A/X: Call the Cousins

Kicking around fighter mercenary-summoning abilities in the presence of Money Up Front:

At 5th level (Sentinel), the Dwarven Vaultguard's exploits have become known in the mountainhome.  All dwarves who he personally leads gain +1 morale in battle.  Additionally, he may choose to call his cousins to fight by his side with promises of treasure and glory.  If he does so, he may choose a dwarven unit type and have a squad of them arrive and enter his service by the beginning of the next adventure.  However, he owes them the promised treasure, of a value equal to their cost if they were a mercenary unit.  Failure to pay the cousins at least a third of his personal share of the treasure towards this debt every adventure will force a loyalty roll.  Should a cousin perish, another will come to replace the fallen one once he has been given a proper burial and his arms and armor returned to the mountainhome.  Should no cousin in the vaultguard's service remain alive, he is absolved of his debt to them but may not summon another unit of cousins until he gains a level of experience.  Should a vaultguard ever kill one of the cousins, or in bad faith cause one to be killed, he will be branded a kinslayer.  A kinslayer's cousins desert immediately and no more may be summoned thereafter.  A vaultguard who has satisfied the treasure expectations of all cousins currently in his service may call an additional unit of cousins; this may be done multiple times.

Nice things about this: it feels very dwarf, it gives you seven dwarves (or thirteen if you pay off the first squad), it disincentivizes betraying them, and it totally works around market class restrictions for replenishing them, which is nice because availability of demihuman troops in human markets is pretty lousy (but replaces markets with the need to retrieve the bodies and possibly travel).

OK things: this is probably a smaller retinue than human fighters will get, but it's OK because dwarven troops are better.

Less nice things: it requires tracking the state of the debt (but it's a fraction of earnings so if you have a bad session you're not going to end up underwater, you just have to pay them based on what you earned).

Potential extension points: cousins level up to elite 2nd- or 3rd-level mercenaries when the Vaultguard hits certain levels.  A similar ability to call dwarven henchmen?  With a bonus if you have Dwarven Brewing, making it a useful proficiency?

A/X Mercenaries: Money Up Front

Been thinking more about open table ACKS lately.  Stumbled on this old post and read through some of the session reports from the Shieldlands campaign, that best of open-table ACKS games.

I think the session needs to be a relevant unit of time.
Markets refresh per session (roughly).
Spells refresh per session (roughly).
Domains provide passive income per session and no XP (and may be a source of trouble; clocks can run in them, and they're part of the world in the structure of "session begins, players attempt to do a thing, pizza break, a thing happens in the world")
More explicit structure for sessions - Market Phase, Planning Phase, Adventure!, Treasure Phase

Going to need to scale things down a little from ACKS' defaults.  I'm OK with a 9th level fighter having 30 mercenaries and a run-down fort - this is exactly what you'd expect from the Men, Brigands monster entry.  So if you're 9th level and you have a wee baby domain that nets you 250gp/session and a handful of mercs, that's OK by me.

I've still been kicking around how to simplify mercenary bookkeeping.  I think I may have hit a potential solution.

First, hire them as units beneath a sergeant, like I've been saying for a while.
Second, pay them up front.

ACKS has this concept of "the magic ratio", which comes up repeatedly in its economics and is tied to the rate of return on capital in fantasy Rome (bear with me).  Most investments are expected to pay for themselves in about 30 months, and characters in the world are assumed to have about 30 times their monthly income in assets.

So if you want to hire a mercenary and not have to deal with tracking his monthly expenses, pay him 30 months of wages up front.  Better, do it through a sergeant to handle a whole squad and if any one guy dies, the sergeant will take the pay pre-allocated to that guy and use it to pay some other poor bastard that he dragoons in the next market you pass through.

So if a light infantryman costs 6gp/mo in wages, then you can hire a squad of 6 of them for the foreseeable future for around 1100gp.  And then mercenaries become sort of like a magic item - they can go on your character sheet instead of in a spreadsheet, because you don't need to pay them monthly.  "The Yellow Saddles, Light Cavalry, 5/6 men".  Easy.  And they replenish between sessions subject to market class (possibly derandomized, because I don't want to have to roll for merc availability all the time).

