Strategy RPG Options

For a year or so, I've been thinking about creating a campaign that joins together several different levels of medieval-fantasy gameplay. As I mentioned a year ago, this idea dates back to the proto-RPG scene in the 1970s, where it wasn't unusual to mesh together a hodge-podge of different game systems to simulate the operation of a small kingdom in a pseudo-medieval world. Most of these early projects were disorganized and poorly recorded, although a heroic amount of editorial work by Judges Guild ended up saving enough of Dave Arneson's First Fantasy Campaign to preserve the basic concepts for posterity. The result is simultaneously both a fantastic mess, and yet gloriously visionary.

This sort of project mostly collapsed in favor of episodic single-session roleplaying centered on one particular element of the fantasy kingdom: the great deeds of individual heroes. This style of play was necessarily somewhat limited by time constraints and the need to keep all players engaged at once. In the 70s, play-by-mail games were pretty common and face-to-face meetings were major events. So it seemed "normal" to have players (mostly hardcore wargame hobbyists) spend most of a month slowly designing their private castles and armies. But during the peak-fad years of the early 80s, game audiences shifted toward younger players and more fluid groups with a steady rotation of inexperienced players. Only the dungeon-delving subgame could really meet the needs of that social environment.

Trying to reintegrate the kingdom-management game with the heroic-adventure game to create an ur-RPG is difficult. RPG heroes tend to rapidly accumulate power in ways that totally circumvent the need for participation in normal society, zooming from chumps to demigods in a matter of months through the power of level-grinding. Any realistic simulation of the ways in which actual medieval nobles worked to accumulate their own little fiefdoms would get in the way of your standard high-fantasy plotline!

What I'd really like to find is a fully procedural (i.e., based on just-in-time dice rolling, not purchasing a "campaign setting") strategic system that will

• Generate a reasonable-looking random world environment
• Allow players to run a small kingdom or duchy, making meaningful decisions that balance off the usual 4X priorities
• Field armies to fight miniature battles when the sides are evenly matched, or quickly simulate the outcome of those battles if they look lopsided or otherwise boring
• Allow for personal development of a few named leaders of those kingdoms, through the traditional "treasure-seeking and monster-slaying" RPG

That wouldn't necessarily mean doing anything beyond the game sessions we've played in the past year or so. It would just involve tying together different games that were formerly independent. So the build-your-own miniatures battles would be replaced by battles to resolve events in a dynamic world, or short one-night RPG excursions would yield mature heroes who could live on as captains in the armies of those kingdoms!

Here are a few products on the market today that try to add the strategic layer back into games, and my assessment of each of them.

Renegade Crowns This is notionally a product for Warhammer Fantasy, but it's virtually system independent. It uses a vast array of tables to generate an entire region of random fantasy principalities, full of cruel greedy despots. The book is of high quality and is full of flavor and dark humor. It really performs only one function, however -- world-building. There are no rules for actually managing the militaries or economies of those political organizations. It's essentially a setting-design workshop for a GM who wants to create plot-hooks for a high-level campaign that revolves around politics.

Kingmaker This a Paizo adventure path which adds both a lightweight kingdom simulator and a set of mass combat rules. (The rules are freely available as open-source content though the SRD, using the links provided.) The implementation is minimalist, but has extremely high production standards, including a beautiful customizable city map. The focus of simulation is towns and the buildings used to develop them, rather like cities in Civilization. This is essentially a self-contained mini-game which uses abstracted resources (BP) and consists of balancing three competing priorities represented by single-value statistics (Stability/Loyalty/Economy) in city development. Each structure either generates income or improves a statistic. The rules are revised and indexed in the recently-released Ultimate Campaign sourcebook.

Birthright This set of rules was originally developed by TSR for second edition D&D, then abandoned after the takeover by WotC. Unofficial rules have since been developed for 3e by a volunteer online community. It's highly setting-specific (based on the concept of magical bloodlines), and some central game aspects would be hard to adapt to a new setting. Battles can be resolved either through direct dice-rolling based on relative strength, or by a detailed tactical battle. Naval units are nicely differentiated, and heroes can join the battle directly by treating their adventuring parties as units.

