New on Desk #40 — Class Week

I’ve actually been doing all sorts of things this week, so it was difficult to pick one to feature first. I chose the D&D stuff on the premise that that’s what people like to read about.

Doing Class write-ups for the Coup

I’ve been particularly inspired to write up full class write-ups for the Coup old school D&D campaign. I swim deep enough in the game design waters to basically revise much of the basic stuff for every major campaign undertaking like this, so not only combat rules and such get a once-over, but character classes as well. The mechanical theming in this campaign is a bit like AD&D implemented with Basic philosophy, topped off with my own brand of Forgite technical polish. It’s still living and moving in various ways (I still don’t have a firmed up task resolution system, for instance), but we’re getting there.

For comparison’s sake, here’s a snapshot of where we’re at with the character class landscape of the campaign:

Gygaxian AD&D Classes	Coup Classes right now	Have actual full write-ups right now
Cleric	The 4 basics (Cleric, Fighter, Thief, Wizard) — the most common adventurer Classes in-setting, but not technically speaking special in any other way.	Cleric
Druid	Commoner — a sort of “null class”, the starter of choice with a bad stat line. Main virtue in being easy to multiclass out of into some real Class.	Fighter
Fighter	Slave (Beggar) — under consideration; an actively hampered wretched survivor Class. Core conceit is gaining some modest advantage from negative Ability scores, which is of course extremely anti-synergistic in the long term.	Thief
Paladin	AD&D premiums (Assassin, Bard, Barbarian Druid, Illusionist, Monk Paladin, Ranger) — all except the Cavalier, which has insufficient thematic platform between Fighter and Paladin.	Paladin
Ranger	Hedge Mage (Witch) — a non-academic magical generalist, often named “witch”. A sort of Wizard counterpart with less INT requirement and lower XP threshold. I’m thinking they have a bit of a wild magic, improvisational “magic as art and not a science” edge to justify the Class next to the Wizard.	Ranger
Magic-User	Warlock / Anti-Paladin — a pair of Chaotic Evil Paladin-equivalents defined by selling your soul for demonic power. Warlock’s an infernal magic-user, Anti-Paladin (probably gonna rename that one) is a prestige fighter like the Paladin.
Illusionist	Blackguard / Slave Factor — a pair of Lawful Evil Paladin-equivalents; code of honor aimed towards oppression instead of aiding the weak. The Blackguard is just a Paladin reversion, while Slave Factor is a Thief with some magical Abilities.
Thief	Elf-Friend — a Chaotic Good Paladin-equivalent. The campaign doesn’t have conventional player character elves, so the Elf-Friend is basically that; a human with some elf magic. Typically combined with some other Class.
Assassin	Jester — a remade Thief-Acrobat, sort of like a non-spellcasting Bard-Thief.
Monk	Dweomerist — a specialist spellcaster working with a narrow family of spells. A bit like the modern Sorcerer, but more so.
Cavalier
Barbarian
Bard

So yeah, I have many more character Classes in the campaign than I’ve yet to write up in detail. Doesn’t really matter as long as I keep abreast of what the players actually play. Fortunately I have developed pretty firm design precepts for Class design, so every Class tends to be quicker than the last to bake to completion.

This week alone I’ve written up the Ranger and Thief, and finished the Paladin, so that’s been pretty productive. For a taster, here’s the advancement chart for the Ranger — the most complex class I’ve written up so far:

Level	Title	Xp Req	Class Features
1	Hermit, Pathfinder	–	Scaling AB, Improved HD (martial), Ranger Skills, Inured HD, Favoured Enemy
2	<Animal> Ranger	2600	Animal Empathy, Action Stunt
3	<Terrain> Ranger	5200	Favoured Terrain, Conceal Enmity
4		10 400	Martial Feats
5	The Grandee	20 800	Circle Lore
6		41 600
7		83 200
8		166 400
9	The Silent	332 800	Blade Sight
10		665 600
	Sword Hero, Woods Hero	1 000 000	Heroic Advancement
11		1 331 200
12	Hero	2 662 400
13	Planar Hero	5 324 800
Name	Bailiff, <various>	100 000 /rank	Loremastery, Communal Authority

I’ve arrived at a pleasant framework for class design by coupling together a few basic formal constraints; what remains of freedom is the canvas of creativity here. Consider these class design precepts if you will:

• The XP progression is a stable geometric series, no custom exceptions whatsoever.
• Characters enter Heroic tier (sort of like “epic level” in modern D&D) at 1M XP sharp, which is at whatever level depending on the class’s XP factor.
• All characters gain the metaphysical status of “Hero” at 12th level. 13th is “Planar Hero” and after that we have divine ranks.
• Classes only have level titles on levels with important class features. Empty levels are encouraged to keep the design clean and emphasized.

