Managed to get my grubby paws on a preview of the Domains at War basic rules today, and they look pretty good! Simple / abstracted mass combat turns are mixed with PC actions against enemy units, where the scale is normal and it's you and your buddies against 300 goblins with spears. There's been some concern that engagements of this size (party vs several hundred enemies) will take a long time to resolve, but I suspect that they really won't. Powered by domain, hijink, and trade income, the average party level is starting to shift up towards 6 or 7 (7s: Tim's fighter, Tom's wizard, Drew's assassin. 6s: Matt's venturer, Drew's cleric. 5s: Tom's crocodile-man, Jared's bard. 4s: Alex's wizard). Tom just finished researching and repertoiring fireball, and the combination of cleave and damage bonus that the fighter and assassin can put out should let them demolish 1-HD foes in industrial quantities. Drew's a level from getting Flame Strike, and hell even sleep can drop a whole squad of humanoids. The other saving grace is morale; you probably only have to kill 150 goblins or so before the rest break and run. If you include champions and subchieftains in the units, then there's another avenue to break morale too.
On the other hand, I am a little concerned about PC survivability in the face of many, many attacks per round (and let me tell you, if I'm concerned about survivability, it might be serious). Lots of attacks means that even against plated-fighters with high HP, it's quite possible to catch enough incoming fire to get killed. So... I guess people will have to be clever. The standard answer for ACKS, really - if you're having trouble, quit being stupid (I have a good story along these lines - suffice to say that they were trying to clear two ankheg lairs, and stupidity was had, dwarves were eaten, tactics were revised, and then no further casualties were suffered). Also impressed with the XP and loot rules; there's quite an incentive for pursuing mass battles in favor of dungeoneering. Which is good, because that's kind of what we need right about now, as the Razors prepare for all-out war against the witches who have taken up residence in the Bleak Academy and their beastman allies.
So yeah! Looking forward to testing these on Sunday. Will report back in sufficiently general terms as to not spoil anything :P
Wednesday, October 31, 2012
Monday, October 29, 2012
How Traveller is Supposed to Work, Part 3 - Responses
Well, I made the dubiously wise decision of posting a link to this on the /r/rpg subreddit. Got very little feedback, but the main point which all commenters agreed on was "Man, if you run Traveller with strict economy, it makes life so much easier because you can lead the PCs by the nose, especially when they can hop between worlds!"
To which my response was kind of "Augh damnit guys, you're missing the point." If you lead the PCs by the nose, then they're forced into particular situations of your choosing. If such a situation is impossible to overcome, then it's your fault when they lose. Likewise, if they do manage to succeed, it's because you designed it in a particular way and drove them into it. Hollow victory on success and bad blood on failure? Noooo thanks.
On the plus side, local response has been pretty good - Tim went "I'd play that!" and Alex went "Damnit John, I want to run a Traveller campaign next semester!" ... upon further reflection, that's actually a mixed response, but neither of those were "This sounds like an awful idea."
To which my response was kind of "Augh damnit guys, you're missing the point." If you lead the PCs by the nose, then they're forced into particular situations of your choosing. If such a situation is impossible to overcome, then it's your fault when they lose. Likewise, if they do manage to succeed, it's because you designed it in a particular way and drove them into it. Hollow victory on success and bad blood on failure? Noooo thanks.
On the plus side, local response has been pretty good - Tim went "I'd play that!" and Alex went "Damnit John, I want to run a Traveller campaign next semester!" ... upon further reflection, that's actually a mixed response, but neither of those were "This sounds like an awful idea."
Friday, October 26, 2012
On PvP
Player-versus-player actions in tabletop RPGs are a tricky subject. Matters recently came to a head in ACKS, when people got fed up with the actions of a particular chaotic PC mage against their holdings (secretly charming their henchmen and such). A long and heated discussion ensued, and I think we reached a satisfying conclusion.
It came up that we had managed to have a lot of fun with PC vs Group actions during my Traveller game some semesters ago, and an analysis of those actions followed. Two actions in particular stood out. In the first, which I've mentioned before, Tim's character was tasked with jettisoning some prisoners into the sun while the rest of the party was away buying spare parts. Instead, he made a deal with some other shippers and managed to send the prisoners home. The rest of the players know about it, and thought he had erred badly in permitting their enemies to live, but their PCs knew nothing of it, and it worked out for the better.
