OK.

Richard G 3 Minutes

OK. Here’s the current thing with CCH (apart from the fact I don’t have time to run it and it keeps bothering the corners of my brain anyway)…

I have 2 possibly-contradictory visions for it and they might not mash together nicely.

1. Heistcrawl is where it all started. This is basically treating all defensive works and/or colonies as dungeons on which you can plan your assaults/interventions. It’s straight up DnD-as-heist and so a good system for running it already exists.

And the point of a heist is to gather and order your information, find the optimal chink in the opponent’s armour and then use the minimal tool necessary to prise that chink wide open and get the treasure. A heist turns a powerful enemy into a puzzle and solves it laterally.

This was actually why I ever thought of CCH. I thought “how could a small band of adventurers turn the course of colonial history?” and then I thought “well that’s pretty much what Robert Clive (“of India”) did and he kinda treated it like a puzzle, applying the (initially small) forces he had to optimal effect.” 

…so for the action (ie final) part of the heist, existing RPGs will do nicely. The trick is to systematize the powerful opponents, intel gathering and political consequences so they can be part of a game and not just off-the-cuff improvised abstractions.

2. then I got seduced by scalability, largely because I’d already been seduced by Pokemon (another story, that). It occurred to me that CCH would probably work with units of radically different sizes – men, ships, city-forts, also cosmic seadragons or something that represented the hidden power of the natives. And that maybe the point of a heist was to find a way to disaggregate a big unit – pull the nails out of the ship (or spike its guns or wet its powder); pull the teeth of the dragon, pull the loyalty out of the troops. Then when you fight, it turns out that the heist has turned big units into small ones.

It occurred to me that Risus could model scalability well – every time you double the size of a unit, you add 1d6 to its rolls (an advantage of 1d6 pretty much uniformly leads to the larger side winning 3/4 of the time, as far as I can tell, with the probability curve plateauing more and more at larger dice totals, so you’d really want like 2d6 or 3d6 advantage to be decisive on a roll of 16d6, even though those many d6s will tend to roll more and more average results). So then everything could be a character with a few skills (for a ship: sailing speed, guns, melee/boarding, hull strength, maybe ability to sail toward the direction of wind if we want to get really fancy) and specific interventions would change the number of dice for those skills.

This makes unit scale nicely explicit and provides a shorthand for a unit’s strengths and weaknesses, but….. Risus really doesn’t help the crunchy danger-heightening mood of a good heist (action stage).

3. And then finally there’s the totem spirits/pokemon/essence of intent of each faction/place/condition. On one hand, I feel like this magical element can only dilute the tactical bite of a well-balanced heist game, which thrives on clear and visceral stakes, tools and ingenuity. If you have a spirit that can warp wood then your heist to disable the enemy ship is easier to plot but maybe less satisfying than if you had to come up with a sneaky method of just drilling holes in the enemy’s hull or subverting their command structure. I really don’t like the my-special-ability-trumps-your-special-ability arms race that MtG threatens to turn into. I’d rather have victory depend on architectural reasoning like chess (although not exactly like chess because I suck at chess).

 

On the other hand, Pokemon! The whole player community voted for them (all those years ago) and it is just lovely to imagine:

a) fleeing into the jungle, powerlessly, and finding a spirit there that allows you to fight back

b) Patrick’s and Arnold’s and Scrap’s weirdo pseudo-religions being made into battling spirit animals

c) discovering that actually the whole English colonial plan has been appropriated and is now being run for the Spirit of Sugar Cane, which wants only to spread over all the Earth, even to the detriment of the Spirit of Silver.

So that’s why I’m a bit stalled right now.

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Published by Richard Grenville

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21 thoughts on “OK.”

  3. So. Yes it is 2 games. Maybe that’s OK, though.

    If the domains at war game has a mostly iron logic to it and you can know the odds with some degree of accuracy, then you can assess your position and make appropriate moves.

    But then you can essentially cheat at that game through heists, which is much of the actual play. Pulling apart the iron logic through sneakiness/intelligence.

