Prince of Ravens, Obamacare, Boston

Hi, there! Thanks for stopping by. I know it’s been about three weeks or so, but I skipped my June 20^th post because we were entertaining my wife’s parents, who were visiting from out of state. We went up to Vancouver to pick them up as they returned from an Alaskan cruise, and then took them over to Victoria BC to spend a few days sightseeing and playing tourist. The unexpected gem of the trip for me was the amazing crossing from Vancouver to Victoria—the ferry route passes through the Gulf Islands, which are essentially the Canadian equivalent of Washington’s San Juan Islands. The scenery is nothing short of spectacular, and we even saw some orcas in one of the channels, although they were a good distance off.

Anyway, in this week’s edition of Atomic Dragon Battleship: Prince of Ravens, health care, and Boston.

Prince of Ravens: On July 3^rd, my latest Forgotten Realms novel goes on sale. Prince of Ravens will be available as an ebook at various online stores. Here are a couple of links to the book’s product pages on Amazon and Barnes and Noble:

http://www.amazon.com/Prince-Ravens-Forgotten-Realms-ebook/dp/B005UFN5SO

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/prince-of-ravens-richard-baker/1106578782?ean=9780786961313&cm_mmc=AFFILIATES-_-Linkshare-_-TYYL2aZFZn0-_-15%3a9780786961313&

Prince of Ravens returns to the story of Jack Ravenwild, one of my most well-loved characters. Jack debuted in my 2000 novel City of Ravens; he’s part Gray Mouser, part Cugel the Clever, and part Fletch. He’s ambitious and greedy, but too lazy to try to get ahead though anything resembling hard honest work; the world owes him a life of luxury and comfort, or so Jack feels. He’s always on the lookout for his next big chance, especially if it offers the opportunity to get rich quick, and just can’t say no to the next scheme that presents itself. Of course, it’s Jack’s peculiar misfortune to find himself in the middle of situations where he needs to act like a hero.

In Prince of Ravens, Jack awakes in the Underdark after a hundred years of magical imprisonment. Unfortunately, he wakes up in the power of a drow noble family who now hold the Underdark beneath the city of Ravens Bluff. He has no idea who imprisoned him or why, and the drow of course prove quite capable of seeing through his bluffs, schemes, and deceits. Things have changed in Ravens Bluff, but Jack is soon embroiled in a whole nest of plots and schemes again—the pursuit of a rich noble’s daughter, the return of a dangerous old foe, the mystery of his magical imprisonment, and of course, the threat posed to the city by the drow realm a mile below the streets. Misadventure ensues!

One more thing I’ll add that I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned before… if you get a hold of the old City of Ravens, make sure you look for the Easter eggs. There are dozens in the book. Here are just a few:

·        The Dread Delgath, the name Jack adopts when he joins the Wizard Guild, is of course one of the pregenerated PCs appearing in the back of the old modules A1 through A4.

·        Jack shouts “Take that, you fiend!” when he hits his double with a magic missile. TTYF is a spell from the old Tunnels & Trolls game.

·        When Iphegor’s familiar challenges Jack in the necromancer’s library, he says, “Here now, who are you?” – the same line spoken by the troll’s purse in The Hobbit.

·        The Orb of Khundrukar is named after Khundrukar, the dwarven fortress in Forge of Fury.

Anyway, check out the new Prince of Ravens. It’s a good read, with plenty of action and intrigue, and a good dose of humor as well. I hope you like it!

Politics/Current Events: Like just about everybody else in the country, I was eagerly awaiting the Supreme Court’s decision on the Affordable Care Act, AKA Obamacare. I found Thursday’s verdict disappointing, because I felt pretty sure that the mandate was not constitutional and I think that the law is a big stinking mess of exemptions, influence-peddling, and impossibly unfunded promises. But, that said, I am satisfied that the constitutionality question has been put to rest. The Supreme Court has put Congress on notice that they can’t disguise a tax by calling it a mandate, and that is a reasonable position to take. Everybody on the planet could see that the authors of the legislation were disingenuous in the extreme as they tried to hide the fact that they were passing a tax measure to make the legislation work; I doubt that the ACA would have passed if they’d been honest about that.

It’s also noteworthy that the Roberts opinion firmly upholds the decision on the basis of Congress’s tax authority, not the Commerce Clause. Some conservative commentators have been citing this as a hidden victory in the decision. I feel that they’re looking for the silver lining with that line of reasoning, and I’m not at all convinced that future iterations of the Supreme Court will give the Roberts opinion all that much deference. The Supreme Court has certainly dispensed with precedent before when it’s in one of its more political phases. But this should inform decisions for the next 20 or 30 years, and that’s a good start.

While I think the law is now constitutional enough to stand, it’s still a terrible piece of legislation and desperately needs to be repaired. It’s not going to do a thing to contain health care expenses or “bend the curve” as the President promised. It’s going to add hundreds of billions of dollars of domestic spending to our overstretched budget every year. And it is inherently partisan and unfair, because hundreds of industries and special classifications—most Democrat influence groups—have been singled out for exemptions from its requirements. Passing laws that some people have to abide by and other people don’t isn’t the way to address our national health care challenges.

