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.

Champions D&D, the Sad Tale of the LCS

Welcome back, everybody! Thanks for checking in. It’s a beautiful spring day in Western Washington, which is something you don’t get to say very often. I actually was driving around today with the top down on my convertible, which is one of the real pleasures in life. Baseball season is underway, and so far I like what I’m seeing out of a much improved Mariners lineup. On the other hand, the Phillies are off to a poor start, and have no real prospects of improving any time soon. Right now I’d trade the Phils starting lineup for the Mariners lineup, and that is ridiculous, since the Mariners last year had one of the worst offenses in history, and the Phils scored the most runs in the National League in the second half. Amazing how fast things turn around, good and bad.

(Important safety tip for you GMs out there: Do NOT give 5-year 125-million dollar contract extensions to dudes over 30 whose numbers are already beginning to decline.)

Anyway, on to the more substantial matters…

Gaming: One of the RPG genres I just don’t get to play enough is superheroes. With the Avengers movie drawing near, I find myself really stoked about the idea of running or playing through a short superhero campaign. After all, the Avengers are *made* for a RPG—it’s an ensemble cast, and while they’re each awesome all by themselves, they get to team up and do really spectacular things. But here’s the thing with superhero RPGs: The biggest fun is making up your own superhero character. I’ve just never been satisfied with playing someone else’s character, even if it’s a superhero I love watching movies and reading comic books about. To put it another way: I’ve always found my biggest reward in coming up with the original, interesting mutant who *could* have fit right in with the X-Men if only they’d ever asked me to contribute a character. I suspect a lot of players have that same desire.

Thinking about a superhero game of course brings up the question: What’s the right game system? I played the heck out of Champions and the old TSR Marvel system, I played a little Mutants and Masterminds, and I have a passing familiarity with a couple of other systems. The one that I would like to run the most is Champions, simply because the character creation is awesomely flexible… if you know what you’re doing.

The problem is, while I love the way a Champions character comes together, I hate the Champions combat system. Spreading actions spread over a twelve-phase action turn is just a beating. So I asked myself, What would happen if you just ran Champions with one action per round? Or, more properly, something like the D&D 4e action economy?

First, your Speed stat in Champions would be bogus. That’s okay; I think we could use that number to replace initiative. Since Speed begins at DEX/10, heck, just have people act in Dex order. Done.

Endurance usage and Recovery get thrown out of whack. I think you can fix that, though. Most Champions fights seem to go not much more than one or two action turns, which translates to maybe eight to twelve distinct character actions separated by one or two recoveries. That probably remains true when you call each action its own round rather than part of the big phased turn. Instead of giving heroes a “free” recovery at the end of each action turn, just let characters use a Second Wind once per battle, maybe as a minor action. Done.

Finally, speedster characters would seem to get nerfed by not getting more actions than other characters. Again, I think that’s not a big problem. Just buy the Autofire advantage on your punches or maybe Area Effect-line to simulate making multiple punches in the time it takes anyone else to make one punch. Speedsters have a high movement rate anyway, so they should still be pretty speedsterish.

I might also be tempted to replace the 3d6 attack roll in Champions with a d20 attack roll, but keep the same target number calculation of OCV and DCV. The Champions bell curve gets vicious when you’re looking for 15’s or 16’s to hit; the d20 would let folks at different combat values interact a lot better.

I have notebooks full of Champions characters, many designed for truly obnoxious game breakage. But there are some dudes I’m pretty happy with, too. I’d love to be able to play that game without being forced to drop into bullet time by the combat system. Now I just have to find some folks to play with!
 

Politics/Current Events: I’ve been doing a fair amount of reading about current naval affairs in the last couple of months (research for a little secret project of mine), and one of the things I ran into the other day was the US Navy’s LCS program. I’ve been hearing about it for years, but I took a good long look this week. It’s hard for me to say this, but someone needs to: This program is a disaster. I am a former naval officer and I *want* to be an advocate for important new naval building programs. I want to see our sailors go into harm’s way in the toughest, most capable platforms we can give them. I want to know that ton for ton our warships are the finest in the world. But with the LCS, we’re spending billions and billions to build a fleet of ships that can’t fight.

