Platoons, My Favorite Adventures, Debates

Greetings, all! Time for another exciting edition of Atomic Battleship Dragon! This week, a word about my new campaign, adventures I’m proud of, and the down-to-the-wire presidential race.

But before all that… As you know, I’m a big Phillies fan. I’ve been thinking for weeks and weeks now that the 2013 Phillies would be smart to set up a couple of strong platoons rather than finding expensive everyday talent. Right now platoon players are undervalued in the big leagues, but platoons can outproduce single players who cost more than both platoon players put together. I don’t see why Ryan Howard should start against lefties, or why John Mayberry ought to start against righties. Anyway, it turns out a very serious analyst has put together a great piece on this very topic, and I recommend it to any baseball fans who happen to be reading (and doubly so if you’re also Phillies fans):

http://crashburnalley.com/2012/10/09/platoon/

 Gaming: Just last week, I did something I hadn’t done in years: I stepped up to the DM screen and started a new D&D game, with Yours Truly as the DM. For a long time now, I’ve been pretty lazy about volunteering to be the DM. Most of the time, my excuse was that I was working all day on D&D stuff and writing D&D novels at night, so finding the extra little bit of creativity or energy to run a game too was hard. Well, since I am now my own boss and I’m spending most of my time working on non-D&D things, I figured it was time to step up again when the Thursday night group decided it was time to go back to the dungeon.

We had a good discussion of which edition of D&D we wanted to run, and I settled on 3.5 with some small tweaks. (I like running 4e, but we’ve spent the last few years pushing minis around on the map and using encounter powers, and I wanted something that felt a little more sim-driven than gamist.) I intend to run the game without a combat grid as much as possible, and re-emphasize roleplaying and exploration… and yeah, I got those ideas from my exposure to the early stages of D&D Next when I was still in the shop at Wizards. I stole some no-grid rules we’d worked up for a canceled game, and made a few adjustments. Then I made the crazy offer to set the game in the world of the Birthright setting. My players leaped at that one, so that’s where we are. I haven’t run a Birthright game in oh, about fifteen years or so.

Naturally, after everyone expressed interest in playing in Cerilia, I had one player tell me he wanted to be a ninja. And another player wanted to be a warlock-like magical assassin that he saw in some anime or another. And there’s one more complication: I think I’m going to be lazy and shamelessly raid adventures I wrote across various editions to form the basis of the campaign, so I’m starting with Dark Legacy of Evard, a 4^th Edition Encounters Season adventure, and I may move on to Reavers of Harkenwold next. Okay, so we’re playing Birthright, a 2^nd Edition setting, with 3.5 rules, D&D Next sensibilities, and the Book of Nine Swords, and I’m running 4^th Edition adventures. I don’t see what could possibly go wrong with this plan.

I find that when I do run D&D games, I’m strongly inclined to run adventures I wrote. I think it’s simply a matter of familiarity and confidence. It’s good to be comfortable with the material; you’d like an adventure you run to feel like a well broken-in shoe, easy on the feet and ready to take you to your favorite places. Because I often used home games for playtesting adventures I was working on in my day job over a long career of working on D&D, most of the adventures I gained that familiarity with were the ones I was working on for publication. I guess that’s a weird narcissistic side effect of being a professional adventure designer.

Since this might turn into a campaign of Rich Baker’s Greatest Hits, I thought I’d take a moment and share a short list of the adventures I’m most proud of. I think most of them are worth a play, but of course they’re in very different editions these days, and your mileage may vary. Anyway, here goes:

10. Dragon’s Crown: I only wrote part of this Dark Sun epic, but I was the lead designer and had the job of herding all the cats. A cabal of super-powerful psionicists want to take over the world, how fun is that?

9. King of the Trollhaunt Warrens: My cowriter was Logan Bonner. The whole time I was working on the Trollhaunt, I was thinking of the Star Trek episode The Galileo Seven and the misty planet haunted by giant hostile humanoids.

8. Prison of the Firebringer: This Dungeon magazine adventure began as a high-level FR homebrew for the game group I was running at the time. It’s about the only time I ever ran the process in reverse, starting an adventure as a homebrew and turning it into something I published.

7. Prism Keep: My first Dungeon adventure, a take on the classic “castle in the clouds” adventure. I wrote this because I had a horrible tax bill looming and needed a thousand bucks, but for all that I think it’s a fun little sandbox and puzzle-solving adventure.

6. Dark Legacy of Evard: A 4^th Edition Encounters Season. I’m proud of this one because it oozes flavor, and it’s maybe the best ghost story I’ve managed to frame as a D&D adventure.

5. Rana Mor: The middle of my three Dungeon adventures, written early in 3^rd Edition. Kind of based on the Jungle Cruise ride in Disneyworld, the part where you go through the ruined temple in Cambodia or India. There aren’t many good Angkor Wat adventures in D&D, so I took a shot at writing one.

4. Cleric’s Challenge: The basic premise is a tough challenge for an adventure design—write an adventure for one PC, specifically, a cleric. I like this one because it’s a good story that works well for a whole group as well as a solo PC.

3. Red Hand of Doom: Co-written with James Jacobs. I sort of feel that the D&D universe can always use adventures that capture classic tropes. For RHoD, I decided I wanted to write a good stop-the-horde adventure, which I hadn’t seen anyone try to do in a while. Most of my work is in the very beginning, and the event-encounters early in part 2.

2. Reavers of Harkenwold: The adventure no one knows about, I would guess. It’s in the 4^th Edition Dungeon Master’s Kit. This time, I took a shot at writing the Robin Hood adventure. It’s a classic fantasy adventure bit that gets you out of the dungeon for the bulk of the play, and culminates in storming the castle. Chris Perkins gave me a hand when the format changed a bit, and did it so well that I can’t tell which parts are mine and which parts are his.