Monday: Coup de Main #16

There was a specific reason for why I wrote up the Ranger this week — Tuomas sent his main character Phun Eral into downtime to identify magic items and whatnot, and created a Ranger in his stead! Wayward the Ranger, Tuomas’s new alt (main?) is your ranger’s ranger (“Foil” in the campaign parlance, a character with stat-based XP bonus), because Tuomas rolled a hella-strong stat line for him. Developing our ideas of what Rangerhood means in Flanaess and the Coup campaign was one of the major points of entertainment in the session.

Aside from the Ranger stuff, Heikki had Rob Banks the 3rd level Thief meet with Donmas Kaapu, the Greyhawk Thieves’ Guild rep in Yggsburg. The meeting was surprisingly jovial considering how Rob is actually spying on Donmas on behalf of the guildmaster; the two Thieves exchanged tips and affirmed some implicit understandings. Donmas even promised Rob a tryout, a mission to test his talents for admission into Donmas’s crew. Unfortunately Rob learned nothing of particular interest about what Donmas’s operation is, so in that sense the spying adventure isn’t progressing anywhere.

However, drawing a dud on Donmas didn’t mean lack of excitement! The adventurers have been shaping out a theory about there being a hidden dungeon under Yggsburg, and it just so happened that Tuomas’s new Ranger found the place by accident! The players didn’t have particularly amazing clues to the dungeon, but lucky dice rolls intersecting with enemy action (or friendly action, what do I know — maybe they’re friends with kobods) ended up with quite the high-tension situation: the party intercepted a bunch of kobolds almost red-handed in the process of kidnapping children from a local cobbler family. We ended the session with the adventurers in hot pursuit, roughly 20 minutes behind the kobolds at the time they entered the first room of the dungeon that did, indeed, exist down there under the town.

The next session is going to be pretty exciting, as the stakes are high, the time-limit is evident and the party will maybe need to make some difficult choices about when to press on and when to retreat.

Tuesday: Hiking in the Boatmoor

“Boatmoor” is my delightful spot translation for Talaskangas, a tiny nature reserve near here. We went hiking there with a couple of friends this week, just a little day trip to break the monotony. Three men and a dog, a classic wilderness team.

The trip went well overall. There are plenty of duckboards (such a cute name in English) on the path, what with it being rather marshy all around. My pet conspiracy theory is that as Boatmoor was originally kickstarted by a preservationist political action in the late ’80s, the maintenance of the place is a very low priority for the national park management org (Metsähallitus); this would explain why the duckboards are mostly submerged and disintegrating like the place hasn’t had a facelift for thirty years.

I reaped the benefits of a complex footwear solution by wearing a thin-sole moccasin; the main advantage of that in comparison to a hiking boot is that it doesn’t matter if your shoe gets swamped, as it’s quick to dry out. The main disadvantage is that I bruised my little toe by kicking a rock. (The footwear solution was “complex” in that I also carried conventional hiking boots with me all the way just in case we’d encounter uncomfortable terrain.)

One thing I learned on the hike is that apparently it’s legal to hunt in the nature reserve with a special permit. The doggo discovered (and tried to eat, as a dog does) a shot bird, and a bit later we met the hunter himself on the path. Could be poaching, I guess, but they had such a colorful entourage with the entire family and four dogs that in hindsight, considering that I checked that it’s possible to have permission to hunt at Boatmoor, I’m choosing to believe that they had a permit. I at least wouldn’t take the entire pack with me to poach, it seems like more of a lonely-man hobby.

Thursday: Varangian Way

On Thursday RPG Club Hannila continued with our Varangian Way viking drama sandbox. There was flames and death and politics, your typical dark ages stuff. Säisä the forlorn Finn joined forces with a man he’d saved from captivity on a daring night assault against the blood-thirsty Red Jays, cutting the thread of his past. The victory elevated Jutikka, the captive Finnish forest bandit, to a megalomaniac 7 Passion points; power enough to change the world, so we shall see what he does with that!

