Busier Than Expected

This is one of the busiest vacations I've ever had.

No entry for today, I'm afraid.

Stay tuned -- Ten Years on Terra returns January 3rd!

Reinforcing the Ranch

One thing that I've always wanted to run was a base-building game in BattleTech, given the level of the structure rules available.  I was mildly hoping to somehow weave upgrading the ranch into the story line, but that never really happened once the Firestarter was ditched in the mountains.  I don't think I'm going to be able to do it now, unless I have a specific reinforcement encounter ahead of the ranch attack.

I feel like there's more to say on this topic, but somehow, its not coming.

What About Simon?

I'm still plotting out the research facility for Session 14.  Although it is Clark's capstone, I'm trying to wind in checks and excitement for everybody.  In this the problem character is Simon.

Simon is normally easy to give something to do, because he's the communications wizard.  He's always monitoring enemy communications or decrypting data channels or hacking into this, that, or the other thing.  The  problem with this session is that its pretty much a flat-out assault, and during our last combat-heavy encounter Simon's player (Anthony) extremely bored; I failed to engage him properly.  So for Session 14, I'm trying to think of how to get him engaged in a way that doesn't radically complicate the mission for the rest of the party.

I've gone over Simon's character sheet to see what things the character was built to do.  All told, five skills had over a hundred skill points coming out of character creation (Small Arms, Interest/Game Theory, Computers, Communications/Conventional, and Technician/Electronics) of which the last three had 170 vested points.  Since then, my XP log shows me that he has been dumping XP into Communications/Conventional, Career/Communications, and various attributes (primarily INT, WIL, and DEX.)

All this tells me he's doubling down on his Communications skills; so I want to give him another communications challenge of some kind.  Anthony also enjoys the out-of-game puzzles, such as the logic puzzle or cryptograms.  That makes me think some kind of interest puzzle, perhaps a door-opening problem, would keep him satisfied, especially if he could have various levels of success (such as bypassing combat encounters) based on his ability to solve the puzzle and a number of checks Simon would make.

The Interest/Game Theory makes me want to somehow wind a game theory puzzle into the story, but I'm unclear on what that would look like.  Perhaps some research into game theory will spawn a few ideas.

[NULL]

There is no post for 27 December 2011.

Time Flies When You're Busy

'Twas the night after Christmas, and I hadn't written an entry for Monday yet, and my brain was fried from going flat-out for three days.  Tomorrow doesn't look like much relief, but hopefully I'll have useful content again by Wednesday.

Picking Out New Battle Armor

First off, the Master Unit List is a glorious thing.

I ask a simple question, like "What Battle Armors were deployed by the Word of Blake in the Jihad era?" and it tells me.

32 results come back, representing all variants introduced between 3069 and 3078.  I can't actually sort the data the way I want on the page, but I can copy and paste into a spreadsheet, and manipulate it there.  First, and most obviously, is that this operation is taking place in 3073, so I can strike from my list all models and variants with an introduction date of 3074 or later.

That eliminates 11 of the options, mostly variants and a Manei Domini prototype that was off the table anyways for plot reasons.  That cuts me down to 21 options, which fall into 8 models: Purifier, Tornado G14, Djinn, Tengu, Phalanx, Nephilim, Asura and Se'irim.  Morgan has previously expressed a preference for the Mimentic-armor equipped Purifier Adaptive, but let's take a quick look at the field here.

The Battle Armor BAR Table on p. 187 of A Time of War tells me that there is a direct linear relationship between the armor value of a Battle Armor suit and its BAR in A Time of War-scale combat, so I'll concern myself with those numbers first.

Model	Armor Value (minus trooper)
Purifier	6
Tornado G14	2
Djinn	5 (standard) 6 (stealth)
Tengu	13 (support) 12 (medium laser)
Phalanx	7
Nephilim	16
Asura	7
Se'irim	6

Yeah.  We ain't in 3025 anymore -- that Nephilim suit has damage resistance on-par with some recon 'Mechs.  But let's look at what we have to work with.

It looks like we have groupings in the 5-7 range and the 12-and-up range.  I'm not interested in the 12-and-up range, so that leaves six models to work with.  Morgan really wants to play with being in a stealth-equipped battle armor unit, which takes the Asura off the table.

The rest of these choices look just fine.  Cross-referencing their numbers, the Tornado is the closest match to the capabilities I want Shin to have -- no real anti-vehicle weapons, and light (comparatively) BAR.  The G14 carries only "Mission Equipment", though, which for an idle suit would be a grand total of nothing.  A quick review of the suit on page 15 of Technical Readout: 3075, though, shows that while the G14 suit isn't really suitable for my needs, the G12 variant is, and has the benefit is being considerably older and more likely to be lying around.  It also has the basic stealth armor and camo system that Morgan wants to play with, and no integral weapons and low armor, which makes me happy.

Thus, a bit of review of the available hardware and cross-checking with the TRO's has solved my Battle Armor issue, and now Shin will find a shiny new gift waiting for him in the Word of Blake bioweapons research facility!  Merry Christmas!

Big-Ticket Gifts

We're starting to get into the part of the campaign where the ComStar characters start getting their nifty toys back.  I've already allocated  a mission for Alex's mech-retrieval, so I need to decide if Session 14 is Shin's Battle Armor, or David's chopper.  Given the nature of the mission, I'm decidedly inclined to go with the former.

I feel like it is not terribly unreasonable for a spare battle armor suit to be laying around a Word secret laboratory.  The real trick is I finally have to face the reality of what putting Shin in Battle Armor will do to the campaign.  He will become the dominant military option available to the party for close-in combat.  There's not terribly wrong with that, but I do need to make sure sessions don't become me and Morgan running a game while everyone else watches.

The trick is, I think, that I want him to be in something mid-range; something that can handle the attention he'll draw to himself, but will deal with those threats accordingly.  To put it more clearly; I can handle Shin taking care of three-quarters of the enemies if he's also taking three-quarters of the fire.

Referring back to the charts I made about TNs against BAR, the inflection point for inbound damage is somewhere around BAR 3 or 4, which makes it a good place to put a party member's resistance.  That's high enough to deal with most of the stuff you'd expect to bounce off of battle armor, but low enough that a serious hit (such as a support weapon or a vehicle-scale gun) is still a problem.  A bit of this is also me factoring in Shin's absolutely hideous BOD score (currently 8), which makes me worry a bit less about him.

Tomorrow I'll go digging through the MUL to figure out what mid-to-late 3070's Word of Blake Battle Armor Shin is going to find hidden away in a closet.

Mounted Warriors

The Creatures section of A Time of War starts on page 238.  It is fantastic for finding a beast to maul your party that they can put down without having to get into politics or potential alliances or anything else; a bear just wants to off you, and isn't going to be wildly clever about how it does so.  I am not paying a visit to this section to evaluate the combat statistics of creatures, though: I am here to evaluate their usefulness as impromptu aircraft.

A number of creatures have it mentioned in their write-ups that these animals make suitable mounts for humans.  Indeed, the Creatures table on p 246 contains a note indicating which animals listed there are appropriate for such a task.  Our favored animal of the campaign, the branth, is among them.   So with some trepidation I opened up A Time of War to read the rules on how mounted combat works.  This is never an easy rules condition in any human-centric RPG I've gamemastered or played in, so I was braced for an arcane array of checks and conditions to put the maintenance rules to shame.

The rules weren't arcane.  They weren't torturous.  They weren't even there --  although what animals are fit to carry humans are distinguished from those who are not, there are no rules for what checks are required to mount one, or how carrying passengers affect their performance characteristics (of particular interest to a flying creature.)

