ACKS: Domain Growth II, Leveling Rates, Mid-Level Play

From a discussion on the ACKS forums regarding some complaints about the domain system, and its spreadsheet-nature:

Personally I handle "the math" of domains in all of my campaigns and simply presented my players with the inputs and outputs they control. (And I had similar complaints from my players about building their 3.5 characters, which also took a spreadsheet in their opinion, and adopted a similar solution.) - Alexander Macris, ACKS Author

This is the sort of advice that should go in the DM's section of the book :(

This is also problematic solution, however, because when I am DMing ACKS I already have entirely too much stuff on my plate.  I could automate domains, sure, but that's just spreadsheeting taken to the next level.

I guess the lazier solution would be to just nullify domain growth over the timescales most of my games last.  You want a better domain?  Go and take it.  I'm a little dubious that you could reasonably civilize an uninhabited patch of wilderness in five years in mythoclassical conditions anyway.  Civilization takes lifetimes, conquest takes a season, and pillaging away lifetimes of civilization takes a weekend.  Nixing domain growth would provide a player-comprehensible reason for civilized humans to go to war with each other, rather than just building up to prosperity.

Which brings us nicely to today's topic.  Previously I have considered growth rates derived solely from reinvested income; this neglects the players' primary source of income, namely adventuring.

To get a fighter from 1st to 9th level takes 250kXP.  By ACKS' 80% rule, this means he will have earned in total around 200kGP.  Some of this will have been lost as resurrections, reserve XP, and henchman wages and such, but let's assume a fiscally responsible party for the sake of easy math.  During this time, each of the other members of the (stereotypically) 4-man party has also earned 250kXP, so the party's total assets are around 800kGP.  An enormous citadel sufficient to secure a 24-mile hex of wilderness costs 480kGP (30kGP per 6-mile hex * 16 hexes), and direct agricultural investments to bring the population up to borderlands cost around 270kGP, for a total of 750kGP.

So hypothetically a near-domain-level party who was really good at saving money could just show up and plunk down a castle and a bunch of irrigation ditches and manage two years of domain growth in a season, but it would take almost all of the money they accumulated during their entire careers.

There is, however, the question of "how long does it take to actually amass 200kGP and hit name level?"  Exponential growth is a pain when it's in your way.  Previously I postulated that the path to levelling was expeditionary wilderness play, where you follow treasure maps to high-value treasures, but I'm reconsidering that.  Treasure map max value is something like 30kGP (plus a couple magic items; more on those shortly).  When you're dividing things four or more ways, that's doesn't go very far; you need 25 of them to amass 750kGP, and most maps won't be that valuable (you can do better with Treasurehunting hijink maps since those scale as a function of your thief's level, but they're still not going to pass 30kGP on average until 9th level.  The thief does hit 9th earlier than anyone else though, and the treasurehunting map value is pretty swingy so you could follow up on high rolls and ignore low rolls).

Consider also the dragon-hunting strategy.  A mid-level party can probably deal with adult dragons, who have treasure type Q+N.  Q+N is in expectation about 31kGP, so this is somewhat more efficient than pursuing treasure maps, though also riskier because dragons are guaranteed to be involved, and ACKS' dragonbreath pretty much vaporizes people.  You're still looking at 25 adventures to get from 4th or 5th to 9th, though, if you can even find a sufficient supply of dragons (or other high-yield but killable monsters).

Ultimately this is not unreasonable but the problem with wilderness expeditions is that there is typically substantial logistics and travel involved, maybe a random encounter or two, a big fight, treasure, and then more travel and logistics and random encounters.  One expedition per session is not unusual in our experience; at one session per week, this puts the mid-levels at around six months of realtime.  This roughly matches our experience; Tim's fighter started at 1st and was around 7th after six months of play, and still had a good way to go to get to 9th.

...  you know, I should just go full Monty Haul and double treasure in future ACKS games.  Treasure is good for levelling rate and good for player morale.  Nothing but TPKs is so morale-crushing as bleeding your way through a dungeon without finding any treasure, though booby prizes like trade goods and copper pieces are arguably worse.  Monster treasure isn't (as far as I can tell) strongly linked to the rest of the economic system anyway.  More thoughts on this later.

Another option which we did not consider, and which I am not sure the expected values on the treasure tables take into account rigorously, is the selling of magic items.  We have been drowning in swords +1 in previous ACKS games, each of which is in theory salable for 5kGP and 5kXP.  That adds up.

Finally, mid- or high-level dungeons could present gametime-denser sources of treasure than dragon lairs and treasuremap caches.  Building dungeons is a heavy DM-side time investment, though, and suffers from a boom-and-bust cycle, where the players extract most of the easily-found treasure in a couple of high-yield early expeditions, then get frustrated in following low-yield expeditions.  This requires either really aggressive restocking of monster lairs or continual generation of new dungeons.  By comparison, hunting dragons or following maps seems like it should yield more consistent treasure; the only reason to fail to get the treasure on such an expedition is defeat or failure, rather than lack of intel.  I also think high-level dungeons generally make less sense even than low-level dungeons, which serve as shelters for small groups of weak monsters.  I suppose a sensible reason for a high-level dungeon to exist and not be dominated by a single entity or group would be the existence of a powerful magic resource (Midnight-style power nexes) or a gate to hell or some such thing which attracts or generates powerful critters, generating an unstable-enough situation that it doesn't just turn into a big lair for one most-powerful group of monsters.

In conclusion: getting to 9th level might provide you with the resources to build a flourishing domain out of nothing, but it also takes a long damn time and is not as amenable to fast-forwarding as the reinvestment approach.

