Compromise and Conceit

Infernal adventuring…

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An Australian statistician and role-player living in Japan, interested in the theory and practice of role-playing…

  • Converting Warhammer 1st Edition to 3rd Edition

    Another of my (several) complaints about Warhammer 3rd Edition is that it doesn’t seem to contain a great deal of flavour about the world, compared to the 1st and 2nd editions. I think this is largely because it is new[1], though I think Fantasy Flight Games are doing the rather nasty trick of assuming that everyone is just going to use old 2nd Edition source material for the flavour. In a way this is good because it means you don’t have to buy a whole new range of background material when you buy a new system, if you just want to upgrade to a system that actually works. After all, Black Industries may have produced a completely and insanely shit system, but the quality of their work on the world is unparalleled and unlikely to be bettered by any other company[2], and I think that the reason most people who play WFRP2 love it is the world, not the system – you love WFRP2 despite its myriad flaws.

    So combining the two is the perfect way to play warhammer. And that’s what I did recently, when I started running the (excellent) first edition Fear the Worst adventure in WFRP3. I won’t spoil this adventure for readers by describing the content in detail, but suffice to say that it’s a really good example of the best kind of module. It has lots of material on the setting and a general structure for how the module should run, so that GMs can run it as intended and get a rich and interesting experience, but also leaves huge sections open to free-form development, so that the GM can drop things he or she doesn’t like, and players can make their own path to the conclusion (which occurs on a fixed timeline). It also openly allows for the possibility that the players will “lose,” with catastrophic consequences for the town if not for them. I like this style of adventuring a lot. And also, it’s quite lethal if the players are stupid.

    The module was also very easy to fit in with WFRP3, with one caveat – played as written in WFRP 3 for the PCs as described in the module (novices), it is lethal, far more than I think must have been the case in the original. The module was easy to convert because the basic worlds overlap so well – the available flavour in the WFRP3 books makes you feel like you’re in a 1st or 2nd Edition Old World, and all the concepts described in the module are familiar to readers of 3rd Edition. Also, many elements of the module are very similar to those of the introductory module in the WFRP3 Tome of Adventure, with the same feeling of brooding trouble, everything on the surface happy and normal but chaos beneath. In short, the personalities of the different versions match up.

    So what particular challenges faced me in converting the module?

    Converting statistics: The WFRP 3 basic book and the Winds of Magic supplement include the monsters you need to make your adventure work, and all the NPCs in Fear the Worst can be mapped to them, so it’s no trouble to generate statistics. I fiddled a few details on some stat blocks to make the NPCs match up, and there were one or two spells that I had no analog for, but this didn’t bother me at all. Stat blocks in the original module are easily read and understood, and can be converted easily if you know what an average value should be in each system. This took very little time and produced creatures which in combat behaved roughly as the module suggested they would.

    Handling traps: There are no rules for traps in the WFRP 3 rules, so I made my own, with corresponding cards. On the night my thoughts on traps were half-formed so I winged it a bit, which ended with the thief hanging by his hand over a pit full of spikes, looking very worried. But the joy of WFRP 3 is that it is the ultimate system for winging it. You can produce anything you want with those dice, and as I get more familiar with them I’m having a lot of fun making them do their creative work. This adventure depends on traps being dangerous, and I certainly made them so. Had the thief had a little less saving throw luck, he’d have been dead.

    Handling the lethality:Quite unlike earlier editions of Warhammer, WFRP 3 is singularly lethal, and this was the third time my party came to a near TPK. This one was particularly dire, with the party cycling through unconsciousness several times (a very risky proposition) and their entire fate resting on a duel of wizards. My party were on the cusp of a second career, with all the extra power that entails, and so considerably tougher than the original module requires, but even if they had been smart and seen the ambush coming they would still have been in a very challenging battle. For novice WFRP 3 PCs the encounter at Black Rock Keep would, I think, be deadly on about 70-80% of runs, even without the ambush. The deadliness needs to be dialled down, either by reducing the size of the enemy group or by rolling some into a minion stat block, which is what I should have done with the two toughest fighters and the two weakest fighters. The original module calls for 7 unique creatures to do battle with 4 PCs, and gives those unique creatures reasonable strength in an ambush setting. I should have had 3 unique creatures and two pairs of minions, with the minions in melee and the unique creatures ranged/spell-casting. By not doing this I set a really challenging battle.

    So the main take home lesson from this is to be careful in converting stat blocks and arranging enemy groupings, to take into account WFRP 3’s additional lethality; or to be ready with a backup plan for a TPK scenario (I had one vaguely mapped out in this case that would have been a lot of fun to run). Don’t be sucked in to the common myth that WFRP 2 or WFRP 1 are dangerous – compared to the third edition they are, in my (limited) experience much much less so. Module conversions need to take this into account, or GMs need to be ready to fudge it or wing it to make up for their mistakes half way through the adventure – or be willing to rain regular TPKs on their group, which in my opinion is not fun and soon loses you players.

