Ancient Battles

by on November 3, 2009 at 11:32 am
Posted In: CC:Ancients

Patch actually lives some distance away (near Sacramento), but he’s in the area about every other week for an RPG group he’s involved in. This Sunday, I actually got him over on one of those weekends without the rest of the gang.

We had a fun afternoon of breaking in my new set of Commands & Colors: Ancients. He’s played it a time or two before, but not as often as me, and had to spend a while re-familiarizing himself with the rules. Once that was done, he picked things up really quickly.

Since he was still getting up to speed, we started with the first scenario, the Battle of Akragas, which is a good, short, simple, teaching scenario. I took the Syracusans for the first round (before noting that they’re the advantaged side). Don’t remember much about the battle at this point, but after an initial lead it turned into a close affair. 5-4

We switched sides and went at it again. I quickly realized that I was going to be in trouble for the rest of the afternoon as Patch did a better job with the Syracusan army than I had, getting the Heavy Infantry into action much earlier. 3-5

We then went to the second scenario, Crimisos River, another quick 5-banner scenario, but with the added complication of one wing of the Carthaginian army being stuck behind a river. It’s a tough knot for Carthage, crossing the river tends to cause retreat path problems, and they only have one leader (and a special unit that acts like it always has a leader, but that doesn’t apply to adjacent hexes the way a true leader would. I never sorted out my flank, and Patch knocked out the Sacred Band in one or two good attacks. 0-5

Patch again improved on my performance as we switched sides. He sorted out the river crossing much better than I had managed. One gambit was to send the Medium Cavalry down the side to the far crossing. Sadly for him, my slingers got a double retreat result on them that sent them back to their starting hex. They later showed up near the main crossing and were forced to retreat again. Someone didn’t want to risk valuable horseflesh in battle…. The middle game got fairly desperate for me. Syracuse only starts with nine units on the board, so as I started taking losses, I was getting thin without any ability to cycle out units. In the end, I narrowly won a race to pick off wounded units. 5-4

Wanting to stick with a smaller battle that would fit in the time we had left, we went to the Truceless War set of scenarios, and the Battle of Utica. I took the rebel army first, and soon realized I had trouble. I had the lighter army, and a hand of four cards (against six). I’ve found in the past that going below five generally ends up with too little flexibility to be viable. It didn’t help that Patch’s first move sent some of his elephants into my midst, where they promptly annihilated my only heavy unit in one attack. After that, my dice, which had been doing poorly all afternoon, went hot. I counterattacked against the elephants and quickly cleaned up three units in four attacks with a good streak of red square results. After that, I pressed on before Patch could reorganize. It helped that the card shortage never seriously affected me for once. 5-1

Thankfully for me, Patch did not have nearly my luck with the dice after we switched sides. I didn’t have quite the same dramatic opening (in fact, I don’t know if I ever got his heavies, they retreated to the base line early and spent a while getting back into the action). He weakened one, and killed another, but never eliminated my elephants. In fact, my entire line was moving up, and the major problem was not crowding the elephants too much. 5-3

Utica was the only battle that had a split decision, though I’d consider it the most obviously weighted against one side. My double win made up for the earlier shutout, and I carried the day, 23 banners to 22.

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Many Archons, Handle It!

by on October 25, 2009 at 2:16 pm
Posted In: Boardgaming

Had the gang over for a playtest session of Archon yesterday. Well, part of the gang. With school and work, getting everyone together at the same time is going to be difficult until just after Christmas.

Anyway, we had four this time. Me and Mark, who had played it two-player before, plus Jason and Dave. Everyone had read the rules at some point (generally some time ago), and with the clarifications in the current version of the rules it was pretty easy to get everyone up to speed.

Choosing city-states was a bit easier this time, since the need for population growth was understood this time. I took Attica (first) and Arcadia (last), Mark took Argolis and Thessaly, Dave took Corinth and Lokris, and Jason took Aetolia and Messenia.

Play went fairly smoothly, and seemed to act a bit more like I expected. After a few rounds, RPs weren’t desperately short, but no one was amassing humongous unspendable stockpiles either. Dave I think set the record for income at about 12-14 RPs late in the game.

The biggest comment from everyone is how austere the game is. Sending out colonies is pretty easy, but gaining control over the area, or doing any sort military adventurism is very difficult. Not because it’s expensive in population or resources, but in actions. With a need to build multiple units (at one action apiece), and then activate them for movement, an offensive is very difficult to manage. I was the only one who conquered another city-state, and it took most of the game to get to that point. I could have managed a second at the very end, but mis-thought what I was doing, and took an army as a casualty to preserve my population/militia. That left me with the potential to take another province, but not enough actions to recruit the force needed.

While that is accepted as part of how the game is, the big concern is population growth. Population growth fuels a fair amount of the game (both in that population is needed to do things, and that having too much population needs to be avoided), but the random mechanism for it is proving too chaotic for most everyone.

Having the last pick for initial city states ended up with me taking land-locked Arcadia. This meant that my colonization was powered purely by Attica (Athens). However, with my other distractions (building an army), and a three turn period where I could do almost nothing (kept getting ‘play now’ cards which drained my hand of actual actions), my colonization efforts never got going.

