Wednesday, 4 December 2024

The Rules Made Me Do It

There are essays about this, so I'm not about to add my own to the mix. Instead, just a couple of thoughts that always come to mind when I think of this topic.

Nothing spicy, just my own experiences.

I've played miniature wargames since I was a kid, and a few years ago I dipped into Bolt Action.

Some weapons use a blast template, like you got in the old Games Workshop games. You place the cardboard circle over the enemies you're shooting at to see how many get caught in the explosion.

Like these things

The book has some templates in the back, but I didn't have them prepared ahead of my first game, so we just eyeballed it with a tape measure.

The next time I was playing with a friend who was new to miniature wargames. I wanted to avoid the fuzzy measuring I'd used in my previous game, so I decided to use a variant rule where you just roll a die to see how many miniatures are hit by a blast weapon. This is already how the game works when the targets are inside a building, so the numbers were already waiting to go.

Now perhaps I just have the brain of a lab rat, but in the first game I made sure I kept my individual soldiers as spread out as possible to avoid the blasts, and in the second game I kept them packed tight together because I didn't need to worry about that and thought it looked cooler.

Is Bolt Action, played with the blast templates, a game about intricate unit cohesion and maintaining the most effective formation? Well, not really, but it certainly made me spend a few seconds thinking about it each time I moved a unit, and it quite drastically affected how our board looked during play.

This sounds obvious, right? Acting within certain constraints to try to win is basically just... why games have rules.

My second example is Traveller, which I've been running as an almost year long campaign now.

So much has been said about the economy of Traveller, and why it works as a catalyst for space adventures. My campaign has been quite different.

The players got absurdly lucky during the lifepath character creation and wound up with a refitted cruise liner, a chunk of its mortgage already paid off, and good amount of cash to fund their first few trades. The rules for shipping freight (as opposed to speculative trading) were generous enough that they could reliably hit their mortgage payment each month through honest work.

Of course, players are players, so money became an issue later on, mostly through problems of their own making. Less like desperate traders struggling against a system that's stacked against them, more like lottery winners squandering their winnings until they nearly bankrupt themselves.

Now this isn't a case where I used a rules variant. This was standard Mongoose Traveller character creation but with very lucky rolls. Still, we can imagine Traveller having quite a different reputation if the rules were adjusted to make this sort of setup more common.

Yet it seems like no amount of starting wealth could stop the players getting into trouble and gambling their wealth on a stupid trade.

Perhaps the competition factor is key here. I'm not a competitive wargamer, but I try to win. My Traveller players were more likely playing to create fun moments at the table.

I guess I buy into the idea the rules can nudge you to do act differently, but there are other more powerful forces at work.

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Wednesday, 27 November 2024

Busy Week

Please excuse the lack of a proper post this week, I've been busy with a thing.

Here are some rough snippets straight from the oven.

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This post was originally sent as a reward to all Patreon supporters, and is released freely on this site the week after its original publication.

If you want to support my blog, podcasts, and video content then head over to my Patreon.

Wednesday, 20 November 2024

Bypassing the Fun

In MAC Attack each faction is based on a group that splintered from HumanityFleet upon completing their voyage across the stars. Early on I knew that I wanted one of the factions to have organic MACs, bordering on kaiju as much as mechs, with a hefty dose of Tyranid bio-titans. 

This faction ended up as New Genesis and I love the way they’re looking in Amanda’s fantastic artwork. They have their origins in the terraforming division of HumanityFleet, and it’s implied they’ve adapted a little too hard to their new home. 

Alongside their flavour, each faction gets a unique module to use on their units and a special rule that applies across their whole force. The special rules are written as a double-edged sword, both an advantage and disadvantage, so that vanilla units aren’t at a disadvantage against faction-specific forces.

New Genesis had something beyond a special rule. They could recruit an entirely different type of MAC, representing their bio-mechanical creations. They didn’t need to worry about facing, they didn’t track heat, and their weapons needed inert gland modules to support them. They were very efficient and manoeuvrable, but a bit less versatile than a fully equipped standard MAC. They certainly felt unique.

But I wasn’t really happy with them in play. 

It wasn’t that they were too strong or too weak, but instead it felt like they bypassed two of the fun challenges of the game: heat management and manoeuvring big clunky units. 

They kind of felt like beginner MACs that you’d include in a stripped down version of the game, and that didn’t feel right for a faction that was supposed to be experimental and scary. 

So now they have a special rule just like the other factions, and their MACs don’t get a new classification of their own. They get a little bonus move and rotation at the start of their move to maintain some of that ultra-mobile feel, but each module destroyed causes extra damage, as all their parts are so intricately entwined with each other. Organisms are just less modular than machines, I guess. 

They’re less unique in a purely mechanical sense, but they still play differently to every other faction. 

