Swords Against Scheduling

I've been running my in-person game pretty open-table style.  Once a week I send out a four-question survey to my player pool asking "if we gamed on (mon|tues|wednes|thurs)day, would you make it?  Yes / no / maybe".  If we get three players for a given night, then we game.  I've been very surprised at the degree of flakiness; so far in ~six weeks we've had two sessions dip from 3 expected players down to 2.  I don't think I've ever seen a session-failure-rate due to flakiness anything like this before.  This post is speculating about explanations.

Many (most?) of my players are young men, early-career, between one and three years out of school with this as their first job.  It's been a bad job market in this field for the last year or two.  One of the more common excuses for flaking is that more work suddenly popped up and they're working late, in the hope that if they work hard now they won't get laid off next year.  In fairness, when I was their age, I dropped D&D entirely as a hobby for a couple years to focus on work.  So I respect the impulse to work hard early-career and solidify their positions, but the way in which they don't keep their commitments does bother me.

Amusingly, the players of chaotic characters have been flaking at a higher rate than the lawful guys.

Another hypothesis is a generational change in culture, perhaps arising out of differences in the pandemic experience between those who were in college at the time and those who were working at the time.

A third possibility is that maybe new campaigns / player-groups are always sort of like this and it's just been so long since I played with anyone but family or the Old College Stalwarts that I'd forgotten about it.  It may just take time to distill a core of reliable players, to winnow the chaff from the wheat.  The July 4th holiday certainly didn't help with building campaign momentum.

Finally, I must consider the possibility that this is all my fault.  Maybe my game just isn't that interesting or that fun.  Maybe by making it open-table, with no real penalty for no-showing and no social pressure applied by other players for people to show up, I've brought this on myself.  Or the opposite, that maybe I've taken too strong a hand in recruiting players and scheduling sessions, and really maximal respect for player agency would require them to self-organize in the West Marches style, at which point players would be applying social pressure to each other to honor their commitments.  If I do want to maintain my current role in recruiting and scheduling, I could probably also "solve" the problem of session-failure by either expanding my player-base (eg going from 8 total players on the roster to 12) or by lowering the bar and running sessions for two players, which also gets more viable as they level and get access to henchmen (as happened last week; only two showed but they were game to give it a go anyhow, and one of them had hit second level the previous session, so I allowed him to hire a 1st-level MU and they made good progress with three bodies in-world).

Curated Outdoor Spaces

I visited the Chicago Botanical Gardens the other week and had a sort of a weird experience.

I'm used to parks and gardens which strive for a veneer of plausible wildness, if you will - sure, there's a paved trail cutting through it, and yes, they're a bit organized, with a grove of cherry trees (in a variety of labeled types) here and a grove of a variety of magnolias there, but there's still a fair bit of undergrowth and the groupings of plants could have occurred naturally, and you stay on the trail mostly because you don't want to get into the weeds (and the "beware of hornets' nest" signs).  Obviously these environments wouldn't fool an experienced outdoorsman used to bushwhacking, but I don't think they're intended to.  Maybe a better description of what they're aiming for is idealized, Edenic - the woods you used to play in as a kid, where your parents told you the names of the trees and where the hornets' nest was.  Not wild wild, but an environment kinda doing its own thing with limited human intervention to make it suitable for human enjoyment.

The Chicago gardens weren't like that - there were lots of "stay on the trail" signs and art pieces in among the plants.  Parts of it (like the aquatic plants exhibit) reminded me of The Witness - I kept expecting to find puzzles to block my progress rather than just art objects.  There was no escaping the artificiality; a veneer of nature was not a design goal.  Chicago's garden felt like a heavy-handed exercise in power, in control, in making appearances just so.  The outdoor environment as a canvas, something to be written to before it is read from.  When this succeeds, as in their Japanese-style garden exhibit or the desert greenhouse full of crazy cacti, it can be quite beautiful.  But parts definitely fell flat or felt forced.

I think there are a couple of points of relation to D&D and the design of artificial environments.

I don't think I've ever attempted to design an outdoor adventure site that was heavily-modified by its inhabitants (beyond, say, fortresses), but Gardens of the Elf King does sound like a TSR module title.

I think on the other end, it's probably worth distinguishing between attempts to provide a simulated wilderness as it would actually be in a fantasy setting (with eg simulated migration of monsters) and aiming for an idealized wilderness of myth and fiction, full of dragons and treasure and talking birds.  The latter is more compatible with the Tiki Style of Early D&D - the players are tourists into this mysterious place and we don't need to have everything that happens in the "backstage" worked out because it's more important that it feel right than that it be right.

Maybe part of my interest in the wilderness game has been that wilderness is almost by definition unmanaged - it does not require simulating minds/agents to build a plausible wilderness, whereas a dungeon wants for explanation and justification for its construction.  And then the gauntlet funhouse dungeon appeals to me in part because it is a rejection of in-world explanation, design, purpose.  Rather than making a dungeon of the wilderness, it makes a wilderness of the dungeon.

Mapping and Measuring - Paces

I recently picked up an old used copy of Sleightholme's Better Boat Handling.  I had some trouble with docking this summer and it seemed like it might be a worthwhile read over the winter to build up a set of drills to run in the spring.  I haven't sat down and read it yet but I flipped through and looked at some exercises.  On page 22 it suggested:

Exercise 3: Distance judging

Whenever you are out walking and the opportunity occurs, note objects ahead such as typical two-story buildings, people, cars, gates, etc.  Guess their distance and then count your paces.  It is not merely size of distant objects but detail that gives the clue to distance.  A window, for instance, loses its bars as distance increases, then its rectangular form, and then finally it becomes a dot.

Lack of intuition about distances is a serious problem I have had - many canonical-ish instructions in docking or man-overboard drills measure distances in boat-lengths.  I know how long the boat is in feet, but projecting that out multiple times across the water is more difficult.  So I took note of this exercise and have started playing with it; I can do it even if I can't put a crew together for a given day, or the weather's bad, or whatever.  It seems like it would also be useful for anyone running wilderness encounters.  How much detail can you make out about a group of people and/or orcs at, say, 50 yards with the naked eye? (see also this old post)

The mention of measuring distances in paces also got me thinking about the dungeon game.  If I tell the players that the room is 30' by 40', how did they determine that?  I have never stopped the game to ask my players how they want to measure a room.  The default dungeon exploration speed is low enough that I could definitely see pacing the length and width of the room being viable for getting pretty accurate measurements within the allotted time.  But doing this would also expose you to danger from traps or enemies in the room.  So now I'm wondering whether I just want to give descriptions like "big, longer away from you than it is wide" and "small room" up until they have paced it.  Or give them estimated distances in tens of feet, but with a roll for error, and then if they pace it they can get accurate distances?  idk.

