Let's Read ACKS Core at RPG.net

Acknowledging that taste and preference trump all, I see enforced cost of living expenses as a way to model the very realistic conspicuous consumption associated with the wealth and power assumed by higher levels.

For example, I was browsing through my news feed yesterday and saw something about the Obamas in Italy. Mrs. Obama was wearing an “inexpensive” blouse priced at only $130. I’m middle class, and I still wear $10 t-shirts in public when my wife and work let me; I can only imagine spending such sums on clothing in the context of different norms based on socio-economic classes. In that light, it makes sense (while reinforcing my ambivalence about making more money).

For more context, consumption was even more extravagant in earlier periods. I’m working off my phone right now, but it’s not hard to find evidence describing a pre-modern preference for prioritizing looking good over investment or other rational expenses. This tendency - nay, obligation - explains many of the otherwise inexplicable problems faced by the rulers of Sicily, France, and even some of America’s Founding Fathers (particularly the Southern planters).

Just my two cents. I prefer the abstract cost of living “tax” for simplicity, but an easy way to make it easier to swallow might just be to grant a minor bonus for players who make an effort to explain exactly how they’re blowing money on travel, baths, perfumes, rare delicacies, shoes, and clothing.

And, technically, they were correct, she was probably operating a bit under what I'd expect an ex-First-Lady's "cost of living" to be. You can get $130 shirts at  Macy's, so it's not like that's a boutique price. And the fact that they point that out in the news is part and parcel of how deeply ingrained that sort of crap still is in the underlying culture - she's wearing something you can get at a mall, and because of the history of conspicious consumption, that's something evidently worth mentioning.

It'd be interesting to see a count of how often clothing costs are mentioned based on if they're above, equal to, or below whatever the apparent cost-of-living table is in the real world.

 

after I said my piece on cost of living on the thread, I went to talk to my players since it seemed like a necessary assumption and it turns out they've all been paying the appropriate (though minimum) cost for adventurers levels 5-7.  Even doing this, they were eager to spend something in the realm of 3 months on downtime activities, so I'm not sure why Thirdkingdom's game seems to have so much more heavy of a push to constantly adventure.

In my mind, the cost of living table should be tied in with your ability to attract henchmen, and your reputation.

The henchman rates assume that what you’re paying them is reasonable for their level. If you’re 8th level, but you wear dirty peasant clothes and sleep in the common room at the Inn, you look like a peasant. That 6th level cleric who uses his pay to maintain a nice household in the wealthy part of town is NOT going to be your henchman.

In other words, nobody knows what level you are, they know about your cost of living, they know some tales of your adventures, and if they adventure with you, they see how you handle yourself, soooo…

Henchman availability ought to depend on your cost of living (as visible stand in for level) and reputation. Fake it with that big treasure hoard to get the best “people” and try to stay ahead of the curve :slight_smile:

As for what it should get you materially, I think a cost structure like that has to assume that you’ve got a staff and a household once you get above a certain level, no?

[quote="Jard"]

after I said my piece on cost of living on the thread, I went to talk to my players since it seemed like a necessary assumption and it turns out they've all been paying the appropriate (though minimum) cost for adventurers levels 5-7.  Even doing this, they were eager to spend something in the realm of 3 months on downtime activities, so I'm not sure why Thirdkingdom's game seems to have so much more heavy of a push to constantly adventure.

[/quote]

 

I don't know!  I think part of it is because we started off with the intent of having it more of a hexploration type of game, instead of dungeon crawling, and they've been pretty cautious while exploring, as well.  They've got a pretty massive mercenary army and henchmen trees, as well as a bunch of workers they've hired, so their cash outlay is pretty substantial.  All of them set 25k aside for this three month downtime, and will mostly burn through that.  However, the Company itself has another 100k in the bank, so it's not like they're going to go broke immediately.

This has been a really fascinating thread to read, because it reveals to me the areas where people find friction in the rules. A few notes:

1. I should have done a better job of explaining the benefits of exploration speed in the rules, and making it explicit what the penalties are for not moving at exploration speed. When I run ACKS, characters moving at exploration speed gain the following advantages: (a) because they are watching their footing, they only set off traps on a 1-2 on 1d6; (b) because they are counting paces and estimating distances, they are given explicit dimensions of rooms and hallways and permitted to map their progress; (c) because they are moving cautiously, they are not automatically detected by passively alert creatures; and (d) if Elves or other characters with Alertness they can spot secret doors. It was not my intent that it allowed automatic searching for traps, though it merits playtesting to see if that should be the official rule. It would require some re-engineering of other mechanics, though.

