Mongoose has a new career book out, for Citizen and Scholar. I almost want to buy it to review it, but... I don't really have any reason to believe it's not going to be Yet Another Mongoose Career Book Full of Filler.
(Aside: it turns out 'cosmopolite' is, in fact, a word on the other side of the pond and not something someone made up. So it has that going for it, at least)
Wednesday, August 20, 2014
Monday, August 18, 2014
The Irony of the Superhero RPG
is that they're almost all classless (at least all the ones I've met). The superhero genre is precisely where a classes+feats+multiclassing model should shine. Something like True20 or d20 Modern, both of which had very generic classes and special-abilities-from-a-menu every level, would work perfectly with a somewhat doctored (ie, upgraded) selection of feats. At the end of the day, it mostly boils down to fighting-types (Wolverine, Hulk, Thor, ...) and wizard-types (Doctor Strange, Xavier, Scarlet Witch, ...). The gear-users (Batman, Iron Man) are mostly actually fighters, while the blasters, speedsters, and one-spell wizards like Nightcrawler are more like a 50/50 split with all of their 'magic' focused into one thing. I think it could work.
By comparison, yes, Mutants and Masterminds (which is based off of True20) lets you play as basically a normal human with one super-thing they can do really well. Buuut... point-buy adds a lot of complexity to character generation and balancing it is practically impossible. I don't think it's worth it, especially when most superheroes do fall into an archetype or combination of just a few archetypes.
By comparison, yes, Mutants and Masterminds (which is based off of True20) lets you play as basically a normal human with one super-thing they can do really well. Buuut... point-buy adds a lot of complexity to character generation and balancing it is practically impossible. I don't think it's worth it, especially when most superheroes do fall into an archetype or combination of just a few archetypes.
Sunday, August 17, 2014
Logistics
I've been thinking about grand strategy games recently, and it occurs to me that supply rules are a lot like encumbrance rules, in that they're a pain in the ass but also worthwhile because they convey the same concerns the character experiences up to the player. A dungeoneer worries about how much weight he's carrying; a general worries about how to keep his men fed. What's more, as Keegan's History of Warfare suggests, supply concerns dictated the largely-coastal structures of campaigns in the Hellenic era. Without supply, you get all kinds of crazy long-term unsupported actions in the enemy rear (this is a problem I have observed in, say, the Civilization series of games).
But the difference between supply and encumbrance is that we're reached a reasonablish compromise between complexity and realism in our encumbrance rules, with encumbrance by stone or with Traveller's low-kilos threshold. I don't know if supply is amenable to simplication... but until I find a set of rules for it which are really light-weight, I expect that it will remain one of those much-begrudged rules which is ignored by the players whenever I forget about it.
(Been thinking about wargame campaigns again, since I'm back in Collegetown and one of my main wargaming opponents / buddies is still around)
But the difference between supply and encumbrance is that we're reached a reasonablish compromise between complexity and realism in our encumbrance rules, with encumbrance by stone or with Traveller's low-kilos threshold. I don't know if supply is amenable to simplication... but until I find a set of rules for it which are really light-weight, I expect that it will remain one of those much-begrudged rules which is ignored by the players whenever I forget about it.
(Been thinking about wargame campaigns again, since I'm back in Collegetown and one of my main wargaming opponents / buddies is still around)
Wednesday, August 13, 2014
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.
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.
Sunday, August 10, 2014
Open vs Living Worlds
Or, my sandbox games have not been all that they could have been.
In considering them and Alex's sandbox Traveller game, I came to the conclusion that I had made a choice without realizing it. I had been running an open world in the Morrowind style - things mostly static except where the PCs acted and set off chains of events. The advantage of this idiom is that the blame for everything almost always falls back on the PCs. This is good, because it places the focus on the consequences of the actions of the PCs; player agency is emphasized. It is eminently suited to classically tragic play; mistakes born in hubris come back and lay the mighty low. Finally, this style works well for post-apocalypses where things have stabilized and everyone is afraid to leave their homes, or for wildernesses where a ecological equilibrium can be assumed.