I go back and forth on how I feel about weird niche subsystems in games. I understand the appeal, but I think I’d rather strive for achieving a unique feeling without bypassing the fun parts of the core game. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------

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If you want to support my blog, podcasts, and video content then head over to my Patreon.

Wednesday, 13 November 2024

Juicy Details

Nova wrote about the concept of Hyperdiegesis, teaching me a new word in the process. I chimed in on discord, so I get a nice mention in there too.

I guess it's the text version of this artwork thing I wrote about before. An intriguing little detail that makes you wonder about an unexplored element of the setting.

I love them in films and books, where I can decide to breeze past it or let myself imagine what lies beyond the mist.

In RPGs I find them great sources of inspiration as a GM, but I probably wouldn't use them at the table as-written. If my version of Obi Wan is going to mention the Clone Wars off-hand then I'd probably have at least a rough idea of what the Clone Wars were.

The Clone Wars are a good one to chew on, because I think it's a detail that has a medium amount of juice.

A juicy little detail should immediately impart something to the reader, even if there's no further explanation in the text.

By that measure, "You served my father in the Clone Wars" is okay. Clone is an interesting word, and it conjured as least a few possibilities to mind. Let's explore some alternatives.

"You served by father in the Second Zalthkar War" is bad. Really bad. The word "war" is broad, and kind of boring for such a horrific concept. Zalthkar certainly isn't helping out either.

"The Seventh Zalthkar War" is still bad but better. At least we can start to imagine that Zalthkar is a war-torn place, or perhaps the name of an ongoing enemy.

"The Zalthkar Revolution" gives us a bit more juice. At least now we have a stronger notion of what Obi Wan was up to.

"The Zalthkar Massacre" would give us something to chew on. Which side was Obi Wan on here?

But I don't think "The Clone Massacre" sounds right. Perhaps "Clone" is a juicy enough word that it needs the relative dryness of "War" to really shine through.

There's a reason why this is all especially interesting to me right now.

Do you ever think about nerve stapling?

As I've shouted before, Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri is a masterclass in delivering a game setting. The nerve staple is a delicious little juicy fruit that exemplifies this.

You see the icon above as a button on the control panel for each of your colonies. Using it supresses unrest, though it also counts as an atrocity, which can have diplomatic ramifications.

The game never explained to me what the nerve staple was. Even though the icon is evocative, the name alone does so much of the heavy lifting. You don't need the game to explain what happens when you hit the "nerve staple" button and your colony's unrest decreases. The juice flows fast.

I'm trying to tap into that energy for the setting of MAC Attack, with one example being a pretty obvious nod to the nerve staple.

Each faction gets a little quote underneath the portrait of their leader. Like this guy:

But then further down the same page you also get a quote from one of the other factions, offering an alternative look.

I suspect I'll never forget the nerve staple.

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This post was originally sent as a reward to all Patreon supporters, and is released freely on this site the week after its original publication.

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Wednesday, 6 November 2024

Into the MAC

They warn you about the danger of being shredded by gunfire. Being incinerated in a reactor meltdown. The brave pilots who burn up in drop without seeing a moment of battle.

They don’t warn you about the cockpit.

Twelve hour patrols in a cage of fogged-up glass and rattling alloy. Sweat soaked seat, padding crushed to paper, squeaky faux-leather. A kick to the arse with every step. 

Always hot or cold. Never warm.

Sucking on a tube of soot-stained water, an aftertaste between metal and rubber. RationPaste kept too cold in the locker, all ice crystals and tomato paste with a caramel chew. 

Brakes once tuned to supreme sensitivity, now slammed on or off. Left arm twitchy, right arm lagging. warning lights that just won’t quit. 

If you’re tall your knees are in for a bad time. If you’re short you might not reach the ejector. 

The FlakVest pinches. The helmet is small but heavy, an ache in the temples and the neck. 

The air tastes like radio static. The radio sounds like a sputtering engine. The engine doesn’t sound like anything, it’s all enclosed, but it shakes the whole MAC at just the right frequency for a toothache.

Most of the buttons don’t do anything, but some of them overheat the reactor. The silent running switch looks just like the headlights. The armour panel release is just below the impact brace. 

The whole thing is insulated, so you don’t get fried when you’re hit with a JoltCannon, but don’t touch the display panels. They can give a little shock of their own. 

The atomiser keeps the whole thing sterile. If you can’t stand a vinegar haze in your eyes you can disable it down in the manual switchbox. Pilots say this is the most important part of your cockpit, so most engineers hardweld it shut. You’ll be the most popular jockey in camp if you’ve got a cutter that can get through it without shorting the whole interface. 

Every pilot complains about the waste system, but you’ll hear nothing from me. If we keep moaning they’ll only change it, and right now at least it goes in the right direction. 

Anyway, good luck out there, you’ll love it. 

What's all this about?


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This post was originally sent as a reward to all Patreon supporters, and is released freely on this site the week after its original publication.