On the Overspecialist

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. - Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough for Love

 ...  I suppose that does make it rather clear where I fall on this.

This post sort of follows some thoughts I've had a result of conversation with Somok over on his blog regarding the correct deployment of irritating monsters like golems.

This is a tricky subject.  It is a problem with systems, a problem with players, and a problem with DMs.

The argument goes that golems are an unfair and unfun monster because the casters can't damage them directly, and because they negate the rogue's sneak attack.  There is some basis to these complaints; I recall my first encounter with a flesh golem.  I promptly hit it with a lightning bolt, which is precisely the wrong thing to do.  We made it through but it wasn't pretty (and then there was a bodak in the next room!  We all made all of our saves and had no idea the sort of peril we'd been in until later).  So yes, for the unprepared caster, golems are a bad time.

The only excuse for a mid-level 3.x arcanist to be unprepared for such an eventuality, however, is ignorance.  Even a specialist wizard still has access to most of the schools, and there are plenty of spells available from a variety of schools that work in a fight with a golem - displacement, haste, fly, sleet storm, and summon monster spring to mind immediately, just from the 3rd level list (and this is saying nothing of direct-damage SR-ignorers like acid arrow or the elemental orbs).  Even if you don't want to learn and prepare spells for such an infrequent occurrence, scrolls are inexpensive and a good way to prepare for odd contingencies like golems.  Nobody was tracking encumbrance anyway...

(Likewise, the rogue who takes some ranks in Use Magic Device can employ cheap, quarter-charged wands of low-level spells like Grease and Web to good effect.  Lets you quit begging invisibility off of the wizard, too.  This is one of the rogue's coolest abilities, but I don't think I've seen anyone use it in years)

So... why the frustration with golems, again?

Because players like to overspecialize.  They (we) like to formulate their (our) tactics during character creation and pick abilities that support those tactics, often at the expense of any versatility and with full disregard for the maxim that "No plan survives contact with the enemy."  When thrust into a situation where those tactics do not work, one of two things tends to happen: they either attempt to keep using them, to little effect, or sit on their hands and hope the situation changes.  Either outcome is liable to lead to frustration.

This is the player part of the problem.

One of the system parts of the problem is that 3.x's buildiness encourages this.  One of my favorite examples is the fighter and his feat chains.  When was the last time you saw a 3.x fighter without Weapon Focus and Weapon Specialization?  Spec is (considered) so good that it behooves you to specialize.  If you've ever wondered why random treasure tables died out, Weapon Specialization certainly contributed.  The two-weapon fighter has to sink a ton of feats into TWF, as well as picking ability scores to support those.  There is a widespread belief that if you haven't taken Precise Shot, you shouldn't bother carrying a ranged weapon.  That one particularly grinds my gears.  My family has two sayings; from my mother, "No task is beneath you," and from my father, "Do what you have to do before what you want to do."  Do you have proficiency with a ranged weapon?  (Yes.  Even monks get javelins, and druids get slings and Produce Flame.)  It doesn't matter how bad your Dex or how low your BaB, sometimes there is a flying monster that needs shot down and today might just be your lucky day.  This is a thing that you can do that improves the party's odds of winning - you should not hesitate to do it!  It's alright to specialize, to be a master of one weapon, but it shouldn't stop you from using another when circumstances require it.  Use what is useful, do what you can, rule out no avenue to victory.

All in all, though, the Player's Handbook material isn't that bad.  Arcanist specialization is pretty lax, because specialist wizards don't lose all that much and Spell Focus' bonus isn't that big.  Clerics come pre-specialized, which is unfortunate but at least you know what you're getting into and it's hard to restrict yourself much further.  Overspecialization is mostly a fighter problem in Core/PHB, although the depth of the feat trees also bleeds into other mundane combatant classes.

Prestige classes are where it gets really bad, and possibly (I think) where the Overspecialist Syndrome began (my case of it at least; I claim no immunity.  I also quite expect some AD&D grog to show up and comment about the Player's Option supplements and the kung-fu subsystem from Oriental Adventures).  The whole notion of the prestige class, that you can sacrifice general capability in exchange for super-focused abilities, plays right to the overspecialist, and they're available for every class, in great heaping piles of splatbooks!  The prestige class contributed, I think, to the commonly-held sentiment that every character should be a beautiful, mechanically-unique snowflake.  With so many classes to choose from, there's no reason to ever play the same thing twice, or anything anyone else in your group has ever played before!

(Pathfinder, incidentally, has taken this past art and science to the realm of the mechanical process.  When you start multiplying backgrounds/traits and all the wizard and sorcerer bloodlines and barbarian rage abilities and the new base classes they're pumping out, you don't even need prestige classes to be playing a unique, super-specialized character every campaign.  Truly, they know their market.)

