MEK-OP Game Night: Final Exam Week!

Everyone was busy with the wrap-up of the semester (I'm giving an exam on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday), so we just spent a few hours playing through the first half of a Runebound game (1st edition). With six people the pace of the game is significantly slower, but I think everyone still had fun. We had to quit just as I had assembled a perfect combo of melee maces!

A few thoughts about the game:

• Although the biggest changes from 1st to 2nd edition was the norming of the dice distribution (2d10 vs 1d20) and necessary tweaks to keep the game challenging, playing with this many players makes it absolutely essential to use regenerating encounters. That's a rule that should import pretty easily from 2nd edition without needing to use the 2e Adventure Card set.
• The combat system is apparently more confusing to other people that I expected. I needed to explain it a few times before it made sense. It's very counterintuitive that "attacking" and "defending" use the same mechanic and can both cause damage to you after a failed check.
• The movement system is still wonky to me, since it doesn't really reflect any simulationist attitude toward terrain difficulty. Walking along a road, for example, requires "road face" results -- which means that it's almost impossible to be allowed to walk along four consecutive roads instead of taking a mandatory detour through the nearby mountains! Whether this sort of thing bothers you or not is probably a signature of where you reside on the vertical GNS axis.

For my own purposes in designing an "exploration game" that involves some similar pseudo-RPGish elements, the aspect of this game that I'd most like to modify is the "downtime" issue. I don't want to completely eliminate downtime; it's actually an advantage in slow, strategic games that are left up over multiple sessions so that, for example, my wife can put my daughter to bed while the rest of us keep playing. But I do want to make it more optional, and create a role for players who are not active in the turn cycle.

Some ideas for how to keep off-turn players engaged in a multiplayer adventure board game:

1. Group players into teams. I always prefer this approach to a free-for-fall once the number of players goes past three. In some games, even three players makes for too many sides to be stable in game-theoretic terms. (It's easy but rare for a two-player game to create an asymmetric equilibrium, but trivially easy to accomplish in an n-player game.) With good coordination, a team of players can complete certain portions of the game (like movement) simultaneously, speeding up the sequence of play.
2. Give players an intervention mechanism that activates during other players' turns. In a free-for-all, this needs to be something that involves hostile interference: playing a "wandering monster" in Munchkin, say, or anything in the Dungeonlord phase of Dungeoneer. But in a team-based game, this could be a form of material support. I prefer the latter mechanism since it has simulationist precedent (Lend-Lease during WW2, for example), which avoids the question of "Why am I suddenly playing the bad guys now?" In some games, it might make thematic sense that the enemies could be influenced by agents of the other team.
3. Segregate starting points. Instead of having all six players begin at the same location (which forces them to go one at a time in a race to valuable objectives/resources, etc), the players can then spend the early development portion of the game doing simultaneous movement. This works pretty well in 4x strategy games that involve exploration.

I'd recommend the first and the third ideas, but also apply the second idea sparingly. I can see some merit in having the game start with (3), and then transition toward emergent or preset alliances (1) and occasional cooperative interventions (2). But I appreciate a very small component of hostile intervention (2) to function as a wildcard, as long as it doesn't preclude effective strategic planning. Everyone deserves a healthy backstab now and then, right?

Strategy RPG History

Just a few days ago, I commented on the fact that I had seen very few examples of strategic level board games that involved a neutral arbiter (umpire, judge, etc), to allow for hidden information and general player-neutral aspects of gameplay. I only lived through the 80s and 90s, and even then had only limited experience with a range of game activities during those periods (mostly Avalon Hill games on the board-game side, and West End systems on the RPG side). History goes back quite a bit farther than that, and so I've been reading through Peterson's Playing at the World to get more of the backstory.

One area of activity of which I had little awareness was the innovative play-by-mail community during the 1960s. Peterson spends a great deal of time delving into the publications of various groups involved in PBM campaigns for Avalon Hill's Diplomacy. Although I had played this a few times back in college (as a single-night "one-off" when we weren't running something larger), I hadn't really appreciated its popularity during the wargame era. In fact, if someone had told me that such a simple game had been able to generate extensive activity of the sort that we'd today classify as "fan-fic", "LARP", and "cosplay", as a sort of abstracted counterpart to the SCA, I would have found it hard to believe.

