I recall that the cast-commentary on Serenity described the ship as "another character", and we see this reflected sometimes in Traveller. There was also a saying, back in Tribes 1 (I swear I'm not actually this old), that the missile turret on Raindance was the 11th man on a 10-man team.
Got to thinking, maybe we ought to treat domains more like we treat ships in Traveller.
In Traveller, the party as a whole has a ship. Sure, there is one guy who, practically-speaking, is in charge of managing most of the paperwork. You can get by with just a pilot, but in practice you want a pilot, an engineer, an astrogator, and a gunner or two for the whole thing to work.
What if domains were like that?
The party as a whole has a domain. The player with the highest paperwork tolerance is probably in charge of dealing with most of the numbers, and you can get away with just one character running it, but in practice you really want a full party, fighter-wizard-thief-cleric team to run a single domain.
This approach is somewhat internally-consistent with ACKS' assumptions; if you assume that most domains come into being via adventurers clearing territory, then you'd expect to see that enshrined in their origin myths and the structure of their institutions. The normal way for things to be run in this world is a council of oligarchs, one from each of the Four Estates (nobility, burghers, church, and wizard's tower - yes, I am absolutely stealing from EU4's Cossacks DLC. It's a good idea.). Moreover, each estate expects its representative to be independent, not a henchman of some other estate's representative. Per The Art of Not Being Governed, a fifth "hill tribes" estate willing to follow explorers, barbarians, and shamans might be worth adding. A domain's dwarven population might want a dwarven oligarch; likewise elves.
Estates have morale/loyalty scores instead of the domain as a whole having a morale score. Loyal estates give you good stuff, mostly usable by the classtype that is supposed to lead them (eg, divine power, arcane research stuff, troops, offensive hijink capability / reach), while disloyal estates cause trouble (the church foments peasant uprising against reprobate leaders, the burghers hire assassins, &c). You also need multiple estates cooperating to keep things running smoothly - nobles for garrison, burghers for cash+market, and divine for disaster-resistance, at a minimum. As a result, having a party split up into many tiny personal domains means that each will have a great deal of trouble, while uniting as a single domain reaps rewards.
Might also be worth assigning estates a strength score, affecting their ability to cause trouble as well as their ability to provide benefits; the priests cannot foment a rebellion if that have all been killed, but likewise there will be nobody to buy a Restore Life and Limb from (market class for divine spellcasting reduced to VI). Strong, loyal burghers pay lots of taxes, but strong, disloyal burghers have lots of money to hire assassins (per-season per-estate random event rolls, modified by estate loyalty, anyone?).
The ACKSiest approach would be to track estate strength numerically with families. I recall reading that historically, about 90% of the population farmed, supporting the remaining 10% who specialized. This is reflected in the default assumptions about the urban population fraction in ACKS (though there it's actually 90.9% and 9.09%, which is a pain in the ass). Taking the "no land area, only families" simplified domain approach I postulated here, when you gain families, you place them under the administration of one of the estates, which is then responsible for extracting labor, taxes, and such from them and yielding some benefits to its oligarch and the realm as a whole.
The noble / feudal estate provides a knight and his retinue for every 10 families under its administration (the ACKS-math works, with demographics of heroism providing 1 2nd-level character per 50 people, which is 10 families), as well as providing garrison for the realm and labor and materials to build and maintain strongholds. The burgher population determines market class, as well as providing labor and maintenance for a navy, which generates trade income in peacetime and can transport and supply military units during wartime. Families laboring for the church generate divine power, which can be used for realm-scale blessings, averting disasters like plague, and personal research. They also support paladins, although at a lower rate than feudal families support knights. Wizards are trickier; we want to both provide a benefit to the domain as a whole, as well as to the mage-oligarch personally. Monsters and magic items are hideously expensive and not super effective, but if ever there were a time and place to train wizards in mass-combat quantities, it would be a prince-wizardric (existing within a larger domain, like the prince-bishropics of the Holy Roman Empire). Such an organized enclave would also maintain libraries and labs, and possibly a repository of spells. The hillfolk are unruly and pay very little tribute to the realm, instead redirecting their economic surplus into population growth. They're a good source of light/skirmish mercenary units, though. There are a lot of things dwarves could provide, including siege weaponry, heavy infantry, fortress maintenance, high-quality nonmagical equipment (gunpowder?), and loans from the vaults. Elves have mass-combat spellswords and top-tier archers (possibly spellsword archers?), and are a source for monstrous mounts (giant eagles, gryphons).
I guess one of the goals of this, in addition to bringing the party together on one domain by design and eliminating the need for hex-mapping, is to make domains give you tools, weapons, stuff-you-can-use, rather than just cash. All too often in previous domain play, players had cash but needed mercs. Having families provide less cash, but also obligated troops, helps address this problem. Also, cash is boring, troops are fun. Eliminating hexmapping also opens up more possibilities for the low-level domain game, because you no longer have such strict requirements for clearing hexes and claiming land. If you're third level and you have ten families in your 30-acre "domain", you can start getting troops out of them very early. Further, switching to just tracking families under nebulous governing institutions removes the need for deep NPC-trees. It's absolutely unrealistic for modeling Medieval Europe, where governance was intensely personal, but man it would make life easier for me (provided a decent spreadsheet to manage all the stuff that domains provide - then it's just "they're a very militaristic realm of 10k families with medium priests, weak burghers, and no wizards, call it a 50% feudal, 30% church, 20% city split on population, so that gives 500 knights, 500 squires, and a thousand pikemen led by an 8th-level fighter, 150 paladins led by a 7th-level cleric, and a class IV small city market run by a 7th-level thief, with a fleet of one small galley and three large sailing ships. Boom done, go invade it already, and take their families for yourself."). It is also a better fit psychologically for my players (and possibly non-historian players more generally), who typically expect impersonal states with a couple of figureheads at the top and aren't huge on the courtier game.
Saturday, March 11, 2017
Saturday, March 4, 2017
Simple Fumble, Mortal Wounds, and Resurrection Tables
I mentioned before that fumbles are a very normal part of real-life combat. So here is a very simple fumble ruleset:
On a natural 1 on an attack roll, save vs paralysis. On a failure, roll a d6 on the following table:
On a natural 1 on an attack roll, save vs paralysis. On a failure, roll a d6 on the following table:
- Fall prone
- Off-balance, flat-footed until your next action
- Drop weapon
- Injure self for half of attack's damage
- Attack another, randomly-determined nearby target
- Roll twice, ignoring identical results
While I'm at it, may as well address a few complaints with ACKS' tables...
Simpler Mortal Wounds:
- Very dead, -1 to resurrection roll if your compatriots bother hauling your parts out in a bag
- Pretty dead
- Only mostly dead, +1 bonus to resurrection roll
- Minor permanent injuries; some big scars, some teeth, a couple fingers, probably a penalty to reaction rolls. Pick a result from the actual table that you find amusing. Also in shock (as 5).
- Mission-killed, in shock or severe concussion, 1HP but not fit to fight or cast and probably needs a minder to get out of the dungeon, but going to be OK.
- KO / minor concussion, get back up with 1HP.
Roll 1d4+1. Add 1 if Con 18, subtract 1 if Con 3. Add 1 if checked by a medic within one combat round, subtract 1 if receive no medical treatment within a day. Add 1 if 0 or more HP after magical healing, subtract 1 if negative HP >= half of normal max HP. Treat results >6 as 6, <1 as 1. Optionally, you can take one non-spellcasting action after being struck down at the cost of a -1 penalty on your eventual mortal wounds roll.
Simpler Restore Life and Limb:
- No return, not even miracle.