1. Forge of Fury: Probably my most widely-played adventure. All I wanted to do here is hit something right down the middle of the fairway, since it was very early in 3^rd Edition and we wanted people to experience classic dungeon delving. My editor’s the person responsible for the succubus; it was a quasit in my original draft. But if you’ve ever been killed by the dragon Nightscale—and I guess quite a few of you have—yeah, that’s all me.

Oh, and if you’re curious about adventures I like by other people: I’m a big fan of Night Below, Return to the Tomb of Horrors, and Desert of Desolation.

Politics/Current Events: Beats me if I know what’s going to happen in this election. Part of me thinks this is 1980, and Mitt Romney is Ronald Reagan. Part of me thinks this is 2004, and Mitt Romney is John Kerry. I suspect that Romney has a strong lead at this point, and is going to score a big upset of a sitting president, and if I had to make a prediction, that’s how I would go. But he’s got to do well in so many states to make up the ground Obama claimed in 2008.

Put me down as a big fan of last week’s debate: I can’t remember the last time the two candidates were able to really talk to each other and were given time and elbow room to fully develop their points. It was far and away the most instructive and least artificial national debate I’ve watched since I started paying attention to presidential politics. It will be really interesting to see how President Obama comes back for rounds 2 and 3 over the next couple of weeks; I doubt he will make a better impression by trying to be less polite or by insisting that Romney is lying. He’d like to show America a truly pissed-off Romney who looks less presidential, or lead Romney into a mortal gaffe (“Eastern Europe is not under Soviet domination”), but you have to believe that Romney will be ready for that. We’ll see how it goes.

The Finer Things: A fine fall day. We’ve had a spectacular run out here in Seattle, with crisp, clear afternoons and the best fall color I’ve seen in the Northwest. It’s not quite like fall in Wisconsin or New England, but it’s still pretty good. On the downside, I think I missed my last chance to go hike at Rainier for the season—I was just doing too much writing.

 

City of Heroes, Aduria, the Four Feathers

Hi, folks! This week, a few words about City of Heroes, the mysterious continent of Aduria, and The Four Feathers.

Gaming Part I: A bit of sad news came in this week: City of Heroes is shutting down for good next month. It’s a strange thing when an MMO dies; most of the time when a game company closes its doors, you can keep playing whatever you bought from them for as long as you want. I have dozens of games from defunct companies that I pull out and play occasionally. Even old PC software resurfaces in places like Good Old Games or Beamdog. But when someone turns off the server for a MMO, I guess that’s it.

City of Heroes is, so far, my favorite MMO. I played the hell out of it for several years. I started playing mostly because I wanted a change of genre for my personal gaming; when you work on D&D all day and write D&D novels at night, well, you’re not in a rush to make a D&D clone your principal timewaster in your leisure hours. I was a very late adapter for WoW as a result, and invested in City of Heroes first. I ran through the game levels 1 to 50 several times, and played with a good group of my coworkers and friends for many months.

City of Heroes had an amazing variety of character types compared to WoW or Star Wars or most other big-budget MMOs; not only did a role like Tanker or Scrapper come with a hundred builds instead of three (each had something like 8-12 offense sets and 6-10 defense sets, for 50-100 combinations), but you also got to use the awesome character illustrator tool to make your beginning character absolutely unique. You weren’t just playing with minor details like hair color or eye color or the shape of the face; you could build a *concept* for your character that was absolutely your own, and was reflected in both powers and appearance. I built awesome characters like Ghost Marshal, the rifle-armed flying stealthed hero in a duster, cowboy boots, and a Western hat; Runemight, the arcane champion who used dark melee powers to fight evil and whose slate-grey skin was covered with glowing purple runes of power; and Moon Mage, the Dr. Strange-esque masked magician who aided other heroes with his lunar sorcery. Building characters like that felt *amazing* -- while World of Warcraft was a big sprawling place to explore, you never got that same sense of character investment from your race and class selection.

I haven’t played City of Heroes much in the last couple of years; I guess people like me who moved on are why it’s going away. But I think it’s important to look back and celebrate what a good game it was, and what it did better than any of its competitors: It let you *create* something amazing.

Gaming Part II: As requested, here is my old map of the mysterious southern continent in the Birthright setting. It turns out my sketch of Aduria has been kicking around the internet for a while now, but some of you Birthright fans might not have found the right spot, so here it is:

 

I can’t claim credit for the nice labels; those were added by someone else whose image I’m linking to. (Since I’m the original creator of this map and I came up with most of the names on it, I feel no guilt about that.)

And here’s a link to descriptions of the various areas:

http://www.birthright.net/forums/showwiki.php?title=Aduria_the_lost_continent

The birthright.net site is a fantastic resource for you diehard Birthright fans out there. If you’re not familiar with it, you really ought to wander on over and visit sometime. A lot of the language and content around the Lost Continent of Aduria wiki entry looks pretty familiar to me. A long time ago I wrote a small series of online articles (or was it for Polyhedron? I don’t remember) that described the former Anuirean colonies of Aduria’s northern coast. The Sere Coast, Oeried, Rhandel, Lurech, and Mhor Atha are drawn from my work on that article. The area labeled Lucitia is where the realm of Alitaine exists in the current day of the setting (although Alitaine also extends to the plains on the north side of the inland sea). Alitaine is the accommodation we made to work Aquitaine into the setting, as I noted in my comments on last week’s post.

I think that Ed Stark and Carrie Bebris came up with Nehalim, Ghanim, the Beastlands, and the Mountain States. Zaynani, I don’t remember. I seem to recall a concept meeting back in the old TSR building where we talked about how my map sketch for Aduria ought to be filled in; I think many of these notions came from that meeting.

Anyway, you Birthright diehards out there: Enjoy!

