I have a mysterious commenter *waggles brows* who's always anonymous, and mourns the loss of 7th Sea from the gaming table. I've been responding to his comments in various posts, but I've never received a reply in turn. Thus, I almost responded to his comment with a comment of his own, but the more I thought about 7th Sea, the more I realized it needed a post of its own, as this sort of encompasses many arguments I've had with people about their pet broken game.
First, let me start by expressing my boundless love for this game. 7th Sea tackles all the awesome sub-genres of swashbuckling and stitches them into one, awesome whole. You have the fairytales and knightly adventures of Avalon, the backstabbing political intrigue of Vodacce, the grim hyper-reality of Eisen, and the Zorro and Musketeer inspired antics of Castille and Montaigne. It allowed us to explore Enlightened Europe with everything turned up to 11, never forced to stop and let historical facts drag us down. Montaigne was more french than France could ever hope to be, for example, and got to be the big bad guy, which is way more fun than beating up Spaniards. In fact, alot of people criticize Theah for being historically inaccurate; I think they miss the point, as Theah isn't even close to historically accurate. It's theatrically accurate.
Plus it had loads of neat ideas, like Swordsman schools, magic that was about more than just combat, the awesomeness of drama dice (many people complained that they shouldn't be worth experience, but in my games, nobody hesitated to spend them. Awesome now or awesome later, works out the same). My bookshelf space has become very precious, as I have far more books than shelf-space, but 7th Sea still holds a proud space on it, as it was the first game that I really sat down and played (as opposed to run) and loved to death. Sigmund still has a special place in my heart, just as I know that Tru has a special place in Jenny's heart, and Walter still loves his Montaigne accent.
But it has problems. The typical response to pointing this out is "Well then, fix it." The same has been said of many games, from Scion to Rifts to the old World of Darkness. My typical response is "I shouldn't have to," but let's face it, no game is perfect. I've broken my rules and fixed WotG and nWoD as well, so why not 7th Sea? Well, I tried. I sat down, dug out my computer programs, my calculators, proceeding to rip the system apart and look for the basics, so I could revise accordingly.
What did I find? Beneath all that fluff there's a hamster running in a creaky wheel and strange bits of voodoo, none of which do what they're supposed to. The more you examine it, the more it becomes clear that they had a bunch of "neat ideas," and tossed them together without bothering to worry about the implications.
Let's start with the basics: the Task Resolution system. 7th Sea uses the "roll and keep" system, where you roll a bunch of dice (Attribute + Knack), but only "keep" some of those dice (the Attribute), which you add up. Thus, if you have 5k3 and you roll 3,6,8,9,9, you'd keep the 8, 9 and 9, and you'd have... What? I'll let you work it out while I point out the first flaw: it's got lots of adding. Humans suck at adding. We can't glance at numbers and make them fit. This is why most systems look for successes. GURPS is bad enough with its 3-die addition, but 7th Sea regularly gets into 4-5 die addition, plus exploding dice. This is a minor quibble, but let me ask you this: 8k2 vs a difficulty of 15, how likely are you to succeed? It's not obvious. So inobvious that dice-probability buffs online have to really struggle to come up with a formula to figure it out. I just ran lots of simulations. The result? Not good. But a player can't possibly be expected to notice this. This is a problem, when you approach a problem without knowing whether you will succeed or fail, and I think it also hid alot of 7th Sea's flaws, allowing those who loved it to keep pretending it was working, because they couldn't see where it wasn't.
But a wonky dice system is far from a death sentence. Let's move to the next, more obvious problem: The Knack System.
Players in 7th Sea purchase big skills, which represent overall categories, and then purchase "subskills" called "Knacks." Thus, you might be a courtier who is particularly good at Fashion and Etiquette, while another is more a Seductive Orator, or whatever. These knacks add to your roll as unkept dice, and they cost target-number x 2 to buy with experience. Attributes add kept dice, and cost target-number x 5. That seems fair, right?
Wrong! If two players both spend X xp on different traits, they should both, at the end of the day, be equally useful. I mean, 100 xp is 100 xp, right? You shouldn't have to hunt for the "good" purchases and ignore the "bad" purchases, right? This is the route to twinkery, where happy players buy what they like and smart players buy what's useful. In a good system, both end up cool, in a bad system, one is vastly better than the other. All systems have some amount of imbalance, generally in the form of strategy, but it's a rare and special system that traps you with an entire aspect of it's gameplay being a bad buy, and Knacks are those.
If X xp must be the same in various traits, then we must look at XP to Usefulness Ratio. In 7th Sea, that's easily measured by how much a given trait will improve a dice roll. Improving an Attribute somewhere between +5 to +7 to your roll (It depends on how many unkept dice you have). The value of this drops as you increase your attribute: A single +1 to your roll costs about 2 points when you go from an Attribute of 1 to 2 (as it costs you 10 points to get that +5), while raising from 4 to 5 costs you 5 points per +1. So you get diminishing returns, which is fine. Also, incidentally, Finesse is your single most useful combat trait, with Panache, Brawl and Resolve holding together (after many many many combat simulations with various combinations) and Wits at the back of the pack. Outside of combat, it's anyone's guess, but my experience showed that Resolve, Finesse and Wits tend to be called alot, with Brawl called less, and Panache called rarely, making Finesse far too useful in the game, and panache a little on the weak side, but the rest, surprisingly, well-balanced.
Knacks, however, do not follow the above progression. The first dot adds between +2 and +3 to your roll, as it allows your dice to explode, which is a Big Deal. After that, they quickly start to drop off, on average, to +1 to +0.5, as the higher they get, the less they add... and the more they cost. So buying your fifth knack dot costs you 10 xp, and gives you something like +0.5, which means you're paying something like 20 points for a +1 to your roll, which is absurd compared to the attributes. Knacks give you less for more.
