Of Thieves and Wizards

I was thinking the other day about how magic items for wizards and magic items for fighters more-or-less mirror those class' native/inherent resource management schemes, and how those resource management schemes tie back to their roles on the Kirk-Spock Axis (I'm going to refer back to that post again; it's a little roundabout but really good, and you should read it).  Fighter magic items are typically persistent, passive boosts which don't need to be shepherded carefully, while wizard magic items are typically consumable, and must be managed in a similar way to spells.  This consistency continues to encourage fighters to play (relatively) recklessly and wizards relatively cautiously and analytically into the high levels.

This connection between resource management and playstyle got me thinking about thieves again.  As I've mentioned before, the thief's sort of "core mechanic", thief skills, are essentially saving throws against certain situations likely to doom the thief and the party.  If you fail move silently, you're no worse off than if you'd never rolled it.  They're mainly useful (at least at low levels) in "oh god we're all going to die maybe I can roll out of this and sneak away" situations; high-risk, high-reward, with none of the guarantees of the fighter's AC or the wizard's known spells that solve problems outright.

The very boolean nature of thief skills ("I'm either totally invisible or just as visible as a regular guy, and I don't know which") and their general unreliability leaves a lot of players cold, though.  These strain suspension of disbelief, and require supernatural explanation, which is unsatisfying.

Likewise, for gamers brought up outside of the D&D tradition, wizards make no sort of sense.  Vancian magic is pretty unusual, and a bad fit for many campaign worlds.

So what if we changed things up a bit?

What if we swapped the positions of the thief and the wizard on Roger's Party Axes diagram, placing the thief in the analytical, cautious, clever position opposite the fighter, and the wizard in the "forbidden secrets, great sacrifices, desperate measures" location opposite the cleric's consistant, happy moral magic?  And updated these class' mechanics accordingly, of course.  What would that look like?

Fighter-vs-thief is, in some ways, a quitessentially Combat-as-Sport vs Combat-as-War axis.  The fighter is very good at dealing with the tactical exercise of combat, but not strong outside of it.  The thief, on the other hand, is logically strong at avoiding combats and mitigating losses but weak at direct combat.  The fighter welcomes the glory of single combat against a worthy opponent; the thief would like nothing better than attacking in the dead of night with superior numbers (or, better yet, stealing the treasure, opening the gate, or otherwise achieving the objective without fighting or being noticed at all).  So we have a tactical-vs-strategic conflict here.  The fighter is already well-equipped tactically; what does an alternate thief equipped to deal primarily strategically look like?

If we accept that strategy is "putting yourself in a position to win battles and profit from them", then two functions immediately spring to mind for the Strategic Thief: intelligence-gathering and logistics.  Logistics is, of course, boring, but we could certainly cherry-pick an ability or two from the venturer and call it done (in a way, the hijinks system as it exists currently serves a logistical support function at the domain level, in that it provides cash to enable other operations).

Intelligence-gathering and public relations, however, are rather more interesting.  Abilities like Perceive Intentions, Hear Noises, and Sensing Evil let you avoid fights before they happen, saving valuable resources, or let you get the drop on enemies and win fights more easily.  Likewise, map management and operation-planning that brings you to the treasure more quickly reduces the number of risky fights you might have to deal with.  The thief is logically well-suited for a scouting role, though historically this is both risky and somewhat boring for the rest of the party.  I do not have a great solution to this problem just yet, although I suspect that in ACKS at least the way this plays out is that the thief has to remain within the area of shadowy illumination in front of the party's torch (in order to see anything at all), which requires the party to advance relatively closely behind him.

Another problem with using the thief in an intelligence-gathering / combat avoidance role is that ultimately, his function is diminishing the "fun" of the game, if one assumes that combat is fun rather than deadly.  In a game where the enemies are very dangerous, the thief will dominate the fighters; in a game where the enemies are weak, the fighters will tend to overrule the thief.  Treasure-sensing abilities would sort of address this and be quite thematic; they give the thief a "we should" piece of intel, rather than being purely "we shouldn't".  Maybe an Appraisal ability that lets a thief estimate the value of a magical object or pile of coins instantly.  Done directly, treasure detection could strain belief, but such abilities could also be explained as having gathered map fragments and rumors in taverns (HumInt).  Making the thief the go-to guy for rumors and partial maps before the expedition might actually make a good mechanic; exchange time and gold for rolls on the Dungeon Intel table, which are modified by thief level, charisma, distance from dungeon, and level of dungeon, with results ranging from false rumors from peasants to maps from reliable veterans who've been there before you and door passwords or other secrets from sages.  A more resource-managementy and mechanical concept here (to fill in the gap being left by the wizard) would have the thief gather intel points through Tavern Research rolls, which can then be spent in the dungeon ("consulting your notebook for a few minutes, you deduce that...") to 'cast' effects like Detect Treasure, Find Secret Doors, Align Map Fragment, Locate Shortcut, Know Password, and so forth, Indiana Jones-style.  Heck, you could even tie Find Traps into such a system, if you're so inclined as to trap.  This also transitions nicely into...

