Asymetrical characters

My philosophy on RPGs is to make things work in a way that bucks a key current convention, player symmetry. By player symmetry I mean the deliberate design philosophy that all characters have the same capacity for problem solving and combat. I want players at different capabilities and levels playing together. Of course this creates different balance issues as I don't want players left out or to create one person running away with the group.


In order to facilitate my philosophy I brought back the old exponential experience curves. The curve gives lower level characters a chance to catch up as high level characters require so much experience to advance compared to low level ones. In addition some classes are on faster experience curves than others. This provides an exceptional opportunity for bringing balance in. More powerful classes can be put in slower advancement curves.

Now while I love asymmetry that doesn't mean that there isn't balance. Balance comes from different directions. Slow XP discourages certain classes mostly the high powered and magic using classes. The faster XP classes however while usually weaker start gaining followers faster. In my case PCs start gaining individual followers starting at level 4. It may sound early to most campaigns to add followers but it's taken my current group a year to get to level 3.So while the thief may be limited in their power getting followers faster means they can catch up with a more powerful caster class though additional characters.

While I like Pathfinder as a base rules set the leveling is way too fast.

KDM 5 Lantern Year 5

Time to try out fighting an Antelope. We forgot the Mysterious Stranger event so went back to do it got nothing and went ahead to have the return on year 8.

Loadout: Pretty much the same as before

Hunt: Somehow we avoid anything bad or good on the 3 of the four but we were screwed by the dark pit which of course stripped a character eating their gear costing a founding stone, loincloth, skull helm, , bone darts and the cat's eye amulet. The amulet is a real loss.

Showdown: We set up and use the rawhide headband to great effect keeping the antelope from using very dangerous skills until we set up on it. Ezra and Edgar shredded it over the course of 4 turns. Encourage was absolutely critical though to prevent it from crushing anyone knocked down. Edgar got age and collected Monster claw(+1 Str, +1 Acc, and savage  on tooth and claw) Tooth and Claw is now 2/7+/3 Deadly, and Savage. So he's going to now be a martial artist. We also snagged 3 fresh herbs.

Settlement: We debated thus pretty heavily but decided to to innovate and got shrine promptly using it and adding armor to the next hunt. We also created a weaponsmith and tried again to increase population loosing the mother. Since we were confused we drew a random event instead of the hands of heat which we already did a year too early. And we got storytelling with the extra endeavors we go scrap hunting.

KDM Lantern Year 4 (The Butcher)

Loadout: Lucy keeps the rawhide set, lanterns and bone axe. Ezra picks up the cats eye circlet. Simone takes the katar in preparation for gathering the white tiger set. Newcomer Edgar is the first child of the settlement picks up the job of tossing the darts.

Hunt: Skipped because the butcher comes to us. (Oh joy)

Showdown: We draw the weeds and set up in the corner so that we can harvest them while the butcher spends it's first action running over towards us. Of course this works and sets the butcher up to fight us in the corner with some fresh herbs and survival. The cat's eye pays off in spades allowing us to avoid traps, impervious and keeping the bone axe away from the duper dense spots. As the butcher shuffles the hit locations every round the cat's eye allows us to put out steady damage without the rather severe consequences of the butcher's wound locations. Thankfully while it attacks a lot they don't do that much damage except adding blood tokens on hit. To counter we use a lot of survival until the screams (adding 1 brain damage a turn) drives everyone into a frenzy (+1 str and +1 speed) so we throw out a lot of hard hitting attacks. The butcher still carves up Simone and Ezra. He actually finishs though them with blood tokens. Neither of them even got a serious wound. Bandages (archive to remove 2 blood tokens) would of really saved us. Thankfully the Lucy steadily wears it down to just a few cards resulting the butcher trying backhand over and over knocking away the remaining survivors and then just standing there until they get up and finally beat it to death. Sadly all we get is a single lantern.