I also think it would be fun to give room sizes and distances in paces instead of feet.  Just like using stone for encumbrance, it's a quaint and evocative unit with a little bit of slop.

As usual, this led down a shallow wikipedia rabbithole, with a couple of interesting findings:

• Alexander the Great brought specialist pace-counters along with his army to measure distances, and their accuracy was so good that some now think they must have had an odometer.  How much does a specialist bematist demand in monthly wages, I wonder?
  
• You know those wheels surveyors use to measure distances?  Another name for them is a "waywiser".  I love it - it's alliterative and very Olde English.  If you put them on your equipment table, definitely use that name.
• Apparently pace-counting is still used by the military and they use beads on a string to help keep track of large counts.  I did find myself wondering if I were occasionally slipping up with counts up towards a hundred while I was walking my block this morning; these make total sense.
  

Coastal Sailcrawling?

Part of the reason things have been quiet here lately is that I was taking a course on navigating vessels under sail in coastal waters, which pretty well ate my weeknights.  At the beginning I was looking at doing a "Notes from a $TOPIC course" series like I've done previously with some courses [1][2] but it got away from me.  So, having arrived, now reflecting.

One conclusion from spending a lot of time staring at charts and plotting courses with pencil, compass, and protractor is that there is definitely room for procedure and gameplay in modeling this.

I think the distinction between coastal and open-water navigation is probably under-appreciated in Trad D&D's "waterborne adventuring" rules.  I don't know much about long-distance open-water passagemaking yet but reading accounts from eg Slocum it doesn't seem crazy to abstract down to "n days pass, have a couple random encounter rolls, you arrive more-or-less where you were planning to" given reasonably-intelligent play like using the trade winds and celestial navigation.  You can definitely get screwed and capsized by a big storm in the open sea, but there aren't many things to run into.  The coast, on the other hand, is by definition something you can run into.  To paraphrase one old salt, "the sea is pretty safe; it's the land that will get you".  Coastal vs offshore is probably also a useful line for ACKS' rule about continuing to sail through the night with a navigator - at night in open sea, by all means, get out your sextant, take some bearings on some stars, and sail on.  At night in unfamiliar, medieval coastal waters without lighted buoys, an accurate chart, or a full moon...  probably wiser to drop anchor and wait for dawn.

On a 1:80000 scale coastal chart like Chart 1210TR, one inch is about one nautical mile (some nuances apply due to Mercator projection but good enough for gaming work).  A small vessel under sail typically makes about 6 knots.  So if you do 1-inch, 1-nautical-mi hexes, you get a 10-minute turn to move one hex.  Or you go up to one-hour turns with 6 hexes per turn.  Either way, you also probably want to apply current smeared across the hour; if sailing in a 3kt current, you get pushed one hex current-ward every 20 minutes.  Since we're stealing a real-world chart, we can go dig up published tidal current tables.

Putting it on hexes is also kinda reasonable for dealing with wind direction and tacking; pick (or roll) one of the six hex directions for the wind to be coming from, and moving directly in that direction costs double (assuming you're making multiple short tacks within a single hex).  A modern sloop-rigged boat usually wants to sail at least 45 degrees off the wind, and then there's some leeway so you're going to do a bit worse than 45, often more like 50-55 in significant winds, sometimes much worse in big winds.  60 degrees off the wind is probably quite optimistic for medieval sailing vessels but if you're running a post-apocalyptic setting where not everything has been forgotten, primitive sloops sailing 60 degrees off the wind seems workable and simple.  Roll again every hour to see if the wind has shifted direction or remains from the same direction (or if it dies entirely, leaving them at the mercy of current - which is how many boats without motors end up on the rocks).

The other side of tide from current is depth.  A 1-mile hex probably admits multiple depth soundings.  If the party is sailing in a hex where there are spots with a depth less than their draft, there's a chance they run aground.  This seems basically like the "roll a d6 to see if the trap fires".  Use your judgement of what fraction of the hex is very shallow to determine the probability they end up in it.

If shoals are traps, tidal straits (also called tidal gates) are doors.  These are narrow channels through which tidal currents are very strong.  Examples include the Golden Gate in San Francisco, Hell Gate in New York, and Deception Pass in Puget Sound.  If you try to pass the wrong way through one of these at the wrong time, currents can be more than four knots and you make very little progress.  So they're like doors that only open at certain times.

Finally, how do players actually navigate a coastal sailbox?  They don't have a chart, and there are probably not lighted buoys in your setting.  There might be lighthouses, and if they have a hand-compass you can give them a rough bearing.  The various tall points of reference typically on coastal charts, like radio towers, water towers, and church steeples could be readily translated into towering keeps, wizards' towers, and hilltop monasteries for your players to go Full Lindesfarne on.  Chart 1210TR includes "monument" and "Chilmark Spire" points of reference - I'm not exactly sure what the Chilmark Spire actually is but it's rather evocative, no?  Again, in a post-apocalyptic setting, city areas could be readily translated into ruins.  Headlands, steep coastal bluffs, and the edges of particular islands also seem like commonly-used points of reference for inshore work.  We have, in the language and reference points of actual navigators, pieces for a language of wilderness play.

One may readily ask - why bother / will there be interesting gameplay here?  I think so.  Looking at the structure of river deltas, barrier islands, and sounds, there are lots of tiny islands and the structure of the water-network comes highly-Jayquayed by default.  A small island is kind of like a room; it is self-contained and you can stock it as a unit and the party can anchor the boat and row ashore and explore it and interact with the stocked thing.  And then your waterways are sort of like treacherous hallways, and your sheltered bays are places to rest at anchor. 

 

Just look at all those islands

 

In conclusion, perhaps deltas and barrier island chains may be thought of and played as dungeons, open sea as wilderness.

Calibrating Compasses

I've been opposed to having compasses in my D&D games for a good long while, on a couple of grounds.  They don't really fit into a Dark Ages or Ancients milieu, and it seems intuitively obvious to a suburbanite that they should sort of trivialize navigation.  The latter, I am learning, is not quite true.