Here’s the whole sorry tale, as explained by wired.com:

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/08/future-warship-ran-aground/7/

Now, most normal people have no idea what a LCS is. So here’s the story: LCS stands for Littoral Combat Ship, a new type of warship that was supposed to replace the Perry-class frigates. (Interesting aside: I did my midshipman first class cruise many years ago aboard the Robert G. Bradley, a Perry class ship.) At the same time, the Navy became really interested in improving its “brown-water” combat capabilities and coming up with more efficient ways to deal with asymmetric coastal threats—for example, mines, or dudes in speedboats with RPGs. Sending a real heavy hitter like an Arleigh Burke class destroyer into that sort of environment is not a good idea: it’s overkill, you’re asking the Arleigh Burke to fight in the worst possible environment for it, and finally, if the bad guys get lucky, you’ve lost an important asset. Anyway, the Navy decided to kill two birds with one stone and replace its frigates with new, small, cheap combatants optimized for inshore warfare. Sounds smart, right?

Well, to make a very long story short, the job was botched. A whole slew of bureaucrats distracted by the global war on terror and the idea of transforming the force structure (thanks, Rumsfeld) committed buzzword-manslaughter on the concept. Here are just a few of the critical failures of the design:

-        The armament consists of a 57mm gun and a single RAM (rolling airframe missile) launcher, on a 3000-ton hull. The LCS has nothing that can touch a target only 5 miles away. It’s badly outgunned by China’s Houbei-class missile boat, which weighs in at 200 tons and costs a tenth as much. I mean, one Houbei could expect to kill three or four LCS without getting scratched.

-        The ship is designed for a crew of only 40. Excellent, reduced headcount is efficient, right? Well, the Navy is discovering that they need senior NCOs and officers washing dishes and handling lines just to operate the ship. Underway sailors average less than 4 hours of sleep a night.

-        The ship was designed with mission modules to optimize it for anti-surface, anti-sub, or anti-mine warfare. At this time, the anti-surface module has been canceled, the anti-sub module is being completely redesigned, and the anti-mine module is a bust.

The only thing the LCS can do is fight targets that can’t fight back, and carry a small amount of troops. Oh, it can also go like the blazes—the design requires the insane speed of 40+ knots, as if you could outrun cruise missiles. We would have been better off just buying more of the Coast Guard’s excellent new National Security Cutters. They’re not too cheap, either, but at least they have enough crewmen to run the ship.

Someone needs to push the STOP button and actually design a robust little warship for the Navy. I’m usually all about giving the Department of Defense what it says it needs, but nobody needs the LCS.

The Finer Things: Nothing leaps to mind this week, sorry. Have you seen the trailer for The Hobbit? You should; it will make you happy.

Star Wars, Buffing Spells, Supreme Court

Hi there! Thanks for stopping by. Things are settling down for me after a very busy few weeks—between visiting family, my daughter’s busy performance schedule in the school play, and a trip down to spring training, I fell behind on a lot of stuff. But now I feel like I’m finally catching up. The girls are home all next week for spring break, so I’m thinking of setting up a Star Wars marathon—they haven’t seen all the movies yet. And I think I’ll show them in the order of 4, 5, 2, 3, 6. I read a compelling argument online that the whole saga is really at its best when the prequels form an extended flashback right after the big reveal at the end of Empire Strikes Back. I think I’m going to give it a try.

Here's a link to a fascinating discussion of story telling across a series of movies:

http://www.nomachetejuggling.com/2011/11/11/the-star-wars-saga-suggested-viewing-order/

(Oh, and as to episode 1… it turns out it is not really necessary, and actually interferes with this plan. Maybe we’ll watch it after the others.)

 

Gaming: I’ve been thinking about the next D&D game I would like to run, and I’ve been looking at the various editions of the game on my bookshelf to ask myself which would be right for my next game. Naturally, I find myself wanting to pull elements from multiple editions to make what I think would be the best D&D. That seems like a daunting piece of work, and one that’s likely to duplicate a lot of the effort a whole team of folks at WotC are now engaged in, so I don’t know if I would really do it or not. It would seem better to pick an edition I like and make some minor modifications to it. Anyway, that whole line of thought got me looking at 3.0 again, and wondering what exactly I would change or houserule to make 3.0 a game I liked better. And the salient thing that stuck out to me was simply, Fix buffing spells.