One final thought about Obamacare: Watch out for the challenge on the HHS contraception and abortion services directive. There’s another day in court coming on this bill, and I wouldn’t be surprised if a different ruling came down from the high court next time.

The Finer Things: Boston, as in the band, not the city. Was there ever a better debut album than Boston’s first record? I had one of those truly excellent parental moments the other day when my daughter Hannah and I were driving up to Fatburger to grab a couple of burgers. “Foreplay/Long Time” came on the radio. Hannah’s 14 now, and of course she’s into various pop music, but every now and then I get a chance to expose her to the classics. Anyway, I pointed out the great little acoustic guitar breaks in “Long Time,” and told her to get ready for a serious dose of awesomeness, right about… now, when that third break hits but it’s the electric guitar, not the acoustic. Hannah just grinned in delight and said, “All right, Dad, that was pretty awesome.” It give me hope for her generation, maybe they’re salvageable still.

Multiplayer games, Wisconsin, Seattle spring

Hi, thanks for stopping by!

I took some time earlier this week to guest-post in the Pathfinder Online blog about my work on the village of Thornkeep, part of the Pathfinder Online setting. If you’re curious, you can find my post here:

https://goblinworks.com/blog/

I have a couple of other projects keeping me busy these days, but nothing else I can really talk about yet. Keep your eyes peeled for Prince of Ravens, my upcoming e-book; next time I post I’ll make sure I provide some good links or pointers to places where you can find it.

Oh, and no blog entry next week: We’ve got family visiting from the East Coast. So don’t expect me back here until June 30^th or so with a good long look at what’s next in Jack Ravenwild’s life.

Gaming: I’ve long held the opinion that multiplayer games without preset sides are a uniquely difficult social dynamic for many people. Games like Risk, Diplomacy, Kingmaker, Empires of the Middle Ages, or Twilight Imperium all present the player with a viciously hard decision right at the very beginning: Who are you going to screw over? That’s bad enough, because you often don’t really know what the right answer is when you make a decision that affects the rest of the game. But, even worse, there’s a metagame element to it too. When you decide to stop Joe from grabbing North America right at the start of a Risk game, maybe he shrugs it off as part of the game—or maybe he nurses a grudge against you all week. Be honest now: You’ve played Risk with Joe, haven’t you? Everybody has at one point or another.

That wicked social dynamic is the reason why I’ve always enjoyed the Axis & Allies boardgames. Only the most absolutely unreasonable Joe will hold a grudge if he’s playing Russia and Germany attacks him. The game’s preset alliances provide a fig leaf of decency to that first punch in the nose. There’s no opportunity for betrayal, or even perceived fictional betrayals, when your adversaries have to announce themselves up front. It’s why I designed Conquest of Nerath to work as a faction game as well as a free-for-all game.

I think that many game designers really overlook that tough social dynamic when building free-for-all games, and count on players to self-regulate in cooperating against the frontrunner or manage the endgame. If we’re all confident, mature, thick-skinned gamers, sure, that works. But we’re not—we don’t want to pick fights, we get angry when people pick on us, we hold grudges. I sometimes wonder if games like Risk would be better if it included a spinner with the different player-piece colors marked on it, just to help out those folks who can’t stand to make friends sore at them. I bet the psychology of being able to point to the spinner and say, “Dude, I’m sorry, but the spinner says I gotta attack you” would prevent a surprising amount of arguments and bruised friendships.

Back when I was first starting out in the game design biz, I had the good fortune to work with veteran TSR designer Bruce Nesmith. Bruce had a great insight about multiplayer, free-for-all games that has served me well for years: Every time you sit down to play, pick one person at the table to be your ally, and one to be your enemy. Never do anything to screw your ally (unless of course he breaks the alliance first), and never cut your enemy a break. Don’t let fleeting opportunities or setbacks change your allegiances. If you have a hard time choosing sides in free-for-all games, give this a try!

Politics/Current Events: A few months ago I wrote about the upcoming Wisconsin recall election, and why I thought it was important. As you might imagine, I was gratified to see that Walker survived his recall. Some of my Wisconsin friends have now moved on to a “well, Walker’s a criminal who is about to be indicted” argument. I really can’t speak to that, since I’m not familiar with the accusations. But I find that I’m just a little dubious about the latest calls for Walker’s head after the string of Democrat efforts to stop him at any cost. Busing out-of-state protestors into Madison, death threats against Republican legislators, Democrat legislators fleeing to Illinois to deny a quorum, the full-court press to elect a more favorable State Supreme Court and the ridiculous accusations of assault against judge David Prosser when that failed, the endless Hitler comparisons, and of course the effort to recall just about every potentially vulnerable Republican in state government… sorry, somewhere along the way you lost me.