I have been doing some pre-reading in the Annapolis Book of Seamanship for a coastal navigation course I'm taking this winter, and was surprised to learn that when installing a compass on a vessel, you need to calibrate it.  Ferrous metal fixtures on the vessel can interfere with the compass' accuracy, and that interference changes as the vessel changes heading.  There are some fine adjustments you can make to modern compasses, but those probably weren't available on compasses in the Bad Old Days, and even today these fine adjustments can sometimes be insufficient, in which case you end up writing up a table of adjustments to the heading the compass shows based on the heading of the vessel - a mapping from apparent magnetic heading to actual magnetic heading.  And making that table requires having precise bearings from where you're carrying out the calibration.  Apparently "compass adjuster" is something of a specialist profession.

And then magnetic north is off from true north, and the amount you have to compensate for that varies based on your location - if you're between the magnetic north pole and the actual north pole, the difference could be 180 degrees!

I was talking about compass deviation due to metal fixtures at work and an ex-army colleague mentioned that when he taught overland navigation, one of his pastimes was giving the compass to the squad's radioman and seeing how long it took the squad leader to figure out that the radio was interfering with the compass.  "Machine gunners were OK too, it's a big piece of metal."

There is also a note in the book that "Very few steerers [helmsmen] are good enough to keep a boat within 2 degrees of course in smooth water; in rough weather, steering errors of 5 to 10 degrees are common."  One side of a hex is 60 degrees wide, so a 10 degree error in rough weather is one hex side every six hexes or so...

All of this is to say that if you allow compasses in your games, they aren't necessarily an end-all-be-all for navigation.  Full plate may mess with your compass, magic items might mess with your compass ("magnet" and "magic" share a prefix, after all), magnetic "north" in your setting may be in an interesting spot or just move around a lot, and even if you have bearings there's still room for error in steering to lead to course deviation.  To say nothing of the quality of nautical charts and other maps in pre-modern times!

Notes from a Sailing Course

After many years of putting it off, I finally got around to getting some sailing lessons this summer.  Some D&D-relevant notes from instruction and the manual, in the style of Notes From a Hiking Seminar:

I was already familiar with points of sail so I'm not going to talk about that much here.  I have yet to go back and re-evaluate the water travel rules in light of what I have learned.

Land makes wind shadows.  This was very apparent when we were under sail; even small, unimpressive islands were doing it.  It made me wonder about figuring prevailing winds on a per-hex basis, or otherwise getting much more micro with climates than I usually think about.

Expected survival times in water of varying temperatures under varying actions.  Cold water is very bad for your health!  One of the things I read suggested that about half of all "drowning" victims actually die of hypothermia while floating, rather than dying of water entering the lungs.  And swimming to produce more body heat is actually disadvantageous a lot of the time, since your clothes are a crappy wetsuit that holds water that you've warmed next to your skin, but swimming tends to flush them.  In any case, assuming these times are for normal men with d6 HP, we might reasonably conclude that 35 degree water does a point of damage every 20 minutes, 55 degree water a point every hour, and 70 degree water a point every four hours or so.

Nautical charts - they're definitely maps.  I don't think I've ever seen an adventure that took a nautical chart and imposed a hex grid over it but it could be fun.  And there are plenty of them available for free from NOAA (granted, some in an obscure file format used by electronic chart plotters on ships).

"My [the instructor's] wife likes powerboating better than sailing - it's less mysterious".  In a bronze age setting where sailing is a new technology and mystery cults abound, a cult of the mystery of the sail would be fun.

An interesting definition of "seaworthy": "the vessel is competent to resist the ordinary attacks of wind and weather, and is competently equipped and manned for the voyage, with a sufficient crew, and with sufficient means to sustain them, and with a captain of general good character and nautical skill."  Bit of a "what is steel compared to the hand that wields it?" point of view.  And contra OSE's classification of vessels as seaworthy or unseaworthy independent of captain and crew.

On interpreting weather forecasts: "If a forecast calls for a 45% of high winds assume you will be sailing in heavy gusts 45% of the time."  Could have applications for generating weather during a given random encounter - sure you know the big picture of the day's weather, but maybe the encounter is during a lull.

Traveller's Terms and HBR's Tours of Duty

I had an interesting text-chat conversation with a former coworker recently (excerpted):

me: I suppose maybe that is a good argument for me going to XXX next rather than YYY...  Just to see if XXX is the way that I think it is (which was part of why I wanted to go to $CURRENT_EMPLOYER - to see it).  The tourist approach to career planning.

them: Ha, I like how you describe your career strategy!  Kinda reminds me of Reid Hoffman's tour of duty https://hbr.org/2013/06/tours-of-duty-the-new-employer-employee-compact

It's a pretty good article.

I have thought about careers and life in terms of Traveller's terms for quite some time; my blogger profile used to have what I estimate my Traveller stats at, including terms in various occupations.  When I'm at a new company, I think of staying a full four years as a good solid run; I've only done it once so far, and it was a pretty darn successful four years, definitely worth an extra benefit roll (with a shift in company direction in the final year or so which I did not think promising).  More commonly, after 18-36 months, if things are looking mediocre, I move on.  Not a failed survival roll, but more like a failed roll to promote.

So I think it's a little funny to see a serious publication like the Harvard Business Review take basically the same perspective, following in the footsteps of some geeks in the '70s trying to model careers.

Wildfires and Wilderness Adventures

We have some smoke blowing in north from California, east over the mountains, and even a little generated locally, and as usual any change in visibility brings me back to thoughts on wilderness adventuring [1][2][3].

Two days ago it wasn't too bad, large buildings about six miles away were visible as grey outlines in the haze, and objects two miles away were fairly visible.  Yesterday things were much worse, with buildings two miles away pretty much indistinguishable from the trees, and the trees mostly visible as shadows only where they grow along the top of a ridgeline, and they are lit from behind.  Today visibility is absolutely garbage, maybe a mile tops, and the light has a strong yellow tint to it (it was very orange when I woke up but had faded by the time I was done with morning chores).  Haven't seen the mountains about sixty miles away since last weekend, but even the little smoke that was there before the bulk of it blew in on monday made it easier to see the depth between the various ridgelines, which I did not expect.