- Restless Spirit - You don't make it back, but at any point in the future your ghost can appear to do something important during play (with stats as they were when you died, but max HP and full spells). You can only come back for one session, and then you're done and out permanently. Make it count.
- Eurydice - Somebody's going to have to go to hell and drag you out. Since your friends couldn't keep you from dying on the prime material, they're probably not up for storming the brimstone gates, and you might just have to make a deal with a devil instead.
- Quest - The resurrecting deity demands that you undertake a quest in return for being allowed to return to life. Failure to complete it (or at least convince said deity that you're making progress) within a year and a day will result in your prompt and thorough unresurrection.
- Something goes weird. Pick a result from the RL&L table that you and/or the DM find amusing and not totally crippling.
- Scott-Free, except for a little memory loss around the time of death (hence no earned XP from the expedition).
Roll 1d4+1. Add 1 if Wis 18, subtract 1 if Wis 3. Add 1 if performed by 12th+ level cleric, subtract 1 if not performed in a sanctified place. Treat results >6 as 6, <1 as 1.
Saturday, February 25, 2017
Mad Ramblings - Wargames, Dreamworlds, Nihilism, Sandboxes
This is not a well-structured, carefully-pruned, cohesive post.
Sometimes I think the game I really want to be running is not D&D, a fantasy RPG with dungeoneering, but a fantasy campaign skirmish wargame. Ditch hitpoints, switch to single-digit numbers of Warhammer-style wounds, use an armor save instead of AC, and make characters largely replaceable. Remove character detail, improve speed-in-play, perhaps increase tactical detail (as discussed back in Starmada, there's a big difference between character-creation complexity and tactical complexity). A lot of this would just be nice on the DM side - I don't want to think about how many HP this goblin has. It's 1HD, it has 1 wound, done. A shift to wargaming mentality also does some interesting things for party composition; each player builds a warband from some fixed pool of resources. "Just one sixth-level wizard with no henchmen" and "a big pile of second-level fighters" both become valid, interoperable ways to play.
The primeval purpose of play, as seen in young animals, is training, for food acquisition, mating-fights, or flight. What are we training for? With a wargame it's pretty clear. With D&D it's much less so. Maybe we're training for everything, but when you defend everything, you defend nothing.
On the other hand, rather than "I want to run D&D as a wargame", it may be more true that I seem to always end up running D&D as a wargame, and making systemic changes would make my life easier, but not more satisfying. I'm not really sure why my games seem to keep ending up as wargames. I think I enjoy the tactical challenge of actually giving players a good fight (and a good fright). I also feel that I have lost confidence in the quality of my creative output, leaving tactics as the only place I'm willing to go nuts. The well feels dry more than it used to. Part of this, I suspect, is that I've basically stopped consuming fantasy media. The last fantasy book I read was Wizard of Earthsea about a year ago (I did read Beowulf and finally finished the Saga of Burnt Njal this winter, but those doesn't quite count). In terms of videogames, I think the only fantasy stuff I've played in the last year was Skyrim (lousy) and Hammerwatch (arcade, empty). Skyrim was a strong contributing factor to launching the last campaign, actually - "If as many people loved Skyrim as seemed to, the bar must be lower than I thought; maybe I should give it another shot." In any case, not much fantasy input, not much to remix and quietly steal. I tried tapping dreams and hypnagogic hallucinations - that's how we ended up with a mad city-dungeon open to the endless void of space, showered by metal shavings from the decrepit cosmic engine that burns the souls of the damned to spin the earth. No seriously, that's where the copper pieces came from - they fell out of the sky and into the dungeon as the engine ground itself towards inevitable failure and the End of Days. Really the embarrassing part is that I put something as mundane as ratmen in such a place.
Reflecting on that, I was remiss to omit that I began reading Kill Six Billion Demons some time last summer, and I greatly enjoyed its Planescape-ness, its strangeness. Still do. So I suppose perhaps that influenced me more than I thought, but I put my own spin (ie, Warhammer-esque) on it, and thereby took most of the strangeness right out of it.
What I have been reading has been mostly history and sociology, which are relevant to D&D but not in useful ways. D&D (and RPGs generally) are fundamentally based around emulating stories; myth, legend, books, movies. I have gotten very skeptical, suspicious, of stories. Stories simplify the very complex into nice simple causal chains. A good story is always simpler than the reality of the situation; it's an authorial duty to cut out parts, to simplify for human consumption (Venkatesh Rao argues in a very roundabout way that all human organizations are based on such simplifications, claiming that leaders create simplifying myths for their underlings to live within). Making wilderness illegible, or making running a domain hard because of historically-reasonable administrative information shortages, is not conducive to producing any sort of resonant narrative. They're interesting thought experiments, but probably terrible in practice. Which is a better story, the one that people all know, that riffs off of will resonate with them: Arthur and the Sword in the Stone, or King William and the Census?
At any rate, I suspect my nonfiction reading has made me a worse ACKS DM. Played in a more typical D&D fashion ("band of roving murderers saves kingdom"), things like administrative information shortages could be turned into reasonable narratives, but when it comes to players looking at rulership, it gets mighty tedious to have to maintain both a true set of information for my own use, and a plausible false set of information to feed players. In the case of an NPC governor deceiving an NPC king, I don't have to do the latter. Frankly I have little desire to do the former anymore either. I need all of my paperwork tolerance for taxes this season.
You know what else I'm starting to hate? Character levels. Having mechanical advancement be a thing that the system does means that players (well OK, people like me and my players) will aggressively optimize for it. ACKS has this problem where the level of risk you have to take in order to make enough money to level at any sort of reasonable* pace results in levels being attritted away by casualties faster than they are earned. I like the exponential XP curve; I really do. It means that you can bring in 1st-level guys and they catch up, provided that any XP at all is being earned. Domain XP breaks this, by providing XP only to the high-level characters in the party, and leads to the gap opening rather than closing. The real problem with the OSR's XP curves (for us) is that they're build to support loooong-haul campaigns that run for multiple years of real-time. That's something that we never do; in the six month duration of my typical ACKS campaign, players tend to get from 3rd or 4th level to 7th or 8th level. Calibrated on 3.x, my players are frustrated by this slow progression and unwilling to take the sort of risks required to accelerate it. ACKS dangles the domain carrot, of safe monthly gold and XP, and they really want to skip getting beaten with the wilderness stick (having labeled it as a poor risk-reward balance previously). This is frustrating for me, because I feel that we haven't even scratched the surface of wilderness play (for example, tactics in the wilderness), while I find domain play tedious / boring so far. It's kind of funny if you interpret it in a certain light: as adolescents the fantasy was to kill the dragon and win the princess, but as adults the fantasy is to be the guy at the top of the hierarchy who collects taxes from the safety of his castle while other people do the dying and the dirty work. I miss Tim's meandering / anti-domain style of play. Probably I should switch to some other retroclone, but I suspect my current playerbase (such as it is) has been accumulated in part by the allure of domains.
It would be an interesting experiment to bring a bunch of PCs in at low domain level (8th or 9th or so) and say "OK that's it, no leveling, all advancement will be Traveller-style through gear and hirelings and domains and achieving ends-in-the-world" (or just lower the level cap to 9th across the board...). I've also been thinking about how poorly the leveling system as it currently exists does at supporting common narrative tropes. The characters who start the weakest, the farmboy and the squire, have the greatest potential, while the characters to start strong, the knight and the wizard, rarely gain. Lancelot and Merlin and Han Solo never get any stronger; Arthur and Luke do (though I guess this could also be interpreted as a game with a lower level cap). What if you had the option to start at a higher level, but your maximum level was lowered accordingly? This is a much more interesting use of level limits than demihumans; make it correlate with age at the beginning of the campaign. Starting older gives you XP, but limits the new tricks your old dog can learn. What if henchmen simply couldn't outlevel their masters - they could continue accumulating XP, but without adequate mentorship, they can never reach their full potential. There are lots of interesting things to try in this space.