And there's more of them! There's a grand total of five Attributes. Maxing them all at 5, when you started with all at 2, would cost you a total of 300 experience. The price of raising all your knacks... incalculable. There are 135 (counting duplicates) Civilian Knacks in the core book alone. They add even more in later books, and there's also the Swordsman and Martial and Magical Knacks to consider. Even if we cut that number down to 100, you're looking at a price of nearly three-thousand XP to get all those civvie knacks to 5, and guess what? Such a character, despite having spent far more Xp than the guy with the Attributes all at 5, would be pwned by him in every way.
It's like they wanted it to be GURPS. The skill list is peppered with useless, pointless skills. Knotwork? Seriously? I mean, yes, it's important for sailors to know how to tie a knot, but doesn't that fall a little below the resolution of the system? Or how about the fact that they have a knack for Gambling, Cheating AND Gaming. What, pray tell, is the difference between Gaming and Gambling? And what happens if I take one and not the other? What if I don't take Knotwork. Does that mean I can't tie a knot? If I must have each and every knack to be effective, I'm better off buying more attributes. If I don't, then why clutter the book with so much crap (and I'm still better off buying more Attributes). This is particularly depressing when you consider Athletics (Wait, to swing, jump, roll, and do crazy stunts, I need to spend XP on each different trick?). You can see Wick's idea here, that putting these on your sheet made you more likely to use them... but forcing you to pay for them made you LESS likely to use them!
And then there's the martial knacks, which brings us to Combat.
World of Darkness has very boring combat. You stand there and roll and see how much damage you do to your opponent, and then he does the same back to you, and this goes on and on until someone dies. It's very easy to calculate, but also very predictable. WotG, on the other hand, has such a wild combat system with so many variables that it's almost impossible to model without inserting some tactical assumptions, making it highly unpredictable and constantly surprising. Guess which 7th Sea is like?
Assume two characters with 3s in all traits and 3s in their combat knacks. You have two basic combat options: attack, or defend. Defending generally costs 2 dice (though you can "wait" and only spend 1), while attacking costs 1. If you attack and you hit, you threaten your foe with X amount of damage. He may spend 2 action dice to attempt to parry your attack, but he has to beat your roll, which means he'll only do so 50 percent of the time. Thus, you have a choice: you can spend 1 action die to inflict X damage, or you can spend 2 action dice to have a 50% chance of preventing X damage. Obviously X > 0.5(0.5X), so it's better to just attack... and attack... and attack. Which is depressing.
Thus, your combat knacks have to compare to basic Attack. A Swordsman Knack, for example, should be better, pound for pound, than attack, or you'd never bother to use fancy tricks, right? Well, some are. Pommel Strike, for example, if you get a hit you inflict some damage, and then, if you have a die saved up, you can immediately use it to slash at your foe who is suddenly VERY easy to hit. Suddenly, you have an interesting tactical option and flowing combat. Someone who uses nothing but Pommel Strike is better than someone who uses nothing but Attack. Excellent. Likewise, Riposte is quite nice, as it doesn't sacrifice your attack to make a defense, and thus someone who uses Riposte all the time is actually a little better off than someone who uses Attack all the time. Interestingly, someone with Riposte makes for an interesting fight against someone with pommel strike: Let them pommel strike you, waste their next die to get that big attack in, then you riposte against them (since their attack value is likely lower), thus parrying their more dangerous attack, and getting in a dangerous attack of your own, all for one action die, while he wasted two on his combo. Sweet! And actually fairly balanced, and a fight worth watching!
But how about Feint? I increase your defense by 5 times your Wits and if I beat it, you can't defend. But guess what, if your defense is already 30, and your wits are, say, 3, that's a 45. If I can get a 45+, you're not going to defend anyway. Setting aside the fact that active defense is basically useless, as we've already pointed out, getting a 45 takes alot of work, making it even less worthwhile. Someone who just straight up attacks could also make three raises (raising your defense to 45) and get +3 unkept damage dice, and still be just as uselessly hard to defense against. So why feint? Or Tagging, which seems soooo cool. You have to struggle and fight to get past your opponent's defenses, and when you do you get... one drama dice. I famously argued that collecting all those drama dice would make you more dangerous in the long run, but the math shows that isn't so. You will finish the fight more quickly if you just stab the guy. And then there's Double Parry, which has all the uselessness of a normal parry, except it doesn't give you a passive defense, requires two hands, and it gives you a drama die that will vanish in less than a turn. Wooh.
Guess who has all three of those knacks? Valroux! Guess who has two of the useful knacks? Ambrogia! Yeah, that's balanced. Some people argue that it isn't worth the points to even take a swordsman school, as in addition to giving you useless knacks, it makes you vulnerable to people who know how to fight your style (+5 unkept dice on top of your already huge pool is nothing to sneeze at). I think they can be, when they are schools like Ambrogia, but should there even be a question? If you want to be a skilled fighter, being a swordsman should make you one of the best! Instead, it's highly likely that you'll waste your points if you pick the wrong school! Not to mention the fact that it gives you more knacks to waste points in.
I mentioned Raises, but let's discuss them a little further. Despite my previous statement of the system being obtuse, the fact that an attribute is worth about +5 isn't lost on most players (it's the knack's value that's the source of confusion), and thus most players get a solid idea of what they can and cannot do. If you keep 3 dice, it's rare that you'll get below 15. If you keep 5 dice, it's rare than you'll get below 25. A raise increases the difficulty, with the theory that you'll come closer to defeat by choosing to do awesome stuff. In practice, however, it's basically free. If you keep 5 dice, and you face something with a difficulty of 10, you can make a raise without worrying about the consequences. When it comes to opposed rolls, making raises has no drawbacks at all, because it just makes it harder and harder for your opponent to defend against your attack. It's a "false dilemma" because it's not really a dilemma at all.
The worst part of all this, with the swordsman schools, the skills, the knacks, the magic schools, is that the typical response is to eliminate knacks, but you can't. The entire system revolves around them. If you ditch swordsman knacks, it becomes pointless to take a swordsman school, and you have no way to rate what your swordsman skill is. Likewise, it becomes "too cheap" to be a non-swordsman as opposed to a swordsman. You end up rewriting the entire system. So the better option is to make all those pointless shit knacks more useful, but that's an exercise in futility. I have the carpal tunnel syndrome to prove that!