At domain levels, the thief runs a spy network, which he can set to work gathering information on enemy troop dispositions, leader capabilities, realm morales, and so forth.  While the fighter is leading troops, the thief's network is sabotaging supply caravans, funding resistance organizations, kidnapping heirs, and otherwise causing trouble.  The spy network is a well-established trope, and one which I suspect would be more satisfactory and less...  inconsistent with the game's economy than the thieves' guild.

So what does the strategic thief look like?  Backstab and hear noises stay in their current forms; they're solid abilities and we want thieves to be somewhat useful in combat.  Modifiers to surprise rolls and enemy surprise rolls in the vein of Naturally Stealthy and Combat Reflexes (but improving with level) let the thief scout effectively while making use of (rather than circumventing) ACKS' existing mechanics for stealth and make the thief more consistently sneaky.  Some sort of Black Market ability lets the thief provide materiel support (maybe "divide the cost of an item by a number up to your level +1 for purposes of finding it in the market, but multiply the price you have to pay for it by that same factor; usable once per item per market per month").  Finally, a Tavern Research roll mechanic fills out the intelligence-gathering abilities.  At domain level, a spy network lets you use a similar mechanic to gather intelligence or perform spooky operations at larger scales; rather than tracking individual ruffians, your spy network is mostly comprised of no-detail "cells" of rookie thieves and common men, which let you perform intelligence-gathering in far-away lands, as well as a few high-level "operatives" who can incite cells to do riskier things.

(Amusingly, this actually removes one of the fighter-thief conflicts present in vanilla ACKS, namely "thieves' guild is looting my town for obscene amounts of money but not actually hurting domain morale so I guess it's OK?")

There is, of course, the question of "whither traps and locks?"  Make Lockpicking a general proficiency at 18/14/10 and Trapfinding a class proficiency for fighters, thieves, assassins, &c.  (Assassins, incidentally, are mostly unchanged - they replace hide in shadows and move silently with scaling surprise modifiers.  Their domain game needs some work I guess)

That's that for the thief.  Next post, because this one is quite long enough: wizards.

Viking Nonsense

Have had those crazy Scandinavians on the brain again.  Currently about halfway through Burnt Njal's Saga; most of my observations from Egil's Saga apply, though this is more similar to the very late parts of Egil's Saga; much trouble between households and politics at the althing and such.  Sort of interesting as a study in the functioning of an effectively-anarchist society with prechristian morality, but not super-gameable.

I also picked up and skimmed Mythic Iceland recently.  There were a lot of things I probably won't use (because I'm not running BFRP and doubt I could get buy-in for Runequest), but they had one rule that was pretty interesting.  Characters have Luck points, which basically work like action points and aren't recharged.  When your PC runs out of luck points, he starts to take additional penalties (beyond just being out of luck points); his neighbors say that he is "luckless", that his time is almost up, and that he has fulfilled his fate, and start avoiding him, because associating with a luckless man can bring no good.  So that's a big of an interesting variation on the standard action point system; I guess Dungeon Crawl Classics is sort of similar in that luck is a stat and if you run out you get no bonuses to luck rolls, but I'm not sure it goes quite as far with the penalties.

Also Mythic Iceland's Big Table of Icelandic Names and section on various places in Iceland are pretty good.  Oh, and the King of the Polar Bears.

Finally, there was an interesting post on /r/askhistorians about berserkers, and an historian specialising in Norse history made some remarks on how it's likely that berserkers were probably religious warriors associated with animal cults.  Thus, if I were to run a norse game, some manner of divinely-powered berserker class might make a good replacement for paladins...