    I am thinking of trying to run one of the longer WFRP 2 campaigns (one of the famous ones) in WFRP 3 to see where it leads. It’s good to see that conversion is easy, because it means that I will be able to do enjoyably in WFRP 3 what would have been very frustrating in an earlier, less well designed system for the same world.

    —

    fn1: and actually I would say that there’s a higher ratio of background material to rules material in WFRP3 than any other system I’ve ever read. The magic and priest books are basically entirely about the world, as is the tome of adventure. By shifting all the rules into the cards, the books themselves get to have a lot of non-system content. But they’re chaotically laid out and it can seem like that material’s not there, and I think it’s not as good as the material from the 2nd Edition.

    fn2: and I think Fantasy Flight Games are in a bind here. If they release a bunch of new companion material and background flavour they’ll be accused of fleecing fans a second time over, but if they don’t -and assume that fans will use existing 2nd Edition material – they’ll be accused of neglecting the warhammer world in favour of the system. More evidence that games need rescuing from their fanboys, if this happens.

  • D&D Alignment and the Political Compass

    Everyone knows the political compass, and many people think it’s a good idea but I’ve been thinking ever since I found it (well, since someone showed it to me) that it’s a cheap knock-off of the AD&D alignment system. We’ve all been through the process, haven’t we, of trying to work out what our own alignment is? Well, Sir Grognard (James) over at Grognardia has posted up an ancient picture of the original AD&D alignment system, which basically confirms my suspicions: the political compass folks are simply systematizing what D&D did first.

    I think that says a lot about just how sophisticated modern political theory is. Chaps, if what you’re doing – if all of Marx, Hitler, the Tea Party, Paul Keating and Stalin – can be summed up in a page of a quite second-rate role-playing game … you fucked up. Go back to the drawing board and try again. Gary Gygax is pissing on your grave. (In this I’m referring to the polticians, not to the political compass people, whose attempt to map the AD&D alignment system to real life is an excellent idea).

    But the iconochasms thing is really good.

  • Example Trap Card: Pit Trap

    My previous post described some ideas for setting traps in Warhammer 3; in this post I present the pit trap card.

    The resistance side:

    That sickening feeling of falling…

    This is the disarm side:

    Every party is spoiled if the thief doesn't come…

  • Setting Traps in Warhammer 3

    One of my (several) problems with Warhammer 3 is that it doesn’t contain rules for some basic aspects of adventuring that we all take for granted, including (rather annoyingly) traps. I don’t often use traps in adventures, since I’m not a great fan of dungeon adventures, and I understand that dungeoneering isn’t a big part of the warhammer milieu, so I can see why they don’t want to include the rules in a basic book, but traps are a very handy GMs tool, and it’s nice to have the designer’s ideas on how to handle them. WFRP3 doesn’t have a clearly described saving throw system of any sort, so in order to set up a trap I have to come up with some kind of scheme. Since the most recent adventure I’ve been running depended on traps, I need to design some method, and these are thoughts towards that method.

    The Basic WFRP3 Saving Throw Mechanic

    I’m not a fan of separating saving throws from the other mechanics of the game, so I’m happy to use a system like WFRP3 where the saving throw is not a special set of rules. However – and probably as a throwback to my days of using saving throws – I like any accidental event that the PC has to resist (like natural events or traps) to be resolved by a dice roll that the player does, rather than me. So if a trap is set off, the targeted PCs should all make some kind of ability check to avoid it. This is easily handled in WFRP3 as, for example, an attribute or skill check vs. a fixed difficulty determined by the trap. However, there is a small unorthodoxy built into this approach. Typically in WFRP3, action checks are constructed in such a way that the results are determined by the number of successes and boons rolled up. But in the case of a saving throw rolled by a PC, the results should be determined by the number of failures and banes.

    There’s nothing wrong with this per se, but it seems to be a variance from the standard system.

    Traps as Attacks

    We can get around this by making the trap an attack, that the GM rolls against a PC’s skill or ability score, and then resolves damage etc. accordingly. This is entirely consistent with all the other rules of the game, but vaguely unsatisfying. Especially for save-or-die type traps, players should always be able to make the roll that determines their fate. Even though it’s exactly the same if the GM does it, it feels too … narrative … if it’s handled by the GM. The same applies to skill checks in which one PC or monster uses a social combat mechanic to control the actions of another PC – resolution of this should always be performed openly by the affected PC.

    Disabling Traps

    There also needs to be a mechanic for disabling traps, which pits a specific skill against the trap itself. The act of disarming the trap then has results depending on the number of successes gained, and also a standard result for banes. I’m thinking the standard results are:

    • 1 Success: the trap is disarmed
    • 3 Successes: The trap is disarmed and can be rearmed by the same PC later
    • 2 banes: the trap is triggered
    • 2 boons: the PC learns how to make this trap if their intelligence score is greater than the trap’s difficulty

    This allows for the possibility that PCs might be interested in developing trap-making abilities of their own, and requires the inclusion of special trap-making rules.

    We can put all of this together through the construction of Trap Cards.