A multi-player game, when played by mail, can only be manageable when information is centralized through a single player who functions as the hub, and a neutral referee is probably the only fair way to accomplish this. What's more interesting is that, almost as soon as the player-referee structure is established, players seem to have begun speaking in the voice of a dramatic persona (what we'd today call "in-character", or IC) to create a fictional narrative. Once someone else takes responsibility for running the mechanical side of the game, the players are freed to concentrate on immersion and story-telling. This is despite the fact that Diplomacy is nearly as abstract a game as chess!


Oh, a fascinating bit of trivia I learned: The now-standardized trope of dragons (and other similar mythical creatures) being distinguished by a set of vivid primary colors is actually something that traces to this era. The original publication of the various canonical chromatic dragon types (black, white, red, green, blue, and the so-called "purple worm") was actually in a Diplomacy fanzine written to support a Lord of the Rings variant game being played by mail. The author, "Professor S.K. Eltolereth" (an apparent Gygax pseudonym) was really intended to support the narrative of one of these postal campaigns.

Let me say that again. The purple worm was invented to play this game. I just can't get over how strange and wonderful that is. Don't ever change, obsessive fantasy fans. Don't ever change.

Curious Feature Of Naval Thunder

There are three basic dice mechanics in this game system:

1. A "to-hit" check, using "roll high, modify target".
2. A "penetration" check, using "roll high, modify result". Just to make things extra confusing, for this one it's necessary to beat the target and not just match it.
3. A damage control (or command) check, using "roll low, modify result".

Oh, and critical hits use a hash-table with a bell curve, placing less damaging criticals (guns, engines) in the center of the distribution, and more dramatic results (bridge, magazine) out in the tails.

Three different systems, three totally different implementations. That's pretty unusual in games today. The only mechanic missing from the list is the rarely-encountered "roll low, modify target" method, which is the one I actually like best!

I'm kind of curious why the designer used such a piecemeal approach, but I think I have my own idea. For the to-hit roll, it's often necessary to roll identical guns from the same ship against two different targets. For the penetration roll, it's necessary to roll different guns against the same target. This is something I encountered during the design of a morale system for the fast-combat system I wrote over the summer. All of a sudden, I wanted to apply a single roll against a variety of different targets, and suddenly a "modify target" system made perfect sense. And so I can respect the decision.

I think that so many games today use result modification instead of target modification that even when a target-mod system makes logical sense, designers still try to shoehorn everything into the industry standard. I chalk it all up to lingering trauma over the complicated "THAC0" experiment, which tried to mix negative bonuses to the target with positive bonuses to the result, all at once. That was probably a bridge too far, even by my standards.

MEK-OP Game Night: Naval Thunder

Tonight I was all prepared for an all-out brawl, fighting the surface engagement of 1st Guadalcanal on a set of four tables. But apparently we were too close to final exams, and so attendance was greatly truncated. Instead, we played out a quick daylight engagement between a few forces from the official order of battle.

IJN Hiei's historical fate: crippled and hunted down

The Imperial Japanese Navy (me!) ended up with

• Battlecruiser Hiei
• Two destroyers

The US Navy took

• Two heavy cruisers (Portland and San Francisco)
• Two light cruisers (Atlanta and Juneau)

 It was probably a good thing we scaled things back, since the fight still took most of the evening. By sheer luck, I think, it was a remarkably balanced scenario.

Both destroyers went down quickly as they attempted to close to torpedo range. In hindsight, I think it actually makes more sense to hold the destroyers behind the battlecruiser and use them to engage anything that tries to close range, rather than detaching them. Using the larger ship to block line-of-sight doesn't "feel right" historically, but on the other hand, it might have been the correct lesson to learn from 2nd Guadalcanal!


The Japanese battlecruiser took a long time to kill. It knocked off two cruisers before it started taking fire control criticals, but still had plenty of hull integrity left. At that point the battle slowed to a grind, with the lighter American cruisers mostly unable to penetrate heavy armor, but the Hiei's main battery effectively blinded.


Superstructure criticals eventually took their toll. By the end of the battle, the Hiei was reduced to about 20 hull points (two good hits away from death), and was suffering from serious fire damage. A lucky bridge critical finally drove it from the battle, leaving the Portland as the sole survivor... with less than a quarter of its hull strength remaining, and half its guns silenced.