Of course, when we/I came down off the supplement high, this sentiment did not die despite the immediate dearth of prestige classes (God is dead but his shadows linger).  So we brought it back to Tim's Trailblazer game, and there was discontent, because try as we might the Core rules didn't let us specialize as effectively as we were used to!  It went pretty well for all that, and part of the reason for this, I think, was that Tim just wasn't pushing us that hard most of the time; it was OK to not be hyper-optimized, except inasmuch as you were competing with the rest of the party.  There were certainly some nasty fights, but he did a good job of providing plenty of easier ones too, and wasn't out for blood (things I have been guilty of...).  (Aside: Trailblazer almost got Weapon Specialization right by changing Focus, Spec, and ImpCrit to apply to a damage category (ie, Weapon Focus(Melee Piercing)), but then they went and screwed it all up with the fighter's Expert Weapon Proficiencies)

Prestige classes may have created the overspecialist, but it is the DM who keeps it alive.  The DM part of the problem is observing the overspecialist's discontent and reformulating fights to avoid it rather than addressing it via communication.  An entire campaign where most fights go according to the plan the PCs came up with three months ago is fundamentally boring as hell.  Talk to the players, tell them that golems and flying monsters and paralyzers and charm/dominators and blinders and ambushers and really-high DR critters and incorporeals and fast monsters and lots of little monsters and really big monsters and enemy spellcasters are all on the table (and, hypothetically, maybe that save-or-die or gear destroyers like rust monsters aren't).  Get them on board with it; discuss their motivations for overspecialization if you have to.  "What're you really trying to achieve by playing a half-naga with four prestige classes who can only cast divination spells?  If it's just an experiment, does that mean we can expect you to want to change characters when you get bored with it?  If not, can we address your motivation in a way which is more useful to the party?"  Make it an explicit social contract that if they build a character who can do exactly one thing, or play a character in a way that dramatically and unnecessarily limits their options, loss of fun is not a great and terrible injustice and is, in fact, sort of a personal problem, much like losing a chess match because you decided to only use knights.  If part of the DM's job is to make sure everyone is having fun, then establishing realistic expectations regarding character usefulness necessarily follows.

Mechanically, let them prepare for a broad variety of threats.  Don't restrict the availability of magical consumables for purchase.  Let them shuffle their feats around.  Whatever.  Then just play the game and use enemies that make sense.  If they're raiding the dwarven burial ground, any dwarf can tell them about the guardian golems and the dorfghouls.  If they're travelling overland, any caravaneer can tell them about the manticores.  Players in the generalist state of mind will usually find a way to deal with reasonably level-appropriateish things, especially if they're forewarned that these threats exist.  The trick is showing them that playing without overspecializing can actually be fun, and that hyperspecialized character optimization is not typically necessary to fun or survival (or even conducive to either, in diverse environments).

(There's also, on further reflection, a group structure component to the problem - playing with large groups enables and encourages overspecialists, playing with small groups encourages generalists)

Domain Growth I: Peace and Prosperity

I've been playing with ACKS' domain growth math recently.  The random +1d10-1d10 families per month cancels out in expectation.  The adventuring bonus is only 1% per month for domains of any reasonable size, which helps but won't take you from wilderness to civilization in your lifetime (12.7% per year will take you 10 years of adventuring every month to bring a freshly-secured 24-mile hex of cleared wilderness domain up to borderlands, and another 15 years to population-capped civilized).  The only other ways to increase population are investment, at the rate of 5.5 families on average per kilogoldpiece invested, and high morale, yielding potentially another 2.2% average growth per month.

A family in an average domain generates 12 gp/mo of gross revenue, and has expenses costing 7gp/mo.  A new ruler could drop taxes to 0 (+2 to morale rolls) and hire an extra 3gp/mo/family of garrison (+3 to morale rolls) without taking a monthly net loss.  With +5 to morale rolls, every season there is a 1/12 chance of dropping towards apathetic, a 1/3 chance of gaining one level of morale, and a 7/12 chance of gaining two levels of morale (in expectation, +1.4 levels of morale per season; better if you have a positive Charisma modifier).  This should converge to Stalwart (maximum) morale in 2-3 seasons, at which point income per family rises to 14 gp/mo gross, and you also get a growth bonus of 2.2% per month.  Combined with the adventuring bonus, this would yield ~3% growth per month, which would allow wilderness to borderlands in about three and a half years with no costs to the domainholder besides building and maintaining the castle.

Similar results could be achieved by sinking all of one's domain income back into agricultural investments; at 5gp net per family, every 200 families yields 1000gp/mo, or another 5.5 families per month, for a 2.75% monthly growth rate.  This does leave one without the secondary benefits of a happy populace and the strong garrison that the morale approach provides.  It also suggests an improvement to the morale approach; if we sink the 2gp/family/mo from being Stalwart back into agricultural investment, can get another 5.5 families per five hundred (+1.1%/mo), additive with the Stalwart bonus, for a 3.3% monthly growth rate; with active adventuring, this is 4.3% per month.

Of course, any growth rate above 5% per season also provides us with a +2 bonus to morale rolls.  5% per season is only 1.63% per month, which should be achievable by any of these means.  The extra 2gp/mo you can then extract in taxes while maintaining stable Stalwart morale yield another 1.1%/mo growth via investment (additive with other morale and investment increases), for 5.4%/month growth with active adventuring.

(Also, if you have access to ritual magic and >125 families total in your domain, Harvest is a net win.  When cast on larger domains and reinvested, it approximates +1.1% growth per month for a year.)

Even with that sort of all-in reinvestment strategy (ignoring Harvest), growth from wilderness to borderlands takes 24 months.  Growth from borderlands to civilized takes another 13 months, and then civilized to capped-out civilized takes 19 months.  Meanwhile, during the first fiveish years of your rulership, you have effectively extracted a princely sum of 0 GP from your domain!  (Less if you count the cost of your fortress and its maintenance, though you might've earned some XP for money that you reinvested in agriculture and voluntary overgarrison, depending on your level and your DM)  On the plus side, you're way over-garrisoned (which is to say, secure), the peasants love you, and after the population has capped out you can raise taxes and drop the garrison, at which point your lands will yield 62000 GP/mo, which is above the domain XP threshold for all but 13th and 14th level characters.