Then there's an array of minor issues. Reputation is lost for being a villain (murdering children) or being rude (getting drunk and being loud). Reputation is gained for being heroic (saving children) or by being polite (knowing to lift your pinkies at dinner). Because it's all on one continuum, if you want to be a loud drunk who saves children, you end up with a reptuation of zero, and thus miss out on all those cool reputation dice. Further, you lose your character when you drop below -30 reputation. This makes sense for murdering children, but it makes sense for being a loud drunk! Moreover this is a game about being pirates. Why are they taking our characters away for attacking ships and kidnapping wenches and singing loudly when drunk??
(Ed - Or you can play a child-murdering villain who observes all the niceties of proper society and stay at reputation zero as well: be a wicked murderer and keep your character, while the drunkard loses his! Wooh)
Or Virtues and Vices. Vices grant you -10 points, so everyone takes them. Nobody takes a Virtue, which costs you 10 points for the privilege of spending a drama die on a bonus of dubious value, like Altruistic, which states you can spend a drama die to reroll a test you made to help someone else. Or, you know, you could spend that drama die to improve the roll in the first place. I mean, if your roll was already close to victory (because it's not like a reroll is going to change a roll from 10 to 50, right? It's going to change it from 10 to 15. Maybe.), why not just do that? Oh, and Altruistic can only be used once per roll, because we don't want people using a useless power too often! It might become useful!
Or Magic. Some of it's really cool, like Glamour, Rune Magic and Shapeshifting, but the rest are same-same. All Porte Sorcerors are exactly the same, so why bother with a knack system at all? The same is true of Fate Witches, though their power is at least cool enough that people still take it. Porte just ends up being travel magic, which is a shame.
And then there's the setting itself. This is a game that bills itself about being about piracy and sailing on the grand seas. This is so true that Walter invested in a ship. And yet, setting aside my complaints about reputaiton, there's no place to go. The neat places, like Cathay, can't be reached at all, or, like America, have been removed completely. So you just sail around Theah, dealing with continental politics, wondering where the Carribean and the entire source of piracy in the real world went. And thus, it's a great game for the Muskteers, and crap for piracy.
Can this be fixed?
I have 6.75 Megabytes of material I put together in my vain effort to fix it. Some simple stuff works quite well, like a renewed Repartee system, a new reputation system, a new Raise system (you give up dice, rather than increase difficulty, which incidentally also makes knacks more useful), charging 3 XP per knack dot, and some fixes on the weaker swordsman knacks. Changing the knacks themselves was an exercise in futility, though, and what ultimately broke me. That and I was essentially rewriting the system from the ground up.
That's the problem with broken systems, when they tell us to fix them. They ignore the harrowing amounts of work involved. Games like Rifts, Scion, the old World of Darkness and 7th Sea are so evocative that we want to love them. We want them to work, and so we pretend that they do. You can even sort of make 7th Sea work if you just play a bunch of continental heroes (squeaky clean heroes at that, no anti-heroes here) who don't bother with knacks beyond flavor, pretending it's a game with 5 traits, drama dice and nothing else, which probably explains why it appeals to people who want to keep things simple (because if you try to let it become complicated, the system collapses, breaks down and dies), but none of this really fixes the fact that it's broken, broken, broken.
As our anonymous poster pointed out, it already takes alot of work to make a game work. My current GURPS Space Opera takes about 4 hours of planning per session, plus the studying of rules I need to remember and the writing of templates and NPCs I want to include. If GURPS didn't work, on top of that, I simply wouldn't have the time to be running the game at all.
I spent several months fighting with 7th Sea. If it had been working in the first place, I could have been spending all that effort towards running it. I always feel guilty for abandoning games my players love. I miss playing with Jenny, and I know if I reached for 7th Sea, she'd be tempted to come back. Bee still resents me for abandoning Exalted, a point that continues to cause tension. If I could just "get over" my "problems" and "stop being a wuss" I could run these great games, right? Except it's not me that failed. It's the games that failed.
They call them Heartbreakers for a reason.
This is why I don't run 7th Sea, Scion, Rifts, Exalted or oWoD anymore. I can spend my time better elsewhere. I hope you guys understand.
Friday, October 9, 2009
Thursday, October 8, 2009
Weapons of the Gods
Someone offered me one of the nicest things one gamer can offer a game master: a seat at his table as a player in one of his favorite games. In this case, I had inspired someone with my WotG oneshot who has since purchased the books and begun to run the game, much to the acclaim of several players. He wanted some help with the Secret Arts, so I whipped up my own character (rather similar to Grey Lotus, actually, except less medical skill and more White Crane. Mmmm. White Crane)
I've tried not to touch WotG since I finished our last campaign, fearing that I would "burn out" on it like I burned out on Exalted or 7th Sea, but after re-opening that part of my life and feeling the utter exhiliration of the game again, I wonder. Did I burn out on Exalted and 7th Sea because I played them "too much," or because they sucked. Forgive me if you loved those particular games, but their systems certainly could have been better. Walter, for example, wanted very much to love 7th Sea even while the reputation system was graphically violating his character concept and encouraging all the players to waste their points in useless knacks (Fortunately, everyone wasted their points the same way, so we didn't see discrepencies. We should probably thank our stars that Roomie wasn't playing, or he'd have dissected the system and put everyone's characters to shame). Was I tired of Exalted because of running it so much, or because I got sick of sifting through 50 charms whenever I wanted to make a powerful NPC and hassling through endless, pointless fights with eternal perfects, insurmountable defenses and absurd armor that resulted in miniscule chances of anyone involved taking even a single HL of damage?
I mean, I'm not tired of GURPS yet, or World of Darkness (the new one, which is actually pretty good), despite years of playing them. Maybe the problem isn't that I get sick of a game, but that I get sick of doing all the mechanical heavy lifting and pretending a game is good when it isn't.
