"For exile hath more terror in his look, Much more than death." ~Romeo and Juliet, Act 3, Scene 3
I think my next campaign pitch, when I'm ready, will be about playing exiles. Inspired by colonial era, and in particular, at least the mythos of Australia as a land where Britain dumped its malcontents and criminals to get them out of the country causing problems. The land was brutal and nasty and actively vicious to the settlers, with flora, fauna, and natives all hostile to the incoming settlers.
Yes, this is hyperbolic exaggeration, but it is at least a nugget of the inspiration.
Wednesday, May 15, 2013
Friday, May 3, 2013
Domain Management: Buildings and Other Structures
To have a proper domain you need land. Once you have land, you need to build structures on that land.
Now in my idea regarding scope the rules wouldn't cover every structure, just the ones with narrative weight. Therefore, it would be assumed that there are small farms, timber yards, mills, and other small structures dotting the landscape.
Why? Cause frankly, I do NOT want to have to deal with that level of book keeping. I'm following a couple of Adventure, Conqueror, King System (ACKS) games, and one in particular (Chronicles of the Grim Fist) looks amazing, but the system is a bit too book keeping intensive for its domain management. So we aren't going to manage that degree.
So the buildings and structure we have are structures that will have narrative weight, they are important structures in the domain.
I've discussed before that I want three types of buildings - Production (Raw Goods, Trade Goods) and free standing buildings, as well as specific city/village buildings, however, I realized that I wanted another set of miscellaneous structures - for roads for the most part, but I'm sure I'll come up with (or have it strongly recommended to me) other items that should fall in there.
Production is split into two categories - raw goods and trade goods.
Production Buildings - Raw Goods
Raw goods production doesn't require an infrastructure. Originally, I had envision five types of goods - wealth; wood; stone; ore; and food, now I'm thinking I need to move "wealth" to its own category, and add another one for animal products (fur?), though I suppose I could always just turn food into cloth, like I initially thought about doing, i.e., the return of fish head pants.
I thought about what I wanted production buildings to do - whether they should produce a flat increase, or some sort of multiplier. And for right now I'm envisioning the grander answer of "both". Two levels of production building a regular one, which just adds a flat bonus to production, and a greater building which would not only add a flat bonus, but then multiple the total amount. So production buildings we have would be:
Wood - Timber Yard
Stone - Quarry
Ore - Mine
Food - Farm
Production Buildings - Trade Goods
Trade goods, to be built, would require infrastructure to be built to support them, I'll probably allow them to be built without a village or city to support them; however, there'll just be an additional cost included. I'm not sure what I'd want people to be able to produce right now. Cloth and iron come to mind as the two big ones right now.
Iron Works (Turns Ore into Metal)
Smithy (Turns Metal into stuff)
Weaver (Turns Food into Cloth)
Seamstress (Turns Cloth into stuff)
What's stuff? I don't know yet.
Other buildings I'd want to have producing stuff:
Marketplace (Enhances trade)
Academy (Turns People into professions)
Theater (Create Art)
Library (Store Knowledge)
Inns & Taverns (Create Trade, Secrets)
Warehouse (Store stuff)
Free Standing Buildings
Village - small gathering of families and people.
City - As a village grows it eventually becomes a city.
Outpost - Small garrison of troops
Fort - military base, some trade
Manor House - Administrative center
Castle - big fort, a really, really big fort.
Other Structures
Dams - Enhances quality of an area
Roads - trade multiplier
Walls - Costs money, but adds to a defense, greater walls, multiplies defense.
Once again, these are just rough draft notes, I'll happily take advice and add stuff in when I come back to actually crunch some numbers.
Now in my idea regarding scope the rules wouldn't cover every structure, just the ones with narrative weight. Therefore, it would be assumed that there are small farms, timber yards, mills, and other small structures dotting the landscape.
Why? Cause frankly, I do NOT want to have to deal with that level of book keeping. I'm following a couple of Adventure, Conqueror, King System (ACKS) games, and one in particular (Chronicles of the Grim Fist) looks amazing, but the system is a bit too book keeping intensive for its domain management. So we aren't going to manage that degree.
So the buildings and structure we have are structures that will have narrative weight, they are important structures in the domain.