And if you want them to replenish faster, we could base something on the commissioning items rules to let you raise the effective market class, and then either give fighters free virtual gold to spend on this every session (or let them write recruiting costs off on their living expenses), or give them a venturer-like ability to replenish mercenary units as if the market were one size larger.  This also provides an incentive to visit markets during adventures, to heal your mercenary units.

Now, I could see some sticker shock at 1100gp for six measly light infantrymen.  It's 2200 for heavy infantry, 2700 for bowmen, 5400 for light cavalry, and 10800 for heavy cavalry.  Those are not small chunks of change, and my former players would probably want to be banking that money towards building a fortress.  But if you change how domain acquisition works, from "build a fortress" to "domains are immutable, go capture one", then these changes complement each other - the money you aren't spending on castles can be spent on mercs, and the mercs are how you "buy" a castle.  And honestly, with domains out of the spending picture - would you rather have a +1 spear, or six knights who respawn between sessions?

Ooh, and this works out beautifully - a 9th level fighter has 250,000 XP.  He got about 200,000 of that from GP.  200,000 GP in permanent mercenaries is about 180 knights, which would be big for a bandit encampment but is in the realm of the reasonable (he probably spent some money on other things too).

So I don't think this is a totally crazy plan.

A/X: Continuity and Design Decisions

I've run into a bit of a design problem in A/X.

To what extent should I assume and support campaign versus episodic play?

ACKS is, by default, the ne plus ultra of high-consistency, high-continuity campaign play, starting in the mid-levels.  But in the low levels, ACKS works pretty well for low-continuity open table sorts of games.  That's part of what I like so much about low-level ACKS.  So I want to extend that support for low-continuity episodic games into the mid-levels as part of A/X.

But this complicates an already complicated problem.

Supporting lower-continuity play in the wilderness means being able to handle a wilderness adventure in a single session of say four hours.  The whole process: packing in gear and rations and mercenaries, getting where you're going, exploring a site, getting home, and divvying up the treasure, with a random encounter or three on the way.

This will/would require lower-fidelity systems and more abstraction.  I've been on about these two things for a while (2015, apparently), but never quite realized why I cared about them.  I think it really does come back around to enabling episodic play while also preserving resource management.

 But what do I simplify to speed up wilderness play?

The Arnesonian rule that terrain doesn't change travel speed would certainly speed up pathfinding.  Even reducing terrain movement speeds down to three categories (fast on roads or plains, normal in forests and hills, slow in mountains and swamps) and renormalizing it around hills would help, rather than having to multiply stuff out for each hex.

Making it easier to restock on mercenaries and livestock at the beginning of sessions would help a lot too.  In an episodic game, maybe you just don't worry too much about how long actually passed between sessions; if you need to sit in town for a while to gather mercs and horses, or travel to a big city through civilized lands, you can handwave that, or increase the prices a bit to account for having the things you need imported by other people.  This question of resource replenishment between adventures plays into mid-level mechanics for eg the Fighter - if you can replenish mercs between adventures with little difficulty, then an ability to help them replenish their mercs isn't gonna be very useful.  Maybe Fighters can do it for cheaper, if there's a cash cost associated with it?

Removing randomness from markets might help with speed too.  If it's always 1 crossbowman instead of 1d3, that's one less thing I have to roll at the beginning of a session.

Bed-rest for party members is also something that could be elided or abstracted ("they're out for one adventure").

Tracking rations in man-weeks, each of one stone, and only marking them off at the end of the week on the rest day rather than daily would parallel torches nicely and might speed things up a little.  Probably want to stop worrying about rations spoiling, not worth the hassle.

For any reasonably-sized party, the question with foraging and hunting isn't "will you find food?", but "how much food do you find?"  Maybe abstracting away the survival roll per character would be reasonable (especially in the presence of mercenaries inflating party size).

Are "getting lost" rolls important?  Is there a better way to handle wilderness navigation, parallel to mapping and the destruction of the map in the dungeon?

How do you speed up wilderness fights, in the presence of mercenaries?

