Hex Crawl Completion Update

My attempted design of a "classic" hex crawl (in the vein of AH's Magic Realm and other pseudo-RPG boardgames but at the "large expedition" scale) is currently in the rewrite/edit stage. Work has been slow, mainly because I'm realizing that my initial pass at the rules has created too many elements that are incompatible with one another at worst, or involve confusingly dissimilar mechanics at best. I've been trying to take a machete to the 50+ pages I have written, to cut them down to a slightly shorter and better organized second draft.

The rules currently draw substantial elements from the following systems, to give a feel for the flavor:

• Outdoor Survival: Movement mechanics, basic turn sequence, and terrain types
• Source of the Nile: Game objectives, mapping, and expedition organization.
• Underworld and Wilderness Adventures (D&D Vol III): Character design, encounters

Another sensible comparison might be Kanterman's Star Explorer. I've mostly avoided anything that resembles Magic Realm itself, since I feel like if I tried to imitate it I'd just invent an inferior duplicate.

This game system is intended to be detail-heavy and require substantial record-keeping. That's a nearly non-existent game category today, which is why I want to make my own! It will definitely require a calculator to handle all the combat calculations, but probably not a spreadsheet. The overall intent is to create a solitaire-appropriate game that allows me to either wander around a real-world map, or procedurally generate a random one as the expedition travels. Multiple players would mostly be playing independently (like Magic Realm) with limited interactivity, but that's a standard problem for adventure games that I've discussed before. Once I have everything working solo, I'll think about what to do to keep additional players from getting bored.

Here's a run-down of the table of contents with the state of completion for each section:

1. Introduction (revised)
2. Game Concepts (revised and expanded)
3. Victory Conditions (revised)
4. Character Creation (revised and simplified)
5. Recruiting and Outfitting (in process of revision)
6. Map (revised)
7. Time (complete)
8. Movement (draft)
9. Exploration, Discoveries, and Encounters (draft)
10. Combat (draft, very rough)
11. Exploration Reports and Advancement (draft)
12. Weekly Actions (draft)
13. Victory and Defeat Conditions: Competitive Games (draft, very rough)

All of that amounts to about 45 pages. Some of the rules are just placeholders (like, say, the encounter evasion table from Moldvay's B/X) which I want to avoid creating until after I've experimented with the game a few times.

Then I have a large number of mod-able optional rules that can help define the setting for the hex crawl (ancient mythology, medieval, fantasy, New World):

• Fantasy Race & Class (draft)
• Encumbrance
• Becoming Lost
• Reaction Rolls
• Dungeoneering

Aside from the fantasy optionals (which I've created to allow the game to borrow character and encounters from the Swords and Wizardry SRD for low-effort playtesting with a familiar fantasy feel), all of this is very rough and minimally sketched. I also want a weather system at some point, which I've already researched and implemented as tables but not attempted to translate into written rules.

MEK OP Game Night: Barbarossa Wrap

We played through a second turn of the 5-turn Barbarossa campaign, but I decided to call it before the effort of production. The front was stalemating, which is to say that the Germans no longer had a serious chance of capturing any major objective

In the continuing first turn, the Russians immediately launched an aggressive counterattack. Two stacks of Rumanians were pocketed and eliminated, resulting in a near collapse of Axis defenders. Poor weather forced a tactical retreat back across the border, sparing Rumania from a complete collapse.

In the second turn, virtually all German attacks failed on low die rolls, aside from a couple that were at sufficiently poor odds that even victories didn't produce a spectacular outcome. By the third impulse, the Soviet forces were again counterattacking, and a single breach in the northern line was swiftly filled and repaired. Losses were very one-sided, with the Russians losing only a few divisions and weak infantry, and the Germans losing substantial quantities of armor and mechanized corps.

Here's the board at the conclusion of the turn:

The southern front is largely depopulated on both sides, and the north has a thickly stacked perimeter of tough corps bunkered behind river lines. Only the center still has some potential to open up for Germany, and even then, they've taken some meaningful losses.