As for fires themselves as a wilderness hazard, several of the fires in Washington are between 100,000 and 170,000 acres.  At 640 acres per square mile, and about 30 square miles per six-mile hex, that's between 5 and 9 6-mile hexes each.  This is, conveniently, right around the size I've been thinking about for "rooms" in the wilderness-as-dungeon.  I could definitely see throwing some pine barrens into a wilderness sandbox and having them catch fire occasionally (and then smoke up big parts of the map).  I have never had a player complain about having too many things to light on fire in the play environment.

In conclusion: pine forests are to wilderness adventures as big red barrels are to first-person shooters.  Also, maybe not the best places to build domains.

Hike Notes: Wallace Falls

Went hiking a week or two ago with team from work at Wallace Falls, up to the Skyhomish Valley Overlook.  Two or three interesting observations.  Not much in the way of wildlife, just people and their dogs.  Clear day, cold in the morning but it warmed up, as one might expect.

First, even though we had looked at the posted maps and had plenty of cell coverage, we ended up taking a little detour out to about the DNR road I think?  The social dynamic, in particular, was that management thought they knew where we were going and junior engineers were correctly skeptical but didn't speak up loudly enough.  So this poses a pretty funny potential explanation for getting lost with increased party size, and a reason that navigation shouldn't necessarily just scale with the number of characters with Navigation proficiency - it's a "never bring two clocks to sea" sort of situation, if one navigator gets it right and the other gets it wrong.

So this is why I'm not really sure how far we went, or how much total elevation change we did.  Our highest point was about 500 feet above our starting point.  It took us around three hours, which would make sense for about four miles each way plus elevation.  But...  even looking at a map now I'm not sure how that could've happened.  Backtracking off a wrong turn is doubly expensive I guess.

In any case, getting lost is definitely a topic which I should think more about, for developing a gameplay loop for wilderness adventures.

Second, I pulled something in my knee (IT band I think) about a quarter of the way in, and boy howdy the rest of the hike was fun.  Didn't do anything particularly stupid, just walking and gradually ow.  The wilderness damage is real.

Finally, splendid visibility, leading to some observations for the "describing the wilderness" problem.  More than I expected!  Although I suppose 500' is a fair bit of climbing to do just for a view; might be some interesting choices and tradeoffs during wilderness adventuring, spending time climbing stuff to see more hexes away.

To the south, a dirt road on the hills on the other side of the river, about 10 miles away and I reckon 12-15 feet wide, was clearly visible to the naked eye as a result of contrast, yellow dirt among green trees.  I hadn't considered the visibility of preindustrial roadways in adjacent hexes before.  A sandy island in the river, a quarter mile wide, was easily visible at a similar distance, again by contrast.

Turning further west, the Olympic mountains, about 70 miles away over the Sound, were likewise visible.  The gap between the last line of near hills and the mountains is very hazy, almost a white line; I'm not sure if this is due to humidity off the water, or something with the horizon.  If it is a water humidity effect, it might be useful for signaling to players an intervening, distant large body of water.  If it's a horizon effect, then it might be useful for signaling that the mountains they're seeing are further than the calculated horizon (about 45 miles, at the elevation we were at).  The edge of the Sound was about 45 miles away, so hard to call either way.

And then to the east and north, the view was pretty well blocked by the mountain we were on.

This whole post-hike process that I do, where I go correlate stuff I saw to things on google maps and try to figure out where it was and how to get there, seems like a much looser version of the exploration loop that you'd get in the wilderness with a paper (er, vellum?) map in hand.

Finally finally, for all that "door or cave hidden behind a waterfall" is a bit of a trope at this point, it seems like that would actually be rather dangerous, given that the pool into which the water falls tends to get deep and be churned up.

Hike Notes: Mount Fuji, Part 1: Climb Report

This post: long-form report of observations.
Next post: D&D-relevant distillation.

About a week ago, my father and I summited Mount Fuji via the Fujinomiya Trail.  The distance as the crow flies from our starting point to the summit was about 2 miles and 4330 feet of elevation gain, but with switchbacks the length of the trail was around 3 miles.  The climb up took us about five hours, we spent half an hour or so at the summit, and then the descent took us three and a half hours.

We were only lightly encumbered, with a single pack between us, which we took turns carrying.  The pack was 3lb empty, and contained three liters of water (~6lb), rain gear and layers, snacks (I estimate around 2lb), about 20 100-yen coins for toilet fees (5 grams each, so 100 grams, or a quarter pound of currency), cell phones, and a few contingency items like flashlights.  I think in total it was probably around 20 lbs.  It definitely made itself felt; the pack carrier had to maintain a slower pace on both ascent and descent.  The one time I fell over, on the descent, was while carrying the pack (fortunately I fell backwards and it cushioned my fall).  Some climbers brought helmets - initially we thought for falling rocks (which were a risk, as regularly noted by signs), but now I think for falling over too.

Despite a few wipeouts and near-wipeouts, we were fortunate to avoid any serious injuries or destruction of equipment.  Some old injuries that we thought healed (damaged hip adductor attachment point, injured knee) started hurting on the way up and continued on the way down, but they didn't increase in severity.  Had a couple hot spots on my feet that were on the way to blistering, but nipped in the bud by tightening the laces of my boots.  My father did drop his glasses at one point and was concerned that they would be damaged but they were fine.  Towards the very end of the descent, I caught the heel of my boot and started tearing the sole off, but it was still usable and we made it down.

We were also lucky with the weather.  Forecast showed a 50% chance of a thunderstorm, but it only drizzled a little.  There wasn't that much direct sun either (a little on the way down); instead there was a lot of mist and low clouds, which wafted up the mountain.  Supposedly when it rains, it often rains upwards in a similar way, making ponchos insufficient rain gear.  If we had gotten soaked, there would've been a small risk of hypothermia, as temperatures at the summit were in the 40s, even at midafternoon in early August.  There was still some ice in ravines and runnels that don't get direct sunlight, but for the most part we were comfortably warm in technical fabrics, plus lightweight jackets near the top.

The view down - mists blowing up the slope, bit of "moon rock" on the right

We purchased a small (~300 mL) canister of oxygen at the Sixth Station, and carried it up with us.  It was really only enough for five or six deep breaths (which is the best way to use it - take a deep breath from it, hold it for a bit, and then exhale).  I'm not sure we really needed it; I didn't use it, and we had some extra to share with another family of Americans on the way down.  I did notice some dizziness, some clumsiness, a little tinnitus, and a headache which got worse as we went on.  It was a bit like being drunk, but I am a reasonably happy drunk so it was alright once I got used to it and determined that I wasn't going to start vomiting immediately.  I did feel pretty bad around the Old 7th Station but it turned out I was mostly hungry.  Colors also faded a bit, but it was a gradual enough process that it wasn't very noticeable to my father until he tried the oxygen.  Part of the reason that we did not do the overnight hike (climb most of the way up, sleep in huts on the mountain, summit before dawn, watch the sunrise, descend) was that altitude sickness seems to sneak up on many people during the night, so by doing it in a single day we narrowed our window at risk.

