Traveller's Terms and HBR's Tours of Duty

I had an interesting text-chat conversation with a former coworker recently (excerpted):

me: I suppose maybe that is a good argument for me going to XXX next rather than YYY...  Just to see if XXX is the way that I think it is (which was part of why I wanted to go to $CURRENT_EMPLOYER - to see it).  The tourist approach to career planning.

them: Ha, I like how you describe your career strategy!  Kinda reminds me of Reid Hoffman's tour of duty https://hbr.org/2013/06/tours-of-duty-the-new-employer-employee-compact

It's a pretty good article.

I have thought about careers and life in terms of Traveller's terms for quite some time; my blogger profile used to have what I estimate my Traveller stats at, including terms in various occupations.  When I'm at a new company, I think of staying a full four years as a good solid run; I've only done it once so far, and it was a pretty darn successful four years, definitely worth an extra benefit roll (with a shift in company direction in the final year or so which I did not think promising).  More commonly, after 18-36 months, if things are looking mediocre, I move on.  Not a failed survival roll, but more like a failed roll to promote.

So I think it's a little funny to see a serious publication like the Harvard Business Review take basically the same perspective, following in the footsteps of some geeks in the '70s trying to model careers.

The Caller and the Vietnam Hypothesis

In order to command well, we should know how to submit. He who submits with good grace will eventually become worthy of command.

- Cicero, On the Laws.

There was a post on the osr subreddit the other day asking about the caller.  This post is an elaboration of my comments on that post.

In what seems to be my idiom lately, I decided to go have a look at what OD&D and 1e said about the caller, and was a bit surprised at what I found.

OD&D makes only a brief mention of the caller on page 12-13 of Book 3, where there is a dialogue between the DM and the caller, in which the caller describes a series of actions the party takes during exploration.Curiously, none of the other players say anything.

AD&D 1e largely replaces the term "caller" with "leader". A dialogue demonstrating exploration on pages 97-100 of the 1e DMG does include separate voices for Leader Character (LC) and Other Characters (OC). The OC voice seems to do a fair bit of asking questions of the DM, undertaking combat actions, and in a few cases undertaking independent actions when separated from the party. There is also a note after one of the LC's proposals ("The other players concur") which indicates that this dialogue is perhaps not intended to capture the full discussion at the table, just what passes between the DM and players (but on the other hand, there are also lines that are more or less just other characters agreeing to a plan proposed by the leader, so the text is somewhat inconsistent). The LC does seem to have a very active role in proposing courses of action.

The 1e PHB also makes a few mention of party leaders. The heading "Obedience" on page 106 notes,

The leader and caller of a party might order one course of action while various players state that their characters do otherwise. Your DM will treat such situations as confused and muddled, being certain to penalize the group accordingly.

(emphasis mine).  It is foreign indeed to modern gaming sensibilities for any player to give orders to the party as a whole. I have often thought of callers as sort of like the chairman of a committee, responsible for keeping the party moving coherently, but perhaps "elected expedition captain" is closer to the original role.  Maybe "caller" is meant as in "shot-caller".

This doesn't seem like something that would work well with the sort of people I have historically gamed with - contrarian engineers suspicious of all authority, who can't take orders even from the people paying them without arguing (to be fair, a big part of the job is figuring out which orders are impossible and pushing back on them).  But it probably worked for some sort of player, once - but what sort?  And then I remembered that I had read of a game at West Point that used a caller in very much this commanding style (with a second-in-command even, I believe).

Maybe, like careful dungeoncrawling and Tucker's Kobolds, this commanding way of playing the caller comes out of the American experience in Vietnam, where a broad cross-section of men were exposed to giving and receiving orders as a consequence of the draft.  And like careful dungeoncrawling and Tucker's Kobolds, maybe its decline in the '80s reflects the spread of the game beyond its original audience of historical wargamers and veterans.

Current 1:1 Timescale Campaigns

So apparently I haven't been the only person taking an interest in Gygax's timekeeping lately.  I stumbled into a cluster of blogs describing three campaigns currently being run with 1:1 timekeeping:

• Bdubs' ACKS campaign
• Bdubs discusses observations on the effects of different timekeeping strategies in play here
  
• Jeffro's AD&D campaign (which has been running for about a year now)
• Waterdeep OSR's 5e campaign (this post also discusses the how to effectively delegate the activity of high-power NPC patrons to players)
  

This seems like a very natural/consistent/worthy next thrust for the OSR.  Having recovered the early rules, and made them readily available, rediscovering and repopularizing the culture of play of the early days for which those rules were intended.

