Listen to the Rain

Was thinking lately about the problems I have with so many survival games and I realized that it comes down to a lack of being punished by the indifferent gods.

Okay, so like I wrote about in my recent gameing update, I've been playing Project Zomboid. It's a lot of fun, but it has a lot of limitations, and I've had some of the veil pulled back in how the game's simulation actually works and now I can't unsee it. For example, by default, zombies sort themselves into small groups that are roughly equidistant from each other, and they'll migrate to nearby areas with no zombies. But, crucially, they'll only migrate the equivalent of a few hundred meters, because the only area that's simulated is the area that far around the character. There's a mod called Wandering Zombies that cause zombies to wander around a bit more, and it does mean I need to be a bit more careful about stragglers and zombies having shown up near houses I've cleared, but it still can't cause zombies to wander too far away. The giant horde coming toward the protagonists' safehouse, one of the staple tropes of zombie fiction, is impossible in Project Zomboid because there are no far-away horde movement mechanics. If you clear out the area near your base, base defenses are useless because no zombie will ever find you.

Zomboid gets around this by just having zombies respawn, which is pretty gamey in a game that tries hard for verisimilitude.

Cataclysm has similar problems. It also only simulates the area near the player, but while it does have horde mechanics, the area it simulates is small enough that it's very possible if you have a large enough base that hordes would appear on the edge of the simulated area which could be inside your defenses. To deal with this, hordes were changed to prefer roads and city centers, but that leads to the same problem as Zomboid, where if you build your base away from a zombie hotspot--the obvious thing to do--you can farm and play post-apocalyptic Stardew Valley without a care. In a game about the inevitable decline of the world, nothing dangerous will come to you unless you go seek it out.

Unreal World has a similar but different problem, which is that the early game is a brutal struggle for survival as you try to carve a homestead out of the unforgiving wilderness but once you do, once you have a small cabin and food stored in your food cellar for the winter and some traps set out for animals, you usually wonder "Well...now what do I do?" and stop playing. I've done that several times and never actually played through winter because I knew I would survive and it would take months of the exact same gameplay to get there. I didn't have to worry about any trouble unless I made it for myself.

And that's my problem. City-builders are very good about providing unexpected challenges that you need to have the resilience to beat, like Timberborn's droughts and Badtide or SimCity's disasters, but a lot of survival games don't seem to have anything like that even when it would be appropriate. Now, I know that some of this is because these are games and if you sow an entire field and it all dies to drought, you're just going to quit the game rather than try to recover from it the way that our ancestors did. But it's very weird to me in a game that's about the zombie apocalypse you can avoid most of the tropes that are central to zombie apocalypse fiction. Zomboid doesn't have NPCs (they've been promising them for 12 years...), which means there's no raiders, there's no person who joins the group while hiding a bite, there's no conflict over who has to do what jobs. It has no wandering hordes so bases are totally safe. Cataclysm has multiple interdimensional invaders fighting over the Earth, except none of them actually fight unless they happen to spawn near each other and you can likewise just ignore most of them unless you deliberately seek out trouble. Once you've brought in one harvest, you've won the game.

I keep looking at Vintage Story for its robust survival mechanics but that has an entirely separate thing I don't like (it keeps the Minecraft-like system of mobs just spawning in from thin air), so who knows.

Still plugging away at at some D&D homebrew. I'm maybe a third done and currently writing up a bunch of spellcasters. Since I hate the way D&D does magic, I'm giving every class its own theme and very limited list of powers. Pyromancers blow things up (or make food spicy or inspire courage or see through flames), shadewrights control shadows and darkness, glamourweavers do Fair Folk-style trickery like changing leaves into gold or making people lose their way or cursing people, and so on. There are no generalists because I think generalist wizards is one of D&D's worst design problems. Rather, wizards should have to be creative to figure out how to work their limited magical area of expertise into a solution to the problems they face. A pyromancer is great in a fight but less so when you need to sneak into an enemy camp, and so on.