In the second, Jared's character pulled one over on Tim's character in order to get the party to pursue his interests. I don't remember exactly how it went down, but they both knew exactly what was going on, and Tim was OK with it. And it was from this case that we derived a general principle for Acceptable PvP - the target needs to agree to it for whatever reason. Maybe they think it will advance a story in a pleasing fashion, maybe they want to get rid of a particularly troublesome henchman, or what-have-you. But in the end, the affected player needs to not have a problem with what is happening. This says nothing about the characters, being an entirely metagame concern, but does serve to mediate out-of-game issues.
This marks an interesting shift in the ACKS campaign. The players have abandoned their freewheeling, backstabbing roots in for solidarity and common goals. I believe something to the effect of "Look, let's delay fighting among ourselves until it's safe to walk around out in the wilderness" was actually said. While I will miss the old propensity towards PvP (which I always found pretty entertaining from my side of the screen, especially if undertaken in a dangerous environment like the dungeon), if the players are happy about it then it is probably better for the campaign. I also expect we may see the Acceptable PvP Principle propagate into other games we play here.
It came up that we had managed to have a lot of fun with PC vs Group actions during my Traveller game some semesters ago, and an analysis of those actions followed. Two actions in particular stood out. In the first, which I've mentioned before, Tim's character was tasked with jettisoning some prisoners into the sun while the rest of the party was away buying spare parts. Instead, he made a deal with some other shippers and managed to send the prisoners home. The rest of the players know about it, and thought he had erred badly in permitting their enemies to live, but their PCs knew nothing of it, and it worked out for the better.
In the second, Jared's character pulled one over on Tim's character in order to get the party to pursue his interests. I don't remember exactly how it went down, but they both knew exactly what was going on, and Tim was OK with it. And it was from this case that we derived a general principle for Acceptable PvP - the target needs to agree to it for whatever reason. Maybe they think it will advance a story in a pleasing fashion, maybe they want to get rid of a particularly troublesome henchman, or what-have-you. But in the end, the affected player needs to not have a problem with what is happening. This says nothing about the characters, being an entirely metagame concern, but does serve to mediate out-of-game issues.
This marks an interesting shift in the ACKS campaign. The players have abandoned their freewheeling, backstabbing roots in for solidarity and common goals. I believe something to the effect of "Look, let's delay fighting among ourselves until it's safe to walk around out in the wilderness" was actually said. While I will miss the old propensity towards PvP (which I always found pretty entertaining from my side of the screen, especially if undertaken in a dangerous environment like the dungeon), if the players are happy about it then it is probably better for the campaign. I also expect we may see the Acceptable PvP Principle propagate into other games we play here.
Wednesday, October 24, 2012
More Thoughts on How Traveller Is Supposed to Work
Well, last post along these lines kicked off good discussion with the roommate last night. There were kind of two main threads that I recall from our discussion:
First - one issue with Traveller is that money is advancement. Skills grow really slowly, but money can buy cybernetics and combat armor and whatnot, so that's usually how characters improve over the course of the game. When characters are strapped for cash, as my last post posited that they should be, suddenly advancement grinds to a halt. So there was some debate over how to preserve advancement while keeping money tight. The best we could come up with was something like the Mercenary ticket support system, where you get a job from a patron and maybe it comes with some gear. Of course, if you're hard up enough for cash, you might try to sell the gear, but depending on the patron it might be stolen, hot, illegally salvaged, or otherwise unsalable, in which case it would probably stick.
This leads nicely into the general loot distribution and accountability problem, too. One thing about RPGs which is usually a little weird is that they're super-egalitarian, even in situations that usually aren't in real life. Pseudo-nautical situations, for example, usually entail a clear chain of command. Looking at the Traveller rules, it certainly seems possible for one guy to be The Captain and everyone else to be crew. There are pay rates for the various shipboard functions, and if you have the right skills you can stack up a pretty nice salary and you also don't have to worry about keeping the ship's finances in order. If the captain can't make the loan, that's his problem. If he can't make payroll, that's everybody's problem. In any case, if you go that route, then most of the group gets a nice flat 'character advancement budget' per month, and it's just the Captain who has to go without advancement. Ideally, though, the Captain is the most experienced character in keeping with trope, and maybe doesn't need it.