Final death tally: 14 to 4. The dice are set to the most common rolls for each side over the course of the night!

Next week: Looking to find a third player, and switch to the Pacific map.

Search Party Efficiency

I've been trying to research the most efficient way to perform a search. Not a computer search algorithm! I mean a real-world search, like the kind you'd design if you wanted to find a lost hiker in the wilderness and 50 volunteers showed up to help. This is a standard situation for any game trying to model an imperfect information situation, like two armies trying to engage one another on a battlefield with limited visibility. For my own design project -- a classic wilderness hexcrawl -- this kind of mechanic is close to the heart of the game.

These days, a normal game is most likely to implement searching as a skill that has a fixed numerical score, like a Perception check. If you are "good at searching", the you notice details more often. If you have more people available, you get to make more individual checks. This makes a reasonable amount of success in a tightly constrained environment like the stereotypical RPG dungeon.

But if you're wandering around outdoors with a troop of dozens of adventurers trying to find the secret entrance to that lair, you probably won't wander past it all the same time to make simultaneous skill checks. Instead you'll set up a base camp nearby, and have everyone fan out in small groups to explore little areas of terrain. Perception skill matters less than distribution strategy. It's not noticing the entrance that's hard, it's making sure that you assign your little search parties to the right locations as efficiently as possible, so that they don't cover one another's territory and waste time, or miss an important region entirely.

I can think of two sources of dimishing returns here:

1. As the number of parties increases, they need to cover more terrain, and some of them will need to move farther from the base camp before they even begin. If you have them fan out into quadrants, then every search party after the eighth will need to walk at least the distance of one quadrant before they even start searching. You can subdivide your fan pattern into more wedges than quadrants, but then once you saturate, you'll need to send people even farther to get beyond the radius of those longer-and-skinnier wedges. And for something beyond octants, you now have too many groups overlapping close to the camp.
2. Some features you might want to discover (say, a mountain, or a mysterious tower ruin) might be visible from far enough away that you wouldn't need fine subdivisions of the geographical area. Instead, you'd much rather have everyone devote more of their time to spreading out over a larger area. So the optimal subdivision shape isn't much like a wedge, but more like a square... which makes it less efficient to perform the initial spreading-out stage of the search.

I'm not entirely sure of how the model the latter effect, in particular. At the moment, my wilderness hexcrawl game rules are using a unified mechanic for all diminishing returns where the size of the party is used to determine a number of dice to use by taking its square-root and rounding down. That's not a terrible assumption, I think, but I wish it were on sturdier grounds. Alas, all attempts to find an actual mathematical model for search parties keep turning up
only computer search algorithms!

Inspirational Source Literature: Safari Cards

One of the lovely things about playing a simulationist game system is that it almost always has a bibliography at the end. In the scientific world, bibliographic references in a journal article provide a sense of communal teleology; that is, it reminds the reader that the purpose of a particular paper isn't to be impressive in itself, but to participate in a conversation that helps to meet the ends of everyone involved in that field of research. Playing Korea: The Forgotten War helped me to understand politics during the Truman/Eisenhower era, clarified why we maintain a presence in Korea today, and gave me a better perspective on what was going on in those old MASH episodes. And of course, reading books and watching movies set in a particular fictitious universe creates a heighten level of engagement with the narrative elements of the game as well.

This little guy is my totem animal, I think.

When I was young, I had a small collection of Safari Cards, which were a mail-order product that functioned as a nerdier counterpart to sports cards. Each card had an animal name and picture on the front, and a back full of information about that creature's ecology and taxonomy. The cards were satisfying in the way of any collectible item, but also had a reassuringly authoritative voice: "This is science! Collect science!"The abstracted icons for class/order, the stylized terrain, the color-coded Mercator map, all of these suggested elements of some systematized universe of adulthood that was deeply inviting to me. I wanted to go out into nature, discover real life beasts to match each picture, and put a little check mark next to a list of the cards in my collection. That impulse has never really gone away, and probably explains why we own a set of National Park refrigerator magnets and topographic maps.

