Onslaught Six

Thirty and counting.
Connoisseur of fine trash.
Not ever gonna make it,
but then again, who does?

The dice exist to resolve ambiguity.

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GOOD POSTS:

  • Cluster-Based Combat

    The following is a procedure for theater of the mind or non-grid based combat with simple, non-defined ranges. It is not limited to fantasy genres.

    Players have two Actions during their turn. They can use one Action to Move from one Cluster to another. (Some games have their own Movement and only one Action; in games like this, use your Move action to move form one Cluster to another. Adjudicate attacks of opportunity if your system has them.)

    You can use your Action to Attack any enemy within the Cluster. Ranged Attacks can hit enemies in other Clusters. However, if an ally is also in the Cluster, Ranged Attacks will have Cover. If your game has multiple cover options, each successive ally in a Cluster ranks Cover up to the next. (For example one ally may provide ½ cover, two allies 2/3 cover, etc.)

    AOE Actions (such as spells, grenades, etc.) affect all participants in a given Cluster. If your game has particularly large AOEs, then it may envelope two or more Clusters, based on the relative size of the AOE and how large the battlefield is.

    The advantage to this is that it’s easier to remember what players are attacking what Monsters in a given Cluster and makes it easier to adjudicate AOEs in theater of the mind.

  • The Public Domain Statement

    I believe copyright is a sham.

    I believe that lobbying corporations have turned what was originally a protection designed for the individual artist into a strangehold over ideas and culture in America, and by extention the rest of the world.

    Copyright existed so that I could make a work of art, and then for a reasonable amount of time after that, profit from that art. I am not directly opposed to this idea. In fact, I think it’s a great idea. A creator of something should have, for at least a while, the exclusive right to create and distribute their work and profit from it. And by profit, I really mean, “make a living from.”

    Which is where my next bit comes in: The original terms for copyright were seven years from the original date of publication. Which means I make a book, or a painting, or a song, and for seven years, that’s Mine. You can’t reprint it or alter it without my permission. But then, seven years later, it’s free game. You have had seven years to profit and make a living from this single work of art; time’s up, better get back to those artin’ mines and make a second thing.

    The intent for this was twofold: It prevented one artist from relying on a single work for their entire livelihood, forcing one to create Again. And I philosophically believe that not just the art of creation is good for the human soul, but continued creation of art is good for the human soul. I made a lot of music before, I’ve made TTRPGs before, but nothing heals my soul after the long week of capitalist bullshit than sitting down and making something entirely new.

    Secondly, it prevents one from monopolising the culture. If a creation became so widespread and popular, it becomes part of the culture. It BECOMES PART OF THE CULTURE. The olden Gods like Zeus and Thor are part of the culture. The myths of older cultures are part of the culture. King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table are part of the culture. Robin Hood, Peter Pan, Cinderella, Beowulf, all of these are part of our culture.

    So are Superman, Batman, Spiderman, Mickey Mouse, Pikachu. These characters are also a part of our culture. And we should be able to interpret them as we like, without threat of corporations stomping us down.

    I am under no illusion that anything we create for Tidal Wave Games could be as popular as those things. But, they could become popular. People may want to build on our ideas, whether they be mechanical game design or worldbuilding. Therefore, we want them to be accessible to the culture–after, of course, a reasonable amount of time has passed.

    Those who picked up CERES: THE PLANET THAT NEVER SLEEPS may have noted a piece of text in the table of contents & credits page: “All text contained within this book will become public domain on January 1st, 2033.” That is a legally binding statement, and it’s true. As of January 1st, 2033, all the text in Ceres will be public domain and anyone can use it or build upon it without attribution. As of the 4th printing of the CUSC Core Rulebook coming early next year, it will contain the same text, with a revised date of 2032–ten years after original publication.

    This is our commitment, to the culture of the world. We hold on to the copyright for ten years. You can do whatever you want after that. The art, is not public domain, because we are against the AI image war and we are pretty concerned about what letting our images into the public domain might do for that, among other things. But, we aren’t going to come after you for making new art based on those images–reinterpret the world as you see fit, fan artists!

    Furthermore, if you’re interested in working with some of our content or want to make stuff based on it–just talk to me. We are extremely open and want people to create for us. We’ll even pay you and help you put it out!