Settlement: Graves brings our endeavors up to 6. And our event nets red hands (+1 strength token for all survivors in the showdown that can be spent as survival.) and another strength. We also get the lantern oven (+1 departing survivor's survival and provide heat). Lucy now towers with +4 base strength and with her axe and token to get 8 strength so when she hits it will wound excepting natural ones. Our stored resources let us innovate storytelling moving survival up to 5. We try storytelling and use up our lanterns to give another understanding to Lucy. We use 3 more endeavors to get two new kids and loose a couple of parents who are unimproved pre-existing citizens. Sadly this leaves us with just one female among the starting unimproved survivors. She's going to be busy especially as we want to get 15 population to trigger the society event. We add the new blood to the party welcoming Edgar and Priscella. We can't afford much except to preserve the herbs. It's pretty good +2 survival on leaving and cancel one severe wound and loose it.

KDM Lantern Year 3

KDM Lantern Year 3

This year we're going after another white lion lv 1. We want to get Lucy the white lion set with her already high strength she should be devastating with the set and paired katars.

Loadout: Lucy is coated again this time with a complete rawhide set, both lanterns and the axe. Alister grabs the bone darts, and Ezra and Simone are both still using founding stones, with Simone grabbing the lion helm since we have it.

Hunt: We find a the elegant tomb and score understanding getting understanding and Ezra collecting a reroll on this hunt. We proceed to get a tough one that will mess up Ezra so we reroll it and get the gambler. One dead Allister later (sigh) and very lucky Simone we're off to the showdown.

Showdown: Due to a lucky event the lion starts off ground fighting. I say lucky because it means we have time to set up while it just lies there! Ground fighting triggers a preemptive attack if anyone adjacent to it takes an action but it will not draw AI cards until it's triggered or the lion takes a wound. With Simone taking Alister's darts after he died means we can just toss darts until we get a wound and clear the mood. We proceed to loot the terrain. Searching the lonely tree and acanthus nets us a broken lantern and a point of survival for Ezra. With all the treasure collected we prepare for the attack. We set up grass right behind the lion and have to wait several rounds for Simone to finally score a hit taking out the ground fighting mood. Our trap is sprung time to strike with Ezra and Lucy. Ezra immediately starts attacking and gets the trap netting a couple of light wounds. Lucy does us proud and scores a coupe of wounds; wounding on a a 2+ really helps. The Lion retorts dragging Erza away. Thankfully we set up the other grass for this exact result. Lucy encourages and and other than armor damage we're back in the fight. Thanks to the rawhide set's power Lucy has a 50% chance to get her survival back. In this showdown this turned out to give her something like 10 survival. She's using the gaps in the lions attack to interrupt and add more damage. Simone keeps flinging darts though the fight getting only one hit on the mane again luckily she's crazy and gets a well deserved point of strength from frustration. We agree on that! Simone's been all but useless with the darts it took 4 tries just to get the one wound when it was just laying there. Still having a ranged attack is worth having just for things like the ground fighting. Anyway the lion decides to stare down Ezra pointlessly her insanity protecting her and Lucy's infinite pool of survival stands her back up. Lucy continues to pound away with two attack a round her own and on the lion's action opportunity. Sadly for the Lion is nearing it's last legs and gets to go though the ai options again pulling stare down again to the same effect. Lucy mops it up crushing the last of it's health leaving us effectively uninjured from the showdown.


Settlement: Lucy, Ezra and Simone all get their first level all getting a fighting art. Lucy gets thrill seeker getting +2 survival instead of +1 when gaining survival in a showdown. It's going to be very hard for Lucy to run out of survival like this. Ezra gets the dodge twice a round not a bad deal as we try to use her as bait. Simone gets the eye scoring perfect hits on 9 or 10 too bad her torn muscle means she can't use it. We get back and the old man shows up dying giving us three more resources. With 5 endeavors thanks to graves and Allister's death in the hunt we have a lot of options. We innovate and have to choose between ammonia which opens up a few new pieces of gear we can't buy and increases our leaving survival or symposium for 4 choices for innovations and an increased survival limit. We go with symposium so we can find out what more innovations we can get later on. With the male population dwindling Lucy goes into a frenzy of matchmaking using our nameless reserve 5 to couple. The first child is Edgar and we go with survival of the fittest, he gets +1 strength, +1 understanding from graves, +2 courage, tough fighting art (+1 on severe physical injury rolls reducing the chance of instant death) and immortal disorder (when insane wounds go to brains instead of body).  We've never wanted someone insane but now (cackles). Of course Edgar is a guy and they get murdered rather suddenly so hopes are mixed. Survival of the fittest raises our survival by another one to 4 which is quite exciting and the kids get +1 strength, but rolling twice and choosing the lowest means we'll probably never get saviors or twins. Two more endeavors go into getting two more kids thankfully without penalties. The last endeavor we roll drums and whew a 9 there goes Ezra's seizures and +1 survival for the departing survivors.