It kind of tempts me to run Traveller in this style...  the most obvious difficulty is figuring out the resources available to patrons, and Striker's rules for planetary GDP would provide a very workable starting point.

Traveller and Warhammer 40k

Another product of a discussion with my father.

We played Dark Heresy (1e) together for a short campaign or two.  We more or less agree that it's a fun premise for a game, but a lousy system.

Meanwhile, Traveller is a pretty decent system, but it's hobbled by the fact that its implicit setting and expected conventions of play are unfamiliar.  There is no Appendix N of fiction in the Classic Traveller books, unfortunately.  So people misuse it for Firefly when it was meant for Space Viking and Dumarest (or so I'm told).  About the closest I've read, works of that era that get at the "Imperial Science Fiction" feel, might be Dune or Foundation.

But it's not quite true that Imperial Science Fiction has no heirs.  Warhammer 40k is also Imperial Science Fiction of a sort, though a deeply pessimistic lens.  You have a sprawling, strongly human-centric empire with subsector and planetary governments who are only loosely under the thumb of central power - just like Traveller.  You have faster than light travel which is slow, unreliable, and leaves ships isolated from each other for the duration, just like Traveller.  FTL communication exists, and it's faster than FTL travel, but still not great in either.  All three of these are features which permit characters out on the fringes much more autonomy than would otherwise be expected.  Psionics are rare, dangerous, and stigmatized, much more so than in Traveller.  How many science fiction settings have psionics at all, nevermind agreeing on the general attitude towards them?  Ship ownership by private individuals, the Rogue Traders, is rare and inherited, versus ship ownership being rare and just extraordinarily expensive in Traveller (I guess you could do multi-generation-term inherited starship loans...).  Powered armor (and the skills to use it) is also very rare and expensive in both, while both also have very heterogeneous mixes of tracked, wheeled, and grav vehicles and both energy weapons and slugthrowers in common use.  The emphasis on melee combat is surprisingly high for science fiction in both - "cutlass" is a legitimate weapon choice in both.  And the position of anti-aging treatments in both settings has some similarities; they exist, but they're rare, expensive, for the rich and powerful, probably not for your character.

I recall hearing tell that Warhammer 40k's setting had its origins in Traveller's universe, but filtered through a British black comedy 2300 AD / Judge Dredd lens.  And the more I think about it the more right it seems.

So the natural conclusion is that Traveller is probably a really darn good system for running Warhammer 40k RPGs; almost certainly better than the baroque percentile monstrosities that have been churned out in the last ten years.  And if you want modern gamers to understand Traveller's default assumptions, you could do a lot worse than describing the setting as a lot like Warhammer 40k, but less grimdark, with all the craziness dialed down to like a 3.  Yes there are space marines in powered armor and they'll probably ruin your day if you try to fight them, but under the armor they're just well-trained dudes, not centuries-old super-soldiers.  Yes the planet is a feudal technocracy and it's sort of like it's run by the Mechanicus but they're not as culty and not as cyborg.

The real question is whether you'd use Striker or the actual WH40k wargame rules to resolve small mass combats.

And hey, nothing says "To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions.  It is to live in the cruelest and most bloody regime imaginable" quite like death in chargen.

Winning at D&D, Domains as Endgame

I've been playing Grim Dawn lately, in addition to a little Deep Rock Galactic.  I'm getting up towards "endgame" in both of them.  I had never really considered "endgame" in the context of RPG-like games with leveling / progression systems (as opposed to, say, grand strategy games where "endgame" is when your strategy has come to fruition, your position is secure, and you get to coast to victory).  The way it seems to be used in Grim Dawn and DRG is that your progression stops or slows, but difficult and very time-consuming content remains, to interact with optionally.

Looking at Basic D&D through this lens of CRPG terminology, it seems like name level (9th-10th) is almost a soft-cap.  The XP to level changes from exponential to linear (with a steep slope), the rate of HP gain is halved, you've gotten most of the attack throw and save improvement that you're going to get, and you start getting access to new, expensive content on long time-scales: domains.