I've discussed before that I want three types of buildings - Production (Raw Goods, Trade Goods) and free standing buildings, as well as specific city/village buildings, however, I realized that I wanted another set of miscellaneous structures - for roads for the most part, but I'm sure I'll come up with (or have it strongly recommended to me) other items that should fall in there.
Production is split into two categories - raw goods and trade goods.
Production Buildings - Raw Goods
Raw goods production doesn't require an infrastructure. Originally, I had envision five types of goods - wealth; wood; stone; ore; and food, now I'm thinking I need to move "wealth" to its own category, and add another one for animal products (fur?), though I suppose I could always just turn food into cloth, like I initially thought about doing, i.e., the return of fish head pants.
I thought about what I wanted production buildings to do - whether they should produce a flat increase, or some sort of multiplier. And for right now I'm envisioning the grander answer of "both". Two levels of production building a regular one, which just adds a flat bonus to production, and a greater building which would not only add a flat bonus, but then multiple the total amount. So production buildings we have would be:
Wood - Timber Yard
Stone - Quarry
Ore - Mine
Food - Farm
Production Buildings - Trade Goods
Trade goods, to be built, would require infrastructure to be built to support them, I'll probably allow them to be built without a village or city to support them; however, there'll just be an additional cost included. I'm not sure what I'd want people to be able to produce right now. Cloth and iron come to mind as the two big ones right now.
Iron Works (Turns Ore into Metal)
Smithy (Turns Metal into stuff)
Weaver (Turns Food into Cloth)
Seamstress (Turns Cloth into stuff)
What's stuff? I don't know yet.
Other buildings I'd want to have producing stuff:
Marketplace (Enhances trade)
Academy (Turns People into professions)
Theater (Create Art)
Library (Store Knowledge)
Inns & Taverns (Create Trade, Secrets)
Warehouse (Store stuff)
Free Standing Buildings
Village - small gathering of families and people.
City - As a village grows it eventually becomes a city.
Outpost - Small garrison of troops
Fort - military base, some trade
Manor House - Administrative center
Castle - big fort, a really, really big fort.
Other Structures
Dams - Enhances quality of an area
Roads - trade multiplier
Walls - Costs money, but adds to a defense, greater walls, multiplies defense.
Once again, these are just rough draft notes, I'll happily take advice and add stuff in when I come back to actually crunch some numbers.
Thursday, April 11, 2013
So What's Next?
So I think I figured out what I'm going to try and run next, and I think it'll be Marvel Heroic Roleplaying, at least for a short term deal, though my definition of short term is probably off.
Why? Cause I want to run some non-apologetic heroics, after running "shades of grey" games for the last decade (Exalted, Changeling, Dresden), I want some "Big Damn Heroes" at my screen.
Plus, I've never run straight out super heroes before, capes, costumes, the whole bit.
It won't be this month and it probably won't be next month.
But time for something different.
Why? Cause I want to run some non-apologetic heroics, after running "shades of grey" games for the last decade (Exalted, Changeling, Dresden), I want some "Big Damn Heroes" at my screen.
Plus, I've never run straight out super heroes before, capes, costumes, the whole bit.
It won't be this month and it probably won't be next month.
But time for something different.
Monday, April 8, 2013
Domain Management: Land
My biggest problem with dealing with land is coming up with a notion of scale. How much land should we account for in the system. Some part of me wants to just hand wave, but I know that'll eventually come back to bite me at some later date.
I think as a rule of thumb, I'll use "a day's travel across" as the maximum for a single spot of terrain. We'll assume that an easy day's travel involves a horse, or roughly 20 miles, or given a perfect square 400 sq. miles, or 400,000 acres. Immense, yes, but reasonable. Sure, some places might be a bit bigger, some a bit smaller, but that seems reasonable enough to use as a rule of thumb. This puts it on the small side of an U.K. county, which I'm okay with as that allows us some room to play with additional terrains to make a bigger county.
So using that, let's pull some land types, stealing mostly from a Birthright adaptation for 3.5:
Right now I'm trying to avoid numbers till I figure out what I need to figure into my needs and wants.