An Echo, Resounding This is a system very similar to Paizo's, but with less emphasis on a single settlement and more on the surrounding environment. Here the stats are Military/Wealth/Social, but they work in much the same way. It supports a unique Asian-flavored setting, and lots of well-written examples of how to use domain management and prepare a map. It's weakly-linked "minigame" that sits on top of an existing campaign, allowing players to make a few domain-scale decisions at the beginning/end of each night of standard RPG play. It's the work of a single author, Kevin Crawford, and yet in many ways it manages to be quite competitive with Paizo's rules. But while Paizo is more interested in 3e/OGL compatibility, this set of rules is obviously designed to interface with 1e/2e version of D&D. (It advertises compatibility with the Labyrinth Lord retroclone, but has so few linkages to other rules that it could be used for anything pre-3e with only minor changes.)

Adventurer, Conqueror, King (ACKS) This is the "crunchiest" system on the market, with emphasis on realistic demographics and economics. It's built on top of the old Basic rules, plus a few imported ideas like a 2e-style THACO system for hits, as a sort of alternate-universe version of the rather-different endgame in the Rules Cyclopedia. It's really working hard to provide as much detail as possible, and as a result, it would be hard to run without a spreadsheet to keep track of all the information involved. It's an approach that heavily emphasizes stronghold-building and merchant-trading operations which are absent or highly abstracted in other systems. In that sense, it looks less like a post-Sid Meier simplification-of-design approach ("reduce everything to block granularity and single functions") and more like a 70s-era wargame. You can pretty much design a castle from the ground-up, using grid paper, and figure out exactly how much it costs and precisely how many troops can be garrisoned there. There are extensive supply and command rules. And so forth.

All of these systems look interesting, but I think my inclination is toward ACKS for a few reasons:

• Most other systems assume that you start with a long RPG campaign, and pin the strategy game onto the end of it. I'm too impatient to run a long campaign of RPG modules before getting to "the good stuff" with armies and castles. And in any event, I know more about wargames than I do about RPGs.
• The majority of systems above involve a party of adventurers pooling resources to run a single kingdom, which each party member playing a specific role. I'm more interested in a quasi-competitive game in which each player gets a separate kingdom to run. ACKS lets you fill out your own private roster of vassals and henchmen, giving you your own team of heroes (at various stages of career development) to run all at once.
• There's a good deal of research behind the rules, so that (for example) the duration of sieges in the game will be very similar to the duration of historical sieges, or (for another example) the fraction of your population in cities will be very small compared to the number of rural serfs required to support them. I'm a simulationist at heart, and I love knowing the exact number of peasant families in my realm!

The biggest defect I see in ACKS is the absence of a good exploration component to the game. That is, you just clear a sufficient number of hexes, roll dice for the "quality" of your land, and there's really no other inputs than the dice. In particular, it doesn't make sense to pay any attention to geography when laying out your domains, since geographic features make no difference to your result. A kingdom in the mountains works exactly the same way as an ocean port.

So I'm thinking that I'll use the ACKS rules, but add in a subsystem to randomly generate a terrain map (or really, borrow it from my own FF project for some playtesting!) and then reference the map to determine the value of a domain that includes certain hexes. This makes it definitely worth searching around for special features (lakes, mines, timber, that sort of thing), rather than just rolling and then inventing those details after the fact to explain the roll. I want to recapture some of the feel of Imperial Starfire, where you could roll up an amazing binary-star system with three habitable planets at maximum mineral value and a tidelocked moon!

No Games This Week

Our regular family schedule this week was pre-empted by a new arrival!