In any case, stopping or capping leveling suddenly introduces a gaping existential hole - why play? I had hoped that ACKS, by making the domain game mechanical and providing XP for interacting with it, would encourage players to interact with the world on non-mechanical terms. This was foolish; if you have mechanics for interacting with something, it will be interacted with mechanically at the exclusion of non-mechanical interactions (for another example, see 3.x Diplomacy hacks). This is the underlying logical crux of the OSR's "rulings, not rules" stance, and its opposition to skill systems. It also relates back to old thoughts on reliability and aim-of-playing, which loops back to "why play?". Last spring, when I quit, I had been reading Interaction Ritual Chains, which discusses the process by which sacredness is manufactured through ritual (by which is meant routine, roughly-weekly interactions where a set of participants gather, isolated from the rest of the world, and waste resources). I observed that this description fit the weekly D&D game perfectly, and was left very conflicted and disturbed about it all. It left me asking "why do we really play? Sure we have our surface reasons, that we like to kill monsters and gain levels, but is there another level of motivations underneath it where we value the game in itself?" I observed that this potential treatment of the game as lightly-sacred was consistent with my behavior on one occasion, where I wrecked my bike on the way home from work and wasn't sure whether I'd sprained or broken my wrist, but went to run the weekly ACKS instead of to the hospital (I ended up there the next morning when the pain woke me up at 0430). That is not the sort of thing that rational self-interested actors do. Past-me is an idiot and the ACKS ritual made me so. There is something weird going on here. There is also a conflict between Interaction Ritual Chains and Rao's schema here, in that Rao doesn't believe that the organizing myth-makers get caught up in their own myths. When I was reading Interaction Ritual Chains, I was elated, that now I understood how to create values, and the keys to power, to binding man, were in my grasp. It was not until later that I realized that I could not help but become caught in those values myself, at which point I destroyed all of my social rituals (except the inescapable lunchtime at the office) and strove for hermit-hood, moral freedom, and the rejection of fantasy. Success has been mixed; habits, personal rituals, are hard to break, and it is draining work.
I did not viscerally understand nihilism / moral relativism until Interaction Ritual Chains showed me how the sacred sausage is made. It is one thing to be told "all morality is constructed", and another to be told exactly how it is constructed and at what cost. I'm still not sure what to do with that information. I suppose I can link this back to the bit above about leveling by noting that removing explicit / absolute mechanical objectives (like XP / leveling) is killing god (to borrow Nietzsche's phrase and meaning) and exposing the players to that same paralyzing freedom, of "all is permitted but nothing matters; freedom, and futility, are the only absolutes." This ties back to the article by Rao, where political leadership requires simplifying political realities for human consumption. It is also true that moral leadership generally requires simplifying moral realities for human consumption. XP and reward system is essentially a moral choice (albeit a laughably small one), and delegating that choice down onto players is probably not what they're looking for. They are here to play a game, to escape the spirit of gravity and the burdens of life, maybe for some occasional catharsis, but not to stare into the abyss. Sandboxing in general has this problem.
One reasonable response, though, is that while the sacredness of moral norms may be an emergent property of social organizations rather than a reflection of any cosmic significance, that doesn't invalidate their usefulness. Sacredness and morality formation are a mechanism for something (probably social cohesion and ingroup predictability) - if they weren't worth their cost in "wasted" resources, they wouldn't have emerged over and over again, in every society across human history. Now granted, they may provide a fitness advantage to societies in competition with each other rather than to the individuals within those societies, who are materially poorer as a result of ritual expenditures (but the success of those individuals' genes and memes over the long term is tied to that of the society in which they live). In any case, my response, cutting out all sacredness without really reflecting on its function, was like that of the D&D3.0 group that removes attacks of opportunity or the XP cost from creating magic items, or bans grappling because it's complicated, without understanding the effects that these will have on the system (spellcasters even more overpowered than normal). Chesterton's Fence applies here:
But enough of that.
I also miss the competitive-cooperative nature of the first ACKS campaign. I've been reading some game theory stuff lately and there is a category of "non-fixed sum" games that describes observed player behavior during that campaign well. It also helped that there were a variety of vigorously-argued value-systems / player utility functions present in that campaign, rather than a tacit convergence on the "whatever maximizes GP/XP" utility function that I see more now. There's no playfulness anymore, and this is probably my fault for setting lethality high and leveling so slow. I keep hoping that we'll hit the point of fatalist playfulness - "we're all going to die, so better to die for something, heroically or entertainingly, rather than waiting for the eventually-inevitable lame, random, or cowardly death" - but I think character advancement, and specifically the risk of falling behind the rest of the party, discourages this. So I suppose there is still some competition, but it's boring, tacit competition that drives inaction, rather than entertaining competition that drives action.
I've come to the conclusion that the Death and Dismemberment table just isn't worth it. It's funny about 10% of the time. The other 90% of the time it just sucks - either you get an injury that doesn't matter for your class, or you get one that does and then you repeat the same "hope for effects that don't matter" procedure on the RL&L table. If I were to build a new one, I'd probably just make it a roll between "mission killed" (out of action for the rest of this adventure), "multi-mission killed" (out of action for a couple adventures), and "campaign killed" (maybe there's enough left of you to retire, but your adventuring days are done), and leave details up to players. I really want to make the bedrest mechanic work. It seems like a good way to encourage players to maintain stables of characters and to swap out for mission requirements. It sort of works for henchmen, but if a PC is out for bedrest, adventuring is often delayed, because playing a henchman risks being outleveled and because PCs are the highest level (hence most useful) and missing out on XP for a PC means falling behind on already-glacial leveling.
In conclusion: great dissatisfaction!
Sometimes I think the game I really want to be running is not D&D, a fantasy RPG with dungeoneering, but a fantasy campaign skirmish wargame. Ditch hitpoints, switch to single-digit numbers of Warhammer-style wounds, use an armor save instead of AC, and make characters largely replaceable. Remove character detail, improve speed-in-play, perhaps increase tactical detail (as discussed back in Starmada, there's a big difference between character-creation complexity and tactical complexity). A lot of this would just be nice on the DM side - I don't want to think about how many HP this goblin has. It's 1HD, it has 1 wound, done. A shift to wargaming mentality also does some interesting things for party composition; each player builds a warband from some fixed pool of resources. "Just one sixth-level wizard with no henchmen" and "a big pile of second-level fighters" both become valid, interoperable ways to play.
The primeval purpose of play, as seen in young animals, is training, for food acquisition, mating-fights, or flight. What are we training for? With a wargame it's pretty clear. With D&D it's much less so. Maybe we're training for everything, but when you defend everything, you defend nothing.