2. Changing spell repertoire was deliberately made costly and time-consuming. It's not intended to be like the Wizards or Sorcerers of 5E; it's unique to ACKS. The idea is that any given mage has a bundle of spells he's "in practice" with and then a larger set he could practice. Learning those takes time and money, and you can't stay practiced in everything because there's only so many hours in the day and so much space in working memory. The reason it is cheaper to learn spells when your repertoire increases with level/INT is analagous to why it's easier to learn a foreign languae when you're living in a country versus studying it in school on the side - the former is organic learning that happens naturally, the latter is not.

3. The costs of living are not intended to be required in the same way that, e.g., attack rolls are required. Much of the ACKS system is economic guidelines and expectation-setting, not rules-as-physics. One of the things I intend to explore in AXIOMS is explaining exactly what is being spent.

[quote="Alex"]

This has been a really fascinating thread to read, because it reveals to me the areas where people find friction in the rules. A few notes:

1. I should have done a better job of explaining the benefits of exploration speed in the rules, and making it explicit what the penalties are for not moving at exploration speed. When I run ACKS, characters moving at exploration speed gain the following advantages: (a) because they are watching their footing, they only set off traps on a 1-2 on 1d6; (b) because they are counting paces and estimating distances, they are given explicit dimensions of rooms and hallways and permitted to map their progress; (c) because they are moving cautiously, they are not automatically detected by passively alert creatures; and (d) if Elves or other characters with Alertness they can spot secret doors. It was not my intent that it allowed automatic searching for traps, though it merits playtesting to see if that should be the official rule. It would require some re-engineering of other mechanics, though.

2. Changing spell repertoire was deliberately made costly and time-consuming. It's not intended to be like the Wizards or Sorcerers of 5E; it's unique to ACKS. The idea is that any given mage has a bundle of spells he's "in practice" with and then a larger set he could practice. Learning those takes time and money, and you can't stay practiced in everything because there's only so many hours in the day and so much space in working memory. The reason it is cheaper to learn spells when your repertoire increases with level/INT is analagous to why it's easier to learn a foreign languae when you're living in a country versus studying it in school on the side - the former is organic learning that happens naturally, the latter is not.

3. The costs of living are not intended to be required in the same way that, e.g., attack rolls are required. Much of the ACKS system is economic guidelines and expectation-setting, not rules-as-physics. One of the things I intend to explore in AXIOMS is explaining exactly what is being spent.

[/quote]

To me, the "traps only trigger on 1-2 on d6" is the extent of the "automatically searching for traps".  If you're moving faster than exploration movement, every trap triggers without warning.

Do you have any comments on spells being different from B/X,?

I’m not sure why Thirdkingdom’s game seems to have so much more heavy of a push to constantly adventure.

I don’t know! I think part of it is because we started off with the intent of having it more of a hexploration type of game, instead of dungeon crawling, and they’ve been pretty cautious while exploring, as well. They’ve got a pretty massive mercenary army and henchmen trees, as well as a bunch of workers they’ve hired, so their cash outlay is pretty substantial. All of them set 25k aside for this three month downtime, and will mostly burn through that. However, the Company itself has another 100k in the bank, so it’s not like they’re going to go broke immediately.

Wow, when I run low-wilderness-level (5-7) games my players usually struggle to make payroll and dump any remaining cash into boats, more mercs, rarely reserve XP, mostly fortifications (a favorite because they yield immediate, threshold-exempt domain XP for spending gold with no chance of failure and very small ongoing costs). If they took a month off (or just had a bum haul on an adventure), their hirelings would start deserting. And that’s with zero cost of living - nearly every gold piece they earn gets pumped into something as soon as it’s available (except for one or two kgp per player kept on hand for RL&Ls - 25k per player is an order of magnitude more disposable gold than I’d expect to see).

My suspicion is that this behavior is partly just personality (group dominated by optimizing tech nerds), and partly a reaction to slow leveling rates and high mortality. The logic goes that if you have 500gp, you can hold onto it and maybe die before getting to spend it, or you can spend it on castle and get 250 XP that might let you level sooner and live longer. Buying magic items is very dependent on availability (and hidden in the Secrets chapter), spell research is so unreliable and gametime-expensive that payroll costs dominate, you’re probably already functionally capped out on henchmen (and the utility of one more henchman must be balanced against the ongoing wages and XP-share costs), mercenaries have ongoing costs, limited availability, and limited utility, and trade goods have a combination of limited availability, high gametime-costs to buy and sell, and high hassle-factor. Agricultural investment is a sound long-term approach (costs roughly 182gp/family on average, which yields 6-7gp/mo and pays for itself in 24-30 months), but unreliable at low volumes and the XP gain is very much dependent on campaign XP threshold. Historically we’ve found ourselves with mostly sub-threshold wilderness domains and campaigns ranging from 12 to 18 game-months, such that on the margin 250XP now is better than the possibility of 20XP/mo later (if you ever cross the threshold). Fortresses-for-XP is definitely the sort of pit that a greedy algorithm would fall into, but I’m not sure it’s actually bad play under the circumstances.