Mary Olivia 'Molly' Hamilton, born 9/26/13

The Rise And Fall Of Computer Strategy

Game design philosopher Chris Bateman explains why, if you're an NT in the Meyers-Briggs taxonomy, you probably think that games have gone all downhill since the 90s:

Because the Rational temperament is associated with programmers and game designers, early videogames were extremely influenced by Strategic play. Early mainframe games in the 1970s , such as Star Trek (Mike Mayfield, 1971), Adventure/Colossal Cave (Will Crowther, 1975) and Dungeon (Don Daglow, 1975) and its spiritual descendent Rogue (Toy, Wichman and Arnold, 1980). Many early games were influenced by the tabletop wargames (and role-playing games) of the 1970s, which were also great examples of Strategic play – providing complex play resulting from many different rules and options.

In the 1990s, turn-based strategy games raised Strategic play to a new level with games such as Civilization (Microprose, 1991), Master of Orion (Simtex, 1993) and the X-COM series (Mythos Games et al, 1994 onwards). Additionally, strategic role-playing games such as the Heroes of Might and Magic series (New World Computing et al, 1990 onwards), and point and click adventures such as The Secret of Monkey Island (LucasArts, 1990) made this decade the golden age of Strategic play for many people preferring this play style.

This screen represents hundreds of hours of my life.

Sadly for players preferring Strategic play, the arrival of the PlayStation in the mid-90s marked a change in the focus of the videogame market. Until this point, players favouring Strategic play were (arguably) in the majority, and the bulk of the games being made appealed to these players in some way. But a new era was arriving in which effortless 3D graphics opened the door to a wider market. The Strategic player was about to go from being the key audience for videogames, to being a strong but diminished niche market. 

This change was to mark the end of the commercial importance of adventure games, and a gradual narrowing of the importance of turn-based strategy games which today support very few viable franchises, and maximum audiences of no more than 2 million units (while other types of games were able to pull in maximum audiences of 8 million units during this time). Today, Strategic play in isolation is a commercial backwater, although many successful games support Strategic play along with other play styles.

Next Up?

Next up, for me at least, had better be the birth of my daughter, who's already three days late.

That probably means I won't be sitting in on any Saturday games next week. If I do, I'll be leaving a very grumpy, desperate, and immobile wife at home. I anticipate taking a vacation for a few weeks from playing much of anything.

The next project will probably involve trying to come up with an ongoing fantasy kingdom simulator that can function as a strategy-RPG wrapper for miniature battles. I want something that functions like the Starfire strategic system, to tie together some single-night fantasy battles. Already have plenty of ideas. Don't have nearly enough time. As usual.

Meanwhile, I've invested in some additional supplies and game components for a solo playtest of the FF rules. I'm still working out some details for the territory-control subgame that involves garrisoning trade routes and unique sites. But I already have a working mock-up for the setup and the encounter tables. At this point, my greatest concern is that the rules are getting too bloated and need streamlining.

MEK OP Game Night: War of the Ring

With two simultaneous Warhammer games going on at once, and my wife home being unhappily pregnant, there weren't many players left over for board games. I set up War of the Ring anticipating we might have a few new players, but ended up in a one-on-one game against Walley. He elected to play the Free Peoples again, and this time the game was much more even.

Shadow opened by massing against Rohan. Cards on the table from both sides turned the northern front into a stalemate, and very little happened there through the night aside from periodic reinforcement and an Easterling strike on Dale. Instead, the game featured a very methodical grind through Rohan and on into Gondor.

The Fellowship elected to move south through Isengard. This slightly longer path might have made the difference between a victory and a defeat, given the closeness of the result. As it was, the slightly greater danger of being hunted by orcs out of Orthanc was mostly negated by poor hunt rolls early in the game.

Going into what would almost certainly have been the penultimate turn of the game, Shadow was still missing three victory points, and the Fellowship (guided by Legolas(!) and Pippin(!!)) was only four steps from Mount Doom. Minas Tirith had crumbled under multiple assaults, taking Gandalf, Aragorn, and Boromir with it. An enormous number of non-hunt action dice gave Shadow just enough resources to take apart both Dol Amroth and Lorien, as the clock ran down.

Neither siege would have succeeded without the perfect set of Shadow event cards. The siege of Dol Amroth featured Grond, Hammer of the Underworld, providing a 3 round battle.

Meanwhile, the siege of Lorien was supported by the balrog of Moria, good for some extra rolls pre-battle at 4+.

