I blame Jeffro

I just bought a game expansion I cannot play, and it's Jeffro's fault.

OK, to be entirely fair, Eric Raymond was my gateway drug for piquing my interest in Commands & Colors: Ancients, but it was Jeffro who made post after post showing gameplay of Talon, and more recently, Space Empires 4x.

Of course, both are out of print. So now I'm on the sign-up pre-order list for P500, so that when they get to 500 orders they'll publish and ship copies.

But no, that's sortof like Kickstarter, but better because they don't get your money until they cross the finish line. 

The real kicker was the gameplay examples from the expansion set, Close Encounters.

You see - what I didn't want to do was finally, finally receive a copy of SE4x and then turn around to buy the expansion, and discover I'm back in P500 limbo.

So yes, I paid perfectly good money for a game expansion for which the core game I've only looked at the rules and twiddled a bit on Vassal, and won't receive a physical copy for months, at best.

Having looked at the rules, and given how much I've loved other GMT games I've played, I'm sure it will turn out to be a wise decision.

In the meantime, joking aside, thank you Jeffro for showing me how awesome the game is, for your enthusiasm for not only the games you play, but the hobby as a whole. Finally, thank you for the wonderful job you've done at the Castalia House blog.

Update: In the latest email from GMT, we have the following tentative shipping schedule. Despite still being marked "Not there yet" at 397 and 276 pre-orders respectively on the site, Space Empires 4x and Talon are off to the printers, payments will be taken in early July, and shipping is tentatively set for July 15-25th of this year.

Vassal and GMT Games

For those who don't know, GMT is the company responsible for the absolutely amazing Commands & Colors: Ancients (of which I have a copy) and Talon which has shown up at Castalia House on more than a few occasions.

They're also known for a series of "COIN" counterinsurgency games such as Cuba Libre, Liberty or Death, On a Distant Plain, and Fire in the Lake. I haven't had a chance to play these yet, but everything I've heard is phenomenal.

Finally, they're known for quality parts and components.

Here's a problem - a lot of their games are out of print. You'll see the status for Space Empires 4x, Commands & Colors, and Talon as being on the P500 list, and not slated for reprint yet.

So, I'm perfectly willing to sink a few hundred dollars into Talon, SE4x, and pending a couple playthroughs, on Cuba Libre, etc., but I can't buy the games without selling a few organs because they're basically unavailable.

Unlike some, it doesn't bother me much. Why?

This is a company that has stayed in business for decades, and puts out high quality games, and I cannot help but think that this policy of "don't print a game until we know people are interested" has something to do with it. Also, sometimes they print stuff just because - my understanding is the first of the COIN series never crossed the threshold but the company believed in it anyway - and it's since justified that choice.

Of course, for some of us, it means that if we want to playtest a game first, especially if we don't hear about it until after the first run has sold out, we're stuck. Though, since every game of theirs I've played has been uniformly excellent, I'm sure with a little more budget and storage space I'd be dropping cash on more hex boards than I can count on. And if I don't like it, I'm sure someone will take it off my hands to break even.

Finally though, it allows something I've noticed that is rare in current boardgames - and yes, I'm specifically looking at Amarillo Design (Federation Commander, Star Fleet Battles) and Fantasy Flight - a set of high quality, endorsed Vassal and cyberboard modules for many of their games (Like C&C) and full downloadable rules. By contrast, Fantasy Flight deliberately has the modules crippled so you need to have the actual game on hand to refer to critical components.

Lending Meaning to Choice

A drum I've beaten over and over again with my game group - I want the choices my characters make to mean something other than "I get through the adventure, I gain XP".

It's one reason that, if I'm running a game, I'm running ACKs, though I'm looking forward to some Traveller (book) play at some point as well. It's why, as I alluded to earlier, I also prefer modules to "adventures" and "adventure paths".

So, someone going by "Raging Owlbear" posted that, after the game expectations were set, as they were rolling up characters, one of his players suddenly wanted a different set of bonuses for his elf, and why the hell not?

Jeffro had posted it to G+ and there was some discussion, Owlbear even joined in. I'd written the following:

IMO there are several ways to handle this.

One - make a game wide ruling that elves will have these different abilities. Preferable before people are rolling up characters

Two - not sure how this applies to 5e but ACKs has a point trade system built in. If you really really want that int up, you can trade something else at 2-1

Three - define a new class/race of elves. ACKs allows you to do this via the player companion in a way to ensure relative ability changes balance out.  This one should also be done in advance.

For one and three , especially three, okay, what makes them different from existing game-world elves? What other quirks or issues will the character have to deal with?

Four. "You want gnome abilities, play a gnome. Want to play an elf? Adapt, improvise, overcome. Breathe life into your character."