I've been thinking about explicit party roles like the old Caller lately.  Necrocarcerus had several such roles that players assumed.  I wonder if having such party leadership structure (ie, someone to resolve disputes, some to map, someone to handle logistics) would help speed things up (especially for large parties).

ACKS: Stat Mulligans and Swaps

Something I've been kicking around in response to The Ability Score Are Too Damn High.

In most of our ACKS games, we have had players roll five sets of stats, choose one to play and hold two as replacement characters.  This tends to lead them to having the best of five.

An alternative I've been considering: roll a set of stats, 3d6 in order.  Accept it as your character or reject it and reroll up to (say) four times.  If your next set is better than what you rejected, too bad, and if you run out of mulligans, you play the last of the five.

I like this idea because it changes the problem from optimization (pick the best set of stats from the five) to satisficing (is this set of stats good enough?).  It introduces an element of gambling, that OSR pillar risk and reward, that self-determination of "what is your ambition?", and of incomplete information.  In the average case, I expect it would also accelerate the character-generation process; you probably aren't going to roll all five sets, and at while there are more decision-points, each decision is boolean (keep or reject).  Characters will also in expectation have somewhat lower stats, which is also an outcome that I am OK with.

In order to preserve some amount of choice of class, and as a replacement for offstat-drops, I think allowing a player to swap any two scores in the set is probably reasonable.  This preserves some input from the dice (for eg multi-primereq classes), but if you just want to play a wizard, fine, swap your highest into Int.  And if you already rolled something high in your main stat, then you can shuffle around two of your offstats to your preference.

Notes from a Hiking Seminar

Some of which are relevant to wilderness adventuring.

(But first - deep apologies for not replying to comments on my last post; I was offline for most of a week, and now it seems like something's going wrong with google accounts and I can't post comments anywhere, including here.  So...  everything I would comment is now going into posts, I guess.  Thank you DHBoggs for relaying some history on the development of the hex - I found it very interesting and am happy to hear that the day was originally a clear parallel time quantum to the turn in dungeoneering exploration)

Prep questions:

• Where are you going?
• Who are you going with?
• Who's the least able?  Can they make it to where you're going?
• What season is it?
• What's the weather going to be like?
• What passes or permits from governments do you need to go there?
• When do you expect to be back?  Who are you going to tell that to so they can send rescue?

 Ten Essentials:

• Extra clothing, layers for variations in weather and climate across trip
• Extra water (or means to procure it, like LifeStraws, water filters, dowsing, and high-level clerics)
• Extra food
• First aid kit
• Knife or multitool
• Means of producing fire
• Map and compass
• Headlamp / hands-free light source
• Sun protection
• Emergency shelter (down to and including just a blanket or tarp)

As a rule of thumb, most packs can carry weight in pounds equal to their capacity in liters minus ten.  Not a problem if you're using stone as a combined unit.

If you find a leaf with a face chewed into it, you shouldn't take it home with you.  (This was actually the comment that led to this whole post - intended as a silly example of leave no trace, but my brain went "that would be wonderfully creepy in-game")

Place campfires in established rings, or else.

Avalanche and river-crossing dangers depend less on the weather right now than on the weather from the previous week or so.  Probably also true of trail conditions.  On the one hand, this complicates the problem of making weather systems for the wilderness game, because if you want high-fidelity simulation you have to track past state.  On the other hand, this also pushes towards other potential solution-spaces, which isn't a bad thing (maybe something like the Oriental Adventures events tables - you roll a big trend for this month's weather, which sets the trail, river, and avalanche conditions, and then roll daily weather within that big weather pattern's subtable).

Animals in popular hiking destinations steal enough food from peoples' bags to get enormous.

Black bears are basically just large housecats for morale purposes, unless cubs are involved.

Mountain lions are also basically large housecats for morale purposes, except they think you are a toy.

Local outfitter offers appointments to get your gear in order for a particular trip.  Quartermaster NPCs!  I'm pretty sure I've written a post about having a NPCs to organize mules and rations and all that stuff (as a script, of course), but I'll be arsed if I can find it.

Some good place-names.  "Ranger Station" is a phrase that translates wonderfully into D&D.