So I am trying to establish what mounting a branth looks like from a mechanics point of view.  Fortunately, we can piece some rules together here.

First, mounting.  Animal Handling has a subskill of Riding.  The rules on page 143 describe this skill as being something you make when attempting a special maneuver of some kind, but for a marginally-tamed giant winged reptile, we're going to call climbing aboard a "special maneuver."  Modifiers are specified for the physical and emotional state of the animal (not good in our poor lab rats' cases), demeanor of the rider, and general stimulus (such as alarms and gunfire.)  So let's presume our characters are going to be making an Animal Handling check to climb aboard.

Second, navigation.  Again, these won't be trained riding branths, so an Animal Handling check will probably be required each turn to keep them under control once they're aloft, with a Margin-of-Failure threshold determining if they go in the wrong direction or try to dislodge the rider.

Finally, landing.  Simple check to determine how well the riders is able to bring down and dismount the branth.  Again, likely with a Margin-of-Failure between "uncooperative" and "pissed off."

For the moment, I'll assume that the branth's flight characteristics aren't changed when it has a rider (which is patently absurd considering a human would be something like 13% of it weight, but so it goes).  Now I have a set of checks to add some adventure and excitement to the branth escape scene, especially if Alex Black is forced to flee that way.  He has Animal Antipathy, you see.

Planning for the End of an Arc

Over the weekend I posted a question to the Lead Developer's forum regarding some of the concerns I expressed yesterday.  Given that forum only has about an 80% reply rate, though, I'm not holding my breath for an answer.

In the meanwhile, I'm turning my attention back toward setting up session 14, which is the conclusion of both the Branth Bioweapons plotline and Clark's personal character arc.  This mission will be the first real base assault since the TerraSec building, so I'm approaching it much the same way: construct a layout appropriate for the kind of facility my players will be invading, then tinker with it to achieve the best dramatic situations.  In this case, we're looking as a super-secret underground bioweapons lab eastern Montana.  Unlike the TerraSec infiltration, I can give the party an attack plan via the Resistance for how they're expected to tackle this.

Given this an arc-closer mission, I want the stakes to feel much higher, and I want there to be a lot of excitement.  Fortunately, the abbreviated nature of Session 13 meant we have most of our session-start paperwork out of the way already; if I send the party the battleplan in advance, they can be ready to rock the moment we're done with breakfast.

So right now I'm brainstorming exciting events that will make this a memorable episode.  I'm thinking of making the initial complication disarming the base's nuclear self-destruct (ala The Andromeda Strain), which allows the Resistance to start capturing useful data and equipment.  Once the self-destruct has failed, a WarShip on orbit is reallocated to bombard the facility, but it needs to pass over the site.  Adjusting its orbit will take some plot-appropriate amount of time.  In the meantime, the party takes/destroys some critical objective, which they complete just as the bombardment starts.  The first few shells take the roof off the Branth enclosure, and some subset of the party escape using the Branths as mounts to escape before the next round of fire from the WarShip lands and destroys the remainder of the base.

It sounds suitably epic on paper, but now I need to plot out how I'm going to make this plan fly.

Content In Utilities

One problem that I often struggle with when I'm writing utilities for BattleTech that I intend to release to the general public is the question of how much intelligence about the rules of the game I should build into it.  While I've been around the game industry long enough to have a pretty good sense of what will and will not get me sued, I nonetheless want to respect the wishes of developers, especially Catalyst, whether or not they have legal grounds for those wishes.

For instance, I have no problem creating a master list of Skills and Linked Attributes; that information is fairly easily available online.  I'm less inclined to input the whole set of Life Paths into a tool, even to create the much-needed A Time of War Character Creator.  I may need to post to the forums to determine what Catalyst is comfortable with accepting in terms of official content in user-created applications.

First Product

For the limited amount of time I had to code this week, I produced a fairly simple utility that outputs half a character sheet.  You might find this handy if you already have a data system storing your characters.  It takes in an XML file and spits out a PNG of a character sheet for the character described in the XML file.  I tried to keep it as simple as possible.

The XML file only has four possible tags: the <character> tag (only one per file), and within, <attribute>, <trait>, and <skill> tags.  I included an example character to show how these work.  The only real curve balls are the tiers vs. combined linked attributes.  Combine attributes are listed with a '+' sign between them in the linkedAttributes attribute of the skill tag, while tiered attributes (in which the second attribute is used if the skill is at least +4) are listed with a '/' between them.

The second curve ball is that the system automatically detects and accounts for "Fast Learner" and "Slow Learner" when computing skills -- you don't have to redo those manually.

This still needs a lot of work, and is probably destined to become part of something larger, but I'm making the link available here:

A Time of War Character Sheet Renderer (1.1 MB)

Starting Out

To kick off my development time, I'm writing a little bit of code that converts my Character Data Structure into a PNG of a filled-out character sheet.  I'm finding the sheet providing in A Time of War makes this the easiest, since it has very few fields pre-filled.  The sheet still has the issue of not having enough lines for the skill blocks of an average Life Path-created character, but I'm not worrying about that at the moment.

As I'm doing the math here, I realize I could relatively easily write a wizard that takes you through the life paths, and allows you to create an entire character from whole cloth.  I don't think I'm going to do that though.  It would require taking more actual content from A Time of War than I'm comfortable doing.

Data Structures

The way that A Time of War's character information is laid out makes it slightly awkward to handle by computer, but not overly so.  Most ways you can spend XP equate directly to a number on the character sheet: Attributes and Traits have costs that are directly and easily calculable, usually just by dividing and rounding down.  Some additional data needs to be stored for Traits, such as what the valid range of points for a particular trait is, and whether it is positive or negative, but all that is relatively simple as well.

Skills are rather more complicated data structures, as the rate they translate into a bonus changes depending on which traits are present (Fast Learner and Slow Learner), and skill also have subskills, which they interact with at play-time in complex ways.  For a character sheet, though, any two subskills can be considered skill unto themselves.

All of the above I have currently explained to my computer, which has given me a solid skeleton from which to build out information processing systems that need to analyze and store A Time of War characters.  I hope to have a bit more useful tools soon.

Going into the Holidays

Now that Session 13 is done, we're accelerating into the Holiday Season in the US, and Session 14 isn't likely to occur until early 2012.  In the meantime, I'm going to focus on doing some of the support development I said I'd be doing for A Time of War, in terms of coming up with little widgets to help organize and quality-check the fairly hefty amount of data this game uses.  Hopefully some of you will find uses for this gizmos as I finish them.

Session 13

Session 13 was the party visiting the Sarna HPG in California.  This was another fairly laid-back session that involved the party arriving after the Resistance group had gotten there, and finding that the HPG originally built to create the Sarna attack film had been refit with an HPG projection weapon, but the site had since been abandon.  Significantly, in the basement, they found a board being used to track the progress in killing off the Capellan HPG personnel who were working at the Sarna HPG when it was destroyed.

This was another session in which Morgan immediately made the backstory connection, but his character, Shin, obviously couldn't know so much.  This session also had more of a "researchy" feel to it as there was no shooting.  Partially, this was because I didn't get as much prep done for this session as I normally do.  It became one of the weakest sessions I've run so far, although the level of tabletalk and speculation padded it out appropriately.  We also pre-ran the downtime XP and expenditures for next session, so we'll have more time than normal there, which is good, since next week is the capstone session of Clark's arc.