On the other hand, rather than "I want to run D&D as a wargame", it may be more true that I seem to always end up running D&D as a wargame, and making systemic changes would make my life easier, but not more satisfying. I'm not really sure why my games seem to keep ending up as wargames. I think I enjoy the tactical challenge of actually giving players a good fight (and a good fright). I also feel that I have lost confidence in the quality of my creative output, leaving tactics as the only place I'm willing to go nuts. The well feels dry more than it used to. Part of this, I suspect, is that I've basically stopped consuming fantasy media. The last fantasy book I read was Wizard of Earthsea about a year ago (I did read Beowulf and finally finished the Saga of Burnt Njal this winter, but those doesn't quite count). In terms of videogames, I think the only fantasy stuff I've played in the last year was Skyrim (lousy) and Hammerwatch (arcade, empty). Skyrim was a strong contributing factor to launching the last campaign, actually - "If as many people loved Skyrim as seemed to, the bar must be lower than I thought; maybe I should give it another shot." In any case, not much fantasy input, not much to remix and quietly steal. I tried tapping dreams and hypnagogic hallucinations - that's how we ended up with a mad city-dungeon open to the endless void of space, showered by metal shavings from the decrepit cosmic engine that burns the souls of the damned to spin the earth. No seriously, that's where the copper pieces came from - they fell out of the sky and into the dungeon as the engine ground itself towards inevitable failure and the End of Days. Really the embarrassing part is that I put something as mundane as ratmen in such a place.
Reflecting on that, I was remiss to omit that I began reading Kill Six Billion Demons some time last summer, and I greatly enjoyed its Planescape-ness, its strangeness. Still do. So I suppose perhaps that influenced me more than I thought, but I put my own spin (ie, Warhammer-esque) on it, and thereby took most of the strangeness right out of it.
What I have been reading has been mostly history and sociology, which are relevant to D&D but not in useful ways. D&D (and RPGs generally) are fundamentally based around emulating stories; myth, legend, books, movies. I have gotten very skeptical, suspicious, of stories. Stories simplify the very complex into nice simple causal chains. A good story is always simpler than the reality of the situation; it's an authorial duty to cut out parts, to simplify for human consumption (Venkatesh Rao argues in a very roundabout way that all human organizations are based on such simplifications, claiming that leaders create simplifying myths for their underlings to live within). Making wilderness illegible, or making running a domain hard because of historically-reasonable administrative information shortages, is not conducive to producing any sort of resonant narrative. They're interesting thought experiments, but probably terrible in practice. Which is a better story, the one that people all know, that riffs off of will resonate with them: Arthur and the Sword in the Stone, or King William and the Census?
At any rate, I suspect my nonfiction reading has made me a worse ACKS DM. Played in a more typical D&D fashion ("band of roving murderers saves kingdom"), things like administrative information shortages could be turned into reasonable narratives, but when it comes to players looking at rulership, it gets mighty tedious to have to maintain both a true set of information for my own use, and a plausible false set of information to feed players. In the case of an NPC governor deceiving an NPC king, I don't have to do the latter. Frankly I have little desire to do the former anymore either. I need all of my paperwork tolerance for taxes this season.
You know what else I'm starting to hate? Character levels. Having mechanical advancement be a thing that the system does means that players (well OK, people like me and my players) will aggressively optimize for it. ACKS has this problem where the level of risk you have to take in order to make enough money to level at any sort of reasonable* pace results in levels being attritted away by casualties faster than they are earned. I like the exponential XP curve; I really do. It means that you can bring in 1st-level guys and they catch up, provided that any XP at all is being earned. Domain XP breaks this, by providing XP only to the high-level characters in the party, and leads to the gap opening rather than closing. The real problem with the OSR's XP curves (for us) is that they're build to support loooong-haul campaigns that run for multiple years of real-time. That's something that we never do; in the six month duration of my typical ACKS campaign, players tend to get from 3rd or 4th level to 7th or 8th level. Calibrated on 3.x, my players are frustrated by this slow progression and unwilling to take the sort of risks required to accelerate it. ACKS dangles the domain carrot, of safe monthly gold and XP, and they really want to skip getting beaten with the wilderness stick (having labeled it as a poor risk-reward balance previously). This is frustrating for me, because I feel that we haven't even scratched the surface of wilderness play (for example, tactics in the wilderness), while I find domain play tedious / boring so far. It's kind of funny if you interpret it in a certain light: as adolescents the fantasy was to kill the dragon and win the princess, but as adults the fantasy is to be the guy at the top of the hierarchy who collects taxes from the safety of his castle while other people do the dying and the dirty work. I miss Tim's meandering / anti-domain style of play. Probably I should switch to some other retroclone, but I suspect my current playerbase (such as it is) has been accumulated in part by the allure of domains.
It would be an interesting experiment to bring a bunch of PCs in at low domain level (8th or 9th or so) and say "OK that's it, no leveling, all advancement will be Traveller-style through gear and hirelings and domains and achieving ends-in-the-world" (or just lower the level cap to 9th across the board...). I've also been thinking about how poorly the leveling system as it currently exists does at supporting common narrative tropes. The characters who start the weakest, the farmboy and the squire, have the greatest potential, while the characters to start strong, the knight and the wizard, rarely gain. Lancelot and Merlin and Han Solo never get any stronger; Arthur and Luke do (though I guess this could also be interpreted as a game with a lower level cap). What if you had the option to start at a higher level, but your maximum level was lowered accordingly? This is a much more interesting use of level limits than demihumans; make it correlate with age at the beginning of the campaign. Starting older gives you XP, but limits the new tricks your old dog can learn. What if henchmen simply couldn't outlevel their masters - they could continue accumulating XP, but without adequate mentorship, they can never reach their full potential. There are lots of interesting things to try in this space.
In any case, stopping or capping leveling suddenly introduces a gaping existential hole - why play? I had hoped that ACKS, by making the domain game mechanical and providing XP for interacting with it, would encourage players to interact with the world on non-mechanical terms. This was foolish; if you have mechanics for interacting with something, it will be interacted with mechanically at the exclusion of non-mechanical interactions (for another example, see 3.x Diplomacy hacks). This is the underlying logical crux of the OSR's "rulings, not rules" stance, and its opposition to skill systems. It also relates back to old thoughts on reliability and aim-of-playing, which loops back to "why play?". Last spring, when I quit, I had been reading Interaction Ritual Chains, which discusses the process by which sacredness is manufactured through ritual (by which is meant routine, roughly-weekly interactions where a set of participants gather, isolated from the rest of the world, and waste resources). I observed that this description fit the weekly D&D game perfectly, and was left very conflicted and disturbed about it all. It left me asking "why do we really play? Sure we have our surface reasons, that we like to kill monsters and gain levels, but is there another level of motivations underneath it where we value the game in itself?" I observed that this potential treatment of the game as lightly-sacred was consistent with my behavior on one occasion, where I wrecked my bike on the way home from work and wasn't sure whether I'd sprained or broken my wrist, but went to run the weekly ACKS instead of to the hospital (I ended up there the next morning when the pain woke me up at 0430). That is not the sort of thing that rational self-interested actors do. Past-me is an idiot and the ACKS ritual made me so. There is something weird going on here. There is also a conflict between Interaction Ritual Chains and Rao's schema here, in that Rao doesn't believe that the organizing myth-makers get caught up in their own myths. When I was reading Interaction Ritual Chains, I was elated, that now I understood how to create values, and the keys to power, to binding man, were in my grasp. It was not until later that I realized that I could not help but become caught in those values myself, at which point I destroyed all of my social rituals (except the inescapable lunchtime at the office) and strove for hermit-hood, moral freedom, and the rejection of fantasy. Success has been mixed; habits, personal rituals, are hard to break, and it is draining work.