In terms of terrain, the lower elevations had small plant-life growing off the trail and a little inside the trail, and the surface tended more towards dirt and gravel with some hand-sized rocks mixed in (just enough to roll an ankle on, or to hit your head on if you fell).  This makes sense, since dirt is a fluid and will gradually flow down hill (particularly when driven by the boots of tens of thousands of climbers per year).  Above that, it turned into bigger rocks, head-sized to torso-sized, with intermittent "moon rock" - big solid pieces of porous igneous rock in irregular shapes, speculatively hardened frothy lava from a previous eruption.  It often jutted out in concave formations, like whatever surface had been beneath it had eroded out from under it.  Towards the top the fraction of "moon rock" increased, and there were also rocks with yellow and green colors, perhaps indicative of sulfur.  The "moon rock" was hard going, especially on the way down, where its steep drops and concavities made finding places to step tricky without looking out over its edges.  We had collapsible hiking poles with tungsten carbide tips and these were a great help.  Many climbers had octagonal wooden poles, which could be branded for a small fee at the various stations, and so were both practical implements and souvenirs, but the tungsten bit better than I imagine the unshod wood would've (and they folded down to fit in a checked bag better, too).

The views were mostly down into mists, with occasional glimpses of the secondary peak of Mount Hoei, or the forests at the foot of the mountain.  Often we could not see either the station above us or the station below us, between the mist and the irregularities of the slope, even though we were probably only a couple of hundred meters from them in Euclidean distance.  The views across the side of the mountain were sometimes quite good, with ridges and overhangs and a rock formation that looked almost like a whale.  It was hard to see much of anything looking up, between mists and neck-angle and switchbacks.  Several time we thought we saw the summit and turned out to be mistaken.  It was steep; with 4300 feet of climb over a three mile trail, it's about 1:4, 25% average grade, or a 15 degree average slope, and that was up the switchbacks, rather than directly up the mountain.  Some of the views were rather precipitous; one of the stations had a metal grating out over the slope, and when we arrived on the way up, I wanted nothing to do with it.  Coming back down I waltzed right up to the edge.  Morale is a funny thing.

This is also a view down - the white thing on the left is the roof of (I think) New 7th Station below us, and the building on the right in the distance I think was the 6th Station, lower still.

There's a shrine at the top, dedicated to the kami of the mountain, and the whole area above the 8th Station is sacred ground, as delimited by a torii gate with many coins embedded in it.  We even encountered one old woman in traditional pilgrim's garb who was on her way up as we were going down.  I speculate that hypoxia may have an entheogenic effect, much like alcohol, which contributes to the phenomenon of mountaintops as holy places.  There were many Japanese families with children (often just dad and son, though most of the sons were much younger than I), a decent number of groups of male Japanese teenagers who kept similar paces to ours and with whom we interacted repeatedly, a few American families, and a few European solo climbers.  Most impressive were the runners - we saw several Japanese men, mostly in their late thirties or older, in the sort of kit you'd expect of marathoners, just running up and then back down the mountain.  In many places the trail was only one person wide, so when we met someone headed the opposite direction from us, one party had to yield.  Often this was a welcome break, but we got a bit antsy on the way down, as large groups of climbers were ascending for the overnight.

Looking down into the crater from the summit, there was more ice and sulfurous rock than we had seen on the way up.  We made an attempt for the Kengamine Peak, which used to be a radar weather station, but abandoned it; the slope from the shrine at the summit to the top of the peak was all steep gravel which slid beneath us, and it was a trudge.  In retrospect this was the correct decision; we needed what energy we had for the descent, and we only made it to the bottom fifteen minutes before the last bus off the mountain, so if we had spent twenty minutes up to Kengamine and then fifteen back down to the shrine, we'd've missed our bus.  On the way down, the terrain which had been easiest on the way up (moon-rock) was hardest, and the terrain which had been hardest on the way up (gravel) was the easiest.

We observed very little animal life; some sweat-bees even towards the top, one small brown bird around the 8th or 9th station, some flies around the stations where human waste accumulates.  There were a number of bright butterflies down in the green parts of the slope.  Supposedly there are bears on some of the lower trails, but being Japanese I imagine that they are very polite bears.  There were a few statues of tanuki at one of the stations but we did not observe any on the mountain.

The next day we were decently sore; I felt it in my calves and hip, and I think my father did in much of his lower body but especially his quads.  My quads were a little sore the day after that.  I was pretty happy with the results of my training program of weighted barbell squats plus stationary bike cardio (obviously training at altitude would've been better, but shikata ga nai).  We came off the mountain hungry but still more thirsty; we had drank a total of four liters of water between the two of us (some of it enhanced with Pocari Sweat powder), and eaten less than half of our snacks.  Towards the bottom my headache stopped pounding, but persisted; I think this was the hypoxia component resolving itself and being replaced by a dehydration headache.  I think we might've been better off with less snacks and layers and more water, but it all worked out (and water is damn heavy).

Next post: on climbing mountains in D&D.

Eyes of the Eagle

I dug up a pair of old binoculars to bring on the Dungeness Spit hike, and have since started going to local parks and using them to watch boats.  It's generated some good, first-person qualitative data for the wilderness vision distance question.

Observations:

There's another park across the lake from the park I go to.  It's about two miles of water.  With 8x magnification, on a clear day, I can count the cars in the parking lot, clearly make out the portable toilet, and can tell one person (or person with dog) from two people from five-ish people, but can't really discern anything about them other than that they're bipeds.  With the naked eye, I can often make out the glint of metal or glass from there on a sunny day but otherwise would be hard pressed to tell it apart from a field.

It is also easy to make out the contours of mountains about 40 miles away (I think, that's about where the range begins), and which parts of the mountain have snow on them, again provided clear weather.  To the naked eye, the view is still pleasing but I would be hard pressed to make any plans off of it.