Politics/Current Events: A double shot of gaming this time, so I’ll skip it for now. Be sure to tune into the first presidential debate on Wednesday, it ought to be a good one.

The Finer Things: I watched The Four Feathers the other night—the 1939 version, which is regarded as the best of them all. It’s a great old movie that I hadn’t ever seen in its entirety. It’s set against a fascinating historical backdrop--the Mahdist uprising in the Sudan and the 1898 Battle of Omdurman. (Interesting historical tidbit: a young Winston Churchill was with Kitchener at Omdurman.) Anyway, The Four Feathers reminded me a lot of one of my other favorites from the same era: Beau Geste. The novel itself is not very PC, but it’s a product of its times, and it’s a classic adventure story. For that matter, I’m a big fan of Lawrence of Arabia, too. I guess something about the combination of desert, the British Empire, and rousing adventure works for me. They just don’t make movies like those anymore.  

 

Birthright Campign Setting Reflections, 47%

Hi, everybody – welcome back! A couple of weeks back, Nicolas Santarelli asked about my recollections of working on the Birthright Campaign Setting. I went and broke out an old BRCS box to remind myself of what the world was all about; it’s been a few years, after all. So this week I’m going to take walk down memory lane with the Birthright Campaign Setting, reflect briefly on campaign “gaffes,” and pay homage to teriyaki.

First, a funny story about the Birthright Campaign Setting. The designers and editors were asked to brainstorm up some marketing taglines. We kicked around dozens of possibilities. One that kept coming up was “Blood and Honor,” which seemed okay—the setting was about characters with heroic bloodlines, ruling honorably. But something sounded familiar about that. I thought hard about it, and realized that there was a reason it sounded familiar: Blut und Ehre was a slogan of the SS Hitler Youth. I suggested to my colleagues that we probably didn’t want a Nazi motto for our marketing tagline, so we kept trying. We circled back around to Blood and Honor like four or five times, and each time I had to shout out, “No! Nazi slogan! Try again!”

Eventually, upper management grew tired of our efforts, and retained a Chicago marketing firm to create our motto for us. They came up with, “When greatness by right is thrust upon you, it is best to be ready.” I kid you not. I don’t recall the alternatives we came up with (other than Blood and Honor) but I know they were better than that! I mean, it doesn’t even make sense. Do you have greatness by right, or are you becoming great because greatness is being thrust upon you? Sigh. The real tragedy is that for those fourteen clumsy words, TSR paid more than they paid Colin McComb and I to write the whole damned setting over six months of work. No wonder they went out of business.

Gaming: Okay, so what do I think about the Birthright Campaign Setting fifteen years after publishing it? Well, I love the art and the maps. I like the human cultures that populate the continent, and I like the spooky and interesting takes on the elves and halflings. But the real point of retrospection is thinking about what you would have done differently, and of course when I look at something I worked on a long time ago, I want to go back and tinker. So what’s on my list?

First, I wish we’d actually stuffed the box with things the setting really needed instead of the mish-mash of poster maps, reference cards, battle cards, and a fold-up battle card storage unit. I didn’t really want all that clutter in the box, nor did Colin or Anne or Sue or Andria—all of us creative sorts felt that we were including things we didn’t need. But the orders from higher up were clear: Here are the components, use them all. It turned out that the cost of the goods of the product  was so high that there was no way it could ever make money, but that sort of information wasn’t shared with the creative types back at old TSR. Did I mention they eventually ran the company out of business?

In world design, I wish we’d left a little more open frontier on the map of Cerilia. While it’s pretty clear that low-rated provinces in the middle of nowhere are probably pretty lawless and open for development by anyone who comes along, the map seems to suggest much more firmly established borders. Maybe we could have come up with a graphic treatment to distinguish between the borders different realms *claim* and the borders they actually *control.* In retrospect, the classic D&D trope of clearing wilderness and becoming a minor noble would have worked well in the setting and could have been integrated better into the Domain rules.

In domain mechanics, I wish that wizards weren’t so concerned with unspoiled lands. It makes wizards into very druid-like figures, and I think that’s just a little bit off. Part of this arose out of the edition of D&D we were working with: In 2^nd Edition, druids were considered examples of specialty priests, not a full character class like the cleric. Had we done the same material in 3^rd Edition or 4^th Edition, we probably would have assigned the wizard’s mechanics for gathering regency to the druid. Interestingly enough, the power source notion described in 4^th Edition might have been a very powerful tool for organizing the system of holdings and regency points. In the 4e idiom, Primal characters would be the guys drawing power from sources and ley lines, and that just feels right.

That begs the question of what the wizard should have been doing instead. If I were to do it over again, I might get rid of permanent arcane holdings altogether. Instead, I’d tie the wizard’s ability to use the Realm Magic system to possession of “items of power”: a legendary spellbook, a mystic crystal, a demon prince’s heart, etc. They’re generally not portable, so the wizard’s holding really represents a fortress or lair in which the items of power are protected. Items of power might include things that aren’t even items per se, for example, a circle or guild of lesser mages, the patronage of a powerful extraplanar being, or a curse or prophecy. If you lose your item or items of power, you’re still a high-level wizard, you just lose access to Realm Magic.

Okay, and last but not least. Here’s what might be the most heretical thought for you Birthright fans out there: I think I would really downplay the idea of bloodlines and bloodline powers in a redo. “Your character is the king” was enough of a hook for the setting that we didn’t need to make those characters mystically better than ordinary people with extensive bloodline powers. That would also mean revisiting a number of the awnsheghlien: Too many of them are tragic figures because we got overly hung up on the notion of the bloodlines. And, unfortunately, other designers missed the mood of the setting and went for grotesque with the monstrous bloodlines. The Blood Enemies book really suffered for that reason, I think.