I wish I still had my set (or a larger, more comprehensive version of it), just so I could build a game around it. The basic mechanics of traveling around to collect elusive critters already had its CCG heyday in the Pokemon era, but the stylistic aspects of that genre was sadly antithetical to the Safari Card ethos. Instead of feeling dryly analytical, like something from an old European library, the games of the 90s were garish pastel affairs, light on text and far from the gritty feel of wrinkled lizards clutching grimy rocks. The best approximation to Safari Cards might have been the endless series of "The Ecology of the ______" articles in Dragon Magazine that ran during the early 80s as an expression of Gygaxian naturalism, and were condensed into increasingly detailed expansions to the 1e Monster Manual.

The same thing is true of a variety of numerous books about geography and climate that I read during the late 70s, laid out with textbook figures that merged art and data. Here's biome chart that could easily have been plucked from one of the pseudo-textbooks in my childhood collection:

Graphic via Inkwell Ideas

This picture just begs me to create a small table where rolling dice select the level of precipitation in a hex map zone, and cross-referencing the latitude zone on a global world map indicates the type of terrain it contains. It's a simplified version of a messier reality, to be sure, but it feels scientific. And once nourished on this kind of intellectual fare, it's hard to accept anything that doesn't clear the same bar for rigor and consistency.

This is, if you will, part of my design bibliography. My "Appendix N", an RPG player might say. The game it would create would be the same sort of game that appeals to someone who wants to collect detailed ecological data for hundreds of Safari Card species, an overwhelming deluge of academic detail and digressive flavor-text. It isn't one which the current industry standards support, with the greater emphasis (post Euro-game revolution) on abstracted and anti-simulationist design. But it has a powerful nostalgic draw for me.

MEK OP Games Night: WiF Barbarossa

This weekend I set up the new World in Flames game for the first time, using newly laminated maps and my rather limited set of game counter magnets. I took the Russians, with the intent of letting the German player run through the initial super-combined move (via offensive chit) as a teaching tool. This effectively creates a turn impulse in which virtually every possible action that can occur, does occur.

In some ways, pitting an inexperienced attacker versus an experienced defender doesn't do a great job of showcasing the system. For example, the primary power of the German Wehrmacht is in being able to quickly blitz through clear terrain and envelope enemy formations. But a clever Russian defender will simply set up in ways that place absolutely all the units in hexes with unfavorable terrain for blitzkrieg, forcing the Germans into making direct assaults with minimal penetration. Even with some decent rolls in the opening turn, the Germans were unable to obtain any exploitation results off the combat table, since all the vulnerable Russian units were set up in forests and cities.

Here was the situation at the end of the first impulse:

Army Group Centre has blown a hole through the line south of the Pripet Marshes that I'll need to repair, and the Rumanians have killed a quality MECH corps, but otherwise the Germans have only been able to blast away a few perimeter defenders.

After another Axis impulse, the gap is still filled with a stopgap that should take a couple more impulses to clear, and every other Axis formation is disorganized and out of commission until July.

The Germans have eliminated Timoshenko's HQ, at the cost of flipping. Some reserves are waiting to move forward and the Russians are probably going to fall back toward Kiev to shorten the line against a couple new German corps that have railed in to rescue Rumania.

At this point we quit. Casualties were relatively even on both sides:

Incidentally, both sides were understrength relative to a normal invasion due to some of my misunderstanding of the rules. The idea of calling out "reserves" is a new development since the 5th edition, and works differently for major powers and minor countries. For a minor country, they work more like normal production, although they build for free. For major powers, the materialize on the map instantly after a declaration of war, but just suffer disorganization. So the Russians should have gotten all their reserves immediately, giving them a lot more defenders.