With 8x magnification, I can sometimes make out the tail art on airliners coming and going from the airport about 15 miles south of me as they pass overhead, but I have been unable to observe the flight numbers.  I was able to identify an F-18 as such, and to see that an H-60 helicopter in the distance had its side doors open (I could see sky through it).

I was able to observe a pair of helium party balloons (lost from a party I presume) ascending about a mile north of my position, though I couldn't see them with naked eye so I stumbled on them accidentally while watching an eagle.  They were silhouetted against the sky or I don't think I'd've been able to see them with magnification either.

Sometimes I can read the numbers on the sails of boats; I don't actually know how close they were or how large the numerals were though.  Generally reading the names of small boats off their bows is beyond me unless they're quite close, but I have been able to read the names of two large tour boats off of their bows at maybe half a mile of distance, one in twilight.  Sometimes in the evening the air over the water shimmers like hot pavement and it gets hard to make out details of anything.  The lights from houses across the lake twinkle like stars.

The view of the moon is very good, especially because it is full right now.  I could make out some craters that were at an angle to the sun, and to see the shadows inside their rims.  I have never seen the moon like that before.  I was also able to observe some satellites, as basically dim stars moving on smooth tracks.

Remarks:

I really wonder how fleets coordinated their actions before optics.  I feel like making out semaphore at a mile without a spyglass would be really hard.  Did they just sail in really close order?  Did captains just have a ton of autonomy?  I was reading about the audible range of hunting horns and elk bugles a while back and I recall those being about a mile or so depending on terrain, but I would guess that auditory signaling might be hard at sea with the wind carrying it away.

ACKS' description for Eyes of the Eagle has them giving 100x magnification, which is pretty nuts.  Low-powered binoculars are 7-8x, high-powered are 10-12x.  Spotting scopes for long-range shooting are generally 24-60x, and that lets you observe groupings out to hundreds of yards.  100x is in an awkward spot between high-power spotting scopes and low-power astronomical telescopes.  With 100x magnification, I think it would be pretty easy to count individuals a mile or two away (but your field of view would also be obliterated - there's no way you could just wear 100x magnification binoculars like contact lenses in your daily life, never mind dungeoneering).

Amusingly, none of the other rulesets I checked (OSRIC, S&W, 3e, PF, 5e) listed a magnification for their Eyes of the Eagle.  3e, Pathfinder, and 5e did have a nonmagical spyglass though, with 2x magnification for 1000 gp, which is a little funny since they weren't definitely invented until 1608, well into the Gunpowder Age, and since Galileo also developed 8x and 23x telescopes by 1609.

I was surprised how much atmospheric effects mattered even over this fairly-short distance of two miles.

"The glint of metal" is probably a fine way to introduce a distant wilderness encounter with sentients.

Hike Notes: Dungeon-Ness

Today I hiked the Dungeness Spit.  It was about five miles each way, and took two and a bit hours each way over decent terrain (sloped gravel, mostly, but not really any elevation gain except at the very end getting back up the bluffs to the parking lot).

Google Street View - Not Just For Streets Anymore

And as I was out there trudging through gravel, I thought to myself, "Dungeness is a wonderful name, evocative of both dungeons and wilderness.  It would be a splendid name for a wee sandbox region in the style of Wilderness as Dungeon - one with pine forests and beaches and shoals and cliffs and mud flats".

So if I ever actually get around to fleshing out A/X, maybe that will be my testing region.

Other notes, in the style of Notes From A Hiking Seminar:

I am sore and pretty well bushed.  If we had had a random encounter at the end, it would've been rough.

Many subtle variations in types of sand - firm wet sand, firm dry sand (easily churned up by shod and heavy people, becoming soft sand), soft wet sand, soft dry sand, soft sand full of teeny tiny sharp gravel or with a layer of it on the surface, soft sand with fist-sized rocks in it which present tripping/ankle hazards, piles of fist-to-head sized rocks covered in kelp which is slippery when wet and sticky when dry.

Kelp anchors - impressively strong, even when dead.

Crab swarms, tidepool dungeons, sea anemone the size of a coke can on the side of a rock in a tidepool.

Empty crab shells - undead "exoskeleton" giant arthropods?  Probably molts actually but hey.

Poison-skinned newts in the forest.

Lots of bright white rocks that looked almost like eggs.  If they were eggs, what sort of monstrous creature's eggs would they be?  What fate would befall poor fools who took said eggs home and sold them as curios?

Area of choppy water marked by buoys - not sure if kelp or shallows.  Either way, roll Seafaring.

Ferries - could be interesting as an option for access to certain areas of the sandbox without actually having to own and crew a boat.  Make friends with local NPCs (ie humanoids) with boats.  But it'll take a while, there are only certain places they'll go, they'll want to move some cargo too, and they'll want money.  But this shifts the "chartering a boat" game from "in town" to "in the wilderness", which might be interesting.

Marching order - in the absence of an imposed, decided marching order, our party of 13 tended to clump into groups of 3-5 people separated by 20-60 feet (I would guess, at a wag).  The part of the sand that was good for walking on was only 1-3 people wide.  I think if we had tried to maintain tighter cohesion we would've made worse (but perhaps more sustainable) time, and that might be something to consider when figuring out overland travel rates.  Moving in "tight cohesion" where you get to decide your marching order (versus some reasonable random / naturalistic assignment method) slows you down.  Moving in tight cohesion in a formation wider than supported by terrain slows you down even further.  Moving stealthily slows you down.  Etc.  I did not observe any obvious correlations in the sorts of people who ended up in the front versus rear parts of the emergent marching order, but my sample was small.

One driftwood tree trunk stood straight up - how did it get that way?  Landmark.

Vague canine on the other side of the mud flat - fox, coyote, stray dog, spooky dog?

Big tidal variation - the spit gets very narrow at high tide, and the ground above the high water line is full of driftwood and rocks and crap.  Could be an interesting wilderness feature that makes it slower to cross certain hexes (either in certain watches, if using a watch-based timekeeping system, or based on party size, where a large enough party / army will have trouble crossing the spit).

Some really spectacular islands across the Sound that go from sea to mountain to clouds with the tops of the mountains totally obscured.  The Olympic mountains had their peaks similarly obscured despite it being pretty sunny on the spit.  One could hide a lot of interesting things on perpetually-cloud-shrouded mountain peaks.  An interesting variation in the wilderness visibility problem [1][2], much like foggy areas in the original megadungeons.

DO NOT FEED THE BIRDS.