Gear: Knowing we're going against the Butcher next we save enough for an innovation unsure if the butcher will provide needed resources. As we're going to start getting weapon skill we get a katar, the cat's eye circlet, and two skull helms. We've got 3 broken lanterns in reserve that we'll need to find a way use them.

KDM Lantern Year 2

     I forgot to mention in my last post that we rolled up 6 survivors at Hearth bringing our grand total to 10 and located the Vibrant Lantern (+1 accuracy).

Anyway on to our first hunt for a level 1 white lion!

Loadout: we loaded our armor, lanterns and bone axe on Lucy aiming to make the most of her +1 strength and penchant for critical wounds. Zachary and Ezra got the default loadout while newcomer Simone picks up our bone darts. The idea is to keep growing Lucy and start fresh with the undamaged Simone. Zachary and Ezra we hope for the best but are more sacrificial should the situation arise.

Hunt:
It was pretty short and sadly uninteresting as Zachary got lost loosing all of his 0 survival and the scent making a short hunt even shorter. We didn't realize it at the time but getting a few light wounds here would be clutch especially one to Zachary's arms

Showdown:
Well the lion made up for his kin right away by immediately running up and inflicting the two woulds to trigger a severe injury on Zachary. A one on the die seals his fate and he's gone. This sets up Lucy to start hacking away at it from the rear. While not at critical wound happy as against the first she manages to get another to the hand and nets another strength. Somehow she manages to avoid triggering the trap creating steady damage though the fight. Simone falls back and starts flinging darts ineffectually scoring one hit over the entire battle to the mane. Ezra however takes a pounding taking a critical and loosing a speed,  jumping up to insane and at the end drug off on her own.

Settlement:
Getting back to the settlement we get the scream and nominate Lucy who manages to gather enough courage to advance and pick up matchmaker and another point of strength! This is huge as she's at 3 strength she's more likely to wound than not even with tooth and claw. As we now have the Catarium we look at the goods decide she's perfect for the white lion set with her natural strength making daggers or katar's devastating. But for now she's getting our competed rawhide armor until we can get her the gear. Hunting the screaming antelope will have to wait until she's set up. Our innovation was drums which we try with both our remaining endeavors and fail pushing Ezra to a terrifying 9 insanity.

KDM Lantern Year 1

The Kingdom Death Monster Kickstarter first attracted my eye back when I was first dating my finance. We invested and spent much good time deciding which of the gorgeous miniatures to get. Finally we ended up getting all the expansions and a few of the promos. After years of waiting the base game finally arrived and since it's my little corner of the net I'm going to use this blog to document our travails and hopefully success. Since so much ink has already been spilled on the amazing miniatures I'll not retread that ground no matter how much how I concur.

So without further ado:

In our first lantern year we named our group per the classic team Allister, Zachary, Ezra, and Lucy. As we have the promo cards Dying Lantern and Vibrant Lantern we rolled off and gave the Dying Lantern to Allister, the character depicted in the introductory story. The Dying Lantern is a nice piece of gear no affinities and grants +1 dodge. It's not really powerful until you can start stacking enough dodge to make it hard for the monsters to hit. If we can get to the point where monsters start missing more than hitting I expect it to be amazing. Sadly in the first lantern year it did absolutely nothing.

The fight went quite well for our survivors. We suffered only two bleeding tokens Zachary lost his ability to use survival and Ezra picking up the disorder seizures. But luck definitely favored the ladies especially Lucy who snagged a point of strength. Between the two of them the first lion was reduced by two speed when it finally used it's knockback attack and split the party. We laughed and pelted it with half our Founding Stones as it tried to move far enough to get any of us. We finished it off in melee.

We got amazingly lucky on the rewards with two critical wounds granting extra resources and drawing the one that can be converted to two giving us an amazing 11 resource cards for the settlement phase.

