Notes from a Sailing Course

After many years of putting it off, I finally got around to getting some sailing lessons this summer.  Some D&D-relevant notes from instruction and the manual, in the style of Notes From a Hiking Seminar:

I was already familiar with points of sail so I'm not going to talk about that much here.  I have yet to go back and re-evaluate the water travel rules in light of what I have learned.

Land makes wind shadows.  This was very apparent when we were under sail; even small, unimpressive islands were doing it.  It made me wonder about figuring prevailing winds on a per-hex basis, or otherwise getting much more micro with climates than I usually think about.

Expected survival times in water of varying temperatures under varying actions.  Cold water is very bad for your health!  One of the things I read suggested that about half of all "drowning" victims actually die of hypothermia while floating, rather than dying of water entering the lungs.  And swimming to produce more body heat is actually disadvantageous a lot of the time, since your clothes are a crappy wetsuit that holds water that you've warmed next to your skin, but swimming tends to flush them.  In any case, assuming these times are for normal men with d6 HP, we might reasonably conclude that 35 degree water does a point of damage every 20 minutes, 55 degree water a point every hour, and 70 degree water a point every four hours or so.

Nautical charts - they're definitely maps.  I don't think I've ever seen an adventure that took a nautical chart and imposed a hex grid over it but it could be fun.  And there are plenty of them available for free from NOAA (granted, some in an obscure file format used by electronic chart plotters on ships).

"My [the instructor's] wife likes powerboating better than sailing - it's less mysterious".  In a bronze age setting where sailing is a new technology and mystery cults abound, a cult of the mystery of the sail would be fun.

An interesting definition of "seaworthy": "the vessel is competent to resist the ordinary attacks of wind and weather, and is competently equipped and manned for the voyage, with a sufficient crew, and with sufficient means to sustain them, and with a captain of general good character and nautical skill."  Bit of a "what is steel compared to the hand that wields it?" point of view.  And contra OSE's classification of vessels as seaworthy or unseaworthy independent of captain and crew.

On interpreting weather forecasts: "If a forecast calls for a 45% of high winds assume you will be sailing in heavy gusts 45% of the time."  Could have applications for generating weather during a given random encounter - sure you know the big picture of the day's weather, but maybe the encounter is during a lull.

GURPS Traveller: Far Trader

I've been told several times over the last decade that I need to read GURPS Traveller: Far Trader, because its trade model nicely solves the Golden Pair problem, where your PCs find two planets with complementary trade codes near each other and make a killing.  Which is silly, because why has nobody else picked up this hundred-thousand-dollar bill yet?

I'm only on page seven and this is already glorious.

Unlike the first two Imperiums and most planetary economies, the Third Imperium has no central bank. No one in the Imperial bureaucracy sets interest rates, acts as lender of last resort to failing banks, supervises check clearing or tries to reduce the impact of recessions. The Third Imperium feels that it has traded the promise of a smoother ride in the short term for a lower risk of financial catastrophe in the long term.

The Third Imperium has replaced the central bank structure with a monetary board. The members of the board are all retired bankers and economists, many of noble birth, but all chosen primarily for their hatred of anything that smacks of using monetary policy to meddle with the economy. Their task is to carefully control the long-term growth of the money supply so as to mirror the long-term growth of the economy...

Part of the task of the survey branch of the Scout Service is to provide up-to-date economic data for the monetary board to use in its long-range growth forecasts.

That's gonna make a great thumbnail image in the ol' RSS feed.

And this was written in 2004, well before the bailouts of '08 for example.

High-level summary of the simple trade system (correct me in the comments): for each world in your area of interest, figure out the size of its planetary economy and roughly how much total trade it does.  For each pair of worlds, compute a statistic for how much trade happens between the two of them.  There's a big table here for turning that statistic into a dollar-value per year and volumes of cargo, but we don't actually need that yet.  We do need to turn these links between worlds into trade routes and classify the routes by their total volume, and then there's a die roll multiplied by the total trade volume statistic of the pair of worlds to determine how much cargo people will pay you to move, and the price per ton is based on the route type and distance.

...  yeah we're not in Mongoose country anymore, Toto

One thing I don't like about this book is the forward references.  For example, a footnote on the big table of trade volumes on page 16 points forward to a heading on page 22. 

