Tales of the Blue Dolphin

I haven't written about the Austen RPG in ages (my last post was in June; see here and here for previous entries), but I have more of an idea what the game might look like. My models are old fashioned, highly structured RPGs of the 1970s such as En Garde! and Flash Gordon and the Warriors of Mongo, half-way between board games and the tabletop roleplaying of today.

The question I asked last time was, who are the PCs? I think you'd have an interesting dynamic with two sets of players: Parents and their daughters. In a typical game, one player takes the role of the head of the household -- either the father or widowed mother -- while the others are daughters. The HoH takes care of the budget and is the custodian of the family name. His daughters are financially burdensome, and he wants to get them married off, but he also has to make sure they don't get the reputation of being loose women. (Replace these terms with whatever would better suit an Austenesque game.)

The daughters, meanwhile, want to be happily married. Each will have a set of characteristics they most desire in a man, and their happiness depends on how well matched they are. However they must compete both with each other and with a set of NPC women for a small set of bachelors, and they will be expected to marry in birth order, with the oldest daughter marrying first. There will be a temptation, particularly with the younger daughters, to throw convention out the window and be openly flirtatious. This increases their chance of getting married to the men they like, but endangers the family's reputation. So there's an inherent Prisoner's Dilemma dynamic unless the HoH does his job properly.

Thoughts?

The latest version of the politics game, Breakdown, is being put up on Google Docs for public viewing. I've only put up the rules and the "generic" 4-player scenario, but other components will be posted as I finish them. (Note that the region diagram in the 4-player scenario is off; I'll have to fix this by replacing the table with a GIF.)

This version of Breakdown was partially inspired by Avalon Hill's old game Squad Leader. Not by the rules -- Heaven help us -- but by its customizability. I liked how it used historical "scenarios," which were interesting to read. I think it'd be cool to say, "tonight we're going to play Chile in the early 70s" and see how it turns out. It's also a way to invite hobbyists to write their own scenarios, introduce their own rules variants and so forth. If the game caught on -- by some miracle -- it could bring back some of the old wargaming culture, but focused on simulating politics rather than warfare.

As always, I'd love an opportunity to playtest the game, or to hear criticisms or recommendations of one sort or another.

As I recall World of Warcraft and other MMOs have fairly crude rules for determining whether monsters attack PCs. Most monsters will attack as soon as they enter the PCs threat area, this "threat area" being inversely proportional to the PCs level. This makes some sense, but it means monsters will still make Kamikaze runs against high-level PCs who run too close. It's stupid, and annoying for the player, too, who just wants to get to his high-level dungeon without fighting all the Murlocs in his way.

Here's one way I'd model monster behavior, if I could. (No idea if this would be impractical to program, take too much processor power, or what have you.) Assume PCs and monsters can be classified as "low aggression" and "high aggression." "Low aggression" creatures only attack out of fear or self-defense; they get no material advantage from killing. "High aggression" creatures, on the other hand, attack to get something from their victims (meat, money, XP, or whatever). Also assume, for the sake of argument, that higher level monsters always defeat low-level PCs, and lower-level monsters never defeat high-level PCs. (This isn't true, but it's a close enough approximation for the chart.) Given these assumptions, rational monster behavior would look like this:

			PC Aggression
			Low	High
Monster Aggression	Low	Lower-Level	Ignore	Hide/Flee
		Higher-Level	Ignore	Attack
	High	Lower-Level	Ignore	Hide/Flee
		Higher-Level	Attack	Attack

(Sorry for the crude formatting. I'm too lazy to do HTML tables by hand, and I'm only willing to waste so much time cleaning up Word HTML for an LJ entry.) In this table, "Lower-Level" means the monster is weaker than the PC, "Higher-Level" means he's tougher. "Ignore," "Hide/Flee" and "Attack" indicate the monster's responses.

Now if you assume PCs are all "High-Aggression" then the monster's decisions are easy: They should attack weaker PCs, hide or flee from the stronger ones. This alone would make the game more interesting (it's hard farming creatures who flee at the sight of you), but I think it'd add another layer of interest if certain players can be perceived as less-aggressive. This would work especially well if players could advance through non-violent means.