When Drama Falls Flat

So at the end of last session, the party took the last page of a report on the Word of Blake's bioweapons program off the the convoy they struck.  The page gave a few conclusions to the report it was a part of, and had the end notes, which extensively referenced Clark's doctoral thesis as the basis for the Branth research and the weaponized viral agents the party encountered earlier in the campaign.  The goal here was to give Clark the sense that his research was the basis on which the whole WoB program was built on, and give him the opportunity to explore the angst and self-questioning that implies; the kind of roleplaying experience Cameron excels at.

The party got the page and Clark read it.  His response?

"Awww!" he said, overjoyed, "They referenced me!"

Facepalm.

Somehow, someway, my PC's always manage to take a different lesson from my plot points than I mean them to.  Thank God I'm not a professional writer.

Determining the TN

One problem I had during Session 12's combat was sorting out the appropriate modifiers for the vehicle's turret on the fly.  Ultimately, I worked off my GM screen's Combat Modifiers table, but that was clearly not meant for the job; I ended up winging it with the modifiers I could find in under 30 seconds.  I'm certain I missed something.  My first impulse in reaction to this was to put together another flowchart detailing how vehicular combat works, and given that my previous PDF's are some of the most popular entries on this blog, I may do that yet,  but there's a deeper problem here that goes into how the rules in the new BattleTech core books are written as something between a design document and a treatment, especially in A Time of War.  They are not laid out in a way to provide a GM or a player with a step-by-step method of executing an attack; they are more general than that.

The problem that made me realize this is the same problem I had the first day I started playing BattleTech 15 years ago; there's no easy way to verify that you've added all the appropriate modifiers to your roll.  Certainly, A Time of War isn't unique in this problem.  Anybody who has player a D&D boss battle, especially in 2nd Edition or 3.x, has a memory of a caster flipping through the rule book looking for that one modifier that's going to make the difference in a boss battle.  It breaks flow.  It snaps the player out of the moment and back into the minutiae of stats and searching for one line they thought they read somewhere about two thirds of the way through one of these sourcebooks...

Anyways, we've all been there.  This is a non-trivial operational problem often glossed over in the rules with the words "determine the TN."  I've occasionally tried to solve this problem with flowcharts, modifier grouping, or a number of other methods, but one of two things always happens: first, I end up with a lot of special-case scenarios that are as general as I can make them, but somehow real game situations always seem to fall somewhere in the middle, and the end-all list of situations ends up becoming just another tool of approximation.  Second, I can get the problem down to a bunch of categories ("select the range modifier", "select the target size modifier", "weather", etc.) but this is how the book does it, and like the book, I always end up with a worrisomely long list of "Miscellaneous" modifiers, usually tied to specific pieces of equipment that have an asterisk in one of their fields on the Equipment tables (I'm looking at you, missiles.)

Vehicular combat again threw this issue into sharp relief because it had me jumping between A Time of War and Total Warfare.  I understand why this is; to avoid reprinting rules and to make sure that the core rulebooks sell each other, but it greatly exacerbates the problems of trying to find all the modifiers that apply to a particular roll.

Unfortunately, this issue is more of a statement of a problem than a proposed solution; the kind of statement that would get me kicked out of boss' office.  I've tried a number of different ways of getting around this problems and all of them come up short.  I'm sure there is a way to do it, because there are a finite number of modifiers in A Time of War, even in the Tactical Addendum, but giving a player or GM confidence that they've found them all quickly and efficiently has thus far eluded this game, and that needs to change.

Encounter Timing

Session 12's combat encounter I expected to run 90 minutes.  In the end, it came in a hair over two hours.  That worries me a bit in that it was a very simple encounter; there was almost no maneuver on the part of the party or the bad guys -- it was largely a "stand and shoot" engagement.  On the other hand, the combat went a dozen rounds -- meaning I can determine that on average a round of combat took ten minutes to compute.  In reality, it was considerably less than this, because we did have some interruptions that chewed up time, but I'd say an average turn did take at least 300 seconds to execute.  

I'm not drawing any conclusions from that particular datapoint, but the time it takes to run turns is something of great interest to me, and how it is affected by variables such as number and type of opposition and mobility on the terrain is also something you can expect future posts on.

Vehicle Combat

The vehicle combat in Session 12 was rather less exciting than I was hoping it would be.  One response I got from the party was that for a large section of the event, the turret was firing at the resistance members, so their turns were just load and fire on alternate rounds.  The civilians were particularly susceptible to this, since their role was just to support the gunner of each rifle.  Once the turret turned on the party, the game became more exciting, but only in a very anxious way -- beyond taking cover, there was little the party could do to mitigate their risk in being shot.

The result was a battle that felt grindy for about an hour of gameplay.  With static vehicles, there was little or no maneuver.  There was no real chance for brilliance on the party's part, which I think left them disappointed.  It did allow Alex and Shin a chance to show off their impressive combat skills, which was good.  I think I need to re-examine vehicles before I use them again as a combat encounter in Ten Years on Terra; there is obvious potential here, but it is harder to harness than I thought it would be.

Session 12

So session 12 worked and didn't work in a lot of ways.  Pretty much the entire session was eaten by the vehicle encounter, which at least at the beginning broke down into the party mechanically reloading and firing their recoilless rifles over and over again.  The party was able to accomplish the mission, but everybody but Simon was shot at least once.

The first part of the session was spent resolving XP.  I'm finding this activity has grown to a half-hour long process even with all the aids and players being comfortable with the system.  Once we had that squared away, we moved onto the meat of the session; the contact from the resistance telling them about a convoy ambush.

The party hustled out to the target point and found a weapon drop: three heavy recoilless rifles.  They moved into position and Shin chopped down a tree across the road to block the convoy's process.  The convoy ended up being only two vehicles; a lead escort and a following science van.  The escort was a fairly beefy truck with a machine gun turret, but the party opened up on the vehicle with solid hits, and were quickly joined by resistance members on the other side of the road.

The truck's turret targeted the resistance fighters first, and managed to mow down most of them within a few rounds.  After that, the turret turned on the party.  The civilians had a lot of trouble with morale checks, especially after the turret opened up and hit Alex and Clark.  After that happened, Simon broke and ran, and Shin, unable to operate his rifle without Simon, grabbed two rounds and manually delivered them to the target.  He escaped, entered the science van, in which a close-range gun battle ensued, while Alex and Clark were able to get off one last round to disable the van's turret.  The turret shutting down tipped the balance of the battle and the party was able to get into the van and claim its contents.

Reflecting on TN's

After meditating on the last two entries, I'm coming to the conclusion that Anti-Vehicle weapons only make good sense en masse in the A Time of War system.  There is no dramatic shot of the bakooza popping out from behind a building and blowing up the tank in this system.  Tanks are tanks, in the RPG sense, and take a load of damage before they're stopped.  The real value of Anti-Vehicle weapons, so far as I can tell, is they allow relatively untrained personnel to reliably put a point of damage on a vehicle each time they fire.

This leads me think the way I need to do this ambush is to supply the party with a considerable selection of antivehicle weapons so that Clark and Simon can help put 5 points/round onto the escort vehicle.  With three heavy recoilless rifles, they could also serve as support crew for the weapons, and likely keep all three guns firing almost constantly.

We'll see on Sunday.

Target Numbers and High Explosives

Explosives tend to have very high AP values, and very high BD values as well, so I want to show a few other charts before I get around to discussing TNs on Explosives.  The essential difference is that for BAR's below 7 or 8, it is reasonable to expect to tag the target with multiple points of damage for a single blast.  Assuming an exact impact (no bonus damage), the damage curve for Anti-Vehicle ordnance looks like this:

Now, assuming BAR 8 as we did yesterday, we can generate TN's, but the data won't be very interesting as any success will do at least 1 point of damage.  We might be interested in the curves for how much damage we do with various MoSes, but MoS does not affect Blast Damage.  As a result, we fine that Anti-Vehicle weapons will all but guarantee we put some damage on the target, but they are an expensive alternative if an entire vehicle needs to be disabled.