Final scores: Dave 34 VP (city state w/temple, city state w/democracy, 5 controlled colonies, 16 RP), Jason 34 VP (two city states, 3 controlled colonies, 22 RP), Mark 24 VP (city state, city state 2/democracy, 3 controlled colonies, 11 RP), James 19 VP (2 city states, 1 city state w/democracy, 9 RP).

Playing time came out to about 3 hours, perhaps a bit less.

Not sure when we’ll manage more than 2 people face to face again, or what we’ll play at this point.

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Big Subject—Big Book

by on October 24, 2009 at 5:05 pm
Posted In: GURPS

GURPS books from SJG have undergone a steady case of page inflation. This is largely because they can charge more for bigger books, while the cost of printing only goes up a moderate amount. (The cost of producing the material is more linear.)

The first GURPS books were saddle-stitched at 96 pages. Then came GURPS Space (First Edition) at 128 pages, perfect bound, and $15. And well worth it, being one of the best tool-kit/advice supplements ever. SJG tried keeping costs down with $8, 68-page perfect-bound supplements like GURPS Space Unnight, but the margins were too low to work without a greater sales volume than they were generating.

So the GURPS line settled on 128-page books, with the prices slowly rising with inflation. In 1994, the next jump in size occurred with the release of GURPS Religion at 196 pages.

Once again, SJG put its best foot forward with the new format. It never became the line-standard this time, but it did see further use (GURPS Compendium I, GURPS Compendium II, GURPS Traveller, and GURPS Space (Third Edition)).

Like GURPS Space, GURPS Religion is centered around advice more than any campaign-centric material. It is divided into eight chapters, which range from a general talk about the structure of religions, to general system-related discussions, to working examples.

Comparative Religions 101
The first four chapters are “Cosmology”, “Deities”, “Development”, and “Symbols” and together would make an excellent introductory unit for a comparative religions class. Given the 87-pages it’s crammed into, it is a very wide-ranging and well done study of the nature of existing religions. The general idea is to present the various recurring structural themes and give the reader some direction to setting up a religion for his game world.

It achieves this quite well, and while a well-read person will have seen most, if not all of it before (there’s likely to be at least a couple mythologies referenced that any particular reader hasn’t studied), it’s still very nice to see it all in one place and sorted out, topic by topic. The book is worth the price of entry right here.

Give me that old time religion…
The next two chapters move out of general world-building and into more system-related materials. However, the ‘crunch’ is still kept light, and it is still world-building oriented. “Clerics” presents general character types, and gives GURPS-specific advice for fine-tuning the Clerical Investment and Patron (Church) advantages, as well as new material for being Blessed or Cursed, and Power Investiture (the clerical version of Magical Aptitude), or even being Excommunicated.

All of this is specifically pointed at GURPS, but there’s still some food for thought for other systems. Especially pointed is the split between Clerical Investiture (which measures how far up the church hierarchy the character is), and Power Investiture (which affects the character’s ability to channel power from a god), and the fact that the GM will need to decide whether the two are directly linked or not.

“Divine Magic” is the most disappointing section of the book, as the main mechanics boil down to ‘use the existing skill-based Magic system, and substitute Power Investiture for Magical Aptitude’. A discussion of an enforced split between the abilities of the two types (like, say, locking Mages out of healing magics…) would have been good, but is barely mentioned. However, there is good system material in the subtleties, with discussion of holy places, how such are created/consecrated, etc. There is some good generic discussion of shamanistic magic, though the less generic/more detailed version in GURPS Old West (Second Edition) is a bit better.

Working examples
The last two chapters are dedicated to actual examples of religions. “Traditions” actually doesn’t give any detailed setting examples, but rather talks about actual Earth traditions, first going back into generalities with discussions of animism, nonhuman spirts, and so on, before moving on to a whirlwind tour the things that typify Earth religions in various parts of the globe. The last chapter gives actual sample religions for use in SF or fantasy campaigns. There’s one typical D&Dish medieval pantheon (which gets the most space), one animistic religion that obviously borrows several cues from Shinto (including a multi-island based setting), and four SF-setting religions. My guess is that the emphasis on the last is to help stir the imagination as to the possibilities of religion in a genre that has typically ignored the subject.

When it comes to such concrete examples, several GURPS products have left me flat. However, I actually like the examples given here. None of them are stellar, but they are good examples, and I’d at least think about using/adapting them if I was running a setting compatible with their backgrounds.

Overall, I consider GURPS Religion to be another of the greats of the GURPS 3rd Edition line. Short on system mechanics, long on general advice, and packed full of things to get you thinking about the subject; it really was GURPS Space all over again, and is highly recommended for anyone doing world-building, even if that’s for a writing project, as opposed to running an RPG.

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Archon!

by on October 12, 2009 at 8:27 pm
Posted In: Boardgaming

Had Mark over yesterday for gaming.

This time, at long last, we did a playtest game of Archon. It’s designed by Richard Berg, and is scheduled to be included as a separate game in The Glory That Was Greece, Volume III of the Ancient World series.