There are problems with this model, mostly around MUs getting access to 6th level spells at 11th, and some thief skills still don't get up into the 90+% range until 12th - but switching from 5% improvements to 1% or 2% improvements is a very soft-cap "diminishing returns" change of progression structure.  I don't think I would mind a variation that made this more explicit, by making 6th level MU spells ritual magic, and compressing thief skill advancement so that eg Hide in Shadows did get up around 85% by 9th level and then improve by about 2% per level thereafter.

Incidentally, having very-fine-grained progress on thief skills post-9th level might be the best argument I've ever considered for using percentile thief skills rather than d20 or d6.

I think it would be reasonable to conceive of making it into the 9th-11th level range as "winning" at D&D.  You've made it over the hump and fulfilled the default goal of accumulating personal power; further efforts to accumulate personal power will be slow going.  But now you have enough power to pick your own goals.  Or you could just retire to your tower and start a new character.

I've noticed among Grim Dawn players a sort of division, between players who enjoy leveling characters, and players who rush through leveling to focus on endgame stuff.  I think that (say) my past ACKS players also divided naturally into these two categories.  For some of them, domains were the game and leveling was just something you did to get there.  Others felt compelled to get domains just to keep up with the endgamers in terms of domain XP, but had no interest in domains as ends to themselves.

I think in a "MEANINGFUL CAMPAIGN" with very high individual-player autonomy, having a few players pursue the domain endgame is probably less disruptive for everyone else than in a high-cohesion tight-party game.  Particularly without rules for XP from domains.  And if domains are explicitly endgame content, and at that point you're already about capped-out on XP progression anyway, who cares if they give XP or not?  The passage of time that Gygax describes, where you're probably only passing a couple weeks of game-time per week of real-time, also seems likely to keep adventuring PCs at the center of the action, while PCs hoping to only do domain stuff will be stuck waiting a lot.

...  I wonder what the 1e DMG has to say about domains specifically?

"A Meaningful Campaign"

I was thinking in the shower about that oft-quoted bit of Gygaxiana:

YOU CAN NOT HAVE A MEANINGFUL CAMPAIGN IF STRICT TIME RECORDS ARE NOT KEPT.

(all-caps his).

His detractors use it to make fun of him - look at this guy, taking strict timekeeping too seriously and getting mad enough to put it in all caps.  His adherents take it as dogma.

But I got to thinking about Boot Hill's perspective on campaigns, and started to wonder - maybe he meant a structure with much more autonomy for individual players than we typically think of in campaigns.  He's not talking about an "adventure path", obviously, since the quote is from the AD&D 1e DMG and Dragonlance was yet a twinkle in Weis and Hickman's eyes.  Less obviously, I think he's not even talking about the way OSR campaigns are usually run, where the party has a lot of autonomy but players are more or less bound together by it.  One example of this position from Dungeon of Signs - "Old style D&D is not a story about any one PC, it's a story about the adventuring party as a whole, or ultimately about a fictional world as a whole."

I got curious about the context around the Gygax quote, so I dug up my previously-unopened pdf of the 1e DMG and lo and behold, a paragraph after "YOU CANNOT HAVE...", we get:

For the sake of example, let us assume that you begin your campaign on Day 1 of the Year 1000. There are four player characters who begin initially, and they have adventures which last a total of 50 days — 6 days of actual adventuring and 44 days of resting and other activity. At this point in time two new players join the game, one of the original group decides to go to seek the advice of an oracle after hiring an elven henchman, and the remaining three “old boys” decide they will not go with the newcomers. So on Day 51 player A’s character is off on a journey, those of B, C, and D are resting on their laurels, and E and F enter the dungeon. The latter pair spend the better part of the day surviving, but do well enough to rest a couple of game days and return for another try on Day 54 — where they stumble upon the worst monster on the first level, surprise it, and manage to slay it and come out with a handsome treasure. You pack it in for the night. Four actual days later (and it is best to use 1 actual day = 1 game day when no play is happening), on Day 55, player characters B, C, and D enter the dungeon and find that the area they selected has already been cleaned out by player characters E and F. Had they come the day after the previous game session, game Day 52, and done the same thing, they would have found the monster and possibly gotten the goodies!

Some penalty must accrue to the non-active, but on the other hand, the over-active can not be given the world on a silver platter. Despite time differences, the activities of the newcomers to the campaign should be allowed to stand, as Destiny has decreed that the monster in question could not fall to the characters B, C, and D. Therefore, the creature was obviously elsewhere (not dead) when they visited its lair on Day 52, but it had returned on Day 56. Being aware of time differences between groups of player characters will enable you to prevent the BIG problems. You will know when the adventuring of one such group has gone far enough ahead in game time to call a halt. This is particularly true with regard to town/dungeon adventures.