In a few situations, the battle could have swung in a radically different direction. The Juneau missed with both its port and starboard torpedo volleys, which could have ended the engagement quickly. But the Hiei suffered from poor long-range gunnery that allowed the battle to even last long enough for the range to close. Still, we present the victor of the battle, whether by tenacity or luck: the Enterprise's faithful handmaiden, USS Portland.

• Two destroyers

The US Navy took

• Two heavy cruisers (Portland and San Francisco)
• Two light cruisers (Atlanta and Juneau)

 It was probably a good thing we scaled things back, since the fight still took most of the evening. By sheer luck, I think, it was a remarkably balanced scenario.

Both destroyers went down quickly as they attempted to close to torpedo range. In hindsight, I think it actually makes more sense to hold the destroyers behind the battlecruiser and use them to engage anything that tries to close range, rather than detaching them. Using the larger ship to block line-of-sight doesn't "feel right" historically, but on the other hand, it might have been the correct lesson to learn from 2nd Guadalcanal!

The Japanese battlecruiser took a long time to kill. It knocked off two cruisers before it started taking fire control criticals, but still had plenty of hull integrity left. At that point the battle slowed to a grind, with the lighter American cruisers mostly unable to penetrate heavy armor, but the Hiei's main battery effectively blinded.

Superstructure criticals eventually took their toll. By the end of the battle, the Hiei was reduced to about 20 hull points (two good hits away from death), and was suffering from serious fire damage. A lucky bridge critical finally drove it from the battle, leaving the Portland as the sole survivor... with less than a quarter of its hull strength remaining, and half its guns silenced.

Image Source: http://grzegorz-nawrocki.com/

In a few situations, the battle could have swung in a radically different direction. The Juneau missed with both its port and starboard torpedo volleys, which could have ended the engagement quickly. But the Hiei suffered from poor long-range gunnery that allowed the battle to even last long enough for the range to close. Still, we present the victor of the battle, whether by tenacity or luck: the Enterprise's faithful handmaiden, USS Portland.

Strategy Roleplaying Games: A Growing Game Niche?

Back in my college days, one of the major campaign systems we played was something called Starfire, a space-combat game (based on the "space is a 2D ocean with surface naval ships" trope) which was fairly unique in being a strategy game with a referee. That is, in addition to the players, there would be one designated "spacemaster" who would run various "non-player races" and allow for double-blind encounters between players with limited intelligence gathering. In effect, it was an RPG, but using starship navies instead of characters. The campaign game ("Imperial Starfire") was written by sci-fi author David Weber, who also contributed an elaborate historical universe (RPG players might call it a "campaign setting") that functioned as a model for writing up the history of your own civilization.

There really aren't many other examples of games that follow that pattern, despite the fact that this was almost certainly the original play style of the Lake Geneva "living fantasy" campaigns that gave birth to modern role-playing. The combat rules were borrowed from miniatures (Chainmail), and it was understood that players would build their own castles and acquire little fiefdoms full of soldiers and mercenaries. So there's a certain logic to creating a "fantasy Starfire" game, a strategy-RPG hybrid that can scratch the itch of players who want to run armies instead of just heroes. I'm not aware of any other strategy wargames but Starfire that use a referee/gamemaster, but if anyone knows of any, I'd be interested in hearing about them!

At the moment, I've been following the fundraising drive for something called Domains at War, which looks like it might fit the bill. It's written in such a way that it looks primarily oriented toward the cooperative style of play popular with RPG groups, but I think the economic balancing is tight enough that it could be easily adapted for a competitive game between players running rival kingdoms or alliances. The rules are extremely extensive, allowing resolution at three levels (strategic/abstract, 120:1 miniatures, and man-to-man), with the promise of consistency between the outcomes of all three levels of combat resolution. This all looks very appealing, especially since the abstracted combat allows for the quick resolution of mismatched battles without much uncertainty in their outcome. (Being forced to fight a doomed battle was always a chore in Starfire!)

I'll be reading through the rules over the next few weeks, to see how well they might work for creating a fantasy campaign on the strategic level, with players controlling territory and sending armies against one another (or against the non-player races of a referee).