The game as it stands now is interestingly minimalistic about leading the horse to the water, so to speak; it leaves the players almost complete freedom to decide for themselves what’s actually going on in the sandbox. Instead of having game mechanics provoke events, for the most part the players have to actually decide to have things happen.

This arrangement is, of course, entirely normal for GMed games. It works on those because the GM is personally committed to “having things happen”. In a GMless game it’s interesting how the players fill this GM-shaped hole. Often there are various turn-order structures that force the players to take responsibility in turns.

In Varangian Way, though, there is no turn order. The stark white canvas will stay empty until the most responsible player takes up the brush and starts painting. The social dynamics here are bold, as in a given group of players that “most responsible player” will always be the same person, time and again. Perhaps a bit of jockeying, but surely the most active two or at most three players will push nearly all the action.

A solution to that, relevant for Varangian Way: players should, in addition to having tools to establish story and adventure themselves, also have the tools to entangle other players. If that “most responsible player” guy could, rather than thinking up the next story himself, instead call on another player to do it, that’d help a lot in building bridges and activating the entire play group.

There’s a little bit of this already in the game in that the players can specifically set up storylines for each other’s characters, and they can ask others to run stories for their characters, but as with other tools in the game, these possibilities aren’t exactly being pushed at you. I personally like it that the tools are just there instead of being pushed at you by a fixed procedure, but that does mean that we have to realize what’s going on and specifically play the players — invite the other players to play with us, for if we do not, then they’re in danger of merely sitting there while the active players play.

Friday: Condottiere

We finally started putting Condottiere, this miniatures wargame of renaissance warfare, through its paces! A friend’s been painting renaissance miniatures over the summer, so I promised my aid in trying out the game. I’m not a minis gamer myself, but I’m adaptable, so it was interesting trying out something a bit off my usual territory. We even attracted a third amigo, so I could retreat elegantly into refereeing, which is anyway more in my wheelhouse than the fiddly minis positioning.

My general impression of Condottiere is positive, speaking as an outsider to the miniatures gaming scene. The game’s rules are relatively streamlined and evidence a great commitment to the strong points of the minis gaming medium; it’s all about table positioning and dynamic concentration of force. Perhaps the best comparison is to Games Workshop games (that I have mere superficial familiarity with, of course): Condottiere doesn’t really do the nit-picky stat block thing that e.g. WFB runs off; forces are differentiated by what they look like (what the little men are literally holding onto as their armament; to be a pike-man, be a pike-man), and the significance of these distinctions is intuitive. The game’s much more about where your forces are and what they’re doing than about rock-paper-scissor iterating over dozens of troop types with their distinct special powers.

The game’s most distinctive feature is clearly its command model, which deviates quite a bit from your standard “assign one order to every unit every round” thing. Instead, the player assigns movement direction first to his general, and then every other unit can either follow suit or continue executing their pre-existing orders. The player tops off this peculiar command filtering by giving one last unit customized orders, and that’s it for determining what your forces will actually do. Makes for an interestingly constrained and pleasantly thematic command-control situation when your condottiere (mercenary general) rides around the battlefield trying to micro-manage the army into a proper swarm assault that accounts for the terrain and the enemy’s placement.

As for minis gaming as a medium, I enjoy the toy aesthetics well enough, but struggle with the strict regimentation (and slowness) of play, and with the extremely high overhead in setting up games. You really got to like the particulars to care enough to craft up armies and terrain and go through the overall hassle. I also feel that the minis paradigm conflicts with my wargaming hobby in the specific in that it’s kinda sorta adjacent, but ultimately it’s more natural to treat something like Condottiere as a boardgame-without-board than as a serious treatise on the nature of renaissance warfare. There’s nothing wrong with being an abstractly entertaining boardgame with a strong theme, but I find myself kinda wishing that the game was more about honing my warcraft than it really is.