 (emphasis mine)

Can you imagine the drama that would ensue if two new players joined your campaign (group?) and your existing players decided to not go adventuring with them?  I suspect that even in the vast majority of OSR campaigns today, this would be seen as a gross violation of social norms.  Even the West Marches assumes a cooperative community of PCs, a sort of "whoever's at the table that day goes adventuring together".  And yet here Gygax writes as if it were perfectly normal, as if association within the game-world was never taken for granted (and this example wasn't even one of those 20+ person campaigns mentioned in OD&D Book 1 - this is six players!).  This is what I mean by "no party" - there are player characters in the world and they interact with each other as they will.  Sometimes they work together to achieve their objectives, but that's a choice.  A party exists only for a single adventure.  Outside of an adventure, you can do as you please.  You want to go haring off after some oracle (for about a month, in the paragraph following the quoted one)?  By all means!  You want to spend a month just resting and healing?  Sure!  But you might get scooped on treasure.

It makes a lot of sense that if you have that norm, of players going off and doing their own things, and splitting into multiple parties, then yeah, you are going to want timekeeping!  As he says, to prevent "BIG" continuity problems.

The time lines of various player characters will diverge, meet, and diverge again over the course of game years. This makes for interesting campaigns and helps form the history of the milieu. Groups of players tend to segregate themselves for a time, some never returning to the ken of the rest, most eventually coming back to reform into different bands. As characters acquire henchmen, the better players will express a desire to operate some of theirs independently while they, or their liege lord, are away. This is a perfectly acceptable device, for it tends to even out characters and the game. Henchmen tend to become associates — or rivals — this way, although a few will remain as colorless servitors.

You may ask why time is so important if it causes such difficulties with record-keeping, dictates who can or can not go adventuring during a game session, and disperses player characters to the four winds by its strictures. Well, as initially pointed out, it is a necessary penalty imposed upon characters for certain activities [mostly magic item creation]. Beyond that, it also gives players yet another interesting set of choices and consequences. The latter tends to bring more true-to-life quality to the game, as some characters will use precious time to the utmost advantage, some will treat it lightly, and some will be constantly wasting it to their complete detriment. Time is yet another facet which helps to separate the superior players from the lesser ones. If time-keeping is a must from a penalty standpoint, it is also an interesting addition from the standpoint of running a campaign.

Emphasis again mine.  A couple of interesting things in these bits.  One is that the "diverge, meet, diverge again" is very much in the model of, say, Thieves' World, where there are persistent characters who make temporary alliances.  I have heard fiction in this form referred to as picaresque, but looking up the actual properties of picaresque I'm not so sure (I do like almost all of those in my D&D though).  The temporary nature of "bands" is again emphasized.  "interesting set of choices and consequences" is a very gamey thing to say, as is "separate the superior players from the lesser ones".  Gygax here is talking about D&D as a game that you can be better or worse at, and I think would not only say that it is acceptable for some players to fall behind as a result of bad choices and bad luck, but desirable.

So, returning to "meaningful campaign".  It seems that "campaign" here is meant much like the Boot Hill style of campaigning, a big set of interacting characters and a series of skirmish actions with a degree of continuity.  It seems that "meaningful" is meant in some combination of "maintaining internal consistency" and "preserving the agency of each individual player, that their choices about how to spend their resources [time] have consequences."

I'm really curious to see how this notion of great individual agency squares against the practice of having a caller.  I get the feeling I'm going to end up doing a lot more reading from the 1e DMG in the near future.  I found this a more thoughtful position on time, and better-articulated, than I expected.

Entropy as a Character-Generation Currency

Had a conversation with my father today about character generation, random stats vs point buy, and Traveller character generation (including how death-in-chargen leads to intra-party balance in expectation more readily than allowing/expecting characters who fail survival rolls to be played in the company of those who passed all survival rolls).  While discussing point buy schemes and how it's sort of hard to put a number on the value of an 18, but that rolling dice has the problem of "auditability" (did they actually roll these stats?) I got to thinking...

Even if you don't want to actually obey dice, you can expect results that deviate from expectation to a certain degree, and that's a property that you can check.  Ability scores occur with certain probabilities.  Given a set of stats, one could compute the probability of that set occurring.  Depending on the sort of campaign one is running, one could establish bounds on the improbability of each set of chosen stats.