I've tried not to touch WotG since I finished our last campaign, fearing that I would "burn out" on it like I burned out on Exalted or 7th Sea, but after re-opening that part of my life and feeling the utter exhiliration of the game again, I wonder. Did I burn out on Exalted and 7th Sea because I played them "too much," or because they sucked. Forgive me if you loved those particular games, but their systems certainly could have been better. Walter, for example, wanted very much to love 7th Sea even while the reputation system was graphically violating his character concept and encouraging all the players to waste their points in useless knacks (Fortunately, everyone wasted their points the same way, so we didn't see discrepencies. We should probably thank our stars that Roomie wasn't playing, or he'd have dissected the system and put everyone's characters to shame). Was I tired of Exalted because of running it so much, or because I got sick of sifting through 50 charms whenever I wanted to make a powerful NPC and hassling through endless, pointless fights with eternal perfects, insurmountable defenses and absurd armor that resulted in miniscule chances of anyone involved taking even a single HL of damage?
I mean, I'm not tired of GURPS yet, or World of Darkness (the new one, which is actually pretty good), despite years of playing them. Maybe the problem isn't that I get sick of a game, but that I get sick of doing all the mechanical heavy lifting and pretending a game is good when it isn't.
What I'm reading
Or just finished, as the case may be: House of Suns, by Alistair Reynolds.
Very nice book, one of his better, though not connected to the Revelation Space series.
Very nice book, one of his better, though not connected to the Revelation Space series.
Sunday, September 27, 2009
Dark Space Rules and Technology
I should have mentioned before that I've decided, for now, to call my Gothic Space Opera "Dark Space," though that might clash with a book series I'm reading (Which seems to be called "The Sentients of Orion," so perhaps not).
Anyway, I wanted to discuss ideas about the technology and core rules.
A Gothic Space Opera does two things. First, it wipes away all that complicated technology that creates a strange and alien future that modern audiences find difficult to relate to, replacing it with something more medieval while keeping "cool" technologies like big guns and powerful spaceships. Second, it establishes a highly cinematic setting, where style counts more than substance. In keeping with this, I've established some ground rules for how the universe and technology works.
First, there are no hit locations, to accommodate fashionable armor choices, such as female warriors who go for a little cheesecake, or (more importantly) warriors who choose for forsake helmets to show off their burning eyes and their wicked hairdos. Second, and this is a little more important, we discard the TL familiarity rules. The technology of Dark Space, utterly urealistically, spans everything from TL 9 to TL 11, and using the core rules makes this variation too difficult to deal with, especially when you have knights wearing TL 10 power armor, wielding a TL 9 autocannon in one hand, and a TL 11 plasma sleeve in the other. Instead, we'll play up familiarity (Knights wielding Robo-angel weaponry is at -2), and establish broader TL rules ("low tech" societies, anything below TL 9 but above TL 0 suffer -5 to high tech gadgetry, while TL 0 societies suffer a -5 to TL 1-8 items, and -10 to TL 9+). If GMs find this problematic, they can further apply familiarity penalties. Your core TL establishes the upper limit on devices you can normally purchase, and allows you to take +1 TL items as Signature Gear. The standard of the setting is TL 10 (the average between the two) though the common man is TL 9.
Ignoring the crazy alternate races (the werewolves, the vampires, the changelings), we have three "core" technological civilizations all interacting with one another in Dark Space. The original "relic" technology from the golden age lingers on, and continues in the hands of the tech-priest type guys. You see the knights using alot of these devices, and these tend to be TL 10-11. The Robots have their own technology, which takes advantage of the structures of their "angelic cores." This technology is TL 11, but occassionally borders into TL 12. Finally, we have the standard technology of the setting, which is generally TL 9.
GURPS divides technology into four broad areas, but I prefer to discuss 5: Transportation, Medical/Biotech, Military Arms, Power, and Information/Computer technology.
Transportation: During the golden age, mankind traveled in vast "light hugger" ships that moved through physical space. Since the collapse, few planets have the infrastructure to build new light huggers, and if they could, they'd build warships instead. Once a light hugger reached a new world, it established a connection to the "Dark Engine," a vast web of dark matter which interacted with normal matter only via gravity, and the ends of these "strands" existed in multiple places simultaneously, allowing for rapid communication. These Dark Engine strands also served as a sort of anchor and highway for FTL travel, allowing rapid transportation from one world to another. Since the collapse, the Dark Engine has been wracked with storms and collapse, but most of it remains intact, if nightmarishly disorganized and haunted by wicked, man-hating AIs. Thus, the Dark Engine remains the primary mode of transportation in Dark Space. Outside of space, vehicles travel on wheels and tracks, with contragravity isolated to spaceships, large airships, and robotic angels.
Information: The Dark Engine allowed for instant communication between worlds, and so formed a sort of pan-galactic internet. Each world housed at least one calculation spire, a vast super-computer that contained that world's data, and at important nodes, humanity constructed planet-sized computer brains which house god-like AI, constantly monitoring the pulses and information of the Dark Engine. Finally, near the end of the Golden Age, mankind learned to manipulate dark matter so well that they created AI nodes that existed entirely in the Dark Engine. After the fall, of course, most of this capability vanished as the Dark Engine collapsed into virus-wracked chaos, and even today is plagued with nightmarish "zones" of legacy code and corrupted data. The data spires also generally collapsed for fell into disrepair or were hijacked by rogue AIs, which forced mankind to recollect data where they could. Datapads have become the primary "computer" of today, worked by data-scribes who carefully collect data wherever they can, uploading it into their heavy "tomes," and collecting them into jealously guarded libraries.
Weaponry: The guns and armor of Dark Space generally follow the rules of those found in GURPS Ultra-Tech. After the fall, most armies use TL 9 slug-throwers, though Knights use TL 10 "ETK" slugthrowers (though houseruled to be more reasonable). Knights have further access to a variety of "knightly" items, like "lances" and "shields," most of which is TL 10 and 11. Of course, they have access to power armor. Standard armies do not, and are forced to make due with Reflex vests and such.