Why have you forsaken me, Google image search?

*cough* Let's try that again.

OK, that's better. All is forgiven.

And the Witch King made an appearance at both. So at least everything closed out in suitably epic style.

WOTC Free Classic Module Giveaway

For one week only, you can pick up a pdf copy of the original 1e version of Temple of Elemental Evil. This legendary dungeon complex taught me useful life lessons, such as "If you ever enter a place called 'The Fire Temple', and it's full of fiery symbolism and lit by flickering flames, and you're looking for someone called 'the Fire Priest', then it might be a good idea to cast Protection from Fire before triggering the inevitable ambush by fire elementals."

This is a gesture of good will in support of the release of the latest (and possibly final) 5th Edition playtest for D&D. Major changes in this version are (inevitably) all things I don't much like:

• Proficiencies/skills now have a level-scaling bonus, shifting the game back toward the build-oriented end of the 'open stat-based vs closed build-constrained' continuum for player agency. Skills are now treated as a non-optional subsystem.
• Multiclassing has been added back in. It's essentially the low-commitment 3e buffet model, which means (1) it's silly for casters to take any non-caster class, and (2) melee classes will go on grabbing a level or two of <whatever> for min-maxing reasons. Granted, no edition has ever had a successful multiclass system, so my expectations were never high.
• Cleric melee abilities generally downgraded, and casting abilities upgraded. The class is back to being a healbot. You can't fight the expectations of 10 million MMO players, I guess.
• Mages have lost their iconic abilities to scribe scrolls and brew potions, which dated back to the 70s. Apparently there was no way to balance them properly?
• No sign of any OGL-like licensing arrangement as the clock runs down, which means that their chances of displacing Pathfinder as system-of-choice for third-party publishers will remain poor to negligible.

I still like most of the new ideas like advantage/disadvantage, and the retention of 4e's one useful innovation (ritual casting). But in virtually every case where 3e came in contact with 1e/2e, it looks like 3e has won.

MEK OP Game Night - Space Empires: Close Encounters

For this weekend we played a four-way game of SE: Close Encounters, the expanded version of Space Empires: 4X. With two new players, the obvious decision was to put them both on the same team and then harshly school them in the efficiency of early offensive action! As it turned out, they pretty much figured that out on their own.

I used most of the optional rules, but without ground combat or unique ships. In particular, we used "More Aliens" to make home system exploration a little more dangerous. We used instant upgrades, which undercuts some of the authenticity of the game as an empire simulator, but feels necessary when the game needs to finish in a more limited time frame. If people know that ships upgrade even while on the offensive, I figure that makes offensive action that much more appealing.

Player teams were arranged diagonally across the table:

Red - Reba (playing something that involved extra retreating)
Yellow - me (playing Celestial Knights, double shots first round)

against

Blue - Jonathan (playing Immortals, -1 damage per round)
Green - Zach (playing Star Wolves, bonus to small vs large ships)

Initially we did all turns simultaneously. Everyone lost a scout to the planet of aliens, and I figured that would give everyone a chance to try out the combat system in a controlled environment. But as it turned out, no one but me even bothered to go after them...

First blood started on the Red vs Blue border. The Red forces had discovered a space wreck, and Blue had amassed a small CV force with fighters that we assumed was going after one of the two barren planets along the border. Instead, it skipped right past the aliens to grab the wreck, trashing the Red scout that had been left as a garrison.

At that point, Blue decided to just keep going and see how far a single carrier could get. With three new colonies on the border, there were multiple Red targets available. One of them threw up a hasty defense base, but the others had only shipyards in orbit. The fighters bypassed the base, and neatly eliminated a colony.

The second colony down the line was defended by a flagship, DD, and SY. After destroying the Red forces, at the cost of all three fighters, the Blue fleet settled in to blockade the system. Meanwhile, Green took advantage of the situation to send in a four-destroyer squadron along the other side of the Red border.