    Trap Cards

    Of course traps don’t have to be represented by cards, and neither do items (or actions, or anything else) but it’s consistent with the way the game is laid out and it’s a convenient way of setting out rules. I don’t have the ability to make cards beyond those in the Strange Aeons software package, so I am going to recommend a card design based on cannibalizing the basic Action Card format. The Trap Card will have two faces, one (the red face) representing the trap’s effects, and one (the green face) representing the disarming process. The red face doesn’t have a recharge number, but gives the skill the PC needs to use to defeat the trap. The green face has a recharge number, which in this case is the number of rounds it takes to disarm the trap. The body of the card then shows the success and failure lines and their outcomes. Each card is for a type of trap, so will refer to a trap difficulty. This difficulty determines how hard the trap is to evade and how hard it is to disarm. Note that traps basically come with three difficulty types – search, disable and resist. These are not specified on the card, but the card will specify the results and skill checks in terms of these ratings. Note that there could be a fourth value, which would be the strength of the trap and would affect damage.

    My next post will contain an example of such a trap card.

  • Current Reading: The Windup Girl

    I received The Windup Girl, by Paolo Bacigalupi, as a christmas present, and the lazy season being as it is started reading immediately. I was initially interested and a little disappointed, but the book soon turned a corner and became an excellent and impressive read.

    The book is set in a medium-future post-collapse Bangkok, after global warming has devastated the climate, peak oil has devastated the economy, and international agribusinesses have (possibly deliberately) devastated the biosphere. In a world without oil or significant biodiversity the economy depends heavily on calories – energy for large swathes of the population is generated through human or animal motion, i.e. through converting calories to electricity, and stored in springs and batteries. It is a world of windup radios and huge genetically-engineered elephants generating power through treadmills. It is also a world in which basic foods and animals we take for granted have disappeared through the reckless (or perhaps deliberate) behaviour of the calorie companies, whose genetically-engineered disease have gone wild and destroyed much of the plant and animal life of the world, leaving whole nations dependent on the genetically engineered crops that the calorie companies release every year.

    In amongst all of this the kingdom of Thailand survives independent of the calorie companies and free of starvation, and is slowly reintroducing species of plant that have passed out of living memory. The suspicion is that they have a seedbank, but were this to be confirmed the calorie companies would happily destroy the kingdom to find it. The story concerns the interactions of several characters – a foreign businessman seeking the seedbank and his Malaysian Chinese refugee assistant; a Japanese genetically engineered “New Person,” (the eponymous “windup girl”); and a representative of the Thai Environment Ministry. These people are slowly brought together in an environment of intense pressure as the political pressures within the city slowly build up to breaking point.

    My initial disappointment at this book was the standard trade in racial stereotypes. The Malaysian Chinese man was so racist and thought in such stereotypical “old” chinese lines as to be a caricature; the Japanese girl is genetically designed to be subservient, obedient, and enjoy sex even when it is rape – she moves with strange, awkward movements and attracts and repulses foreigners; and the Thais are all lazy and corrupt (bar one). Everyone distrusts every other race and everyone follows their own racial tropes. But in a rare achievement for any book of any genre, the characters quite quickly begin to overcome supposedly powerful racial and cultural traits, becoming instead well-rounded and interesting individuals whose personality reflects their cultural background without being overwhelmed by it. The Malaysian Chinese refugee, initially quite a detestable character, is portrayed (I think) quite sensitively in the light of the traumatic events of his flight from Malaysia and his new-found paranoia and trauma, and his behaviour becomes increasingly understandable as the story progresses. The Windup Girl’s continuing battle against her genetically-designed instinct to serve makes her a strong and interesting character, even in the face of her obvious personal weaknesses; and the Thai characters very quickly differentiate themselves from a common mass of corrupt and lazy “Asians” to become a society who, despite their many flaws, survive proudly where all around them have collapsed.

    This book also does something which I am disappointed to say is very rare in science fiction: it attempts to portray a post-global warming, post-peak oil world. We know these things are coming to us, and although we don’t necessarily expect them to be catastrophic (as this book portrays them) they nonetheless make excellent fields of inquiry for speculative fiction, but they’re sadly rather thin on the ground. Why is this? It seems like a woeful dereliction of duty by the speculative fiction world to have not bothered to create such settings. It’s not as if Sci-fi hasn’t concerned itself with post-apocalyptic stories, so why doesn’t it make more effort with post-semi apocalypses? I would have thought that even if one rejects the claims of climate scientists, it still makes a very interesting world to explore. But there seem to be precious few. This book does a really good job of portraying the kind of world one might imagine would arise after the end of oil, as well as the consequences of a general biodiversity catastrophe, an interesting challenge to think about. Even though at its heart the spring-driven energy storage concepts described in the novel are completely unrealistic, and the calorie economy probably overly optimistic (modern agriculture turns oil into calories, and is unlikely to survive peak oil), the presentation is believable and sets up an interesting set of constraints and demands for the characters to work within. The concept of a seedbank as a treasure worth destroying nations for (as is implied happened in Finland) is a very nice touch, for example.