Going to our new settlement now know as Haven we selected Allister to get the bonuses taking him out for the next session. We built the base buildings and picked the innovation Inner Lantern. We got so much gear; Bone Axe, Bone Darts, and most of the Rawhide set, gloves, boots headband and vest.

Next time our first full hunt.

Review: Fate Stay Night

After having read favorable reviews, getting positive comments from acquaintances, and discovering it's popular enough to have manga and an anime made from it, I decided to try the visual novel Fate Stay Night by Type Moon. Like all visual novels it plays like a choose-your-own-adventure book with special effects and a mostly linear path. Despite the limited game side of it, as many options are A or B and B gets you killed or false choices where your choice makes no difference, it made a pretty interesting if long winded story for the first third to half of the game. I was beginning to really enjoy the story and characters. And then the game went H. It totally blindsided me. I should of paid more attention to those reviews I suppose. Sadly, this is also the point the game finally veered too far into typical anime tropes that I dislike, such as an over-important useless male lead, absurd gender roles, and stupid heroism without an accompanying price. I went ahead and pushed though to the end having to endure the increasing standardization of the plot. It's too bad too, I enjoyed the tantalizing subversion suggested in the early plot. Overall it makes the equivalent of a decent manga which already exists.

The British Industrial Revolution by Robert C Allen

This book tries to explain in explicit detail why the industrial revolution started in Great Britain and how it happened. In a nutshell Britian had relatively high wages with very cheap energy; coal. This created a demand for labor saving devices. On the supply side Britian had a highly educated population with a large population hub in London to disperse the knowledge. Now the book itself takes nearly 300 pages to make this argument and all the supporting details really strengthen the case and there are thorough deconstructions of other major theories. Overall Allen does an excellent job of making his case. I highly recommend this book if you want to know more on how the industrial revolution started.

Science a Four Thousand Year History

I recently finished reading this title by Patricia Fara. It appears the point of the work's goal is to deconstruct the story of Science. For example it takes big names in science such as Newton, Einstein, and Copernicus and discusses how they did things in a way no longer considered scientific, self promoting, or were one of many discovering something. It goes a to great detail into the importance and process of selling scientific memes and the great battles between ideas such as heat being motion or a fluid that flowed into or out of things. The roots of modern science in the now rejected fields such as alchemy and astrology are also discussed at length. A lot of time is spent on illustrating the biases of science towards, upper-class European males.
It is surprising that the scientific method was more or less ignored as its adoption is critical in how current science works, evolves, and self-corrects.

I found the book unsatisfying perhaps because I've never felt science can answer everything; science is great for how thing work but flounders with why which philosophy and religion seem better suited. It just appears similar to perspective of religious adherent who discovered their organization is like any other; imperfect. The conclusion feels a tad incomplete. After deconstructiong the weakness of science and the woldview, not mentioning any other potential viewpoints or calling for reform seems well uninspiring especially after discussing in depth the importance of selling ones ideas.

Transience

Greater North America, The Combine, UCAS, USoNC, The Union,

By many names and many iterations it's common in Science Fiction to have the USA annex Canada in the least through the western hemisphere completely. Never mind that annexing even Canada would be prohibitively expensive to synchronize. My theory is USA size is increased to be representative of how big the country looms in the imagination and to show how much more powerful this future form is. It also allows for narrowing the players in the story. Major nations such as Brazil, Venezuela, Columbia and Argentina can be safely ignored despite the sizable power they represent, and greater potential, on the world stage. On the other hand these worlds usually have the EU as a unified nation and often a pan-African or Arabian Superstate as well so it may just be an attempt to keep the USA up to speed with it's rivals.

What is Science?

Science seems very misunderstood by the general public. Usually when portrayed in media "scientists" are dogmatic priests of the religion of science. "That's not scientifically possible" is the antithesis of scientist with solid observations.

Science is a very simple process: Observe - Conjecture - Predict - Test

Observation
Observation seems straightforward however the key aspects are precision and repetition. Seeing something, say a spaceship once from hundreds of miles away in a fog is a much less trustworthy observation than seeing your spouse next to you everyday.

Conjecture
Conjecture is a guess at why the observation occurred.