The final thought was on iteration. Sometimes the ship gets impounded and the guy in charge goes to jail (because when things go south, it's always the Captain's ass on the line) and the rest of the crew is left dirtside with just their duffel bags going "Well... crud." But this situation provides a wonderful explanation for rules like low-paying planetside jobs and patrons that don't require starships and PCs getting passage tickets during character generation and other such things that just never made sense to me before. And after you get tired of playing in the mud, and you put together enough cash to make a down payment (or you do something dumb enough that you really need to get off-world in a hurry), someone steps up to be the new Captain. And the old Captain's player brings in a new PC and the cycle begins anew...
Another handy perk of iteration in this fashion is that it lets you change ships! If you were making really good money but got caught, maybe you try for a better ship because you think you can make bank if you can just outrun or outgun the authorities. And if you got impounded because you missed a payment, well, maybe you go for a smaller ship that you can actually make the payment on next time... But in any case, this captaincy rollover also provides an opportunity to play around with ship design and loadouts, which is normally not feasible in a game where you get one ship and stick with it forever, because starship components are ridiculously expensive. Given the fun (some would say addictive) nature of Traveller ship design, I feel like the designers might have anticipated this and designed for it...
The final advantage of this iterative cycle is that it lets you change campaign flavors. You could, as a group, go "Uh, well, I guess we're done trading since the entire surviving portion of the party is ex-marines... Let's start a mercenary company and buy passage to the nearest warzone! My character has this cousin who's a mercenary administrator..." Or you join the mob, or the Ine Givar, or the Scouts, or decide to go belt-mining, or do any number of other things that weren't on the agenda before. Effectively, each change of command is a chance to change the structure of the campaign, with the advantage of continuity of characters and setting.
So yeah, the more I look at it, the more I feel like this is how Traveller is supposed to run. Maybe I actually will do this next semester...
First - one issue with Traveller is that money is advancement. Skills grow really slowly, but money can buy cybernetics and combat armor and whatnot, so that's usually how characters improve over the course of the game. When characters are strapped for cash, as my last post posited that they should be, suddenly advancement grinds to a halt. So there was some debate over how to preserve advancement while keeping money tight. The best we could come up with was something like the Mercenary ticket support system, where you get a job from a patron and maybe it comes with some gear. Of course, if you're hard up enough for cash, you might try to sell the gear, but depending on the patron it might be stolen, hot, illegally salvaged, or otherwise unsalable, in which case it would probably stick.
This leads nicely into the general loot distribution and accountability problem, too. One thing about RPGs which is usually a little weird is that they're super-egalitarian, even in situations that usually aren't in real life. Pseudo-nautical situations, for example, usually entail a clear chain of command. Looking at the Traveller rules, it certainly seems possible for one guy to be The Captain and everyone else to be crew. There are pay rates for the various shipboard functions, and if you have the right skills you can stack up a pretty nice salary and you also don't have to worry about keeping the ship's finances in order. If the captain can't make the loan, that's his problem. If he can't make payroll, that's everybody's problem. In any case, if you go that route, then most of the group gets a nice flat 'character advancement budget' per month, and it's just the Captain who has to go without advancement. Ideally, though, the Captain is the most experienced character in keeping with trope, and maybe doesn't need it.
The final thought was on iteration. Sometimes the ship gets impounded and the guy in charge goes to jail (because when things go south, it's always the Captain's ass on the line) and the rest of the crew is left dirtside with just their duffel bags going "Well... crud." But this situation provides a wonderful explanation for rules like low-paying planetside jobs and patrons that don't require starships and PCs getting passage tickets during character generation and other such things that just never made sense to me before. And after you get tired of playing in the mud, and you put together enough cash to make a down payment (or you do something dumb enough that you really need to get off-world in a hurry), someone steps up to be the new Captain. And the old Captain's player brings in a new PC and the cycle begins anew...
 |
| Lando Calrissian - Han's player's backup character |
Another handy perk of iteration in this fashion is that it lets you change ships! If you were making really good money but got caught, maybe you try for a better ship because you think you can make bank if you can just outrun or outgun the authorities. And if you got impounded because you missed a payment, well, maybe you go for a smaller ship that you can actually make the payment on next time... But in any case, this captaincy rollover also provides an opportunity to play around with ship design and loadouts, which is normally not feasible in a game where you get one ship and stick with it forever, because starship components are ridiculously expensive. Given the fun (some would say addictive) nature of Traveller ship design, I feel like the designers might have anticipated this and designed for it...