It is, however, no less fundamentally exceptionalist than the 1st-to-20th adventure path railroad. The PCs are necessarily unlike NPCs, in that they are (the only) causal agents in the world. What's more, this makes for a pretty lousy simulation of settings where NPCs have any degree of power, as well as settings where the world is undergoing substantial changes. But I am a lazy DM, and like to roll with material my players give me.
The pure-open world also has the disadvantage of leaving the PCs sans hooks or direction unless provided by themselves. Reacting to external threats is easy; picking from the infinite menu is difficult. Threat also unifies, while selection divides parties.
If I were to run more games, I think I would desire more world-engines; systems which drive the world in patterns, assist me with adjudication, and remind me that the Mongols are due to invade this winter. One of the places ACKS shows great promise is in the noble court; we know how many vassals and henchmen everyone has, and those henchmen's henchmen, and so on down the chain. This cast of underlings could be a rich source for plotting, conspiracy, roleplaying, and other such shenanigans. Part of the fun of the low-level ACKS game was the treachery; the competition for the allegiance of henchmen, the bribery and charm personing, and the never-quite-actual backstabbing were all quite entertaining for me as a DM, and it sounded like the crew I was playing with at the time enjoyed it too. I suspect that an intriguey game could be fun for even my non-treacherous / Lawful Good players, provided that the party remained unified and plotted against NPCs. But managing the sort of personality traits and relationships between NPCs that I'd need is at least an O(n^2) task, and beyond my brain - hence the necessity of tools. Renegade Crowns' personality and relationship material was a good start, but I think I could do better. VBAM's AIX stats are also moderately inspiring, while Pendragon's virtues might also come pretty close to what I'm looking for if I added a relationship score (persistent modifier to reaction rolls) on top of it. I dunno; it's a hard problem. People are complicated. But if I did it right, it could become an endless font of procedural rumors, plots, allies, and enemies.
Posts potentially in the pipeline:
In considering them and Alex's sandbox Traveller game, I came to the conclusion that I had made a choice without realizing it. I had been running an open world in the Morrowind style - things mostly static except where the PCs acted and set off chains of events. The advantage of this idiom is that the blame for everything almost always falls back on the PCs. This is good, because it places the focus on the consequences of the actions of the PCs; player agency is emphasized. It is eminently suited to classically tragic play; mistakes born in hubris come back and lay the mighty low. Finally, this style works well for post-apocalypses where things have stabilized and everyone is afraid to leave their homes, or for wildernesses where a ecological equilibrium can be assumed.
It is, however, no less fundamentally exceptionalist than the 1st-to-20th adventure path railroad. The PCs are necessarily unlike NPCs, in that they are (the only) causal agents in the world. What's more, this makes for a pretty lousy simulation of settings where NPCs have any degree of power, as well as settings where the world is undergoing substantial changes. But I am a lazy DM, and like to roll with material my players give me.
The pure-open world also has the disadvantage of leaving the PCs sans hooks or direction unless provided by themselves. Reacting to external threats is easy; picking from the infinite menu is difficult. Threat also unifies, while selection divides parties.
If I were to run more games, I think I would desire more world-engines; systems which drive the world in patterns, assist me with adjudication, and remind me that the Mongols are due to invade this winter. One of the places ACKS shows great promise is in the noble court; we know how many vassals and henchmen everyone has, and those henchmen's henchmen, and so on down the chain. This cast of underlings could be a rich source for plotting, conspiracy, roleplaying, and other such shenanigans. Part of the fun of the low-level ACKS game was the treachery; the competition for the allegiance of henchmen, the bribery and charm personing, and the never-quite-actual backstabbing were all quite entertaining for me as a DM, and it sounded like the crew I was playing with at the time enjoyed it too. I suspect that an intriguey game could be fun for even my non-treacherous / Lawful Good players, provided that the party remained unified and plotted against NPCs. But managing the sort of personality traits and relationships between NPCs that I'd need is at least an O(n^2) task, and beyond my brain - hence the necessity of tools. Renegade Crowns' personality and relationship material was a good start, but I think I could do better. VBAM's AIX stats are also moderately inspiring, while Pendragon's virtues might also come pretty close to what I'm looking for if I added a relationship score (persistent modifier to reaction rolls) on top of it. I dunno; it's a hard problem. People are complicated. But if I did it right, it could become an endless font of procedural rumors, plots, allies, and enemies.