Damage as a Target Number

I've been crunching numbers a lot on the Barrier Armor thing recently, and a pattern emerged for me.  It is generally speaking unrealistic to expect to do more than 1 point of damage to a vehicle in a single blow, so for non-Support vehicles, the question of getting a "hit" can largely be reduced to a question of if the PC can roll a specific TN.

The TN for doing 1 point of damage to a vehicle is (2 *  BAR) - AP - BD for burst weapons.  For non-burst weapons, it becomes (BAR - AP) + 4 * (BAR-BD).  While this formula is mechanically awkward for the PC, it helps with GM-side analysis quite a bit.

Here we have the TNs for different base damages (indicated by the lines) for various armor penetration values against BAR 8 armor with a burst weapon.  Since we're usually used to thinking in terms of TN and difficulty, this help assess how hard it will be for the party to engage a vehicle with a particular weapon.  It gets much, much worse without Burst fire:

TN's don't fall into realistic ranges until AP4 at least, and that's with a very well-trained shooter.  Remembering that even a small vehicle will take at least a dozen hits before it has a reasonable chance of losing any of its capability.

This is all very interesting.  Tomorrow I think I'll look at the same values for explosives.

Barrier Armor Rating

One problem that I run into time and again with producing results for character-on-vehicle combat is coming up with a good BAR.  Support Vehicles get explicit BAR's, but BattleMech-grade armor is presumed to have a BAR of 10.  Given that Combat Vehicles have armor that behaves identically to BattleMech-grade armor in Total Warfare, it makes sense that Combat Vehicles also have a BAR of 10.

Here's the problem: During the infantry-on-vehicle combat example on page 212 of A Time of War, the Ranger being engaged by character is explicitly stated to have a BAR of 8.  I looked up the Ranger (page 26 of TRO:3085) and it is a standard Combat Vehicle.  This raises some problematic issues, specifically, that it implies BAR is not always 10 for Combat Vehicles.

Now, I understand, especially after my previous analyses, why an A Time of War GM would want to have a lower BAR for a hostile vehicle.  Vehicles are very hard to take down with man-portable weapons in this game.  That said, I worry about screwing up players' ability to analyze a tactical situation when we scramble those numbers beyond the rules.

Life Intervenes Again

My well-planned session was once again delayed due to travel complications and family obligations cropping up with too many of my players.  Such is the life of a GM -- always ready, rarely called.  The holiday season in the US (November and December) is particularly trying on people's schedules, so we try to make room where we can.

This week I'll take some more time to examine options in running the type of Ambush scenario the next game session should be.  Specifically, I'll be looking at modifiers and tactics in the rules, and how attacking an armored vehicle actually plays out.  My simulations suggest a major challenge is avoid killing a party member in a single attack, so I'll talk a bit about suggesting tactics to the party, and how to do a little slight of hand with the on-table die rolls to make it look like the danger is real without allowing a serious blow to strike the party.

It also helps that this is the first session where I consider party member death an acceptable outcome -- I don't want to lose the whole party, but one tragic loss is not something I'll retcon if it happens.

Power Creep

Just recently XTRO: Periphery came out.  I thus far haven't been terribly impressed with the XTRO line; they've added little new weight to the BattleTech universe and seem fairly obvious plays for quick cash from the hardcore fanbase without quite resorting to asking for donations.  That said, I consider myself part of the hardcore fanbase, so I don't mind it so much.  The art assets are pretty blatantly reused.  I scanned the pictures of the Saladin and Patton variants against their pictures in TRO:3026 and TRO:3025, respectively (the second of which was double-used in that very entry for both the Patton and the Rommel) before I thought to myself that the very fact I was looking for some tiny difference in detail told me all I needed to know about the art.

I realize that the marketplace is changing and that small releases more often are the way to go these days, but I feel like relevance is being punted in the name of faster cycle times.  The Turning Points series was nice, and had some good plot information and the like in its summaries, especially when we, the fanbase, for starving for operational details of the Jihad.  Especially impressive were the BattleForce-scale planetary maps in the back.

The Field Reports series was also pretty nice, giving a snapshot of the early-3080's Inner Sphere, although they were a bit vague and inconsistent between reports.  The Dossiers were clearly an attempt to jumpstart A Time of War, but I've been unable to get them to work very well for any meaningful purpose thus far -- they tend to be extremely special-purpose NPC's, with a few Warchest missions attached.  The new Objectives line is interesting, and I feel like it is going to play well into the new Interstellar Operations book, but so far it kind of treads the same ground as Field Reports in greater detail economically.

That covers most of the less-than-50-page releases Catalyst has put out of late in the BattleTech universe.  All of these works have a purpose, whether or not they succeed at fulfilling it.  The XTRO line, though, is just throwing more canon designs into the mix.  I appreciate the handful of designs showcasing new technologies available to players, but really, do we need more choices?  Look at the Master Unit List.  There's a platform in there for dealing with almost any imaginable mission profile.  Usually there are several.  I have been told that the new power curve is critical to BattleTech's survival as a game, but I'm not sure I believe it.  I still run 3025 designs against Jihad-era taskforces, and with the exception of some true capability-shockers (the Gauss Rifle in 3050, the Clan ER PPC around the same time, etc) the new toys are just providing more bookkeeping for effects that can be provided with weapons going all the way back to the Compendium.

I imagine this post makes me sound like an old man shouting for these kids and their new-fangled ATM's and Heavy Gauss Rifles to get off my lawn, but I'm really sad that so much fluff is coming out of Catalyst recently that doesn't contribute significantly to the tactical interest or the story progression of the game.

Incidentally, I'm going to be MIA next week.  Check back here 11/28, hopefully with a report on the tank battle.

The Effect of Grinding on a Tabletop

As I'm sure a lot of you have experienced, MMOs are quite popular with tabletop gamers, and I m wondering how that effects how my players view the tabletop experience.  The playtime investment for an MMO is typically much larger than for a tabletop -- often by an order of magnitude.  The signal-to-noise ratio is generally much higher for the tabletop; more plot is delivered per hour, on average.  I'm forced to wonder, though, has the MMO standard now made tabletops feel rushed?

I really don't have sessions in which the plot isn't advanced in one way or another.  There aren't a whole lot of day-in-the-life sidequests, or chances to build out the world, which seems to impress players, especially ones not already familiar with the BattleTech Universe to feel the world is somehow thinner and shallower than is the case.  I can't help but feel that it is at least partly my doing as a GM that lends this issue to them, but none the less, I wonder how much of it is the expectation that character development and skill rewards only come after scores of hours of play.

More Jokes

Because I'm late on today's entry:

A Coyote commander is watching a trial unfold between his cluster and a cluster of Hellion warriors. He turns to his XO in a fit of rage saying, "I do not remember the Hellions bidding any protomechs in this trial! Have the surats called for reinforcements?"

The XO turns to his commander and says, "Neg, sir. Those are light 'mechs." 

(drum snare) 

This year the Lyran Alliance has launched new efforts to strengthen their Battle Armor core. New Commandos and Scarabus' should be rolling off the assembly lines soon.

(drum snare)

A Kell Hound mechwarrior is squaring off against a Jade Falcon mechwarrior. Getting frustrated with the Hound pilot constantly jumping into cover or behind his mech, the Jade Falcon warrior switches open his comm link and calls out to his enemy "Stand and fight me you cowardly freebirth!"
The Kell Hound, unphased by the Falcons taunting responds, "Fat chance you son of a whore."
The Falcon warrior replies, "Freebirth surat! How dare you accuse me of having a mother!"

