the worldbuilding front.

To the Stars: Having been stuck on a desert hole of a world, some folks on the PCs' homeworld are going to want to move to space if opportunities arise.  Ties nicely to the exploration game (finding habitable worlds) and the fleet command game (keeping them safe).

Relatedly, if I were to steal a couple of things from ACKS, they would be henchmen/hirelings (should be simpler than ACKS' henchmen, and you need crew for your ships...), reaction and morale (which Traveller already sort of has), maybe mortal wounds (or something like them, as an excuse for cybernetics), and, uh...  not much else.  Oh, and ACKS' initiative system, actually - it could make autofire initiative penalties and leadership/tactics initiative bonuses interesting for once.

If I were to steal just a few things from Classic Traveller, I'd strongly consider weapon-vs-armor tables and the increased encumbrance limits.  Weapon-vs-armor tables do a marvelous job resolving the Armor Problem we've had with Traveller in the past, that anything that can hurt the guy in combat armor will instantly pulp anyone else.  With weapon-vs-armor tables, an anti-armor weapon (say a high-velocity rifle) can hurt the guy in heavy armor, but won't instagib everyone else.  For simplicity's sake you could even do something like just having two main types of armor (hard and soft) for attack DM modifiers, and then some small DR values and weights differentiate within those types.

AI War 2 Kickstarter

This post has nothing to do with RPGs, except inasmuch as people who like ACKS sometimes like the sort of niche videogames that I like (Dwarf Fortress, Crusader Kings / EU4, Mount and Blade...).

AI War: Fleet Command is one of those niche games that I think ACKS people might like.  It's a campaign-scale, highly asymmetric real-time strategy game.  It is always played as a human (or cooperating human team) against two AIs.  The AIs start with control of most of the map, and a very strong numerical advantage that only increases over time.  The humans control the tempo of the game, and do a lot of scouting and raiding for capturable resources.  They must achieve superior local concentrations of force in offensive operations, which must be quick enough that the AI's reserves cannot arrive before the objective is accomplished.  On defense, human players often rely heavily on traps / static defenses.

The human win condition is the destruction of both AI homeworlds, while the AI wins if the human's home command center is destroyed.  A typical map is 60-80 star systems, one of which is the human homeworld and the rest of which begin under AI control, and a typical game lasts 8+ hours.  Taking worlds from the AI increases the AI's perception of human threat, which increases its tech level and available reinforcements, so it is critical to take only the worlds that you really need while bypassing the rest (or destroying their fortifications to make them reasonably safe to travel through).

This is very much a game about picking your battles, both tactically (pulling the fleet out if too much heat starts to arrive) and strategically (only taking the planets that are worth the increase in AI tech).  Of all the games I've played that were billed as "real-time strategy", this one has the greatest strategy component.  And the AI design is notably distributed and devious.

Unfortunately, the graphics are terrible, and over the seven years since its release there have been a bunch of expansions, which present a dizzying array of configuration options and units if not disabled.

But recently there is a kickstarter for AI War 2, with 3d graphics (actually for performance reasons - turns out modern graphics cards like rendering 3d objects in realtime better than they like rendering sprites in realtime) and a return to the roots.  It may or may not make the funding goal; it's looking like a close thing.  So maybe go take a look.

Reviewish: Shadow of Mordor

Shadow of Mordor was a console/Windows open-world game that came to linux recently, where I picked it up while on sale.  Premise: ranger back from the dead runs around Mordor killing orcs, freeing slaves, and disrupting the power structure of Sauron's armies.  Promising!  My feelings on the implementation are mixed, however.

Tonally, it's intended to be fairly dark.  Your character and his family are killed during the opening sequence (look, it's not a spoiler if it's in the opening sequence).  You find yourself surrounded by slavery, executions, and orcish brutality in a grim landscape while music with lots of drums and minor chords plays.  Driven by a quest for revenge for a family you (the player) barely knew, you soon descend into a sea of senseless violence against a transient cast of orcish captains.  Your only meaningful relationships are with these foes.