You may not think it's a core mechanic, but the classes as defined represent trade offs. The GM should "say yes" to anything the characters try in game, but ultimately he arbitrates how the world works, and should not be changing how it works and the expectations people have of elves, whatever after the fact to placate a player.  Changes in what makes an elf different from humans, gnomes, etc change he natures of the society they create, and how they'd react. If one can choose their abilities and bonuses on a whim by whining at the gm those choices have no meaning.

Then someone posted a Youtube Vid by the complex games apologist.

OK - I thought, "let's write this up" and took another look at the article, and realized there was a lot more to unpack. There are a couple philosophies about gaming and rules that I fundamentally disagree with.

Assumptions

First of all, the tone is very... enthusiastic... with profanity tossed in a few times. Not a lot, and hey, cursing like a sailor comes with being one so I'm hardly one to complain, but I really due try to avoid it. Takes away from the emphasis if over used.

We've already gone over the setup - I want my elf to have +2 INT, +1 DEX instead of vice versa.

Here’s the thing. In 5th Edition, a Forest Gnome can get a +2 INT / +1 DEX (and also has Darkvision, etc), so we know that this minor change doesn’t break the game mechanics at all. All non-human races get some combination of +2/+1, and Elves already get a boost to INT and DEX… so it isn’t a stretch at all to just swap their bonuses.

Let's pry that apart. OK, so a forest gnome has the adjustment the player wants. So? Is it an elf? Why not? What makes the players desired elf different from a forest gnome beyond some body paint, and choice of equipment? If they have access to different powers, then that may be balanced in. If not, sure, the combination may not cause a severe imbalance, but there's already something that has those swapped bonuses. The Gnome.

The racial bonuses are completely arbitrary anyway (and even differ significantly from one edition of D&D to the other). Why does an Elf get +2 DEX? Because Mearls and Thompson decided that’s what they thought an Elf was at this one moment of time. Why does the Gnome get the bigger INT bonus? Who the f@ck knows. It’s just a game of “Let’s Pretend”. The Player’s Handbook is not some religious scripture handed down by the gods.

No, it's not scripture, but it is the agreed-upon set of rules for how the game works. One edition of elf may be different from another, but those abilities were - hopefully - put in place relative to all the other factors and available classes and races in the game in a given edition. Those differenced are reflected in how elves behave, how they organize themselves, and what players expect when they see or interact with an elf. As much as I dislike how Pathfinder's skill bloat, "adventure" writing with necessary skill checks to succeed vice role-playing, and the society play "play strictly by the rules" requirements interact, one reason that last bit is in there is to ensure a player can sit down at a random convention table and reasonably expect how the adventure will work.

"Say Yes"

There is an improv comedy/acting exercise where you "say yes." - whatever you're handed to work with by the person you're acting with, you roll with it. No matter how ridiculous. You turn it around and work with it by saying "yes, but", or "yes, and".

A good GM and ruleset - and one reason I like lighter, OSR/ACKs style games over the rules bloat of Pathfinder, is that it gives me more ways to say "yes, let's try that" when the players want to try something. The game is more dependent on what they imagine and what they describe than on "roll 18+ for knowledge(local), wait, you don't have a point in that skill, sorry, it's only learned"

Look at the first three options I presented. As a GM you are free to house-rule what you want that varies from the rules, but there has to be a consequence. Option one requires you the explain why elves are different in this world, and the GM will now have to explain those differences to the other players, or at least keep them in mind for all elf interactions in the game. If you're playing with "adventures" that have the original assumptions about elves, you'll have to modify them.

Option three also makes major changes in the world. Wait, another race of elves? Where do they live? How do they get along with the other elves? And so forth.

Option two can be done on the fly without changing the world. It's baked into ACKs, but unless one is doing the equivalent of Paizo/Pathfinder "society play" it's a ruling the GM can make. Have the player answer "Why is this elf different?" - tell the player yes, he can bump up INT by one more but he has to sacrifice, and take something down two. It allows people to modify their characters without simply reshuffling their points. It also throws the decision back on the player.

SO WHY THE HELL WOULD YOU TELL HIM NO?

Because we're not playing a point-buy game, and even those, like GURPS or Hero system, have places where the GM makes the judgement call on what number of points, types of abilities, negatives, and swaps are allowed, based on what kind of game is being played. Even in PF society play with twenty points for stat buy, the cost is not linear. Getting to 18 on any one stat effectively sucks down all your available points.

Frankly, I'm amazed he hasn't thought it through as to why "no" may be a valid answer, adn when.