But in doing this, I've found that the general approach in the 3.X community is actually the complete opposite--there's a lot of character design strategies that are based around coming up with a single strategy and making sure it applies to all situations. Like the infamous spiked chain tripper of yore, but even more so. For example, there are oracle (a Charisma-based caster) builds that involve putting everything into Charisma and then making Charisma apply to everything. Take the Lore Mystery and then add Charisma to Armor Class and Reflex saves instead of Dexterity, take Lore Keeper to add Charisma to Knowledge skills instead of Intelligence, take the Spirit Guide archetype to get some shaman powers but use Charisma instead, take the Noble Scion of War feat to add Charisma to Initiative checks, take two levels of Paladin to add Charisma to all saves, and then just stack +Charisma items.

This is one of those things that just rubs me the wrong way, but it's an inherent part of character customization. With a large enough group of options, it becomes possible to cherry-pick a group of abilities that synergize extremely well in a way that the disparate designers of those abilities never intended. The only way to avoid this is to have a gentleman's agreement, to redesign the available powers (my take), or to have players who don't care, because the simple truth is that D&D is a game and having a character who can't affect the game world to the same degree as others is not fun.

You'll often see the terms "SAD" and "MAD" (single attribute dependent" and "multiple attribute dependent") used in these discussions, where classes like the wizard are SAD because they basically only need Intelligence but monks are MAD because they need Dexterity to hit, Wisdom to defend, Constitution for hit points, Strength for damage, etc etc. And it's obviously easier to power up a SAD class because there's only one number to raise, and since you can only wear one hat, two rings, one belt, one set of gloves, and so on, if you can dedicate all of those to your one trick that trick goes much higher than if you have to spread that power out.

That's why a huge part of my RPG design philosophy is to bring down the ceiling. If there are no Angel Summoners then the BMX Bandits in the game don't feel put out. People can branch out rather than having to expend all their capabilities keeping up with higher and higher numbers.

I guess my main point is that I'm trying to use Pathfinder to make a game that feels more like Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. We'll see if I succeed.

It's been a long time since I wrote a TTRPG post about mechanics--looks like the last one was this one about deciding between magic systems, back before the Plague Years. I guess Wizards & Witchery counts too...but considering I used to write multiple TTRPG-themed posts a month, that's quite a decline.

Well, here's another one.

Lately I've been hit with massive inspiration--I have no idea from where--to convert Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay into the Exalted-based system that I used to run Warlords of the Mushroom Kingdom. WFRP (2e at least, haven't played any other editions) already has a perfectly fine system that I've used to run a year-long game of biweekly sessions, and I could just do that, but to be honest this is mostly to satisfy my urge to tinker. I have a half-dozen adaptations of this same system to other games--Dark Sun (maybe 33% done), that Wizards & Witchery post (maybe 10% done), Warcraft (maybe 20% done), Forgotten Realms (literally just started)--but the benefit of doing WFRP is that converting things is much easier than writing them from scratch.

Here's some mechanical notes about what I've done and planning to do:

( Mechanics )

I've been thinking of writing this post for days but, well, my appendix tried to kill me so it took a bit. I should also say this is mostly about dungeon-crawling-style RPGs and other games don't always have this problem.

( On reward structures affecting player behavior )

So there was a dust-up on social media about sanity rules in RPGs recently, kicked off by this tweet:



And of course, since Twitter is a terrible medium for most discussion, everything descended into hell. But I'm going to talk about it here where I can write as much as I want!

( Unleash the eldritch madness )

A while ago I wrote about converting Dark Sun over to an Exalted-based system, and while the idea sat in my head for a while, I've since started working on it and gotten pretty far.

( Nerdery within )

I guess I can't complain too much more about that seminar initiative that management came up with because I just finished the final exam and got 100%.

On the other hand, I was able to do all of that because the database has been down literally all day, so it's not like I had anything else to do other than tinker with things.

The WoW Classic announcement got me working again on my dormant Warcraft tabletop RPG adaptation. I finished up priest and paladin spells, and now just need to add shaman spells and some stuff from the RPG that isn't in the computer games (runemasters, etc). Then it'll be ready for testing. Finding time for it...is another matter.