I've ignored urban centers here, because their gross per family is much lower than rural peasants (7gp/mo/family vs 12) with similar monthly costs per family.  They're basically money-sinks.  You want one for a market, but expect to pay for it out of adventuring revenues, because it will not be both growing and profitable, and possibly neither.  Note that I have ignored hijinks here, because hijinks are hax in their current form.  I guess I haven't done the math on granting yourself local monopolies on all goods either; it looks like you can make on average a 20% spread on arbitrary goods by buying them in your town with the monopoly bonus, then selling them without moving them a month later ("Hello, I'm John and I have a system abuse problem."), or 40% spread with bargaining, but it would take some seed money and is very limited by the number of merchants available.  It could add up over time, but I don't think it would be even remotely near enough to feedback into urban growth.

The obvious problem with the Land of Tax-Free Prosperity approach is that most campaigns do not last five years of game-time (plus time spent clearing or otherwise acquiring the domain in the first place).  Even if you slow the rate of adventuring down to the adventure per month needed to keep your growth rate up, sixty adventures is minimally 30 sessions is most of a year of weekly games.  Hell, the two years from wilderness to borderlands are liable to take the entire lifespan of an average college campaign.  We hardly made it through a a game-year in six months of playing weekly (and sometimes more often than that). 

At the end of the day, offscreen time is cheap in terms of realtime, and adventuring time is very expensive.  It seems to me that if you actually want to see really substantial domain growth in the time it takes to play a campaign, you need to hold down the fast-forward button a bit.  With full reinvestment in a Stalwart domain, you can make it from Wilderness to capped Civilized in 6 years without adventuring rather than 5 while adventuring monthly.  This sounds a lot more doable, and gives the PCs time to relax with their feet on their desks, do some spell research (though with funds limited by infrequent adventuring), start raising a family and some heirs, soak up some domain XP, and maybe earn some aging penalties between annual or biannual adventures in the Pendragon model.  Gives you a nice sort of interbellum Golden Age between the bloody business of clearing the hexes and dealing with domain-level crises like the Mongol Horde or the succession war following the death of the Wise Old King to whom you swore fealty or suchlike.

Another way to do this might be to place seasonal restrictions on things.  Adventuring and war are strictly summer activities; mercantile activity is resolved with the autumn harvest, the winter is spent intriguing in court, and the spring is for tournaments and weddings.  Rather foreign to our modern sensibilities, but might make for a useful game framework for domain play.  At some point, things are stable-ish, your reign is secure, and it makes sense for the pace to drop.

I suppose the other option is to continue adventuring at the normal rate and assume that almost all growth comes from adventuring revenues invested in agriculture.  This is...  a subject for next post, because this is already long.

Balancing Starmada

A follow-up to last post's thoughts on applying Colonial Battlefleet's tech rules to Starmada: Admiralty Edition.

At the end of the day, what are we really looking for here?  Perfectly balanced combat (ie, pick any two fleets designed with these parameters and run by perfect players and each will come out with a 50% win rate) obviously isn't happening - even if we did figure out how to design ships this way, it wouldn't be any fun.  On the flip side, a 100%-0% split between two fleets is probably also unacceptably unfun.  Is 75-25 good enough?  66-33?  Where do we draw the line (and how do we draw it without a combinatorial volume of playtesting, given also that familiarity with how to use a particular fleet effectively follows with time playing it)?

One (probably simplest) solution follows from the ancient principle that battles are almost only fought when both sides believe they have a chance of victory.  If, after reading the enemy fleet designs, you honestly believe that you have zero or negligible chance of victory, say so!  Yield preemptively, thereby denying your opponent the satisfaction of crushing you, or request a fleet swap at a handicap (ie, "your ships are so much better than mine that if I were to play yours and you mine, I could beat you at a 30% handicap in fleet points".  If your opponent agrees with your assessment, no battle need be fought.  If your opponent disagrees correctly, then they can have the satisfaction of handing you your ass with your own fleet.  If your opponent disagrees incorrectly or dishonestly, then they suffer on the receiving end of their own cheese).

This does rely on knowledge of the enemy fleet.  I argue that this is representative of a functioning naval intelligence apparatus in a post-first-contact scenario.  It is not, however, traditionally the way we have played, and it also does not scale well up to larger numbers of players.

Another thought might be to establish some sort of tier rules for the construction of fleets, much like Magic the Gathering does for decks.  This would allow us to classify certain traits, abilities, or combinations of traits into tiers.  Starmada is ultimately a toolkit game; it makes sense that we should select subsets of the game to use for different purposes. I think it makes sense to have two scales: shipbuilding complexity (cheese) and tactical complexity.  Consider the following a request for comments:

