Traverse Fantasy

I got new rules, I count 'em. I liked my existing rules for conversations, being basically the same as in D&D Fifth Edition , but I felt like they lacked structure up to the final roll. I kept hearing about how intuitive the rules from Draw Steel were, but the team at MCDM are such maximalist rules writers that my eyes glazed over the constant weighing of situational permutations on the page—most rulebooks should really be like 70% shorter, huh? So I didn’t fully get them until I watched my queen  Ginny Di’s video where she boiled down the structure in a way that could be extended into principles beyond Draw Steel ’s verbose mechanic framework. It’s basically like: We should have an idea of where the NPC already stands. The goal of negotiation is to shift the NPC’s perspective towards yours. At some point, you have to stop pushing the question. So rather than having a unstructured conversation leading up to a climatic roll where the outcome is finally decided—not t...

Some more Resourciv updates! These are actually implemented in-game, but they have implications for how I design leading forward. Production I was giving myself a headache thinking about how, whether I increased the granularity of populations or kept it as unitary as it is now, I would need to deal with the most annoying part of economic games: allocating labor. Assigning peeps to individual hexes is stupid but so is giving them a list of jobs which give and take any amount of random resources; what if the numbers worked around me? There’s a nifty little formula called the Cobb-Douglas production function which handles that as well as diminishing returns: if you imagine, just because you have a bunch of cooks in the kitchen doesn’t mean you make more food, and the same if you have more kitchens than you have cooks. Labor is apparently more useful than capital since its diminishing returns (if it exceeds capital) are less so than capital (if it exceeds labor), and this is represente...

There was a viral comedian set where this nepobaby guy does microaggressions at a clocky trans woman who reveals she works at a defense contractor but is also a self-identified leftist who was radicalized by working as a barista (but no, not at Starbucks, you bigot; it was at a local coffee shop). I've seen discourse transform over the last few days from "fuck you bitch", to "that cishet guy has no right to criticize a trans woman for something he wouldn't criticize another cishet man about", to "pointing out hypocrisy is a mark of privilege against marginalized people without a choice" (the woman in the video even says she sold her soul, as if her only choices were to work at the coffee shop or the defense contractor—has she tried applying to Starbucks?). If that sounds fucking exhausting, it is. I wanted to talk about how frustrating it is that 'leftist' discourse—mind you, I don't even self-identify as a leftist because I think most ...

I’ve mentioned in passing my haven rules for my homebrew heartbreaker Cinco! but never took the time to describe it in much detail. Remember that I don’t really fuck with wealth; instead, each item of treasure just has the value of “1 treasure”, and you spend that during downtime to do an activity ( this is outdated, but you get the idea ). One of those activities is havencraft where you invest 1 treasure to build a town and populate with your favorite NPCs you’ve met and recruited throughout the game. These are called lackeys. Cost Type Population Ability Lackeys 2 Hamlet 100 +1 1 6 Village 900 +2 2 12 Town 3,600 +4 3 20 City 10,000 +8 4 Each season (generally speaking, or unless I fuck it up, a play-session), lackeys can either do a downtime activity on behalf of the governor or embark on an adventure. In the latter case, they can either accompany the crew on their own adventure and basically act like a back-up character, or they can be sent...

Well. How quickly did you expect an update? When I ran my inheritance simulation , I also calculated the Gini coefficient of the population’s wealth distribution. The Gini coefficient expresses relative inequality within a population, where 0% represents total equality and 100% means basically one individual holds all the wealth. Partitive Inheritance Land has a Gini coefficient of 15%, while Primogeniture Land has one around 45%. Modern capitalist societies (and, as far as I can tell, most developed class societies) have Gini coefficients of ~80% with respect to wealth and around ~40% with respect to income. I calculated it by dividing the relative mean average deviance in half, but the typical method is by taking a Lorenz curve and doing some calculus bullshit. I don’t want a Lorenz curve necessarily but I want to know what it means for a Gini coefficient to be such and such. Here’s a solution: draw a square and bisect it along the diagonal. Then, in the lower right, draw a smaller s...

I’ve been procrastinating on Resourciv because I couldn’t come up with a demographic or economic framework (or perhaps meta-framework, since I really want to support different modes of production and distribution and so on) I was happy with. So I made some scripts to simulate different social dynamics in the hopes that I would land on a way to represent them without giving myself or the player a headache. Inheritance My least favorite of the two is an inheritance simulator. I read a couple books by historian and social scientist ( stricto sensu ) Peter Turchin, who’s most famous for his concept of elite overproduction, but I was struck by a point he made that inequality would emerge even in egalitarian societies if the society practices inheritance because families with less children divide the parents’ wealth amongst less recipients. I simulated a society at three sexes (for the purposes of reproduction: F, M, or X) and three age levels (young, adult, or elder) with each individual...

I mentioned earlier I was using Gus L. and I’s dungeon from Fantastic Medieval Campaigns so I could be lazy and not have to prep much for my home campaign’s alien arc —isn’t that the point of a prewritten module, come to think of it? It turned out okay, but I didn’t write a session report because I felt dissatisfied. Everyone had fun, we had good moments, but from my perspective there was friction between the experience we were having and the thing we kind of passively accepted that we were playing. The skeleton of the dungeon is already not the ‘right vibe’ for the campaign but, where at first I was able to make it work because of characters’ own motivations, I struggled because the new characters lacked a reason to be there at all except that the ‘crew’ as an abstract unit had been heading there. The advice sometimes is like, players should invent their own characters’ motivations for being at a place or doing a thing, but I don’t subscribe to a framework of play centered on the se...