I don't have anything scheduled for this weekend, and schoolpsychnerd and I are going out to dinner tomorrow at a new-to-us restaurant. I'm really looking forward to both of those.

A while ago, I wrote up a description of elves for a science-fantasy RPG setting I'm working on. I liked them, but they were based on elves as creatures of Faerie and didn't really have anything science-fiction about them at all, so now I went back and changed them a lot and I think they fit a lot better:

Elf
The elves have always been a people apart. Before the coming of the Mist, the elves were united by the Elven Court of the Elder Wood, the center of elven civilization. There the Queen ruled, advised by the oldest of her people and the spirits of the forest. Even the far-flung communities in other forests paid homage to the Elven Court, their bonds aided by the Emerald Roads that facilitated travel from elven community to community.

The Mist ended that forever. As it washed over the Elder Wood, the elves made a choice. Some of them gave themselves fully to the rule of the forest spirits, forsaking such technology as they used and following the dictates of their shamans. Others saw the changes that the Mist wrought in those creatures it touched and determined to learn from them. They studied the Changed, using all their magic to form bastions among the woods to hold the Mist at bay, and developed the art of fleshcrafting. The former are known as the wild elves, and the latter as the mist elves.

There are rumors of a third group, who fled underground to avoid the Mist rather than ascending to the heights. It is said that the Mist changed them as they fled, that they worship spirits of fungus and spider and unclean things, and that they have tunnels under the surviving lands and raid the surface for slaves. But theses are merely rumors.

Physical Description: Generally taller than humans, elves possess a graceful, slender physique seemingly made of bark, vines and foliage. They vary greatly in appearance, as wild as nature itself. They encompass the colors of all plant life, tending towards shades of green and brown. Their hair grows leaves and branches. The older they are, the more growths they have, sometimes becoming long twisted vines that hang to their waist or longer. Their flesh is wooden, smooth when they are young and furrowing more and more as they grow older until it resembles the gnarled bark of an ancient tree. Their eyes vary from virgin wood green, morning sun gold, rich brown earth, to deep sky blue, but always a solid color with neither pupil nor iris visible.

The wild elves live in the forests and frequently dress in animal skins or clothing of bark and leaves, whereas mist elves wear suits designed to keep off the mist and work with fleshcrafted creatures, or the symbiotic armor given to their warriors.

Society: Where the elves were once unified, now there is a great division among them. The wild elves are ruled by shamans who speak to the forest spirits and look up to the warriors who practice supernatural martial arts learned from the spirits of the animals around them. The mist elves delve ever deeper into the arts of fleshwarping in the hope of discovering the secret of adaptation to the Mist without losing themselves to it.

There are still some similarities, however. Both cultures have a deep-seated appreciation for artistry and craftsmanship, and whether it’s a carved wooden chair or a piece of living furniture, an elven artisan will always work to their utmost and take pride in their work. Magic is held is high esteem, and the lifeshapers of the mist elves and spiritspeakers of the wild elves are some of the most honored members of their communities.

Relations: Others were always suspicious of the elves because of their insularity, and their new behavior has not changed that. It is the wild elves who are the most well-thought-of, because while they are savage and unpredictable, at least their powers are understandable. Wild elves get along especially well with grippli and sesheyans, who share their wilderness homes. Whatever it is that the mist elves are doing in their living strongholds makes the other races nervous, and their appearance, swathed entirely in robes or with visible symbiotic grafts attached to their bodies, does not allay that concern. There are some elves who live in the patchwork human cities that sprang up after the Mist came, but they are often not entirely trusted there, even after long years of residence.

And here's a picture I found on the internet that's a pretty good visual inspiration:



( Pathfinder game mechanics )

( Exalted stats )

Maybe someday, I'll actually be able to run this.