The final advantage of this iterative cycle is that it lets you change campaign flavors. You could, as a group, go "Uh, well, I guess we're done trading since the entire surviving portion of the party is ex-marines... Let's start a mercenary company and buy passage to the nearest warzone! My character has this cousin who's a mercenary administrator..." Or you join the mob, or the Ine Givar, or the Scouts, or decide to go belt-mining, or do any number of other things that weren't on the agenda before. Effectively, each change of command is a chance to change the structure of the campaign, with the advantage of continuity of characters and setting.
So yeah, the more I look at it, the more I feel like this is how Traveller is supposed to run. Maybe I actually will do this next semester...
Monday, October 22, 2012
How Traveller Is Supposed To Work
Two games of Mongoose Traveller have been run in these parts in the last... I guess two years now? In both cases, good times were had by all and we were left with good impressions of the system, but it still like things were running a little bit off. Kind of that feeling when your laptop works but it takes five minutes to resume from suspend, or you're driving cross-country and your car's getting fine gas mileage but making funky noises. It worked, but not like it was supposed to.
Now, after running ACKS, I think I might've hit on how it's supposed to go. What got me thinking was the importance of treasure in ACKS, and another blogger (I think it might have been Beedo?)'s question about "How is trade in Traveller actually supposed to work in play?". PCs in ACKS really care about treasure because it is the main source of XP for levelling, and in play I think it would be fair to say that Greed is one of the primary factors in PC decision making (the other three being Fear, Revenge, and Confusion). Smart play revolves around exploring the dungeon cautiously, finding unguarded treasure, and offing as few monsters as you have to in order to get the goods and get out. So my line of inquiry ran, "Traveller's an old game, with as lethal a combat system as Old D&D, and where avoiding fights is similarly smart; I wonder if it emphasized monetary treasure more heavily than we thought too, and we just didn't notice?"
Looking at MongTrav's rules (hey, it's pretty close to Classic, and it's what I have to work with, alright?), I think this might be so. There's a heck of a lot of rules about miscellaneous expenses - lifestyle, docking, fuel, maintenance, ammunition, life support, crew salary, cargo hauling fees, fines, and of course the all-important starship loan. The rules for this cover more pages than the rules for combat. The rules on making money, via hauling mail, bulk cargo, passengers, or speculative cargo (or through patrons) do likewise, with further methods appearing in the supplements - salvage, gambling, and mining in Scoundrel, and even in the combat-oriented Mercenary book, we got about as much page space dedicated to a system for making money through mercenary contracts as to new combat rules.
So, what the distribution of the rules in the book is telling us is that in Traveller, money is supposed to be kind of a big deal. Now, in our last two Trav games, money was not a motivator for adventure in the slightest. In the first game, the crew had a free scout ship, and were able to cover maintenance costs more-or-less without effort. This freed them to go gallivanting across the galaxy, gathering artifacts releasing ancient evils. In the second, I had a character design, a plan, and enough starting capital to make terrifying amounts of money despite the large starship loan hanging over our heads. And by god, we made every payment on time, despite being wanted men for grand capital ship theft, possession of alien artifacts, and precipitation of international incidents, with enough money left over to run for congress and retire to a private island on that planet whose biosphere we wrecked (long story, but I got the real estate for a song...) with many good (well, better) deeds to our names; we rescued the citizens from their tyrannical mad AI-driven government, saved the human species from an ancient evil, established peaceful relations with the crystal men, performed original Nobel-winning research on ancient alien cultures, and brought civilization (and toothpaste) to the savages. We were doing the "filthy rich and turning our prodigious resources to the greater good" thing, basically.