    This book also has a tight plot and a really good way of merging a couple of different stories together. My only complaint about the plot is that ultimately the thread involving the foreign businessman seemed strangely unnecessary (except for its role in an important coincidence) and it could probably have been made more relevant in the final third of the book with a few minor plot tweaks. There were also a few unnecessary sidelines involving the Environment Ministry workers, which could have been cut out I think. But besides that, the plot was tight, believable, exciting and tense. It reminded me in many ways of a good Neal Stephenson book without the sudden collapse at the ending, and where everything comes together well instead of looking all a bit confused and wayward.

    This book is, overall, an excellent read, with a believable post-apocalyptic world with a really interesting back history, engaging characters who you really come to feel for, in an exotic and novel setting where everyone plays for very high stakes. Well worth trying out, even if you don’t think environmental apocalypse is on the cards, or aren’t that interested in Asian settings.

  • Rats in the Ranks Session 6: Dubious German Sausage

    Last night was the 6th session of the Rats in the Ranks campaign, so about my 9th session of Warhammer 3rd Edition. This time, we again were missing one of our players (Mr. Camphor) so we again decided to put off the main plot of the campaign for a random side adventure, which is fine because the PCs are waiting to get a report from their dutiful spy, and so side adventures are all the rage. I could have seeded the town with rumours and let them do whatever they want, but  in truth I haven’t had a lot of preparation time and (as I think will be obvious in a moment) I’m not yet confident making up encounters on the fly in WFRP3. It’s a bastard of a system if you get it wrong.

    So, instead, I used an old Warhammer 1st Edition adventure, Fear the Worst, converted it to WFRP3, and assumed everything would come out in the wash. And it almost did.

    If you’re planning on running this adventure, in any system, then it probably would suit you to read this. If you’re going to play it or at risk of playing it, then don’t read on. But if you are planning on playing it, you should note that my general preference is to avoid TPKs, and this one came damn close.

    A standard mercenary advert and a sausage festival

    The PCs having just returned from a near-death experience and spent most of their money on healing, they were naturally in need of a new adventure and a new chance to get themselves all killed, so when they stumbled on the following handbill posted up in some dubious corner of Ubersreik, they naturally responded immediately:

    Men and women of a brave and adventurous bent needed for work of a sensitive nature. Seeking wide range of skills, from strong-armed warriors to learned scholars. Excellent opportunity for neophytes. Ask for Karl Taunenbaum at the famous Dancing Dragon Inn, Heideldorf

    So, being in need of money and lacking their main meat-shield, off they went to investigate this simple Heideldorf job. When they arrived they found themselves in the midst of a sausage festival, thronging with nobles from the Reikland and full to overflowing with delicious sausage. Viewed with suspicion by these nobles, and having already had a rather unpleasant roadside encounter with some approaching nobles, they went straight to the Dancing Dragon Inn and asked for Taunenbaum. Taunenbaum in turn served them some sausage and sent a runner for the head of the village, Heinz Schiller, who turned up about 10 minutes later. Before speaking to the PCs he deigned to spend 5 minutes scolding Taunenbaum in front of his guests, complaining about the speed of service and the slovenliness of Taunenbaum’s staff, before joining the PCs. Schiller himself was an overdressed fop, noble in bearing but done up in a slightly tawdry version of last season’s fashions… in short, an overpuffed rural dandy. Not that this stopped him looking down his nose at the PCs as he explained their job to them…

    [Slight cultural note here: most cafes and bars in Japan worth their coin have on the menu “sosseji moriawase,” a sausage mixed plate, and most Japanese know a little about German culinary and festive culture, so a mid-winter sausage festival where you get served a mixed plate of delicious sausage is exactly the kind of environment that makes the players feel like they’re part of a German-themed but chaotic world]

    The Job

    So, Shiller set about explaining the job to them, though first he needed to assure himself that the PCs were, in fact, capable adventurers. Since the group contained two girls (one just 15 years old!) and an elf, this probably isn’t surprising, but after a bit of poking and prodding and some judicious questions he was satisfied, and proceeded to tell them that this sausage festival was his own exclusive idea, built up over 10 years, and he couldn’t afford anything to destroy it. But this year,some bandits had gathered in a ruined castle near the keep and were attacking visiting nobles. If even some nobles left Heideldorf with the impression it was unsafe, he would be ruined. So he needed the PCs to visit the ruins and … deal with… the bandits.

    He initially offered the PCs 10 silver coins each to do this. Given they had entered their first adventure on a 20 silver coin payment, and bargained up from there, they were kind of shocked. So they bargained, and secured a 2 gold coin payment each.

    Having done this, he told the characters to head off in the morning, and then left the pub.