If I'm playing a game, I'll initially assume the designer had a clue, and stick with the rules on teh assumption there's a purpose. Later I'll mess with it, and, as mentioned earlier, if I make a change in the world, I now have to accept the consequences of that choice.

The most important job of a DM is help the players have fun. The players only have power over their characters. The rules on everything else in the world -- setting, genre, NPCs, cities, populace, everything -- is basically in the control of the DM.

This is where it wanders off the rails.

No, they are not. At least not in Basic D&D, AD&D, Traveller, GURPS, Teenagers From Outer Space, Paranoia, Vampire the Masquerade, Shadowrun, Cyberpunk 2013, ACKs, D&D 3.5, Pathfinder, or D20-based games.

Remember that thing called a rulebook? The GM may run the NPC's, may decide if a rule applies, but if the GM is at all fair, there are tables, die rolls, and results that he should adhere to. Sometimes characters will die - like that crab spider that dropped onto your party and poisoned two of them - sometimes they'll make that unlikely roll - and the GM gets to figure out and describe how gloriously you died, or how you narrowly escaped certain death, or why the kobolds are friendly.

Hell, in Paranoia, even letting on you know how the rules work may get your clone killed. You get less choice about how your stats are modified.

By saying "No" to this entirely minor and arbitrary change, you are telling the player “the trivial rules of my game world are more important than your character concept or enjoyment of the game.”

Let's flip that around. By insisting the GM change the rules for them, the players are insisting that their desires are more important than the GM managing a consistent game, the kind of game he wants, or overcoming challenges and obstacles.

And if the rule is that trivial, why is it a big enough deal for the player to want to change it? Why is it a problem if the GM says no?

If he enjoys a tiny amount of PC optimization as part of character generation, why not let him have fun with that part of the game? Who cares if he gets to INT 20 at 8th level instead of 12th (assuming he picks no Feats)... It will make no difference to the game at the table.

If it makes no difference to the game at the table, then why is the change necessary? For that matter, why is the mechanic in the game?

To Wrap It Up

Part of this comes from a desire to escape rules that feel constricting. Especially in Pathfinder, I can see where you may want to escape the mech-pilot existence trapped within a rules bloat. 

Part of this is wrapped up in "who's game?". I submit that yes, it's also the player's game - they have to buy into the world the GM is willing to create, and they certainly drive the story far more than the GM sometimes appreciates. That said, the GM is the arbitrator. He has every right to decide "no, that doesn't suit the game we're playing" - and if the players want to play that kind of game, they have a responsibility as well, to look ahead and say "hey, this is the kind of game we want to play, can you make it work?" Hell, FATE makes a point of the players and GM sitting down to decide the style, setting, scope, etc. of play.

But once the setting is set, once the game is running, the GM has to have the ability to make final choices every bit as much as the players. The players get to make choices, but without limits, without tradeoffs, even "trivial" ones, the choices have no meaning.

Why? Because someone has to make the final call. Either the game needs a GM, or it does not, and the rules are the final authority. And he is also playing.

Another aspect of "Games are the new TV"?

From "How the War on Video Games is Hurting Your Son".

Parents who may have played video games a bit when they were younger but have now stopped, when they see their sons and daughters sitting in front of a TV and playing games, they often think that the kids are essentially watching TV. That it’s just a waste of time. 

But really,  video games are so much more in children’s lives. They play with each other in games; in fact, kids more often  play socially than alone. But beyond that, even when the games are off, they serve as a common language. When kids are out in the schoolyards talking about building levels in Minecraft, it’s similar to watching a baseball game and then talking to your friends about your favorite players and so forth.

Elsewhere, we see articles pointing out that the plethora of entertainment options means that people have fewer common cultural touchstones outside of megahits like Game of Thrones (blech). It hadn't occurred to me before to consider how the relatively small number of games that involve live play with others, and the fact that there are a number of broadly-known popular games in that category, replace the "things everyone can talk about around the water cooler" function that TV shows did as common touchstones.

Uncoalesced

Have a couple posts mulling in my head that are not yet ready to be put down, nor to have a chunk broken off to post (usually later figuring out that's all I need to be said).

One topic is from several recent articles of SJW's in tech and a couple of old postings over at Eric Raymond's Blog. The second link is an article on Kafkatraps well worth reading on its own... and if you search for the articles, the usual suspects get their panties in a bunch.

Another relates to GM style, rules, and campaign worlds from a recent Jeffro discussion.

Oh, and still not tired of winning: Are Trump voters ruining America for all of us?: Tom Nichols

Star Realms - the Game

Well -tried the game out finally.