Posts potentially in the pipeline:
- Barbarians are still coming (strongly related to living worlds / part of the impetus for this post)
- Domains at War - Battles sub-platoon scale? Six-man mercenary squads in a standard dungeon 10x10 square (er, hex)?
- Domains at War - Putting together a sample campaign? I think I want to set it in Midnight, in a section of the Ice Forests. The orcs have a line of forts guarding a supply line to the south; the rebels have a set of villages out in the sticks. The orcs have a stronger supply situation and a larger force, but lack intel and need to balance striking at the enemy with guarding their supply train, while the rebels have better intel but need to feed off of orcish supplies and rely on attrition from small skirmishes in order to survive.
- The time may have come for me to turn the ACKStools into a webapp. I think I am going to use Flask; we're using it at work, and might benefit from some extra familiarity with it. It is not going to be pretty, but it will work.
Monday, July 21, 2014
Update
Domains at War hard copies arrived on my doorstep today. Neat!
Moving back to college in a week and a half for new job (startup that came out of a research project I worked on as an undergrad). As a result, much cleaning, packing, juggling of utilities, parking permit acquisition, bike acquisition, uhaul acquisition and return, and other non-recreational hilarity is in my present, recent past, and near future.
Hope to resume posting regularly when I am back in the company of gamers, free time from work permitting.
Moving back to college in a week and a half for new job (startup that came out of a research project I worked on as an undergrad). As a result, much cleaning, packing, juggling of utilities, parking permit acquisition, bike acquisition, uhaul acquisition and return, and other non-recreational hilarity is in my present, recent past, and near future.
Hope to resume posting regularly when I am back in the company of gamers, free time from work permitting.
Wednesday, June 18, 2014
Natural Language and Causality
Does it strike anyone else as strange that all natural languages (that I have met so far) are built around cause, effect, and intentionality? The whole separation of subjects, verbs, and objects necessarily injects causal inference into every statement - verb happened to object as a consequence of subject's nature.
Contrast this with the nature of raw experience, where causal relations are never explicit in any single action, and can only be extracted from prolonged observation. The causal information density of language is much higher than that of sensory experience, but at the expense of accuracy and nuance.
Contract this also with the mathematical formalism of the function, where we relate a 'cause' and an 'effect' through enumeration of all causes and all effects which follow from a certain 'law', and none of which are really actions. Here there is no inference - only truth, of a sort.
What does this have to do with RPGs? Not sure. Am tired. Maybe relevant to players forming causal inferences about sandbox settings, and the value of providing NPC adventureres and rumors to inform them of some of the details of the universe's operation (like "Wait, you killed a bunch of wyverns out in the wilderness? I bet they had a lair and it's full of unguarded treasure..."). Causal information density there is evidently much higher than traipsing around in the woods for a couple of months... and the mathematical formalism corresponds to letting them read the encounter tables.
Maybe also relevant to learning new games, which is a topic I have been considering lately (coworkers desire one-shot).
I suspect that this will not be the last philosophical, maybe-but-probably-not-relevant-to-gaming post in the queue.
Contrast this with the nature of raw experience, where causal relations are never explicit in any single action, and can only be extracted from prolonged observation. The causal information density of language is much higher than that of sensory experience, but at the expense of accuracy and nuance.
Contract this also with the mathematical formalism of the function, where we relate a 'cause' and an 'effect' through enumeration of all causes and all effects which follow from a certain 'law', and none of which are really actions. Here there is no inference - only truth, of a sort.
What does this have to do with RPGs? Not sure. Am tired. Maybe relevant to players forming causal inferences about sandbox settings, and the value of providing NPC adventureres and rumors to inform them of some of the details of the universe's operation (like "Wait, you killed a bunch of wyverns out in the wilderness? I bet they had a lair and it's full of unguarded treasure..."). Causal information density there is evidently much higher than traipsing around in the woods for a couple of months... and the mathematical formalism corresponds to letting them read the encounter tables.
Maybe also relevant to learning new games, which is a topic I have been considering lately (coworkers desire one-shot).
I suspect that this will not be the last philosophical, maybe-but-probably-not-relevant-to-gaming post in the queue.
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