    Investigating the Job

    As we will see, the PCs are nothing if not thorough in their preparations, and promptly set about finding out more about Shiller and the town. They started, of course, by drinking with the locals. From various locals they found out the following:

    • The nearby keep has been deserted for a long time and is called Black Rock Keep
    • Black Rock Keep is so called because it was destroyed in war about 400 years ago
    • Black Rock Keep is so called because it was originally made of white rock, but a dragon came from the mountains and attacked it. The dragon’s breath weapon was acid, and turned the keep from white to black. After the attack, a bunch of elves turned up to help the village (this was a long time ago) and shot at the dragon with their bows, killing it. The current inn is named in honour of the dragon’s death throes.
    • The keep was always called Black Rock, but 400 years ago it was destroyed by an earthquake. At that time the inn was called the Black Dragon, but after the earthquake the locals changed its name to the Dancing Dragon
    • Shiller always works his staff very hard, especially his mercenaries
    • Some mercenaries came through last year
    • Some mercenaries came through two years ago, possibly including a dwarf
    • They couldn’t possibly have come through during the sausage festival, because everyone knows mercenaries investigate keeps in summer, not winter…

    So… Delicious sausage… regular adventurers… the characters were becoming suspicious. Still, with no definite cause for their suspicion they could hardly refuse to do their work. And what could possibly go wrong if they went into their adventure aware of the possibility of a trap…?

    Entering Black Rock Keep

    The following morning the PCs headed off to Black Rock Keep. When they reached the surrounding area they entered with typical caution, surveying carefully and checking for guards, etc., but found no evidence of bandits of any kind, so entered the grounds proper. They were just about to enter the main wooden double doors of the ruined keep when a crossbow bolt thudded into the doors in front of them. This bolt had a note of some kind wrapped around it.

    Unwrapping the note, they found a map, with the following note written on it:

    From a concerned friend. Heinz Schiller is more than he appears. Beware the cellars!

    The map itself appeared to be a detailed map of the cellars, complete with secret doors marked, and several traps detailed on the map. Unfortunately, none of my 3 players paid any attention to the map. They didn’t really even look at it.

    They explored the ground floor of the keep, finding some evidence of habitation but no living things, and then entered the aforementioned cellars. The thief moved ahead to investigate rooms as they found them, and so within a few minutes he encountered the first trap – a 10′ deep pit filled with spikes, which he managed to avoid through a feat of dexterity that left him clinging to the floor under a door while the remainder of the party threw out ropes for him to grab onto.

    After they had overcome this trap, rather than checking their map or checking for traps, they moved on, soon stumbling onto two more. Both of these traps were hammer traps, huge warhammers falling from the side of doors, and one delivered a nasty blow to the thief, knocking off quite a few wounds[1].

    Having sprung all the traps and ignored their map, the PCs finally managed to discover a secret door and loot some sarcophagi of about 4Gps worth of gems and jewellery (this is a lot of money in WFRP3). However, they hadn’t found any outlaws, just evidence of an ancient, well-looted tomb. So they decided to leave, and returned to the entryway.

    The Mutant Ambush

    When they reached the stairs the PCs were ambushed by a grotesque pair of misshapen mutants, who dashed out of the stairs to lay waste to the thief and the roadwarden. These mutants were vaguely human, with huge bodies, massively strong arms, and tiny tiny heads, inset with vacant, staring eyes showing no intellect of any kind. Perhaps one was a woman; perhaps they were a couple. The thief and the roadwarden didn’t have time to tell, as a single blow from their huge arms was sufficient to cripple normal people.

    Battle was joined, at which point another five mutants burst from the secret door in the stairwell, to attack the PCs from behind. These mutants were:

    • A wizard with eyes floating on tentacles
    • A normal-sized man, with a St Bernard Dog’s head that constantly drooled as it fought
    • A completely normal man, carrying a pistol
    • A human with a normal-sized body, but very long arms and legs, who could use his arms to punch as if they were missile weapons
    • A horrific, bloated man whose entire lower body had shrivelled and atrophied to become a mere bulbous waste of flesh, so that the man had to flop and flip about like a seal in order to move

    The battle that followed was evil, bitter and desperate. The PCs realized they had only one hope of survival, which was to block the stairs so they only had to fight two mutants at a time; but even then they still had to face two ranged fighters and a wizard, though fortunately the wizard was a Tzeentch Wizard, and Tzeentch’s magic is disgusting but weak. Nonetheless, the PCs found themselves in a desperate situation, with the Cleric falling unconscious and recovering (through her own magic, mostly) three times; the Roadwarden fallign unconscious and recovering once, and the thief being knocked out just once (and staying there). The battle ended with all the PCs except the wizard unconscious, and all the mutants except their wizard; the final three rounds were an old-fashioned magical duel, which the party’s wizard won by perhaps one round – at the end the mutant wizard was so low on power and so desperate that he was forced to charge into melee with a knife. This didn’t end well for him, and the session ended with the party down to its last 6 hit points – all of them belonging to the wizard – while a pile of mutant bodies slicked the floor with blood, and the players all cursed their stupidity for not using the serendipitous message they had been sent.