On the other hand, I neglected to mention that the Germans could align the doughty Finns (and comic-relief Hungarians), which would have given the Germans an even larger number of additional units than the Russians were missing. This let me avoid setting up anything along the Finnish border. So everything roughly balanced out!

Challenge Systems: Quantitative Analysis

A core element of many games (both board games and RPGs) is the binary challenge resolved by a dice roll. This might represent an attempt to hit a target with an artillery piece, an attempt to jump over a chasm, or an attempt to persuade a guard to let you past a security door. Previously I discussed the four possible ways to implement the roll itself: rolling over a target versus under it, and modifying roll results versus modifying targets. For example, a roll-high and modify-result system would involve something like "If your 1d20+3 roll is greater than or equal to 15, then you succeed".

This is mostly an aesthetic issue. From a gameplay perspective, a more important question is how the probability of success changes as modifiers are added. This depends on whether how many dice are rolled (a multi-dice bell curve generates diminishing returns in both wings), what modifiers are applied, and how targets are set. There are an infinite number of different possible systems, but I'd like to focus on four distinct approaches in existing RPG games. The systems are:

1. Moldvay's B/X edition of D&D, which used a simple "roll a 1d20, with result at or under the attribute to succeed"
2. The system proposed by Wesley Ives in Dragon #1 (June, 1976), for use with original 70s-era D&D. This system is rather baroque in presentation, even by the standards of that era, involving rolling lots of dice both to set the target and then to test it.
3. The modern convention of a "skill system", with small modifiers based on attributes. Here I've chosen the SEIGE engine (from Castles & Crusades) as a representative example, using a non-prime target of 12, although most other post-3.0 systems in the OGL d20 line work in a similar way.
4. The use of multiple dice against a single target. In this case, I've elected to use the D6 engine from 80s-era West End Games products (like Star Wars), also using a target of 12. (d20 attribute points have been converted one-for-one into "pips" for the calculations below.)

One comment on the "skill system" approach. In practice, this system has substantial modifiers based on custom design, which shift the chance of success up linearly as "skill points" are invested in a category. In practice, however, this kind of system involves illusory improvement, in that the targets (DC's) are simply adjusted higher at the same rate! (In fact, I think the 3.5 DMG explicitly instructs the DM to do precisely this.) So the skill system, rather than producing real improvement, just places characters on a leveling treadmill where they start to fall behind in any category where they fail to pay the appropriate "skill tax".

Here are the results of a computer simulation of 100,000 dice rolls using each method, to show the qualitatively different effects that this choice has on the game system.

The Moldvay approach creates a linear success rate, and the skill-based approach flattens the chance out substantially without altering linearity. (Of course the DM can rather easily shift the entire line upward or downward, by the use of DC-setting fiat powers!) Attributes matter much less in a modern game, apparently.

The Ives system, despite apparent complexity, has a simple effect. It takes the Moldvay system and forces it to saturate at high skill levels, bending it down into sublinearity. This means that even when using his optional bonuses (including level), the chance of success improves very slowly beyond a certain point. This is an excellent example of the design principle of diminishing returns! I rather like this feature, despite the obscurantist feel of the convoluted mechanics.

The multidice system involves a true bell curve of results, which shows up here as an S-curve in the binary check. Note that below a certain point, success is basically impossible, but even at the top end there's a small chance of failure. An alternative system is to replace the roll-high system with a roll-low system (as used in, say, Ninja Burger or Kobolds Ate My Baby), which reverse the curve ends to always provides a small chance of success at the low end, with guaranteed success at the high end. This friendly option works well for beer-and-pretzels games, where you never want a check to be impossible.

Overall, it's hard to beat the Moldvay roll-under-attribute system for simplicity, but I think I prefer the Ives system on philosophical grounds. I wish I could find a way to implement it with less complexity, though!