I am curious what these trade statistics and route types end up looking like under unusual subsector generation parameters, like Mongoose's "hard science" subsector generation option where bad atmos reduce population and low population reduces starport.  Also, what I'd have to change to apply them to HOSTILE's alternate FTL drive system.

The advanced trade system also takes those planetary economy sizes, openness to trade, route classifications, and trade-volume-by-planet-pairs as inputs, but the volume of available cargo for free traders is determined by the big table back in the previous chapter (with terms for random fluctuation and damping back towards average volume on the route), the market rate for shipping on each planet varies over time (random fluctuations plus a damping term), and there's a skill roll to see what fraction of the going bulk freight rate you get.  Also, cargo gets split into lots and it has traits like "biohazard" and "fragile" and some three-letter codes for...  conditions of delivery or something?  Also also, you can try to predict what the going rate for freight haulage will be in the future using skill rolls or asking brokers, and can try to learn what it was in the past in other markets by asking questions of crews coming from those places (and then making your own predictions from those estimates).

And this isn't for speculative cargo, where you buy high and sell low (wait no, the other thing).  This is speculating on how much you can get paid for hauling boxes of other peoples' stuff.

This definitely requires some book-keeping, because you need to know the 4d6 price volatility roll last week for the damping term in the computation of the new price and volume this week.  For each planet of interest.

No penalty is listed for failing to appear / deliver on a futures contract.

I do wonder how they figured the baseline costs per dton per parsec of haulage.  This would probably be relevant in a HOSTILE-like situation where jump works differently.

I am now on page 35 of 146 and my erec enthusiasm has subsided somewhat.

Skimming passenger stuff.  Passenger prices are less volatile than freight prices, and it's not too hard for free traders to eat the whole pie of available passengers on smaller routes.  It's not a very big pie though.

Page 36, on to speculative trading in cargoes.  Properties of speculative cargo are randomly generated independently (eg you roll for price on origin world and which planet codes have modifiers to buying price on separate tables) rather than from a single big table of types of goods.  You probably want to know a guy to find available speculative cargos.  You can try to predict one die of...  3d6? per destination market that you're considering hauling it to.

Huh.  So time series stuff is sort of discouraged in speculative goods trading.  Curious.

And it seems like the solution to the Golden Pair problem is a combination of "you can't consistently get any particular speculative cargo with the trade code modifiers that you want" and "the volume of contract cargo available for free traders on high-trade routes is limited".

We're now a third of the way through the book and we've covered pretty much everything that I expected to have covered.  What's left?

Incorporation, business plans, loans, stock market?, freight handling, traffic control, hiring crew, shipboard law, keeping a logbook, cargo manifests, filing flight plans, freight handling equipment, character options for GURPS, campaign models (tramp freighter, corporate, pirate, and smuggler), a subsector map and notes about its economy, lists of the trade stats for worlds in various published subsectors, some new starships (no deckplans though).

This feels like a reasonable cutting point, where there might or might not be a follow-on post about the rest of the book.

Magic Swords, Proficiencies, and the 1e DMG

This is actually like three short posts about magic swords rolled in to one.

• I've been thinking about trying to organize some in-person D&D, and OSE is probably an easier sell than ACKS in this part of the world.  So in the absence of proficiencies, my previous post about magic items in place of proficiencies has been back on my mind.
  
• If I also wanted to keep cleaving in an otherwise mostly-stock B/X game to give fighters some of their OD&D multi-attack mojo back and help them scale into the high levels, that might also be a good thing to attach to magic swords.  At first wag, something like three cleaves per round per point of bonus seems likely to keep pace with 1 cleave per HD at least up to name level.  This has a number of other interesting properties:
• Fighters and thieves almost certainly get cleaves sooner than clerics as a consequence of the treasure tables being magic-sword-heavy.
• Non-champion low-HD humanoids are unlikely to cleave.  Might want to grant bigger monsters some inherent cleaves, much like how they have magic weapons for the purpose of damaging other invulnerable monsters.
• This also creates an interesting qualitative distinction between "mooks who could easily be humans in rubber masks" and "supernatural monsters who can kill everyone in a mead hall in a couple rounds".
  