    Next session, we will find out why they met mutants not bandits, and what exactly was happening in this remote outpost…

     

    —

    fn1: I actually messed up here, giving the thief an agility check instead of doing an attack roll. The thief’s agility is impeccable, so nothing touches him when he gets to do a save. An attack roll, though, would have left him in a sorry state indeed. I realized during this session that in addition to WFRP 3’s many other flaws of incompleteness, it has no rules for traps and no suggestions about how to do traps.

  • Comparing Reckless and Conservative Stances in Warhammer 3

    The Transitive Property of Gaming blog, which I read a lot for warhammer information, had a post a while back about the relative merits of conservative vs. reckless stances in combat. The post compares the success rates of a theoretical attack using the Troll-Feller Strike (a fairly nasty card) in reckless versus conservative stances, and argues based on the results that the reckless stance doesn’t deliver rewards that match the apparent benefits written on the card. I think there might be a few errors in the calculations of average damage for this analysis, and in fact I think the difference between the damage done in the two stances is quite large (see my addendum below). Even with these mistakes though the post seems generally correct – on an analysis of success rates and the differential damage which flows from them, reckless stance is not worth the risk it entails compared to conservative stance. However, I don’t think this is correct because the analysis at Transitive Property of Gaming fails to consider the extreme risk of delay symbols, which only appear on conservative dice.

    Delay symbols appear in conjunction with success symbols, and basically give the GM the option of either placing two recharge tokens on one of the player’s cards, or moving that player’s initiative token one step down the initiative ladder. The risk of this is very high as the stance depth increases. I tested the probabilities using 40 dice rolls on this convenient simulator, and found a delay occurred in 48% of all skill checks, with the longest run of checks between delays being 5 checks, and the usual run being just 1 or 2 checks. This is actually a ferociously dangerous result, as I will describe based on last night’s adventure.

    Last night the PCs got into a fight with 6 mutants, two of them quite nasty melee combatants, one a vicious ranged attacker, and one a wizard. The entire party went into conservative stance for the fight, and delay symbols were flying about with gleeful abandon. I restricted myself to using delay symbols only on action cards, but this is how I used them:

    • Preventing Magic Dart: Magic Dart is petty magic with a recharge of 0 (it can be used every round) and a very low difficulty. It’s the magic missile of WFRP, but it’s deadly – the wizard can usually ignore armour with this attack, and get criticals. The low difficulty makes it ideal for fast casting, so it can be used every round. But with delay symbols appearing willy-nilly, I was able to put recharge tokens on this card, and prevent the wizard from doing devastating attacks every round. The wizard’s other major attack spell is lightning bolt, which is really nasty but has a high power cost and recharge, so can’t be deployed  more than once in a decent combat. So by delaying the wizard’s magic dart I get to prevent the wizard from doing anything successful for several rounds.
    • Interfering with Execution Strike: The Roadwarden is armed with a pistol and sword, and has a 4-recharge-token action that enables her to fire and melee strike in the same round, with reasonable chance of success. This fight lasted a while and the roadwarden was in a position to use this action maybe 3 times; but because she kept rolling delays on basic melee attacks, I was able to keep stacking recharge tokens on this card so that she actually only used it once in the whole combat. This is the roadwarden’s only high-damage attack, and the delays significantly reduced her ability to do damage
    • Crippling the Thief: The thief has the rapid shot card, which enables a second bowshot in conservative stance, or a third in reckless stance, with increased difficulty on each. The thief has a ferocious missile attack dice pool and could easily expect three successful strikes with this – enough to kill all but the toughest mutants – but chose to use the conservative side. The delays that the thief rolled up were then sufficient for me to prevent the reuse of this card for the remainder of the battle. This card is absolutely evil, and has been used by the thief to decimate enemy groups before. Not so with all those delays
    • Preventing defences: The recharge tokens can also be used to prevent defence cards from becoming available for reuse. Most PCs only have two defence cards, so if I keep one card recharging they are only able to defend once per round. Given that most PCs were subject to two attacks in this battle, this was a bad outcome for them

    The wizard spent a portion of this battle in a very deep conservative stance, which is probably a good plan for a wizard since it reduces the risk of miscast. But it opens the wizard up to all sorts of challenges – as a rule I don’t do this but I could keep the Channel Power card on recharge, which would basically prevent the wizard from using any magic for most of the battle.

    But worse still, with 4 PCs fighting 6 mutants, I could have moved their initiative cards tokens down the initiative tracker, which by mid-battle would have left the PCs facing 4 unanswered mutant attacks before they could act. This means that the wizard could have unleashed some bad-arsed support spells, rather than having to respond to incoming damage directly.

    In short, I think the delay effects on conservative dice are very risky, and you need a good justification for going into a deep conservative stance, especially if your main role is delivering melee damage. With a reasonable toughness you can manage a few fatigues, and you’re much better copping a few fatigue-related penalties on your available actions than not having those actions available at all.

