Electric Broadcasts

Bastion is full of broadcasts. The very air you breathe is filled with transmissions waiting to be received. Radio, telly, machines silently pinging their plots to each other.

Lately everyone seems to be enjoying the telly. Wind out that aerial and flick on the screen. Tap the glass if it doesn't look right.

Current models come with nine of the most popular channels tuned in.

1: Video Nasty
Sedate general-interest programming by day, the most deranged filth you've ever seen by night. They switched their name from "Good Times" when they realised how few people were watching the daytime broadcast.

2: New Rural Broadcast
Intrepid far-transmission teams head out into Deep Country, finally giving a voice to those poor marginalised communities. Most Bastiards treat this as a comedy.

3: Civil Information
Urrrgh... I mean you're supposed to watch this on the hour twice a day if you own a telly and want to keep your license, but nobody ever does.

4: Remembrance
Solemn sepia imagery memorialising significant people who died recently. A panel of fame-hungry personalities discuss each life, ensuring they promote their own work in the process.

5: SeeText
Machine-printed text projected onto the screen, turned to new pages at irregular intervals, with relaxing background music. Like a more irreverent newspaper updated almost instantly.

6: The Starry Gates
A bunch of cults banded together to fund a non-stop broadcast of wildly conflicting ideologies. Only worth watching for the awkward handover segments that occur between sects on the hour.

7: Numberhouse
Just a bunch of numbers sung over and over. Stick the kids in front of it and leave them to it.

8: The Open Broadcast
Anybody can get a free slot on this, but there's a bit of a waiting list. In principle this should be home to creative, independently minded programming, but then the sort of twit who has time for this doesn't usually have much interesting to say.

9: Free Alternative Telly
This started out as a slightly edgy Mockery-led channel, but then everybody realised that you can perform all manner of improper, immoral, or illegal behaviour if you film and broadcast it. Looks like utter anarchy, but everybody on there has an agenda.

0: If you know the right tuning you set Channel 0 to something strange, including:

Scrambled Channels
Looks like a bunch of flashing shapes and falling snow to me, but I heard Machines can make sense of it.

Personal Channels
The lonely rich seem to get something out of earnestly talking into the camera and imagining there's an audience.

Warped Channels
I knew somebody who watched the wrong channel for too long and it turned them Alien. Honest!

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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.

Infinite Couterplay

I previously wrote about favouring Tactical Counterplay over Strategic Counterplay.

In short: I like games where you can counter and counter-counter your opponents through decisions in play rather than decisions that happen before the game begins.

Now that was in the context of miniature wargames, but I think RPGs present a slightly different situation.

In a wargame, if one side is heavily invested in archers and the other has an “immune to arrows” special rule across all their units, that can feel bad. There are a few factors here:

• Taking the smart approach of “I withdraw my forces and try an alternative approach” typically isn’t an option. We’ve laid out the armies to fight, so we’re at least going to give it a try.

• Army building isn’t done in isolation. When you’ve bought, assembled, painted, and found storage for 100 archers it can suck to realise they’re useless against your friend’s units.

• Typical GM-less wargames don’t allow opportunity to adjust to a hard strategic counter. I’ll come back to this.

Now some of this example is hyperbolic. An army-wide “immune to arrows” rule feels like a bad bit of design, but even if it was a milder “arrows get -1 to hit you” rule the point still stands. 

Does this carry over to TTRPGs? Do I think it’s bullshit if gelatinous cubes are immune to arrows? 

Well, no. There are a few factors I think apply here.

• Tactical Infinity means that you always have the option to do other things beside shooting arrows pointlessly into the cube. Lure it into a trap? Run away and come back with more appropriate weapons? Just sneak past it? Work out some way to modify your arrows to work against the cube? Start a fire? These typically aren’t options in a more rigid wargame.

• In the types of RPG I play, a single combat isn’t going to take up the majority of a night’s gaming. It matters less if we hit a single combat where some of the players feel like they’ve been hard countered before the fight begins. For most miniature games that one combat is the entire session of play. 

• With “theatre of the mind” style play a player can adjust their character’s gear, or even their entire character, without needing to buy, model, paint, and store a bunch of new miniatures. In fact, usually this process of equipping yourselves and preparing for an adventure occurs as a group, rather than as a solitary activity, so the team can plan for potential counters together.

So yeah, bring on weapons that ignore armour, shields that block all ranged attacks, and ghosts that ignore non-magical weapons. In an RPG there’s always a tactical counter.

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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.