RennFest, Colonial Battlefleet, and Setting Work

Just what it says on the tin:

Had a good time at the Maryland Renaissance Fair(e) this weekend.  Rediscovered mead; much like honeyed whiskey, but with strong overtones of water.  The jousting at German renn faires was better, but this one had elephants and pythons and a cursing well which I am stealing for my upcoming campaign, so hey.

Also picked up a copy of Colonial Battlefleet from the wargame vault today.  Interesting system.  Their initiative mechanic and the roles mechanism are both interesting changes from Starmada, and the fact that they provide a Big List of Weapons should prevent some of the guncheese we had in Starmada: Admiralty. I don't like how they laid out said table (by weapon tonnage, rather than alphabetically by weapon name or weapon 'family'), but that is at least a useful ordering during ship contruction.  Their shields are also very different from S:AE shields (would be interested in seeing some non-forward-focused shields, but I'm happy enough as-is without the extra complexity).  I like the way they handled tech levels, mostly, except for Laser Weaponry, which I think they screwed up with regards to Screen role availability.  One thing that does torque me off a little is some of the really implausible faux science used to justify mechanics that are in place for game balance reasons - things like "When you teleport something, all inorganic chemical reactions in it cease.  As a result, you can only teleport marines, not bombs."  That grinds my gears a bit; you could've just said "You can't teleport bombs because the yield isn't sufficient for a man-sized bomb to damage a starship" (since scale is intentionally vague), or built a bomb-teleporter weapon, or left the players to not think of it like we didn't in six months of Starmada games with teleporter-marines, but no.  Instead you had to make something ridiculous up and call attention to it, which might produce a counter like "OK, that's cool, we're the Tyranids and we're going to build living bomb-marines with organic detonators.  Wheee-BOOM."  That said, upon running a test game against myself with some converted Homeworld ships, it was quick, bloody, reasonable simple, and overall satisfactory.  So if any of the old Starmada Crew is reading this, I'm down for some games over internet (it's hex-based, so should work fine with VTTs).  Fair warning, though - I have been growing out my beard since the weather cooled off... (for those unfamiliar, we observed that gamers with beards were significantly more likely to win at Starmada than were clean-shaven gamers.  The prevailing hypothesis is that this was due to the increase in planning efficiency acquired by stroking one's beard)

Oh yeah.  The editing is not fantastic, and some areas are lacking examples, but the intent of the rules is generally clear, so it's just sort of annoying rather than obstructionary.

Finally, ACKS setting.  Contemplated Wilderlands of High Fantasy, Northern Reaches (Western Marches into mythic Scandinavia), and Midnight in the Late 3rd Age.  Am currently settled on "The Scaled Continent".  The pitch:

In elder days, the children of squamous gods ruled the world, and man, elf, and dwarf suffered beneath their forked and envenomed lash.  But now their empire has fallen to ruin under rebellion and internal strife, and the men of Aura seek the reclaim the treasures that were once stolen from them and taken across the Sea of Tears, to line the jungled halls of the serpent-kings.  From the Isle of Voltager, their settlers and adventurers struggle against the environment, the natives, and sometimes each other for the riches of... the Scaled Continent.

Thematic elements:

• Settings: 
• heavily-trapped temples to bloodthirsty gods
• overgrown and ruined cities of the Old Masters
• human frontier settlements (incl. abandoned and overtaken)
• the Serpent's Tongue (major river)
• sailing ships anchored off the coast
• volcanoes
• Opposition: 
• Lizardmen, frogmen, toadmen, turtlemen, crocodilemen, &c
• With accompanying witch-doctors and guardbeasts
• Prehistoric and/or gigantic beasts 
• yes dinosaurs 
• also giant cockroaches 
• and dire armadillos carrying dire leprosy
• Monsters from South American and/or African myth and ecology
• (some research required, void where inaccurate)
• Dragons 
• Pirates
• Dragon-pirates
• not, however, from Ninja Island
• Screaming river-eels
• Wereleopards (forvalaka)
• Anything with scales that didn't fall into the above categories
• Ambulatory plant life
• Dysentery and worse jungle diseases
• Monsoon season
• Resources:
• Local guides
• Mules
• Dugout canoes
• Treasure maps of dubious veracity
• Steel and alcohol (as trade goods with the natives)
• Gullible henchmen (but when aren't those a resource?)
• Treasure:
• Golden idols
• Crystal skulls
• Rubies the size of a man's fist
• Holy grails?
• Spellbooks containing forgotten and forbidden spells of the reptile mages, written on halfling-skin vellum (demium?)
• Exotic spices and hardwoods
• Rescued slaves
• Cities of gold
• Fountains of youth
• Possible untimely death
• Modules:
• Caverns of Thracia
• DCC#16: Curse of the Emerald Cobra
• A source of fond memories from my youth
• Isle of Dread 
• Temple of the Frog (inasmuch as it is a ruined temple "in the city of the enemy")
• Thematic fiction:
• "Lost World" stories
• Heart of Darkness
• Pulp portrayals of the tropics (eg, King Kong)

 So!  Time to map!  Oh wait, I can just write "JUNGLE" in great big capital letters on a hexmap and be mostly good to go.  Just have to draw a coastline, some islands, a river, and a distant mountain range...

