What Is Best In Life? Solvency. Stability. A Nice Hat.

 The ACKs game I spoke of way back in my first post has finally started. Its relatively slow and low key and I don’t want to drop too many details yet (in case players read this) but it seems to be doing pretty well. We play on Discord, which fits the play-by-mail feel of kingdom play better.

Now, as I stated, its not a real ACKs campaign. See, the players are starting at 12^th level, their individual character sheets aren’t super important, and it’s not about dungeon crawling, it’s about domain management.  

When I was setting things up though, I did research and one place I found some useful information was over at the the Wandering Gamist's blog. Specifically this post here.

The guy also has pretty cool ACKs home rules. Check him out.

The Gamist thinks the domain system as it stands is too spreadsheet heavy and detracts from the party’s cohesion. I agree.  That was one of the biggest problems with Birthright back in the day. The answer I arrived at, and arrived at early, was to not bother with a party at all. Everybody gets their own country.  And nobody gets to see their leader’s stats, instead the spreadsheet for managing the kingdom is their character sheet.

Well they get their own “country.” See, I decided to start the tech level lower, and made them essentially former impoverished city-states who once were languishing under a terrible evil empire. As a result, they’re all poor, small, underpopulated, and in situations where they have to rebuild.

While looking into it, I realized the “problem” of the King portion of the Adventurer-Conqueror-King trifecta was that the King portion was well, too damn smooth. You gain income, you pay outgo, a large portion of it is designed to avoid pooling up money (money being xp, this makes sense), but I realized what it lacked was ‘challenge.’

And that’s because I don’t think it was ever really intended to be a source of conflict in the game. So.. I did what countless bad DMs have done throughout the decades. I started making house rules and custom scenarios.

ACKs is so diamond hard in its mechanics that the economy, events and decisions by a player have immediate, concrete and most importantly palpable effects for a player. Increase families, increase garrison costs, increase holiday costs, increase taxes and it upsets people on the morale roll, etc, etc.

This means that the core mechanics, for lack of better words, the THAC0 of kingship is built in, all it needs is, well, a dungeon.

The dungeon is not necessarily a location. And the character sheet is not necessarily the King. Instead the real character sheet IS the spreadsheet for managing the kingdom. Lists of families, income, etc, all those hard crunchy numbers that enable and are affected by what truly guides a game system, the player’s decisions. And in that, I hope to find the “emotionally-charged play,” that the Wandering Gamist speaks of.

I don’t disagree with him though, the mechanics for supporting domain level stuff seems a bit brief in the core ruleset. I had to create my own random events chart based on the stuff from Oriental Adventures, to provide for at least one encounter per player each ‘turn.’ Turns effectively being months.

I made the turns months because that’s when income hits, and income is a major driver for the kingdom. Remember, the idea is that the spreadsheet is the character sheet since all we’re focusing on is domain-level play. This makes maintaining it less onerous to the player, because it’s less of a strange side mechanic, and more the primary mechanic.

Also, I broke the hexes up. The maximum domain a player can control in ACKs is a 24-mile hex. This is comprised of a number of smaller 6-mile hexes. Since this game is all about managing territory and kingdoms, I decided that an individual player could manage a number of 6-mile hexes that would EQUAL a 24 mile hex, and then I started them with just 7 6-mile hexes and left it to them to grow.  

I also gave them a treasury, rolled their land values, put the strongholds in place for the initial hexes (some of which were barely sufficient and some of which were stupidly massive) and determined their hex’s family pops.

Some kingdoms started off relatively flush, others severely underpopulated, some severely overbuilt, some with economies in the black, and one or two in the red.

With the issues of nitty gritty being moved from sideline to main game, suddenly players are much more invested if they lose or gain a few families per hex here and there.  

One player for example wants to expand. One wants technological updates. One has crazy vassals. One is trying to keep his people fed. And everybody stares at the random monthly events that come at them with weal and woe, while trying to keep body and soul together.

Because again, their decisions matter.

And that’s what really makes or breaks a game.   

Musical Inspiration Challenge 2! Part 7. The theme of the ‘dungeon.’

Dr. Slumber's Eternity Home by Arjen Lucassen.

I admit. In the last section, I read ahead a bit. Spotting this is what game me the idea for the old folks home, but the more I lulled it over the more I liked it.

In any case. Arjen Lucassen is the guy behind the band Ayreon, which I rather like, but in this case he put out an album, a one shot concept album about a fellow waking up in the far future and having to deal with the strange changes to society that had happened.

Onto the lyrics.. oh, and the dialogue section at the beginning is from Rutger Hauer in the part of ‘Dr. Voight-Kamph.’

///

"Lifespan Wackso-Hackso-Corporation has fresh applications for psychological hickups. People now choose more drastics than ever before. Time has lost too much money. Geography changes on the scale of Richter ... Ageless, pointless, aimless, hopeless? Oh ... must leave space for sponsors. No appointments necessary, the doctor is in."