• Mid-level rival NPC parties with magic weapons are cleave threats.
• On the downside, antithetical to "Steel isn't strong, boy.  Flesh is stronger...  What is steel compared to the hand that wields it?"
  
• Second, there was a discussion in discord recently about sentient swords.  Thinking about magic swords through the lens of "class proficiencies for fighters and thieves that clerics and MUs don't get", sentient swords are actually a restricted form of spellcasting for non-caster classes.  I think they're really important, that using them should generally not be a hassle, and neglecting to roll for them is a contributing factor to caster superiority.  The whole ego / conflict of wills mechanic is to keep high-level powers out of the hands of low-level fighters, and to keep fighters from amassing too many spell-like abilities by having multiple sentient swords. 
• I've been skimming the 1e AD&D DMG recently, because it also keeps coming up in various discussions.  I went and looked in the treasure tables because I was curious about how it handled sentient swords, and several things struck me:
• 25% of swords are "unusual" (sentient).  This is in the same ballpark as B/X's 30%, but much higher than ACKS or later editions.
• "All abilities function only when the sword is held, drawn, and the possessor is concentrating on the desired result."  This isn't "ask the sword nicely to use its powers".
  
• AD&D computes willpower score differently - sum of a character's Int and Wis scores plus their level (with the level bonus reduced by damage taken).  This means that cap for character willpower/personality score is basically unbounded!
  
• A "typical" random sentient sword has about 13 Int, empathic communication, two detection abilities and an Ego of 3 or so, and is reasonably useable even by a low-level fighter of average mental stats.
• "N.B. Most players will be unwilling to play swords with personalities as the personalities dictate. It is incumbent upon the DM to ensure that the role of the sword is played to the hilt"
• har har
  
• Reading the 1e DMG's magic swords, I was also struck how a number of them had effects that activate on a natural 20.
• This wraps back around to limiting the scope of proficiency-like exceptional cases by making them magic items.  Rather than taking Weapon Focus in order to get the ability to crit, it's a property of some swords.
  
• Making crits a property of magic weapons means monsters aren't critting PCs, which is the usual trouble with critical hit rules.  Except for that tiny subset of monsters with eg Swallow Whole abilities that trigger on a 20 - it's probably OK to have it as an exception for, again, big scary supernatural monsters.
  
• It also means you can have a variety of critical hit special effects, like vorpal's save-or-die vs the sword of life stealing's level drain on crit, without needing a complex critical hits table or system.  These effects can also be quite fantastical, since they're magical in origin.
• This might also be a reasonable way to handle combat-maneuver like effects.  Magic hammers that sunder weapons on a natural 20, axes that break shields, rapier of disarming, magic shield that knocks foes down when they nat 1 against you, ...
• Magic swords might also be a reasonable way to sneak backstab multiplier scaling into B/X, where even a max-level thief only does x2 damage.  idk whether I'd want to make just particular backstabbing swords that boost it, or something as simple as "a thief backstabbing with a sword +1 multiplies the die roll by x3 instead of x2, +2 -> x4, +3 -> x5".
  

Material Components in the Wilderness Levels

I wish I could say this was my idea but I'm happy to give credit where credit is due and just preserve/propagate/expand it.

Olle Skogren had a proposal in discord recently about requiring expensive material components for spellcasting in ACKS, their prices scaling exponentially with spell level.

This is both meant to make magic a non-free resource, which normally is wasted if you don't use it daily, to differentiate profane and sacred magic [by the different types of components required] and to make lengthy adventures logistically problematic for casters as you need at first backpack space for reagents, then a mule load and finally cartloads.

Emphasis mine - as that was the bit that most caught my attention.

I could take or leave the exponential cost scaling.  I think just having material components with mass that you have to haul into the wilderness seems like a super-viable solution to my issues with the spellcasting resource model in the wilderness game [1][2], where spellcasters can dump their full load onto any wilderness encounter because you very seldom have more than one encounter per day.  Material components are a resource that is attritable on scales of weeks; they create a limit on total spells expended during a particular expedition, without reducing the total amount of spell-power an MU can bring to bear in any one tactical engagement.  And they're super-associative; they're object in the game-world, no need to impose wonky spell-point recovery systems that operate differently in the wilderness and civilization, or argue about what constitutes an adventure for purposes of spells-per-adventure.  And since they're items-in-the-world, they interact with market mechanics, and their encumbrance introduces tradeoffs around speed vs preparedness.