• Basic (Cheese 0, Tactics 0):
• Max hull 15
• Default movement: Naval
• Max range 12 if Naval movement is in use, 15 with vector
• Max engines 8 with naval movement, ??? with vector movement
• Discontiguous firing arcs are not permitted.
• The only options permitted from Appendix B are Armor Plating, Countermeasures, Fire Control, Point Defense, and Hyperdrive.
• The only options permitted from Appendix C are (list of weapon traits generally regarded as simple, non-problematic, uniformly effective, and/or easily mathematically verified).  I would suggest for this list:
• Anti-Fighter (situational but non-problematic)
• Area Effect (situational but non-problematic)
• Double Damage (easy math)
• Extra Hull Damage (easy math)
• No Hull Damage (non-problematic)
• Non-Piercing (non-problematic)
• Slow-Firing (non-problematic)
• Variable RoF/Imp/Dmg (easy math...  though actually I have my doubts about relative balance among the Var* traits)
• Notable omissions: range-based traits (extremely situational), Piercing (strongly situational based on opponent fleet build).  Extended Arcs and Extended Accuracies are right out.
• The only options permitted from Appendix D are Naval and Basic movement modes, which are recommended for ease of use.  Sequential Movement is permissible by agreement of all players.
• From Appendix E, only Explosions are enabled.
• The only option permitted from Appendix F is customized fighter flights.  However, only numerical customization of fighters is permitted, not fighter traits.  The following limits apply to fighters:
• Flight size: 4 to 8
• Speed: 8 to 12
• To-hit: 4+, 5+, or 6+
• Defense: <= 2
• From Appendix G, planets, asteroids, and asteroid fields are permitted.
• Cheese level: Monty Pythonesque; no cheese in stock.
• Extended (Cheese 1):
• Max hull 20
• Max range 15
• Max engines ???
• Discontiguous firing arcs are not permitted.
• All options from Appendix B except Stealth, Tech Levels, and Flotillas are permitted.
• All weapon traits from the Core book except for Continuing Damage, Inverted Range-Based traits, Increased Hits, Increased Impact, and Repeating are permitted.  Anti-Fighter and Catastrophic from the supplements are permitted.  No more than one range-based trait per weapon is permitted.  Extended Accuracies, Ranges, and Firing Arcs not permitted.
• All customization options available for fighters under rule F.1 of the Core rules may be used, except that fighter defense is capped at 4.  No other rules from Appendix F are enabled by default.
• Cheese level: Burrito.  There may be some cheese here, but it will hopefully be tasty rather than unpleasant
• Expected metagame: Not sure.
• Advanced (Cheese 2 - More or less where we ended last cycle, with a few extra patches):
• No max hull
• Max range 24
• Max engines ??? / all ships with engines must carry at least one weapon.
• Discontiguous firing arcs are not permitted.
• All options from Appendix B except Flotillas are permitted.
• All weapon traits from the Core book are permitted.  
• Repeating and Increased Hits weapons firing at 2+ do not repeat on results of 2, and count extra hits from 3 rather than 2.
• All weapon traits from the supplements except for Starship-Exclusive, Piercing +3, and Ignores Shields are permitted.
• Increased Impact weapons may not generate more than six points of impact per die (as might happen if combined with Piercing +2 and Halves Shields...). 
• Multiple range-based traits are permitted, but no more than three total traits per weapon.  
• Extended Firing Arcs are permitted, but 2+ Accuracy is not.
• Spinal Weapon Rule: Maximum 1 G-arc weapon, which must be in its own battery and is not reparable by damage control.
• All fighter customization options available under rule F.1 in Core and supplements are permitted.  Independent fighters are also permitted.
• Cheese level: Limburger. Possibly too cheesy.
• Complete (Cheese 3 - stuff we banned last time):
• Nothing is forbidden, all is permitted.  Notably the following should be restricted to Complete:
• Flotillas
• Ammo
• Strikers / Seekers
• Starship-Exclusive, Ignores Shields, Piercing +3
• Cheese level: Casu Marzu.  Dear god why.

Running semi-orthogonal to the Cheese Axis is the Tactics Axis.  This mostly deals with the movement type, sensors, optional orders, and such, as well as a few shipbuilding options which contribute strongly to tactical complexity

• Simple (Tactics 0):
•  Movement: Naval or Basic
• All other options from appendices D and E are disabled, except for Explosions and optionally Sequential Movement.
• From Appendix G, only planets, asteroids, and asteroid fields are permitted.
• Less Simple (Tactics 1 - this is about where we were last time):
• Movement: Naval or Basic
• From Appendix B, Cloaking Devices and Mines are enabled.
• From Appendix C, the Slow-Firing trait and Dual-Mode Weapons are enabled.  The Carronade trait is enabled, but may only be used on one mode per dual-mode weapon, and not at all on single-mode weapons (As much as I love my Range 15 Carronade "Long 9s", this, I am told, was its intended function, and so this is what it is most likely balanced for).
• From Appendix D, Emergency Thrust and Evasive Action are enabled.
• From Appendix E, Damage Control, Directed Damage, and Shield Reinforcement are enabled (Shield Reinforcement, incidentally, seems potentially helpful for short-range ships trying to close the gap with long-range ships).
• From Appendix F, Combat Interception, Dogfighting, and Launch and Recovery are enabled.  Launch Tubes are permitted during shipbuilding.
• From Appendix G, all terrain except Black Holes are permitted.
• Less Complicated (Tactics 2):
• As Less Simple, but with the addition of Newtonian Movement, Screens, Critical Damage, Sensor Modes?, and Breachers
• Complicated (Tactics 3):
• As Less Complicated, with the addition of Pivots, Rolls, Sideslips, Delayed Turns, and Overthrusters
• Searchlights may be used to model even more active sensor management.

It might also be worthwhile to backport some of Starmada Nova's more tactical features.  Flares (deployable temporary cover), escort ships (ships that block line of sight/fire for enemy ships), and their seeker implementation (normal weapon that doesn't hit until the turn after it is fired, shots in transit can be fired at and destroyed) were all promising.  I'm vaguely tempted to permit weak AE-style seekers somewhere up the Tactical chain, since seekers actually do pose a lot of interesting choices and lack a lot of the swarmy board-control features of strikers, but all direct-fire expendables to date have shown themselves to be problematic so I'm filing that away under "Cheez-Whiz: May or may not be cheesy."