I did not viscerally understand nihilism / moral relativism until Interaction Ritual Chains showed me how the sacred sausage is made. It is one thing to be told "all morality is constructed", and another to be told exactly how it is constructed and at what cost. I'm still not sure what to do with that information. I suppose I can link this back to the bit above about leveling by noting that removing explicit / absolute mechanical objectives (like XP / leveling) is killing god (to borrow Nietzsche's phrase and meaning) and exposing the players to that same paralyzing freedom, of "all is permitted but nothing matters; freedom, and futility, are the only absolutes." This ties back to the article by Rao, where political leadership requires simplifying political realities for human consumption. It is also true that moral leadership generally requires simplifying moral realities for human consumption. XP and reward system is essentially a moral choice (albeit a laughably small one), and delegating that choice down onto players is probably not what they're looking for. They are here to play a game, to escape the spirit of gravity and the burdens of life, maybe for some occasional catharsis, but not to stare into the abyss. Sandboxing in general has this problem.
One reasonable response, though, is that while the sacredness of moral norms may be an emergent property of social organizations rather than a reflection of any cosmic significance, that doesn't invalidate their usefulness. Sacredness and morality formation are a mechanism for something (probably social cohesion and ingroup predictability) - if they weren't worth their cost in "wasted" resources, they wouldn't have emerged over and over again, in every society across human history. Now granted, they may provide a fitness advantage to societies in competition with each other rather than to the individuals within those societies, who are materially poorer as a result of ritual expenditures (but the success of those individuals' genes and memes over the long term is tied to that of the society in which they live). In any case, my response, cutting out all sacredness without really reflecting on its function, was like that of the D&D3.0 group that removes attacks of opportunity or the XP cost from creating magic items, or bans grappling because it's complicated, without understanding the effects that these will have on the system (spellcasters even more overpowered than normal). Chesterton's Fence applies here:
In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it."
But enough of that.
I also miss the competitive-cooperative nature of the first ACKS campaign. I've been reading some game theory stuff lately and there is a category of "non-fixed sum" games that describes observed player behavior during that campaign well. It also helped that there were a variety of vigorously-argued value-systems / player utility functions present in that campaign, rather than a tacit convergence on the "whatever maximizes GP/XP" utility function that I see more now. There's no playfulness anymore, and this is probably my fault for setting lethality high and leveling so slow. I keep hoping that we'll hit the point of fatalist playfulness - "we're all going to die, so better to die for something, heroically or entertainingly, rather than waiting for the eventually-inevitable lame, random, or cowardly death" - but I think character advancement, and specifically the risk of falling behind the rest of the party, discourages this. So I suppose there is still some competition, but it's boring, tacit competition that drives inaction, rather than entertaining competition that drives action.
I've come to the conclusion that the Death and Dismemberment table just isn't worth it. It's funny about 10% of the time. The other 90% of the time it just sucks - either you get an injury that doesn't matter for your class, or you get one that does and then you repeat the same "hope for effects that don't matter" procedure on the RL&L table. If I were to build a new one, I'd probably just make it a roll between "mission killed" (out of action for the rest of this adventure), "multi-mission killed" (out of action for a couple adventures), and "campaign killed" (maybe there's enough left of you to retire, but your adventuring days are done), and leave details up to players. I really want to make the bedrest mechanic work. It seems like a good way to encourage players to maintain stables of characters and to swap out for mission requirements. It sort of works for henchmen, but if a PC is out for bedrest, adventuring is often delayed, because playing a henchman risks being outleveled and because PCs are the highest level (hence most useful) and missing out on XP for a PC means falling behind on already-glacial leveling.
In conclusion: great dissatisfaction!
Sunday, February 19, 2017
Dark Souls and Dungeon Design
Instead of doing anything productive this weekend, so far I've mostly been watching Joseph Anderson's youtube channel of videogame criticism. I found his videos on the Dark Souls series quite interesting. Figured I might as well extend my procrastination by blogging about it.
Caveat 1: I have never played any of the Dark Souls games, and it seems unlikely that I will any time soon. Everything I know about Dark Souls has come second-hand from Anderson. This is both good and bad.
Caveat 2: Given that it is hardly new, other OSR bloggers have probably already beaten it to death. It sounds like something The Delvers might've talked about. But, I do not care.
Here are some things that stuck out to me from Anderson's videos:
Caveat 1: I have never played any of the Dark Souls games, and it seems unlikely that I will any time soon. Everything I know about Dark Souls has come second-hand from Anderson. This is both good and bad.
Caveat 2: Given that it is hardly new, other OSR bloggers have probably already beaten it to death. It sounds like something The Delvers might've talked about. But, I do not care.
Here are some things that stuck out to me from Anderson's videos:
- Jayquaying - The sections of Dark Souls 1 that Anderson praises heavily are mostly thoroughly-jayquayed environments. He rags on DS2 for switching to largely linear levels, and then has mixed praise for DS3 in this regard. He notes that DS1 was jayquayed on two scales - both in local environments (eg, multiple paths and routes through a town), and in connections between environments (with links between, say, town and a valley full of dragons by way of both an aboveground road and a magma-filled cave below the mountains). DS3 did a good job of jayquaying on the small scale, but not at the large scale. Varying the level of jayquaying in megadungeon zones is an interesting possibility of looking at things this way - the megadungeon can have a nonlinear, loopful superstructure, with zones varying in their degree of nonlinearity. It also expresses one of the problems I had with Rathell - the zone itself had an extremely nonlinear / loop-heavy microstructure, but the overstructure of the dungeon it was supposed to be a part of didn't (at all).
- Resource model - DS1 provided the player with pretty limited healing resources that could be restored by resting at selected "bonfire" locations, which also respawned all of the enemies in the level. This leads to an expeditionary playstyle that sounds very similar to what we expect to see in the OSR, but with a focus on making it to a boss - you explore a level and get to know its monsters, gradually getting good enough at traversing the area that you can make it to the boss with enough healing remaining to win that fight. DS2 added inexpensive healing-over-time items to allow players to fight larger groups of enemies, while DS3 just provided much larger pools of healing than DS1. Similar changes to resource management have taken place over the editions in D&D.
- Investment - Anderson praises Dark Souls 1's system of investing limited resources in particular bonfires, which allows them to restore additional healing resources. This is useful when there's a boss you're having trouble with; you invest in a nearby bonfire and can bring more healing resources to bear in traversing that zone and defeating that boss. This is something that it seems like low/mid-level ACKS should be able to do a lot better than it does, with PCs investing in towns as bases of operation and receiving tangible, dungeon-relevant benefits for doing so. Currently town-buyable, dungeon-relevant resources in ACKS fall into three categories: gear, personnel, and reserve XP. None of these are really tied to the town itself; they're all pretty movable. A decent approach might be to take commissioning equipment one step further and allow a lump sum to be spent to increase availability of certain types of goods permanently in that market (eg, acquire a little land, build a building, hire a guy, and establish Doctor Comfrey's Nursery and Garden Center to increase available quantities of healing herbs forever). Have half the money spent count towards urban investment, and you add another link between the mid- and late-games.
- Predictable, Preventable, Decisive Damage - Anderson claims that damage in Dark Souls is largely avoidable, because enemies telegraph their moves, which allows the player to dodge / block / parry, but that when hits land, they hurt a lot (~3 hits to a player kill, usually). This ties into the healing resource management game, where you only have to spend resources when you've made a mistake, and part of mastering a level to make it to the boss is learning the attack patterns of the enemies on that level. Decisive damage is one of the things I like about OSR D&D (on a good day), but it does less well at predictable (ergo preventable). Bad Trap Syndrome describes this issue in the context of traps, but combat damage is sort of unpredictable too - if you engage in combat without a win-button like sleep, turning, or surprise, damage is a predictable outcome, but the details are left to chance. In a sense damage predictability is more nuanced in D&D than in Dark Souls - rather than making a mistake, you're taking a risk, and instead of a binary outcome you get a distribution.