Thanks to Southern Coyote on the BattleTech Forums.

Toy Tanks

One thing I've been thinking about the last day or so is the idea of miniatures for A Time of War games.  Getting scale right is somewhat difficult; obviously Total Warfare-scale miniatures are much too small to represent their equivalent units on the A Time of War battlemat, but nobody manufactures BattleTech miniatures of considerably greater scale.  For instance, representing a 12-meter tall BattleMech would involve a six-inch tall miniature on a 2m/inch mat.  A large vehicle would be of similar dimension in its footprint.  The scale works out to be something on the order of 1/78th Scale.

Automobile models are commonly produced in 1/24th scale, which might be close enough to work with, but tanks are largely produced in 1/35th at most.  The latter scale is pretty close to using a scale for your BattleMat in which 1 inch equals 1 meter, instead of 1 inch equals two.  That cuts the gamespace area of your Battlemat to a quarter of its previous size, but permits considerably greater selection if one is inclined to use large-scale miniatures for their campaign.  I suspect the investment is most worth it for games being run at conventions, where production value is everything, but even for more private games that want to add a special twist to a session, using mass-produced modern tank models as stand-ins for combat vehicles seems perfectly viable.  Otherwise, the next stop is at 1/72nd, which is probably more economical, and provides more space for units on the board.

Extension!

The Martian Death Flu has laid low one of my players, and another was off on family business, so we didn't make quorum this week.  This is perhaps just as well; I'll have some more time to run simulations on PC-vs-vehicle combat, which still seems something of a crapshoot to me, and not one that favors the PC's.  Also, I'll have a chance to pick up some good physical props to represent the ambush.

Ambush

So the mission for Session 12 is a convoy ambush; a way of getting the party used to taking it to the Word of Blake, and to start the "Active Resistance" half of the campaign.  The theory is the party ambushes the truck carrying Candidate 26 to Devil's Tower as it winds though the forests of Wyoming.  They'll be assisted by a group of Terran Resistance fighters, who will furnish them with a few support weapons, and a few extra bodies. The escort for the truck will be a couple of Word of Blake militiamen, and a light attack vehicle.  I'm thinking a Scorpion Light Tank (TRO:3026R p. 26.)

The Tactical Addendum nor the Combat section of A Time of War is terribly explicit about the BAR values of tank armor, but if we presume that tanks are running around in the same armor as 'Mechs (given they take the same damage at the Total Warfare scale), then we can presume that the Scorpion will have a BAR of 10.  To hurt that tank, that is, to do at least 1 point of armor damage, the party needs to put 20 standard damage points into it with one blow.  Let's see what can do that.

A lot of the Support Weapons have serious Burst ratings, which is all well and good if you can roll well.  At ambush ranges, the to-hit number for a vehicle is something like 1, but the highest Support Weapon skill the party has is Shin at +1.   The practical upshot is that he'll be able to do at best 11 or 12 burst damage.  With a Support Machine Gun (5B/5BD), he'd score as high as 22, but he'd need a 10 or better to do that, and they'd be looking at stacking as much as 64 damage on this beast.  He'll need something more effective.

A Heavy Recoilless rifle will put a point of damage on the tank on any success (8X/12BD).  That's nice, but it won't stop a thundering tank from killing all of them.  More likely, the party will need to lay some kind of command-detonated minefield to take out the armor asset before seizing the truck.  If the mines only disable the motive systems, though, the recoilless rifle might be very necessary.

I expect the party will have a great time planning and executing this operation, once they have a few operational details.

Planning For the Big Reveal

Session 12 is scheduled for Sunday, and plan is for the party to find out the truth about the Word of Blake's bioweapons project on Terra; that Branths are being used to develop extremely dangerous viral weapons.  They'll find out the location of the facility, and they'll find out its approximate garrison size.  Most importantly, they'll find out the entire research program is based on Clark's research.

I want this mission to be more action-oriented than ones in the past.  Simon will not be present, so we can safely bring more combat to the session than normal.  The basic premise will be the party intercepting a convoy coming from the bioweapons station somewhere in Montana to Devil's Tower.  It will be transporting a large amount of Candidate 26, the WoB Class V biological weapon, which the party will need to neutralize.  In addition to the cargo, they'll find a good deal of documentation, including a way of locating the facility itself.

Exactly how all of this will play out, I still need to write.  But I know where I'm going.

How The Puzzle Went

One interesting thing about the puzzle this week was how it threw into sharp relief the problem solving strategies of my various players.  Three of my players are definitely analytical thinkers; they saw the puzzle for a process that had a clear path to solution.  They sat down and began running a logic grid immediately.  This had two problems; it turned out that the way they were working was only practical for three or at most four people.  As a result, Cameron, the most intuitive player in the group, was rather left out.  After about half an hour, he began working the puzzle his own way; making a very intuitive analysis, using scraps and clues the party had learned about but that they wouldn't use on their logic grid because they feared going down an incorrect path.  Cameron, on the other hand, used a more guess-and-check approach, forming a potential solution, and checking it against all the clues to try to determine a viable solution that matched all the constraints.

As it turned out, he was very close when the logic grid team finished their solution.  I am sure that it would've been a near thing if they had started at the same time; I could easily believe that Cameron would've come to a solution first.

That said, rather than bringing the party together as I hoped, the puzzle split it more severely than any activity I've set them to yet.  I need to carefully consider the intuitive/analytic gap before I throw another one at them.

Session 11 Logic Puzzle

For your edification at home, here was this week's puzzle.  Formatting errors are intentional.

INTERCEPT//23123-122//ABD-3995
PARTIAL MESSAGE

TO: ALEXEI ROMANOV
FROM: [UNKNOWN SENDER]
DATE: 31 DECEMBER 3069
SUBJECT: FWD: RE: RE: FWD: RE: RE: FUTURE OPS

Alexei--

Don’t know if you’re still at this address, but your operation is before Eric’s.

> On 29 DECEMBER 3069,  said:
>
> Eric is leading OPERATION SARNA.
>
>
>> On 29 DECEMBER 3069, said:
>>
>> Wait, so who is leading OPERATION SARNA then?
>>
>>
>>> On 29 DECEMBER 3069, said:
>>>
>>>
[LOST CONTENT]
>>>>> is taking place in May of 3074, not OPERATION SARNA.  Jessica >>>>> is leading one, and I don’t remember who is leading the other, >>>>> but its the Fresno op.  Look it  up.
[LOST CONTENT]
>>>>>> No, Jessica is leading the Colorado Springs operation.  We’ve >>>>>> been over this before!
[LOST CONTENT]
>>>>>>>> OPERATION NBC will be completed before Wayne’s team has even >>>>>>>> completed training.  If it weren’t, we wouldn’t be able to
[LOST CONTENT]
>>>>> OK, now I’m really, really, really confused about the timeline.
>>>>> Is the 3070 or the 3074 op in Denver?  I know they’re both in
[LOST CONTENT]
>>>>>>> is leading OPERATION MECHSTEAL, not Wayne!  Unless you’re
>>>>>>> planning to make some bass-ackwards change.  Like that never
[LOST CONTENT]
>>>>>>>> OPERATION NBC isn’t even in Montana.  Doofus.
[LOST CONTENT]
>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Geez, guys.  This is the team we’re kick the WoB >>>>>>>>>>>>>> offworld with?
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Look, this is very simple.  There are five ops >>>>>>>>>>>>>> planned: The Gilgultch op, the 3072 op, OPERATION HPG, >>>>>>>>>>>>>> Jessica’s op, and the Horsehead op.
[LOST CONTENT]
>>>>> Let’s pretend, unlike you, I know operational procedures from >>>>> my own ass.
>>>>>
>>>>> No, Alexei won’t be available for Gilgultch.  We’ve been over
[LOST CONTENT]
>>>>>> Fortunately, OPERATION NBC happens before OPERATION MECHSTEAL.
[LOST CONTENT]
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Way to go, ace.  You sorted each column >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> separately.  A fat lot of good that table does us.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> On 31 OCTOBER 3069, said:
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Here’s the summary for operations over the next few years
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> DATE LEADER CITY NAME
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> FEB 3070 ALEXEI COLORADO SPRINGS BIOWEAP
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> JUN 3071 BETH DENVER HPG
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> APR 3072 ERIC FRESNO, CA MECHSTEAL
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> SEP 3073 JESSICA GILGULTCH, WY NBC
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> MAY 3074 WAYNE HORSEHEAD, MO SARNA