At the bare minimum of complexity, where all components are an abstracted "spell components" item just measured in weight with a fixed cost per stone (maybe arcane components and divine components), it would not be hard at all to add to the wilderness logistics spreadsheet.  And then you could set up the material component costs of spells by level, so that maybe 1st level spells don't use them (so MUs have something always fall back on), and then component-mass required ramps up with spell level.  Or set up material component costs per spell, like Wolves of God does with its spellcasting system (I forget what he calls the points expended to cast, but spells of the same level cost significantly-varying numbers of points) - so sleep and fireball could have their high utility balanced by having to expend component-mass, whereas your lower-tier combat spells like burning hands might be free or just inexpensive.

One could, of course, go the traditional / AD&D route, where particular spells had particular components and they weren't interchangeable.  This would be an interesting avenue to introduce a layer of Vancian-style planning on top of ACKS' spell repertoire system.  And then non-consumed/focus components (like the amber rod and rabbit fur for lightning bolt) dictate how many parallel/simultaneous castings of a spell your collected MUs can drop in a single round.  But I don't know that I need that degree of precision to solve my wilderness-level problem.

This seems like the sort of thing where I should jump up and down and yell "Gygax knew!"  This is exactly the sort of "crufty old mechanic that nobody uses turns out to be critically important" thing that this blog was started on.  Gygax's Fence, if you will.  But I'm actually not sure.  The 1e DMG's encumbrance section (page 255) notes that material components aren't assumed to encumber unless they're unusually bulky.  I guess that yeah, if you're going to have spell-specific components, that would be a lot of paperwork.  And then I suppose the limiting factor on number of casts worth of a particular component that you'd bring on a wilderness adventure was cost, maybe?  Maybe in the misty dawn era before the shared Google Sheet of party encumbrance, it was hard to get players to actually honestly track it, whereas gold was an easier thing for a DM to keep account of, since you know how much each PC earned each adventure, and you can know how much they spend on each transaction.

But the age of the spreadsheet is come...

Red Nails

I don't read much fiction, but someone recently pointed out that several of Robert E. Howard's Conan stories are available for free from Project Gutenberg.  I had previously read The Hour of the Dragon, the most-downloaded of the lot, and found it alright but not great.  The seams of the serial structure in which it was originally published showed through pretty hard.  The next most-read on Gutenberg was Red Nails.

I enjoyed Red Nails quite a bit (with the usual caveats about '30s pulp fiction), but more important, this is really good inspiration for old-school style dungeoncrawls.  Without spoiling anything, there's a multi-level dungeon with competing factions, and those factions aren't monolithic, precisely in the way that dungeon factions are talked about in the OSR blogosphere.  There are also a couple neat ideas for magic items and dungeon set dressing pieces.  The dungeon bits of Hour of the Dragon don't hold a candle to this.

The Appendix N entry for Howard doesn't call out particular Conan stories, but I have to imagine that if it did, this one would've made the cut.

Market Availability and Diminishing Returns

Status: speculative proposal

From another of Rick Stumps' posts that I enjoyed:

Most of the light sources in the Mountain ended up being torches, then candles because they bought all the oil in the region and the few torch makers couldn't keep up with demand. Food prices in Esber skyrocketed because they bought all the smoked ham, salted fish, and cheese to be had for ever-increasing prices. They also stripped the area of oats and sheep tallow, making the local favorite breakfast (unleavened oatcakes fried in sheep tallow) rare and angering many...

The party also hired factors (merchants that buy and sell for you) in 5 towns and cities, bought an inn within Esber as a base and storehouse; met with the local Baron and Bishop to smooth things over  with them, and; gave generously to the poor affected by the lack of food...

If I simply said, "Don't worry about food, water, light, or time. Let's just play." None of that happens. They don't have ties to NPC factors in five towns and cities (that have already triggered 3 more adventures), no meeting with the baron and bishop, no interaction with farmers, or the beggars, no long argument with the muleskinners about if they should get paid as much as light infantry if they also fought the kobolds, no stash of 3,000 gp worth of gear on Level Three, none of it.