In any case, the way I see this working is that regular players maintain a handful of fleets at varying cheese levels, so that when a new player shows up and it makes sense to play Cheese 0 / Tactics 1, we actually have sane ships around to do it with rather than throwing them into the deep end with Ammo and Flotillas and suchlike.  This approach scales better than trying to build a tech tree with every trait or suggesting that we read each others' fleet lists before games.

Boardgames: Iron Dragon, Sentinels, Reflections on Starmada

Some folks from out of town were around this weekend, and so a gathering was had and games were played!

First we played Iron Dragon.  I am told it is a long game, but frankly it broke my time-sense and I could not tell you how long it took.  My initial allocation of cards caused me to allocate my effort in the south-east at the two magically-joined cities and up the coast of the Olde Worlde.  This worked fine in the early game, but sorta screwed me in the late game.  I'm not sure how else I'd've played it given the cards I had, though.  As Jared commented, being able to trade cargo loads or contracts would make the game much more interesting, but probably slow it down even further.  It would also be interesting to build an index of possible opening moves (with your 60 starting cash to build) based on available foremen, drawn cards, and desired margin of safety to cover things like floods destroying your tracks.

After Iron Dragon we played three games of Sentinels last night, and another this afternoon.  The three games last night were not super-notable; played some new heroes, fought some new villains, won two games and lost one.  It turns out you can stab Satan to death, and La Capitaine is not, as I had assumed, a French supersoldier set on rebuilding Napoleon's empire, but is instead a time-travelling pirate.  The game this afternoon was interesting, in that everyone else died and we pulled off a victory with me as the "last best hope".  It took a long time, and my fellow players were less than excited because, while Sentinels does give you some support abilities when you are dead, they aid players who are still alive, which places you somewhat at their disposal.  Inexperienced player that I am, I was perhaps not ideal for making suggestions regarding support abilities.  It worked out against all odds, though, which was kind of neat.  Looong game, though.

There was also some reminiscing about Starmada, both how much fun it was and the process of the decay of the metagame.  Pre-generated fleets were suggested as a countermeasure, and while they could work, I think you/we would need to design the inter-fleet meta as a cohesive whole in order to achieve balance this way.  This is certainly possible (and is the standard solution for most games, like Firestorm Armada and Battlefleet Gothic), but would be substantial work.  I also suspect this process of coordination would take a lot of the fun out of Starmada, since we do so enjoy designing ships.  I still think Colonial Battlefleet's tech system might be a solution, in that it would let you build fleets whose access to powerful capabilities like long ranges, strikers, and catastrophics weapons were all similarly restricted, and would also let you cut out certain broken combinations entirely.  The problem, of course, is that there are a lot more 'techs' in Starmada than there are in CBF, and it seems unlikely that we will predict and eliminate all potentially cheesy combinations in designing a tech system.  I suspect another flaw of a CBF-style tech system for Starmada is that similar traits in Starmada are generally better when used with other, similar traits (Increased Hits + Repeating + Variable RoF all one one weapon), while in CBF you don't really see these sort of self-similar synergies.  Further thought is required.

Unpleasant Weather

I am dissatisfied with existing weather-generation systems for RPGs of D&D's ilk.  So I built one!  Note that I am not a meteorologist; this is intended to be a simple system which generates 'close enough' results for gaming purposes, not a high-fidelity weather simulator.

In any given day, the weather is in one of three states: high pressure, low pressure, or in flux.  High pressure is clear, unseasonably cold, and dry; low pressure is unseasonably warm, wet, and cloudy, sometimes with light rain or snow, or afternoon thunderstorms in the summer.  Flux occurs during the transition between the two and is stormy and windy, with heavy clouds.

On day 0, roll a d6.  One through three, the weather begins as high pressure; four through six, it begins as low pressure.

Each day of normal weather, roll a d8.  On a 1-7, the state remains the same; if it was high pressure today, it is high pressure tomorrow, and if low pressure today, low pressure tomorrow.  On an 8, a front rolls in tomorrow and the state changes to flux.  The front is detectable some hours in advance, as winds pick up and clouds are visible moving rapidly from the horizon.  After 1d3 days of stormy flux, the pressure switches; if it was high pressure when the one was rolled, it is low pressure after the flux, and if it was low pressure, it becomes high pressure.

Weather typically blows in from the west on worlds where the sun rises in the east (at least in my experience), unless there are mountains in the way.

This satisfies several design goals.  First, it is more-or-less consistent with real-world experience in several ways.  If the weather was cool and dry today, it probably will be tomorrow, but sometimes you get violent storms and things change.  Weather is also in expectation stable for about a week, which is more-or-less accurate for the microclimate in which I find myself living.  Things average out to moderate weather, but the result is never just "lukewarm and boring" ("Climate is what you expect, weather is what you get.").  Second, it does not require a table lookup or percentile roll, nevermind several.  Third, it does not go into unnecessary detail; three states are easy enough to remember and sufficiently different for gameplay purposes.  Fourth, it is easy to tweak to suit local conditions.  You could vary the die size rolled based on stability of various types of air masses (ie, maybe during a high pressure you roll a d10 but during a low pressure you roll a d6, so warm air is less common and marked by more frequent storms).  You could make a 2 through 4 on the d8 "precipitation and no change in dominant pressure" during a low pressure.  You could vary the pressure change probability seasonally, so during summer you use a d12 instead of a d8, leading to less frequent storms and better adventuring weather.  You could change flux duration, add minimum times between fluxes, or any number of other minor tweaks.  Much as one might build a random encounter table for the Valley of Storms, so one might alter the weather parameters.  None of that extra complexity is necessary to using the core of the system, however.