    —

    Addendum regarding Transitive Property of Gaming’s calculations

    The calculations in the linked post are of average damages, but when I put the given probabilities and damage outcomes into a spreadsheet and run the calculations, I get very different results. Using the same assumed damage (10) and average armour soak (2) I get a post-armour average damage in reckless stance of 11.69, vs. 10.14 in conservative stance (an average difference of 1.55). As armour soak increases the difference increases too – for an armour soak of 4 it becomes 1.79, and at 6 it is 2.03. For these calculations I’m using the standard method for calculating expected costs of an action: Expectation (Damage) = Sum over ( Probability (event)*Value(event) ), where here Value(event) incorporates the damage bonus, +1 for a critical, and the soak effect. I assume this is what was used in the linked post, but I think the calculations are wrong.

    It’s important to note though that the issue in combats is not average damage done but survival, which is determined by the probability of a hit and the probability of death on a given hit. Typically a troll-feller strike will kill most opponents in 2 blows, so the best card is the one which delivers those blows as quickly as possible. In fact the conservative and reckless stances deliver the same chance of a hit, so survival is similar in both cases, but the conservative side makes the second – essential – hit much less likely to happen. There’s a 45% chance that the troll-feller will be hit with a delay, meaning that the next troll-feller strike won’t happen for an extra 2 rounds (increasing target survival) or – worse still – the GM will put those recharge tokens on the PCs basic melee strike card, rendering the troll-slayer useless in the following round. Alternatively the GM could put those tokens on a defense card, which will probably render the troll slayer defenseless in the next round.

    Conservative stances, then, are particularly good if you have a lot of action cards available to choose from, so you are safe if you get one hit with a delay.

    As a further aside, WFRP3 probabilities are fiendishly hard to calculate and fiendishly hard to game. Being a combination of different sets of dice with the same outcomes, an analytic solution to the problem of the probability of any event in a dice pool is theoretically calculable as the convolution of several multinomial probabilities. But there are as many as 5 different multinomial distributions, so this calculation would run over many pages. This means that we need to use simulated empirical estimates of probabilities (as I have done here) for most situations, or we need to use up an entire amazon’s worth of paper on the calculations. It would be much easier for me to write a simulator in R and calculate empirical probability distributions than it would be to actually calculate the analytical probabilities of any given event. How hideous!

  • Current Viewing: Clash of the Titans

    The 2010 remake of Clash of the Titans is a fun movie, with some interesting hat-tips to modern RPG theological theories and excellent monsters; it is, moreover, a vast improvement on the original. Of course it butchers the original greek myth, but who cares about that? Greek myths are there to be fiddled with.

    This movie follows a pretty straightforward story: mortals are rebelling against the gods, refusing to pray to them, and so Zeus allows Hades to extract vengeance on them, ostensibly to force them to again pray to the gods for salvation. Hades has his own plans and the reprisals turn into a cunning scheme by Hades to overthrow Zeus; but Zeus’s demi-god half-son, Perseus, is loose in the world and has a strong desire to kill the gods, so everyone’s schemes get thrown into disarray. During his adventures Zeus gets to fight some giant scorpions, medusa, some harpy-like demons, and the kraken.

    There’s an interesting role-playing style twist, in which the Gods depend on human’s prayers for their existence and power, so the humans attack them by simply … going on strike. This is very much like some old ideas from the nerd-o-sphere, in which Gods’ power is directly related to the number and fervour of their followers. This movie takes that concept to its logical conclusion, and it’s nice to see.

    Perseus is played well by Sam Worthington, essentially reprising his wtf ?! role from Terminator 4 (but with a better director). To me he comes across as strongly Australian in this movie, and he also plays Perseus’s rebellious streak very well. I have a suspicion that Sam Worthington can’t act anything outside of a kind of dumb-innocent-soldier-guy, but he does that role well, so it fits in here nicely.

    The special effects in this movie are excellent and fit in well with the story. They’re not overblown and they really feel natural a lot of the time. The pegasus, particularly, is good. The Kraken is well done by being just glimpsed – there’s no point where you can see the whole of the thing, which adds to the sense of its monumental size and power. The Stygian witches are really cool, simultaneously coquettish, grotesque and savagely dangerous, and Perseus deals with them well. The inclusion of a chaos/Hades cult in Argos is a nice touch, as is the role Aio plays in directing Perseus along his path.

    Also, they ditched the stupid clockwork owl.

    Overall this movie is a fun bastardization of various greek myths in the interests of killing shit. If you want to see how to kill a god, Princess Mononoke remains the standard; but if you want to see how to kill a bunch of really nasty god-like stuff, rebelliously rather than implacably, this movie is your thing. Also, if you like men in skirts.

  • Photos from the End Times…

    The Guardian today has a series of pictures from deserted buildings in Detroit, USA, where the economy (particularly, I suspect, the housing sector) has been slowly collapsing. These pictures are exactly how I imagine the world after a zombipocalypse. Who leaves a library deserted but full of books, except someone fleeing a zombie assault?