All bets are off, the game is over
Your hand's been played now
Rien ne va plus
You've had enough
Time to leave your cares behind
Leave it to us
We're ready for you

You've reached the end
The final closure
Nothing to plan or worry about
Round up your friends
Time has come to say goodbye
You're coming in
You're checking out

At Dr Slumber's Eternity Home
No, you don't have to go alone
At Dr Slumber's Eternity Home
There'll be no pain
You won't complain
Never again

Our expert team is here
To serve you
Once you arrive
You're here to stay
Sleep your last sleep.
Time to answer your last call
We're overcrowded anyway

At Dr Slumber's Eternity Home
No, you don't have to go alone
At Dr Slumber's Eternity Home
There'll be no pain
You won't complain
Never again

///

It’s a song about assisted suicide being foisted on people on the basis of them being hopeless and considered to be taking up too much space.

Pretty grim crap, set to an upbeat tune.  It also contrasts nicely against our prior themes of pushing against, resisting and overcoming despite our shortcomings. The dungeon stands in opposition to the main theme of the adventure, and that’s a good thing.

As a dungeon, this immediately shouts out the idea of an old folks home, or sanatorium, where the doctors have chosen a drastic and terrible path. However, coupled with our earlier inspirations, something more drastic and more vile starts to come into focus. We’d probably need to make it a bit more of the Magic-As-Technology era of D&D, because sanitariums in the actual middle ages were straw covered prisons or monasteries.

The place exists to destroy hope. To make one feels worthless, so they fall into despair. And our foe comes into sharper focus now that we see the dungeon. A fiend, perhaps an actual one, who with truly diabolical intent is trying to break down heroes, maestros and people who were once great into pits of despair, before finally destroying them.

It fits an urban situation, or a situation just outside of one. And allows us social and combat options for breaking in. After all, the party has to find out about the place and then find a way in.

And hospitals can be creepy.

Hell, we could even add another reason to ‘why should the players care?’ Maybe they got committed to this hellhole?

Musical Inspiration Challenge 2! Part 6. Why should the players care?

City of Lagoons by Hawkwind

Player investment or their ‘buy in’ is one of the most important things in designing an adventure. Prepared adventures, which we are kinda sorta emulating with our thought experiment, even more so.

In a normal campaign the DM can see what the drives and aims of his player group are, and can tailor them. In a way, there is too much tailoring in the modern DM meta.

Without a reasonable buy in, the players are disinterested. Disinterested players are not interested. This is a tautology, but it’s important. If they are not interested, they don’t care about NPCs, or plots, or who that guy speaking riddles in room 34 in the cage is.  It is important to realize however that most players want their characters to be invested and involved, for the most part they want in on the adventure, but can be kept out.

City of Lagoons, our song by the progressive rock mainstay Hawkwind, is an instrumental. I don’t have lyrics to work with on this one, but even without lyrics, the song has a title, and a feel that arises from listening to its music. I’ve not the skills to go into a specific exegesis on the way the notes are conveyed, or how the slow 2/4s time presents the sensation of moving through a calm and mellow environment.

How can something so mellow be a good buy in? By being mellow.

Very frequently, buy in’s feel like conscription orders. “You were sent by the pathfinder society,” or “you were obliged to come to..” loom heavily. In reality, the best buy ins, are low key ones that are spread wide, at least when there isn’t a larger master plot, or aims of players to generate them.

Now, enough of me beating around. The song is indeed very mellow, and has a slow low key sensation to it. It summons up images to me, at least, of walking through a high class area at night, surrounded by fountains and lakes, or alternatively, of slowly coursing down a canal like in Venice, while the world goes about its active but mundane activities around me.

We’ve already established our antagonist slightly as an individual who is doing terrible acts to ‘prove’ that no one is the final arbiter over him, or that he is alone. And we established with ‘Freaks of Nature” that we have a situation of people who are limited but still strong, and in fact gain strength through their infirmaries.. So to couple this with the concept of calmness.. We have several options for why players should care.

Namely, to keep things quiet, to retain the calm and serene niceness of the place. Heroes in many settings are expressly, or implicitly, the defenders of civilization. Keeping things orderly. Safe. Well maintained. Keeping the pathways clear and the world safe from the terrors outside, and inside.

So perhaps the clearest path for player motivation here is simply the idea of doing good to keep the ‘home’ or ‘city’ safe and sound. To watch out for those who might be harmed who have no way of defending themselves.

This helps a bit with something else. I think I’m going to abandon the concept of a freak show or circus and instead make it about an old folks home.  This is something that even the meaner cusses in the party might be motivated by, something preying on the old and infirm. Everyone gets old eventually, after all. Now we can also motivate them with money or with pity, but the primary aim of ‘don’t mess with old folks’ or better  old adventurers makes this much more involved for the players. Maybe we could work in a mentor, or an old inspiration to the players.

They should care, or be involved because one day they too will be old and might need someone to bail them out.

Seems to work for me.