I think as a rule of thumb, I'll use "a day's travel across" as the maximum for a single spot of terrain. We'll assume that an easy day's travel involves a horse, or roughly 20 miles, or given a perfect square 400 sq. miles, or 400,000 acres. Immense, yes, but reasonable. Sure, some places might be a bit bigger, some a bit smaller, but that seems reasonable enough to use as a rule of thumb. This puts it on the small side of an U.K. county, which I'm okay with as that allows us some room to play with additional terrains to make a bigger county.
So using that, let's pull some land types, stealing mostly from a Birthright adaptation for 3.5:
- Wasteland - Desolate, can't support any real existence. You might be able to find a few people who eke out an existence here, but you wouldn't want to be one of them.
- Desert/Tundra - Little rain, little to subsist on, no real ability to build cities, or even villages, without the addition of some feature that allows for it (River/Oasis/Lake/Coast).
- Mountains - The land of windswept peaks and cliffsides. Ore and stone are most prevalent here.
- Forests - Deep heavily wooded forests stretching for miles, and places the light never touches the ground.
- Hills - Little mountains, rolling hills, stone and ore can be found here, as well as the ability to raise some crops.
- Plains - Flat open land without anything to break the wind, perfect for raising crops, raising animals, building cities, and thus very much desired and fought over.
Right now I'm trying to avoid numbers till I figure out what I need to figure into my needs and wants.
Thursday, April 4, 2013
Domain Management: Overview and Sketching Some Thoughts Out
So as I sit in-between games, my mind turns to domain management. Why? Because in about half my games, I seem to have players that would love to spend their time engaging in bureaucratic exercises of running an organization/city-state/nation, and most systems just wing it.
And I hate winging it. System bits that are winged never seems to have the emphasis/importance that they should have when improvised. Improvision is for things not critical/crucial to the plot or the players happiness.
So there are two basic types of management: Domain Management and Organizational Management; while broadly these items could be done in the same system, I think it is wiser to spread them out to emphasize different things.
There are three reasons I see to have domain management, the first is that your players enjoy it; the second is to generate resources, the last is to generate plots and challenges for the players to engage with. I want to keep these in mind when I'm looking at what I'm trying to accomplish.
Broadly speaking Domain Management is about obtaining and usage of land. In my mind, this involves four key components:
Land can be broken down into two subcategories - major terrain and features. Terrain is fairly obvious, mountainous, hilly, forest, plains, farmland, wasteland, desert, etc. Features would make parts of the land particularly appealing, challenging, or rewarding (or some combination of all three). Features would be things like coast line, major rivers (think like the Nile or Mississippi), major lakes (Great Lakes), ancient ruins, volcanoes or other terrain that doesn't really fit as a major terrain piece.
Now the idea behind this is to assume that there are small villages/hamlets scattered across the terrain, just to ease up on the book keeping. Buildings are something more than that, they are things that generate plots or additional resources. I envision one type of structures being freestanding, not requiring anything other than the base resources to build; and another requiring a more civilized infrastructure.
Anyone who has played any sort of building game, especially board games understand the production aspect of free standing buildings - Sawmill, Quarries, Mines, Plantations and the like. They should add (through either doubling, or just a flat addition) to the efficiency of the the land itself.
The second type of free standing structures would be Villages and Cities, with Cities being an upgrade of the Villages. These would be built to generate income as well, the centers of trade that they are, as allow for the building of more advanced buildings.
The last type of free standing structures would be a series of military - outpost, small fort/manor house, fort, and castle. Storage capacity, military forces, and protection.
So what gets built inside villages and cities? Industry that produces finish goods - textiles, iron works; universities and other places of learning, theater and libraries. Most of the goals of these would be to generate income for the city/players to do things with in the game. Of course, it does mean that money.
People
People are simply that - the faces of the people working in the structures. More importantly, as the game progresses they should help provide plots that entertain the group, as well as providing potential bonuses and penalties.
Resources
Resources are things you either build with, sell, or purchase. I'd want to keep it relatively simple and limit the resources to the following five items: Wealth; Wood; Stone; Ore; and Food. More than five and it gets too complicated; too few and you have quirkier things, and I already can see the game of turning food (nominally sheep/goats) into cloth, and the jokes about my fish head pants.
Villages and Cities would nominally require Food to maintain, with each additional infrastructure item requiring more food. All structures would require some amount of Wealth/Wood/Stone/Ore to be built.