But we’re probably doin’ it wrong.

[quote="jedavis"] >> I'm not sure why Thirdkingdom's game seems to have so much more heavy of a push to constantly adventure. > I don't know! I think part of it is because we started off with the intent of having it more of a hexploration type of game, instead of dungeon crawling, and they've been pretty cautious while exploring, as well. They've got a pretty massive mercenary army and henchmen trees, as well as a bunch of workers they've hired, so their cash outlay is pretty substantial. All of them set 25k aside for this three month downtime, and will mostly burn through that. However, the Company itself has another 100k in the bank, so it's not like they're going to go broke immediately. Wow, when I run low-wilderness-level (5-7) games my players usually struggle to make payroll and dump any remaining cash into boats, more mercs, rarely reserve XP, mostly fortifications (a favorite because they yield immediate, threshold-exempt domain XP for spending gold with no chance of failure and very small ongoing costs). If they took a month off (or just had a bum haul on an adventure), their hirelings would start deserting. And that's with zero cost of living - nearly every gold piece they earn gets pumped into something as soon as it's available (except for one or two kgp per player kept on hand for RL&Ls - 25k per player is an order of magnitude more disposable gold than I'd expect to see). My suspicion is that this behavior is partly just personality (group dominated by optimizing tech nerds), and partly a reaction to slow leveling rates and high mortality. The logic goes that if you have 500gp, you can hold onto it and maybe die before getting to spend it, or you can spend it on castle and get 250 XP that might let you level sooner and live longer. Buying magic items is very dependent on availability (and hidden in the Secrets chapter), spell research is so unreliable and gametime-expensive that payroll costs dominate, you're probably already functionally capped out on henchmen (and the utility of one more henchman must be balanced against the ongoing wages and XP-share costs), mercenaries have ongoing costs, limited availability, and limited utility, and trade goods have a combination of limited availability, high gametime-costs to buy and sell, and high hassle-factor. Agricultural investment is a sound long-term approach (costs roughly 182gp/family on average, which yields 6-7gp/mo and pays for itself in 24-30 months), but unreliable at low volumes and the XP gain is very much dependent on campaign XP threshold. Historically we've found ourselves with mostly sub-threshold wilderness domains and campaigns ranging from 12 to 18 game-months, such that on the margin 250XP now is better than the possibility of 20XP/mo later (if you ever cross the threshold). Fortresses-for-XP is definitely the sort of pit that a greedy algorithm would fall into, but I'm not sure it's actually bad play under the circumstances. But we're probably doin' it wrong. [/quote]

 

Well, that 100k in the bank is largely due to the timely sale of two magic items.  My players are settling an area with no human habitation, so I'm also making them spend the money to import both settlers and workers.  They've dropped about 20k on inducing settlers so far.

[quote="Jard"]

To me, the "traps only trigger on 1-2 on d6" is the extent of the "automatically searching for traps".  If you're moving faster than exploration movement, every trap triggers without warning.

[/quote]

Agreed. A 1/3 chance instead of automatically blundering into whatever spiked pit or tripwire is in the way is plenty enough.

[quote="thirdkingdom"]  Do you have any comments on spells being different from B/X,?  [/quote]

Most of the spells are similar to those in B/X. However, there were some subtle changes, largely ignored, that were hugely impactful.