I had been tied up with some aliens, but did my best to make a run against the Blue systems with a force of 4 cruisers, 1 DD, 1 SC, and a flagship. Most of my research was poured into movement, to provide faster relief. Unfortunately, one of the two deep-space systems I moved through turned up... a Doomsday Machine! It ate my scout, destroyer, and a cruiser before being terminated. My weakened Yellow fleet pushed into Blue space and destroyed a colony. All this by the end of phase 7.

At that point time was running low. We decided to call the game after the next turn set. With a choice between pushing on toward the homeworld, and stopping to kill more colonies, I made the worse decision. The colony I decided to attack was defended by a base, and by this time Blue had +2 defense tech. When it didn't go down to the initial Celestial Knight charge attack, I knew it was over. Each subsequent round consisted of it ignoring a single point of damage from the cruisers, while slowly picking them apart. Immortals for the win!


Meanwhile, on the other side of the room, the Warhammer folks were pitting an implausible alliance of Orks and Necrons against a stilll more implausible Imperium/Chaos alliance. I dropped by between turns to witness the occasional WAAAGH! I'll let Walley describe the outcome:

We played a 2000 point battle. This is on the large side for games, Basically the largest I feel can be completed in a reasonable time.

The scenario called for each of us to have an objective placed in our deployment zone. This was the primary objective. Secondary objectives were also used in the scenario, such as killing the first squad and the enemy commander. These objectives yield victory points.

Orks and necrons went first, and the orks quickly redeployed from the slow Dark Angel Space Marines on the left flank and concentrated on the more experienced and mobile Chaos Marines on the right. This went well for the most part, but the game swung evenly back and forth. Orks lost their outriders to shooting, and a failed charge left their infantry exposed in the center of the board. Over all, the orks fought well in melee,but were unable to survive the subsequent counter-charges from the marine melee specialists. The necrons spent most of their game shooting at the heavily armored Terminators, eventually destroying them. And Robert's near-sighted Dreadnought finally landed a shot that killed the ork monster truck Battlewagon. 

the game ended after turn 4, with a difference of 1 victory point. Neither side had claimed the other's objective, and each side had killed one commander. However, the marines had killed an over-eager squad of Deff Kopta pilots, giving them first blood. Thus the Marines won a pyrric victory.

Next week I will not start this size game after 8 pm :)

Historical Adventuring Gear

The National Park Service provides this remarkable list of the martial gear brought along by Coronado on his ill-fated search for the legendary Seven Cities of Gold. It's a fairly random assemblage of antiquated cast-off pieces from the 15th century, plus some native-quality quilted layers. Chain and leather is universally more popular than plate, which makes sense in an environment of low-quality slashing weapons. Only the mounted leaders were toting along full Gothic-style plate armor suits; everyone else got by on breastplates, vests, and jackets. Matchlocks and crossbows were also in short supply.

Perhaps the most horrifying detail, starkly confirmed by the photographic recreation at the top, is that the Conquistadors were avowed sandalsoxers. Cultural genocide was alarming enough when it came from stylish Don Juans in poofed pants and feathered burgonets. But this!? They're history's greatest monsters!

Fantastic Frontiers: Figuring Out Lairs

To begin, here's a little background. The basic historical game system I've written has three types of encounters that can happen, either when entering a new hex location or when resting overnight:

• Settlements are found only for the first case, when entering a new hex. They consist of a village or encampment, which might form a trade agreement with you, but also might become hostile and threaten your existing trade routes. If they aren't conquered, they become a future source of...
• Patrols, which are smaller groups of wandering natives. Patrols sometimes come from a settlement, but often are just random encounters with wild beasts (or magical ones, in a fantasy setting). Hostile patrols interfere with trade routes, and also launch constant attacks on your expedition until you eliminate them (or the settlement spawning them).
• Events are miscellaneous problems or opportunities that either give you extra resources, or cause you to lose existing resources. I've tried to make them mostly positives, since "you lose your whole turn because of these two lines of flavor text" isn't much fun as a mechanic.