It’s unfortunately true that buffing spells have been hard to balance throughout the game’s history. In 3.0, they were so strong that they were mandatory for smart play. Many players wouldn’t budge from the inn until the party wizard or cleric had hit ‘em with bull’s strength, stoneskin, fly, false life, death ward, and maybe polymorph other into some useful form like a troll. It was a little beneficial in that it was a system for transferring character power from spellcasters to nonspellcasters, but it was still pretty obnoxious. In fact, we found it so obnoxious that in 3.5 we killed the duration of buff spells to minutes instead of all day so that people wouldn’t have them all running all day. But that just exacerbated the problem of the 5-minute adventuring day and “scry and fry” tactics. So when 4^th Edition came around, we ruthlessly expunged anything that gave off the faintest whiff of buffing spell from the system. We finally fixed the problem by shooting it in the head and burying it in the woods… even after we invented a ritual system to do the job. So rituals, instead of being the natural place to harbor buff effects, were nerfed even before the game launched.

I found that answer less than satisfying. There is a lot of coolness and iconic D&D beats in the buffing spells, and I think 4^th Edition really misses them.

Anyway, I think I’ve come up with an idea that might fix the problem: the Mantle keyword. Basically, the great majority of buffing spells gain a keyword called [mantle]. A creature can only be affected by one mantle at a time. When you receive a new mantle, whatever you had in the spot goes away (or maybe you get to choose which you keep, whatever). The idea is that your soul, spirit, or psychomagical aura can’t absorb more than one mantle effect at a time. To put it another way, some magic affects you by making a persistent alteration to your psychomagical “true essence.” Just like you can’t paint something red and blue at the same time, you can’t alter someone’s aura in two ways at the same time.

Once we limit folks to one buff at a time, we can restore the long durations of buffing spells from 3.0 days – buffing spells are a LOT less problematic if each character in the party only has one at a time to deal with. You’re not Superman, you’re Ultraboy. Note that it makes dispel magic a lot less tedious, too; you won’t be churning through three or four ongoing buffs.

I could imagine adding another keyword called [benediction] which does the same thing with various sorts of divine blessings – there was always the strange stacking of bless and prayer and recitation in earlier editions, and it would seem to make sense that one blessing or abjuration might overwrite another. But I don’t think short-term buffs are as much of a problem, since they often come with an action cost at a time when you have hard choices about how to spend your actions.

What other elements of D&D 3.0 could stand a little houseruling? I could imagine some work on save DCs, looking for ways to incorporate themes/kits from 2e/4e, or building some at-will attacks for each class. Maybe I’ll make a rainy day project out of it sometime.

   

Politics/Current Events: Like many people, I followed the Affordable Care Act (AKA Obamacare) arguments at the Supreme Court this last week. I think no one really knows how the Court is going to rule on it, but I was gratified to see some very hard questions asked. My opinion (which is worth nothing, of course) is that the Act appears unconstitutional. Throwing it out would be a mess, but keeping it on the books is dangerous. The high-handed regulation-making from HHS Secretary Sebelius that trampled on religious liberty a few weeks back was a pretty good demonstration of what’s at stake. People talk about “the social safety net” all the time—well, the Constitution is a political safety net, designed to prevent the exercise of intrusive power by a government that does not have to answer to the people. We weaken it at our peril.

The Democrats had many options available for moving toward a national health care system that would have been much more sound in Constitutional terms. For example, if they had established a tax authority to pay for it instead of a system of mandates and penalties, they would have been on much more solid ground. Or they could have legislated the system they designed separately in each of the fifty states, since states have the power to create laws that the federal government can’t (that’s why Romneycare is legal in Massachusetts). But the Democratic-controlled Congress tried to minimize the political fallout by using “penalties” instead of taxes and playing games with accounting, and wound up outsmarting themselves by building something that may not pass Constitutional muster. Speaker of the House Pelosi asked “Are you serious?” when challenged on this a couple of years ago. Maybe she should have taken the warning to heart.