I've been on edge almost all day, which doesn't make it easy to relax on a three-day weekend. I even went to get a manicure with schoolpsychnerd and while my nails are much more manageable--they were long enough that it was pretty annoying to type--all I could think of while I was there was how long it was taking. I didn't find it relaxing at all. And I meant to start playing ふしぎの木の実 (大地の章) (Oracle of Seasons) today and haven't even booted it up. Instead I finished reading Japan at War, which is admittedly an excellent book, and fiddled with music for hours.

I've been really nostalgic for Warcraft lately. Not World of Warcraft, necessarily. The time of my life when I played MMOs is over. But the Warcraft setting, around which there isn't any way to interact outside of WoW and Hearthstone now that Blizzard isn't putting out Warcraft RTSes. I downloaded and organized the entire Wrath of the Lich King soundtrack, all fourteen hours of it, and have original WoW and Burning Crusade waiting for me to sort through when I can find the time. I booted up Warcraft III and played for a while before I tore myself away. And I made that icon that's up there from one of the few screenshots of Algalon I could find that wasn't full of PC nameplates or raiders trying to murder him.

I originally thought of putting "The stars come to my aid" as the text, since I played a Balance Druid and wore the Starcaller title from the moment I got it until I stopped playing even as I accumulated titles like "The Insane" and "Battlemaster," but I thought the current version would be more broadly applicable.

I'm all fired up over trying to make my perfect version of a WoW tabletop RPG game based on Pathfinder and using the Spheres of Power sourcebook to build spell lists for each caster class and Path of War for the martial classes, because I think it would work incredibly well even if it would be a ton of work. It'd be less work than actually balancing WoW is, though! And I need a new project now that Warlords of the Mushroom Kingdom is in tinkering mode and I have multiple other games prepped and ready for when I have more time.

Of course, that's what I need, right? More time.

(On the other hand, an old woman at the nail salon told me that I had interesting pants and the proprietor said she was jealous of my hair, so some good things happened today!)

One benefit of the d20 system and its endless permutations is that if yo spend enough time looking, you'll almost certainly find that whatever changes you want to make, someone has already done it.

Like with the subject of this post. I don't think Armor as DR is more realistic or anything, I just like it better--and admittedly, playing Baldur's Gate II has shown me how easy it is to turn everything into rocket tag when there's no way to mitigate damage other than "don't let them hit you"--and so I've been looking for a formal implementation for a while. And while looking around online last night, I found out that Game of Thrones d20 does that while also having shields that make one harder to hit and opposed roll combat, with both attack and defense rolls.

Okay, cool. That means I can dump the damage roll and move to static damage, since I also found this chart that makes any conversions easy. Just plug in the damage done and the attacker size and it outputs a value. It even accounts for critical hits and variations on critical range and multipliers.

One obvious problem is monsters. Unlike Game of Thrones, where nearly every enemy is human, most D&D settings having plenty of monsters and I can't just turn Natural Armor into DR because Natural Armor is usually inflated to make monsters challenging. I don't know if there's a standard modifier I can apply, like 1/2 NA or 2/3rd NA. Fortunately, in E6 Natural Armor never gets too high, but it's something to watch out for.

A second is, assuming I want to use the variable between attack and defense roll to add to damage--and I do--how to account for penalties to the attacker, which are now also penalties to damage? One way is to make some of them into bonuses to the defender which are ignored for calculating damage. Like, Power Attack then gives the defender a bonus to parry/dodge, but if the attacker hits, then damage is calculated using the margin of success without that bonus.

Or maybe that's not worthwhile and it's easier to have tiers, like "For every 5 by which the attacker beats the defender, they add 50% to their base damage." That keeps hit and damage bonuses distinct while making a skilled warrior do more damage overall beyond the obvious note that a skilled warrior will hit more often. Or even easier, for every 5 over, they move up one size category on the chart. Simple and clean.

This also allows armor penetration as a standard weapon ability or feat. Like, it's easy to take something like Keen Edge and the keen property and make them armor penetration instead.

I'm not sure if I'll get around to testing this since I'm currently on a huge Exalted kick, but it was food for thought. And after months of turning Exalted into a game about 8bit Nintendo sword and sorcery which, amazingly, works, I might be able to make this work too.