So, looking at these two games, I believe that lack of motivation to money stemmed in the first case from a lack of starship loan and in the second from an overabundance of starting capital. A couple megacredits (like we had) is way more money than most groups of travellers could be expected to start with; 200-300kCr is a more reasonable, if still optimistic estimate. That's enough to cover the starship loan for a month or two while you look for work, maybe run a little speculative cargo, but nothing like the kind of dealing in radioactives I was doing right out of the gate last time. So you stay above water for a little while, but eventually your starting funds begin to dry up; you lose on a speculative cargo deal, pirates steal your goods, the plasma compressor breaks and you have to replace it, and you find yourself low on cash. Contract trade won't cover the mortgage (not with the size of your hold), so you start hunting for patrons, and eventually you end up close on the end of the month and desperate enough that you take a job from a seedy character and don't look too close at the fine print, because no way is it worse than being impounded and having jump tracers on your tail at every port of call. Of course, it turns out that it is, and then you end up on somebody's bad side; could be Johnny Law if you're moving illegal goods, could be organized crime, or could be that something spooky's afoot and you're in the middle of it. Meanwhile you're still trying to cover the bills despite these entanglements, and you get even more desperate; you're living from job to job, skipping monthly maintenance and hoping you don't combust on reentry, sleeping with one eye open in case Customs Enforcement comes knocking, trusting nobody, thinking about turning to piracy, and absolutely praying for the dice to roll your way and give you that one big score that'll let you settle your debts and retire someplace rustic under a new name. And then the fun really starts.
If you're smart and lucky, you end up in the company of Malcolm Reynolds, Jim Raynor, and Han Solo; you hold things together long enough to pick the right side of the political upheaval, help 'em win, get the girl, pull off the big heist, and fly off into the trinary sunset. If you're not... well, MongTrav is based off of Classic Traveller, which is the Old School, friend. This is a game where you can die in chargen, and if you're stupid or unlucky in play, you could end up with your ship grounded and your sorry smuggler butt in jail for 20 to life. Beats being frozen in carbonite, anyways.
So yeah. You might lose. It might even be inevitable; I haven't really run the numbers on a 'normal' party. It probably depends on how merciful your GM is with patrons and how the law levels are in your sector, really. But this is a game from the late 70s, created by the same folks who made a 2300AD RPG, and popular in Britain... so I can't help but wonder if there might be something of the punks here. Is their rallying cry, "No future!", the secret and intensely ironic intended epitaph of the heroes of Traveller? I am not qualified to say; if any of you, my dear readers, happen to know, I'd very much love to hear. I do think it safe to conclude, though, that the next time I run Traveller, it will be in this Old School fashion, where resource management and risk management are paramount, things get cut close to the wire, and sometimes, you lose spectacularly. There's always a good story to get out of it, though.
Maybe next semester... I still have a bunch of ACKS PCs to kill first.
Follow-up post
Now, after running ACKS, I think I might've hit on how it's supposed to go. What got me thinking was the importance of treasure in ACKS, and another blogger (I think it might have been Beedo?)'s question about "How is trade in Traveller actually supposed to work in play?". PCs in ACKS really care about treasure because it is the main source of XP for levelling, and in play I think it would be fair to say that Greed is one of the primary factors in PC decision making (the other three being Fear, Revenge, and Confusion). Smart play revolves around exploring the dungeon cautiously, finding unguarded treasure, and offing as few monsters as you have to in order to get the goods and get out. So my line of inquiry ran, "Traveller's an old game, with as lethal a combat system as Old D&D, and where avoiding fights is similarly smart; I wonder if it emphasized monetary treasure more heavily than we thought too, and we just didn't notice?"
Looking at MongTrav's rules (hey, it's pretty close to Classic, and it's what I have to work with, alright?), I think this might be so. There's a heck of a lot of rules about miscellaneous expenses - lifestyle, docking, fuel, maintenance, ammunition, life support, crew salary, cargo hauling fees, fines, and of course the all-important starship loan. The rules for this cover more pages than the rules for combat. The rules on making money, via hauling mail, bulk cargo, passengers, or speculative cargo (or through patrons) do likewise, with further methods appearing in the supplements - salvage, gambling, and mining in Scoundrel, and even in the combat-oriented Mercenary book, we got about as much page space dedicated to a system for making money through mercenary contracts as to new combat rules.
So, what the distribution of the rules in the book is telling us is that in Traveller, money is supposed to be kind of a big deal. Now, in our last two Trav games, money was not a motivator for adventure in the slightest. In the first game, the crew had a free scout ship, and were able to cover maintenance costs more-or-less without effort. This freed them to go gallivanting across the galaxy, gathering artifacts releasing ancient evils. In the second, I had a character design, a plan, and enough starting capital to make terrifying amounts of money despite the large starship loan hanging over our heads. And by god, we made every payment on time, despite being wanted men for grand capital ship theft, possession of alien artifacts, and precipitation of international incidents, with enough money left over to run for congress and retire to a private island on that planet whose biosphere we wrecked (long story, but I got the real estate for a song...) with many good (well, better) deeds to our names; we rescued the citizens from their tyrannical mad AI-driven government, saved the human species from an ancient evil, established peaceful relations with the crystal men, performed original Nobel-winning research on ancient alien cultures, and brought civilization (and toothpaste) to the savages. We were doing the "filthy rich and turning our prodigious resources to the greater good" thing, basically.