- Training Wheels - Part of the reason that Anderson claims that Dark Souls is a mostly-fair game is that things are almost always introduced in a relatively safe way before being introduced in a dangerous way. When you meet a new type of enemy, you probably only meet one of them; deeper in the area where they appear, you start meeting multiple. When you enter the trap zone, you're alerted that it's a trap zone by a low-damage arrow trap triggered by a pressure plate, and then the traps escalate from there. This process of gradual escalation that helps make damage predictable. It is also something that I, as a table-driven DM, have not been doing well.
- Shortcuts - Another part of mastering a level in Dark Souls is finding and opening shortcuts - changing the environment open shorter routes to the boss. Keys to locked doors, lowerable drawbridges, levers that move terrain, that sort of thing (one neat example was destroying structures that were shielding monsters along a route, thereby making it effectively shorter for resource conservation purposes). This is something that makes sense in jayquayed dungeons, but usually rather than opening new routes from the other side they're used to gate entirely new areas. In practice the closest my players ever came to developing a shortcut was clearing (or befriending) monsters on preliminary expeditions in order to open a route that was safe to move quickly on. The trouble with building shortcut opportunities into an OSR-style megadungeon is that what counts as a shortcut depends on where you're trying to go, and player objectives usually vary per session, so what is a critical shortcut one day is irrelevant the next. Dark Souls overcomes this with the focus on getting to the boss. But...
- Boss Monsters - Bosses are something I always hate in videogames, but in tabletop games they can actually be kind of fun. They're pretty well-supported by ACKS' worldbuilding guidelines (where every tribe has a chieftain and every warband of barbarians is led by a 9th-level fighter), and would work pretty well with megadungeon factions - kill the boss and the faction disintegrates, opening up space for others or allowing players recruit the survivors. We saw the beginnings of this emerge in Rathell, where the Marrowgnawer (5HD nonmagic-weapon-immune giant rat) served as a "boss" of sorts of a ratman tribe. As usual for D&D "bosses", Marrowgnawer died like a chump to a 3rd-level party, due in large part to...
- Action Economy - Curiously, this has been a persistent issue for the Dark Souls series too. Anderson notes that in DS1, the best fights are one-vs-one duels, while any fight of multiple nontrivial enemies versus the solo player was usually quite difficult, and led to players using dirty tricks to isolate enemies, while in DS2 additional healing was made available to make these fights workable, and in DS3 healing was mostly-reverted but other changes to the combat system were made for this reason. In D&D the same problem rears its head on the DM-side. No bosses without bodyguards (and not chump 1HP 4e minions, either...), and also no bosses that don't one-shot henchman or two-shot PC frontliners.
- Gauntlets - In addition to nonlinear exploration zones and straight-line combat slogs, Anderson notes another sort of zone / level in the Dark Souls series, characterized by testing the player's ability to deal with some sort of complication that forces the player to reconsider and adapt their tactics. Examples that he cites include a level that is heavy on harassment by ranged attackers, a level with darkness (which requires the player to use a torch instead of his shield), and a level with environmental damage-over-time. Designing megadungeon zones based not merely around cosmetics/theme but also with a particular kind of tactical challenge in mind seems like a really good idea to me, especially because the shield-phalanx has come to dominate our games (of course, precisely because the shield phalanx has come to dominate our games, players are now reluctant to enter areas that require a change in tactics).
- "Explore cautiously, fight bravely" - I'm not going to go watch all the videos again to find the section where Anderson talks about this, but he claims that Dark Souls rewards players for exploring cautiously, taking it slow and not biting off bigger encounters than they can chew, but also for playing aggressively once combat is engaged, getting inside the reach of larger enemies, rolling behind them, and backstabbing. I like this philosophy, even if I'm not sure how to produce combats that encourage it in ACKS.
Saturday, January 21, 2017
Microsandboxing
Someone asked a question about sandboxing on /r/rpg recently, and now I have the wilderness on the brain again. I have some complaints about existing mapping doctrine. In the standard ACKS doctrine, civilization is basically required to be mapped (for the domain game if nothing else), which is an awful lot of work for very little payoff because you're not adventuring there. Really all you need is populations/market classes and travel times between points of interest in civilization, because the travel itself is minimally dangerous; random encounters are likely to be civilized folks, and there are roads and signs and farmers that you can ask for directions. There aren't really any strategic choices to be made in civilized travel that benefit from the degree of detail that hexes bring. Consequently, hexmapping civilization is a tremendous waste of time for the mid-levels, and frankly you could run a reasonable (simplified, population- rather than land-focused) domain game without it too.
In the West Marches approach, by contrast, civilization is left unmapped (which is great), but there is an onus to have functionally-infinite wilderness. This likewise is neither efficient nor realistic. It isn't efficient because anything that you build that the players never reach in the course of a campaign is probably wasted (sure, you can reuse it later maybe, but how many of us actually do that consistently?). It also isn't realistic because civilization expands to fill the area that can support it. The wilderness may be big, but there's always some civilization on the other side if you're willing to travel far enough (or lower your standards for civilization a little).
Ultimately I think the "non-state spaces" notion present in James C. Scott's writing (Seeing Like a State, The Art of Not Being Governed) presents a promising opportunity. Non-state space enclaves within a state are (relatively) tiny, self-contained wilderness sandboxes that are easily reached from civilization. I've talked about Mount Rainier before, and it's a good example - one could easily take a couple of hundred square miles around a large mountain, map it in detail, fill it with hill tribes and yetis and a dragon or two, and have a small, self-contained sandbox. There's civilization on both sides of the Cascade Range (well, if you count Eastern Washington... I kid), but there's still wilderness in the mountains. In the historical D&D context, Dearthwood from the City-State of the Invincible Overlord springs to mind. It's a forest practically up against the City-State's gates, and it's full of orcs. This is a classic non-state space, and would make a perfect tiny wilderness sandbox conveniently close to a large market. That was probably the whole point of Dearthwood, from the very beginning (with the trolls of the Mermist Marshes, a little further away, comprising a higher-level microsandbox). The Isle of Dread is another good example; it's big enough to play for a couple of sessions, like a good-sized dungeon, but it's bounded and therefore manageable.
Obviously the non-state enclave isn't the only type of wilderness. Borderlands between civilized areas can be bigger, and then there are places like the Russian steppe and the American Old West that are just huge. But these are unmanageably big, both to DMs who would use them and to players who would traverse them. If I have learned two things from running the Megadungeon Full of Rats, it is that tightly theming can stimulate DM creativity but bore players, and that tightly-scoping is really important. My initial intent with the Dungeon Dimensions was not a full-page dungeon of rats; it was many small dungeons, each tightly-themed and linked. In retrospect, that might have gone better, but I got carried away with the first level. I think loosely-themed, tightly-scoped, small-scale wildernesses offer a lot of opportunity in this regard. Having two or three such microsandboxes available offers choices and ability to alleviate boredom with a particular theme by handwaved safe travel through civilization.
So what are some decent ideas for wilderness microsandboxes? Big enough to take some time to explore, small enough to be manageable to DM and to be easily reached from civilization, and evocative?
Of course, there is the distinct possibility that this is what the actual practice of sandbox wilderness play has been all along, everyone knows it but doesn't talk about it much (because talking about the West Marches is much sexier), and I'm a little slow on the uptake where grand ambitions and practical limits are concerned. Much as I learned in a recent Autarch thread on having players draw their own maps (or not, as it turns out...). In which case, this is a perfectly useful post for the "OSR Lessons Learned" file [1][2][3]. In the same way that the typical, practical OSR dungeon is not Dwimmermount or Stonehell, the typical, practical OSR wilderness is not the Wilderlands of High Fantasy.
