Monday, June 3rd

The Daily Report

Today starts my first full work week here. Last week, I spent a lot of my "working" time just figuring out how/where to set myself up and get stuff done here. This is another reason I'm looking forward to moving. Every time I bounce back and forth, I have to reinvent the wheel a little bit in terms of my work habits, especially given that the apartment is so cramped with stuff and that I don't work well at a traditional desk. But I'm coming into this week with a pretty solid handle on the work environment stuff, so I think I'll be able to get some decent momentum going.

This is going to be a relatively short stay, because I've only got a few months to get ready for the move. Before I leave I'm going to be starting a fundraiser to get the money I need for it. I think I could probably get there the same way I saved money for WisCon... by banking a portion of the $100 a week towards the bonus story thing I've been doing... but I'd prefer to do a separate event for a few reasons.

One, I'm not sure how long the pace of that could be sustained and I'd hate to have to scramble to do a fundraiser closer to my moving date. Two, living in uncertainty is kind of stressful and draining... if I spend the next three months being almost but not quite sure that I'll be able to afford to move then I won't get much else done. Three, it's past time I got my feet wet on the crowdfunding sites.

It won't be a huge fundraiser because I already have some money in the bank, and the expense of a cross-country move, while substantial, is finite.

The State of the Me

Maaaaaaan, remember this time last year when I was here in the apartment in Maryland and miserable because it was so hot? The A/C got fixed and they got a new thermostat a bit after I left and this year the difference is so clear... I feel like the air conditioning must have been on the decline the whole time I've been visiting and last year is just the year it gave up completely, which probably contributed to our uncertainty about whether it was working or not. Anyway, it's definitely working now, and this time next year we'll be in the house.

Plans For Today

Today's a bonus story day. I'm also going to be working on a few blog posts, stretching my "writing stuff" muscles after not having written/posted as many substantial things as I'm used to doing.

AWW: Wilder Combat

You remember when I made some posts about the A Wilder World combat system and experimenting with "fistful of dice" combat systems for it? At the time I concluded that it was a mistake, but after a discussion regarding the pros and cons of "fudge dice" systems, the more I think about it, the more I think a multi-dice combat system is the way to go.

Any "roll once and try to beat a number" system is ultimately only going to work within a fairly narrow range of numbers. Some of the underlying system assumptions about AWW give this a bit more elasticity than usual, but there will always be a point where a character always hits or becomes untouchable, and efforts to get around this with a critical hit/fumble system simply add random swinginess to combat.

This is what I have in mind: the number of dice you get for an attack roll are based on your raw ability. So when you make a melee attack with a Prowess of 4, you roll 4 dice*. The dice are not added together. Instead, rolls of 5 or 6 are counted as successes. Rolls of 1 are discarded. Rolls of 2, 3, or 4 can be turned into successes by "spending" your attack bonuses to raise them to a 5 or more. So if you have +3 to attack and you rolled a 5, a 6, a 1, and a 3, you can turn that 3 into a 6. If the 1 were a 4, you could put one point of bonus with it and two points on the 3 to give you two more successes.

Each natural 6 is worth 2 points of damage or effect. Any other success (a natural 5 or one created through bonuses) is worth 1 point of damage or effect.

Defense rolls work the same way. If you can match the attacker's successes with your own, the attack is defeated. Otherwise, every natural 6 rolled subtracts 1 from the damage/effect of the attack.

Advantages:

1. There is no point at which an attack automatically hits or a defense automatically succeeds. There are points at which it's statistically almost a foregone conclusion, but no point at which it's completely so.


2. It preserves the notion that more skilled opponents have more deadly/effective attacks.


3. The stakes always go up with skill. Equally matched attack and defense always results in a 50/50 chance of hitting or missing, but the consequences of a hit increases with ability instead of the most common result being a hit for little damage.


4. The above means that damage resistance type abilities have a usefulness and flavor that's separate from hit-avoidance ones.