For the fantasy-mod rules, I'm intending to add a fourth type of encounter: monsters' lairs. These represent the kind of places that magical creates live, or guard the great heaps of wealth that you're trying to obtain. These have a fairly venerable pedigree in fantasy literature, dating back to the cup stolen from the dragon-hoard in the final act of Beowulf, or even to Jason's similar theft of the golden fleece from the Colchin dragon. A lair is essentially a fixed location with a permanent encounter that is resolved by a personal act of heroism.

The appeal of this is that it helps to better define the various leaders of the expedition (like Jason here) as monster-slaying heroes in their own right. It's a little anti-climactic when the solution to every wave of dive-bombing hippogriffs is to bring along dozens of archers to shoot them down. At some point, you want your little plastic hero figurines to go mano-a-mano with them in a dark cave, rather than beating them down with your mercenary budget. This also justifies the use of personal statistics (like strength and dexterity) which add color but otherwise don't have much effect on mass combat, unless your heroes are inflated to comic-book proportions.


But this creates a dilemma for me. There's some precedent for letting lairs be eliminated by encountering the monsters outside of them, where logically speaking it should be possible to bring your entire army to bear. For example, The Hobbit has its dwarven expedition encounter two lairs (trolls at the beginning, dragon at the end) and in each case defeats the monsters away from their home base. If this is possible, then it starts to feel almost mandatory to lure the monsters out of hiding. The right way to kill Smaug is always to trick him into flying over a squad of Laketown archers, and never to kill him in the fastness of Erebor.

This problem might be resolved by cost efficiency, for some monsters, where heroes who can survive the encounter can save the lives of the dozens of archers that would fall to a chimera's breath. But if you're getting reimbursed for casualties with a vast hoard of dragon-scale wealth, this stops mattering. (Archers are cheap, I'll just buy more!) This also obliges the player to follow the somewhat tedious approach of camping an army outside the front door of the lair for weeks, waiting for an ambush chance. Not especially heroic, and pretty boring for gameplay.

I'm torn between making lairs something like settlements (where they summon smaller monster patrols, but don't lose their own population in the process), or just making the monsters never emerge from them at all. The former feels ecologically silly (where are all these extra dragons coming from?!) But the latter feels static and non-threatening, and doesn't capture the kind of creeping dread that ought to arise from journeying too close to that ominous old cave with the smoke drifting out the front. I'll probably need to play it both ways, and decide which works better in practice.

Agency, Explained

Here's a pretty good summary, courtesy Subnormality's Winston Rowntree (h/t Cracked):

But you owe it to yourself to read the whole thing.

Fantastic Frontiers: Cry Havoc, And Let Slip The Quantum Ogres!

A while ago, I read this interesting piece on the nature of freedom and player agency in a role-playing game. The basic question is whether it's reasonable to create a game that bends multiple choices to the same outcome, despite promoting the illusion that an alternate decision would have avoided that outcome. In this case, the outcome is a fight with an ogre, where the ogre just magically teleports to whetever location the players decide to go next. It prompted a number of helpful exchanges:

• Here's a proposal to solve the perceived problem from Courtney Cambell ("C") which emphasizes the role of information in making choices substantive. It's not wrong to have a quantum ogre as the outcome of a meaningless decision. But once players obtain information that should make that decision meaningful (which a good game should always offer!), then we have problem if the information isn't actionable.
• Here's some pushback, with a good set of comments by Courtney and Justin Alexander following it.
• And here's a nice overview from Alexander Macris of some fundamental questions related to maximizing player agency, and making a game feel (and actually be!) "fair".

All of these pieces are well worth reading, although the immediate problem being addressed is one that arises in rather different forms in other types of games. For an RPG, the problem is that the GM is engaging in a sort of trickery that confuses the players and might violate an implicit social contract to be a "fair judge" in the adjudication of choices. But for a computer game, the problem is often that the mechanics of the game are hidden behind an opaque GUI that needs to be probed by trial and error, and might be too complicated or feedback-deficient to ever allow for pattern recognition.

In a board game, there's no risk of deception or obfuscation. Everyone knows the rules, and has access to identical information. Instead, the problem is hiding enough of the information to make the choice feel unpredictable at all, without becoming totally random.