At the end of the day, the single most illuminating element of this debate might be what the public-sector union employees have done with their money since Wisconsin law stopped auto-deducting union dues out of their paychecks. Membership in AFSCME dropped from 63,000 in March 2011 to 28,700 a year later. In other words, half the union members chose to keep the money that formerly had to go to union coffers. Think about that for a moment: First of all, didn’t these former union members *gain* the right to *not* participate in a union if they didn’t want to? Isn’t that a valuable worker’s right, too? And secondly, the old system took money from taxpayers of all parties and (through public sector employee salaries) paid it to unions, who then of course donated overwhelmingly to the Democratic party. Somehow it just seems wrong to force folks to make campaign contributions to people they disagree with. How is that not an infringement on their freedom of speech?

I don’t have a problem with unions in the private sector. There is no doubt that they won many important improvements in working conditions that all Americans benefit from today. But a union in the private sector has to exist in a symbiosis with the company its workers are employed by. If you drive your employer out of business with your demands, everybody loses, so you don’t do that. The difficulty with a public sector union is that it has the ability to elect the people it will negotiate with, and that it has no fear of putting the government out of business. Who exactly is looking out for the taxpayers’ interests when AFSCME or SEIU sits down across the table from Democrat politicians they helped to elect?

The Finer Things: One thing I’ve come to look forward to each year in the Northwest is the stately progression of one thing after another playing the starring role in the spring. First it’s the cherry trees with their beautiful pink blossoms, then the dogwoods with their more modest white ones. Then we get a week or two of cottonwood blizzards, with the air full of drifting fluff. After that the rhododendrons bloom in an outrageous variety of colors with blossoms the size of bowling balls. And somewhere in there the scotch broom, a dry and scraggly weed for most of the year, covers itself in tiny bell-shaped flowers like dabs of bright yellow butter, and suddenly every hillside you can see has turned gold. I never considered myself much of a gardener, but I have to say that every year I’m just a little more impressed by the show.

Conquest of Nerath, A Bad Week in Seattle

Hello, everybody! Welcome back to another issue of Atomic Dragon Battleship.

Sorry for a tardy posting this time around. I’m up against a deadline on Monday (the Thornkeep book for the friendly folks at Paizo/Goblinworks), so I’ve been burning the candle at both ends to get that design done on time while keeping up with my current novel. I’ll try to get back on schedule next time.

Gaming: I just learned that my conquer-the-world boardgame Conquest of Nerath won the Origins award for best boardgame of 2011. I’ve been fortunate enough to win a handful of Origins awards over my professional career, but this is one I’ll especially prize. In the first place, Conquest of Nerath was something of a labor of love that went seven years between design and publication. Secondly, it’s likely the last Origins I’ll win in the colors of Wizards of the Coast, so it’s one more marker of change in my career. I won my first Origins in 1994 for the Birthright Campaign Setting, and with the callowness of youth I assumed I’d knock one down every year or so. Turns out they don’t come around as often as you might think.

I’m pretty happy with the way Conquest of Nerath turned out. It’s a fun strategy game with good replayability and a solid balance of deterministic elements and randomness. Pete Lee, the lead developer of the game, did a great job of working through the piece balance and card balance. A year or so ago, Pete and I sat down with Rodney Thompson and Jeremy Crawford and played the heck out of the just-printed game for a month and a half of lunchtimes, running through multiple games in different positions, and we were pretty happy with how it turned out. I wish we’d set the game in Krynn or Faerun, but as it turned out we generated some pretty good story content for the Nentir Vale world when we built the map.

If there’s one mechanic I’d change for the game, it’s dragons. We were all over the place in development and playtesting for the cost of the dragon and the exact lineup of its special abilities. (At one point, dragons cost 7 gold each.) But in the real world with thousands of people playing the game, dragons turned out to be too good. It’s hard to see why you don’t just build a stack of 4 or 5 dragons and use that as your army. So, here’s my simple recommendation: You can’t ever have more than 1 dragon of your color in the same space. Dragons are extremely suspicious and paranoid toward their own kind, and never willingly cooperate with each other. If for some reason you end your turn with 2 or more dragons in the same space, they fight until only 1 is left.

The dragon “problem” really isn’t a problem until you have multiple dragons in the same space and multiple hits you can negate. This rule patches that nicely without nerfing the value of an individual dragon in your army. Anyway, if you play Conquest of Nerath and dragons are a problem, try this as a houserule.

Politics/Current Events: This has been a rough week in Seattle. I’m sure most of you have heard about the coffee shop shooting. You may not know that the shooter carjacked a woman a few blocks from the scene and killed her, too. There was also a shooting at the Folk Life Festival in the Seattle Center last weekend (fortunately, not lethal). And on Thursday night there was a shooting right here in my hometown—a 13-year-old boy was killed in his apartment not half a mile from my house.

Most  of the time when you hear about a shooting in the city you live in (or near), you don’t have any connection to it. But this week the six degrees of separation wore thin for my family. My oldest daughter was at the Seattle Center on a school trip when the Folk Life Festival shooting occurred; they hurriedly evacuated the area. My wife’s officemate knew one of the people who had managed to escape the coffee shop, and the mother of my younger daughter’s best friend was close enough to the carjacking scene to hear the shots. And, finally, the boy who was murdered here in Pacific was a good friend of my younger daughter. They were part of the same lunch table and shared many of the same interests. My youngest is shaken up, but seems okay; I don’t think it has really hit her yet. I know that I didn’t lose any close friends until I was in college, so I can’t imagine how I would have reacted at her age (middle school).