In practice, it goes so dark that I found it hilarious.  Nihilistically comedic.  The orcish dialogue is one of the best parts of the game.  The combat system is an inversion of all good sense - even when they have you surrounded, the orcs only attack you one or two at a time (providing you with opportunities to parry).  The safest place to be in combat is right in the middle of a huge group of melee enemies, so that archers on the edges of the battle will inflict friendly fire rather than hitting you (also walls interfere with your camera control, so fighting with your back to a wall is a good way to end up dead).  Vaulting over enemies in melee is actively encouraged by the combat system.  The end result is something that some might describe as "epic" or "badass", but that I think would be well-served by a Benny Hill soundtrack.  The choice of minor-key music superimposed over such silly combat just makes it funnier!  The stealth system is similarly amusing - you can backstab and kill an orc in mid-sentence and the rest of his patrol won't notice.  Repeating this process lets you wipe a moving group of almost arbitrary size, provided that they don't turn.  Resource management is purely tactical; if you're willing to disengage from combat, recovery is instantaneous via fast travel.  The one-liner introductions from the orc captains vary between cringeworthy and genuinely funny, and the fact that they sometimes come back from the dead with their skulls held together by enormous spiked metal plates (and they complain about it) is also moderately funny.  I actually got a little sad when some of the orcish captains I'd killed a couple times stopped coming back, and then I laughed, because this is a game about killing orcs and here I am being sad about having killed an orc (again).

Those captains are arguably the best-developed characters in the entire game.  You get to know the things they fear, the things they hate, who their rivals are, what drives them to acts of unspeakable cruelty.  And those traits all matter, because they make them easier for you to kill (not that most of them are all that hard, but sometimes they matter).

An assassin's dilemma; if you can predict your target's actions perfectly, you must have a perfect simulation of your target running inside you - you have become them, subsumed them.  If you do not hold them in the deepest contempt, if you bear them any respect, you must feel a little emptiness at snuffing them out, as your inner simulation becomes a 'ghost'.

But perhaps I am not cut out for assassin work.

In any case, this is not the hard-bitten, combat-as-war guerilla warfare and political hierarchy manipulation simulator that I was hoping for.  It is fun when met on its own terms, if you get it on sale and take it for what it is (playing while inebriated might help), but it does get pretty repetitive pretty quickly, and the controls make it very clear that it's a console port (everything is contextual and overloaded, and you can't separate the multiple functions of each key).  The graphics are OK I guess.

To return to a point relevant to tabletop gaming, this (combined with my recent reading of War of the Flea) has me thinking about Midnight again, particularly as regards infighting among the orcs.  More to follow.

Paradox and Conqueror

This is a somewhat roundabout post, but ends with putting the Conqueror back in ACKS.  Bear with me.

I've been playing a lot of Europa Universalis IV recently.  I'm fairly rubbish at it, but I enjoy it nonetheless (and more than its sibling from Paradox Studios, Crusader Kings II, which I've mentioned previously and am even worse at).  These are both essentially domain games; Crusader Kings in particular has commonalities of scale, feudalism, and frequent assassination attempts with ACKS.

One thing I have noticed is that upgrading your lands in EU4 is a slow, expensive process, and even more so in CK2.  I think the only time I had the cash on hand in Crusader Kings to upgrade one of my castles was as a Swedish viking-king who made a habit of multi-year raiding expeditions against the English and Irish coasts, and in EU4 most of the money I've spent on upgrading has come from tribute extracted from nations defeated in war.  Saving cash from the normal budget for a new castle is liable in CK to be a multi-generational affair with years of build time once you've finished gathering the money, while in EU it might take only a decade of prosperous peace and a year of buildtime.

As this suggests, the big money is in warfare.  Even better than temporary extraction of tribute is permanent (or hopefully-permanent) conquest of provinces and vassalization of smaller states.  To use Civilization terminology, playing Tall (a few highly-developed provinces) is much inferior to playing Wide (many poorly-developed provinces).