So there's the backbones of what I want to accomplish with domain management, give my players some systematic tools to manage resources, generate revenue and items for themselves, and generate plots for the campaign.
And I hate winging it. System bits that are winged never seems to have the emphasis/importance that they should have when improvised. Improvision is for things not critical/crucial to the plot or the players happiness.
So there are two basic types of management: Domain Management and Organizational Management; while broadly these items could be done in the same system, I think it is wiser to spread them out to emphasize different things.
There are three reasons I see to have domain management, the first is that your players enjoy it; the second is to generate resources, the last is to generate plots and challenges for the players to engage with. I want to keep these in mind when I'm looking at what I'm trying to accomplish.
Broadly speaking Domain Management is about obtaining and usage of land. In my mind, this involves four key components:
- The land itself - where is it, what features are on it, what can it produce are all key questions that need to be answered.
- The structures built - what buildings are there on that land.
- The key people - the who's who running the domain, other than the PCs.
- Resources - something to manage and spend
Those four items make up the key components of domain management. I want the feeling to allow for the building up from a small manor house to a large county seat of governance. After that point, I think things get a bit too large for what I'd want to have my games to be about. So let us look at each of the areas in some form of depth:
Land
Land can be broken down into two subcategories - major terrain and features. Terrain is fairly obvious, mountainous, hilly, forest, plains, farmland, wasteland, desert, etc. Features would make parts of the land particularly appealing, challenging, or rewarding (or some combination of all three). Features would be things like coast line, major rivers (think like the Nile or Mississippi), major lakes (Great Lakes), ancient ruins, volcanoes or other terrain that doesn't really fit as a major terrain piece.
My biggest conundrum with land is whether a county has one terrain type or a collection of terrain types. Or perhaps that's how one delineates the size of the domain - the number of terrain types, and just allow for repeated terrain types to be used. Thus the mountainous duchy could have Mountains, Mountains, Mountains, and one of farmland to indicate the grotto that exists.
Features are easily for me to conceptualize - they are one off bits that make that terrain different then the other terrain around it.
Structures
Now the idea behind this is to assume that there are small villages/hamlets scattered across the terrain, just to ease up on the book keeping. Buildings are something more than that, they are things that generate plots or additional resources. I envision one type of structures being freestanding, not requiring anything other than the base resources to build; and another requiring a more civilized infrastructure.
Anyone who has played any sort of building game, especially board games understand the production aspect of free standing buildings - Sawmill, Quarries, Mines, Plantations and the like. They should add (through either doubling, or just a flat addition) to the efficiency of the the land itself.
The second type of free standing structures would be Villages and Cities, with Cities being an upgrade of the Villages. These would be built to generate income as well, the centers of trade that they are, as allow for the building of more advanced buildings.
The last type of free standing structures would be a series of military - outpost, small fort/manor house, fort, and castle. Storage capacity, military forces, and protection.
So what gets built inside villages and cities? Industry that produces finish goods - textiles, iron works; universities and other places of learning, theater and libraries. Most of the goals of these would be to generate income for the city/players to do things with in the game. Of course, it does mean that money.
People
People are simply that - the faces of the people working in the structures. More importantly, as the game progresses they should help provide plots that entertain the group, as well as providing potential bonuses and penalties.
Resources
Resources are things you either build with, sell, or purchase. I'd want to keep it relatively simple and limit the resources to the following five items: Wealth; Wood; Stone; Ore; and Food. More than five and it gets too complicated; too few and you have quirkier things, and I already can see the game of turning food (nominally sheep/goats) into cloth, and the jokes about my fish head pants.
Villages and Cities would nominally require Food to maintain, with each additional infrastructure item requiring more food. All structures would require some amount of Wealth/Wood/Stone/Ore to be built.
So there's the backbones of what I want to accomplish with domain management, give my players some systematic tools to manage resources, generate revenue and items for themselves, and generate plots for the campaign.
Tuesday, April 2, 2013
Complilation of Short Thoughts
This is me trying to purge my file of "Oh, THIS is interesting, but I don't know that I have enough to write about on it." A lot of these thoughts are around getting closer to what I want out of a game, and cutting out a lot of the fluff.