    I think there’s probably a lot that could be said in connection with this about the decline of the US industrial working class, and the economic conditions that various powerful political interests have been willing to bring about in order to secure that collapse. Is the Zombie movie an allegory for this? Given I know nothing about the US, I can’t say… but it’s an interesting thought. One typically associates apocalyptic imagery with the cold war, but maybe there are other fears playing in the back of the movie-maker’s mind when, in producing a post-apocalyptic movie, they envisage the buildings of modern real-life Detroit?

  • Current Reading: Psychic Detective Yakumo

    Can he see you…?

    As part of my new year plan to improve my Japanese, I am on a manga collecting binge, starting with Psychic Detective Yakumo (Shinrei Tantei Yakumo,心霊探偵八雲) by Manabu Kaminaga. This is a series of case files about a cynical and slightly misanthropic college student called Yakumo, seen mostly through the perspective of the slightly eccentric college girl Ozawa Haruka. Yakumo was born with a single red eye that enables him to see spirits and ghosts, and the trouble that this eye has brought him has turned him into something of a recluse and a bit of a bastard. His mother even tried to kill him and then abandoned him when he was a kid, so he’s understandably a little cynical about people. Haruka, on the other hand, wants to help others because when she was about 8 years old she accidentally got her older sister killed, and ever since she’s wanted to be the child who everyone loves, but behaves eccentrically in her quest for this fulfilment. What she doesn’t know – but finds out through Yakumo’s red eye – is that her sister’s ghost is following her around as a kind of guardian angel – and maybe this is why Haruka is the impetus for the adventures that we read in the manga.

    In the first episode we also discover that Yakumo is a bit of a fraud, cheating at card games through a mirror pinned to the door of his club room in the University, and then offering to exorcise a ghost from a completely normal memorial picture of the English professor’s dead daughter – in exchange for higher marks and attendance records. “I sell peace of mind,” he tells Haruka, “And it’s an awesome business!” However, he is basically good at heart, and although very off-hand and cool with Haruka maybe he has a bit of a thing for her. By the end of the first instalment we have seen hints of a love triangle, and then tacked on to the end of the book there is an amusing “interview” conducted by the intrepid report “M” who ambushed Yakumo as he was waking up, in which we see the depths of his misanthropy and lack of interest in ordinary life.

    The story itself is simple but effective. From here on I shall give a few spoilers, but since there’s no english translation of this manga as far as I know, i doubt you will be reading it, gentle reader (if you can read Japanese, maybe skip this paragraph). Haruka approaches Yakumo for help, having never met him before, because her friend Miki is in a coma in hospital after a strange incident, and a friend suggested Yakumo could help. Miki visited an abandoned house with her boyfriend Kazuhiko, and was attacked by a ghost from behind the door of “the forbidden room,” a room whose door had a sign on it saying “do not open.” Subsequently Kazuhiko “commits suicide” on the train line. Yakumo visits the girl and identifies that she has been possessed by the ghost of a girl called Yuri. Haruka and Yakumo do some investigating on the computer system of the university (which Haruka has access to through a part-time job) and discover that a girl called Yuri went missing a little earlier. The girl was from Haruka’s class, and by tracing rumours of attachments they identify Yuri’s ex-boyfriend, who Haruka goes to talk to. He tries to kill Haruka, revealing as he does so that he had a brief fling with Yuri and got her pregnant, even though “after we had sex just a few times she started acting like my girlfriend.” But Haruka’s sister’s ghost gets Yakumo, who comes and saves her, revealing as he did so that he had guessed that the boyfriend killed Kazuhiko as well. The reason? When Kazuhiko and Miki were fooling around outside the abandoned building, Kazuhiko took a photo of Miki and in the background was the faint image of Yuri’s boyfriend carrying her body away from the scene of the crime. In good Japanese style, having been discovered, the boyfriend turns himself in. The story closes with Haruka and Yakumo getting involved with the case of a serial killer.

    The story is pretty simple, but it works as a basic detective story, and a lot of it is about boy/girl interactions between the lead characters. In fact, the manga is probably better called “bumbling helper Haruka” because it seems to focus more on her (and the story of her sister’s tragic death) than on Yakumo, who remains an enigma. The narrative force is largely with Haruka, who though a little ditzy and physically weak is a clever and forceful character, possessed additionally of an emotional depth and moral depth that Yakumo definitely lacks. In all it’s a good story and an amusing tale of a burgeoning friendship (or love affair?) between two people whose characters are guaranteed to create trouble for each other, and it is clearly set up so that we will slowly learn more about Yakumo, while we watch Haruka become a skilled ghostbuster and reconcile herself with her sister.

    The artwork is fine, typical manga black-and-white drawings, though everyone seems to have the same features, which makes it hard for me to work out who is talking. But the clear plan in this series of manga is to focus on the story and interactions, not the pictures, so it works as basic background information to support the basic story. I can recommend this to anyone who is able to read Japanese (and I might add, the kanji are entirely supported by furigana, so it’s smooth and easy to read compared to, say, Emma or Shuna’s Journey). If you’re looking for an easy introduction to intermediate Japanese with a fun story and good characters, this is the manga for you!