To make this more concrete, consider the following advice from a friendly wizard:

There is [a way around Mirkwood], if you care to go two hundred miles or so out of your way north, and twice that south. But you wouldn't get a safe path even then. There are no safe paths in this part of the world. Remember you are over the Edge of the Wild now, and in for all sorts of fun wherever you go. Before you could get round Mirkwood in the North you would be right among the slopes of the Grey Mountains, and they are simply stiff with goblins, hobgoblins, and orcs of the worst description. Before you could get round it in the South, you would get into the land of the Necromancer, and even you, Bilbo, won't need me to tell you tales of that black sorcerer. I don't advise you to go anywhere near the places overlooked by his dark tower! Stick to the forest-track, keep your spirits up, hope for the best, and with a tremendous slice of luck you may come out one day and see the Long Marshes lying below you and beyond them, high in the East, the Lonely Mountain where dear old Smaug lives, though I hope he is not expecting you. (The Hobbit, 7.145)

A perfect wall of impassible mountains. How convenient!

Here we have three choices: goblin-infested mountains, Necromancer-infested shadowlands, and You-Know-What-infested Mirkwood. Gandalf is presenting this as a sort of Hobson's choice - "do as I say or die" - but presumably he doesn't have the actual ability to compel the dwarves to do anything. He's just giving information that makes the best decision blindingly obvious. Thorin and company are apparently getting railroaded by world-design into some spider- and elf-related encounters! At times, one starts to suspect that the suspiciously long chains of encircling mountains and forests in Middle Earth that turn Erebor and Mordor into fortresses with a single door are Tolkien's way of keeping his hobbits from wandering off to escape his carefully-prepped arachnid miniboss events.

This is a real choice, though, if a bit artificially discrete. Discrete choices often run into the problem of making the answer too obvious, which feels like a loss of player agency. In a novel, this might be a good way to comment on the nature of fate, but in a game, it takes an interesting decision and makes it boring.

So I've decided to take the whole "quantum ogre" idea and make it as literal as possible! A quantum wavefunction is typically distributed in a neat Gaussian distribution, rather than occupying a single point like a classical photon, or being spread out uniformly in space like a traveling-wave field. This is reminiscent of the three distinct encounter types in RPG-style games: random, pre-existing, and roaming.

In a game like last night's Runebound, we have pre-existing encounters printed out on little cards. They're essentially discrete quantum ogres, in the sense that no matter where you go, you'll get "the next green encounter on the stack". This creates a zero-information Hobson's choice: take the next encounter, or don't. There's no way to scope out each of two possible encounters with scouts, or ask around at a local tavern, or anything like that. This is the sort of encounter model in an MMO, too, where you walk into a dungeon and it's full of fierce enemies standing stock-still -- in neat little battle-sized clumps, waiting for you to defeat them one by one, as their buddies just down the hall politely wait their turns indifferent to the nearby tumult. This creates a world that feels static and not very dangerous. Lots of strategic planning, but poor verisimilitude.

Swoosh! Outta nowhere!

At the other extreme, we have the Final Fantasy overland map. You wander around for a while, and suddenly there's a pixelated screen wipe and you're facing some Cactuars that weren't there a second ago. You can escape, maybe, but there was never any other choice at all. The world is a threatening, terrible place, and you're playing strategic defense 95% of the time. The random number generator is playing the fiddle, and you need to dance to it. This supports the theme of hostile wilderness, but gives you no strategic choices, not even illusory ones.

Probability Ogre distribution function.

A real quantum ogre needs to be the third kind of encounter, fuzzy around the edges, but with a discernible peak in the center. You can roughly spot the zone where the ogre might be, but you can only weigh some relative probabilities. The one certain fact is that the closer you get to his lair, the more likely you'll bump into him as he takes his daily constitutional (this one, or that one). Of course, you could just go around him, but maybe there's a quantum dragon over there, and the ogre is the lesser of evils. And here we have some interesting continuous decision-matrix material: Do we walk midway between them, to minimize the chance of any encounter at all, or do we walk closer to the ogre to avoid the dragon, at the cost of higher ogre-risk. And is it worth walking through the Dismal Swamp to avoid both? Now we have the same interesting narrative pressure that Gandalf gave Thorin, but with a range of possible player decisions to optimize that go beyond "stick to the path".