Power: It's a cinematic setting, so naturally, we don't want to fiddle much with batteries and bullets. Nuclear Fusion is common in the setting, and most vehicles have hand waved "micro-reactors" that mean you never need to fuel them. Standard power cells enjoy the benefits of Super Science, giving them 5 times as much power as normal (meaning most guns don't need to worry about big, bulky packs or changing batteries often). TL 11 "relic" devices use cosmic power cells that feed off of the Dark Engine directly, and thus, never require power (convenient, huh?)
Medical/Biotech: Many denizens of the Dark Space universe benefit from Biotech, but it has fallen out of favor since many of their creations rose up to destroy them. Medical technology suffered most of all, falling to a mere TL 9 level. This allows us to have medicine that's "good enough" to keep people safe and alive, but losing limbs or death are big deals still. Robots generally have the ability to upload minds into the Dark Engine, and call those that do so "Reapers," who generally only collect the dying (or the truly wicked).
Anyway, I wanted to discuss ideas about the technology and core rules.
A Gothic Space Opera does two things. First, it wipes away all that complicated technology that creates a strange and alien future that modern audiences find difficult to relate to, replacing it with something more medieval while keeping "cool" technologies like big guns and powerful spaceships. Second, it establishes a highly cinematic setting, where style counts more than substance. In keeping with this, I've established some ground rules for how the universe and technology works.
First, there are no hit locations, to accommodate fashionable armor choices, such as female warriors who go for a little cheesecake, or (more importantly) warriors who choose for forsake helmets to show off their burning eyes and their wicked hairdos. Second, and this is a little more important, we discard the TL familiarity rules. The technology of Dark Space, utterly urealistically, spans everything from TL 9 to TL 11, and using the core rules makes this variation too difficult to deal with, especially when you have knights wearing TL 10 power armor, wielding a TL 9 autocannon in one hand, and a TL 11 plasma sleeve in the other. Instead, we'll play up familiarity (Knights wielding Robo-angel weaponry is at -2), and establish broader TL rules ("low tech" societies, anything below TL 9 but above TL 0 suffer -5 to high tech gadgetry, while TL 0 societies suffer a -5 to TL 1-8 items, and -10 to TL 9+). If GMs find this problematic, they can further apply familiarity penalties. Your core TL establishes the upper limit on devices you can normally purchase, and allows you to take +1 TL items as Signature Gear. The standard of the setting is TL 10 (the average between the two) though the common man is TL 9.
Ignoring the crazy alternate races (the werewolves, the vampires, the changelings), we have three "core" technological civilizations all interacting with one another in Dark Space. The original "relic" technology from the golden age lingers on, and continues in the hands of the tech-priest type guys. You see the knights using alot of these devices, and these tend to be TL 10-11. The Robots have their own technology, which takes advantage of the structures of their "angelic cores." This technology is TL 11, but occassionally borders into TL 12. Finally, we have the standard technology of the setting, which is generally TL 9.
GURPS divides technology into four broad areas, but I prefer to discuss 5: Transportation, Medical/Biotech, Military Arms, Power, and Information/Computer technology.
Transportation: During the golden age, mankind traveled in vast "light hugger" ships that moved through physical space. Since the collapse, few planets have the infrastructure to build new light huggers, and if they could, they'd build warships instead. Once a light hugger reached a new world, it established a connection to the "Dark Engine," a vast web of dark matter which interacted with normal matter only via gravity, and the ends of these "strands" existed in multiple places simultaneously, allowing for rapid communication. These Dark Engine strands also served as a sort of anchor and highway for FTL travel, allowing rapid transportation from one world to another. Since the collapse, the Dark Engine has been wracked with storms and collapse, but most of it remains intact, if nightmarishly disorganized and haunted by wicked, man-hating AIs. Thus, the Dark Engine remains the primary mode of transportation in Dark Space. Outside of space, vehicles travel on wheels and tracks, with contragravity isolated to spaceships, large airships, and robotic angels.
Information: The Dark Engine allowed for instant communication between worlds, and so formed a sort of pan-galactic internet. Each world housed at least one calculation spire, a vast super-computer that contained that world's data, and at important nodes, humanity constructed planet-sized computer brains which house god-like AI, constantly monitoring the pulses and information of the Dark Engine. Finally, near the end of the Golden Age, mankind learned to manipulate dark matter so well that they created AI nodes that existed entirely in the Dark Engine. After the fall, of course, most of this capability vanished as the Dark Engine collapsed into virus-wracked chaos, and even today is plagued with nightmarish "zones" of legacy code and corrupted data. The data spires also generally collapsed for fell into disrepair or were hijacked by rogue AIs, which forced mankind to recollect data where they could. Datapads have become the primary "computer" of today, worked by data-scribes who carefully collect data wherever they can, uploading it into their heavy "tomes," and collecting them into jealously guarded libraries.
Weaponry: The guns and armor of Dark Space generally follow the rules of those found in GURPS Ultra-Tech. After the fall, most armies use TL 9 slug-throwers, though Knights use TL 10 "ETK" slugthrowers (though houseruled to be more reasonable). Knights have further access to a variety of "knightly" items, like "lances" and "shields," most of which is TL 10 and 11. Of course, they have access to power armor. Standard armies do not, and are forced to make due with Reflex vests and such.
Power: It's a cinematic setting, so naturally, we don't want to fiddle much with batteries and bullets. Nuclear Fusion is common in the setting, and most vehicles have hand waved "micro-reactors" that mean you never need to fuel them. Standard power cells enjoy the benefits of Super Science, giving them 5 times as much power as normal (meaning most guns don't need to worry about big, bulky packs or changing batteries often). TL 11 "relic" devices use cosmic power cells that feed off of the Dark Engine directly, and thus, never require power (convenient, huh?)
Medical/Biotech: Many denizens of the Dark Space universe benefit from Biotech, but it has fallen out of favor since many of their creations rose up to destroy them. Medical technology suffered most of all, falling to a mere TL 9 level. This allows us to have medicine that's "good enough" to keep people safe and alive, but losing limbs or death are big deals still. Robots generally have the ability to upload minds into the Dark Engine, and call those that do so "Reapers," who generally only collect the dying (or the truly wicked).