So what happens if the Affordable Care Act gets tossed? Well, I think it’s clear that we need *something* to improve the financial underpinnings of our health care system. Off the top of my head, I’d begin with opening up insurance across state lines and examining the question of tort reform. That wouldn’t be enough to fix things, but at least it would be a start.

 

The Finer Things: Cherry trees. Washington DC is famous for them, but it turns out that the other Washington is darned near ideal for cherry trees too. We have thousands of ‘em in the valley area between Puyallup and Renton. They started really blooming about three weeks ago, so they’re starting to reach the end of their amazing color. But there are so many around here you’ll actually get drifts of petals like patches of pink snow here and there. I never paid much attention to trees, flowers, etc., until I moved out here, but the cherry trees really are something special.

Apache Trail, Victory in the Pacific, Dejah Thoris

Greetings, all! My apologies for a late post; I’ve been out of town since Sunday the 18^th, so I’m just now getting around to my March 20^th blogging. I took a few days to fly down to Arizona, meet a buddy of mine, and check out Cactus League spring training. Arizona now hosts the spring training camps of 14 major league ballclubs, and they’re well into the process of tuning up for the season. We checked out the camps for the Mariners, Reds, and Indians in the mornings, and took in a couple of M’s games in the afternoons. Then, on Wednesday, we decided to take a break from baseball and sightsee in the Arizona desert, taking in a scenic drive known as the Apache Trail. Theodore Roosevelt called the road/trail “one of the most spectacular best-worth-seeing sights of the world.” He might have been exaggerating a bit, but it was still one heck of a stretch of country.

Gaming: While I was down in Phoenix, my buddy and I played a game of Victory in the Pacific, an old Avalon Hill classic. I managed to fit my battered old copy into my carry-on, figuring that killing an hour or two in the evenings after watching baseball might be a good way to go. When I was a kid, I would save up for months and months to mail-order games full of bazillions of cardboard counters, reference charts, and hex maps. My collection included titles such as Third Reich, Ricthofen’s War, Luftwaffe, Jutland, War at Sea, Arab-Israeli Wars, Titan, and many others. I laid out huge solo scenarios on the floor and drove my mom nuts by leaving square yards of my bedroom impassable for weeks at a time. Every now and then I’d find a friend to play Panzer Leader or Squad Leader with, but honestly, many of these games were my own rainy day activities. (You have to remember, when I was a kid of thirteen or fourteen, there were three channels on TV and video games were things you found in the arcade.)

Avalon Hill, SPI, and other manufacturers of classic hex-and-counter “wargames” managed to drift along into the 80’s and 90’s as the most exclusive niche of a niche hobby. I can’t even imagine what the business model must have been: Publish scores of titles with extremely narrow focus and appeal, each requiring scads of tricky components and countless hours of playtesting and development time, and sell them by catalog and mail order in the days before the internet. But back in the day that WAS the gaming hobby. RPGs came along, then ever-more-reliable and detailed computer games that could out-simulate these massive simulations, and eventually that was that. A handful of boutique publishers such as GMT Games and Multi-Man Publishing sell counter-and-hex wargames now, with sales of a thousand or fewer copies in many cases, but that’s it.  An entire category of the gaming industry, with a few exceptions, went the way of the dodo.

Anyway, Victory in the Pacific was always one of my favorites, because it was light and fast by the standards of the genre but did a fine job of letting you line up big heaps of carriers, battleships, and cruisers, and just bash the tar out of them. One of the very clever things the game did was to separate naval combat into “day actions” (airstrikes) and “night actions” (surface battles). If the two players couldn’t agree on what kind of battle they wanted to fight—usually because one guy had planes, and the other guy didn’t—you’d roll a die, and the high roll got the battle he wanted. If you tied, then you got a doubleheader, a day action followed by a night action. I always felt it was an elegant way to make carrier forces and battleship forces distinct from each other, and I even borrowed this old idea when creating the darkness rules and scenario guidelines in the revised Axis & Allies Naval Miniatures game.