Overall... Sometimes less is more, and I feel that we succumbed to the temptation to “kitchen sink” the setting and included too many new things. I would like to go back, narrow the focus, and make it really sing with a great campaign narrative and a lot more support for the most difficult and innovative concept in the setting—running kingdoms while you’re playing your heroes.

Politics/Current Events: I’ve decided that I am not particularly shocked by Mitt Romney’s 47% remark. It’s probably something that he wishes he hadn’t said, but I just don’t think it’s any kind of game-changer in the presidential race. Answer honestly: Does the story change your intended vote? I’m guessing probably not. Most people are already pretty well settled on voting for Obama, or are equally determined to vote against him. Either way, the Romney kerfluffle isn’t making many people change their minds. There’s maybe a narrow band of say 5 to 10 percent of the voters in the middle who *might* still be in play for something like that, but in all honesty, Obama has said things that are nearly as bad—for example, his “bitter clingers” remark about guns and religion, his “spread the wealth around” comment to Joe the Plumber, or the recent audio that’s been airing in which he endorses the redistribution of wealth as a goal of government. All candidates tailor their remarks to the audience they’re speaking in front of, and say things in front of core donors that they wouldn’t necessarily say to the broader voting public. It ain’t news.

I’m amazed by how many times in the last couple of months the collected punditry of the country has decided to declare Obama the winner of the election. Romney’s tax returns were supposed to be the lethal blow, then the quiet Republican convention, then the rowdy Democrat convention, then the criticism of the administration’s Middle East policy, and now the 47 percent remark. That’s five times in the last ten weeks that liberal commentators have unanimously declared that NOW MITT ROMNEY CAN’T POSSIBLY WIN! I’ve got an idea: How about we just go ahead and hold the election anyway, and we’ll see?

The Finer Things: Teriyaki. A funny thing about the Pacific Northwest: You can’t walk one hundred yards in a straight line without bumping into a teriyaki shop (or a coffee stand, for that matter). I grew up on the Jersey shore, and there were a handful of Japanese restaurants around. Out here, teriyaki places are like sub shops in Jersey. Every shopping center has one, maybe two. You can put down maybe $6 or $7 and get a great chicken teriyaki almost anywhere out here. Someday we’ll probably find ourselves on the East Coast again, and when we do, am I going to miss a teriyaki place on every corner!

In case you’re wondering, Teriyaki 2 U has the best yakisoba; Ginger Teriyaki has the best katsu; and Ono Teriyaki up in Renton has a spicy chicken that is out of this world.

 

Getting Ganked, Awesome Saxophones

I love this time of year. The baseball pennant races are getting really interesting, college football comes on Saturdays, and the NFL’s on Sundays. The weeks between the start of football season and the end of the World Series are really the acme of my sports year… and I love the September and October weather, too. Out here in the Northwest our temperatures are diving into the 40s at night but warming up to the low 70s by day. There’s a lot to love about early fall!

By the way, my apologies for a late posting; it seems like getting back into the school routine for the kids just threw off my schedule for the last week or so. I’ll try to be more punctual next time!

Gaming: I’m playing a lot of EVE Online these days. EVE has been around for a while, of course, but I wanted to take a few weeks and really explore some of the gameplay, since it’s the gold standard of “sandbox” style play for a lot of people, and I wanted to educate myself a bit. There is a ton of room for self-directed play that I find really intriguing, but of course the downside is that any player is free to misbehave toward other players in almost any way they want; EVE is not for the faint of heart. Naturally, I’ve been ganked a couple of times, once with such outright malice that I almost quit the game right there.

In case you don’t know, to “gank” someone is to kill them in PvP combat. Because EVE is a sandbox, there’s nothing to stop stronger/better equipped players from blasting noobs into space-dust except for the fact that NPC guards may intervene in high-security areas. Anyway, in my really savage ganking, I’d been playing a few weeks, and I’d worked my way up to Cruiser size ships. I took a huge hunk of my money and bought myself a shiny new cruiser, lovingly outfitting it with everything I wanted. On my new ship’s maiden voyage, I set out to try it in an easy little NPC mission… but as I was on my way to the mission locale, I received a chat request from another player.

“Hey, can you help me out?” Zander Killer asks me.

Maybe the name should have been my first clue, but whatever.I hadn’t socialized with other players at all at that point, and I really wanted to see how it worked. Plus, I want to be a good citizen and help where I can. “Um, sure,” I reply. “What do you need?”

“I need some help testing out my new tanking fitting. Can you put some fire on me so I can see how it works?”

Okay, that sounded just a wee bit dodgy; I really didn’t want to shoot at another player for any reason. But I was still pretty new to the game, and I could certainly understand the desire to test out a new ship design in a controlled environment where the provider of the firepower could stop and start at your request, or shoot at different ranges, or whatever. “Are you sure?” I asked.

“Oh, yeah, it’s no problem,” Zander Killer replied. “Just come on back to the station.”

“Okay, if you say so,” I replied, and went back to the vicinity of the station. There were a surprising number of wrecks floating right by the station, which perhaps should have been another clue. But I hardly knew what a wreck was at that point in my Eve career.

“Now drop a can,” Zander Killer replied.

“Drop a can?” I asked. Did I say I was pretty new to the game? It turns out that in order to exchange fire with another player in a high-security system, you have to have a reason to shoot at him, or vice versa. Stealing cargo is a casus belli that the game’s NPC peacekeepers recognize and stand back from, as is self-defense. So, get someone to pick up a cargo container you jettison, and you can shoot at that guy. And once you’re shot at, you can of course shoot back. Zander Killer patiently explained all this to me, and then instructed me in how I could jettison a bit of cargo, which I didn’t know how to do.

“Okay, I guess I’m ready,” I said.

“Me too,” said Zander Killer. “Go ahead and shoot!”