In Civilization, most of the map is basically empty at the beginning of the game, and at least in the Civ5 games I've played buffer zones between countries are fairly common even into the late game because playing Tall works well - you settle a handful of cities in good positions and then you tech up.  In the Paradox games, almost all the land is somebody's land, even if they're some backwards tribe of Siberian nomads - if you want to expand (and you do, because building up is extremely expensive), you must conquer.  Conquest notably does not typically entail the extermination of the inhabitants of the land; merely their subjugation, taxation, and drafting for future wars.  In that ten years of time it would've taken you to fund and build a new castle, you could instead take two of your neighbor's castles, and those come with land and serfs and tribute!  Sure, they might rebel later, but that's what you've got a garrison for, right?

To get to the point, finally - when I ran the early domain game in ACKS, it was played in the Colonization rather than Conquest mode.  The natives of the hexes to be annexed were put to the sword rather than swearing oaths of fealty, and then human settlers were imported.  This was a slow and expensive process.  Granted, the natives were beastmen and had no castles, but even beastmen are likely to prefer paying tribute and tolerating the presence of human farmers to extermination.  I guess this might be another case of failing to play as Resource Extractors - we never really asked "can we get taxes and troops from your land without actually killing you?"

Notable exceptions to the Extermination Protocol occurred when faced with human natives, in three cases.  Two were bands of nomad horsemen, who feared the party because many of their resurrected members made the horses nervous, and so fled their lands.  The last was a band of berserksers, whose chieftain the party's top fighter maimed in single combat and subsequently took as a henchman.  I'm not sure what became of his men but I presume that some use was found for them.  Yet another reason I am not keen on beastmen for future use - they make aggression a very easy choice, and diplomacy an unattractive one.

Subjugating tribal / organized occupants of lands-to-be-conquered also sets up a known faction for later reuse.  A small war between the subject tribes and tribes on the other side of the border might become the overlord's problem (since the tribes from the next valley over see the settlers as valid targets) or an opportunity (great justification for more subjugation).  Wars between multiple subject tribes might threaten the realm's stability if they escalate, or conveniently weaken the tribes so that they can be integrated more readily.  A coalition of subjugated tribes might rebel if they can overcome their differences (and a rival tribal coalition might offer to assist in suppressing the rebellion).  None of this tribal warfare fits into the Monolithic State model we moderns are used to, but I expect it would make for a fine source of interesting intra-realm gaming, and one for which my playerbase is much better suited that courtly intrigue.  This sort of "use what the tables give you" approach seems to have some support in the literature, too.  Hell, we could do away with the d10-d10 civilian population growth mechanic entirely and cut down on the paperwork and agricultural investments while we're at it.  Then switch thieves' guilds over to spy networks (you want to know what your tribal vassal leaders are up to, right?) and we're approaching a domain game I'd rather play than ACKS' default.

Also: in future, I'm totally going to try to make sure most mass combats happen at agreed-upon times and places, because resolving them otherwise, in messy circumstances not well-suited to formations, is quite a pain.

A Grumble of Cyberpunks (also Heist Games)

I have been playing Shadowrun Returns (on linux!) recently, and enjoying it for the most part.  There are a few things that stick in my craw, though.

Nothing says "failed op in progress" like traipsing into a highly-secure corporate office without so much as a floorplan.  I like heisty games, where foreknowledge is key.  Most missions in Shadowrun Returns basically require that I go in blind and just shoot the place up with so little concern for opsec that my team is bare-faced and has mohawks up.  I presume that this is to make identification from the security footage easier, and thereby generate more gunfights, which are Fun.

This is a less than satisfying state of affairs.

Also: you got your fantasy in my cyberpunk.  Do not want.  Likewise, their hacking is adorable.  I recognize that it was added as a last-minute feature, and it's a perfect gameplay fit for a turn-based dungeoncrawler, but oooh man it's also terrible.