So, looking at these two games, I believe that lack of motivation to money stemmed in the first case from a lack of starship loan and in the second from an overabundance of starting capital. A couple megacredits (like we had) is way more money than most groups of travellers could be expected to start with; 200-300kCr is a more reasonable, if still optimistic estimate. That's enough to cover the starship loan for a month or two while you look for work, maybe run a little speculative cargo, but nothing like the kind of dealing in radioactives I was doing right out of the gate last time. So you stay above water for a little while, but eventually your starting funds begin to dry up; you lose on a speculative cargo deal, pirates steal your goods, the plasma compressor breaks and you have to replace it, and you find yourself low on cash. Contract trade won't cover the mortgage (not with the size of your hold), so you start hunting for patrons, and eventually you end up close on the end of the month and desperate enough that you take a job from a seedy character and don't look too close at the fine print, because no way is it worse than being impounded and having jump tracers on your tail at every port of call. Of course, it turns out that it is, and then you end up on somebody's bad side; could be Johnny Law if you're moving illegal goods, could be organized crime, or could be that something spooky's afoot and you're in the middle of it. Meanwhile you're still trying to cover the bills despite these entanglements, and you get even more desperate; you're living from job to job, skipping monthly maintenance and hoping you don't combust on reentry, sleeping with one eye open in case Customs Enforcement comes knocking, trusting nobody, thinking about turning to piracy, and absolutely praying for the dice to roll your way and give you that one big score that'll let you settle your debts and retire someplace rustic under a new name. And then the fun really starts.
If you're smart and lucky, you end up in the company of Malcolm Reynolds, Jim Raynor, and Han Solo; you hold things together long enough to pick the right side of the political upheaval, help 'em win, get the girl, pull off the big heist, and fly off into the trinary sunset. If you're not... well, MongTrav is based off of Classic Traveller, which is the Old School, friend. This is a game where you can die in chargen, and if you're stupid or unlucky in play, you could end up with your ship grounded and your sorry smuggler butt in jail for 20 to life. Beats being frozen in carbonite, anyways.
So yeah. You might lose. It might even be inevitable; I haven't really run the numbers on a 'normal' party. It probably depends on how merciful your GM is with patrons and how the law levels are in your sector, really. But this is a game from the late 70s, created by the same folks who made a 2300AD RPG, and popular in Britain... so I can't help but wonder if there might be something of the punks here. Is their rallying cry, "No future!", the secret and intensely ironic intended epitaph of the heroes of Traveller? I am not qualified to say; if any of you, my dear readers, happen to know, I'd very much love to hear. I do think it safe to conclude, though, that the next time I run Traveller, it will be in this Old School fashion, where resource management and risk management are paramount, things get cut close to the wire, and sometimes, you lose spectacularly. There's always a good story to get out of it, though.
Maybe next semester... I still have a bunch of ACKS PCs to kill first.
Follow-up post
Saturday, October 20, 2012
Almost Done Travelling...
Got back late last night from another interview. This one was kind of a mess - my ground transport on the far end didn't pan out, there was no food around at the hour I finally got to the hotel so I ended up hiking about a mile in the along the side of the road in the middle of the night to get chow, had to go through security three times coming back (once OK, went back out to get food, went back through, forgot I had refilled my water bottle and they thought one of my USB drives was a knife, through again; they were friendly about it though and there was nobody else getting screened, so there was good humor on all sides), my flight back was delayed enough to make catching my connection a close thing, and when I finally did get home I ran into the Late Night Food Problem again... but the interview itself went OK, I made it home in one piece, and didn't have to sleep in the airport like I thought I would, so I'm calling it a win. Hopefully this will be the last one... I have to travel again in mid-November, and then in early December, but at least I have most of a month of uninterrupted Term Paper Time between now and the next wave.
As is typical for my post-travel posts, I have a few scattered ideas from the long periods of sitting on my butt not feeling like doing homework.