So, I shot. I noticed my cruiser guns hardly scratched Zander Killer’s shields. And I noticed that Zander Killer was in a really big ship, too—a battlecruiser at least, maybe even a battleship. “All right,” I told him. “I don’t think I can make a dent in your shields. Your ship is pretty solid.”

At that point, Zander Killer opened up on me. In about three seconds of firing he dropped my shields, peeled every ounce of armor off my brand new shiny cruiser, and whacked down through half of my structure points.

“Hey, be careful there!” I told him. “Your ship is REALLY solid.”

“Give me 10 million credits or I’ll kill you,” Zander Killer replied.

“Wait, what?” I sputtered.

“10 million credits. You’ve got 10 seconds.”

I stared at my screen in dismay. I only had 7 million credits to my name after building that brand new shiny cruiser. I tried to find the button on my screen that would let me warp out of there, or go back into the station, or at least die with my boots on, shooting back for all I was worth. But really, the betrayal was complete: I was so stunned that I couldn’t do anything but stare in dismay.

“Asshat!” I finally managed to reply.

“3… 2… 1… bye!” And Zander Killer atomized my brand new shiny cruiser on its maiden voyage, before I’d done anything else with it but leave the damned station. I jumped up from my computer, stomped around the room, and swore like a sailor. My family was quite entertained.

Fortunately, the cruiser was insured. But I lost about two-thirds of my wealth in one exchange of fire. Afterwards, I got to thinking about it, trying to figure out why I was so angry that I would’ve shot the man in the kneecap if he’d been in the room with me at that moment. I knew that EVE was an open PvP environment, and that you could be killed at any time by another player. In fact, I’d lost a couple of little ships that way already, with only minor irritation. My previous demises had been pretty impersonal, just players with bigger ships stepping on me when I was a long way out in the wilds, not even a word of greeting first. Tough, but that’s the environment; I knew I was in risky spots both times.

I realized the two things that really pissed me off about the Zander Killer incident were that, first, I’d lost a sexy new ship before I had a chance to do anything at all with it, and more importantly, Zander Killer had gone out of his way to betray and murder a noob who was trying to be a Good Samaritan. That’s not just playing hard—that is sociopathic. To do something like that, you have to enjoy asking for someone’s help, winning their trust, patiently explaining to them the steps they need to take, and then deliberately kneeing them in the balls when they think they’re helping you out. I don’t know who Zander Killer is, but wherever that dude is, he needs to be locked up. That is just vicious.

Anyway, I got over my initial impulse to quit the game then and there, and I’ve been having fun playing it since. I’ve heard for years that the EVE community is filled with real charmers, and I received a nasty object lesson. I watch other players now like they’re rattlesnakes, and I check and see if someone’s a total outlaw or not when they’re in my vicinity. I don’t have any real impulse to pay Zander Killer back by going and ganking some other poor noob myself, but I hope that someday I might get good enough at the game to be a pretty serious hunter of outlaws like him.

Oh, and one more thing: I can’t offer anything like the nine-figure bounties that real reprobates in EVE seem to command, and I’m going to have to play the game for months and months to afford a ship that could beat Zander Killer. So, I’ll crowdsource this: If you send me a screen shot of Zander Killer’s capsule exploding or the smoking wreck of his ship, I will commend you as a hero to the worldwide gaming audience and celebrate your achievement here in my blog with a paean to your triumph.

Chalk it down as a learning experience.

Politics/Current Events: Eh, I’ll leave this be this time around. I have a couple of axes to grind, but I’m already worked up about the Zander Killer thing and I don’t need to spin any more wheels today.

The Finer Things: Awesome saxophone solos. There is a short but incredible sax solo in Steely Dan’s “Dr. Wu” that I regard as the gold standard of sax solos; stop what you’re doing right now and go listen to it if you don’t know the song. The solo is played by a fellow named Phil Woods, who also played the great sax for Billy Joel’s “Just the Way You Are.” Gerry Rafferty’s “Baker Street” has a beautiful sax through the whole darned song (the work of Raphael Ravenscroft). And of course many, many Bruce Springsteen songs feature the work of the Big Man, Clarence Clemons—I really like the solos in “She’s the One,” “Born to Run,” and “Rosalita” (not quite a solo, but still fantastic). Just thinking about ‘em makes my brain happy.

Fantasy Football, Naval Gunnery, NASA

Greetings! Time for another trip through what’s on my mind these days. These days it’s back to school time for the kids, shopping around for insurance, and finishing up the first draft of my first non-WotC novel. Hopefully I’ll something interesting to report on that front in a few more weeks—we’ll see!

I’m participating in my first Fantasy Football league this year. I’ve played Roto baseball for years and years, but this is my first foray into a new sport. I drew draft position #9 in a 10-player league, which sort of bummed me out a little. But we used a snaking draft, so at least I got picks 9 and 12 out of the first 20, then picks 29 and 32, and so on. I figured out the clever ploy of trying to start a “run” with my second pick in any pair, trying to lessen the pain of that long eighteen picks between my selections. I’m proud to say I managed to start runs on tight ends and defenses—there’s nothing like watching four or five of those picks follow *after* I just made one.

Long and short of it: The Fightin’ Geoducks wound up with Matthew Stafford and Darren McFaddon as my first two picks. Victor Cruz is my top receiver, and I indulged in a couple of “homer” picks with the Eagles defense and receiver Jeremy Maclin. I think I did pretty good overall, although I don’t like my receivers all that much. We’ll see how it goes!

Gaming: I’ve been thinking a little more about Richard Baker’s Naval Game, and what I would do different from Axis & Allies Naval Miniatures. I’m not serious about this quite yet, but I thought I’d share a couple of thoughts about a gunnery system, since I know a few of you War at Sea types follow my blog and might enjoy it.