  • Hit Dice, Hit Points & Weapon Damage

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    I’ve been thinking of doing a little revision to the way my inevitable 2024 revision of what else goes. (There are two alternative versions of this idea, always in motion, the future is: 5e Killer and _&_.) craphack goes.

    I just don’t like the hit dice attached to certain classes in 5e. The grognard in me likes d4 HD wizards. At first I thought I could revise it so there were 3 groups of HD that all made sense together, but unfortunately there are four martials and 5 categories if we use every die, so it’s still a little fucky. Still, here’s the list I came up with:

    image

    So, let’s talk a little bit about what Hit Dice are used for in the game. Primarily they are used to determine your Hit Points. You roll your Hit Dice and add your CON Mod to determine how many Hit Points you get per level.

    My new proposal is that PCs should add their CON Score (so, 13 instead of +1) at level 1, and then never again. So 1st level PCs would be much more survivable, but their HP total would be lower eventually. I haven’t mathed this out yet, but I really want to try it out.

    You also use Hit Dice on a Short Rest to recover lost Hit Points. Perfectly good design, we won’t be altering it here (although we are altering Short Rests–more on that later).

    Finally, I want to propose–I don’t know if I like this yet, but I want to propose–using Hit Dice for your Weapon Damage. Perhaps this will be one of the things that sets _&_ apart from 5e Killer. (Are these two products ever going to coalesce? Probably not.) Hit Dice are badly named in the legacy game and new players come with the expectation that their Hit Dice might actually be the dice they use to hit things. Why not indulge in that? Just make every class do the damage of their Hit Dice when they do weapon attacks.

    This means you can alter the weapons table substantially, because the differences between weapon damage no longer exist. If we were starting from scratch, we could maybe use the weapons table from Wolves Upon The Coast but we aren’t, we’re starting from the table I’ve had for a couple years and recently redid to include WotC’s Weapon Masteries and then my own Martial Options (forthcoming).

    I’m always interested in thoughts about design like this. If you’re interested, feel free to jump on the post, or contact me however you prefer. Stay gold.

  • Space Travel in SEE YOU, SPACE COWBOY…

    They say you can’t help but put your kinks into your work.

    One of my absolute favourite things to do in my tabletop games is to force the players to do something they don’t want to do.

    Man. That makes me sound like an asshole! Let me figure out how to say that differently.

    The world around us is full of shit we don’t want to do. We have to go to work to sell our time to someone else in order to pay our bills, and to afford food that our body requires to keep running.* We have to interact with people we don’t want to interact with, because they control a thing we want. We have to renew licenses, pay taxes, maintain a vehicle, clean the house even if we haven’t been to that part of the house in a week because it still somehow gets dirty. We have to do things we don’t want to do.

    *I personally resent the fact that I have to put food into my body at seemingly random intervals throughout the day, multiple times. The amount of time I waste every day buying food, preparing food, eating food and expelling food is astonishing and I resent almost every second I do it. You know that white oatmeal gruel they eat in the Matrix? “Everything the body needs?” Yeah gimme that. Just shoot it out of a canister into my mouth and solve 90% of my problems.

    Red tape is the only thing the players can’t stab their way out of.

    I love making the players deal with mundane bureaucracy. When my D&D group first entered my huge metropolitan city Dawnharbour, they had to give up all their gold at the gates of the city in exchange for a bank check, that they had to cash at the bank in exchange for Dawnharbour’s paper money. (The bank took 10%, of course.) When they wanted to build a tavern, I outlined a detailed list of all the taxes and licenses they would need and all the guildspeople they would need to speak to and get approval from. And then I had a guy show up at their house to collect their taxes for the year–not their home taxes, their adventuring taxes.

    The players hated this. They hated every second of it. The bullshit that they had to do in order to achieve their goals. I loved it.

    It’s not something I put in every game session, but it’s something I think should be there. Occasionally the players should just have to deal with something that’s a pain in the ass. I don’t know why I feel this way, but I do. Maybe this is the way I make the world feel realistic.