It’s impossible to make sense of the senseless, so I’m not going to try. At times like these the only answer I come up with is that God must surely value free will above all else, and allows people to do evil things because making them not happen would do even more harm. Anyway, this week I’m happy to hug my kids and thank God that we still had a degree or two of separation to spare.

The Finer Things: Game of Thrones. I’m finally taking the time to work my way through the series. I have a curious mental defect that makes me delay reading things in proportion to the number of people trying to convince me that I need to read them *now*, so I tend to be the last guy to get around to a popular series. Anyway, I’m halfway through A Clash of Kings now, and I’m really enjoying it. My only problem is that my wife is watching the HBO series, and I don’t dare watch any of the episodes with her.

Task Forces, Baseball

Hi, there – Thanks for stopping by!

Not much new to report that I haven’t mentioned before. I’m working on a novel, doing some design work for Paizo (the Thornkeep book for Goblinworks’ Pathfinder Online kickstarter), and tinkering around with a little consulting and light design work for some other folks. Oh, and my new ebook Prince of Ravens is getting closer to release: It should be out in early July. All of you Forgotten Realms fans who have been wanting another dose of Jack Ravenwild, this is your chance! Sorry about making you wait ten years between books.

Gaming: I’ve been noodling over bit of kit-bashing in the last few weeks. I mentioned a few blogs back that I’m a fan of the old Avalon Hill title Victory in the Pacific. It’s one of my old favorites, but the game does have a couple of things I don’t like. Most importantly, bringing a smaller force to a battle is just a savage beating, because every unit in the zone gets to attack. Secondly, there’s no rule to limit “ganging up” attacks. At the risk of complicating a simple game, here’s the mod I’ve been thinking about:

1.      Ships in a zone are grouped into Task Forces. A Task Force can have up to 10 ships. You can’t have more than 4 battleships in a TF. You can’t have more than 4 carriers in a TF.

2.      Before each combat round, number your Task Forces. If you have 2 TFs in the zone, one of them is TF 1, and the other is TF 2. You decide which is which.

3.      Each combat round begins with a Search Phase. You get to roll 1 search die for each TF you have in the zone, and 1 search die for each land-based air squadron. Add 1 search die for each previous round of searching you’ve performed.

4.      A search die “spots” the enemy Task Force equal to its roll. For example, if you roll three search dice and get 2, 3, 6, you spot enemy Task Forces 2, 3, and 6. If there isn’t an enemy TF to find in that slot, that search die whiffs.

5.      You always spot all of your enemy’s land-based air squadrons.

6.      TFs that aren’t spotted are Hidden. You can’t attack hidden TFs.

OK, so that organization and search process splits your giant armadas into smaller components. You might find some, all, or none of your enemy’s fleet. He might do the same to you. It’s bad news when you find none of your enemy fleet and he finds all of yours, but that’s war. Now here are the basic combat rules for task forces:

1.      Surprise Phase: Hidden TFs can *either* make air strikes against land-based air squadrons and spotted enemy TFs, *or* wait to attack spotted enemy TFs in Surface Combat. Damage you inflict now takes effect before other air strikes.

2.      Air Strike Phase: Spotted TFs and land-based air can attack any spotted enemy TFs or enemy land-based air squadrons with air strikes. Attacks in this phase are simultaneous (two carriers can sink each other). Damage you inflict now takes effect before surface combat.

3.      Surface Combat Phase: Hidden TFs *may* engage any spotted enemy TF in surface combat. Spotted TFs *must* engage spotted enemy TFs of matching number. In other words, if my TF 2 and your TF 2 are both spotted in the Search phase, they fight each other in fleet combat. Attacks in this phase are simultaneous (two battleships can sink each other).

In surface combat, you can’t assign two ships to attack one ship unless you’re attacking all other eligible ships. You can’t attack a carrier or amphib unless you can assign two attackers each to all other units in the TF you’re attacking. (However, carriers that use their gunnery factors lose this special consideration and are treated just like other ships.)

Each cycle of search-surprise-air-surface is one combat round. You can’t withdraw until at least one surprise attack, airstrike, or surface combat has occurred. Hidden groups that withdraw can’t be pursued.

This system is a simplification of the TF and search rules from Avalon Hill’s Rising Sun/GMT’s A World at War. I like it because it’s good simulation, it’s simple, and it’s a ton of fun in AWAW, but the idea seems like it could easily make combat in Victory in the Pacific a lot more interesting. With good search dice, a smaller force can sting a bigger force and slip away. In War at Sea or Victory in the Pacific, the “right” way to play is to keep your ships in gigantic stacks; this system says that you don’t often get to use all of your gigantic stack at the same time (certainly backed up by history).

I think there are a couple of other games that would benefit from similar house rules. For example, GDW’s old Imperium game or Federation and Empire likewise involve gigantic stacks of ships and punish you for not keeping your fleet in a gigantic stack. It would be pretty easy to mod out this system for either of those games.