Obviously, any ACKS enthusiast is on board with limiting the amount of stuff available for purchase in a market every month.  But except for mercenaries, there isn't really a system for having prices rise as a result of buying up particular goods.  What would such a system look like, with a minimum of book-keeping?

ACKS' equipment availability table is a reasonable starting point for availability without any price increase.  Just at a wag, after buying all normal availability for the month, we might let players roll availability again, but now the goods cost twice as much per unit.  Then triple, then quadruple, up to a hard cap of say x10 (one of ACKS' underlying assumptions is that adventurers generally only have access to about 1/10th of the market).  The next month, take the highest multiple paid for a particular good, decrease it by 1, and that's the new starting multiple.

For example,

 

A mule is 20gp.  A class 4 market has one of each item between 11gp and 100gp per month.  So the first mule costs 20 gp.  The second mule costs 40 gp, the third 60, etc.  The party ends up buying 5 mules for a total price of 300gp - which would've been enough to buy 15 mules if they hadn't been in a hurry.  Next month, they return to the same market and a mule still costs 80gp, and even if price were no object, only six can be bought (at 4x, 5x, 6x, ... 10x the normal price).

One wrinkle here is substibility of goods.  If the party buys up the entire stock of plate mail and drives the price through the roof, people who would buy plate are going to buy banded mail instead, and smiths who would make banded are going to make plate instead, and prices for banded are going to rise too.  So it might make sense to put goods in buckets, and raise prices for the whole bucket.  In Rick's example, "food" is the bucket.  But on the other hand, a lot of goods aren't really substible; a light riding horse and a medium riding horse fill quite different needs, even though they're both mounts.  So maybe it isn't worth worrying about - the players themselves are likely to think hard about substituting banded mail for plate when it's a quarter the price.

Open questions:

Is it worth it to track price multiples across months?  Should the multiple decline differently based on how "connected" the market is to trade networks?  Is linear price growth right, or should be it exponential or something?  How do price multiples interact with hiring henchmen?  Could switching to per-season availability or something lessen the book-keeping here?  Is this competitive with just commissioning goods (the stock ACKS way to circumvent market limits)?  How does the venturer interact with this (maybe he just gets you access to extra goods at one lower price multiplier)?  Heuristics for effects of standing price multiples on domain morale, or a system for having them queue trouble?

Seasonal Overland Travel Times

I stumbled upon Rick Stump's blog recently.  There's a lot of good stuff here!  There was a line from this post that got me thinking:

This means that if there is a good road directly between me and, oh, the market 8 miles away if I leave at sunrise (call it 6:30) and want to return home by sunset (call it 8:45) [I am using the sunrise/set times for Seaward for this time of year] then I wouldn't get to the market until about 9:30 and need to leave by 5:45.

As I've noted elsewhere [2], I'm always looking for more ways to inject seasonality into the wilderness game.  And varying travel per day with available daylight makes a lot of sense!  Taking fall and spring with ~12 hours of daylight per day as your baseline, we'd see negligible seasonal change in available travel time per day in the tropics, but even as far south as Miami, the shortest day of the year is 10 and a half hours, while the longest is around 13 and a half.  So that's a difference of 12.5%, an eighth.  Up here the shortest day of the year is around 8 and a half hours, while the longest is more like 15 and a half.  So just on the basis of having more or less daylight, something like a 30% reduction in overland travel rate in the winter and a 30% increase in the summer would be reasonable at these latitudes.  Dealing with modifying travel speed by an eighth might not be worth the hassle, but 30% certainly seems big enough to warrant consideration!  For latitudes somewhere in between Miami and Seattle, something like a 20 or 25% modifier might be reasonable and fairly easy on the math.

And then if you're already figuring seasonal overland travel speed modifiers for daylight, you could also just abstract weather into that modifier, especially if operating on scales of weeks.

One could also make the slower (winter) speed the default, and then scale everything else up accordingly, since multiplying is easier than dividing.

(Granted - this ignores historical details like the afternoon halt during summer marches.  Maybe the difference between getting 12 hours of rest in the dark and getting eight at night in the summer plus four in the middle of the day doesn't work out to that big a difference in practice.  Maybe it makes sense as just a winter penalty, where your time to break and make camp cuts into your marching daylight time.  And then there are those rascals with infravision mucking things up as usual...)