    It would be nice if the heist mechanics and the domains at war mechanics were harmonized. Maybe this is possible after all. Maybe we can adapt Risus for the heists, plus something to handle heist-specific challenges.

    E. G.

    I think Zzarchov (and, erm… you?) has the right idea about sneaking: using hp or something similar as a tension-building mechanic, so you start with n sneaky points and you use then up as you fail, so you have less from then on to finish and they don’t replenish until the mission’s over. This plus Risus’s usual attrition mechanics seem like they might be enough.

    Regarding the (roughly) 75% success rate for a 1 die advantage, it’s actually much bigger than that I think: let’s say you have 2d and your opponent has 3d: their average roll will be 3.5 higher than yours, which means if you both roll average to within a delta of 3 points, 3d guy wins (and the numbers covered by mean +-3 cover half the probability). For 2d to beat 3d, the 2d guy has to roll in the top quartile of possible outcomes AND the 3d guy has to roll in the bottom erm…roughly 2/3? Now I start to get hazy on this, but my sense is a 1d advantage is only overcome like 1 time in 10 or something, and the probability for overturning that 1d advantage remains remarkably consistent as you increase the numbers of dice involved because even though 3 becomes a smaller share in the overall roll, rolling many dice tends toward average results.

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  4. I’ll write a program to do the math for me.

    The hp as sneak stuff is ZZarchov’s.

    I have a similar thing for the heists, where badly failed rolls or pressing on despite failed rolls depletes the alarm score. at 0, bullshit happens

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  6. heists really make the most sense for generals – they can avoid risking a large force by risking a small one.

    Of course the PCs will be on the risk-taking edge so they’ll see things a bit differently. And heists might not be rational for them but that never seems to bother anyone.

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  7. heists might not be rational for them but that never seems to bother anyone.

    There’s an entire genre of entertaining based around it (RPGs) and it seems to be doing pretty fine

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  8. Welcome to Special Forces – you get the privilege of saving us from committing a bunch of regular soldiers.

    It’s funny thinking of James Bond as a cost-saving scheme. OTOH it makes you realise that every regular infantry operation is an admission that the commanders literally could not think of anything smarter to do and therefore went with the dumbest and costliest option.

    A lot of people in the US believe strongly in “boots on the ground:” throwing a lot of people at the problem as the only way to handle eg counter insurgency. Maybe they’re right, but it seems to me that’s such a bad cost to pay that it would be worth devoting as much thought as you possibly can to avoiding it every time, just in case there’s a way.

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  9. Well, they tried quashing these kind of situations sending murderhobos for half a century in south america (or paying cheap third party troops) and i need not remind you what happened

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  10. missions accomplished?

    I mean, leftie populist governments suppressed, economic chaos leading to cheap resource extraction and a massive deniable revenue stream in the form of illegal narcotics. What’s not to love?

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  12. …the daughter of some friends of ours is just going away to college and is interested in studying art in Brazil under the dictatorship, so we got talking about it and she was like “how do these dictators keep springing up, I mean what is it about South America?” and I’m like “Oooookay. Let’s talk about the School of the Americas.”

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  14. OSR dnd is a curious bird because it mixes the romanticizing of risk with a commander’s sensible risk aversion (all in the name of adding challenge/thinking). Pretty much all the genre fiction it’s based on is full-on romaticizing and it seems like a lot of the later generations of DnD go down that route (still not really a DnD head here) but there’s a sort of cautious-but-fuck-it-but-silly-you-I-said-cautious dynamic in DnD play that pulls all the time in 2 directions and seems to get its power from that.

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  15. ay ay ay.

    In Rome I made sure to take the kids to the Garibaldi monument and tell them (the story I’d heard) about the day Garibaldi offered up southern Italy to Cavour in a glorious moment of unificatory zeal and Cavour was like “did we really not manage to assassinate you and it’s come to this?”

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  17. so was I when I read about it.

    Like, really? Vittorio Emanuele gets all this for free?

    Garibaldi seems like a PC in someone’s weird Monty Haul story game.

    Cavour seems like a PC in some hard Diplomacy/GURPS game where you get extra points for deviousness.

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