Hijinks Again

Been thinking about hijinks again.  This time about sort of the core mechanisms of it, rather than the ecosystem surrounding it.

One thing that bugs me is that most domain activities are measured in increments down towards weeks, while thief hijinks are in solid-month blocks.  This somewhat hampers the utility of PC thief hijinks at the mid-levels.  Consider the case where a mid-level party decides to take two or three weeks of downtime.  The fighter can recruit mercs in that time, and he gets to exercise his +morale modifier.  The wizard and cleric can each attempt to make a potion or scroll or two.  And the thief... can't do his thing because he's a week or two short.  Now, I get that setting up a good heist takes time and planning.  But it doesn't necessarily need to be a contiguous month's planning.

Another thing that somewhat bothers me is the perhaps-unnecessary complexity involved in having many different hijinks, each with different rates of return, different rates of success, and different possible punishments, all of which ultimately serve to just generate gold at different rates.  When combined with proficiency selection (stacking, for example, Skulking and Lip Reading for +3 to spying), the system gets to be a bit complex mathematically, and the consequences for choices become...  not opaque, but somewhat obfuscated, for effects which are (except for stealing) largely identical.  Consider by comparison the spell research system - you get a target number based on your level, stats, and one proficiency that applies across the board, and then you apply situational modifiers based on the thing you're attempting.  One mechanic with a bunch of functionally-different and interesting applications to a wide variety of ends, rather than many mechanics which all lead to the same end.

Both of these lead me to a proposal inspired by Iron Heroes' token mechanics.  The gist is as follows:

• Single hijink throw number as a function of level and Dex, much as with magic research.  There's an argument to be made that in a multi-part operation of reasonable duration, aggregate skills and ability to perform consistently (level) matter more than any one single skill.  Some of the hijink-skill mappings, like Treasure Hunting for maps to Find Traps and Stealing bulk cargo to Pick Pockets seemed sort of forced anyway.
• Thieves can generate 'intel points'.  Intel points are attached to a particular settlement and represent the groundwork, rumor gathering, and connections the thief has made in that community.  Intel points expire at some uniform rate as operational intelligence goes stale - sometimes the guard you bribed retires, they sold the piece of artwork you were after, and the plumbers' guild changed their uniforms.
• Intel points are gathered by spending time performing a carousing-like hijink in town and making a hijinks throw.  Taking more time than the baseline provides a bonus, while taking less time provides a penalty.  Every n points of success beyond your target number generates an extra intel point.
• Possibility of bonus to intel-gathering attempts for spending gold?  For bribing guards and buying drinks.  Requires some math to get right, probably.
• Actual hijinks can be attempted with an expenditure of intel points, a small amount of time (somewhere between a day and a week - most of the groundwork has already been done), and a hijink throw.  Intel points may be spent to lower the target number or boost the payout (to a cap based on performer's level and market class - payouts now a function of intel points spent, rather than per-class-level).  Higher payout levels increase risk of being auto-caught (as with experimentation in ACKSPC magic research) and penalize sentencing roll.
• Ex: Assassination: per intel point allocated to payout, +1 to victim max HD, -1 to hijink throw.  At 5 HD, auto-fail on 1 or 2, -1 on sentencing.  At 9 HD, auto-fail on 1-3, -2 to sentencing.  Per 'ease of use' intel point, +1 to hijink throw.  XP on success: per target's hit dice.
• Hijinks should serve distinct purposes - assassination is for killing a guy (I'm OK with this; high-power opponents rarely stay dead anyway, they just come back madder and uglier than before.  Might warrant a save vs death anyway).  Spying is for learning a secret (possibility of secrets as a second, higher-tier type of intel point?  "The only way you're going to pull that off is if you blackmail the prince...").  Stealing is for acquiring commodity cargoes.  Treasure hunting is for getting maps.  Smuggling is for avoiding tariffs.  The Domains at War: Campaigns hijinks already fit into this mould.  Some means to find stuff on the black market would be a neat one (or maybe a class prof - spend an intel point to reroll an availability roll, but also increases price if available), as would fomenting rebellion to penalize domain morale.  Conflicted on having one to just generate gold (fraud?), and if it does exist, should have low RoI relative to treasure hunting, smuggling, and stealing, due to necessity of follow-up effort (ie, interesting play) on those.  
• Thief hijinks as urban toolbox, rather than thief hijinks as slot machine.
• Thieves may pool or transfer their intel points.  Carousers now useful to a guild in that they gather intelligence that higher-level thieves can act upon.
• Some math would need to be done here to re-figure simplified guild incomes.

