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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Worse Wounds

I'm testing out an alternative wound system for *clears throat* Intergalactic Bastionland.

This game is very much at the "throw everything into a document then take an axe to it later" stage, so take this with a heavy pinch of salt.

The intent is to tap into the visceral appeal of Scars from Electric/Mythic Bastionland, but have them occur every time a character is wounded.

This might well make combat too bloody, but only testing will tell.

Oh yeah, and six damage types is probably too many. I just had the first three for a while but thought it could be fun to have three weird damage types to draw on alongside the core three. I'll talk about my ideas for weapons and armour another time.

There are some other ideas thrown in here too:

• Stunt/Flourish/Escalate adds a bit of a gambling element to Saves.
• Recovery is something I've messed with before, allowing a small amount of GD recovery during combat but only if you fall back to safety.
• Stratagems are a reflavouring of Mythic's Feats, putting the focus more on pre-combat planning than individual heroics.

Will be interesting to look back on this further down the line and see what has survived.

This is probably the last blogpost of the year, so thanks for reading and see you in 2025!

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The d6 Sceptres

Give your Knights something better to whack with.

The Butcher’s Bludgeon

d10 Long
When the wielder Smites, the attack gains both +d12 and Blast.
Cannot Focus.

Death’s Head
d10 Long
When the wielder Smites, the target counts as having no Armour against this attack.
Cannot Deny.

The Master Mace
d8 Hefty
When the wielder Focuses, the Gambit counts as a Strong Gambit.
Cannot Smite.

The Duellist’s Rod
d10 Long
When the wielder Focuses, perform two Gambits instead of one.
Cannot Deny.

The Smithie’s Maul
d10 Long
When the wielder Denies in melee the attacker’s weapon is destroyed.
Cannot Smite.

The Gust Wand
d8 Hefty
When the wielder Denies, perform an immediate free Move.
Cannot Focus.

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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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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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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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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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