If I could tinker with Victory in the Pacific now, I think I might use some kind of initiative roll instead of forcing the Japanese to always move first; that’s a real beating for the Japanese player. No reason that couldn’t be weighted in favor of the Allies, or even weighted by turn one way or the other in order to reflect different levels of Allied codebreaking success through the war. And I think I would also add some more robust targeting rules and screening rules, so that you can’t have twelve cruisers all gang up on one mission-critical enemy ship while leaving most of the enemy force unfought. But, tinkering and home rules aside, it’s still a darned fun game.

Oh, and my buddy won. I managed to grab a lot of territory early as the Japanese, including the Coral Sea, but I just lost too much fleet doing it, and I rolled ‘1’ on damage dice about six or eight times in the course of the game. Enterprise should have been sunk like three times—ridiculous.

 

Politics/Current Events: Okay, not very political, but certainly a current event: Has there ever been such an earthshaking week in the NFL offseason as the one we’ve just watched? First Peyton Manning hits the market as the single highest-profile free agent in I don’t know how long, an instant ticket to contention for any of a dozen teams. Major quarterback signings in Miami, Tennessee, San Francisco, Seattle, Denver, and New York are caught in the crazy rippling spread of consequences. And then, to cap it off, the NFL comes out and hammers the New Orleans Saints with the most draconian set of penalties that I think any pro football team has ever been subjected to. If there’s another example of such an overwhelming beatdown from the commissioner’s office, I’d love to hear about it.

The sad truth of the whole business is that lots of players (and some coaches too) from many teams have set bounties of one sort or another. Why the league hammered the Saints for something that is really not that unusual, I don’t know. The penalties strike me as really over the top.

 

The Finer Things: I was pleasantly surprised by John Carter; the film was surprisingly faithful to many details of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ stories, including things that I never would have expected, such as radium rifles in the hands of the green Martians, the sobriquet Dotar Sojat, ships flying on “light,” two towers in Helium, banths with tails that “widen toward the tip,” and so on. I liked Zodanga as a moving city, although I was less fond of the liberties the film’s writers took with the therns or in making Dejah Thoris an action star. Dejah Thoris is supposed to be legendarily beautiful—tough enough in her own way, but more of a Helen of Troy type of character than the 21^st-century warrior princess scientist the movie made her out to be. She is, after all, the incomparable Dejah Thoris!

Anyway, that take on Dejah Thoris put an interesting thought in my head: Who are the ten most beautiful women of fiction? The ten women whose beauty is recognized throughout their world as the very paragon of femininity, women for whom whole nations would gladly march to war? Helen of Troy, whose face launched a thousand ships, seems like a shoe-in. In Middle-Earth, you’ve got Galadriel, Arwen Undomiel, and Luthien Tinuviel. Doc Smith’s Lensman books brought us Clarissa MacDougall, the culmination of fifty thousand years of guided evolution and the owner of one of only two perfect skeletons in existence. I’m sure there must be dozens more out there. So what other stories or myths claim to feature the most beautiful woman that ever existed? They can’t all be right, after all!

Five Rules of Monster Design, Iran, Riddle of the Sands

Howdy, folks! Sorry for the delay between posts; we were entertaining company this weekend, and it’s been a couple of days since I had a chance to pound out the next Atomic Dragon Battleship. My next one will probably be a couple of days late, too – I’m heading down to see the Mariners at spring training next week. Arizona is looking mighty good these days!

Gaming: For no particular reason, I think I’ll philosophize about D&D monster design for a bit today. Over the course of my career with TSR/Wizards of the Coast, I designed hundreds of monsters in various editions of the game. A few have become “classics” of the game, and people seem to think of them as critters that have always been around. Most have turned out to be fairly forgettable, serving as interesting page-filler in this sourcebook or that. I wish I could predict which monsters will “take” and which won’t, but it’s tougher than it looks. I’m the writer behind the eladrin, the rilmani, the canoloth, and the keeper. I’m also the guy behind the kaisharga, the magma golem, the storm devil, and the cobalt dragon. They all seemed like great ideas at the time.