Is this proposal actually simpler?  I dunno.  But it does seem a bit thiefier than "I'm going to sit in town for a month and then hope I don't roll a 1."  There's an element of resource management present here which is not present in the main system, as well as ideally an increase in thief versatility at the cost of gold-generation capabilities.  Thoughts on this structure?  Any glaring holes before I try to start filling in specifics?

Leisure Reading and Domains at War

Finally got around to reading more of the Black Company series; previous attempts at the Books of Murgen left me cold due to perspective shifts, but making good progress this time.  Read Bleak Season last friday night and then She is the Darkness on sunday (aside: the kindle as a device is terrifying in its ability to enable bibliophilia).  Have postponed starting Water Sleeps until I have recovered from the late nights resulting from the last two bouts of bookserking.

Having run ACKS, however, puts a slightly different light on them.  The line "Combat is mostly fear and fear management" stuck out at me in particular following our Domains at War: Battles playtesting, where morale is how battles are won and lost.  Which has got me thinking...  how hard would it be to set up some of the battles from the books as DaW scenarios?  Two troubles, naturally, are the near-omnipresence of powerful spellcasters who operate outside the Vancian paradigm and copyright complications.  The caster problem is probably surmountable, but I haven't looked too deeply at it yet.  That the BCCS' casters are so damn durable further irritates the problem, though I suppose most of their durability is on the strategic scale (in that the Taken can be killed, but it's hard to keep them dead).  Finally, it might be easiest just to seek out battles where caster presence on either side was fairly minimal; the siege of Dejagore, which got me thinking along these lines in the first place, seems a prime candidate.

I suppose it also might be worthwhile to just model them as high-HD casters / monsters with casting abilities and give that a shot as a "good enough first stab".  The main thing is that when we were playing DaW:B, we lacked enthusiasm due to lack of context within a setting.  Stealing battles from an existing setting might remedy this (and also might provide some good 'sample' DaW:C scenarios too).  Granted, most fantasy literature does not provide good estimates of troop strength or even good maps, which makes this something of a matter of interpretation.

In unrelated news, setting creation progresses.  More to follow.

Hexographer

So the thing I was looking at building last week was a recursive world-generator and hexmapper for procedurally building ACKS worlds down to the 1.5-mile level of detail that Cameron suggested here.  But there comes a point where it's easier to drop $25 on a Hexographer license and try that first before devoting a couple months of nights and weekends to a project like that (especially since front-end work, which is reasonably necessary for mapping, is not at all my forte).  I do hate to pay for closed-source and licensed code, but if it's the right tool, it's the right tool (and if it's the wrong tool, then I get a good idea of features I need when I build something different).

Having fiddled with the paid version for an hour or so now, I'm somewhat disappointed with the state of the advertised "child map" feature, in that (to the best of my ability to tell) it produces an unlinked map from its parent.  As a result, updates to the parent do not produce updates in the child, nor vice versa.  This is less functionality that I hoped for, but fortunately the files Hexographer generates are flat-text Unicode of some sort, and amenable to manipulation by command-line tools.  So I'm thinking a suite of Hexographer submap scripts might be in order, for tracking which maps are submaps of which parts of which other maps at what scales, and updating sub- and super-maps when either linked map changes.  Need to suss out all the details of how features and lines and whatnot are stored first, but it'll to be a lot easier than if it were an obfuscated binary file format.

The fact that the map files are flat text and use a very straightforward "note" format also means that I could fairly easily automate the addition of notes with randomly-generated terrain-appropriate hex contents.  Though I object to their selection of tab-delimited tables as their storage format (supposedly they're going to switch to XML in the near future, which is better in terms of text display but worse in terms of verbosity.  If it changes, I will adapt).

Anyway, it looks like a decent tool, and one which will save me a fair bit of labor.

ACKS: Handling Henchman Signing Bonuses

One thing that caused me trouble when I last ran ACKS was handling signing bonuses.  My PCs, clever fellows that they are, noted early that a signing bonus, being paid once, was generally a cheaper way to get a bonus to their hiring rolls than offering an increased pay rate.  A problem of adjudication ensued - what sort of signing bonus is worth what bonus to hiring?