The AANM system rolls fire volume, accuracy, and armor penetration all together into an overall “effectiveness of fire” roll. That’s pretty simple, but it means that the only real knob you can turn to differentiate between attacks is to give them more or less dice—and increasing the attack dice from Unit A and Unit B might mean that you’re trying to model a ship with more gun barrels, or more accurate guns, or bigger guns with better armor penetration. It doesn’t really let you deal with historical subtleties such as the difficulty 8” heavy cruisers had hitting destroyers, or the fact that a ship mounting fifteen 6” guns didn’t have any advantage in armor penetration over a ship mounting six 6” guns. It would be satisfying to gearheads like me to improve the simulation value of the game by creating a system that accommodated those subtleties. That suggests separating the tests of accuracy and hitting power, and then further differentiating between 4-gun broadsides and 12-gun broadsides of otherwise similar guns.

So, here’s a straightforward way to approach gunnery:

-        Volume of fire is represented by the number of dice you roll

-        Accuracy of attack and difficulty of hitting the target are measured by your hit chance on each die

-        If you score a hit, you test the hitting power of the gun against the armor of the target

 

Putting a large number of shells in the air should generate more hit chances than a lower number of shells, so reflecting that by rolling more individual attack dice seems like a good start. Some ratio of number of barrels to attack dice would make sense; if Montana threw twice as many attack dice with its 12-gun broadside as Repulse with its 6-gun broadside, that would be intuitive. I don’t think you would want 1 die per barrel, simply because the Boise’s 15-gun broadside is pretty ridiculous at that point, but maybe it would be okay. This approach also lets us model arcs of fire and the advantage of “crossing the T” quite nicely—a ship’s guns don’t become individually less accurate or lose armor penetration when only a few of them bear on a target.

In a perfect world, we’d also roll rate of fire into that fire volume measurement. The Iowa could fire about eighteen 16” rounds per minute, but the Fletcher could fire about a hundred and twenty 5” rounds. Presumably the Fletcher should roll five times as many attack dice as the Iowa to reflect that… but I suspect it wouldn’t be fun to roll buckets of dice for little individual effect. For now, let’s set rate of fire aside, and tell ourselves that we might use a “Low, Average, High ROF” modification of some sort that isn’t a pure mathematical conversion.

Attack accuracy is your chance for any particular attack die to score a hit. There should be two basic measurements here: How accurate the gun is, and how hard to hit the target is. My idea for handling this is pretty simple: Your gun provides you X chances to score a hit, and the target provides you Y chances to score a hit. Add X and Y, and you get a target number for your attack. For example, let’s say a destroyer is target size 1 and a battleship is target size 5. Shoot at the destroyer with an accuracy 2 gun, and you have 3 hit numbers; shoot at the battleship, and you have 7 hit numbers. The die size could be anything we want—a d10 would bias the system toward rapid resolution of gunnery duels, but a d100 would probably be more historically accurate. Let’s say d20 for now, and just see how that works out.

I prefer to encourage people to roll high in games, so we’d actually flip the numbers around: We’d want to create a LOW target number and call it a hit when you roll that number or higher. So we’d rate guns for INACCURACY on a 5 to 10 scale, and targets for EVASIVENESS on a 5 to 10 scale. In this world, a highly accurate gun is a 5, and an easy target is a 5. So shooting at a battleship might be 5 and 5, creating a target number of 10—any roll of 10 or better on a d20 is a hit. Shooting a destroyer with an inaccurate gun might be 10 and 10, creating a target number of 20—you only hit on a roll of 20 on a d20.

Accuracy should drop off with range, so we could probably use a global rule like “–1 penalty to attack rolls number per hex of range,” and it would be pretty reasonable. You could even create “spotting in” systems that give you a “+1 bonus to attack rolls per turn of firing on the same target.”

All right, so we know how to reflect volume of fire and attack accuracy. Each attack die will generate a miss or a hit. Misses we ignore, of course. But each hit can now be tested for its effect on the target. This is where a destroyer gun generally fails against a battleship—it might be comparatively easy to put 5” shells on the target, but they just won’t do much to it. Likewise, one battleship-caliber hit might be enough to wreck a destroyer. Off the top of my head, I think you could something as simple as a damage roll compared to target armor. A destroyer might have a damage roll of 1d4 and an Armor of 2, a battleship might be 4d6 and Armor 10. Damage rolls that are less than the target Armor are ignored. Damage rolls equal to target Armor or higher do “1 box” of damage. Damage rolls that greatly exceed target Armor might do “more than 1 box” of damage, or even have a chance to sink the target outright (the Bismarck vs. the Hood scenario).

I’d like to rate ships for Side Armor and Deck Armor, while we’re at it, and have long-range attacks (and aircraft bombs!) compared to Deck Armor instead of Side Armor. American heavy guns excelled in plunging fire penetration; German and Italian guns tended to be high-velocity and did well in close-range Side penetration. That might be covered with a couple of Special Abilities, like “Heavy Shells, +2 damage at range X and higher” or “Hi-Velocity Guns, +2 damage at range 1 or 2.”

Other than that, I’m afraid I don’t have much worked out in my head about ship durability and effects of damage. I’d like to figure out some way for a destroyer’s hit on a battleship to have a small chance to cause a surprisingly serious problem—say, starting a fire, knocking out a secondary battery, causing a power outage, or something along those lines. It didn’t happen often historically, but it did happen. Maybe I’ll put on my thinking cap and ponder that until my next blog entry.

Politics/Current Events: Neil Armstrong’s passing should serve as a wake-up call for America about the state of our manned space program. It’s not that hard to imagine in 2012 that we might eventually come to the day when there are no living human beings left who walked on the Moon. In 1972, that notion would have been completely unthinkable. NASA has been absolutely floundering for almost twenty years now. We don’t even have the ability to put a man in orbit now, nor are we likely to be able to any time in the next ten years or so. That is absolutely RIDICULOUS. It is a staggering failure of leadership and vision.