  • Continual Light was changed so that only a particular number of lights that can be sustained, and only for the life of the caster, with truly permanent light requiring ritual magic or a magic item. This was to avoid magically lit streets and other setting-ruinous problems.
  • Raise Dead was replaced with Restore Life and Limb to better work with the mortal wounds system. I won't dwell on this as it was already covered in the thread.
  • Teleport was made more dangerous. "Too High" was replaced with "Off Target", which could send the caster in any direction, including into areas of solid ground, causing instant death. "Too Low" was replaced with "Lost", sending the character into oblivion. These changes make Teleport much more dangerous. Very dangerous teleports keep distance meaningful and allow for localized freedom from reigning power, and avoid a world of instantaneous travel and communication. 
  • Animate Dead animates double the number of dead in ACKS as in B/X. However, in B/X animated dead last indefinitely, while in ACKS animated dead only last for a day, unless 25gp of holy water is expended per HD. This was important because if undead could be freely animated without cost, it would wreak the economy! Instead, the costs of undead approximate the cost of slave labor. A slave-laborer costs 40gp, so a 1HD skeleton costs 62% of a living slave, while a 2HD zombie costs 20% more.
  • Fireball had its area of effect reduced. In BX, fireball had a 40' diameter, while in ACKS fireball has a 20' diameter. That means the area of effect was divided by four, decreasing from 1,256 square feet to 314 square feet.There were two reasons for this change. First, I concluded that fireball was an overpowered spell (an intuition I later confirmed with the mechanics of the spell design system). Second, and more important, playtesting showed that 40' diameter fireballs were absolutely devastating in mass combat. A company of 120 men occupies a frontage of 60' x 40', or 2,400 square feet, meaning that a 40' diameter fireball will strike half of the entire company, while a 20' diameter fireball destroys just one-eighth of the company. When the demographics of ACKS mages are taken into account, this one change kept mass formations viable in ACKS. This was thus a huge and world-changing revision but it's one that almost no one ever notices!

*Why does each unit take up 60’ x 40’? Man-sized troops in close order each occupy a frontage of 3’ and a depth of 6’.  A unit of 120 men represents a formation 20 men wide and 6 deep. So the formation is (20 x 3’) 60’ wide and (6 x 6’) 36’ deep.

 

 

[quote="Alex"] 1. I should have done a better job of explaining the benefits of exploration speed in the rules, and making it explicit what the penalties are for not moving at exploration speed. When I run ACKS, characters moving at exploration speed gain the following advantages: (a) because they are watching their footing, they only set off traps on a 1-2 on 1d6; (b) because they are counting paces and estimating distances, they are given explicit dimensions of rooms and hallways and permitted to map their progress; (c) because they are moving cautiously, they are not automatically detected by passively alert creatures; and (d) if Elves or other characters with Alertness they can spot secret doors. [/quote]

Thank you for this clarification, Alex! I completely missed the connection between exploration movement speed and the high failure rate of traps; I was just assuming that most traps were unreliable because they depended on people just happening to step on the right stone, and such. I'll clerify this to my players immediately.

[quote="Alex"] 3. The costs of living are not intended to be required in the same way that, e.g., attack rolls are required. Much of the ACKS system is economic guidelines and expectation-setting, not rules-as-physics. [/quote]

And thanks for clarifying this, as well - It's good to know I wasn't 'doing it wrong.' (I actually find my players spend significantly more on luxuries and living it up than the expected lifestyle costs for their level suggests. I suspect it might be something to do with the high death rate they had for the first few sessions...)

Skimmed through the rpg.net read through (no way I have time to read 4000 posts) ...some interesting discussion, but also I wonder sometimes:  Do these people even like playing games?   :)

Meaning, at the beginning of a game session, I just want to make an interesting character and play them - I don't worry about what they're going to be at 5th Level compared to some other class I could have picked.    I guess we don't do a lot of "meta-gaming"- just make a character and get going - let the role-playing direct the story from there not the rules.   We hit a confusing rule - make something up and move on.  Actually, much of it is the way most play now ends up being one-shots or very short campaigns, so few of these issues are probably ever going to come into play anyway - we're all married with kids, etc. so a long, multi-year campaign is never going to happen. Ever.

Also - chatted friends today because I saw the "Gamergate" comment - none of us had a clue what it was (even my video game addict friends) - so a non-issue for us.    Did make me wonder though:  What is stopping Alex from creating another rpg.net account and posting stuff there as "another person"?   :)

Anyway, thanks for starting the rpg.net thread - hopefully it will generate more well-deserved interest in ACKS.

 

[quote="tgcb"]

Skimmed through the rpg.net read through (no way I have time to read 4000 posts) ...some interesting discussion, but also I wonder sometimes:  Do these people even like playing games?   :)

Meaning, at the beginning of a game session, I just want to make an interesting character and play them - I don't worry about what they're going to be at 5th Level compared to some other class I could have picked.    I guess we don't do a lot of "meta-gaming"- just make a character and get going - let the role-playing direct the story from there not the rules.   We hit a confusing rule - make something up and move on.  Actually, much of it is the way most play now ends up being one-shots or very short campaigns, so few of these issues are probably ever going to come into play anyway - we're all married with kids, etc. so a long, multi-year campaign is never going to happen. Ever.