Upon recent consideration, Bribery provides an interesting precedent of three teirs, but the values it uses for each are far too low for this case.  When you're interviewing for a job, a signing bonus of one day's pay really isn't going to significantly influence your decision unless you're very desperate.  A week's pay seems unlikely to either.  The ratio between steps in bribery seems reasonable, though; a +2 bonus costs seven times as much as a +1 bonus, and a +3 bonus fourish times what a +2 bonus costs.  So I suppose, at a wag, a +1 bonus to hiring might be procured with an offer of one month's wages up front, a +2 bonus for six month's wages up front, and a +3 bonus for two years' wages up front.

The follow-up question, of course, is 'what sort of percentage increase do you need to offer a henchman for what degree of hiring roll bonus'.  I do not yet have a reasonable solution to this.  There is definitely some room for characterization in this process; smart or forward-thinking henchmen are liable to favor a percentage increase over a signing bonus, while treacherous or rash henchmen will likely favor the bonus.  Perhaps "henchman personality" should influence the effectiveness of these modifiers...

State of the Gamist, September 2013

Still kickin'.  Had fun at DragonCon, but was also somewhat disappointed with the panels (almost to the point of writing rebuttal posts).  Mostly done travelling for a while, but travel time expenditures have been replaced with girlfriend time expenditures (less billable, but more enjoyable).  No gaming to speak of outside of Natural Selection 2 (at which I am bad) and Dwarf Fortress (at which I am less bad).

Spent some time this last week hunting typos in the final Domains at War: Campaigns draft, though (and was pleased by the fact that dwarven crossbow-cavalry ride mules).  Then the Wilderlands bug bit me again, but upon further examination I realized (again) that the Wilderlands are just too big and inconsistent for my liking.  Resolved to run an ACKS-ified Western Marches-esque game in the near* future instead ("civilization" being a place akin to Roman Germany or Roman Britain at Hadrian's Wall, with a wilderness of vikings and giants and naked berserker Celt-orcs to the north).  Started design work on the Mother Of All ACKS Scripts to aid in this endeavour.  Further updates forthcoming as actual work is completed.

"World creation, has begun..."

* Part of me knows that this is completely the wrong approach, and that I'm falling into the over-prep trap.  So I guess I'll just have to set really aggressive deadlines for myself (or be contented with building an awesome tool and never actually using it to run a game).

Still Alive

News since last update:

• Foremost - going to DragonCon next weekend.  If anybody still reads this and will be down there, let me know!
• Space Hulk - was down in Matt's neck of the woods for work the other week and we played two games of Rescue the CAT using the 1st edition rules.  My dice rolled horrifically when I was playing humans; at one point I rolled 5 1's on 6d6 for flamer mortality (which let a bunch of bugs get through the firewall and into my dudes), followed by no 6s on 12d6 of overwatch fire.  Matt did somewhat better as the humans, but I got one bug up behind his CAT-carrying sergeant, took him out in one attack, and the CAT broke on impact.  Scenario probably winnable, but the north entrance near the CAT entry is concerning.  We also debated whether 'twas better to have a sergeant carry the CAT or a flamerman; I believe we concluded sergeant, since you want your flamers firing and your carrier moving, so stacking both duties forces you to split that model's AP between conflicting purposes.
• Located a FLGS last weekend.  Mostly a Warmahordes / MtG / Pathfinder shop, but supposedly they have two killer GMs already so maybe I'd fit into the RPG lineup nicely.
• Considering taking up minis wargaming; found a mint-condition copy of Dirtside II (with chits!) on Amazon for $5, so I snatched that up.  Also gave Fast & Dirty 4 a read; there are parts of it which are better than Stargrunt, and parts which I do not much like.  Review possibly forthcoming.  I anticipate difficulty finding opponents for any GZG / generic system, though, and last I checked I have little aptitude for painting, so perhaps I should stick to ACKS.
• Went to DEFCON, had a good time, didn't get pwnt (that I know of)
• I have started reading dead trees again, most recently Time Enough for Love.  I suspect book accumulation is some sort of nest-building behavior.
• .i ui mi cilre fi lo lojbo
• Have a bunch of non-gaming personal projects queued up
• Getting back in shape
• Building an OpenEEG (and learning enough EE to do it right and not toast myself)
• Couple of machine learning / AI things I want to look into, including a CUDA artificial neural network implementation (there are several of these already out there, but I need the practice)
• Software defined radio / listening to the parts of the EM spectrum I can't see
•  wechall.net, overthewire.org, and other 'wargames'