Party Creation Session Template - I like having groups of adventurers linked by shared experiences at my table - it makes it easier to integrate the group. While the first attempt at Dresden Files didn't go perfectly smoothly, it did make for a convenient backdrop to how the PCs met and interacted. As I get older and my time becomes more valuable, I'd like to get to a lot of the meat of group interaction versus having to waste a session or two on "why am I here with these insane people again?"
Table Balance of Drama and Levity and Playing Cards to Play Cards, or to Socialize; the latter is actually more interesting for me, because of a constant conflict I have with my wife. We both love to play games, table-top, board games, or your standard card games like hearts or spades. However, we frustrate each other because our intent is different - when I play hearts, for example, I want to play hearts; I'm not there to socialize while occasionally dropping cards on the table. Socializing/talking is fine, but it is secondary to the enjoyment of the game, for her, she generally would rather socialize than play cards, so we have an inherent conflict. And that gets at the heart of these two posts - finding the right balance of gaming as a social activity because we are all friends, and getting into the meat of the subject.
Frankly, for my next game, I'm seriously contemplating trying just a beer and pretzels social event because I'm frustrated with the distractions of life.
Which probably just means I'll get one of my more serious games.
The Currency of Time - I've often said that time is the most valuable resource, because it is the only one that you cannot make more of. I'd love the idea of making informational checks (knowledge/perception) cost something so that they are valuable. But the question is how to do that - one of those is to assume some form of "fail forward" where your failures are successes, but with complications.
Quest Generation - A very rough draft of a question generation for a hip hop RPG system that I'm following for stealing for my own purposes. This gets back to the core of "not wasting time" of "okay let's jointly, PCs and GM, set out a framework of how we want the story to go" and then let the GM, i.e., me, throw in a few twists and challenges. How does this stop wasting time, because the players won't bobble around trying to figure out what the next, we all know and can move forward without wasting time at the table wandering aimlessly with either the players trying to figure out what the GM wants them to, or the GM trying to figure out how the hell he's supposed to work this line of reasoning into storyline.
Stealing Beliefs and Instincts for D&D, while I'm not a huge fan of the Burning Wheel system as a whole, I do love stealing bits and pieces from it. In particular, with the idea of creating three driving beliefs for the character, one for what drove them to hit the road of adventure; the second for what ties them to the overarching campaign thread; and finally, a belief about the larger goal that they want. I could see tying them to some sort of XP system ala the Keys from Shadows of Yesterday, or milestones from Marvel Heroic Roleplaying. Once again, the goal is to make it easy on everyone to get invested with what is going on at the table.
Party Creation Session Template - I like having groups of adventurers linked by shared experiences at my table - it makes it easier to integrate the group. While the first attempt at Dresden Files didn't go perfectly smoothly, it did make for a convenient backdrop to how the PCs met and interacted. As I get older and my time becomes more valuable, I'd like to get to a lot of the meat of group interaction versus having to waste a session or two on "why am I here with these insane people again?"
Table Balance of Drama and Levity and Playing Cards to Play Cards, or to Socialize; the latter is actually more interesting for me, because of a constant conflict I have with my wife. We both love to play games, table-top, board games, or your standard card games like hearts or spades. However, we frustrate each other because our intent is different - when I play hearts, for example, I want to play hearts; I'm not there to socialize while occasionally dropping cards on the table. Socializing/talking is fine, but it is secondary to the enjoyment of the game, for her, she generally would rather socialize than play cards, so we have an inherent conflict. And that gets at the heart of these two posts - finding the right balance of gaming as a social activity because we are all friends, and getting into the meat of the subject.
Frankly, for my next game, I'm seriously contemplating trying just a beer and pretzels social event because I'm frustrated with the distractions of life.
Which probably just means I'll get one of my more serious games.
The Currency of Time - I've often said that time is the most valuable resource, because it is the only one that you cannot make more of. I'd love the idea of making informational checks (knowledge/perception) cost something so that they are valuable. But the question is how to do that - one of those is to assume some form of "fail forward" where your failures are successes, but with complications.