First off, some dude in front of me on one of my flights watched The Four on the airplane. And that got me thinking, "Does ACKS need its own Book of Weeaboo Fightin' Magic?" I'm not really a fan of ACKS' Mystic class from the Player's Companion (basically, the Monk, ACKSified), but it's hard for me to pin down why - I think what initially strikes me as WrongBad about it is that it just has too many class features and doesn't really fit into my setting. On the player side of the issue, though, it has four (4) prime requisites and is unarmored melee with only a d6 HD and none of the survival special abilities of the Barbarian or Fury (DR, reroll mortal wounds). They do get Swashbuckling, +initiative, Alertness, and polearms, so I guess maybe they're supposed to be hard-to-surprise second-line melee? The trouble with light-armored and ranged classes in ACKS, though, as articulated by Tim, is that "Damnit Sheng, if you'd taken your 18 Dex and put it in a suit of plate, you'd be one of the best front-liners we've ever seen." If you have the Str and Dex to run good light melee, you could instead be running awesome front line melee unless you have really crummy Con. Now, I have a suspicion that with the shift in play we're starting to see, plate+shield fighters may be less optimal than they used to be, just due to speed constraints, and ranged will get better than it has been. I refer, of course, to the shift from dungeoneering in tight hallways where the fighter-phalanx dominates to raiding wilderness lairs, where there are fewer chokepoints and more room to maneuver. But, that's another post.
In any case, to return to the initial topic, I'm unsatisfied with the current status of ACKS' martial artists, so maybe I will roll my own. Perhaps let them use Wisdom for AC instead of Dex; this would open up something to high-Wis characters other than Cleric, and would circumvent the plate+dex issue... Also a split-class approach like the Barbarian and the Witch, because fantasy martial arts always have multiple schools. Still won't be thematic for my setting, though, so it's low, low priority.
On the airplane, I also got to thinking about Snow Crash, cyberpunk, and how as a programmer, cyberpunk systems tend to be very hard to read because their rules for computers are just painfully wrong. They usually fail to take into account the usefulness of good tooling / automation, the computational intensity of tasks, and just how long things tend to take in general. So it might be a fun project to roll my own, maybe for Traveller, whose hacking rules in Scoundrel were some of the more reasonable ones I've seen...
I guess that brings the list of posts and things I need to write up to:
As is typical for my post-travel posts, I have a few scattered ideas from the long periods of sitting on my butt not feeling like doing homework.
First off, some dude in front of me on one of my flights watched The Four on the airplane. And that got me thinking, "Does ACKS need its own Book of Weeaboo Fightin' Magic?" I'm not really a fan of ACKS' Mystic class from the Player's Companion (basically, the Monk, ACKSified), but it's hard for me to pin down why - I think what initially strikes me as WrongBad about it is that it just has too many class features and doesn't really fit into my setting. On the player side of the issue, though, it has four (4) prime requisites and is unarmored melee with only a d6 HD and none of the survival special abilities of the Barbarian or Fury (DR, reroll mortal wounds). They do get Swashbuckling, +initiative, Alertness, and polearms, so I guess maybe they're supposed to be hard-to-surprise second-line melee? The trouble with light-armored and ranged classes in ACKS, though, as articulated by Tim, is that "Damnit Sheng, if you'd taken your 18 Dex and put it in a suit of plate, you'd be one of the best front-liners we've ever seen." If you have the Str and Dex to run good light melee, you could instead be running awesome front line melee unless you have really crummy Con. Now, I have a suspicion that with the shift in play we're starting to see, plate+shield fighters may be less optimal than they used to be, just due to speed constraints, and ranged will get better than it has been. I refer, of course, to the shift from dungeoneering in tight hallways where the fighter-phalanx dominates to raiding wilderness lairs, where there are fewer chokepoints and more room to maneuver. But, that's another post.
In any case, to return to the initial topic, I'm unsatisfied with the current status of ACKS' martial artists, so maybe I will roll my own. Perhaps let them use Wisdom for AC instead of Dex; this would open up something to high-Wis characters other than Cleric, and would circumvent the plate+dex issue... Also a split-class approach like the Barbarian and the Witch, because fantasy martial arts always have multiple schools. Still won't be thematic for my setting, though, so it's low, low priority.