NASA’s current budget is about $17 billion per year. Here are a few things the government spends more money on than our space program: The Department of Agriculture gets $27 billion a year, the Department of Housing and Urban Development gets $49.8 billion, and the Department of Education gets $78.9 billion. (Why do we even have a federal Department of Education? ) And that’s not even looking at the immense spending of the Department of Defense (over $737 billion), Medicare ($500 billion), Social Security ($767 billion), or simple interest ($261 billion). How hard would it be to triple NASA’s budget and shave $10 billion apiece off three other agencies or functions? And wouldn’t it be worthwhile to do so?

Make me dictator for a day, and I promise you this: A new orbiter in 5 years, and a return to the Moon in 10 years. The cost is chump change compared to the other things we spend money on.  

The Finer Things: Elvis Costello. I’ve been listening to a lot of his older stuff in the last few days (Punch the Clock, King of America, The Best of Elvis Costello and the Attractions). Man, he was a great songwriter back in the day, and I loved the mellow jazz/crooner groove he got into with Burt Bacharach about ten years ago.

Three Games I Want to See

Welcome back! Not much new to report as far as professional updates: I already told you all about Prince of Ravens last month. My next publication is going to be in Thornkeep, a Paizo sourcebook created for the Pathfinder Online kickstarter. It’s a good bit of town-building with a hundred great adventure ideas built into the place; keep your eyes peeled!

I’ve also recently done some work with The Sundering, the big Forgotten Realms story event announced at GenCon this year. I’m afraid I can’t say much about my part in the Sundering, since my contribution hasn’t been announced yet. But I think it’s some pretty interesting stuff, and I pulled in a ton of old Realmslore to piece it all together.

Gaming: One of my favorite distractions to engage in is the “What game would I create if I could do anything I wanted?” I have this idea that if I ever win the lottery, I’ll establish a little gaming company that has no particular purpose other than to do things I’m interested in, and provide me with a dozen or so hours of great gaming every week. We’d print a couple of games a year, and to hell with whether they make money or not—remember, in this scenario I’m already rich because I won the lottery. Anyway, here are three things I’d like to do, Just Because.

7^th Fleet 2013: I’m a huge fan of Victory Games’ old “Fleet” titles – 2^nd Fleet, 6^th Fleet, etc. Speaking as a former naval officer, they had pretty high sim value. And speaking as a fan of strategy games, they had some really elegant mechanics for organizing the game turn, handling formation defense, and dealing with detection as a critical part of modern naval warfare. Well, the bad news is that all of those games were focused on the Soviet Union as the primary adversary, and the most recent of them is now close to 20 years out of date. So what I want to see is an updated 7^th Fleet that zeroes in on East Asia—the South China Sea, the East China Sea, the Korean peninsula—and takes a serious hard look at China’s navy and all the new assets for the USN, the PLAN, and Japan’s MDF. Believe it or not, I don’t think this would be that hard to do; the basic game engine is fine, all you need to do is work up a new map, produce a new order of battle, stat out some new units, and think up some interesting scenarios.

War at Sea 1914: I’m also a big fan of the old Avalon Hill titles War at Sea and Victory in the Pacific. I’d love to work up a strategic game based on that engine to cover the confrontation of the Triple Entente and Central Powers navies. I think it would be a blast to play for control of the North Sea, the Dardanelles, the Baltic, and the Adriatic. It would be especially interesting if some events like Italian belligerence were not a given; the Austrian fleet looks a lot tougher if the Italians aren’t involved. A few blog posts back, I speculated about good task force rules for Victory in the Pacific; it would be pretty cool to put ‘em in play here. Not being guaranteed of bringing your whole line of battle into play would make the North Sea standoff a lot more interesting. Again, the game engine is there: All you have to do is figure out the order of battle and provide very simple stats for a whole lot of dreadnoughts.

A Coherent Campaign Setting: One of my big regrets about my time with TSR and Wizards of the Coast is that the company abandoned the idea of creating new worlds. On the very rare occasions when new worlds were created, there was so much riding on the concept that creatively we felt obligated to try to include something for everybody. It’s sort of pre-kitchen-sinking your setting, and I think it really dilutes the clarity and usability of the work. Someday I’m going to sit down and write up a campaign setting that stays on message and delivers the hell out of a single design vision. Worlds like Al-Qadim, Dark Sun, and Planescape did that; some other worlds don’t. I often argued that Wizards of the Coast ought to publish a decent, middle-of-the-fairway standard medieval fantasy world again, just to see if people were interested in seeing new iterations of that sort of idea. But I never could talk ‘em into it.

Anyway, there are three games I want to do someday. I’ve got a few more on the list, but those are the ones I occasionally design in my head when I’m stuck in traffic or walking the dog.

Politics/Current Events: I had an interesting conversation with my wife and daughters the other day. Here’s the lead-in: Are the Boy Scouts of America a hate group because they exclude gays? There are a lot of people who would unequivocally answer that question “Yes.” I’m not so sure. I think in America we seem to be forgetting what REAL hate groups look like, and what sorts of things they do. Are Boy Scout troops hiding in alleyways, waiting to lynch gays? Are they burning down gay-owned businesses? Are they burning crosses on the lawns of gays’ homes? That’s what real hate looks like. If you throw around terms like “hate group” or “racist” and use them on everybody you disagree with, you dilute the meaning of the words. To put it another way: When everyone is a hate group, no one is a hate group.

I think the Boy Scouts are more wrong than right, since I don’t think anyone should be worked up about gays in 21^st century America. But they’re a private organization, and I wouldn’t call them a hate group just because they don’t hold the opinion I do.