I'm not a huge fan of deck-builders generally - the kind where you build your deck in-game - but have been reasonably successful playing my friends in the DC comic themed games, and seriously considering buying Core Worlds. Overall, I liked it, despite the usual huge frustration at watching opponents grab up the cards I want and then trying to figure out how they're chaining together 30-40 points of damage when I can't stop my 1-point scouts from popping up.

For those who aren't familiar with how the game plays, you start out with a deck of entry cards  that do one point of damage or one point of trade/purchasing power. You also start out with a pool of "authority" points that are lost when damage is done to you. You play the cards in hands of five to purchase ships and bases. Each of those ships allow you to either do more damage, heal more damage ("gain authority"), or buy more trade. Special abilities exist to scrap cards out of your discards (to flush out low-value cards and increase the odds of desired cards coming up), draw additional cards, or gain additional trade/etc. if ships from the same faction (there are four) are played.

Bases stay out, and give you some benefit every turn - scrapping cards, trade, authority, or damage, for example.  Some - outposts - also act as tanks. They have to be attacked before your opponent can attack anything else, and if he cannot do the minimum damage to eliminate it, are unaffected.

The artwork is solid, the mechanics straightforward, the factions each have their unique strengths regarding scrapping unwanted cards, pulling more cards, etc., and a player is not advised to concentrate on one, or even necessarily two of them.

Oh, and Jon Del Arroz has a nifty book out set in this universe.

You can download the digital version of the game through Steam or the Android Play store or the iOS App store. The free version allows play against the AI, but not online play.

My First Palladium

Over at Castalia, on guilty pleasures no-one has played:

I’ll always have a bit of a soft touch for Palladium games. I mean… no sooner had I stumbled across a stray copy of the iconic Moldvay Basic D&D set, than I had a desire for something like that, but weirder. And Palladium was right there waiting with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Other Strangeness. After the cartoon and the movies, it’s hard to imagine how freaky that was when it was new. I spent countless hours rolling up characters and daydreaming about the Terror Bears, a twisted take on the then ubiquitous Care Bears. It was just awesome.

I bought TMNT in high school because it just. Looked. Freakin'. Cool. The system was a hot mess, but what a glorious mess. I also ended up buying a copy of the firs Mechanoid Invasion book left laying around, which channeled, in a lot of ways, the same mood as Gregory Benford's Great Sky River. 

The Palladium games I actually ended up playing any significant amount of were the Macross-based Robotech books they published.

But good lord I loved having them all.

Commands & Colors: Ancients is Coming to the PC

The core Commands and Colors system developed by Richard Borg has been the basis for a number of games by a number of different companies that have adopted some version of the dice and command card mechanic. These include Commands & Colors: Ancients and Napoleonics, Memoir 44, Battle Cry, BattleLore, and Battles of Westeros. Only a couple of these, like Memoir 44 and Command & Colors: The Great War, now have computer versions available outside of playing the electronic "board" version via Vassal. So I was very happy to see the following announcement relayed via Rolling Boxcars:

We are pleased to announce that we have entered into an agreement with HexWar Games Ltd., of Elgin, Scotland, to develop digital versions of Command & Colors: Ancients and Command & Colors: Napoleonics. HexWar Games Ltd. is a 12-man games studio with a long history of converting board games to digital games. Their most recent releases have been The Great War, from PSC Games, and 1775 from Academy Games. Their recent The Great War release uses the Command & Colors game engine by Richard Borg.

Because this is quite a major project for HexWar, they have also partnered with Lordz Games Studio of Belgium, for them to develop a world class user interface and superb game graphics. Lordz Games Studios recent success include Panzer Corps and Warhammer 40,000: Armageddon.

Development for the digital Commands & Colors Ancients has already been underway for some months. According to our last word from our friends at Hexwar, they plan to release the base game of Command & Colors: Ancients for the summer 2017, and the base game for Command & Colors: Napoleonics for the end of 2017. All the additional expansions, for both games, will be released as add-on packs over the next couple of years.

The initial target platform will be for PC and Mac, and then for iPad, a couple of months after the PC release. The intention is to eventually release for Android and possibly for iPhone. Other features in development are cross-platform multiplayer and a scenario builder.

We look forward to giving you all regular updates on this project. We anticipate that we will have some early game graphics to show you as part or our February monthly update.

SJW's Produce Terrible Work

I have not finished Forbidden Thoughts yet, so a review will have to wait. Overall I'm enjoying it so far but some of the complaints noted by several people are, IMO, valid criticisms... certainly a couple stories preach with a 4x4 that did not have to.

That said, the intro, by Milo, was brilliant. And in that, the following leapt out at me:

"SJWs produce terrible work SJWs are fantastic at complaining, but terrible at creating. Like games and comics, SJW science fiction is drivel. The low quality of the content is why controlling industry awards, publishers and hobby journalism is critical" from "Forbidden Thoughts"

OK. What do we mean by "terrible work."