Sunday, September 20, 2009
Once More Into The Breach
As mentioned in my previous post: Frozen War! We played another session.
Between my classes and my 40k obsession, it's hard to focus on my standard Space Opera, but thankfully, I managed to find the attention to do so, got it together, and we played it out again. All in all, it went well and was well received by my players. But just as before, there are places I could have done better.
I'm still really uncertain of gravity. I think I might just ditch it in my main Space Opera game, as it doesn't really seem to bring much to the game except alot of mathematical hassle. Gunplay improved alot, but I made another mistake here: Byler went "down" when he was under suppressive fire. So far, so good. He thereafter tried a "pop up" shot, which put him under suppressive fire for one turn and gave him a -2 to hit. Again, so far so good. Unfortunately, Gunslingers don't suffer that penalty. He's even more badass than I realized.
In another colossal screw-up, I really underestimated the defenses of Caldera City, and as a result, the attacking forces were slaughtered. I lied to my players, something I had decided I didn't want to do: by the rules, they actually should have killed every last man, woman and child that attacked the players, through a combination of the Quetzali leader's stupidity and the sheer power of Caldera's defenses. The old rule of thumb is that you need 3 times your defender's strength during a siege, and I should have used that, but I figured 1.5 times was more than enough. However, with players making heroic actions and the massive defenses of a city, I should have placed alot more firepower in the hands of the Quetzali.
The lowest point of the game, alas, was a player. During an early battle, they managed to ambush some Quetzali, wound their leader, take down two of their infantry, and run them out of town, and Walter qualified it as a "defeat." He complained when their non-infiltrator types couldn't detect an infiltrator, when his APC HMG couldn't blow a flying APC out of the sky. He complained that he's always losing (despite the fact that the players have won every battle they were allowed to influence), that Quetzali have superior technology (they have essentially identical technology to humans, much to my annoyance), that the Quetzali are superior themselves (They are worth more points, but I've designed them to be weak in certain, important areas), and complained that he couldn't possibly defend his city ("I'm out-numbered!").
The other guys didn't complain. They even got on his case for doing so, so it's clearly not the game itself. To me, the most grating thing about this is that it destroys the illusions I'm trying to create. Now that they won that battle, it sounds like I toned things down based on his complaints, and his victory is now hollow because he won by whining, and that's just not so. He won through his own grit and (reluctant) determination.
I suspect I know where the real problem is. In the previous session, Walter actually lost, but didn't complain. This session, he won and complained. The difference, I think, is the role of his character. Byler and Roomie have both slipped into their roles perfectly, and know exactly how to play their characters, and achieved some serious badassery. Walter, once again, finds himself in a sidelined support position, and he does not do well there. Only, he's not really in a "support" position. His character is just as good with a rifle and UBGL as before. He's just as well armored as before. And he hasn't yet mastered the arts of leadership in GURPS. Walter hates to feel useless, and not knowing how to achieve victory is a form of that. As he learns better, he'll relax. I just wish he'd trust me. I think I'll have Sasha suggest to him to "get involved" in the next fight as much as possible, commenting that he doesn't enjoy "leading from the rear."
I trusted him last session and gave him a nuke when he requested it, having visions of epic uses of it later in the game. He threatened to use it on a squad of 5 Quetzali at the risk of his own men. Wow. Then he threatened to use it on the city he was defending. Wow. You should never give someone a toy unless you're willing to let them use it, but man, this is really not how I intended him to use his nuke. I'm not generally a fan of "punishing" a player, but this might be a case to pull out some dirty tricks: All his loud, boisterous threatening of the Quetzali with a nuke has told them that he has a nuke. If they can take it from him, the enemy general who just lurves holocausts can use it on the city. Hopefully, that will make him think twice about blabbing confidential info at the enemy, especially in the form of empty threats.
But beyond this, I think it was, overall, a very good game.
UPDATE: I feel the need to add that, as pointed out by Byler (I believe), Walter's complaints are a good sign. They mean he cares about the game. If he didn't, he'd just shrug and disregard any setbacks. Instead, he wants to see his lieutenant succeed! And that means he actually likes the game.
UPDATE 2: I might have given the impression I was mad at Walter, and I wasn't. I've seen players get frustrated with their characters before (Erik, a friend from the Netherlands, was very frustrated with his Dragon-Blooded sorcerer before we fiddled and found a way for his generic Occult to be useful). I'm quite sure Walter is in the same situation.
In fact, he contacted me and apologized. This is what I mean when I say I have good players. According to him, his real frustration is the lack of a decent MAP, since visual input really helps him formulate strategies, so we've figured out how to sketch out some stuff on MapTool, and we should be ok. His comment about the nuke was this: "A Nuke is a bluff, a MAD device. Thus, it's useless if you don't announce it." Which is true, come to think of it! I suggested that he might save that bluff for more useful times, however, not overestimate it (You can't demand the surrender of an entire army just because you have a nuke and you're in their midst), and to better understand his opponent psychology (Quetzali tend to be skeptical of physical danger, both a great asset and a grave problem for them)
Between my classes and my 40k obsession, it's hard to focus on my standard Space Opera, but thankfully, I managed to find the attention to do so, got it together, and we played it out again. All in all, it went well and was well received by my players. But just as before, there are places I could have done better.
I'm still really uncertain of gravity. I think I might just ditch it in my main Space Opera game, as it doesn't really seem to bring much to the game except alot of mathematical hassle. Gunplay improved alot, but I made another mistake here: Byler went "down" when he was under suppressive fire. So far, so good. He thereafter tried a "pop up" shot, which put him under suppressive fire for one turn and gave him a -2 to hit. Again, so far so good. Unfortunately, Gunslingers don't suffer that penalty. He's even more badass than I realized.
In another colossal screw-up, I really underestimated the defenses of Caldera City, and as a result, the attacking forces were slaughtered. I lied to my players, something I had decided I didn't want to do: by the rules, they actually should have killed every last man, woman and child that attacked the players, through a combination of the Quetzali leader's stupidity and the sheer power of Caldera's defenses. The old rule of thumb is that you need 3 times your defender's strength during a siege, and I should have used that, but I figured 1.5 times was more than enough. However, with players making heroic actions and the massive defenses of a city, I should have placed alot more firepower in the hands of the Quetzali.