Risk-Aversion and Powergaming

This came out of a discussion I had with my father yesterday, where he mentioned a skill-focused / noncombat session he played in where one player had a strictly combat-focused "damage monster" character, and was subsequently bored.  It got me asking the question "why do we often see characters built to focus solely on combat, but rarely see characters built to solely focus on noncombat capabilities?"  In some sense this is part of the OSR's Thief Problem and maybe an issue with ACKS' Venturer, so it does sort of matter.

The naive answer is "combat is the biggest portion of the rules, and most options during character creation and advancement focus on combat", ie "the rules made us do it."  There is some truth in this, but as an explanation it is incomplete.  It begs the question, "Why are the rules this way?"

A more complete explanation, I think, follows from risk aversion and what is at stake during combat vs non-combat challenges.  In combat, if you fail you are likely to die.  Your only other remedies are retreat (often infeasible) and surrender / trust in the mercy of your foes (also often inapplicable, as with unintelligent monsters, and probably quite costly even with merciful intelligent foes).  The rules for combat are detailed precisely because of what is at stake, and players build combat-monster characters in order to avoid dying ignominously.

By comparison, non-combat encounters are likely to feature a wide variety of possible outcomes, and are less often immediately lethal on failure (these do happen, but the proportion of potentially-lethal combats much outweighs the proportion of potentially-lethal noncombats).  This is why noncombat gets both briefer treatment in the rules and less attention from players; if a non-combat is going poorly, one can often "retreat" from it more effectively than one could a combat, and seek another way around.  Couldn't pick the lock?  Time to bring out a hammer.  Couldn't bribe the guard?  Time to find some blackmail fodder, or a back door, or any number of other approaches.  But once the swords come out, somebody's going to end up under a shroud, and you'd rather it weren't you.

Freeport Bundle of Holding

The latest Bundle of Holding is Green Ronin's Freeport books!  I have fond memories of Freeport from the Dragon Magazine adverts of my youth (I guess advertising does sort of work, at a decade's delay), and have stolen the name and flavor (pirate town full of monstrous cults) at least once.  I look forward to consuming the original material.

Destiny Disrupted

As usual when reading historical works, I find my thoughts turning to gaming.  The current source of inspiration of Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes by Tamim Ansari.  Some notes so far:

• Ansari argues that "the Western World" is civilization as arose around Mediterranean trade, while "the Middle World" (Arabia to India, Persia, and the 'stans) grew up primarily around land trade routes, with the intersection on the eastern edge of the Mediterranean being a perennial area of cultural exchange and conflict.  This is interesting from the ACKS perspective, where the prototypical Auran campaign world (and a number of other campaign worlds, like my own Shieldlands and Omer's Barbarian Conqueror King) are built around the Mediterranean model.  It might be worthwhile to roll an ACKS setting along more Middle-World land-trade lines.
• Lots of good place-names to steal that my players have probably never heard of.
• It's sort of sad how quickly Islam went downhill (in terms of charitable / egalitarian social virtue and unity of the umma) after the first two caliphs.  Power corrupts, so it goes.
• The manner in which Medina and the bedouin tribes were united under Muhammed and Abu Bakr is interesting - there existed political factions, and the early leaders of Islam unified them.  These coalitions were then threatened by the death of Muhammed and the resulting Wars of Apostasy.  This ties into some thoughts on poltical deficiencies in the ACKS domain game I've had recently - I think I want a system where the resources present in a domain are more-or-less static, and there exist factions with some form of power (military, economic, moral authority over the masses, whatever) who contend for the resources in that domain.  Players then attempt to either gain influence over existing factions (befriending their leaders or membership, doing favors) to gain their resources and allegiance, or destroy them through intrigue or fire and sword and replace them with personal factions (extended henchtrees) of their own construction.  Uniting existing factions is a quick and convenient way to streamline your domain, make management less of a hassle, and extend your capabilities out onto larger scales (ie, a coalition of county-grade factions might be able to operate as a duchy-scale faction if unified).  But, as is apparent, I have yet to flesh out a system for this.
• The divide between the Mu'tazili rationalists and the conservative ulama (religious scholars responsible for generating, verifying, and clarifying religious law) during the Abassid caliphate is fairly interesting, particularly the way the Abassids allied with the Mu'tazili first (seeking to escape the power of the ulama) and then ended up yielding to the ulama's moral authority over the general populace.  Not unlike the attempts by Western monarchy to break the power of the church, but less effective.  Another good example of the Factional Domain Game in historical action.
• There's an interesting note in the section on the Crusades: "Usamah idn Muqidh described the Franks as being like 'beasts, superior in courage and fighting ardor, but in nothing else, just as animals are superior in strength and aggression.'"  Combine with reports of Crusader cannibalism (it turns out that supplying your sieges in deserts is hard) and the sack of Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade, and an amusing inversion comes to mind; what if one were to cast the orcs not as the Germanic barbarians invading Rome, but as the Frankish (or "Franj") barbarians invading the Middle East?
• Looking back at the original assassins, we see an organization much more interested in causing political strife / preventing unification / propagating fear than in making money.  I would like to see ACKS' assassin guilds operate similarly.
• As bad as the assassins and the Crusaders were, the Mongols did a very effective job of Chaotic/Evil.  Particularly notable were the utter destruction of a city whose original name is lost and which is now known only as Shahr-i-Gholghola ("the city of screams"), the breaking of the assassins after an attempt was made against Hulagu Khan, pretty much everything Tamerlane ever did, and this aside regarding the sack of Baghdad in 1258:

The Mongols had a proscription against shedding royal blood; it ran against their traditions...  So they wrapped the [Abassid] khalifa and members of his family in carpets and kicked them to death.

Anyway, good inspiration, and I'm still less than halfway through (though I expect things will get a bit more modern, hence less useful for RPGs and more useful for wargaming, shortly).

Review: Sufficiently Advanced

I was on rpgnow the other day to pick up a copy of Petty Gods at Tenkar's suggestion (free, incidentally) when I stumbled across Sufficiently Advanced (which also has an SRD).

This game is way, way outside my normal fare (and hence may not be interesting to my typical audience) and yet it seems plausibly awesome.

I guess I would characterize it as a hardish-science transhumanist diceless strategic story game driven primarily by ideological conflicts.  That's a mouthful, so let's break it down.

Hardish-science: Written by a physicist, and generally everything here falls under plausiblish.  Direct conversion of matter to energy is postulated, and with abundant energy come atomic transmutation (through nuclear processes) and plausible FTL through bent spacetime (both Alcubierre-style warpdrives and wormholes).  With FTL comes the possibility of time travel (which is used primarily to explain prescient AIs).  It's a bit softer than the sort of grungy, one-system near-future SF I've had on my mind since Schismatrix, but it's within the realm of "plausible given sufficiently-advanced technology".  Notably absent are violations of thermodynamics and conservation laws (many of the entries in the Technology chapter include a description of their waste heat) and psionics, though extensive cognitive enhancement and weaponized memetics are present.  Full marks from me for averting the Jedi Problem in favor of mentats and cognitae.

Transhumanist: A medium-powered character in SA2 is functionally immortal (immune to aging, capable of regenerating lost limbs), has a neural computer capable of backing up their memories, dermal nanites which provide extensive sensory capabilities, implanted energy weapons comparable to modern antitank artillery, and subdermal armor to match.  Massive enhancements are the norm, with characters at the top of the scale capable of generating wormholes, mentally simulating a small city (which does raise the question - can an intellect capable of simulating a city simulate a city containing itself simulating a city containing itself simulating a city containing... ?  What about simulating a city containing multiple adversarial intelligence of similar strength?), and surviving reentry naked.  Uploaded intelligences and groupminds are supported during character creation.  The limits of the flesh are no longer binding.

Diceless: This one's straightforward at least.  Character generation is deterministic; you just pick your stats.  Conflict resolution is also deterministic, based on the relative stats of the opponents.

Strategic: One trouble with deterministic conflict resolution is that if you go up against a superior force, you will lose.  Strategic, then, refers to maneuvering the situation into one which favors your strengths and forces an opponent to rely on their weaknesses.  This requires intel about an opponent's abilities, which is fortunately readily available through nanotech, cold-reading social abilities, and some mentat-y story mechanics.

Story Game: Narrative mechanics abound, and the main tradeoff during character creation is that the higher your raw mechanical, technological stat-power, the less of the narrative control currency you'll be able to use.   Conflict is also resolved in a very story-game fashion, with each side inflicting complications on the other and then describing the action that resulted in those consequences.  I also really like the inclusion of Plots and Projects, which are long-term ways to influence the setting (with potential results including scientific discoveries, building a city, or shifting the beliefs of a population).