There are of course obvious choices with cardboard cutout characters standing in for not just conservatives, but for strawman versions of them. There is the "humor" of Jon Stewart and Colbert, that occasionally is funny when apolitical, but devolves to "they're stupid" when their favorite whipping boys are the subject. There is movie after movie with fundamentally ugly, miserable views of humanity where even the protagonists - I cannot call them heroes - are ugly.

But I don't believe, especially given the context of the comment, that Milo is talking about such incompetent and obviously incompetent and ugly dreck that even liberals blanch. I want to discuss the competent - where the craftsmanship is there, but the work itself is hollow, or rotten.

Take Game of Thrones. Yes, I'm going there, because having read a number of works from before ASoIaF like the Sandkings, or the Tuf stories (which should have been a hint, frankly...), and finding them darkly amusing, and hearing so much about the epic fantasy series, I sat down and started reading it.

And my sense of disgust and disappointment as I finished the first book was so profound, I never cracked the cover of the second.

Is he a bad author? No. He's an excellent writer, and as evidence I'd submit that the visceral reaction I felt to the incest, depravity, the killing off of the Starks, and the betrayal and futility of all that is virtuous in the quest for "realistic" (and hitting instead unceasingly grim) is a mark of the impact his writing had. Ditto how the Tuf stories, and the SandKings are so vividly recalled after all these years.

But his stories are hollow, lacking in true joy or light.

Take Stephen King. I've read It, The Stand, The Long Walk, The Running Man, Dreamcatcher, Cycle of the Werewolf, Eyes of the Dragon, and the Gunslinger books through Wizard In Glass. I'd also seen Misery. Over time, several overarching themes became apparent - King's disgust with people, with civilization in the fore among them. In the Stand, like any good horror story, at the end, the horror was civilization itself and all the trappings built up, and the town of "good" survivors had started becoming a bunch of controlling busybodies. The sense of decay, especially in Roland's background, is palpable. The mundane horror of The Long Walk still palpably haunts my memories. He's celebrated for bringing out the horror and evil in people and the mundane rather than overtly supernatural things - and after a while one gets the sense that not only is it inevitable that some people are evil, but that most are helpless. Add to that increasingly shallow "good" and "bad" (conservative, of course) characters as portrayed in "Under the Dome", and no, I no longer read him.

Compare this to Dean Koontz, who often explores the darkness in people, but also has the theme of virtue, nobility, and without making it a pointless game for chumps. In Watchers there is both the "evil" monster, born of meddling in things man was not meant to know, but also the dog. The moonlight bay series also explored many of these issues - technology being something that enabled people to be more - more good, or more evil - and civilization being overall a force for good.

So King is again, an excellent writer, who passes off toxic sludge for stories.

In the Walking Dead, the creator openly opines that it isn't just about the drama of good and bad people in a horrible situation, but that it's about how even compared to the monsters, we are the real horrors.

What about games?

I'll leave the controversy over triple-A titles aside, and look aside, at the stuff recommended on, for example, the iOS app store. I'll also focus on stuff that is at least well crafted rather than, say, Depression Quest. 

Sure, a number of puzzlers, racing games, and traditional twitch games exist, but I'm also struck by the kudos I'd seen for apps like Monument Valley. it is, indeed, a beautifully executed puzzle game, with an interesting art style, yet in the end, it's not a very deep one. The puzzles were noted by Polygon - the same guys who couldn't play Doom as well as a noob - as being not very difficult, and there aren't many of them. The "story" is not only shallow, but in true liberal fashion explicitly eschews conflict. From the developers app page:

AN ILLUSORY ADVENTURE OF IMPOSSIBLE ARCHITECTURE AND FORGIVENESS

 In the end, it's beautifully crafted, was worth the time spent playing through it for some clever puzzles, but did not have not much other substance, and little replay value.

Or look at the praise heaped on Journey. Again, it looks beautiful. The mechanics and responses and environment are crafted with attention to detail and usability. It's also an "experience."

But occasionally you’ll bump into another player on the same pilgrimage. You can only communicate with musical notes, but these sonic interactions feel reassuring, reminding you that you’re not alone. The identity of your companion is never revealed, either, but you feel a connection to this mysterious other player as you make your way through your journey.

And it also explicitly eschews competition or violence:

The multiplayer component of Journey was designed to facilitate cooperation between players without forcing it, and without allowing competition.[13] It is intended to allow the players to feel a connection to other people through exploring with them, rather than talking to them or fighting them. The plan was "to create a game where people felt they are connected with each other, to show the positive side of humanity in them."