Anyway, here’s some advice for would-be monster builders, five broad rules that should make your monster something worthy of confronting the boldest heroes:

1.      Monsters should create expectations and meet them. When you see a monster, you should be able to make good guesses about what it does. A player who’s thinking about the tail spikes or glowing eyes on your monster and wondering how your monster is going to use them is a player who is engaged with the game. He’s immersed, and thinking like his character would think. Monsters should carry visual cues or observable behaviors that tip off canny players about what’s coming next—real surprises or “gotchas!” should be unusual.

2.      Monsters should belong in the game. If you have an idea for a monster and you’re surprised that nothing like that is in the game already, you have a monster with good resonance. Sometimes it’s as simple as finding a scrap of real-world mythology no one else has done something with yet, or making a D&D monster out of an inspiration from film or fiction. Sometimes it’s based in game mechanics—you might notice a type of attack that isn’t used very much and think of a creature that would make use of it.

3.      Monsters shouldn’t be like other monsters. Most monster concepts are pretty small pieces of real estate; you shouldn’t try to build multiple houses on that one lot. For example, the game doesn’t need an ice giant when it’s already got a frost giant, or a temple mummy when it already has a mummy, or nosferatu when it already has a vampire. Many designers give in to the urge to design the “right” version of a monster that’s already in the game; I have done so myself even though I should know better. But your monster is probably not going to be particularly memorable if it’s just borrowing the look and reputation of something else.

4.      Monsters need offense, defense, and utility. One of my rules of thumb in monster design was to give a monster a mode of attack, a mode of defense, and a mode of movement or noncombat ability that works within the broad monster concept. Not all creatures need all three, of course; if you’re building a humanoid race you might not want them all to have a special magical attack. But maybe the race has a signature weapon, or uses a poison with a special effect, or possesses a racial immunity to some effect that makes sense for your concept. In any event, this is how I usually finish a monster: By looking over what I’ve got and asking myself, “Did I cover offense? Defense? And some sort of movement or utility?”

5.      Monsters need an Achilles heel. Every monster should have a specific weakness, preferably one that can be observed or intuited by clever players. A weakness can be as simple as a crummy AC, one terrible save category, or a lack of ability to deal with ranged attackers—it doesn’t have to be “slowed by cold damage” or “takes double damage from Bohemian ear-spoons.” Don’t try to patch all the holes; leave something for the players to discover and exploit.

So, there you go: Five broad guidelines for building monsters. There are many small details such as figuring particular numbers in various editions or choosing the right abilities, but the important thing is getting the concept right at the start. Everything after that is implementation.

Politics/Current Events: I’m something of an armchair strategist. And like armchair strategists everywhere I have been following the story of Iran’s development of nuclear weapons. In recent days various sources such as The Atlantic, Forbes, and Stratfor have reported that the odds of the US going to war with Iran in the next 6 months are now hovering around 50-50. Heck, Las Vegas gives the odds as 3 to 2 in favor. (Do people really bet on stuff like that?) I am pessimistic about the chances; I frankly don’t see how a war in the Middle East can be avoided. At this point, one of three things will happen:

1.      Israel will launch a military strike to disrupt the Iranian nuclear program.

2.      Israel and the United States together will launch a strike.

3.      No one will strike Iran, in which case Iran becomes a nuclear power.

There is no option 4. Economic sanctions or diplomatic pressure can’t convince the mullahs and Revolutionary Guard to change course, since at this point the easiest way for the Iranians to bring sanctions and pressure to an end is to finish their program. Cases in point: Pakistan, India, and to a lesser extent North Korea.

Here’s the depressing part: I don’t think there’s an option 3, either. Israel feels that it HAS to ensure that Iran does not develop nuclear weapons. That’s because the Israelis have no evidence that Iran would behave as a “rational actor” with their nuclear weapons. Remember, Iran has been actively supplying Israel’s enemies (Hezbollah and Syria for a start) with arms and financial support for decades, and its rulers have called for the destruction of Israel on many occasions. What if Iran cannot be deterred by the possibility of mutual destruction? The Israelis can’t take the chance that might be true. In addition, Israel’s history points toward acceptance of preemptive war. So Israel is going to hit Iran, because it is the least bad option for them.