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Wednesday, 30 October 2024

A Mythic Calendar

I’ve ragged on games before for wasting my time with bespoke calendars. Traveller’s names for weekdays are running jokes in my group. It’s the height of worldbuilding indulgence that never actually matters at the table, right?


Okay but... just let me do it this one time.


It can matter, of course, but only if you make it matter. So I’ve tried to keep things simple and focused on things that might actually affect the game, such as times when important events occur, or how certain days of the week affect peoples’ behaviour. 


This is more detail than I’m actually including in Mythic Bastionland itself, so take it or leave it for your game.


Let’s start at the top. 


Seasons

Seasons do not obey a rigid calendar, their whims known only to the Seers.


These are already covered in the book and focus on the very broad strokes of Spring, Harvest, Winter.


From a purely gameplay perspective the main thing here is that Winter sucks for travel, and if you’re invested in a particular Holding then you’ll care about how well the Harvest turns out. 


Months

Each season is broken into three months of variable length, typically around 40 days. These might be hurried through or strung out as the season progresses. As always, the Seers understand this. 


The three months fit nicely onto the existing details of each Season as written in the book. Here they’re expanded a little and named, keeping the focus on why a player Knight would actually care which month it is. 


Spring
  • Sprouts - First shoots of green are coming through. The Feast of the Sun is all excess and revelry, so lots of room for messy drama to occur in and out of court. Bloody contests are encouraged, believing it strengthens the land for the year ahead.
  • Petals - Blossoms paint the Realm in every colour. Sceptremass brings all the local rulers together to renew their vows of loyalty at the Seat of Power. Big events could occur at this gathering, or at an individual Holding while the ruler is away.
  • Leaves - The peak of ripening growth, rising up to the longest day. The Tax begins, collecting coins from the wealthy inhabitants of the Realm, Knights often sent along as escort.
Harvest
  • Bales - The land turns gold and the first hay is cut. The Feast of the Stars is the best day for weddings, knighthoods, and hosts the most important tournaments of the year.
  • Bushels - As the breeze cools, amber grains and ripe fruits are reaped in vast quantities. Eldermass is a secret gathering of Seers, which Knights are unlikely to be directly involved with, but are often summoned by Seers afterward to work their agendas.
  • Barrels - A chill runs through the air as the leaves fall. Meat, beer, and bread is loaded into storage for the winter. The Tithe begins, a portion of all foodstuffs taken into the ruler’s store, often putting a strain on the people of the Realm. Knights are called on to manage this.
Winter
  • Pyres - First frost is fought back with the roaring fires of the Moon Feast, a solemn festival often combined with a census of the Realm’s inhabitants.
  • Hearths - The Realm lies quiet in its death shroud, the people huddled inside at their fires. Kindlemass is a lone reason for some to venture toward their neighbours to offer or partake of hospitality. Generous rulers see this as an opportunity to bring the people together, while others see it as an excuse to receive lavish gifts.
  • Candles - Rivers stir, snow turns to damp earth, and the cold air reveals a hint of freshness. The Levy begins, collecting a share of raw materials and crafted goods from across the Realm, taking them back to the Holdings and Seat of Power. Travel is still difficult at this time, so Knights are expected to offer their service.


Days

A Week is nine days. Think of it as three sets of three days.


The first day in each set is a normal working day.

The second day in each set is considered lucky for a particular activity, but generally treated as another working day. 

The third day is traditionally a break from daily work for some other purpose. Most honour this in some form. 


Stoneday - Named for the hills and mountains of the Realm.

Woodsday - A lucky day for hunting, fishing, foraging, or finding lost things. 

Armsday - Those who can fight must train, others support them. 

Riverday - Named for the waters of the Realm.

Silverday - A lucky day for trade and travel.

Kinsday - All should visit their kin, especially those in need.

Skyday - Named for the heavens above the Realm.

Rainsday - Considered a lucky day if it rains. 

Stillday - A day of fasting, peace, and contemplation.


Months can change on any day, and successive days of that type are named “the first, the second” etc. 


So a chronicler might describe a particular date as “the third Armsday of Bushels” which would be roughly three weeks into the month of Bushels, at the first month of Harvest. 

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This post was originally sent as a reward to all Patreon supporters, and is released freely on this site the week after its original publication.

If you want to support my blog, podcasts, and video content then head over to my Patreon.

Thursday, 24 October 2024

The Age of the MAC

I’m back from three weeks in Japan, and as such there’s no proper blogpost this week. I complained about jetlag after GenCon but sheesh… this is another level.

However, I’m happy I can finally share the new-look MAC Attack playtest featuring fantastic art from the amazing Amanda Lee Franck.

I’m holding back the Faction and Variant sections for now, but the doc has everything you need to try the game out. I can tease one of the factions, though, so you can see how they’re looking.

What’s the plan with this game? Let’s see how early 2025 looks when we get there.