Politics/Current Events: We’ve hit the interleague play portion of baseball’s 2012 schedule. While I enjoyed the novelty of interleague play when it first began in 1997, I find that I am not much of a fan of it these days. The simple reason is that the wild card ticket to the playoffs combines pretty poorly with the interleague schedule. Since you don’t play *every* other team in the other league, just a selection of “regional rivalries,” it’s possible for one team in League A to have an interleague schedule against distinctly stronger opponents than another team that might be competing for the same wild card slot. For example, the Phillies draw a bunch of strong AL East teams for their interleague schedule, while the Cardinals draw a bunch of weak AL Central teams. But when it comes time to figure out who’s going to be the wild card, well, a win’s a win. The Phils have a disadvantage on strength of schedule.

Now, if there wasn’t a wild card, no big deal—you get to the playoffs by winning your division, and you could set it up so that all the teams in a division had the same interleague schedule.

You can certainly argue that the wild card is bunged up already because some divisions are stronger than others, and teams play an unbalanced schedule where they get three times as many games against rivals in their own division as they do against teams outside the division. But a wild card based on a system where all contenders play the same teams would be an incremental improvement over the current situation.

Unfortunately, interleague play is about to get worse. Next year, the Houston Astros are moving from the NL to the AL. Well, that’s good for Dallas and Houston; that should be a fun rivalry between the Rangers and Astros. But two 15-team leagues means that interleague play’s going to have to happen all through the season, with all its inequities. It’s not going away anytime soon.

I really find myself longing for the days of two divisions in each league, with a one-round league championship, followed by the World Series. That was the format from 1969 through 1993, and there were some legendary playoffs through that time. Maybe I’m less sympathetic to giving the weaker teams a bit more hope because my Phillies have been at the top of the heap for four or five years now, or maybe I’m just remembering the Olden Days with a warm glow of nostalgia. But it seems like the postseason was just better back then, doesn’t it?

The Finer Things: Cold Stone Creamery. I dig the Coffee Lover’s Crunch and Peanut Butter Cup Perfection mixes. I only go in to a Cold Stone maybe two or three times a year, and it seems unfair that I have to pick one or the other.

Thornkeep, War at Sea short list, South China Sea

Hi, folks! Welcome back!

I guess the interesting news of the day about me is that I’m working with Paizo/Goblinworks to design Thornkeep, a sourcebook that will be available as an exclusive reward for pitching in on the Pathfinder Online Kickstarter. I’m delighted to have the chance to work with the great folks at Paizo, and I’m pretty proud of the design work I’ve done so far on Thornkeep. It’s a great little setting for a small campaign, with a hundred different adventure hooks and storylines for an enterprising DM to pick up and play with. The Goblinworks gang has some great ideas about Pathfinder Online, and I’m excited to see what comes next.

 

Gaming: This week, I thought I’d take a look at a handful of interesting ships and planes that haven’t yet made it into an Axis & Allies Naval Miniatures set. I couldn’t tell you if they will be included in a set 7, or when a set 7 might come out; they’re just some units I think might be good in the game. In no particular order, here they are: USS Texas, HMS Valiant, the BV-138, and the Krakowiak.

USS Texas is one of the “missing” US battleship classes, and more importantly, she’s a monument you can go visit today if you want. In fact, the impressive battleship guns pictured at the top of my blog page belong to USS Texas. While she didn’t take part in any naval battles, she participated in amphibious assaults and provided shore bombardment on several occasions: Point du Hoc on D-Day, Battery Hamburg at Cherbourg (a heavy shore battery of 9.4” guns), Iwo Jima, and Okinawa. Her battery of ten 14-inch guns would be pretty close to the main battery of the British King George V. Battery Silencer and Shore Bombardment would be pretty reasonable special abilities.

HMS Valiant is a sister ship of Warspite. The WW1-era Queen Elizabeths were all refitted in different ways in the 1930s, but Valiant’s profile came close enough to Warspite’s that you could use the same miniature to represent either ship. Valiant helped to inflict the single worst defeat the Regia Marina suffered at sea during the war: The sinking of three heavy cruisers at the Battle of Cape Matapan. Valiant could easily merit the Night Fighter special ability for her part in the battle. The British fleet could probably use a few more Night Fighters, since that was one of their key advantages over the Italians. They were probably the second-best in the world at night fighting after the Japanese, at least before the US Navy developed effective radars and radar doctrines in 1943.

The BV-138 is a long-overdue German flying boat. The Germans actually built more of the Bluhm and Voss patrol bombers than the more famous Kondors. As far as flying boats go, the BV-138 would probably be close to the PBY Catalina in size and armament, although apparently they never carried torpedoes. Like other flying boats, the BV 138 would gain Loiter, something the Germans don’t have yet. And it might also get some form of Defensive Armament, since it was reasonably well armed (although not a “porcupine” like the Sunderland or Emily). ASW Pinpointer might be a good fit, too.