Notes from a Hiking Seminar

Some of which are relevant to wilderness adventuring.

(But first - deep apologies for not replying to comments on my last post; I was offline for most of a week, and now it seems like something's going wrong with google accounts and I can't post comments anywhere, including here.  So...  everything I would comment is now going into posts, I guess.  Thank you DHBoggs for relaying some history on the development of the hex - I found it very interesting and am happy to hear that the day was originally a clear parallel time quantum to the turn in dungeoneering exploration)

Prep questions:

• Where are you going?
• Who are you going with?
• Who's the least able?  Can they make it to where you're going?
• What season is it?
• What's the weather going to be like?
• What passes or permits from governments do you need to go there?
• When do you expect to be back?  Who are you going to tell that to so they can send rescue?

 Ten Essentials:

• Extra clothing, layers for variations in weather and climate across trip
• Extra water (or means to procure it, like LifeStraws, water filters, dowsing, and high-level clerics)
• Extra food
• First aid kit
• Knife or multitool
• Means of producing fire
• Map and compass
• Headlamp / hands-free light source
• Sun protection
• Emergency shelter (down to and including just a blanket or tarp)

As a rule of thumb, most packs can carry weight in pounds equal to their capacity in liters minus ten.  Not a problem if you're using stone as a combined unit.

If you find a leaf with a face chewed into it, you shouldn't take it home with you.  (This was actually the comment that led to this whole post - intended as a silly example of leave no trace, but my brain went "that would be wonderfully creepy in-game")

Place campfires in established rings, or else.

Avalanche and river-crossing dangers depend less on the weather right now than on the weather from the previous week or so.  Probably also true of trail conditions.  On the one hand, this complicates the problem of making weather systems for the wilderness game, because if you want high-fidelity simulation you have to track past state.  On the other hand, this also pushes towards other potential solution-spaces, which isn't a bad thing (maybe something like the Oriental Adventures events tables - you roll a big trend for this month's weather, which sets the trail, river, and avalanche conditions, and then roll daily weather within that big weather pattern's subtable).

Animals in popular hiking destinations steal enough food from peoples' bags to get enormous.

Black bears are basically just large housecats for morale purposes, unless cubs are involved.

Mountain lions are also basically large housecats for morale purposes, except they think you are a toy.

Local outfitter offers appointments to get your gear in order for a particular trip.  Quartermaster NPCs!  I'm pretty sure I've written a post about having a NPCs to organize mules and rations and all that stuff (as a script, of course), but I'll be arsed if I can find it.

Some good place-names.  "Ranger Station" is a phrase that translates wonderfully into D&D.

Wigle Whiskey Tasting Notes

Totally unrelated to gaming, except inasmuch as it has become traditional for certain of my players to show up to ACKS hungover.

Wigle Whiskey (not to be confused with WiGLE) is a Pittsburgh distillery named after Phillip Wigle, a local hero(?) of the Whiskey Rebellion.  Anything having to do with liquor is a bureaucratic nightmare in Pennsylvania these days (what with the state Liquor Control Board's monopoly), so Wigle is one of just a handful of distilleries (well, legal ones) in what used to be a very still-heavy part of the country.  They had a free tasting last night, so being a whiskey drinker of unsophisticated palate, I decided to go try their goods.

After a bit of a wait in the cold, I tried the following things (in roughly the following order, so it might be expected that things I tried later have slightly less accurate reviews):

• Landlocked Spiced: Landlocked is a honey spirit that has been compared to rum.  I rather like honey spirits (eg Bushmill's Honey Whiskey, with Barenjager on my to-try list), and this one was OK but not amazing.  Tasted a bit flowery almost?  From their notes, I was probably getting too much vanilla over the honey, which is not what I was hoping for.
• Small-Batch Maple Wheat Whiskey (which I'm not seeing on their online store, curiously): Wheat whiskey aged in charred oak barrels with maple staves, if I recall correctly.  I went through an "mmm, tastes like drinking a tree" phase a year or two ago, and this is representative of that style in the best possible way.  Not to my current tastes, but if that's what you're into, probably pretty good.
• Walkabout Apple Whiskey: Wheat and rye whiskeys, barrel-aged, blended, and cut from cask strength using local cider rather than water.  A promising premise, but there was definitely a discordant note that threw things off for me; I'm not sure if it was the rye or the woodiness from the barrel aging or something else, but something did not combine well with the apple flavor.  Not a fan, but it's an experimental on their parts so I think we'll see further refinements in future.
• Landlocked Clear: I know, you're supposed to mix clear spirits, but this was pretty good.  An unapologetic, uncomplicated honey spirit, would probably blend well with apple flavors.
• Straight Wheat Whiskey: One of their flagship whiskeys, and quite good - not as sweet as a corny bourbon, not as woody as a Tree In A Barrel, nicely balanced, tasty.

On my way out I ran into some friends in line who decided that the wait wasn't worth it, and we went and got thai food while I metabolized before driving home.  So that all worked out rather well.

Notes from the Salt Marsh

I spent a fair bit of time out in the swamp over this holiday weekend, and brought back a couple of thoughts.

• A fun model for a "the dungeon closes at sundown" would be a megadungeon in a tidal zone that floods every 12 hours or so, with changing water levels and levers and pumps and things to open and close areas...  Sorely tempted to build one of these.
• Six mile hexes are still big.  In a mile of trail, saw several differnet biomes, including stands of dead trees, fields of cord grass, tidal mud flats, pond full of red tannin water, thickets, beach, bay, numerous islands...
• Small islands make good isolated microbiomes for something like Western Marches (Western Marshes?)
• Saw a worm that looked like a twig.  Scaling up to a giant worm that looks like a dead tree and eats human-sized critters would be entertaining.
• Heat, humidity, biting insects, jellyfish, sunburn, the smell of the pluff mud (actually I don't mind that one much), blaugh.  Minor environmental inconveniences often get ignored, even as flavor text.  Bring extra water rations and a hat next time.

Of Strategy and Software Engineering

This post has nothing to do with gaming.  Probably.

I've been continuing to work my way through The Transformation of War, and hit something somewhat interesting last night.  Van Creveld commented on the traditional division between strategy and tactics, that tactics is the art of winning battles while strategy is the groundwork, to make sure that the battle will be fought under advantageous circumstances, that men and equipment will be in good order on arrival, and that victory can be capitalized on to achieve a campaign's objectives.  Further, he argued that much of successful strategy is working around three sorts of difficulties; uncertainty and friction (the tendency for things to go wrong and impede progress) were recognized by Clauswitz, while van Creveld also adds inflexibility.