Driven by ideological conflicts: In the absence of natural threats on scales smaller than supernovae, conflict (in the narrative sense) must come primarily from interaction with one's fellow posthumans and with oneself. One of the main sets of stats each character has is Core Values, ie beliefs, which contribute substantially to his abilities.  Some Core Values are chosen, while others are inherited from a character's home culture.  A plethora of sample cultures are presented, ranging from the Cognitive Union (a society of people conditioned through their brain-computers to borglike cooperation; core values Obedience and Order) and Nanori (so full of nanites that most other cultures classify individual Nanori as weapons of mass destruction; CVs Emergence and Evolution) to Oldworlders (space-amish; CVs Tradition and Simplicity).  I really, really like a lot of these cultures (and also some of the more minor, cross-culture ideological factions); very Schismatrix, and there are some of these that part of me can point to and say "Forget wizards, I want to be that when I grow up."  These cultures are driven into conflict by their differing value-systems, and so too are PCs likely to be motivated against their opponents (and each other) by their value systems.  The rules note at one point that PCs are sufficiently powerful that often the question isn't "can we do X?" so much as "how can we do X in a manner in accordance with (all of) our beliefs?"

Overall, I'm pretty impressed.  Like Sine Nomine's Stars Without Number, this is definitely a science fiction game written by a well-read fan of the genre for other fans of the genre.  Unlike SWN, though, SE2 is essentially optimistic on every level, breaking with both gaming tradition and common science fiction tropes to celebrate a mostly-bright future that feels foreign enough to be plausible.

Other things: as noted on the rpgnow page, this is sort of a beta; the art's not done.  There were some typos but nothing Mongoose-grade.  The organization wasn't great; I'm not sure starting with character generation was the right choice for a game so off the beaten path, mechanically.  I had a lot of questions while building a sample character for the first time which were eventually answered by reading the rest of the book, but which were not immediately obvious.  Could use a sort of conceptual glossary up front maybe?  The five universes (sort of starting conditions in terms of inter-civilization relations) are pretty good; I really liked The Divide (bit of a spy-thriller milieu) and Sublight.  I'm conflicted about the organization of universes vs cultures; universes came first, which meant that I had to infer / gradually pick up data about the civilizations mentioned.  This is either a triumph of "show instead of tell" or a failure of organization, and I can't decide which.  A number of pieces of very short (almost all <1 page) fiction are present in the universes and civilization descriptions; I enjoyed most of the ones I read, and they contributed to the "showing" of civilizations, but they definitely increased the pagecount by a bit in a book that was already not short for the degree of mechanical complexity in the system.  The last 10% of the book is designer's notes, including a chart of "if you alter this subsystem, you should expect changes to cascade to these other subsystems", which is glorious.

Review conclusion: It's been a long time since I gamed, but I kinda want to run this.

Board Games V: Pathfinder Adventures Card Game, Alchemists, Pandemic

And lo, there were games!

Pathfinder Adventures Card Game (hereafter PACG): Jared picked this up recently and was very excited to play it.  It was interesting and fairly fun if not what he expected (something closer to Sentinels).  Six locations, four PCs.  Each location and each character has a deck; a PC's deck represents their available HP, and their hand provides them resources for exploring locations.  Each location deck contains monsters, obstacles, loot, and either a henchman or the adventure's villain.  Defeating a henchman closes the location where it was found, which means that no further exploration there is possible and the villain cannot flee there if he is defeated.  If you defeat the villain without closing all the locations, he gets shuffled into a random one, along with divine blessings in the remaining locations.  It's possible to temporarily close a location when the villain is defeated if you have a party member there, which encourages the party to spread out; our D&D mentality and some of the mechanics (bard's support ability, ability to pass cards to other players at same location) encouraged us to bunch up, two players at each of two locations.  We fought the villain twice before we ran out of time (there's a turn limit), and because we were concentrated we were unable to close many locations to him.  As a result, we lost.

There is a campaign mode, where you alter your character's deck over iterated games (and also alter your character's limits on certain types of cards in your deck; ie, I had a ranger, and with sufficient experience I could gain access to spell cards).  I think there's some promise in the deckbuilding aspect of the game, but I'm not sure I'd want to play a proper campaign; there's a lot missing compared to the RPG experience.  Fun, but not the same sort of fun.

Alchemists: Took a benadryl before this and was pretty fuzzy; came in last by a fair margin.  Oh well.  It seems the meta has developed since last I played, with lots of turn-3 debunks where the debunker didn't actually know if they were correct, and used it to gain information.  There was some discussion of playing Master Mode next time, where this is not feasible.

Pandemic: An unforeseen chain outbreak in Asia got us.  So it goes.