The lowest point of the game, alas, was a player. During an early battle, they managed to ambush some Quetzali, wound their leader, take down two of their infantry, and run them out of town, and Walter qualified it as a "defeat." He complained when their non-infiltrator types couldn't detect an infiltrator, when his APC HMG couldn't blow a flying APC out of the sky. He complained that he's always losing (despite the fact that the players have won every battle they were allowed to influence), that Quetzali have superior technology (they have essentially identical technology to humans, much to my annoyance), that the Quetzali are superior themselves (They are worth more points, but I've designed them to be weak in certain, important areas), and complained that he couldn't possibly defend his city ("I'm out-numbered!").
The other guys didn't complain. They even got on his case for doing so, so it's clearly not the game itself. To me, the most grating thing about this is that it destroys the illusions I'm trying to create. Now that they won that battle, it sounds like I toned things down based on his complaints, and his victory is now hollow because he won by whining, and that's just not so. He won through his own grit and (reluctant) determination.
I suspect I know where the real problem is. In the previous session, Walter actually lost, but didn't complain. This session, he won and complained. The difference, I think, is the role of his character. Byler and Roomie have both slipped into their roles perfectly, and know exactly how to play their characters, and achieved some serious badassery. Walter, once again, finds himself in a sidelined support position, and he does not do well there. Only, he's not really in a "support" position. His character is just as good with a rifle and UBGL as before. He's just as well armored as before. And he hasn't yet mastered the arts of leadership in GURPS. Walter hates to feel useless, and not knowing how to achieve victory is a form of that. As he learns better, he'll relax. I just wish he'd trust me. I think I'll have Sasha suggest to him to "get involved" in the next fight as much as possible, commenting that he doesn't enjoy "leading from the rear."
I trusted him last session and gave him a nuke when he requested it, having visions of epic uses of it later in the game. He threatened to use it on a squad of 5 Quetzali at the risk of his own men. Wow. Then he threatened to use it on the city he was defending. Wow. You should never give someone a toy unless you're willing to let them use it, but man, this is really not how I intended him to use his nuke. I'm not generally a fan of "punishing" a player, but this might be a case to pull out some dirty tricks: All his loud, boisterous threatening of the Quetzali with a nuke has told them that he has a nuke. If they can take it from him, the enemy general who just lurves holocausts can use it on the city. Hopefully, that will make him think twice about blabbing confidential info at the enemy, especially in the form of empty threats.
But beyond this, I think it was, overall, a very good game.
UPDATE: I feel the need to add that, as pointed out by Byler (I believe), Walter's complaints are a good sign. They mean he cares about the game. If he didn't, he'd just shrug and disregard any setbacks. Instead, he wants to see his lieutenant succeed! And that means he actually likes the game.
UPDATE 2: I might have given the impression I was mad at Walter, and I wasn't. I've seen players get frustrated with their characters before (Erik, a friend from the Netherlands, was very frustrated with his Dragon-Blooded sorcerer before we fiddled and found a way for his generic Occult to be useful). I'm quite sure Walter is in the same situation.
In fact, he contacted me and apologized. This is what I mean when I say I have good players. According to him, his real frustration is the lack of a decent MAP, since visual input really helps him formulate strategies, so we've figured out how to sketch out some stuff on MapTool, and we should be ok. His comment about the nuke was this: "A Nuke is a bluff, a MAD device. Thus, it's useless if you don't announce it." Which is true, come to think of it! I suggested that he might save that bluff for more useful times, however, not overestimate it (You can't demand the surrender of an entire army just because you have a nuke and you're in their midst), and to better understand his opponent psychology (Quetzali tend to be skeptical of physical danger, both a great asset and a grave problem for them)
Saturday, September 12, 2009
Double Banana
Aka "Green Shirt + Red Shirt = Rosarius!"
I've been away from 40k for awhile, due to cost and losing my American crowd to play it with, but my hunger to be a part of that universe has driven me once again into the unloving, cold arms of GW, and I'm painting a Crimson Fist army (it's going very well, thank you, the prettiest minis I've painted yet, though still not up to the standards of Koen, Roomie or Walter). I've also been getting to know a group of people at a place called Gameforce, and it's been nice. I was really making inroads today, which is a shame, because something really got beneath my skin and made me walk out early.
I'm watching a battle between Orks and Space Marine, and the Ork player is a little iffy to me. The way he measures bugs me (for range: front of model to front of model), and "accidentally" snatching up failed rolls and tossing them with the next batch (unless someone points it out), forgetting rules if they inconvenience him. Really, smaller than I'm making it sound, more "round up for me, round down for you," sort of gameplay, and this already begins to bother me. But then he really starts to pull something that really gets me going.
He keeps saying his units, in plain sight, have cover. I finally get up and say "Dude, look, he can see all of them but like four. You don't get a cover save!" Then he argues that his units are intermixed, so he does. And the thing is, he's right.
Lemme explain:
If you have a bunch of guys behind rocks, they get cover saves, like so:
SSSSS (space marines)
RRRR (some rocks)
OOOO (Some orks)
If the Space Marines try to shoot the Orks, the Orks get cover. Makes sense.
Units provide cover too.
SSSSS
GGGGG (Some grots)
OOOOO
The Orks are behind the Grots. If the Space marines wanted to shoot "through" the Grots to hit the Orks, the Orks would get a cover save. This makes sense, as the point of sending a vanguard is for them to die first. Duh.
But he pulled this:
SSSSSS
GOGOG
OGOGO
GOGOG
Now, he can only see about 3 of the 8 Grots, and 2 of the 7 Orks. If he declares he's firing at the Orks, the Grots give them cover. If he declares he's firing at the Grots, the Orks give them cover. You can only fire at one unit, and since these are technically two units, each unit has a cover save (even, incidentally, if you hit them with artillery). They just march around, ignoring cover, because they don't need it. Orks that are supposed to have a 6+ armor save suddenly all have Rosarius, superior even to Space Marine armor, for a third the cost. Victory was assured, because he picked the ideal army to use this tactic. Completely cheesy.
