Law & Economics, or Players Respond to Incentives

Thanks for the very kind words on the blog post, and on ACKS!

Regarding rational action v. maximization, I think you’re right that it’s probably too much to even attempt to address here. Nobel Prizes are gained and lost on such debates.

I think awarding XP for domain management makes sense in the context of our assumed fall-of-Rome-ish (Auran Empire) setting, Warring States Japan, Dark Ages, or Bronze Age clash-of-cities setting, or similar environments where rulership was a highly dangerous activity. It makes a lot less sense in campaigns where you’ve got the rule of law, fixed heredity, stable societies, and so on. In these cases, adventurers are truly outliers and most rulers would just be normal men or low level characters…

Cheers!

Very cogent post. The part about “GM soft fascism” is probably the very core of why I play the way I play.

AD&D as the D&D Actuary’s Edition makes a lot of sense. The idea of the DMG as the (uncompiled) source code for a Gygaxian Naturalistic world once again illustrates the truth that “It’s not stupid; it’s Advanced”.

If players are treated as utility-maximing, rational, and incentive-reactive, many game rules which seem like good ideas are revealed as bad.

Love this as a basis for rule analysis. So true to lived/played experience.

One niggle though:

Such a fighter becomes invincible if Shields Must be Splintered. He need only reach into his bag, and voila-he produces a one-charge item that prevents death.

Non-problem IMO, and definitely not a gamebreaker.

SSBS allows a character to ignore damage from one attack per round, not to ignore death from damage.

  • How long does it take to fish another shield out of a Bag of Holding? One round? Mr Bag o’Shields has just been shut down as anything other than a speedbump for so long as he continues to dive into his bag.
  • Who says the opposition are attacking one at a time?
  • What’s the ROF for a bow in ACKS at the moment? 2/round?
  • Fat lot of good a shield does against falling damage, hot oil, etc…

(this last section cross-posted from Sean-n-Sorcery blog)

Chris, regarding SSBS, I had a very different experience. We tested it with mid-level characters and found it quite game breaking. Perhaps my group is more, uh, “utility maximizing” than yours? An encounter with a cyclops or a giant becomes much, much easier with SSBS, for instance.

I found it useful to think about it this way: How much would I expect to see a one-use magic item that enabled a character to ignore damage from one attack per round cost? Would it be “more than 10gp”? The answer is yes!

Or consider that a potion of healing enables a character to spend one action to regain 1d8hp. This is mathematically the same as avoiding an upcoming attack worth 1d8 hp. A splinterable-shield enables a character to spend one action to avoid [any one attack] worth of hp. A fighter is therefore considerably better off with an extra shield (10gp) than with an extra potion of healing.

I agree that the Shields Must be Splintered rule makes shields too good. This is certainly true for a game that includes armor as heavy as plate. Generally, shields fell out of favor when plate was in common usage as you needed a two handed weapon to cut thru it. Also, it fails to account for the fact that very few characters in the stories that D&D is based on actually make use of shields on a regular basis.

When is this game coming out already? I need it right now! :slight_smile:

This is a fascinating critique of the 1E DMG, and it intrigues me now to reread sections of ACKS through the lense of maximizing utility, or whether the right behavior is being incentivized. I’ve spent the most time with the campaign sections, so I can see how this philosophy comes through pretty clear in campaign choices the players might make.

One wrinkle to SSBS you might have missed; the original version of the rule I saw Michael Curtis using involved having to make a Death Saving throw in order to sacrifice the shield; it’s not an automatic escape-death item.

SSBS - the original rule comes from Dragonquest.

I’ve never had the hunkering to go out and buy a retro-clone…but you guys seem to be doing it right!

What’s the ETA on release?

We are discussing that by email right now, but the answer is some variation on not much longer!

I had thought this for the longest time about EGG. Sure when he took the necessary job of an insurance guy for a while to put beans on the table, it may have appeared off course, but it very much honed his skills at rul-ifying life, and by extension “fantasy life”. I also worked for a few insurance companies, and through the insurance comes a tradition that’s attempting to capture the framework of life, random crap that happens, random event (why are there so many actuarial tables about “random encounters”? Because that’s his background, and putting tables around fantasy life helps organize it much better.) . And just because he was a salesman, and not a product manager, the training that they give you and some thinking about the matter would’ve very easily led him to the ideas on how to construct such a game.

So he applied his science fiction and fantasy reading into a well-designed, even if rules-heavy, construct through which everything can be accounted for. For example, how to put a framework around the risk of a loss occurring on a property? Well, where is it? Is it a crime-ridden neighborhood? Could it be overtaken by a wildfire? The well-worn tradition of insurance very much aids in getting your head around these issues, over many decades of trial and error.

So not only did EGG inherit a good deal of fantasy and SF literature and cultural tropes from which to build the game, he also inherited the skills and traditions of the insurance field.

Isn’t this the way it is often is, take a few seemingly unrelated disciplines, and combine these, and all of the sudden you have something surprisingly new and worthwhile.

OTOH, a “Splintering Shield” +2 that you could expend to save your character’s life one time would be a pretty cool magic item. :slight_smile:

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