All options are bad at this point, really, but sometimes an enemy puts you in that spot. Aiding Israel may turn out to the least bad option we have, as well. Watch the moonless nights this spring: If something starts, it’ll start around March 21^st, or 4 weeks after that, or 4 weeks after that.

The Finer Things: I finally got around to reading a book that may be one of the most important fiction works of the 20^th century: The Riddle of the Sands, by Erskine Childers. While The Riddle of the Sands is a very engaging espionage novel (one of the first of the genre, really) and has significant literary merit on that basis alone, the reason it’s important is that it was The Hunt for Red October of its time. The book was published in England in 1903, and it served as a dire warning about the potential for war with Germany. In its own way, Sands hardened English resolve to meet the mounting challenge of Germany’s naval building program. Childers looked at the North Sea and saw no English naval bases, no squadrons of warships, and no shore defenses against a surprise attack.  Within months of the book’s publication, the Admiralty announced plans to establish major bases at Rosyth and Scapa Flow, and the strategic relocation of the Home Fleet to the North Sea began to take shape. Anyway, The Riddle of the Sands is a darned good read as well as a fascinating piece of history. Check it out when you get the chance.

Air Force Miniatures, Why am I Conservative?

Hi there! Welcome back to my blog. If you haven’t noticed yet, I’ve given myself a schedule to post every ten days or so. At the moment my time is my own, and I can keep up easily enough, but I have a few irons in the fire and it’s possible I may be busier soon. Anyway, as promised, this week I’ll share some thoughts about Axis & Allies Air Force Miniatures (or AAAFM, as I much prefer to type).

Gaming: Axis & Allies Air Force Miniatures: Angels 20 is finally out, and so far I’ve been very happy with the reception it seems to be receiving. In particular, I’m relieved to see that the gameplay is receiving high marks from many of the fans. It was more than a little challenging to design a system that struck the right balance between air combat simulation and fun gameplay, and while I was fairly well satisfied with the compromises I settled on, you don’t really know how it’s going to hold up until you see what thousands of people who weren’t in your design meetings do with the system. First, let me post a link to a pretty lengthy preview article I wrote for the Forumini newsletter back in December. It’s a good overview of the gameplay, the scale, and the general design objectives we had for the game.

http://www.box.com/s/ztkifraremr83dqp1l0a

And here’s a link to the Forumini message boards. If you’re a fan of the A&A minis game, Forumini is a great message board to visit.

http://aaminis.myfastforum.org/

Anyway, in no particular order, here are a few reflections I’ll add now that the game is out. First: Why did we include altitude? The answer is that WW2 fighter planes generally fell into two categories: turning fighters such as the Zero or Hurricane, or vertical fighters such as the P-38, P-51, or the later Bf 109 models. (Many excellent planes were pretty good at both, of course.) Although altitude is on the complicated side for a beer and pretzels game, we felt that we needed to include it so that the vertical fighters could fight their fight just as well as the turning fighters could fight theirs. I’m pleased to see that AAAFM players are aggressively seeking out altitude advantage and making use of these rules already; it was one of the hardest things to playtest since many casual playtesters around the office simply didn’t grokk altitude tactics.

Next thought: speed. In my earliest design draft I played around with systems that conserved speed from turn to turn; if you did a lot of tight turns you’d kill your speed, and getting speed back was hard to do. Obviously that would have been much more realistic, but it was shaping up as really complicated and, well, un-zoomy for a relatively light game. In addition, we worried about creating a game that was too dependent on “system memory.” (System memory is when it’s important to remember what you did last turn, and we try to make sure that when we include a system-memory element in a game, we provide players with as much help as possible for it. In AAAFM, aircraft status is a system memory element, but we make sure the game tells you exactly when to choose it and the model’s pose reminds you what you chose when the next turn rolls around and it matters again.) Anyway, we ditched the idea of only changing speed within a narrow band of your previous speed because we didn’t want any more system memory requirements than we absolutely had to have. If you don’t mind the extra tracking, it would be easy to houserule this one.