Predict
Prediction is essentially that if this theory is accurate what else, untested, will be true. One of the most impresive examples of this comes from Dmitri Mendeleev who used his periodic table to predict many of the qualities of germanium, gallium and scandium which had yet to be discovered.

Test
Evolution happens to be one of the strongest theories in science stronger than Newtons Laws of Gravity. Quantum mechanics were needed to replace gravity in the realm of the very small. In addition many of the smartest minds in the world have been trying for over 100 years to specifically to disprove evolution. In a proper scientific environment other people who often disagree with you will try to actively disprove your results.

This is why string theory is not really scientific, it's just not currently testable. The math is beautiful but without a way to test it is pretty much just beautiful math and philosophy. This is part of the reason why so many proponents are big on supercolliders. They need the evidence.

Now within that framework there a a few generally accepted goals:
Parsimonious: simplest explanation. eg gravity being a bunch of strings between every object in the universe and each other

Predictive: This serves as the most powerful evidence of a theory. If it can predict what will happen in other untested thing and is accurate it indicates the theory is robust

Testable: This is why science and religion grind on each other. The divine is specifically non-testable. Ah well, what sort of divine being is cruel enough to give us a way to interpret a world consistently and then expect us to ignore that ability.

Provisional: No science is proper if it cannot be updated in the face of new evidence.

Science does make some assumptions. Mainly that reality is a cohesive place in which observations can be consistent and the physical laws of reality don't change randomly.

Spiderman the Video Game

Spiderman the Video Game 1993 Sega

Genre: Brawler/Platformer

Spiderman the Video Game calls upon some of the more obscure Marvel super heroes. Remember SubMariner, Black Cat and Hawkeye? Yeah, me neither. Despite having plenty of villains from the Marvel Universe your generic enemies look like they should be fighting Power Rangers. Spiderman the Video Game tries to do two things and does them both with mediocrity. It tries to intersperse brawling sections with platforming. And I have to admit the transitions between them are pretty good. However both forms are quite generic. The aesthetics, sound and graphics, are distinctly average but functional. The difficulty is fairly low except for a fairly tricky Green Goblin. In fact its so easy that you have a health timer to ensure you die from time to time. All in all a very mediocre game that just tried to do too much rather than one thing well.

Lost Gaming Gems: Command HQ

One of more recent ancestors of the RTS genre, Microprose's Command HQ (circa 1991) tries to receate the great global wars in a pseudo real time environment. Everything happens on a turn basis but the turns passed on a player controlled timer. Structurally it has the 3 World Wars (#3 being 1970-80s Nato vs Warsaw Pact) and 2 random wars one with pre-placed cities and another with random cities.

The best part about the game and something I still love is the elegance of the units. They're all useful and to the point. Ocean units consists of the rock paper scissors trinity of gunships, subs and carriers, land has simply infantry and armor.

HQ has an excellent interface point and click complete with a what might be a decent path-finding algorithm. Although I think it may just use a lot of real-world trade routes. And if the wars are fought sequentially serve as an excellent tutorial as more complicated stuff like aircraft and satellites are available in more modern conflicts.

Of course the music, graphic, and sound effects while decent for the time show their age today.

Who pays for the stimulius?

With so much in the news about the stimulus in I find myself asking who's paying for it. The money is not coming from tax increases. Nor have there been increased savings inflows from abroad. That the dollars are coming from the printing press fails to identify who is paying. Historically printing currency means inflation. Inflation means the value is coming from the devaluation of assets and savings.

Item Ideas

I recently came across a site full of creative ideas for cursed and interesting items and to a lesser extent characters. The SCP Foundation is a site dedicated to collection all the creepy ideas in the vein of X-files. It even has a really neat report format. Heck with a rules set this site could be a setting.

Check it out!

http://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/main

d20 Casters

A lot of ink was split over how overpowered the arcane casters were in d20. Being a veteran of the older AD&D format I found the class became significantly more powerful than earlier editions especially in comparison to other classes. I believe the aggregation of the desire to simplify the game and standardize the the classes incompletely without reducing the class to match.

Originally the class was the expert class. It required levels of play as a near useless character, was always levels behind most of the party, had a random array of weak to powerful spells, and was physically laughable in melee.