On the airplane, I also got to thinking about Snow Crash, cyberpunk, and how as a programmer, cyberpunk systems tend to be very hard to read because their rules for computers are just painfully wrong. They usually fail to take into account the usefulness of good tooling / automation, the computational intensity of tasks, and just how long things tend to take in general. So it might be a fun project to roll my own, maybe for Traveller, whose hacking rules in Scoundrel were some of the more reasonable ones I've seen...
I guess that brings the list of posts and things I need to write up to:
- A whole pile of session reports
- Including a post on emergent jokes, like Hao Dee, Urvin, and such
- And one on the shift from dungeoneering to wilderness adventures
- How Does Anyone Survive in ACKSLand, Anyways?
- A New-School DM's Guide to Running an Old School Game
- Resource Management
- Risk Management
- Actions Have Consequences
- Player Cleverness / Fluff is Crunch
- Exploratory Play
- Referee Impartiality
- And two secondary stylistic points that I think reinforce the main elements, but which are not themselves core to the old school
- Gygaxian Naturalism / Simulationism
- Grim settings
- More ACKS background / setting information
- The Problem With Viking Campaigns
- How Traveller is Supposed to Work (And Why It Hasn't For Us Previously)
- Dark Travesty - A conversion of Dark Heresy to the MongTrav engine
- Murlynd's Spoon and the Ring of Three Wishes - In Defense of Random Treasure
- The Way of ACKS-Fu
- Cyberpunk++;
- And probably some that I'm forgetting
Monday, October 15, 2012
VBAM Scenarios - The Succession Wars
I was thinking about VBAM scenarios in the shower, and came across a promising variant of the MoO Scenario that I mentioned previously.
Consider a future-feudal empire, whose emperor holds power over the Noble Houses through his extensive spy network, the strength of his Praetorian Guard, and his sole possession of weapons of mass destruction. The Houses pay him tribute in taxes and troop levies for the suppression of rebellions, though they are constrained by imperial law to build only certain technically-inferior ships for the purposes of policing their territories. Though they politick and plot against each other, the ambitions of the Houses are largely checked by imperial power, and peace is had in human space. A dynasty of five hundred years rolls on in this fashion, with technology largely stagnant, until suddenly and unexpectedly the emperor and his heirs are assassinated and their genetic backups destroyed in an act of exceptionally coordinated sabotage. Elements of the Praetorian Guard are implicated, and they fragment as an organization, though the Houses pay dearly to acquire their soldiers and advanced equipment for their own militaries. With the check of imperial power gone, minor feuds over traditionally-contested territories erupt into open warfare among the Houses, often justified with accusations of involvement in the death of the emperor, and long-forgotten weapons development programs and military academies reopen their doors across human space. Each House also seeks to legitimize its own claim to the throne, by means fair or foul; through backing from the Praetorian remnants, through popular support from the citizenry, or through simple ability to take and hold the Throneworld against all comers.
In short - Game of Thrones meets Legend of the Five Rings meets elements of the BattleTech and Traveller universes. In spaaaace.
Consider a future-feudal empire, whose emperor holds power over the Noble Houses through his extensive spy network, the strength of his Praetorian Guard, and his sole possession of weapons of mass destruction. The Houses pay him tribute in taxes and troop levies for the suppression of rebellions, though they are constrained by imperial law to build only certain technically-inferior ships for the purposes of policing their territories. Though they politick and plot against each other, the ambitions of the Houses are largely checked by imperial power, and peace is had in human space. A dynasty of five hundred years rolls on in this fashion, with technology largely stagnant, until suddenly and unexpectedly the emperor and his heirs are assassinated and their genetic backups destroyed in an act of exceptionally coordinated sabotage. Elements of the Praetorian Guard are implicated, and they fragment as an organization, though the Houses pay dearly to acquire their soldiers and advanced equipment for their own militaries. With the check of imperial power gone, minor feuds over traditionally-contested territories erupt into open warfare among the Houses, often justified with accusations of involvement in the death of the emperor, and long-forgotten weapons development programs and military academies reopen their doors across human space. Each House also seeks to legitimize its own claim to the throne, by means fair or foul; through backing from the Praetorian remnants, through popular support from the citizenry, or through simple ability to take and hold the Throneworld against all comers.
In short - Game of Thrones meets Legend of the Five Rings meets elements of the BattleTech and Traveller universes. In spaaaace.
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