Finally, Krakowiak is a British Hunt-class destroyer escort (Type 2) that was operated by the free Polish navy during the war. The Hunt class destroyers are one of the larger and more important ship classes not represented in the six existing War at Sea sets: The British built 86 of these guys, and a group of Hunts participated in some hard fighting in the English Channel against German torpedo boats right up to D-Day. The Hunt type 2 carried six 4-inch guns and could make 27 knots, so they were pretty capable for escort destroyers. Krakowiak amassed a sterling war record, steaming over 140,000 miles and escorting hundreds of convoys as well as participating in some of the fierce fighting in the Channel.

 

Politics/Current Events: A post or two back I took a look at the Falklands dispute and the worrisome tone of bellicosity creeping into the news from the South Atlantic. Well, there’s another trouble spot people ought to be paying some attention to: The South China Sea. This is the arm of the Pacific Ocean that lies between Vietnam, Borneo, the Philippines, and the southern coast of China. The South China Sea is trouble because there are a number of tiny islets and reefs more or less in the middle that are currently claimed by no less than six different countries: The People’s Republic of China, the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei, and Taiwan. These islands are spectacularly useless piles of sand, scrub, and coral, and no one would really care much about them except for the fact that all the nearby nations count on fishing in the South China Sea, and there may be extensive reserves of oil and natural gas in the area.

The dispute is really pretty fascinating, because it’s a mess. Vietnam says it owned the islands during its imperial days a few centuries back. The Philippines, Malaysia, and Brunei more or less base their claims on proximity—if you use the 200-mile limit in the Law of the Sea Treaty that most countries have signed, most of the islands would belong to those three countries. But the People’s Republic of China actually claims the entire damned sea, right up to the 12-mile limit of all adjoining countries. This is like saying you own every square inch of the cul-de-sac, and all your neighbors’ driveways right up to within a foot of their garage doors. Taiwan, not to be outdone, makes the exact same claim, because they view themselves as the historic heirs of the old Chinese republic’s claims. Accordingly, each of the involved countries currently has handfuls of soldiers standing on just about anything that isn’t covered at high tide (and a few things that are) occupying as much of the disputed areas as possible.

Right now, China and the Philippines are engaged in a standoff about a speck of rock called Scarborough Reef, which is 120 miles or so from Luzon and almost 500 miles from Hainan (China).  Mostly this is about fishing rights, but China hasn’t been shy about pointing out that their navy outnumbers the Philippine navy about 100 to 1, and that maybe they should “defend their sovereignty” with military action if the Filipinos can’t see things China’s way.

So why does this matter to the United States? The short answer is that we have a mutual defense treaty with the Philippines. There are rumblings of some weaseling about whether we would consider ourselves obligated to protect disputed territory, and it seems unlikely that we’d risk a shooting war with China to protect Philippine claims over tiny rocks a hundred miles from their shores. But it seems to me that we also ought to be thinking about the message we send if we *don’t* stick up for people who sign treaties with us. Maybe other countries in the area would strengthen their own ties and try to look out for each other… or maybe they’d give up and try to make the best deals they can with Beijing. The world’s a dangerous enough place already without China being rewarded for intimidation and brinksmanship.

 

The Finer Things: Wow, Avengers was a fun movie. If you’re any kind of comics geek, you have to see this. Now, DC, can you elevate your game a bit? Your Batman movies are pretty good, but I’d like to see a Justice League movie at some point, and your recent Superman and Green Lantern movies don’t inspire a lot of confidence.

A&A Pilot Skill, Cosmic Rays, Chicken Wings

Greetings! Welcome back for another edition of Atomic Dragon Battleship. Here’s your happy thought for the day: Only six more months of presidential campaigning and we’ll be all done for 2012! Anyway, on to this week’s look at gaming, current events, and whatever tickles my fancy.

Gaming: Here’s a rule for Axis & Allies Air Force Miniatures we explored but dropped in development: If your pilot quality is worse than the target you’re shooting at, you take a –1 penalty on each attack die. For example, let’s say that an average P-40 pilot is shooting at a Zeke veteran’s 4 o’clock. Normally the hit number is 5, but because the Zeke has a better pilot, that would bump up to 6. If the P-40 was diving on the Zeke and shooting, that would go back to a 5. If the Zeke was evading, back up to a 6. And so on.

I sort of liked the original draft of the rule, because I figured one of the Japanese “traits” in the game would be very high pilot skill in many of the aircraft available in 1941 or 1942, especially naval aircraft; the Japanese Navy began the war with extremely well-trained pilots. Aircraft with later availabilities might be better airframes than the early war Zeroes, but the pilot quality would downgrade steadily, so you just might not find any veteran or ace pilots in 1944 or 1945—or at least, a lot fewer than the Japanese had early in the war. Allied planes and pilots in 1941 and 1942 would usually be outclassed in pilot skill, so the impact of this rule is that the Zeroes would be that much harder to hit.

However, one of the tough things about global rules is that they work for everybody, and I was a lot less sure that the pilot quality ratings would have the same salutary effects when the European powers went up against each other. Clearly, the Russians had a serious pilot quality disadvantage against the Luftwaffe for most of the war, but the British and American pilots were generally about as good as the Germans. I was also becoming very worried about the trickiness of computing your to-hit number, and developer Mons Johnson wasn’t very enthusiastic about how often this rule would push you into “rolling for sixes” on your attacks. So we ditched the defensive benefit of pilot quality, deciding that we could create special abilities to do that work if we saw a plane we really wanted to give it to.