This is probably not news to those familiar with Western strategy, but it did make an interesting connection with software engineering for me.  You see, software engineering isn't really engineering as one might use the term for, say, civil or mechanical engineering.  A mechanical engineer can look up the strength of various alloys of steel in reasonably reputable sources, crunch the numbers, and figure out what he needs in order to make the thing he's designing meet the requirements.  When he's done, he can be reasonably certain that the thing he's built will more-or-less work as intended if he has done his job properly.  Software engineers cannot do this.  The performance benchmarks available are gamed all to hell, the mathematics taught in school are primarily concerned with asymptotic behavior and completely neglect very substantial performance concerns, nobody outside of Intel and maybe some of the agencies actually knows the full instruction set most general-purpose computers are running, and next year that library you're using is going to break its interface out from under you with no warning.  Not only do we not know the 'laws of physics' of the area we're working in, but those laws are constantly changing, often adversarially.

(And of course, the client wants it done yesterday with a completely different set of requirements than they asked for six months ago, but I figure that's probably normal for most engineering disciplines)

At the end of the day, software engineering has more in common with art and alchemy than with traditional mathematically-rigorous engineering approaches.  The proof of this, I think, is that we see reflections of strategy's aims and obstables in modern software engineering practices.  Waterfall has fallen by the wayside because its timetables failed to account for friction.  Its fixed requirements led to inflexibility and may have been wrong or useless by the time the project was brought to completion.  Test-driven development makes a tradeoff between flexibility and friction, as codified tests somewhat reduce your ability to adapt to changing requirements but also reduce the impact of random failures.  The Agile family of methodologies seems focused on flexibility to changing requirements and reducing uncertainty about customer requirements through communication, which is good, but may come at the cost of a flavor of friction as developer-time is lost playing Meetings & Metrics (have you heard of my new game?  Best-selling the world over...).

(Exercise for the reader: commission a civil engineering firm to design a highway suspension bridge using Agile.  Be sure the change the requirements regularly to keep them on their toes.  Record the stand-up meetings and put them on youtube.)

Anyway: at the end of the day, software engineering is about establishing a context to programming, where the unpleasant, messy work of one's developers can actually achieve the objective despite uncertainty and both human and machine failures.  In this it is like strategy.

The High-Low Mix

I've been reading some criticism recently about US aircraft acquisition policy which is sort of interesting from a wargaming perspective.  The opposition allege that the Air Force has a problem where it tries to construct a fleet solely of maximum-capability airframes with stealth and mach 3 and all the bells and whistles required to fight an adversary with advanced air defense capabilities while making cuts to areas like close air support and aerial reconnaissance that don't require the same degree of technological sophistication and are much more useful against technologically inferior opponents.  As it turns out, these sort of high-tech aircraft are really expensive and hard to manufacture and maintain in large numbers, leading to numerical inferiority and either reliance on old models for pedestrian missions like bombing guerillas (for which all the bells and whistles are not required), or extreme maintenance costs for those missions if advanced aircraft are employed.

The opposition further argues that the Air Force should strive for a "high-low" force mix, with 20% of the force consisting of highest-end specialist hardware designed to punch holes in technologically advanced adversaries at any expense, and the other 80% consisting of less-expensive, less-specialized, general-purpose aircraft capable of performing a wide variety of missions at lower costs.

This reminds me of a time when someone tried to build an all-cataphract army - it was very strong on paper, but availability was low and they weren't good at going in and digging lizardmen out of caves.

This discussion is also interesting in light of our Starmada games.  I think part of the reason we didn't really see mission-specialized ships was that basically all of the Starmada victory conditions boiled down to "destroy the enemy fleet".  It probably didn't help that some scenarios banned Cloaking, Hyperdrive, and other options which would permit the construction of specialist ships for those missions.

...  and now I have the itch to build a better (less complex) BattleTech on top of Starmada's chassis while avoiding Wardogs' mistakes.  Bother.

On the Road

Only brought work laptop.  Failed to consider that my Scaled Continent notes and scripts are only on my home laptop, not stored in that magical fairyland known to many as The Cloud :\

Progress: slowed.

Still might be able to prep a session for Sunday if some folks party up and tell me where they want to go.

Today in Herpetology...

I learned that komodo dragons have only cones in their eyes (no rods), which means their night vision is terrible.  Suddenly, the fact that lizardfolk are one of the only three races in 3.x lacking low-light or darkvision makes way more sense (the other two were halflings and humans), and I no longer feel bad at all for removing Thrassian class darkvision.  Komodos also have only a single earbone per ear, which results in a much-reduced range of hearing compared to humans.  The implications for lizardman language are interesting.

On the flip side, they can smell carrion from 2.5-6 miles away, which means that hauling the bodies of your fallen comrades back with you permits monitor-lizard-men to pursue you on wilderness-map scales...

("Thanks wikipedia!" - my players, being pursued by lizardmen)

Work-Life Balance - Rather Tilted

Sorry about the lack of updates - work started, and then I went on a surprise week-long training excursion to a distant state.  Went sort of like this:

My boss, on Monday: "There's a training thing in Elsewhere, but they're out of slots."

On Tuesday: "There's a training thing in Elsewhere, and a couple of slots opened up, but we're not sure if we can let you go because you're not really in the personnel system yet."

Wednesday morning: "Hey, are you packed and ready to go?  Turns out they only have one slot, but you're here early, so it's yours if you have a suitcase in your car.  You'd leave today, and it starts tomorrow morning at 8AM."

Being the old-school 'equipment, intel, and preparation for contingencies' person that I am, I did in fact have a loaded suitcase en car, right next to the MREs and sleeping bag.  And so here I am, in Elsewhere, working lots of overtime, sleeping little, and learning many interesting things.  The food, the folks, and the work are all good, though.

But not doing much gaming.  One thing that came out of a facebook discussion is that I need to write a Thrassian Devourer class - a cleric variant with a special Contemplation-like ability to recover spell slots by eating the bodies of fallen foes, implemented mechanically with a combination of the spell point and divine power backends that Alex has been talking about on the fora.

Also, neat setting post from Edward at DM from Outremer.  And Micah had a solid post last week on handling monster templates in ACKS by adding *s to their XP value.  I guess if I can't actually post, I may as well aggregate.