This will probably be the last of my posts on Two-Fisted Tales: The Golden Age, as there aren't enough of you who are both ex-2FT players and Golden Age comics fans. I'm planning to use a number of public domain superheroes as examples, and Will Eisner's ever-so-derivative Wonder Man was an obvious choice.

Wonder Man

The not-so-great Wonder Man was created by the great Will Eisner to be a blatant rip-off of Superman. His debut in Wonder Comics # 1 (May, 1939) was his last appearance, as National Comics (Superman’s publisher) successfully sued Fox Feature Syndicate before the second issue hit the stands.

Fred Carson was a radio engineer and amateur inventor. On a trip to Tibet he met a yogi who gave him a power ring, one that gave him amazing strength. This interpretation of Wonder Man was built at the Astonishing power level¹ from the Professor template.

Brains	14
Luck	11
Mind	10
Muscle	612
Reflexes	10
Savvy	10
Status	11
Reputation	11
Wealth	11
Weird	72
Specialties	Brains (Science)
Masteries	Brains [Engineering]
Schticks	Crime Televisor3
	Wrist Radio
	Thick Skin
Defects	Power Source (-10)4
Hero Points	0

¹ I had to make four new power levels beyond "Amazing" - Incredible, Astounding, Astonishing and Uncanny - which have an extra 20, 40, 60 and 100 Hero Points, respectively. "Uncanny" is for Stardust the Super-Wizard or other characters who can do just about anything they feel like; I considered calling it "Insane" instead.
² This was Superman's precise Muscle rating, I realized, after I found out it was how large a Muscle score had to be before you could "leap an eighth of a mile." Since Wonder Man was such a Superman ripoff, it should be his Muscle rating, too.
³ Speaking of Stardust the Super-Wizard, both of them had this crime-viewfinder thing. Since Wonder Man came first I guess this was actually original.
⁴ You'd call this "Defect" a "Limitation" in most games. It indicates you could take away Wonder Man's powers by stealing his power ring.

In the early 80s I loved RuneQuest, like many aspiring RPG writers, for its delightful mechanical consistency and elegance of design. One thing I didn't like, however, was its "Battle Magic" system, at least in the first two editions. (Battle Magic was equivalent to Arcane in 3e D&D.) It wasn't how spells worked, in play, that bothered me, but how you learned them: You went to a local cult, gave them money, and *bang!* you could cast spells. I thought it killed the flavor of the game, to have magic taught by equivalents of the New School, and was happy when Avalon Hill changed this in 3rd edition.

Fast forward twenty-something years to 4th edition D&D. As I've said before, I liked how Rituals were distinguished from other spells (continuing the 3e trend), but after a bit of play I was dissatisfied. There are a number of reasons, but one is that it brought back Ye Olde Magick Market: You marched over to the Discovery Institute, paid them cash, and walked out knowing a nice new ritual.

kokoinai pointed out that this market already existed in 3rd edition, which is true (and it existed in 2nd as well, in a different form). In those days, though, it was limited to wizards (Bards in 2e). I can accept the "spell market" for wizards -- they need to buy all those books, after all -- but extending it to clerics, shamans, and so forth seems wrong to me. What would be the alternatives?

One would be to simply give the latter classes their rituals for free, but that might put them at an advantage, money-wise. A solution -- for divine casters, at least -- may be to charge them a tithe, expressed perhaps as a fixed fee per level, and then give them rituals (and perhaps other benefits) for free. I would have no problem doing the same for psionic casters (since I identify them with Eastern ascetic traditions) but I'm not sure how to charge primal classes. Demanding a tithe from a shaman seems weird -- who would they pay? -- but there's no reason for them to have extra money in their pouches. Expect them to spend time "communing with the spirits," perhaps, on the time-is-money principle? I don't know, but I'd welcome suggestions.

Update: I just noticed that shamans don't get the Ritual Caster feat. Replace "shaman" with "druid" above, I guess.