Quest Generation - A very rough draft of a question generation for a hip hop RPG system that I'm following for stealing for my own purposes. This gets back to the core of "not wasting time" of "okay let's jointly, PCs and GM, set out a framework of how we want the story to go" and then let the GM, i.e., me, throw in a few twists and challenges. How does this stop wasting time, because the players won't bobble around trying to figure out what the next, we all know and can move forward without wasting time at the table wandering aimlessly with either the players trying to figure out what the GM wants them to, or the GM trying to figure out how the hell he's supposed to work this line of reasoning into storyline.
Stealing Beliefs and Instincts for D&D, while I'm not a huge fan of the Burning Wheel system as a whole, I do love stealing bits and pieces from it. In particular, with the idea of creating three driving beliefs for the character, one for what drove them to hit the road of adventure; the second for what ties them to the overarching campaign thread; and finally, a belief about the larger goal that they want. I could see tying them to some sort of XP system ala the Keys from Shadows of Yesterday, or milestones from Marvel Heroic Roleplaying. Once again, the goal is to make it easy on everyone to get invested with what is going on at the table.
Monday, March 18, 2013
Why I Don't [Want To] Play BSG Much Anymore
So there was a game of Battlestar Galactica at Madicon a couple weekends ago, and I realized, after a few moments, that I had no regrets that I missed it as I swooped by the game and chatted with the folks there.
Part of the reason was that it was Madicon, and I'm all about the shortish games (generally) and socializing and talking with my old friends and meeting a few new people.
But really, as I thought about it, it was the fact that while I love the concepts of the game and how it plays out for the early and mid-game, the end-game is just frustrating and drawn out, especially if the cylons are winning.
Admittedly, the Exodus expansion fixes some of this, and is why I won't generally play a BSG game without it; however, it is a band-aid to the core the problem that the cylon's best play is to drag out the game as long as possible, turning it into a grueling 3 hour+ game. And occasionally that's fun, but regularly? Not anymore, I don't have the time for not knowing how long the game is going to go.
What does the the fact that hidden cylon's win by "drawing the game out", it means that there is almost always an optimal solution, and that anyone who doesn't choose it is at risk of being a cylon, and especially if they are president (or admiral), should be removed from that role because it is a larger than average risk. For example, if your admiral does a short jump or two, then remove them, it could be that they got bad draws, but really, it is more likely that they want the group to take more jumps to suffer more crises and suffer that slow trickle. If they turn out to be human? Ah well, sorry the percentages weren't in your favor.
Except. And there's always an exception, and the one exception is that when you are playing with players relatively new to the game. They add a random variability of chance and unknown factors, because you can't assume that everyone at the table, human and cylon, are playing the optimal strategies for victory.
And playing in that grey zone of wondering whether someone's an ally or enemy, and/or just really bad at determining what the best play is? That's what makes the game fun for me, and I just can't get that when everyone knows what the best play is for their role.
Part of the reason was that it was Madicon, and I'm all about the shortish games (generally) and socializing and talking with my old friends and meeting a few new people.
But really, as I thought about it, it was the fact that while I love the concepts of the game and how it plays out for the early and mid-game, the end-game is just frustrating and drawn out, especially if the cylons are winning.
Admittedly, the Exodus expansion fixes some of this, and is why I won't generally play a BSG game without it; however, it is a band-aid to the core the problem that the cylon's best play is to drag out the game as long as possible, turning it into a grueling 3 hour+ game. And occasionally that's fun, but regularly? Not anymore, I don't have the time for not knowing how long the game is going to go.
What does the the fact that hidden cylon's win by "drawing the game out", it means that there is almost always an optimal solution, and that anyone who doesn't choose it is at risk of being a cylon, and especially if they are president (or admiral), should be removed from that role because it is a larger than average risk. For example, if your admiral does a short jump or two, then remove them, it could be that they got bad draws, but really, it is more likely that they want the group to take more jumps to suffer more crises and suffer that slow trickle. If they turn out to be human? Ah well, sorry the percentages weren't in your favor.
Except. And there's always an exception, and the one exception is that when you are playing with players relatively new to the game. They add a random variability of chance and unknown factors, because you can't assume that everyone at the table, human and cylon, are playing the optimal strategies for victory.
And playing in that grey zone of wondering whether someone's an ally or enemy, and/or just really bad at determining what the best play is? That's what makes the game fun for me, and I just can't get that when everyone knows what the best play is for their role.
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