Mathematically, the information we have about each encounter should be equivalent to the width and height of the Gaussian distribution. We need to use narratively-meaningful encounter attributes to generate these values. (Well, technically, using discrete dice will give a binomial distribution, but we know they're equal in large-N asymptotic limit!)

In the Fantastic Frontiers rules, the logical variable to use for the distribution width is the encounter's movement speed, and the logical variable for the distribution height is the population size. Since the area rises quadratically on a 2D map, it makes sense to use linear-quad scaling (one of my favorite design elements!), and let the height rise as the square root of the population. Here's an example.

A previously-spotted encampment of 12 ogres has movement speed 4. The square root of 12 is 3.46, so let's round that off to 4, and call that the base probability for entering the ogres' territory. (The wings of the bell curve will be chopped off, for simplicity.) Every step closer to the last location where the ogres were seen is a step deeper into a hex-ring of radius 4, and boosts the target chance by +1. To implement this as a bell curve, roll a couple of d20 against this target. (Just one die would give a linear distribution, not a bell curve.) If both results are at/under the target (for a roll-low check), then the ogres are encountered!

This makes the world feel a little more dynamic. The ogres are wandering around, instead of just waiting for us to come back and clobber them. But we still have the basic mechanic of being able to strategically plan for ogres, using our hard-won ogre-related information. It's the best of both worlds.

MEK OP Game Night: Runebound

The first Saturday session of the semester had about 12 in attendance, with quite a few new faces. There were two big events: a Warhammer 40k scenario between Ork and Space Marine armies, and a 6-player Runebound. We also set up a couple of nights for RP sessions on Monday and Wednesday, which are going to be run independently of the main club meeting times.

2nd edition version: Even nastier!

The Warhammer game finished after about four rounds, in a fairly inconclusive draw. Everyone involved broke off to work on assembling the new Grey Knights set, which will probably be a multi-week project. Most of the glue work seems to be finished, but there's still an enormous amount of painting to be completed.

The Runebound game took about four hours, and ended with a fairly tight battle that resulted Dragon Highlord Margath on the first attempt. I think if we play again, we'll probably try incorporating a few 2nd edition rules, including the respawning of lower-level encounters. With that many players on the map, the endgame usually involves only a couple characters that are able to handle red-difficulty encounters.

My attempt to set up a WiF campaign seems to have mostly fizzled. I suppose there needs to be some kind of permanent culture already in place to support that style of game, and the current swing of the wargaming pendulum is pretty heavily in favor of both "miniatures" and "fantasy/SF themes". A historical hex-and-counter system is a hard sell.

I'll probably run a Space Empires: 4x game next week, which is the simplest strategic-scale hex-based game I have. It's similar enough to established computer games like Civilization and  (especially) GalCiv that it should feel familiar even on a first play-through. We obviously have a lot of new players to integrate into the routine. I might run it with no ground combat, just to make everything run a bit faster the first time through.

Personal notes

Currently the state of the Fantastic Frontiers rules draft document is too messy for me to feel comfortable shopping it around, but I might try to play through a couple selected playtests with people I can trust to be patient despite Enormous Glaring Problems. Removing EGPs is an immediate concern, so I can avoid coming off like a crank who wants everyone to play my half-baked vanity project at the expense of time that could be better spent moving around Ork motorcycles dripping with guns, chainsaws, and spiky bits.

Immediate priority: Finishing off some fantasy encounter tables with lots of classic monsters from my old D&D sourcebooks (MM1 &2, and the Cyclopedia).

Realization in which I take perverse pride: The two items in a classic monster stat bloc that virtually everyone ignored back in 1st edition ("% lair" and "Morale") end up being of critical importance in a skirmish-scale game with a persistent world map!