Session 11

Session 11 ended up falling out a bit differently than I was expecting.  We resolved the downtime XP (which I've now created a form for, since we've reached the part of the game where we have double-digit numbers of months between session.  Then I delivered the intercept to Anthony, who began solving it while the rest of the group continued eating breakfast and chatting.  He made some progress, and people made their way over to help him as we moved forward, but I'll cover how that worked out later this week.

I solved the puzzle in 45 minutes the night before, and I figured my limitations as a single person working would just about balance out the gains I had being in practice for logic puzzles.  It turns out that was a bad assumption; it ended up taking about 90 minutes for the group to solve the puzzle to their statisfaction.  They discover the resistance will be executing an HPG operation in Denver in February of 3070, and that Alexei will be leading.  Simon lays a number of detection traps in the HPG station computer to try to get a message to Alexei when he breaks in.  The team successfully contacts Alexei and later manages to intercept the Resistance team that's breaking into the Denver HPG station.  A tense standoff ensues between Davida and Shin and the two resistance members (neither of them have ever seen Alexei, so they can't tell if one of them is him.)  The resistance members tell them they are now tapping all communications through that station, and if the party needs to get in touch with them, to just send a signal through there.

After that, the session wound down quickly.  This is the last of the "learning the threats" sessions that I planned, and Session 12 will be the first "Doing something about it" sessions.

Elementary School Busywork For The Win

I've decided to go with the Logic Puzzle approach to Sunday's session.  I've been looking for resources to suggest ways to construct logic puzzles, but thus far the algorithm seems to be "create the grid, create a clue, add clues until you can solve the puzzle yourself."  Not terribly creative, but effective.  It is also possible that I can simply hijack an existing puzzle online by replacing their category names with my own.

This latter option is the one I find myself admitting I would suggest to somebody else, which is usually my prime indicator that I should embark on that path.  To that end, I found a site, http://www.logic-puzzles.org, which simply has an archive of logic puzzles known to be solvable in about 5-10 minutes.  Now I just need to select one, replace the names of the categories with categories from my game, determine how to word in-game documents to contain the clues properly, and do the rest of the footwork to have this particular exercise ready to go for Session 11.

Maintaining Momentum

Oftentimes I think that forcing myself to post here some I can at least not be too embarrassed by is the only thing that keeps this campaign at the quality level it is maintaining.  With the close of the year coming up fast, my schedule is ever-more packed, and finding room to think about Ten Years on Terra atop my myriad other responsibilities is becoming a bit of a challenge, but it keeps me honest, and makes sure that my players get the GM attention they deserve.  So thank you for continuing to read this blog; the steady stream of hits on the statistics page reminds me of my responsibility to you, and to my players.

Operational concerns aside, the last 24 hours have yielded little in the way of ideas for game elements to add to Session 11, but I also need to determine a few details regarding why the party is going there.  I know that they'll be getting a hint that will set them on Alexei's trail, a hint the feeds into the minigame that lets them find him, and by extension, the HPG station in California.  Most of my ideas have been that they find a radio beacon that leads them to him, but exactly why that comes out almost two years after he goes missing is not clear to me -- most of the explanations that spring to mind push the limits of credibility.

Likely I'll have Simon find some hint as he works.  Exactly what depends on the minigame, but I'll work that out soon enough.

Preparing for the Sarna HPG

The Sarna HPG plotline that I've developed was entirely based off fairly old (pre-Catalyst) BattleTech source material.  I was somewhat bemused to discover that the recently released Jihad: Final Reckoning sourcebook contained a number of HPG-based weapon systems that added a lot of rules, or at least guidelines, for what the Word is working on at the HPG station in California.  On Sunday I hope to explore that with the party.

I still want to develop some out-system minigame for them to solve as the first part of the session; a puzzle in which they can all participate.  I've discussed this in prior entries, but I'm still not terribly happy with any of the games I came up with.  Exactly how that will look, I'm still not sure.  Something to break the mold, make each of the players use their skills in a seriously helpful way, and contribute toward a goal that advances a party goal.  More and more, I'm convinced that I need some kind of puzzle that the character make skill checks to solve.  Something with five components, one for each character.  Maybe a logic puzzle of some description.

When I was young we used to do logic grids, in which you had two sets of data (people and rooms, for instance), and a list of hints you were supposed to use to determine which datapoints were associated with each other.  I really enjoyed them, and a few years ago I built a D&D campaign, one of the core plot points of which basically boiled down to solving one of these.  I'm thinking I might build a smaller one for Sunday if I can think of reasonable datasets to have the party correlate.

Knowing What You Don't Know

One of the more interesting interesting interactions that happened during Session 10 was when Simon, who spent the session monitoring WoB comms chatter, learned about the incoming bomber attack.  He had two-way communication with David and Shin, but could only listen  in on Clark and Alexander.  The result was that while Clark and Alexander's players knew of the impending attack, their characters did not.

Bert and Cameron (Alexander's and Clark's players, respectively) are very different sorts of players.  Bert tends to try to play optimally, so he immediately began seeking a reason for his character to get to safety.  He wasn't willing to have his character just break and run on a hunch, but there was suddenly a series of questions about exactly what he could see and hear (standing in the hulk of a ship under construction, the answer was "not much.")  He was very agitated until the air raid alarm went off and he could justify having his character run.

Cameron, on the other hand, was much more relaxed about the situation.  He concluded there was nothing his character could do until he found out that there was a threat, so he just went on roleplaying the encounter as he had been, albeit much more slowly as Bert was now constantly interjecting with ways he could preternaturally detect the incoming attack.

Now, both of these reactions are common play styles.  There was some strain, though, in the fact that suddenly Bert was chewing up a lot of time at the table; he wanted out bad, and who could blame him?  A trio of altitude bombers were bearing down on his character.  The problem was that he was now cutting into time other players, whose characters did know the attack was coming, wanted to use to get themselves repositioned and ready.

I countered this particular problem in two ways.  First, I accepted the first two or three questions as usual, but when they kept coming, I stopped Bert and asked for just a moment while I handled the other players, going around the table in order.  The "around the table in order" thing is something I've found to be important, because it gives the person who needs a lot of time a clear indication that we will be getting back to him, at a predictable time, but also lets me get actions from each other player.

Second, I moved up my schedule for the air-raid alarm.  By doing this, I was effectively giving Bert what he wanted -- a chance to run.  I gave up a bit of tension for the other players by yielding early, but the tension was going to be damaged anyways by the disruption that was being caused to the gameflow.  This second action was more cutting my losses than taking proactive steps to improve my game experience, and I feel that there was a better solution, but it has not come to me.