Now, some AAAFM players have also been wondering if the Zeroes are too fragile. I think the Zeroes have the durability ratings history warrants, but I agree that it’s a little unfortunate that a single ‘6’ cripples the plane—Zeroes are just a little more vulnerable to low-odds deflection shots than they probably should be. However, the “dropped rule” might help this situation a bit. So, if you don’t mind a little more complexity in your game, try this:

-        First, add the defensive advantage for a superior pilot: –1 penalty on your attack dice if you’re shooting at a pilot of higher quality.

-        Second, a new suggestion: If you need a 7 or higher to score a hit, a 6 counts as 1 hit, not 2. We considered this rule too early on, but backed away from it to avoid complexity. Anyway, it works well in conjunction with the rule described above.

Combined with the great evasion abilities for the Zeke and Zero, and you’ll find that your average and poor Allied pilots in early war planes will have a much harder time getting that first hit that cripples Zero or Zeke. Be warned: I haven’t playtested this much, so test with care!

 

Politics/Current Events: There’s a major new insight in the climate change debate that’s caught my interest. A Danish astrophysicist named Henrik Svensmark published a paper through the Royal Astronomical Society examining the effect of cosmic rays on Earth’s long-term climate. Basically, cosmic rays influence cloud formation, which influences climate.

Here’s the Royal Astronomical Society press release: http://www.ras.org.uk/news-and-press/219-news-2012/2117-did-exploding-stars-help-life-on-earth-to-thrive

And here’s an (opinion) piece discussing the ramifications: http://calderup.wordpress.com/

The work is controversial because it’s evidence that solar activity cycles, which influence the rate of cosmic rays reaching the Earth, may play a much more significant role in Earth’s climate than the various climate models and the proponents of AGW (anthropogenic global warming) theory currently allow. That’s pretty significant already, but the really interesting new angle in Svensmark’s work is that he shows that there is a strong link between the overall level of cosmic rays and climate across hundreds of millions of years, and those varying levels seem to be based on whether there is a high or low incidence of nearby supernovae. In other words, when the Solar System passes through a part of the galaxy where supernovas are somewhat more frequent, cosmic ray levels are high, cloud formation is high, and Earth’s climate is cool. When the Solar System passes through a region where supernovas are few and far between, cosmic rays are weaker, cloud formation is low, and Earth’s climate is warmer.

I spent an inordinate amount of time in the last couple of weeks engaged in a Facebook debate about conservatives and science. The argument came down to the question of whether it was reasonable to entertain skepticism about the climate change consensus, or not? When we finally drilled down to it, I realized that my opponents viewed their authorities as unimpeachable: The only people qualified to comment on climate science were climate scientists. I maintained that it was possible that important insights about the climate change debate might come from other disciplines, too. I don’t know if Svensmark’s research “wins” the debate—in fact, I’m sure there is a lot of debate still to happen—but I think it does show that the science isn’t necessarily settled.

The Finer Things: Buffalo wings. A couple of weeks back I had the opportunity to compare Hooters and Buffalo Wild Wings within just a few days of each other. I’ve regarded Hooters as the gold standard in chicken wings for many years now, but I have to say, Buffalo Wild Wings just thumped ‘em. Now, it’s true that Hooters wings are still pretty good, and there are other reasons to take in a meal at Hooters. But as far as pure buffalo wings go, well, Buffalo Wild Wings is a little bit better.

Star Trek Starship Tactical Combat Simulator, the Falklands, BBQ

Howdy! It’s been a busy week for me, as I’m churning away at a couple of projects with the goal of trying to write 3,000 words a day between the two of them. Unfortunately, that’s a tough goal to meet day in and day out, at least for me; I know some writers who routinely bang out 5,000 or more words a day, and I have to tell you, I wonder how they pull it off.

Anyway, things on my mind this week (other than, Good God, can the Phillies please find some *hitters*???) are: The best ship combat game ever; the “Maldives” (by which President Obama means, the Malvinas, or the Falkland Islands); and barbeque.

Gaming: One of my favorite games ever was FASA’s Star Trek Starship Tactical Combat Simulator. This was a boxed set supplement for the Star Trek roleplaying game, published all the way back in the mid-80s. FASA produced several additional sourcebooks called Ship Recognition Manuals tied to the starship combat system, so if you had the box and the sourcebooks you had stats for a couple hundred Federation, Klingon, Romulan, Gorn, and Orion starships. Based on the name alone (a candidate for Worst Game Name Ever) you might expect that this game was as exciting as watching paint dry, but you would be wrong: This game was great. It was the best tabletop capital ship combat system ever put together for any genre, and I spent whole semesters of my college career playing the STSTCS instead of going to class.

So what made this game so good? I think it comes down to three key decisions: Faithfulness to the source material, good complexity level, and the exact right amount of hard decisions.