But wasn't I just complaining that things were too dark? 

Yes - bear with me. Let's turn back to books, and my least favorite puppeteer who ruined the Writing Excuses podcast for me even before I discovered she was an SJW. From Jeffro's review of Lady Astronaut of Mars:  

The author appears to be extremely aggressive in her attempt to counter female stereotypes in science fiction, but she doesn’t seem to have anything compelling to offer in their place. There is no power here, no virility, no beauty, no passion, and no meaning here. There’s just a woman that strikes me as being an inadvertent reductio ad absurdum to our culture’s dominant views on women and women’s roles. Sure, she gets to be the hero and the astronaut in the end… but her sacrifice is more about her and how it makes her feel than anything else. She’s so myopic… and yet, she really would have been happier if she’d just been a mom and stayed at home. (Everyone else would have been happier, too. She’s strikes me as being the sort of person that you’d never want to do anything for you because she’s such a martyr that you’d never hear the end of it.)

I don’t have anything against this author personally and have no idea what else she’s done. Just based on reading this, I can only conjecture that she’d hate the sort of works that I prefer– Tolkien’s writing, for example. She strikes me as a competent wordsmith, but I don’t know that I can readily forgive her for using her talents to make something that is so intentionally ugly and hollow. Maybe I should feel sorry for her for her lack of imagination? Ah well, I guess this is all that’s left when a person has purged the chainmail bikini from their science fiction and fantasy. At the very least, this piece graphically demonstrates where that sort of idiocy ultimately leads….

"She strikes me as a competent wordsmith " - That's what all these works share. They're well executed, but ultimately hollow. The craft and beauty are ultimately skin deep - the quality of the word arrangement, the beauty of the art style - but substance and depth are lacking. Some have putrid cores that cynically see the worst in people, other's possess an equally monochromatic core of forced harmony.  The latter are pleasant, but ultimately are as transient as cotton candy.

They are incomplete.

I Can't Believe I Missed This

Especially since I'm a) a huge Battletech fan (I first purchased it when you could still find copies boxed as Battledroids, and the mech artwork was taken from sources such as Macross and Crusher Joe).

Anyway, there's a kickstarter out, brought to you by the same guys at Harebrained Schemes who've managed to deliver on Shadowrun returns. The KS itself is over but you can still pre-order as a backer.

I'm sure some aspects of the campaign story will suffer from the same liberal tropes Shadowrun did, but.... Battletech! Skirmishes! PvP!

Update: More background on the Battletech universe from the incomparable Razorfist.

And some gameplay video from earlier this year.

Traveller Skills

Today is a bit of a digression, but when I was in middle school, I had picked up at the local hobby shop a black rulebook with a painted sleeve cover showing a group of people exiting a spaceship parked on (apparently) a vacuum plain via  pressurized corridor, with guns. It was for a science fiction RPG system called "Traveller", and took over for me from D&D as my primary RPG of choice. I'd spent hours in middle school running ship designs to get the best possible combination of weight/cost/distance for different roles, plotting out combat scenarios in the vector-based system, and rolling up (and often killing in the process) characters.

One thing that has flummoxed a lot of people is the skills system. Old school D&D didn't really have much of one - it was basically "try whatever you want / can describe" with the GM taking into account the few proficiencies for weapons and armor, etc., and your physical stats to determine, sometimes with a die roll, how it works out.

Later editions of D&D, 3.5 and Pathfinder in particular, took this granularity too far, and GURPS was built on granularity from the ground up.

GURPS though, had something explicitly baked in that was mostly implied in Traveller - that many "skills" that would require a roll were things any normal human could try, they just weren't explicitly trained.

It is that "mostly implied" that this most recent post gets into:

The first thing to remember is that Traveller characters are competent. Skill-1 is employable - you are good enough with it to get a paying job using this skill. Skill-3 is a professional - typically enough to get you a license in one of the Professions, such as being a Medical Doctor or a licensed Engineer. In ordinary situations, they do their jobs competently. Under CT rules, for example, First Aid and even Surgery for Severe Wounds do not require a roll - you got the paramedic (First Aid) or the surgeon (Surgery), you get results. They only need to roll dice when there is a significant chance of failure even for a professional, and when failure will have dire consequences. For example, if a doctor character would try to perform the above-mentioned surgery in some colonial hellhole when only the local TL-3 tools are available, and not in the default TL8+ Medlab.

Again- Skill-1 is enough to work at an actual, skilled job. Most people, both in real life and in Traveller, do not have too many such employable skills.