Onto unit costs (I told you this was in no particular order). The unit point costs are definitely a little inconsistent, and I apologize for that. For the first draft of the costing I created a simple scheme that rated units A-B-C-D for offense, survivability, maneuverability, pilot quality, and special abilities. Those weren’t weighted equally; my scheme heavily weighted sheer gunnery and defense more than maneuverability. For example, planes received 5/10/15 points for frail, average, or sturdy Armor and durability. I knew it was a shaky costing system, but I had to start somewhere; that’s why the P-40 and the P-51 are so close in cost. As the game developed we chose a couple of benchmark units and did a lot of comparative costing against them, but you can tell we should have spent more time on this. In retrospect, I wish we’d weighted Climb a little heavier, since it’s proving to be more important in real life gameplay than our playtesting indicated.

One last thought for now, on the unit mix. If you’ve seen the whole set, then you know we stretched 17 distinct sculpts into 31 different units for the game. At one point the set list was more like 36 units, but cost constraints reared their ugly heads. For example, we had to push the Ki-43 Oscar and the D.520 into later sets to save on sculpting costs (a painful decision, to say the least), and we left a Spitfire Mk II and a South African Hurricane Mk I out of the mix to save on painting costs--we had the units designed, but creating the extra paint schemes proved too costly (a decision I was not too happy with). So, for those folks who wonder why we only made a Spitfire Ace, that’s why. But one interesting thing that turned up as we had to get leaner and leaner on the final set list was the way we were pushed to use the sculpts we did have in surprising combinations. For example, the MS.406 is fun because it not only covers the main fighter of the Armee de l’Aire, but also gives us an overperforming plane in the Finnish air force without using a sculpt on the infamous Buffalo. Down the road, the Hurricane could show up for any number of Commonwealth air forces—but it also flew for the Soviet Air Force and the Romanian Air Force. I’m looking forward to seeing an Axis Hurricane at some point, just because it’s something people don’t expect to see.

Politics/Current Events: My wife asked me an interesting question the other day: “Why are you conservative?” She asked because the great majority of my friends and colleagues (especially in the gaming industry) seem to hold liberal views, and she wonders why I don’t conform. It’s a good question, and it’s one I have wondered about myself.

First, a bit of clarification: I’m actually a moderate on a lot of social issues. For example, gays in the military never bothered me; I knew some when I was serving. I think evolution should be taught in science class while creation should be taught in church, and I certainly don’t have any issue with contraception. But in the big picture, I strongly favor conservative (conservative, not necessarily Republican) philosophy and governance. I have seen no evidence in my lifetime that a Big Government can live within its means. Our government has made promises in the large entitlement programs that cannot possibly be honored down the road; I do not expect to collect a Social Security check or enjoy the benefits of Medicare in my old age unless tough choices are made now. Given that, I’d rather see a smaller government that promised less and offered people more freedom to succeed to the fullest extent of their talents and hard work. In other words, I vote conservative because I think the cultural and social stuff can be worked out, but the questions of fiscal responsibility and national interest require answers at the ballot box.

Why do I think this way, when many people in my line of work cheer for the other team? Ultimately I think the native predilection toward progressive (society can be perfected) or libertarian (the individual is the best judge of his or her own good) philosophy derives from your life experience and your values. Liberalism is not a mental disorder, nor is conservatism. For the most part, people on both sides of the issues dividing our country are well educated, equally intelligent, and are decent human beings, no matter what the obnoxious pundits of both left and right claim. So why is there disagreement? I think that Occam’s razor provides an answer: Issues are complex, there are many “true” ways of seeing things, and people can disagree because there’s more than one valid way of looking at issues.

Final thought: I find it profoundly troubling when I encounter statements from people I know and respect to the effect that Republicans/conservatives must be a) uneducated, b) gullible, or c) evil. Which, exactly, do you believe applies to me? That’s an easy way to dehumanize your opponents and refuse to engage their ideas, which seems pretty bigoted and intolerant to me, especially coming from the side that claims to stand for tolerance and open-mindedness.

The Finer Things: Girl Scout cookies. The Do-Si-Dos are the best. Those are the peanut butter sandwich cookies, which rise to an unprecedented level of Sheer Awesomeness when paired with a glass of cold milk. Do not confuse the Tagalongs with the Do-Si-Dos; Tagalongs are chocolate-covered evil and do not deserve to be known as peanut butter cookies.