Faithfulness: Many gamers regard Star Fleet Battles as the final word in Star Trek ship battles, but Star Fleet Battles introduces many things you never see in the TV show or movies—whole new races, tactics such as drones and missiles, etc., etc. FASA did a much better job of working within the Star Trek universe. The only lateral content (stuff FASA made up) for their ship combat game was a pile of starship designs. But the new ones they made up *fit* in the universe very nicely. A lot of the credit for this goes to Dana Knutson, the artist who created the line drawings for all the new starships in the Ship Recognition guides. They were fantastic.

Correct Complexity: The game offered a very nice balance between simulating what you saw in Star Trek ship battles, and remaining playable and fast-moving (another place where Star Fleet Battles fell down, in my opinion). Attacks were resolved with an attack roll and a hit location roll. Effects were generally clean and easy to implement. Movement was phased, but it was broken into three steps so that it wasn’t any real burden. You used face-down “Fire” and “No Fire” chits to declare when you wanted to shoot.

Hard Decisions: Finally, the thing that FASA’s Starship Tactical Combat Simulator did exactly right was to give you an excellent set of hard decisions each turn. Bruce Nesmith, my onetime colleague at TSR, told me that “every game needs hard decisions.” It was great advice that has helped me throughout my career as a game designer. The FASA game offered two excellent decision points. First, you allocated power each turn between shields, movement, and weapons. Naturally, you didn’t have enough power to maximize all three; each turn you needed to decide which element to short. Second, movement was divided into three phases, and after each movement phase you made a Fire/No Fire decision. If you shot up an enemy at the end of the first phase, that damage would hose him for the second and third phase… so each turn you had to ask yourself if you wanted to get a little closer and do more damage, or fire early before you got torn up yourself. It was a ton of fun!

We never bothered to play with the RPG rules, which forced us to houserule a couple of effects in the game. For example, in the ship combat system, a Bridge hit was important because you’d check to see how the characters on the bridge were affected, and that would in turn affect what the ship could do next. If you’re not playing with specific characters on the bridge, you need Bridge hits to do something else. (We said that your ship took -2 to attacks and enemy ships got +2 to hit until the end of the next turn.) There were one or two other houserules we had for applying damage.

Anyway, this was one of my favorite games ever. And over the years I’ve gone back to the mechanics and concepts in the Starship Tactical Combat Simulator several times, thinking about the lessons they held for whatever game system I was working on at the time. If you can find one of these old games around, pick it up and try it out—it is simply one of the best.

Politics/Current Events: Most people probably don’t realize that we are now observing the 30^th anniversary of the Falklands War. The war began on 2 April 1982 when Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands and South Georgia. It took the United Kingdom 74 days to force the Argentine garrison to surrender and liberate the islands. It was the largest naval war since World War II, resulting in the loss of several British ships to Exocets and old-fashioned dumb bombs, plus the controversial sinking of the cruiser Belgrano (to this day, the only warship sunk by a nuclear submarine).

The question of who actually has the best claim to the Falklands (or the Malvinas, as the Argentines call the islands) is a long-standing dispute. Britain never relinquished its claim, but there was a period of time in the early 19^th century when no people were living there, which is when the Argentines established a small colony of their own, later seized by the British when they returned to establish a permanent post in 1833.  I think the British claim is pretty conclusive at this point: The 3,000 or so people living there are descended from British settlers, regard themselves as British subjects, and overwhelmingly want to remain British. Besides, Britain paid in blood and treasure to repel an unprovoked Argentine attack. You lose claim points for attacking and losing.

So why is this important now? In the first place, the Argentine government is once again asserting its claim to the islands, which is something they do every now and then when they want to distract the folks at home from the way they’re running the show. Second, recent oil exploration in the area has turned up reserves that might be as large as 8 billion barrels; by comparison, the UK’s current proven reserves are about 3 billion barrels. Argentina is making a lot of threatening noise about Britain taking “their” oil. Finally, it is far from clear that the UK could launch another expedition to retake the islands like it did in 1982; the Brits just don’t have the fleet or resources anymore. They have to defend the islands with the garrison now in place.

Unfortunately, our current administration has gone out of its way to assure Argentina that we don’t take sides in this dispute. That may be the exact wrong message to send. It would seem much wiser to me to spell out our unqualified support for our closest ally, or failing that, the right of self-determination for the Falklanders. That would be a good way to discourage a new round of Argentine adventurism. Instead the Obama administration seems anxious to curry favor with Argentina’s feckless Kirschner government (one of the Latin American wave of “Third Way” populist governments currently in power these days). There’s a theory floating around the Obama hates Britain because anticolonialism is the foundation of his political philosophy. I couldn’t say if that’s true, but boy, he doesn’t ever seem to pass up a chance to slap Britain in the face.

The Finer Things: Dickie’s Barbeque. The chain finally began opening stores here in Washington state. The pulled pork is OK, but the chopped brisket is great, and the barbeque sauce is awesome. They use a vinegar-based sauce, which as all right-thinking people know the best and most appropriate dressing for BBQ. We used to call it Uncle Joe’s sauce in my family; I haven’t had the real stuff in years, but now I’ve got a place 10 minutes away that sells something pretty close.