Further down:

Skills are a Big Deal in Classic Traveller. Pilot-1 alone can land you in a 6KCr/month job - very well-paying for a 22-years-old character. Medic-3 alone is enough for being a licensed physician, and with DEX 8+ you are actually a surgeon! Most people - even sci-fi heroes - will not have too many skills. The game mechanics also reflect this - on a 2d6 curve, DM +3 is a Big Deal, and skews things very far in your favor. Add to that Characteristics DMs, and a talented, skilled professional can be a highly successful expert.

But what about all the other adventuring stuff? you ask, If my character only has Vacc Suit-2 and Computer-1, what about combat skills? Driving a vehicle? Well, my friends, for this you have the Skill-0 rules. For starters, all Traveller adventures have Skill-0 in all common small arms. With a good gun at good range, especially with good Characteristics, they'll make very decent combatants even with Skill-0. With Vacc Suit-1, you can wear Combat Armor, and with Vacc Suit-2, you can wear a Battledress! As a Referee, I'd also assume Vacc Suit-0 and a Skill-0 in one Vehicle skill for the typical character. Most "passive" knowledge skills are subsumed in the EDU Characteristic. Finally, this is Old School - your character can do a whole load of "adventuring" stuff without having a specific skill listed on their character sheet.

He uses some interesting examples, including Ripley from Alien and Aliens.

Kerbal Space Program

Well - bad news. One of my favorite "games" - Kerbal Space Program - has lost a large chunk of it's development team over at Squad. After thanking the professionalism, etc. of the dev team, Squad posted the following:

“But this is not all! Here at Squad we’re looking into the future and we have great and ambitious plans for the KSP franchise and even more!

Looks like they're trying to rehire. 

Completely unknown at this time is how much of the driving vision of KSP was due to any of the leaving members, and how well future development work will fare. I have my fingers crossed.

Why, you ask? 

KSP is an old school sandbox game that matches the insane level of detail of most flight simulators with orbital mechanics, and cute little green guys who die in rocket crashes. Which will happen. A lot. Did I mention crashes? It demands patience, has a steep learning curve, and the high you get when you finally, finally, land a Kerbonaut on the "Mun" is worth every second of it. The crowd playing the game develops delta-vee charts for various booster configs so you can calculate needed fuel tankage and thrusters for various payloads and mission profiles, develops plugins for everything from increased detail to autopilot systems to even more insanely realistic physics. 

What is Not Permitted is Forbidden - RPG's and Detailed Skills Systems

Over at the Black Gate, a Game Master discusses why he ran an old-school style game for his friends instead of Pathfinder, a system he's also very familiar with.

I used this when explaining S&W to one of my new players. Now, in Baldur’s Gate, he would click on the ‘Find Traps’ skill and if a trap was nearby, it would be outlined on screen in a red box if detected. And he is aware that in a modern game (like Pathfinder), you would roll a 20-sided dice against your Find Trap skill.

But I explained it won’t work that way in S&W. After I described the environment, he would have to tell me how he goes about looking for traps. Does he examine the ceiling? Does he roll a round stone across the floor? Does he put his fingers in the mouth of the idol (always a dangerous move!)?

To try and bluff your way past the guard at the city gate, you don’t simply roll against your Bluff skill. You have to tell the same story to the Referee that your character is telling to the guard. With appropriate gestures (heh heh).

 One of the things that grew to really annoy me about Pathfinder - outside of the "on rails" modules and the ever increasing bloat of rules (also brought up) was the implicit assumption, especially in society play, that when it came to skills or achieving something, if it wasn't allowed, it was forbidden.

It felt like you had skills for everything. Except that no individual character, or small group of them, could have skills in everything. And if the module or adventure called for a knowledge: obscure plants, and you didn't have it? And it was over a 10 DC? And you didn't have hours to spend at the library?

Tough.

Yes, I know that in homebrew play, the GM could do as we did with ACKS, T&T, or others, and if you came up with a plausible reason, or everyone had a default zero skill, or....

But if you played by the rules - required for society play - knowledge skills had to be trained. If a skill test was called out, and you weren't, you were screwed. If you failed the roll - no matter how well you role played or justified knowing that based on your character, background, etc. - you were screwed. And it was all or nothing.

In short - skills, which at first look like a good thing, remove your ability to choose, and judge.

As an aside, virtue is something that must be chosen - virtue compelled is not virtue. Creating more laws putting in place what must be done not only creates more ways for someone to become a criminal, but even in compelling them to do the right thing, removes choice. Forbids that which is not required.

Gameplay and Antifragility

Eric Raymond a while back published some observations on strategies to win games, titled A secret of game-fu.

I have a rule: when in doubt, play to maximize the breadth of your option tree. Actually, you should often choose option-maximizing moves over moves with a slightly higher immediate payoff, especially early in the game and most especially if the effect of investing in options is cumulative.