In information theory, there's a concept of "surprisal" in the occurrence of an event, which roughly quantifies how surprising it is given the probability of its occurrence (also called self-information).  If an event occurs with probability p, then its surprisal is -lg(p).  So given the probability of each ability score roll, we can compute the total surprisal of a set of stats.  And one nice property of logarithms of probability is that when you would multiply probabilities, adding their logarithms is equivalent (eg, 0.5 * 0.5 = 0.25.  lg(0.5) = -1, lg(0.25) = -2, so lg(0.5) + lg(0.5) = lg(0.25)).  Being able to work with them additively rather than multiplicatively is a desirable property for something like a point-buy system.

Stat	% chance	Probability	Self-information (bits)	Normalized self-information	Scaled and rounded self-information (deci-bits)
3	0.46	0.0046	7.76	4.76	48
4	1.39	0.0139	6.17	3.17	32
5	2.78	0.0278	5.17	2.17	22
6	4.63	0.0463	4.43	1.43	14
7	6.94	0.0694	3.85	0.85	8
8	9.72	0.0972	3.36	0.36	4
9	11.57	0.1157	3.11	0.11	1
10	12.5	0.125	3	0	0
11	12.5	0.125	3	0	0
12	11.57	0.1157	3.11	0.11	1
13	9.72	0.0972	3.36	0.36	4
14	6.94	0.0694	3.85	0.85	8
15	4.63	0.0463	4.43	1.43	14
16	2.78	0.0278	5.17	2.17	22
17	1.39	0.0139	6.17	3.17	32
18	0.46	0.0046	7.76	4.76	48

So we could use these scaled surprisal values as points during character generation.  But a set of all 10s and 11s is surprisingly unsurprising; an average set rolled on 3d6 looks more like 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14 than like all 10s and 11s.  If you wanted to model stat-lines at this level of surprise, a reasonable approach might be that you get a 7 in any one stat and 8 deci-bits to spend on the other 5, with the option to take a 9 to get a credit of 1 deci-bit.  Realistically, this means you get either a 14 or two 13s and the rest are 10s or 11s (unless you take the 9, which buys you a 12).  Might also want to add a rule that you should have close to the same number of 11s and 10s.

Honestly 13, 13, 11, 11, 10, 7 is a very playable set in B/Xy games.  I could absolutely see giving new players pregens with this array.

But going from there to higher-entropy statblocks seems sort of tricky.  If you let players take a 3 to buy an 18 (or a 6 and a 7 to buy a 16), their stats are "in balance", but more surprising /  less natural / less likely than a statblock with an 18 and a 10 would be!

Average stats of 4d6 drop 1 are more like 9, 10, 12, 13, 14, 16 - 34 deci-bits with the option to take a 9 for one more, I suppose?  Four 14s and a pair of 12s is nothing to scoff at in 3.x, while in B/X 16, 13, 13, 13, 11, 10 (or 12, 9) is a very solid set.

Perhaps it would make more sense to compute the probability (and then surprisal) of each ability score modifier band (per game-system), so that a 13 and a 14 are more-or-less equivalent?

Maybe the real problem here is that we're computing surprisal of each score in isolation, when maybe we should be computing the surprisal of the whole set.  Having an 18 as the highest score in a set isn't really that surprising - 6 stats, each with a 1-in-216 chance of being an 18, means a 1-in-36 chance that at least one is an 18, which is the same probability as having a 16 in any particular score.  But I'm not actually familiar enough with information theory to say if I would need something more complex like joint/mutual entropy (but it seems like there shouldn't be any mutual information between stats in a rolled character, because the stat rolls are independent, so you should just be able to add the self-informations together to get its aggregate information).  So I think this line of thought, evaluating the whole set of stats together, would take more thinking.

In any case, an aside - if we're considering using surprise as a currency in character generation, we could also use it to buy "weird stuff".  Want to play a lawful drow, or the lost son of the rightful king, or a balrog?  Fine, but those are extraordinarily rare and that costs entropy that you then aren't spending on your stats.  If elves are half as common among adventurers as humans in your setting, then being an elf is about 10 deci-bits of surprise.  And then maybe we can get rid of stat minimums for demi-humans (which currently impose roughly that effect - three-quarters of stat-lines qualify to be dwarves, and three-quarters qualify to be elves; call it 4 deci-bits).