The Finer Things: I’ve only watched a couple of episodes so far, but Longmire on A&E is a darned good television show. Robert Taylor plays the sheriff; other cast members include Lou Diamond Phillips and Katee Sackhoff (Starbuck from Battlestar Galactica).  I’ve always had a soft spot for Westerns; it’s nice to see a good crime drama with interesting characters set out west. Check out an episode or two, and see if you agree!

Empires of the Middle Ages, Romney's VP Pick

Hi, there! Sorry I’m a day late, but summers in the Northwest don’t last forever, and when you get a stretch of good weather, you don’t want to spend too much time banging away on the computer keyboard. Anyway, for this week’s posting on Atomic Dragon Battleship: A look at one of my favorite old games, and a brief thought or two about Paul Ryan.

Gaming: One of the benefits of working at a game company for a significant number of years was the pretty much ever-present availability of a lunchtime game. At TSR or WotC I could almost always count on being able to set up a game on a “safe” table somewhere in a little-used conference room or an out-of-the-way corner, and rounding up half a dozen of my coworkers to knock down big games that might require 10 or 20 hours of playtime one lunch-hour at a time. It’s a highly civilized habit that would improve many workplaces, I suspect. Anyway, one of our perennial favorites, a game we dusted off and played at least once a year or so, was the old SPI “Empires of the Middle Ages.”

“Empires” is interesting for a number of reasons. First, the mapboard was cleverly designed for its day and age (hexes were pretty much the standard in the mid-80s). Second, it’s a game that’s about managing decline and catastrophe. It’s very common for all the players to wind up in worse positions at the end of the game than they held at the beginning, because they’re constantly savaged by negative events such as Leader Dies Heirless, Epidemic, Outbreak of Heresy, and obnoxious NPCs called magnates who appear at random and attack everything around them. Finally, the basic resolution system is tilted toward stagnation; the average ruler taking an average action has something close to a 50% failure rate, so you spend many turns not getting anything done at all. With that description, you might wonder why anybody plays “Empires of the Middle Ages” at all. Well, there are a couple of reasons: The game is enough of an opponent that you don’t feel compelled to constantly screw with the other players, so in a way it’s an early peek at a cooperative us-against-the-AI game. Secondly, there is a wonderful dose of schadenfreude to be savored in watching your neighbor’s kingdoms fall into pieces, and plenty of gallows humor when you learn, over and over again, that things can always get worse.

The resolution system of “Empires” is pretty interesting: Your base effectiveness for any action is your leader’s personal stature, which can be 1, 2, 3, 5, or 9. Your leader is rated for Combat, Administration, and Diplomacy. You can take one of five basic actions each turn: Conquest, Pillage, Rule, Fortify, or Diplomacy. Each of those different actions is based on one of your leader stats. So if you want to conquer or pillage something, you’ll use your leader’s Combat status, but if you want to try ruling or fortifying a territory, you use Administration. You modify your active stat based on various conditions like the overall social state rating of the province (is it a wealthy little center of civilization, or a miserable forgotten backwater?) and things like language, religion, and other situational modifiers. Then you flip a Year Card and compare the result to your modified effectiveness. A typical result on the card might read something like “C 3+, -1 SS 5-“ which would mean you achieve a Conquest result if your effectiveness was 3 or better, and the area you launched the attack from takes a -1 hit on its Social State if your effectiveness was 5 or less. The card-based resolution system encodes a ton of information in a pretty efficient little presentation.

Anyway, the big lesson I learned about playing “Empires of the Middle Ages” over the years was simply this: Play to your strengths. If you have a 5-1-2 in Combat, Administration, Diplomacy, you should NEVER bother with taking actions that don’t use your combat stature, no matter how much you think the game situation calls for administering or diplomacy. The success chances are just miserable if you’re trying to do things with a value of 1 or 2 instead of 5, so you ride your best score as long as you can. I think that lesson might apply to a number of other board games—if you’re good at some particular type of action, you should do that over and over again and take what the game gives you.

One more note… the Decision Games version of “Empires” that appeared in 2004 isn’t quite the same game. The mapboard is more appealing, but it turns out that it’s easier to record province social state on a sliding track (as in the original game) than to keep hunting for the right social state chit over and over again. The new buildings introduced in their advanced rules are generally not balanced well, and the scenarios award them to some positions but not others with no VP handicap adjustment. Finally, the event deck is filled with minor leaders that almost never match up with the player who draws one. Pick up this version if you can’t find the original SPI game or if your SPI copy wears out, and be prepared to do some significant marking up to improve the play.

Politics/Current Events: I like Mitt Romney’s choice of Paul Ryan for vice president. Ryan is one of the most interesting politicians in the country for one simple reason: The man had the guts to say what he thinks needs to be done, and put it in writing. *Nobody* else has dared to provide a detailed plan of what they would do with tax rates and entitlements to improve the fiscal footing of the country—everyone else sticks to empty platitudes. You might think that Ryan is gravely mistaken about which steps are necessary, but at least you know what specific steps he’s proposing. Maybe, just maybe, we can actually have a serious conversation about the “third rail” issues like Medicare and Social Security in this election. Whether you think the Republicans are right or wrong, it’s clear to me that NOTHING can happen, one way or the other, until the conversation at least begins. Ryan’s budget is a place to start. Now I’d like to see what the Democrats’ counter-plan looks like, so we can compare and contrast. As voters, we should *insist* that the Democrats tell us what they would do differently from Ryan instead of simply telling us that his plan is wrong.

The Finer Things: Convertibles and sunny days. I went hiking with my friend Warren up at the Olympic National Park (the Staircase entrance, in the southeast corner), and we drove all the way back to Auburn with the top down on my Mustang. Pure automotive bliss.