By contrast, 3.x's weather system fails in all of these regards.  It fails to make weather today relevant to weather tomorrow; the only consistency comes from the fact that "normal" (ie, no-op) weather is probabilistically dominant.  It requires a percentile roll and table lookup, sometimes followed by another percentile roll.  It expresses its temperatures and wind speeds in terms of degrees and miles per hour, which are hardly practical units for adventurers to measure in the field - one might argue that the intent is to use the temperature categories, but when you start adding things like Heat Wave and "temperature drops x degrees at night", it becomes fairly clear that you're supposed to be tracking it numerically.  Finally, its ultimate sin (and a telling reflection on 3.x's design philosophy) is that the effects of the weather are expressed purely in terms of combat (and perceptiony skill checks, but those are almost inevitably just a precursor to combat).

Sure, weather does effect combat, sometimes in unexpected ways.  The English won the Battle of Crecy in part because the French (well, Genoese mercenary in service to the French) crossbowmen had wet crossbowstrings due to an earlier downpour; while the English longbowmen had unstrung their bows, the crossbowmen had not (perhaps were not able to due to the construction of their crossbows), and so were unable to offer more then desultory fire.  Alright, in lousy or just humid weather crossbows take a -4 to hit, bows a -2, and thrown no penalty (assuming visible targets otherwise within range).  Shorten encounter distance during precipitation or fog by a small constant integer factor.  If the ground's muddy or snowy, speed is reduced and attempts to knock people down are easier.  Alright, done with effects of weather on combat. 

On to the fun stuff!  Effects of weather on exploration.

During a high pressure, seeing distant smoke is relatively easy, while during a low pressure it is more difficult because the humidity keeps the smoke down.  During flux, spotting smoke is nearly impossible due to wind dispersion and precipitation, and building a fire in the first place is going to be difficult.  Cloudy or stormy weather may make identifying one's mountaintop reference points more difficult if the peaks are above the clouds.  The party's mercenaries are probably none too happy about the extra maintenance they will need to do on their gear, and cold, soggy (or worse, moldy) rations add insult to injury - while hardly a calamity, a penalty to any morale roll provoked during wet weather may be in order.  Speaking of which, wet weather might render some rations inedible, forcing a reevaluation of the supply situation (likewise in hot weather, the water supply becomes less stable).  The effects of heavy rain on the wizard's spellbook are potentially punitive; also true for the party mapper.  Heavily-burdened mounts, pack animals, and especially carts may become hopelessly mired in mud or deep snow, and in general overland movement rate will suffer.  Precipitation can wash away or obscure tracks while it is falling, but after it stops the mud and snow take and hold tracks, making tracking easier.  If you like, say that mud persists for one day per day of rain.  If some sort of endurance system is in place (next post, perhaps), wet weather makes it harder to keep warm, both because you get soaked and because there is little dry fuel for fires.

In other words, adventuring in persistent rain is not a good time.  Probably the only good reason to do so with all other things being equal is a situation in which you are operating at a disadvantage in an area occupied by strong and coordinated resistance, where the shortened encounter distance means you can close with and defeat in detail enemy detachments before help can arrive.  Flying predators (eg wyverns) might also be effectively grounded by a powerful storm, or impeded by low-visibility conditions like fog.  Ambush predators might have their lairs flooded out or otherwise damaged by storms and be forced out into the open (conversely, flooded streams and rivers might be effectively impassable; sufficiently powerful floods might alter the flows for some time, or carve new watercourses, rendering maps out of date).  Humanoids are likely to try to stay in shelter during storms, while some monsters may prefer to hunt in the rain.

And this is all saying nothing of freak weather like lightning storms or tornados or blizzards!  This is bog-standard mundane weather that anyone hiking in the woods (or to and from class) in temperate climes will get to deal with sooner or later, and yet it already introduces quite a few things for PCs to consider during their forays into the wilderness (especially if the wandering monster table varies with weather).

And now I'm off to go bicycling in the cold drizzle...

Thief Skills Also Ninjas

I have more wilderness posts I want to write, but these thoughts kinda bit me last night.

OSR thieves aren't normal, mundane burglars.  They're goddamn ninjas.

In 3.x terms, Hide in Shadows has a lot more in common with Hide in Plain Sight than the Hide skill.   Hide in Shadows, on a successful roll in shadows (note: does not require actual cover, just bad lighting) is "invisibility until you move."

Move Silently completely overrides Hear Noises.  This isn't "I got a 25 on my Move Silently, I sure hope the dragon rolls low".  This is quieter than a gliding owl, quieter than the sound of a cat's footfall (incidentally, not all that quiet in my experience).  This is absolute silence like inside a silence spell.  In sum, magical silence.

Exhibit 3: Climb Walls.  You're telling me that this guy can climb a vertical, sheer (ie, perfectly flat) surface at a foot per second, with no gear.  Slab climbing is hard, even with sticky rubber shoes and other specialist equipment and lots of training.  Like "typically not climbable from the ground up without pre-drilled holes" hard.

Ability to read any language at 4th and to use literal magic scrolls like a wizard at 10th also seem a bit beyond the ken of normal men, no?  The d4 HD also points to a life of seclusion and introspection rather than a hard life in the gutters and alleys.