This rule has many consequences. In pick-up-and-carry games, it means that given any choice in the matter you want to start by deploying or moving your train or spaceship or whatever to the center of the board. You minimize your expected distance over the set of all possible randomly-chosen destinations that way. You give yourself the best possible chance to “get lucky” by finding a fattest possible contract or trade opportunity that you can deliver in minimum time.

More generally, in games with multiple paths to victory, open as many of those paths as you can. And heavily favor moves that help you explore the possibilities faster than your opponents. In Empire Builder, buy the faster train as soon as possible. In Merchants of Venus, the first ship upgrade I bought was better engines.

This is Taleb's "Antifragility" as strategy. Keep options open, fail fast, and allow for and accept that some paths, if not most, will fail.

Review: Agent of the Imperium: A Story of the Traveller Universe

A long time ago, in a suburb far away, a middle schooler went into the local hobby shop. Most of this shop was dedicated to trains, miniatures, modeling, and such, but it also had an aisle with role playing games and classic wargames by companies like TSR, Steve Jackson Games and Avalon Hill.

His eyes fell upon a large, 8.5 x 11 hardcover book. The cover had two people with futuristic weapons, in clothes that would easily fit in on the Millennium Falcon, or Serenity. They were leaving their ship via a transparent, enclosed gangway, ready for trouble.

The name on the cover, oddly, used two "L's. Traveller.

He opened the rules, looked at the line art, and immediately bought it.

---

Traveller was unique, and in many ways still is. I'd already been exposed to two editions of D&D - Moldvay basic with Keep on the Borderlands, and AD&D - and wargames like Starship Troopers, Afrika Korps, and Panzerblitz. Sure enough, there were rules for combat, weapons, and armor, as well as rules for creating alien creatures to populate planets with. It predictably had a list of common starships, and a pretty coherent system for building your own. Because it involved traveling It also had a set of clear rules for generating a sector to move about in, generate planets. A lot of time was spent debating if having such a skeleton available was better or worse than making up D&D maps from nothing but graph paper. I still say "yes" - nothing stopped you from fudging things to add a needed feature, and sometimes the odd interrelationships opened new possibilities.

The first true shock was discovering that the character creation system not only gave a background, but could also kill your characters before you ever got a chance to play them.

All in all, it's a set of rules that, despite having played a number of other systems over the decades - including a number of editions of Traveller -  I would still gladly play. Simple enough. Complex enough. Loose enough. It has aged well.

The other thing I loved was the setting. The rules alone, as published in the original little black books, could easily be used to adventure in settings like the Polysotechnic League, Drakes Slammers, or Pournelle's CoDominium or universes. But later books, incorporated into the hardcover I bought, included the beginnings of the Imperium setting, information on and maps of the Regina  sector, and background. Grand in scope, feudal, with a lot of room for adventurers to get in trouble, it took on a life of its own.

Agent of the Imperium is a book set in that universe. Written by a man who obviously loves the sweep of history, and knows and loves the universe he created.

We have a problem - the empire needs trusted troubleshooters on call, in a moments notice, with full authority short only of the Emperor, to deal with threats that could grow to destroy the empire. That troubleshooter needs to be anywhere, at any time. Given the size of the empire, where trips across it can take months, even years, one man's lifetime is simply not enough. A troubleshooter, a cleaner, or as the book calls Jonathan Bland - a Decider - needs to somehow be everywhere at once.

We also have "skill wafers" - that can temporarily, with some risk, impart skills.

What if you had a souped-up version that could store an entire personality, and reactivate it once plugged into a person carrying a wafer implant, for 30 days? So that not only the skills, but the trusted personality occupies the mind and body of the host.

The Decider has a terrible role - he must do just that - Decide. He not only effectively has the full authority of the emperor, he also has to accept the responsibility for the choices made, rather than some junior commander on the scene.

The story jumps episodically, but the pieces start coming together. A planet sterilized by orbital bombardment due to a parasite breakout that could threaten the imperium. And other incidents. Each time the agent awakes, in a new body, reorients. Works the problem. He decides.

But the recordings in turn are updated with experience, and synced. And in time Bland realizes that there are less obvious threats to the empire than the ones he is awakened for, far more dangerous ones. And so he begins to make long term plans....

And so the story explores what happens from there, with the strange distributed loosely synchronized memory, and quasi-immortality of our Decider.

This books is a great example of taking something familiar, and cliched, what at first looks like a standard space opera setting, and breathing life into it. It also uses that familiarity to ground you while it then proceeds to explore the ramifications of change.

It is a thoughtful page turner. Highly recommended.