All this has me in the mood to roll myself a proper cyberpunk rpg.  The basic premise of Shadowrun, that the megacorps need dirty deeds done by deniable assets, is great.  I'm disappointed with the implementation, though.

What's more, heist games tend to not go over so well with my group, which has 1) a fairly limited patience for planning, combined with 2) a collective indecisiveness which tends to generate muddled and incoherent plans even after some time planning.  Halfway through the operation someone will go "wait I thought you were supposed to have done X ten minutes ago."  I have been that someone; I have also been that you.  So running a heist straight, in a perfectly chronological fashion, doesn't work so well for us.

Might be time to take a note from the movies, where things often cut back and forth between the planning and the execution.  Instead of a planning phase, followed by an execution phase, we might have an intelligence-gathering phase, followed by a combined planning/execution phase.  I see this working like so:

In the intelligence phase, the PCs take actions to gather some numerical manner of 'Intel Point'.  Actions which earn intel points include getting floorplans from the building inspector's bureau, hackin' around the intertubes, talking to hardware suppliers, maintenance contractors, and former employees of the target, dumpster diving, getting an employee drunk and pumping him for information (and a covert scan of the RFID tag in his ID badge), seducing the plant manager's wife, and all that fun stuff.  The more groundwork you do, the more Intel Points you have to spend later when things start to go wrong.  On the flip side, if the target catches wind of your intelligence-gathering efforts, they're liable to tighten security preemptively; put up an extra checkpoint, add metal detectors, double up the watch schedule, change all the passwords, keep a rapid response team in a black van on call, maybe shell out for that cavity-searchbot the chief of security's had his eye on for a while now.  The usual.  If gathering intel goes poorly, the number of surprises you wish you had intel points to preempt will rise.  If intel gathering goes particularly poorly, maybe one of your guys ends up ID'd or caught, and then you're really in trouble...

At some point you have to make the call and go for it; either your intel gets stale and starts to go bad, or you have a deadline from your employer, or the risks of continued intelligence gathering just aren't worth it.  So you formulate a preliminary plan - something like "The face is going in for a job interview under an assumed name.  He will 'get lost' looking for the bathroom, and then open a back door for the muscle and the ninja, who 'borrowed' a plumber's van and some overalls.  The ninja will proceed to the objective while the muscle and face provide distractions or covering fire, and the hacker provides security camera and comm interference from some local university's library wifi and a spoofed MAC address."

And then things start to go wrong, and the players start to spend intel points to alter the plan around these new obstacles if they can't think of a way of dealing with them on the spot.  The rule, though, is that when the obstacle is revealed, you have to choose immediately whether or not to revise the plan before you take any actions to circumvent the obstacle.  If you planned for it, you never met it; permitting actions gets you into an even weirder hypothetical state and basically gives you two shots at each problem.  Intel point costs are based on the relative secrecy of the obstacle; it's not a huge leap of logic and planning to assume that a secretive installation might have guard dogs and to plan accordingly, but it is probably harder to find out beforehand that the thing in the top-secret lab is actually an angry tankbot, and then even more difficult to smuggle antitank weapons into the facility.

I dunno.  It'd be an interesting experiment with a flavor of party-shared associative action point, and perhaps a solution to our heist-game woes.

If I were to really build such a game, I think I'd want to do it on a Traveller chassis, maybe with a slightly wider die spread (2d8 or 2d10, with 10+ and 12+ for success respectively) so that modifiers could be a little more granular and so a +4 modifier isn't as game-breakingly good.  But Mongoose Trav is about the right grade of complexity, and a lifepath-type character generation system would be perfect for cyberpunk.  Everyone's down and out, but not necessarily for the same reasons.  Likewise, Traveller has good support for dangerous performance-enhancing drugs, the law level mechanics would certainly be hands, their cybernetics book was reasonable, and there is no prior expectation of elves and mages.  Hacking would need some work, but it always does.