5. There's a ceiling on damage that the random number generator can't break.


6. Attack bonuses can proliferate higher with fewer consequences, and the point at which diminishing returns kicks in is higher for characters with higher relevant ability scores. That is, a character with Prowess of 1 won't normally benefit from having more than +3 to attack, but a character with a Prowess of 5 can potentially make use of a total of +15.

Disadvantages:

1. Attack rolls--and particularly applying bonuses to them--become less straightforward. In particular, it becomes possible for an inexperienced/not-math-savvy player to apply their attack bonuses "wrong" and end up with a weaker hit than they would have had.


2. The scale for attack bonuses, damage bonuses, and effect bonuses changes quite a bit.


3. The effect system is going to need some re-working to suit the new scale.

Even with the disadvantages... and I consider the first one to be substantial... I think I'm going to go with this, because it really does redress what the weak points of the combat system have been. If it turns out to be totally unwieldy in play, I can revise or even scrap it.

*(Of course, abilities of less than 1 are possible in AWW. My initial idea was that you'd roll Prowess +3 dice, giving you 1 die for -2 and 3 dice for a score of 0. This results in far too many dice on the table and is one of the reasons I discarded this whole idea the first time around. So instead I'm going to have dice equal to ability with a minimum of 1, and have the "dead die" range increase for each point below 1. Characters with a score of 0 discard dice that show a 1 or 2, characters with a score of -1 discard dice that show a 3, and characters with a score of -2 discard all dice that are lower than 5... which means that attack bonuses do not ever apply for someone with a score of -2. I regard this as a feature, not a bug. No amount of training can overcome that profound a physical limitation.)

AWW: Combat update, updated.

...had the random insight while I was showering that all the unwanted complexity of applying attack bonuses to the multi-dice system comes from my desire to preserve the old scale of bonuses as much as possible; that is, to make "+5 to attack" meaningful in a way that doesn't add five dice to the table.

But that's a poor approach to game design. The possibility of having +5 to attack comes from a now-discarded set of assumptions about how an attack roll works. If there's no way to naturally and gracefully integrate it with the new assumptions, it needs to be discarded. At the very least, I shouldn't be starting with the assumption that all abilities that intersected with the old combat system should intersect with the new one in the same way.

The only reason I tried it this way is... laziness. I mean, it's a lot more work to re-do everything that gave an attack bonus than it is to figure out how to make "attack bonuses" that make sense in the new system. But it's a false savings, because it'll be easier and less of a hassle on every level to fix it now than to test a game with crumbling foundations to see which way they break and then try to fix it.

The good news is that one of the last things I did with the basic character guide before I had to drop everything and get ready for WisCon was to deprecate attack bonuses by getting rid of as many escalating attack bonuses as I could, which makes the task of converting the remaining ones easier.

The end result may be that some options that simply gave attack bonuses may disappear and that things which make a character a better fighter may become more diverse in their effects (because the new generic "+1 to attack", adding another die, will be comparatively rare), and I think both of these things will make the game stronger and characters more interesting.

A small post-con note/travel tip.

I just want to say that while I've been attending WisCon every year since 2010, this is the first time I managed to completely escape picking up any form respiratory illness (what I usually refer to as "creeping con crud"), and that the rest of my family escaped, as well.

Con-related illness is a real thing, though it can be hard to tell if the bugs are actually picked up at the con or in transit. You might have heard that it's from breathing the same recycled air as a hundred strangers, but the air in an airplane is actually heavily filtered air that's refreshed with outside air as you go. It's some of the most sanitary air you'll ever breathe.

What hasn't been sanitized at all is the surfaces in the plane: the seats, the seat belts, the tray tables, the arm rests. Airlines may remove obvious messes, but they don't really "clean" a plane in between flights.

We've recently become very sensitive about this sort of thing due to a chronic health condition in the extended family, and as a result we pack hand sanitizer and antimicrobial hand wipes for traveling. If you're flying anywhere, stick some wipes in your pocket and wipe down everything you need to touch on your seat (in the airplane and the seat) then wipe your hands. Nothing is foolproof, but even with all the travel I do I haven't caught a "travel bug" since last summer.

(I never really noticed it before, but WisCon itself is very good about providing wipes and hand sanitizer during the con.)