The worst thing? Completely legal. Completely legal asshatery, if you ask me.
(He's not the first to come with this, after a brief perusal online. You find plenty of discussions, replete with the foul-mouthed offensive-defenses you'd expect from twinks defending practices they know are twinky. A common house rule is: You cannot both give and receive cover to/from a unit," and that seems reasonable to me.)
"Ok, so just don't play against him" says Bee. Well, I don't plan on it. Even if he relents and admits this is a crappy way to play, or if GW (finally) comes out with a rule against it, his attitude bugs me. See, I know I'm going to lose when I play. It bugs me, but I accept it, because playing will be fun. It'll be competitive too, as players use superior strategies to defeat one another. Feelings will be hurt but, hopefully, friends will be made, and I'll have stories to regal my friends with. Yeah, I've been on the benefiting side of overpowered cheese (Space Wolf 2e codex with that magical teleport device), but I remember realizing it was cheesy after a few games, and honestly enjoying my "invincible" SW scout "Roark." (He never died. Really.) I remember losing alot as Black Templar, and never winning as Chaos. That's how these things go. As one fellow (Tommie, I think) said "Whatever happens, just smile." That's a good attitude to have.
But I don't want to play if I have to get into yelling matches about the rules, or have people tell me to look up stuff on the internet. Just because a loophole isn't against the rules doesn't mean it's a good idea. The fun of the other player matters too. As Tony said "I want to have someone to play against again after I win," and that takes sportsmanship.
I'm really disheartened. I was hoping to get back in, and now I'm nervous that this sort of thing will be wide spread. If so, I'll focus on friends I make, and playing with the Knights (they play 40k too). I feel bad I walked out, but I wasn't really planning on it, it just sort of happened because I needed to cool my head and I wanted to paint (needed a new brush). Hopefully, though, I'll feel better next week.
I've been away from 40k for awhile, due to cost and losing my American crowd to play it with, but my hunger to be a part of that universe has driven me once again into the unloving, cold arms of GW, and I'm painting a Crimson Fist army (it's going very well, thank you, the prettiest minis I've painted yet, though still not up to the standards of Koen, Roomie or Walter). I've also been getting to know a group of people at a place called Gameforce, and it's been nice. I was really making inroads today, which is a shame, because something really got beneath my skin and made me walk out early.
I'm watching a battle between Orks and Space Marine, and the Ork player is a little iffy to me. The way he measures bugs me (for range: front of model to front of model), and "accidentally" snatching up failed rolls and tossing them with the next batch (unless someone points it out), forgetting rules if they inconvenience him. Really, smaller than I'm making it sound, more "round up for me, round down for you," sort of gameplay, and this already begins to bother me. But then he really starts to pull something that really gets me going.
He keeps saying his units, in plain sight, have cover. I finally get up and say "Dude, look, he can see all of them but like four. You don't get a cover save!" Then he argues that his units are intermixed, so he does. And the thing is, he's right.
Lemme explain:
If you have a bunch of guys behind rocks, they get cover saves, like so:
SSSSS (space marines)
RRRR (some rocks)
OOOO (Some orks)
If the Space Marines try to shoot the Orks, the Orks get cover. Makes sense.
Units provide cover too.
SSSSS
GGGGG (Some grots)
OOOOO
The Orks are behind the Grots. If the Space marines wanted to shoot "through" the Grots to hit the Orks, the Orks would get a cover save. This makes sense, as the point of sending a vanguard is for them to die first. Duh.
But he pulled this:
SSSSSS
GOGOG
OGOGO
GOGOG
Now, he can only see about 3 of the 8 Grots, and 2 of the 7 Orks. If he declares he's firing at the Orks, the Grots give them cover. If he declares he's firing at the Grots, the Orks give them cover. You can only fire at one unit, and since these are technically two units, each unit has a cover save (even, incidentally, if you hit them with artillery). They just march around, ignoring cover, because they don't need it. Orks that are supposed to have a 6+ armor save suddenly all have Rosarius, superior even to Space Marine armor, for a third the cost. Victory was assured, because he picked the ideal army to use this tactic. Completely cheesy.
The worst thing? Completely legal. Completely legal asshatery, if you ask me.
(He's not the first to come with this, after a brief perusal online. You find plenty of discussions, replete with the foul-mouthed offensive-defenses you'd expect from twinks defending practices they know are twinky. A common house rule is: You cannot both give and receive cover to/from a unit," and that seems reasonable to me.)
"Ok, so just don't play against him" says Bee. Well, I don't plan on it. Even if he relents and admits this is a crappy way to play, or if GW (finally) comes out with a rule against it, his attitude bugs me. See, I know I'm going to lose when I play. It bugs me, but I accept it, because playing will be fun. It'll be competitive too, as players use superior strategies to defeat one another. Feelings will be hurt but, hopefully, friends will be made, and I'll have stories to regal my friends with. Yeah, I've been on the benefiting side of overpowered cheese (Space Wolf 2e codex with that magical teleport device), but I remember realizing it was cheesy after a few games, and honestly enjoying my "invincible" SW scout "Roark." (He never died. Really.) I remember losing alot as Black Templar, and never winning as Chaos. That's how these things go. As one fellow (Tommie, I think) said "Whatever happens, just smile." That's a good attitude to have.
But I don't want to play if I have to get into yelling matches about the rules, or have people tell me to look up stuff on the internet. Just because a loophole isn't against the rules doesn't mean it's a good idea. The fun of the other player matters too. As Tony said "I want to have someone to play against again after I win," and that takes sportsmanship.
I'm really disheartened. I was hoping to get back in, and now I'm nervous that this sort of thing will be wide spread. If so, I'll focus on friends I make, and playing with the Knights (they play 40k too). I feel bad I walked out, but I wasn't really planning on it, it just sort of happened because I needed to cool my head and I wanted to paint (needed a new brush). Hopefully, though, I'll feel better next week.
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
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