First the drawbacks to the spells themselves became much lighter; haste does not take a year of your life every use; teleportion has a risk of killing you outright, polymorph requires continual saves not to lose you mind, ect. These drawbacks made mages much less willing to use the overpowered spells. In the move to make the game more accessible at the end of 2nd edition and truly break from original D&D mechanics the designers made a lot of changes in order to make the game "better" and more accessible. A lot of these decisions conflicted with the basic design philosophy of arcane casters and were not jettisoned resulting in overpowered arcane casters, divine too but that is another article.

Then the decision to allow spell selection caused all sorts of trouble. Now mages who had to depend on finding/buying good spells could cherry-pick the best spells on each level. Critically this meant that rare & more powerful spells became the standard which made all of the other nifty but weaker spells suck.

The standardization of experience was a huge advantage for the casters as they now leveled at a much faster rate than previously where they were always levels behind their non casting allies. As a result access to higher level spells changed. Older editions tended to end by level 15 with the mages a level or two behind. As a result mages rarely got access to the higher 6th-7th level spells. 8th and 9th level spells were essentially never meant to be in PC's daily spell selection except in extremely high powered campaigns. They were the domain of spell-failure prone scrolls and the villains. As a result high powered spells with their penalties clipped were dropped into lower level campaigns creating enormous imbalances

Casts per day were vastly increased especially at low levels the addition of high intelligence allowing for many more casts per day again increased the power level a bit. This was not in itself the main problem. Combining it with the decreased encounters per day created one of the most problematic issues in d20. A culture where the caster was expected to be constantly casting. This created we adventure until the caster is out of spells mentality that trapped designers and player into excessive casting that eroded the value of endurance characters like the classic fighter who's hp was the old limiter.

Arcane casters maintained the increase of additional dice every caster level combined with faster level accumulation compared to the rest of the party led to increased damage production.

The mechanics of spell resistance and saves changed both in ways to make the casters more powerful. Certain high-level foes had 95% spell resistance; no feats or leveling to reduce that number also saves became much more sure for everyone since the save mechanic was roll an x or higher on d20 with rare spells that have a -2 to -4 on the saves. As a result casters usually had their high damage curve reduced by steadily improving saves for reduced effect. Conversely at lower levels the characters the few spells the mage had were very likely to work as foes had maybe a 15%-20% save rate. The creation of spells to get around golems and foes specifically there to keep casters in check yet again increases their power.

Another change was spell failure. In earlier editions spells could be disrupted by 1 hp of damage and required the caster to do nothing else at all that turn and long casting times for high level spells. The creation of concentration and defensive casting allowed casters much more impunity with their spells.

I my initial goal was to illustrate the why the partial changes between editions led to wild imbalances in d20 environment. Something I suspect designers did not want. They clearly learned from this and decided not to keep old stuff except for names in 4th edition. As a result they seem to of successfully addressed these power imbalance issues creating, with fanatical zeal, a level playing field for all the characters classes. The sated goal of making the game more accessible in 4th is a success. Perhaps that why it's so uninspiring for me. I liked the challenge of an elite class with a heavy price. It was tough going early on. You never got the really good stuff unless the DM was nice. It was a class filled with the power gamers, who worked hard for that power. All those difficulties kept the munchkin(1) population down. I do admit that biggest problem was you had to have a year long or more campaign for the rewards of a mage to truly kick in.

(1) Sadly despite how much I like d20 I feel it catered to munchkins more than any other edition.

Solar Power Falacy

I decided to find out just how much solar power it would take to power the US. The results were disturbing.

The US uses roughly 3.3 TW a day. The better solar arrays power produce on average 1 GW per sqr/km per day in the US, accounting for cloud cover. So that means that to power the entire nation an area of 3/8ths of contiguous US would need to be a giant solar array. That's essentially everything east of the Mississippi river. (derived from data in Wikipedia)

This means solar power can never be anything more than chump change in US energy policy!

Introduction

This is my first blog. I'm starting it as a way to improve my writing/typing skills and record/share interesting things to me. Ideally it will eventually gain focus on a specific topic. The primary topics I expect to write about at this point include economics, geopolitics, and D&D.