In the West Marches approach, by contrast, civilization is left unmapped (which is great), but there is an onus to have functionally-infinite wilderness. This likewise is neither efficient nor realistic. It isn't efficient because anything that you build that the players never reach in the course of a campaign is probably wasted (sure, you can reuse it later maybe, but how many of us actually do that consistently?). It also isn't realistic because civilization expands to fill the area that can support it. The wilderness may be big, but there's always some civilization on the other side if you're willing to travel far enough (or lower your standards for civilization a little).
Ultimately I think the "non-state spaces" notion present in James C. Scott's writing (Seeing Like a State, The Art of Not Being Governed) presents a promising opportunity. Non-state space enclaves within a state are (relatively) tiny, self-contained wilderness sandboxes that are easily reached from civilization. I've talked about Mount Rainier before, and it's a good example - one could easily take a couple of hundred square miles around a large mountain, map it in detail, fill it with hill tribes and yetis and a dragon or two, and have a small, self-contained sandbox. There's civilization on both sides of the Cascade Range (well, if you count Eastern Washington... I kid), but there's still wilderness in the mountains. In the historical D&D context, Dearthwood from the City-State of the Invincible Overlord springs to mind. It's a forest practically up against the City-State's gates, and it's full of orcs. This is a classic non-state space, and would make a perfect tiny wilderness sandbox conveniently close to a large market. That was probably the whole point of Dearthwood, from the very beginning (with the trolls of the Mermist Marshes, a little further away, comprising a higher-level microsandbox). The Isle of Dread is another good example; it's big enough to play for a couple of sessions, like a good-sized dungeon, but it's bounded and therefore manageable.
Obviously the non-state enclave isn't the only type of wilderness. Borderlands between civilized areas can be bigger, and then there are places like the Russian steppe and the American Old West that are just huge. But these are unmanageably big, both to DMs who would use them and to players who would traverse them. If I have learned two things from running the Megadungeon Full of Rats, it is that tightly theming can stimulate DM creativity but bore players, and that tightly-scoping is really important. My initial intent with the Dungeon Dimensions was not a full-page dungeon of rats; it was many small dungeons, each tightly-themed and linked. In retrospect, that might have gone better, but I got carried away with the first level. I think loosely-themed, tightly-scoped, small-scale wildernesses offer a lot of opportunity in this regard. Having two or three such microsandboxes available offers choices and ability to alleviate boredom with a particular theme by handwaved safe travel through civilization.
So what are some decent ideas for wilderness microsandboxes? Big enough to take some time to explore, small enough to be manageable to DM and to be easily reached from civilization, and evocative?
- The Lonely Mountain
- Mirkwood
- Swamp of the frogmen
- Tropical island chain with walled port-city and cannibal natives in the uplands
- Wasteland
- Result of magical experimentation, Chernobyl-style
- Result of necromancer / ghoul infestation
- Fungal forest, as in the Grim Fist
Of course, there is the distinct possibility that this is what the actual practice of sandbox wilderness play has been all along, everyone knows it but doesn't talk about it much (because talking about the West Marches is much sexier), and I'm a little slow on the uptake where grand ambitions and practical limits are concerned. Much as I learned in a recent Autarch thread on having players draw their own maps (or not, as it turns out...). In which case, this is a perfectly useful post for the "OSR Lessons Learned" file [1][2][3]. In the same way that the typical, practical OSR dungeon is not Dwimmermount or Stonehell, the typical, practical OSR wilderness is not the Wilderlands of High Fantasy.
Saturday, January 14, 2017
THAC0 11+: Pretty Reasonable Actually
A complaint I have heard before from new players, particularly martial artists, fencers, and SCA types, is that it's too damn hard to hit in D&D (especially at low levels). You only get one attack every six seconds, and you have a 50% chance to hit an unarmored person? What the hell? Watch this! *bap bap bap bap bap bap bap* The crowd that plays D&D to emulate myth and media runs much the same objection - heroes in their source material are deadly-accurate.
But I think it's actually pretty reasonable. Like the Original Megadungeon, I think military culture and fighting experience informed the design decision to have most combatants in D&D be quite incompetent.
Consider the Marshall Study. SLA Marshall in World War II documented that 75% of US servicemen were unwilling or unable to fire to kill on the enemy in combat. While Marshall's work is controversial, it led to changes in training for American infantry that boosted their "attacking percentage" up closer to 90% in Vietnam. This is, coincidentally, the correct timeframe for the Ur-Gamers to have heard about Marshall's research, and to have modeled the poor THAC0 progression off of it.
Another source which supports Marshall's claims is Collins' Violence: A Microsociological Theory. This is a very long and exceedingly bleak book, and I have not gotten very far into it, but Collins' method is the analysis of footage of fights, played in very slow motion, so that fighting can be observed in detail as it truly is, rather than as it is recounted. It turns out that people lie about fighting bravely, and Collins' analyses of combat footage largely agree with Marshall - there is a particularly damning still, where a group of armed men is under fire, and seven seek cover behind each other while only one returns fire. Most people shy away from inflicting effective violence when they can see the face of their target, unless they have a bunch of other people backing them up and cheering them on, and this is true across a number of observed cultures (not just modern westerners). Most effective violence is inflicted with four-against-one or greater disparities of force, or against fleeing foes. This is, incidentally, why the pursuit of a routed army was where most combat casualties occurred in Classical campaigns.
So yeah - your average 1st level henchmen would be lucky to make a credible attack every six seconds. He's going to spend a lot of time hemming and hawing and evading, and his opponents are doing likewise, because neither wants to kill or to die, and neither has had the sort of conditioning employed by modern militaries to make it easier. Psychologically, fighting hand-to-hand with real weapons for life-or-death stakes against a hostile opponent is incomparable with fencing in a controlled environment, and it introduces a whole new layer of stress and adrenaline and clumsiness (another of Collins' findings - people fall over, hit the wrong targets, and generally fumble and flail an awful lot in real fights. It has me reconsidering my stance on fumbles on natural 1s on attack throws). That is the nature of the beast called man.
But I think it's actually pretty reasonable. Like the Original Megadungeon, I think military culture and fighting experience informed the design decision to have most combatants in D&D be quite incompetent.
Consider the Marshall Study. SLA Marshall in World War II documented that 75% of US servicemen were unwilling or unable to fire to kill on the enemy in combat. While Marshall's work is controversial, it led to changes in training for American infantry that boosted their "attacking percentage" up closer to 90% in Vietnam. This is, coincidentally, the correct timeframe for the Ur-Gamers to have heard about Marshall's research, and to have modeled the poor THAC0 progression off of it.
Another source which supports Marshall's claims is Collins' Violence: A Microsociological Theory. This is a very long and exceedingly bleak book, and I have not gotten very far into it, but Collins' method is the analysis of footage of fights, played in very slow motion, so that fighting can be observed in detail as it truly is, rather than as it is recounted. It turns out that people lie about fighting bravely, and Collins' analyses of combat footage largely agree with Marshall - there is a particularly damning still, where a group of armed men is under fire, and seven seek cover behind each other while only one returns fire. Most people shy away from inflicting effective violence when they can see the face of their target, unless they have a bunch of other people backing them up and cheering them on, and this is true across a number of observed cultures (not just modern westerners). Most effective violence is inflicted with four-against-one or greater disparities of force, or against fleeing foes. This is, incidentally, why the pursuit of a routed army was where most combat casualties occurred in Classical campaigns.