Wilderness as Dungeon Revisited

A lot of this is probably obvious; circling back around to typical ways of running the wilderness, but through the lens of dungeoneering.  Less a post about rules than about how to organize information.

Previously, I was thinking about 6-mile hexes as being like rooms in a dungeon.  Now I think maybe they're supposed to be more like a 10' square.  Hexes and squares are both the smallest unit of organization in mapping on their respective scales.  You can traverse multiple per unit-time (turn in dungeon, day in wilderness), but it takes a unit-time to search either.  They're also a unit of organization in your notes - you probably wouldn't have multiple encounters or multiple traps in a single 10' square in a dungeon, and you probably shouldn't in the wilderness either.  I think the difficulty of book-keeping involved in trying to cram multiple lairs into each hex is a big gripe of mine with ACKS' assumptions about wilderness density.  Yes, it makes sense in-the-world.  But it's bad UX.

So if a hex is like a 10' square, what implications does this have?

"Rooms" / "biomes" / "zones" / micro-regions of multiple 6-mi hexes sharing common terrain, common opposition, and isolated by surrounding hexes ("walls").  Possibly a single key entry in DM's notes - "Cradle Wood, hexes 0601, 0602, 0501, 0503, 0504.  Lush valley full of tall pine trees, ferns, stinging nettles, and moss.  Abundant small creeks with crayfish.  Three goblin villages (7, 5, 4 warbands) with wargs.  Chiefs Ugbu, Ordo, and Glum are all brothers."  And then you can vary random encounter tables by room - all demihuman encounters in Cradle Wood are goblins, or someaught.  Weather might also be particular to a particular "room" ("Ironvale, hexes ...  Valley in the hills where it rains most of the time.  Oak trees and mud.  Abundant iron and coal beneath the surface.  Dwarven vault built into the hillside has flooding problems.").  If naming "rooms" is too much hassle at scale, just number them like rooms on dungeon maps.

Vision - in the dungeon, the limit of your vision is by torchlight and measured in tens of feet.  In the wilderness, it's by height and blocking terrain, and measured in 6-mile hexes, with a default of two hexes on flat plains.  See also also Trilemma.

The function of walls in the dungeon, to block both movement and vision, is softened from boolean in the wilderness.  Most terrain that slows movement also blocks vision (hills, forests), but some doesn't (open water, tundra).  "Walls" in the wilderness are more like ridgelines.  They're probably their own "rooms", since you can enter them - it'll just be slow going.

Does it make sense to have "unroomed" hexes?  Sort of like hallways in dungeons, which are often unkeyed?  Unroomed / unkeyed hexes might work well for "walls" too.  Use default terrain random encounter tables to place dynamic lairs, assume low land-value relative to named and detailed areas.  Sort of like leaving parts of your megadungeon to be filled procedurally during play.

Random encounter distance is one place where the analogy breaks down a bit.  In the dungeon, a random encounter at book distances is unlikely to engage you for a turn or two.  In the wilderness, by-the-book distances put them on top of you in minutes, definitely not days.  I think it might be worthwhile to change random encounters to the "wandering monster / lurking threat" model, much like dungeon encounters - wargs picked up your trail and have been eating your leavings, elvish scouts have noticed your tree-cutting and are displeased, and so forth.  So extend the random encounter distance to 1d3-1 hexes or so; sometimes you do stumble right on top of them, and for some random encounters that's the only time they make sense (skeletons aren't going to follow you, probably).  My players have long complained about a lack of control over engagement in the wilderness, and having a little more advance warning might help.  Might also be worth stealing a page from DaW's book and having an opposed Strategic Ability roll to see which side gets advantageous terrain before a wilderness fight, and then use the book values for random encounter distance to figure out how far apart the forces are at the beginning of the fight.

If a hex is like a 10' square, then microsandboxes need to be reconsidered.  A 10 hex by 10 hex map is going to be very dense, without much room for rooms, much like a dungeon in a 10x10 grid, and my experiment with building such a tiny sandbox bears this impression out.  So the howling emptiness of early D&D follows naturally from this metaphor - empty hexes are OK-to-necessary when hexes are considered primarily in clusters rather than individually.