And We're Back

I have returned from a week working very intensively on another project to update you on the developments in Ten Years on Terra.  I was expecting to have two sessions worth of updates (Sessions 10 and 11), but Session 11 was canceled due to unseasonably early snow in our neck of the woods, so we'll just focus on Session 10.

Session 10 was the Galveston Shipyard visit that introduced the party to the Wyrm.  The effect was carried off just as I had hoped, and the party was truly impressed by the size of the vessel and its combat attributes.  David and Shin took it upon themselves to dress up as dockworkers and infiltrate the yard while Alexander and Clark joined the tour group using credentials planted in the system by Simon.  It was a great group effort.  The party gathered a great deal of information on the Wyrm, and was incensed with the need for them to neutralize it before ComStar could re-invade Terra.

Mid-session the bombing attack went off as planned, and none of the PC's ended up in the blast of the bomber attack.  Both Alexander and Clark fled off the port side of the Wyrm while the bomb attack scattered starboard.  In the ensuing chaos, David and Shin we able to steal a number of blueprints for the Wyrm, although not the comprehensive set they had hoped for.

The party exfiltrated just fine, and made it back to Clark's ranch in Denver.

They're Talking!

I have no idea what I did differently this time, but we have an active email thread and a developing plan for Session 10.  This is very exciting, and very useful for my planning purposes.  Now I just need to draft up the adventure itself.

In a bit of bookkeeping, I'm on vacation next week, and I have been remiss in giving myself an adequate buffer to keep blog entries coming, so I'm afraid that I'll be offline for a week.  I hope to have something interesting to show you when I get back.  Regularly scheduled posts will resume on 1 November 2011.

Offline Interactions

One thing that I've been trying to do for Session 10 that I haven't accomplished so far on previous sessions is to get the party to pre-plan a bit over email before the session starts.  Unfortunately, thus far no leader has managed to emerge in the group to lead the conversation, and I feel like I'm steering them, consciously or otherwise, if I try to lead the discussion.  So this week I'm trying again to  prod them into action.

I am admittedly much better at GMing in person than over an electronic connection, especially one with latency as high as email, so I'm straining to entice my players (all extremely busy people) to take time out of their days to think and talk about the game.  I'm a bit cautious about taking game talk out of the allocated time slot, but we burn a great deal of time with everybody looking at each other during the "planning" phase of each session.  I hope take advantage of incidental downtime to slowly get the conversation going, but historically this has been a bad plan.  I'm trying to consider what benefits I can off them above and beyond simply having more playtime every session that might encourage them to preload some of their planning.

An Ear to the Sky

I sometimes forget that Ten Years on Terra is taking place during a turbulent time for the Inner Sphere in general, so I thought it might be useful to take a quick survey of what's been happening in the rest of the Sphere while our party has been on Terra.  Most of this is from the timeline in Jihad Hot Spots: 3070.

March 3068 - The Blakist hit a number of Lyran Industrial worlds, including Hesperus II.  Skye and the Bolan Province of the Lyran Alliance actively begin attacks across the Free Worlds League Border.  Clan Wolf-in-Exile sends a taskforce to rescue survivors from Outreach.

April 3068 - Hohiro Kurita leads a DCMS force to counter the Blakists on Dieron.

June 3068 - Blakists take Solaris VII.  Hohiro Kurita is captured by the Word on Dieron.  Kai Allard-Liao vanishes, and Duke George Hasek of the Capellan March launches an unauthorized invasion of the Capellan Confederation.

August 3068 - The ComStar WarShip Bordeaux rescues Primus Mori off of besieged Tukkayid.

October 3068 - Orbital strike on Sian.  Chancellor Sun-Tzu Liao reported missing.  New Earth (site of Clark's contact) falls to the Word of Blake.  Contact with Canopus is lost.  Knights of the Inner Sphere killed in a chemical weapons attack on Atreus as massive naval engagement breaks out in-system as Word of Blake asserts control over FWL.  HPG network jammed with "white noise."  Primus Mori assassinated.  Anastasius Focht goes into hiding.  Gavin Dow ascends to the Primacy.

November 3068 - Orestes (ComStar's de facto headquarters) are attacked by the Word of Blake.  Bordeaux is badly damaged.  Northwind falls silent.

December 3068 - Columbus falls to the Word of Blake, with the 151st Eridani Light Horse.  Sun-Tzu Liao is rescued from the rubble of the Forbidden City.

January 3069 - Hohiro Kurita is liberated on Dieron.

That just about brings us up the Session 10. About this time, extrasolar communications will be restored, so the party should get a briefing on what's been happening in the Inner Sphere while they've been under effective interdiction.

Combat Focus

Writing focus sessions in a technique I've found that helps keep my players engaged and give me a more direct narrative vehicle to tell a story.  By giving the player an opportunity to play their character exactly as they want to, I greatly increase engagement and enjoyment in the session.  Session 9 was just such a session for Clark.  I'm looking at increasing focus on some of the ComStar party, as they have been a bit neglected by the plot as of late.

One of my big problems is with David Cho.  His character was built as a special forces operative.  He's exceedingly good at hand-to-hand combat.  The problem is he is really designed for independent operations; trying to cater to him either involves separating him from the rest of the party, or placing several characters in mortal danger they are ill-equipped to handle.  So now I'm looking at ways to spotlight this character, without running the risk of a party wipe.

I'm hoping I can run parallel adventures during Session 10, so that the party is split, but both sides are working to accomplish their goals in different places.  The trick, I feel, is going to be not spending too much time on one side at the expense of the other group.  I feel like there is plenty of opportunity for part of the party to be with the main tour group while a subset sneaks around collecting information that the Word might not want them to have.  I have to crystallize this vision soon.  Session 10 is scheduled for Sunday.

Session 9

On Sunday we ran Session 9, the investigation of a Word of Blake nuclear blast site in Montana.  The party spent a long time discussing what the site might represent and planned for their operation there, then went to the site and successfully sneaked past the cordon and made it into the site, where WoB NBC operations were working.   They investigated a number of flavor sites (break rooms, bunks, food storage), and finally entered an office trailer where they were able to get a number of plot documents regarding the biological pathogen outbreak that precipitated the nuclear strike.  They rendered on office worker unconscious and escaped with two hard disks taken from the computers on-site.

Returning to the ranch, the party broke the encryption on the drives to find details about two different pathogens.  They were able to determine that Candidate 17, the less deadly of the two, was the released virus at the Montana site.  That revelation was fortunate in that starting three days after their visit to the site, Clark began exhibiting symptoms of Candidate 17.  The Ranch had been kept under quarantine while the disease ran its course, and fortunately it did not kill Clark.  After his rapid recovery, the party was able to isolate and find a treatment for Candidate 17.

This session was particularly remarkable in that the party members rolled exceptionally well; we had several Stunning Successes.  It also ran very well in that it became something of a spotlight episode for Clark, while still allowing each of the present members of the team to contribute in a meaningful way (Simon was absent for this session.)

I now need to start focusing on other characters.  Notably, David has gotten very little exposure in this game, and I want to make sure he gets a chance to showcase his character, who has been somewhat frustrated by the lack of direct action by the party.  I may need to reconfigure Session 10 to feature martial arts more prominently.

Timing

This weekend will be Session 9 of what was originally supposed to be a 15-session campaign.   We'll be in October of 3068,  less than a year  into Ten Years on Terra.  I need to start thinking about the speed at which I'll be advancing sessions.