So yeah - your average 1st level henchmen would be lucky to make a credible attack every six seconds. He's going to spend a lot of time hemming and hawing and evading, and his opponents are doing likewise, because neither wants to kill or to die, and neither has had the sort of conditioning employed by modern militaries to make it easier. Psychologically, fighting hand-to-hand with real weapons for life-or-death stakes against a hostile opponent is incomparable with fencing in a controlled environment, and it introduces a whole new layer of stress and adrenaline and clumsiness (another of Collins' findings - people fall over, hit the wrong targets, and generally fumble and flail an awful lot in real fights. It has me reconsidering my stance on fumbles on natural 1s on attack throws). That is the nature of the beast called man.
Saturday, January 7, 2017
ACKS and the Art of Not Being Governed
I have been reading The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia recently. I'm pretty sure Noisms mentioned it at one point, but I can't find it if he did. In any case, it's a bit rambling, but there are some excellent quotes which suggest new, exciting(?), and adequately-cynical ways to run the ACKS domain game.
Unfortunately I've done a poor job of logging interesting quotes as I read, so I'm going to go with bullet-point paraphrases and subsummaries.
Unfortunately I've done a poor job of logging interesting quotes as I read, so I'm going to go with bullet-point paraphrases and subsummaries.
- Intensive wet-rice agriculture, dense populations, and population centers pre-date monarchial states, which were introduced by "political entrepreneurs" who captured rice production areas.
- Intensive agriculture is important to the formation of powerful states, both because it can support very high population densities (important for warfare, large-scale irrigation projects, and monument construction) and because it is relatively easy to tax (record, track, and steal) synchronized monocrop grain harvests.
- Southeast Asia is (historically) not very densely populated, with lots of empty land to which peasants can escape from tyrannical kings. While policies were often enacted to lure population to the early states, net migration was often negative, with peasants escaping out in to the wilderness.
- The administrative reach of the court center was bounded logistically, by the ability to supply the army. As an ox eats its own load in a matter of days, campaigns could be conducted only near navigable waterways, or in areas where provisions were readily appropriable (which is to say, where intensive grain agriculture was already under way). Kingdoms often nominally extended about a hundred and fifty mile radius from the population-dense capital region, but in practice exerted direct rule over closer to a seventy-five mile radius. Forests, hills, and swamps all imposed logistical barriers to military campaigns, and as a result became de facto state-free areas. Their inhabitants might pay tribute to the state, but were rarely directly under its thumb politically.
- Early states also suffered from untrustworthy administrators and inaccurate population counts; one example is given of district administrators understating the population of their district by 40%, in order to keep the difference in taxes for themselves.
- The monsoon season effectively limited the reach of the state to zero while it lasted, and often entailed expeditions to "show the flag" when the dry season began.
- Because kings needed peasants and peasants did not much like being ruled and taxed, there was an ongoing war of sedentarization and slave-raiding against the hill populations, when possible. Some Thai and Burman kings went so far as to forcibly relocate and tattoo their subjects. States competed to amass subjects, both by force and by diplomacy (with eg hill tribes, offering special dispensations and status if they settled within the kingdom).
- The primary focus of warfare between agricultural states was not taking and holding land, but capturing prisoners. An example is given of a state taking 6000 prisoners and resettling them in the fields around the capital. Prisoner-taking was not restricted to peasants, but also included military specialists and court poets. A case is mentioned where a Burmese kingdom captured the entire court of a Thai kingdom (or the other way around, I forget) and brought them back to its own court, ushering in a temporary renaissance of Thai-Burmese fusion culture.
- Meanwhile, in the hills, tribal / kinship organizations prevailed. Agriculture was practiced, but it was nomadic slash-and-burn agriculture, supporting a maximum population density of 20-30 per square kilometer. Hill tribes self-divided into predators and prey as far as the slave trade was concerned. They also raided grain states when the situation permitted, occasionally knocking over a failing dynasty and setting up their own.
- Hill tribes and grain-states traded extensively. In addition to slaves, hill tribes sold a wide variety of raw materials to the agricultural states, including elephants, ivory, precious metals, medicinal plants, honey, opium, lumber, feathers, gems, fruit, livestock, and spices. From the states they bought sea-products (salt, dried fish) and manufactured goods, including metal tools and weapons, pottery, cloth, and ritual/status items, like bronze gongs, crowns, and capes, which provide legitimacy to a chieftain.
- Hill tribes often had their pick of trade partners, because it was relatively easy to relocate to a different watershed, which drained into the territory of a different grain-state (compared to moving a state and its attendant population and fortifications overland to a different river system).
- In addition to hill tribes and grain-states, a few other types of states appeared.
- Maritime states were confederations of port-cities, and gathered wealth by taxing or monopolizing trade between the up-river and the down-river / ocean. Maritime states tended to lose wars against grain states, because they lacked manpower.
- A similar sort of "trade state" was occasionally found in the hills, sitting at a major crossroads or mountain pass and gathering wealth by taxing trade. These tended to be unstable, as trade shifts.
- In the hills, there were often small pockets of land which were irrigable and hence usable for intensive rice production. Small towns grew in these pockets, and sometimes formed defensive alliances with nearby hill tribes and other hill-towns against the slave-raiding predations of lowcountry grain states. Terrain and logistics typically prevented unification of these hill confederacies into centralized states.
- Religion is tightly-tied to mode of production / agriculture. Highland tribes tended to be animist, while lowland states in the region were typically Buddhist or Hindu (and the maritime states were mostly Islamic). There was an interesting note that when a particular group of highlanders tried to start growing lowland rice, they found that its successful cultivation required the execution of lowlander religious rituals, and the adoption of the lowlanders' calendar (hence cosmology).
- The mentioned population support limits of slash-and-burn agriculture (20-30 people per sq km) translate to 310-466 families per six-mile hex, well within the "civilized" band for population density, despite the nomadic hill-people very much operating as borderlanders politically.
- Might a tropical thing, though
- Decreased focus on territory suggests an alterate approach to Simple Domains - only track population, not territory.
- Clear an initial area for a settlement, then replace further hex-clearing operations with "domain random encounters" that occur over time rather than over space.
- Assume sufficient irrigable land that the limits of supportable population density will never be reached in PCs' lifetime.
- Also make population change somewhat interesting / actionable
- Rebellion and exodus
- Famine
- Plague
- Wars of capture
- Hired slaving expeditions (insert cash, roll on "slave raiding outcomes" table...)
- Diplomacy to get hill tribes to settle on your land
- This approach might be viable in other low-population-density areas, like the Baltic
- Frankly I could see doing away with Civilized / Borderland / Wilderness classification by population density, and replacing it with a domain type mechanism.
- Nomadic / Tribal - Can't really be taxed / yields low profit to its nominal ruler outside of warfare, experiences natural population growth, provides troops, can relocate domain.
- Settled Agricultural - Most like a standard ACKS domain. Taxable (oh so taxable), requires a stronghold, experiences natural population decline.
- Settled Maritime - Not very taxable agriculture, increased trade range? Really needs some domain-level trade mechanics to work.
- Provide some domain income based on number, types, and sizes of trade partners?
- States of trade between domains connected by water:
- No trade - sanctions or at war
- Natural trade - some trade, but no particular protection under the law for traders from the other domain
- Favored trade - traders from other domain are protected under the law, may be granted monopolies, possibly in exchange for exclusive trade (ie, a grain state offers a hill tribe favored trade status in exchange for that hill tribe cutting off trade with another nearby grain state).
- This is probably too complicated already
- Converting between domain types is roughly as bad for morale as New Religion Introduced, since that's basically what happens.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)