Cultural Saloon Summary

All right, let’s take an arbitrary dip into what the gentlemen and craven curs at my saloons have been saying:

• A screen cap from a relationship advice forum featured a lady complaining about how much of a turn-off it was to visit a gentleman at home and discover that they were stocking all sorts of geeky boardgames in their bookshelf — not just normal stuff like Monopoly, but the hard stuff. How distasteful! I had a pretty funny hot take slash sociological theory on this: we could speculate that a person dislikes geeky boardgames because they’re societally “low culture” and therefore not a respectable pastime, but it’s also conceivable that a person would dislike geeky boardgames because they’re “childish” and not a fit pastime for an adult man. The interesting bit is that the former is a distinctly elitist reaction, while the latter would be a working class idea — the idle classes do not generally think that cultural hobbies are childish. It’s interesting that you can’t know which way a person leans, though, from just an anecdote like that!
• Speaking of Monopoly, does anybody play pre-Catan boardgames anymore? Many gentlemen have dabbled in boardgaming as children, but the hobby has changed quite a bit since then, what with the rise of the German gaming scene and the downfall of Ameritrash. It might be interesting to take a trip back to say 30 years ago, though, play some of those childhood classics and find out how good or bad they were, exactly.
• How many right-wing radicals are there in 4Chan, anyway? How many nazis in the rpg scene, anybody have any real data? The question came up when we discovered that some contributors have widely varying impressions of the matter. Are almost all of those anonymous 4Chan nazis the real deal, discussing their real convictions, or are they almost to the man ironic trolls roleplaying radicalism? It seems that we have a tendency to evaluate these kinds of quantification data points on the basis of our personal experiences, foremost of all; those who know national socialists in real life are more likely to believe in their existence, but the fringe is small enough that for others nazis might as well be faeries for all the first-hand experience they have.
• I got an opportunity to discuss my understanding of the tactical nature of mid-levels old school D&D. Specifically, what constitutes mid-levels? My pet theory is that the decisive watershed is common access to area of effect attacks like Fireballs. While tightly disciplined groups of shield-and-spear henchmen often rule the low-level dungeon ecosystem, at mid-levels the adventuring party is forced to abandon this comfortable paradigm and move towards a quick and ruthless commando operation; magic just becomes too deadly, and henches die in droves when any random Fireball wipes the whole board.
• IF you were investing in a solid train boardgame series, would you get into the 18XX games or the Age of Steam family? One of the gentlemen was wondering, and I was actually able to give a pretty solid recommendation for Age of Steam, and particularly its streamlined descendant Railways of the World. It’s actually such a good game that I consider purchasing it myself now and then just to get some more quality time with it — and I don’t buy boardgames often at all.
• A regular correspondent has been playing a wacky one-on-one old school D&D campaign, as I’ve told before. The story of how their campaign is unfolding is quite enjoyable, as they’re playing a very dynamic take on the Temple of Elemental Evil. Solidly mid-levels tactical D&D with crazy twists and turns. The latest events involved the adventuring party (controlled by the one player) using Raise Dead on a Giant they killed and smuggling the undead deep inside the Temple, then assassinating the leader of the Temple and stealing the corpse so as to interrogate them magically. (Hmm, lots of necromancy in this crew’s tactics.) This was, however, just the opening move, as in an astounding stroke of bad luck the interrogation ended up attracting the attentions of Iuz the Old (an evil demigod of considerably potency) who killed most of the party, only for them to get resurrected by a spirit they’d done a favour for several dozen sessions before. Last I heard the party had been razing the Temple with the Wand of Fireballs they stole from the assassinated wizard-general, applying some blitzkrieg. And as far as I can tell, they’re playing this all in a dynamic, legit way — the events aren’t scripted, things are just cascading crazily like they sometimes do in D&D.
• Donald Trump’s corona infection has inspired contributors, as you might expect. We’ve been discussing the electoral events in the USA, of course, trying to guess who’s going to win. An interesting philosophical sideline has been the question of whether it’s OK to be happy about a misfortune happening to a… well, a particularly unpleasant, dishonorable and harmful individual.
• And further in the political sideline the gentlemen like to run, the recent demonstration debacle in Helsinki has inspired a fair amount of debate on police brutality. The police apparently used pepper spray and some other forcible methods in controlling an illegal demonstration (as in, a demonstration parked in the middle of the street in downtown Helsinki in an attempt to obstruct the traffic), and just like the nation in general, agora is divided on whether that was the appropriate response. Certain gentlemen think that this is not only appropriate but routine, others that the operational execution was unnecessarily brutal. Some think that using violence on a non-violent demonstration in an attempt to maintain public order is categorically suspect.

State of the Productive Facilities

Well, I’ve been producing campaign crunch for the Coup, so that’s something. Unfortunately it seems to fill in all the idle writing time I have, which is less than ideal. Hopefully I’ll grow bored enough with that to work on something else soon.