    I’ve occasionally gotten comments about the space travel rules in our game SEE YOU, SPACE COWBOY…–that they either don’t make much sense or it isn’t clear why they exist. They are a little bit crunchy–nothing close to the original Traveller space travel rules, but they require you to roll a check, figure out how many days a journey might take, buy fuel, and then roll some dice to figure out how much you spend on food for the journey. (It should be noted that there are zero mechanical consequences for not eating or being hungry in CUSC, merely that you must announce at every opportunity that you are hungry. Unless you’re smoking.**) You can wrap your head around it. It isn’t difficult. But, it is annoying.

    **Smokes in CUSC cost $$1, by the way. Everything else in the game costs $$50 or a multiple thereof. This means that if you smoke, you will always have a surplus of $$49. In an early playtest, someone asked “Why not just make smokes $$50?” and when I asked if having $$49 left over annoyed them, they said yes. I responded with, “Congrats, that’s the point!”

    That’s really the point. Getting from point A to point B can be annoying, and you should plan ahead for it. And, everyone does it even if it’s a pain in the ass, so you have to do it too.

    You could excise these rules from the game and just let them gallavant from planet to planet, and if that’s what your group enjoys then I’m not going to stop you. But I think you lose something about the world. The players should always have the sense that the world is out to fuck them over at every turn, and by making space travel difficult, you make it something they have to deal with.

    Also, it opens lots of opportunities for generative storytelling. They can end up off course, adding multiple days to their journey, which can cause them to run out of fuel. Now they have to stop off somewhere they weren’t planning on stopping at, interrupting everything they wanted to do, and now they have to go somewhere else. This is GREAT for a Bandleader because now they get to riff on a whole new area they weren’t planning on using. If the players are too broke to get back on the space road, then they need to go hunt a bounty that’s around here. That’s great stuff! And it’s super in genre for the show.

    I don’t know how to end this article. I just felt like writing about why the rules are the way they are, and why they’re in the game. Stay gold.

  • Cereal Box Hexcrawl

    I was at my day job grocery shopping about two months ago when, on the back of a store brand Cheerios box, there was a hexcrawl.

    image

    Okay, the box says it’s a sudoku puzzle. I don’t know shit about sudoku. It’s a hexcrawl now.

    The first thing I did was recreate the hexcrawl in Affinity Publisher. You could do this with any graphic editing software or even by hand on paper, I just used what I’m comfortable with. I counted how many of each number and wrote it on the side; I also created a blank template that you can use.

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    I left the “region borders” out of mine because I felt like they restricted the creativity too much, but you can add them back in.

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    The next step is to colour the hexes. I assumed we would need towns, dungeons, forest, hills and mountains, so I grouped them together based on what felt right and how many I had of each. I then split up the blank tiles based on mostly grasslands but went with what was around.

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    Lastly, I added icons from Hexographer. I named some evocative dungeon locations, some crap 5 minute town names, and boom–we have an adventuring location ready for play. This took about an hour and most of that was graphic design!

    The icon packs I used are here:
    https://welshpiper.com/packages/classic-hexographer-icons/?sfw=pass1685689538
    https://www.hexographer.com/extra-icon-sets/multicolored-classic/

    So, fine, I made a local area. But, my wife is also running a Spelljammer campaign, and needed her own local area. To the rescue: The Cereal Hexcrawl.

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    We named a few areas and generated some interesting locations using the tables found in Stars Over Stormwreck by Mike Shea of Sly Flourish. I can’t believe this kind of stuff wasn’t in any of the books for Spelljammer!

    After we had our locations, we just spread them out based on the numbers we had on our hex map. We might have moved a couple around. Then, I opened my hexcrawl up in Affinity Publisher and did the work doing graphic design (including the space background). I’ve got a print copy of the map on 11×17 paper coming from Printkeg right now!

    Protip: If you are doing a space hexcrawl or other kind of space map, for personal use, Googling “planet clip art” or other things like that is a GREAT resource. High resolution transparent background graphic representations of planets? Gimme that shit!

    So you can see how easy this is to pull off. I made my original hexcrawl in about an hour over my lunch break, and that includes finding all the icons and stuff. It’s so easy to come up with a local area from this and the iterations and changes you could make are seemingly infinite.

    Get out there and make your hexcrawl!