Incidentally, that all of these abilities are semi-magical is part of why I'm opposed to adding mundane gear to support them.  Wearing extra-padded socks isn't going to make a difference when you're trying to move this quietly; true silence comes from within, from slowing your heart rate and controlling your breathing and being One-With-The-Void.

Backstab and Hear Noises are alright.  They're neither clearly supernatural nor clearly natural, are useful in play, core to the class, et cetera.  I feel no need to either explain or alter them.

And then we also have the crappy, mundane abilities like opening locks and finding and disarming traps and picking pockets, which is just the worst of the bunch.  The vast majority of uses of pick pockets, in any campaign, will inevitably be either 1) picking pockets of random NPCs for a pittance (and a DM headache) by clueless but excited players, or 2) stealing stuff from one's fellow party members.  Meanwhile, opening locks and trapfinding are regarded as the thief's core abilities, but are actually rather boring, quite replaceable with mundane gear and livestock (nevermind magic), and have the stupid one-attempt-per-level rules.

It seems you've been living two lives, Mr. Thievingston.  In one, you have magical powers modern science cannot explain.  In the other, your primary advantage over a common locksmith is that you are willing to risk life and limb in search of treasure, though you are arguably less skilled for most of your career and very easily discouraged.

One of these lives is interesting, exciting, and potentially fun; the other is not.

So here are some thoughts, from the ACKS side:

• Normal people can already take Alertness to boost their Hear Noises from 18+ to 14+.  What if Trapfinding were a proficiency that boosted your Find Traps from 18+ (which everyone can already do) to 14+ and granted a roll to Find Traps without searching whenever you're in the target zone of one?  Much more exciting than searching systematically.  Make it a class prof for Thieves, Explorers, Assassins, Fighters, and dwarves, send those guys in front, alleviate Search Paralysis but at some risk to the scouts...  And then we drop Find Traps from thieves, freeing up a slot for Other Fun Stuff 
• Likewise Open Locks.  This should be a general proficiency with at most 18+/14+/10+ for success.  I can pick (shitty) locks, and I sure didn't burn a proficiency on it.  When you lug a locked treasure chest back to town, you should be able to hire a civilian locksmith to open it who isn't also a ninja master, but if you or a henchman have Lockpicking then you can try to crack it yourself in the dungeon (with failures taking extra time, and a max of 3 turns in a row spent working on it before you have to take a break, just like listening for noises)
• Remove Traps: Don't build shitty traps that can't be neutralized or avoided by reasonably clever play.  Spike the portcullises open, put wax in the poison dart holes, rig a rope over the pit, put a rag over the insanity mist sprayer, a mirror in front of the disintegrator ray, and so forth.  Then get rid of Remove Traps.
• Get rid of Pick Pockets, forget it ever existed.
• Give thieves some fun and useful abilities.  Ideally fun stuff which is also 1) party support rather than personal power, and 2) in keeping with the ninja pseudomagic.
• From the ACKSPC, the Barbarian's "Naturally Stealthy" ability makes so much sense for thieves that it hurts.  This provides some degree of mundane stealth as a backup for when the ninja magic fails.  Even when you're not being spooky-quiet, you're just not as noisy as the guy in plate.
• As the canonical monk-ish class, the Mystic also has some neat stuff we can steal (hey, we're thieves, it's what we do).
• Command of Voice / Mystic Aura is sort of the stereotypical hypnotic pattern thing
• Speed of Thought / Combat Reflexes makes decent sense
• Wholeness of Body / Poison Immunity plays well with both early-game dungeoneering and domain-level assassination operations.  Potentially really strong, though.  Separate into "ability to manufacture poisons and poison a weapon without risking injuring self" and "immunity to natural environmental poisons" available later?
• Perceive Intentions is great for a party face or scout and retains its value into the high levels, but is notable among social abilities because it doesn't directly make the user into the face.
• Strength of Spirit / Fear Immunity fits well, but honestly what triggers fear other than dragons and magic?  Is mummy paralysis fear?
• Plenty of other useful things we could do.  Some of these might make more sense as class proficiencies.
• Disguise?  Fitting, but it creates the same risk of party-separation that darkvision on a thief does.
• Skulking, like Naturally Stealthy, softens the pain of the low levels.  It was regarded as basically mandatory by our thieves in previous campaigns anyway.
• Endurance, for all that it is not exciting, is pretty suitable for an aescetic. 
• Familiar: not just for wizards anymore!  What sort of competent goatee-stroking spymaster doesn't have a pet monkey or something that can go where he cannot and hear what cannot be heard by men?  Or the assassin with his pet viper or raven, or an animate shadow or suchlike.
• A Shadowdancery "shadow step" short-range teleportation ability would be thematic and expand on the mobility theme presented with Climb Walls.  Would also allow thieves to shift between the party rear and the vanguard in the standard Dungeon Phalanx configuration.  Honestly you could go full-on Shadowdancer mode with a thief rework and it would probably kick ass.
• Some sort of unarmed fighting style bonuses
• Detect Treasure as a spell-like ability would be pretty amusing, very thiefy but not very ninjaesque, and super-useful for generating intelligence in the dungeon.
• Some sort of 'low profile' ability that lets you evade notice during social situations, searches, &c.  Less overt Disguise, more like faceless in a crowd.  Sort of like Explorer wilderness evasion, but for civilized areas?

 Also, smokebombs should be a thing anyone can buy and use as mundane gear.

In closing: this sort of thief does not model all thieves of literature.  But it could be a lot of fun, and deliver on the original promise of some of the core OSR thief abilities while maintaining the thief's role as dungeon and city support+offense (complementing the cleric's dungeon and city support+defense).