I have no idea if I'm ever going to actually put any time into this--probably not, considering all the already-written RPGs I want to run games of--but I've been thinking a lot lately about what my perfect fantasy RPG would look like so here are some characteristics it would have:
( Read more... )

Yesterday, we met for the last session of the flashback in the Horror on the Orient Express game. It went at somewhat of a hurried pace, since we wanted to finish the whole thing up in one game, but we managed to decipher T̝̻̲̲̲̣̃ͯ̅h̬̭̱̖̝̺ͨ̒eͬ̓̅͐ ̰̩͠W̞͔͇̲̘̲h̢̝͕͆ͅi̇̓̏ͫ̋͏̗͚͕͉s͒̊̓ͥ̐ͭ̉p̭̰̓͆͛e̬͖͖͉rͦ̍ͦ͂͟i̲̩͚n̮̩͉͓͍͛g̯̝̝̤̭͍̠͊́ ̷̘͚̉̄́ͦ̃̑̆F̠̹̙ē̶̱̠͍̬͋ͅz͚̲͇̑̉ͧͯ͌ and get Menkaph ejected from the train at the Niš stop. Professor Worth (filling in for Dr. Polat, whose player was absent) used his knowledge from the book to arrest the decline of Mr. Meyers, though it required him to put on a fez himself, adding additional urgency to our quest.

We arrived in Constantinople and met with Professor Demir and learned that his son had been kidnapped, which sent us across the city to find out where he had been taken. While Professor Worth went to the library, Captain Barrington, Mr. Banks, and Miss Meadowcroft visited a man who called himself "the Frenchman" and had an audience with the sultan, eventually learning that the so-called "Children of the Blood-Red Fez" were holed up on the Island of Doomed Princes, a secret tenth of the Princes Islands in the Sea of Marmara south of Constantinople. Professor Demir knew a fisherman, a "Nine-fingered Abdullah," who knew of the location and could ferry the investigators there, so under the cover of night, they traveled to the island and rowed out to land there.

On the island, the Captain and Miss Meadowcroft distracted the guards by provoking the goats while Mr. Banks climbed the crumbling walls of the tower at its summit and pulled the eunuch guarding the cult leader out the second-story window. In the chaos, Professor Worth dashed up the stairs and engaged the leader in a battle of wills for ultimate control of the fez, eventually winning despite her attempts to dissuade him otherwise. As the fez was destroyed, her head exploded, and the party managed to get Professor Demir's son, and the other prisoner, a Prince Ramazan, out of the tower. Hurling petrol bombs behind them, the party made their escape and went back to the professor's house. At that point, the game time was basically over, so we wrapped things up and went home. Victory!

And the Captain proposed to Miss Meadowcroft, so they or any children they have could be backup PCs if any of the 1920s-era characters dies. Mr. Banks would also be willing to come back for one last hurrah, but Professor Worth's player mentioned that he probably went home, forgot anything like this ever happened, and refused to speak to Professor Smith ever again. Not that I blame him.

Now that I'm playing an official Call of Cthulhu adventure, I can see why Trail of Cthulhu changed the mechanics of investigating. The stakes are often "Do this thing or the world is doomed," and then whether we even know what thing to do comes down to Library Use and Persuade and if we fail those--and this is a percentile system, so that's likely at some point--the GM has to scramble to find some way to get us back on track or else the world ends. It's why I'm glad that mutantur laid out the paths for us to take instead of letting us flail around for a while. We did a lot of flailing last session, though we eventually worked things out!

My solution for this is generally to have lower stakes and let the PCs fail--I'm reminded of the time I ran Operation COBALT SHADOW (aka "A Victim of the Art") in Delta Green, where what I thought would be a relatively quick opera took four sessions before F Cell screwed things up so badly that MAJESTIC swept in and they had to extract themselves--and that may happen someday. I mean, it's not for no reason that we have possible backup PCs. I think that since this was a flashback that had to end in a particular way because it "already happened" it exacerbated that problem, though.

I am curious if we'll seriously screw up a leg of the journey. Next time, France!