Simple Domains: Trade Routes and Tributaries

Central thrust: link wilderness-level travel and trade to domain trade income by establishing "routes", allowing some improvement to one's domain under Simple Domains without having to track population

One of the annoying things with Simple Domains is the urban population.  I'm also more interested in settings where city-states and tribes are the norm, rather than feudalism.  Consequently, different rules for and assumptions about organizing realms seem appropriate.

I don't really like ACKS' default population growth as a domain "advancement" mechanic because 1) it's boring (spend money or wait time, counter ticks up, spreadsheet recalculates), and 2) it's unreasonably fast (yeah, there's some justification about "time of upheavals and migrations", but that's not always reasonable).

It occurs to me that domain "advancement" might still be doable with static population numbers via mutable trade routes.  Opening a new trade route between two domains entails clearing it to some reasonable degree, and then leading a ship or caravan along it.   I've been thinking about "threat" primarily affecting edges of the trade graph; a threat closes the edge, then if left unaddressed might spread to more edges, and if it holds all the routes in to or out of a particular town, the town comes under its thumb as well.  So I'm not really talking clearing all the hexes on the route, just dealing with things big enough to threaten a caravan (bandits, orcs, griffons, dragons).  Once a route is cleared, maybe a seasonal encounter roll can bring monsters back to it.

Once the route between two settlements is safe and you demonstrate this by leading a ship or caravan across it, imitators follow and trade along the route becomes regular, allowing the rulers of each end to gather additional market taxes.  If the additional market revenue from trade get high enough, the market class improves.  This lets the trade mechanic fill in for the "extra urban families from vassals" problem that Simple Domains had before.  On the downside, allowing market classes to change like this opens up all sorts of weirdness if you use market class for anything (like trade range, or calculating how much trade income is generated), and could lead to undesirable positive feedback loops.

What I like about this idea is that it links the wilderness game to the domain game with travel.  Your players get to go see the rest of the campaign world in order to make their domain stronger, rather than grinding through hex-clearing.  My players often seem to want caravans and ships in the mid-levels anyway.  At low levels you play "caravan guards", at mid-levels "caravan leaders", and at high levels "that guy who sponsors caravans led by henchmen".  It also opens up structured interactions with diplomacy.  Going to war with a domain generally means closing of routes between the combatants, and you may attack trade routes they have with other domains as well to reduce their trade income.  This might anger their trade partners, leading to embargo or entering the fight against you.  Conversely, a small domain coerced by a larger one might not be willing to trade with their overseer's rivals due to the sword looming over their heads, unless you can make them assurances of protection.  A domain defeated in war might become a tributary state as a term of surrender, sending its trade income to the domain the subdued it.

The tricky part is getting the numbers right - big enough to be worth bothering with, small enough to not spiral out of control, consistent with ACKS' existing trade rules, and simple enough to not be a huge hassle (ie, "just treat it as a network of sources and sinks for various goods, and you're adding a new link, which changes traffic patterns and directs trade through certain nodes which changes the tax income for those nodes"...  like yeah, I could do that, programmatically, but I don't want to need a computer).

Another interesting question is interaction with all the other parts of ACKS.  Does trade with settlements of different culture, terrain, "tech level", etc generate more income?  Interaction with monopoly?  Thieves' guilds?  Our favorite class, the venturer?  Seasonal variation in trade income (less in winter, more in summer)?  How do trade volumes or revenues relate to infrastructure like roads?  (Can we spin this into a reason for players to build and maintain roads, which they also seem to often want to do?)

I don't know if this would actually be simpler in practice than population growth.  But I do think it might be more fun.

A third approach to "domain advancement", and one which players seem to for push historically, is building up local industries and institutions.  I think this is actually fairly easy to adjudicate under ACKS' core rules, but it's not very profitable, and it could stand to be quantized, Kingmaker or Fields of Blood style - drop 10kgp plus some monthly maintenance on a Shipyard, and now you can buy ships as if your market were one class bigger.  Domains have a limited number of Industry slots based on size.  This would certainly be philosophically consistent with Simple Domains, so maybe it warrants further development.