WiF Optional Rules

With ambitions for a summer WW2 campaign using the World in Flames Deluxe set, I've been pondering the use of a few optional rules beyond the ones included in the RAW. In particular, I'd like to make production less random; currently it just involves drawing counters blindly from the available force pool, which can result in oddities like the British accidentally building an Australian infantry just as the Germans are massing an invasion fleet! It's also difficult to draw units randomly when using magnetized counters, which make it impossible to use the old "shake 'em all up in your hands and draw" method.

The first rule is from our old days at the Calvin Historical Simulations Club:

What's in this stack?!?

• Fog of War: The units in each stack of the board are normally concealed, except during combat by any units that cover them. Any other player may request to see only the top land unit, the top naval unit, the top air unit, and any stationary assets like fortifications or factories.

The advantage of this rule is that is prevents excessively time-consuming calculation of pre-combat odds, and represents a realistic level of operational intelligence.

The second rule, which I'm proposing for the first time, is intended to reduce production randomness:

• Production Specialization: Sort units into force pools (and sub-pools) as usual. Any pool that contains only units that have no year-dates on the reverse side must build randomly, as usual. For any other pool, do the following.
• If the pool contains units from only one year, the unit(s) to be built may be selected non-randomly by the builder.
• If the pool contains units from more than one year, and a single unit from the pool is built, it may be selected non-randomly by the builder, but may not be from the most recent year.
• If the pool contains units from more than one year, and multiple units from the pool are being built, then the first unit must be selected non-randomly from the earliest year available, but all subsequent units may be selected non-randomly from any year.

That's a little more complicated to explain than the current rule, but it should be faster to apply it in practice. It avoids the horrendous ordeal of constantly having to sort out force pools at the end of each turn, or else buying a stack of extra game trays to keep them sorted. The logic behind this is that, if you are building just one bomber wing a turn, your Ministry of War Production isn't going to be nearly as proficient at designing good planes as it would be if it were cranking out a dozen bomber wings.

There are a few weird side effects from this rule, like the fact that small powers like the Chinese will have to wait an extra year to build most of their top-end units. On the other hand, they'll get to avoid the indignity of having to build some completely obsolete junk, which helps to balance it out.

Building A Magnetic Game Surface

Pretty much any game with a high counter density is in constant danger of being instantly destroyed by an errant elbow brush, table-leg kick, or gust of wind. And never mind the curious 18 month-old child I currently have roaming the house. So I'm currently trying to build my own portable gaming panel with a magnetic surface, so I can do something like this:

OK, I'm a long way from having anything that works this well, but I did put together a rudimentary approximation to the basic concept. Currently I have three 22-gauge metal plates, side by side, backed with a sheet of 11/32' plywood. That's not very sturdy, but it does have the merit of being something I can move by myself if necessary. That's the right size for both World in Flames maps at their usual scale, or for a single map if it's been double-sized as in the image above. I really need to buy a set of self-driving wood-screws to connect the plates more firmly to the wood. Currently they're just held on with duct tape and carpet tacks. (I tested this with two tiny screws I found around the house, and they work great.) I definitely should have bought a sturdier wood board, too, even at the cost of needing a second person to transport the game.

Alas, the set of  400+ game counter magnets I own seems to have been stored improperly (too much heat? not aligned correctly during transport?) and the magnets no longer grip the metal as well as they should. The idea of turning the board vertically and mounting it on the wall seems to be out of the question. At the same time, they do snap together into useful stacks, and they don't slide around nearly as much as they would if they were free, so I still consider it an improvement over non-magnetic counters. At least I should be able to move it into a back room less accessible to toddler fingers and pedestrian traffic, in between sessions.

If anyone has the slightest idea of where to buy the (apparently discontinued) 1/2" game counter tiles that used to be sold in a box that looks like this one, let me know. I see only a single instance of them being sold on Ebay within the last year, so the existing stockpile must be either dwindling or subject to hoarding. Looks like an economic opportunity for a magnetic-sheet manufacturer to exploit. Or maybe that's just wishful thinking, in an age where hex-and-counter games are virtual dinosaurs.