The general idea is a simple card-driven game of the rise of the Greek city-states, and their colonization of much of the Mediterranean Basin. Each player starts with control of two city states, and tries to gain control of other ones and/or colonize and control Ionia, the Dardanelles/Bosphorous, Crete, the Nile delta, southern Italy and Sicily (the Greeks also reached much of the Black Sea coast and France, but these are deliberately left out of the game). Somewhat like Berg’s recent Blackbeard, the game consists of a single run-through of the deck, which certainly keeps the length down.

Mark and I had read the rules many moons ago, but had forgotten pretty much all of it by this point, so it was the blind leading the blind. Still, it wasn’t too bad, and the game actually went about the predicted amount of time (4 1/2 hours for the first play—it should drop to 3).

We started with fairly basic choices for city-states. I took Attica for the resources, population and navy (and supplemented it with Argolis for it’s navy), while Mark took Laconia (for the home defense, it took a bit to realize that wasn’t going to be starting armies) and Boeotia.

This was technically the start of a resource imbalance that wouldn’t show up for a bit. Shuffling didn’t go so well, so a lot of card pairs were still clumped together. I expect that’ll sort itself out next time. We got drought for the first couple turns of the game, which seriously cut short our available resources. In fact, a couple of cards that demanded naval maintenance wiped out my treasury, and then the navy. So much for that advantage.

However, once the long drought was over, I quickly started getting resources faster than I could spend them. It’s not that there was nothing to spend them on, just that spending them takes actions, which are very precious. Much of the middle game was spent trying to figure out how to actually be able to take a neutral city state (purposefully made difficult). We each managed one (Corinth for me, and Phokis for Mark).

The main driving force in the game is population. It grows steadily, if randomly, through the game, and having too much can be as much of a problem as too little. The die rolls really favored me, with Argolis gaining population faster than anywhere else. Of course, this ‘forced my hand’ somewhat, as I needed to found colonies and maintain a standing army to take up all the spare people.

We only really understood some bits in the rules about controlling colonies for VPs very late, and the end of the game was a scramble to establish control of what we had established. Overall, Mark did somewhat better than I. I abused the fact that I went last to get more than he did, but he was a bit better organized and burned some of my colonies, whereas I never did return the favor. With an extra turn, he would have done much better.

By strict VPs, it was a blowout: 91 to 49 in my favor. Much of that was the middle part of the game where I was consistently drawing 13 to 17 RPs a turn (RPs left over at the end become VPs). I horded them at first, and then realized I couldn’t spend them fast enough anyway…. Without the RPs, it was much closer, 17 to 16 in my favor, and again that was mostly because I went last.

Anyway, we think it shows some real promise, and we hope to try a multiplayer session of it soon!

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A Grand Old Time Out West

by on October 6, 2009 at 9:10 pm
Posted In: GURPS

GURPS has been known for its historical supplements. GURPS Old West was a relatively early one, coming out in 1991. This rewritten edition came out nine years later in 2000. Given the amount of GURPS material that came in between, I imagine the book saw a lot of changes.

In fact, I flipped through the first edition once when it came out, so I’m aware of one general difference: This one is a bit more tightly focused. The original actually covered from the creation of the Old Northwest Territory in 1787, whereas this one really doesn’t pick up until 1800. The shift is subtle, but there. I don’t know about the focus of the previous book, but this one is emphatically dedicated to the ‘classic’ period of the Old West, 1865-1885.

As usual for a GURPS historical product, it is full of fun tidbits as well as general historical and role-playing info. There is a nice run down of the general terrain and flora and fauna from the Great Plains all the way west to the Pacific coast. Some miniature floor plans of typical railroad cars, and even advice on ‘how to rob a train’ (face it, it’s going to come up).

In general, I found this to be one of the better historical books GURPS has done, and on reflection, I believe that it is because the West is a genre just as much as it is a setting, and the book pays attention to both.

Beyond the usual history, characters, campaigning, etc, chapters, there’s also one on the Indians, which can be a bit depressing (which means they do a decent job). It’s a very quick overview of the major groups of tribes, but a good one, that serves as a good basic grounding. Also, the second half of the chapter is dedicated to a magic system based on Indian beliefs. It looks pretty good, if a little sparse, and would be enough for anything short of a ‘high magic’ version where it not only works, but can be quite spectacular. As it is, it’s plenty for either representing how the Indians believed it worked, or a world where some things just can’t be explained by reason alone…. (and there are some thoughts on how to handle the various possibilities).

The vast bulk of the book is not really dedicated to system-specific material, so anyone wanting to take a game into the Old West (or something resembling it), can find some good value here. This was written for GURPS 3rd Edition, and I can’t say exactly how easily most of the system content goes to 4th Ed, but:

  • The guns (biggest problem, system re-write wise) are taken straight out of High Tech, so dropping in the stats for the current edition of HT will solve that. The rest of the equipment isn’t system-dependent enough to be a concern.
  • The characters section was written before templates became a big deal, so there’s none here, it’s all advice, and no real costs to translate.
  • I have no idea if the magic system is already redone in GURPS Thaumatology, or if it’s related to anything in there, or what.
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