[/quote]

The number of questions I'm asking on these forums tends to be directly proportional to how active the current game I'm running is, and the questions are things that either came up or had the chance to come up but didn't require a ruling on the spot, or the ruling we went with felt weird.  We're all adults and are willing to accept the possibility of "hey, we did it this way, but after some advice from the forums, it seems like that will break down farther down the line" and change it.  

I can attest to the power of this: we played the Kingmaker pathfinder campaign many years ago, and we used the default PF/3.x assumptions of magic availability and created fairly absurd scenarios pretty quickly.  My favorite was when the gunslinger provided dozens of barrels of gunpowder for other members of the party to carry after magic users cast invisibility and fly so that we could stealth bomb some river-ships that were carrying troops towards our capital.

[quote="tgcb"]

Also - chatted friends today because I saw the "Gamergate" comment - none of us had a clue what it was (even my video game addict friends) - so a non-issue for us.    Did make me wonder though:  What is stopping Alex from creating another rpg.net account and posting stuff there as "another person"?   :)

Anyway, thanks for starting the rpg.net thread - hopefully it will generate more well-deserved interest in ACKS.

[/quote]

Most places on the internet frown VERY heavily upon making alternate accounts, commonly called "sock puppeting", and a statstically significant % of the RPG communityonline will drag your name through the mud if they suspect you are or ever have been a sock puppeteer.

[quote="Jard"]

Most places on the internet frown VERY heavily upon making alternate accounts, commonly called "sock puppeting", and a statstically significant % of the RPG communityonline will drag your name through the mud if they suspect you are or ever have been a sock puppeteer.

[/quote]

Hah. I have an account on RPG.net in good standing - cunning concealed under the username "apmacris". I've known the owner for years and was one of the corporate donors to their recent membership drive. I post on the site as an ordinary citizen on occasional topics of interest, and for the most part no one notices (or says anything if they do notice). 

I felt it would be counter-productive of me to post in the RPG.net thread about ACKS primarily because my presence there would create a tendency to inspire questions about me instead of about the game. I think ACKS speaks for itself. I have my politics, philosphies, quirks, and charms, and surely they have affected the game, but the game itself is not allegorical or political. 

[quote="Alex"]

 cunning concealed under the username "apmacris".

[/quote]

Ha!  Hide in plain site - I love it!   Like Kal-El putting on glasses to become "Clark Kent".

 

 

[quote="Alex"]

I felt it would be counter-productive of me to post in the RPG.net thread about ACKS primarily because my presence there would create a tendency to inspire questions about me instead of about the game. I think ACKS speaks for itself. I have my politics, philosphies, quirks, and charms, and surely they have affected the game, but the game itself is not allegorical or political. 

[/quote]

I think that is a good decision to stay away. The game is good and does stand on it's own. RPG net however always has to drag in an author's/creators personal politics that have nothing to do with the product. I've been following the thread since it started and surprisingly it's been really good and is still focused on the game at hand. I'm still surprised it hasn't devolved yet into pointless political bickering.

[quote="Alex"] It was not my intent that it allowed automatic searching for traps, though it merits playtesting to see if that should be the official rule. It would require some re-engineering of other mechanics, though. [/quote]

I have the house rule for automatic searching of traps while using exploration speed so long as one PC in the party has a 10' pole out. Without looking into it too closely, I didn't notice the need to re-engineer any other mechanics though, so I'd welcome someone pointing out any obvious issues with this tweak either in this thread or elsewhere.

Traps trigger on a 1-2 for each PC, no? Someone in a party of any size will almost certainly then trigger the hallway trap regardless. So the effect of this rule in play is often to spare the high h.p. frontline PCs a bit of damage at the cost of actually killing the lower h.p. PCs in the middle ranks. The 33% trap is actually deadlier than the 100% trap. That infamous pit trap in the Caverns of Thracia, for example, has only ever killed PCs from the middle or even last ranks in my experience. The 2-in-6 trap has the interesting effect that the front line is not always the most dangerous place to be, a feature I always appreciated about some of Grimtooth's more... creative traps.

Yeah I like reading many RPGNet threads, but it could really do with a RPG Meta sub forum, where all the 'stuff that is not about gaming/games but gamers/writers' bile can be spilled. And I don't have to see it! Anyway I'm enjoying the thread and especially thoughts from thoe who don't really know ACKS