I'm going to aim for returning to the roughly-one-session-a-year rate I originally planned.  So I'm going to outline about which plots I want to be dealing with in which years:

Session 10 - 3069 - Wyrm inspection tour (Wyrm Plotline)
Session 11 - 3070 - A Lead on Alexei (Sarna Plotline)
Session 12 - 3071 -  A New Branth sighting; Reveal on Clark's Role (Bioweapons Plotline)
Session 13 - 3072 - Weaponized HPG Test (Sarna Plotline)
Session 14 - 3073 -  Bioweapons facility found (Bioweapons Plotline)
Session 15 - 3074 - TerraSec visits ranch (Party Plotline)
Session 16 - 3075 - Re-establish Contact with ComStar (ComStar Plotline)
Session 17 - 3076 - Wyrm launched  (Wyrm Plotline/ComStar Plotline)
Session 18 - 3077 - Destroy weaponized HPG Station (Sarna/ComStar plotline)
Session 19/20 - 3078 - Invasion of Terra/Destruction of Denver (Multi-Part Finale)

To make this work, it means that the Wyrm won't be completed until  3076 -- possibly due to damage suffered in the bombing attack.

On the plus side, having written this down, I really feel like I have direction again.  We'll see if I can stick to this timeline and only let this campaign slip by 5 sessions.

An Aura of Invincibility

One of the elements I want do make sure gets across during the Galveston visit is the sheer endurance possessed of a Wyrm SDS system.  I can certainly have the tour guide do that, talking about how any single section of the ship could be entirely destroyed and the ship would remain combat-capable, or about how the internal bulkheads are capable to containing any non-nuclear explosion with ease, but that would only be talk.  I  would like to create a scene demonstrating just how tough a nut to crack this ship will be.

My immediate thought is a yard accident -- an explosion of some description  that would vaporize a lesser ship goes almost unnoticed aboard  the Wyrm.  Doing so during fitting out might be awkward, however -- fuel bunkers and magazines, the primary causes of BattleTech explosions, would be almost empty.

Better, I can leverage the Terran Resistance again, making a move against the ship.  Possibly even have an encounter with the St. Louis chapter that's being confused with the party.  A major attack with BattleTech-scale assets, perhaps aerial bombers, that does minimal damage to the still-under-construction hulk.

The Wyrm has 150 armor and 150CF per hex, so a bomb load dropped by an aircraft (maximum of 20 10-point bombs), strip the armor but not destroy the hex.  If we're looking at an altitude-bombing attack, the bombers could do at most 20 damage to each hex, meaning that it would take 8 aircraft in a line to break the armor.   Given the ship is being fitted out, I think we can presume there is less than full armor applied.

In the midst of the tour, then, I'll have a flight of three atmospheric aircraft overfly the Wyrm's berth and drop payload on it.  There will be minimal warning to the characters -- this is a surprise attack designed to take advantage of the number of TerraSec personnel present.  The Wyrm will be minimally damaged by  the attack, but there may be significant causalities among the workers.

This scene will drive home the external invulnerability of the ship, and hopefully convince the party that they need to find a way to stop this vessel from launching if at all possible.

Justifying the Expense

The exact reason TerraSec wants this Wyrm is shrouded in mystery.

The exact mission that TerraSec intends to use the vessel for is confused -- in fact, nobody at the tour actually knows.  The TerraSec personnel understand that people above them are expecting these unit to help in law enforcement but are skeptical of its actual use.  They're wary that this is an extension of the same thinking that put BattleMechs on patrol in city streets.   The builders are simply proud of this remarkable platform they've built.  The Word of Blake Militia represented at the tour are extremely skeptical of TerraSec's need for the ship, and do no wish to release it to their care.

As mentioned yesterday, it will quickly become obvious that the Wyrm is a warship, not particularly suited to law enforcement.  The base justification for this profile is that during planetary lockdowns, such as the one during Case White, TerraSec is charged with enforcing the no-fly zone covering the planet, but their atmospheric fighters could not stop an orbit-bound DropShip from escaping the planet unless those fighters happened to be very fortuitously placed during its launch.

This mission profile holds very little water and could much more effectively and economically be accomplished with aerospace fighters, but for the moment that is the comeback argument when TerraSec is prodded about this ship.  Despite not knowing the true motivation, the interaction between the WoBM  and TerraSec members will make the TerraSec personnel compelled to defend the decision, despite not agreeing with it.  These arguments will actually do more to solidify the middle-management layer of TerraSec that acquiring the ship is a good idea -- without really consciously doing so, they'll want to have the ship just because the WoBM doesn't want them to have it.  This interaction is perhaps the most important story point of the session -- it will give insight not only into intra-Terran relations between the two organizations, but will help explain why the lower ranks of TerraSec are slowly getting on board with this plan.

Revealing The Wyrm's Mission

So you're a Terran Resistance fighter standing on a pier in Texas, looking at a half-constructed, enormous submarine being fitted out.  What gives away it primary purpose?

My first thought is that you notice the four enormous NL55's waiting to be delivered by crane into their turrets. As opposed to the few tons that a 'Mech-scale laser would weigh, these weapons would be 1,100-ton monstrosities, and as large as many of the small boats running around yard.  The capital missile launchers would be modest by comparison -- about the size of a large BattleMech, accompanied by a host of missiles the size of small to medium BattleMechs.   Among all the weapon systems being loaded onto the ship, these would stand out as being obviously the primary armament.

It would also  be obvious that the ship has a pressure hull rather than a displacement hull, and is designed to completely submerge.  The enormous turrets full of weapons scattered about the ship would seem to suggest an air defense system, while the numerous torpedo tubes would make it clear this vessel is capable of dealing with threats of all types.  It will be immediately obvious to anybody acquainted with the difference between law enforcement and military duties that this is a warship, not an interception and inspection cutter.

Finally, as the tour winds inside, the space tracking RADAR and independent engagement systems separate from the ground-based search systems will confirm that this vessel is built to repel a major orbital action in Terran orbit.  Hopefully by this point the ComStar members of the party at least will recognize that this ship and its sisters could serious compromise ComStar's next attempt to retake Terra.

Thinking Ahead

I'm comfortable with the amount of prep work I've done for Session 9 now, so now I'm thinking ahead to Session 10 -- the Wyrm infiltration.  The party is looking at infiltrating an inspection tour of a partially-completed Wyrm SDS ship.  I'm not sure exactly how they're going to try to get aboard -- impersonate a TerraSec officer, try to get in as press members, or disguise themselves as workcrew.  No matter how they get aboard, I need to communicate a number of items to them.

First, they don't know what the purpose of this ship is (except Morgan, who out-of-character knows exactly what the Wyrm is.)  For this session, I need to show them what the vessel's purpose is.  That's the first item I need to make sure shows up aboard.

Second, they don't know why TerraSec is trying to obtain a ship like this, and when they find out the purpose of the vessel, it will likely become even more confusing.  This is not a question I want to answer, but one I want to lampshade -- make it clear that even in-universe, this makes little sense.

Third, I want to be sure that the party interprets this as an extremely difficult target to destroy, even by sabotage.  The ship's damage control and redundancy systems would make it outstandingly difficult to disable from any one point on-board.  Although they may have immediate thoughts of attempting to destroy the ship, they can't immediately act on them.

Finally, I want to give them some idea of when the ship will be completed.  They'll likely need to wait until it is no longer in a construction yard to realistically damage it, so they'll want to know when it begins trials so that they might take action then.

That's the outline for Session 10.  This week will be filling in some of those details.

Tiny Bombs

Another thought that came to me after reviewing the Historical: Reunification War WMD rules was to look at how the Word's first attempt at containing the outbreak would've played out from a game mechanics point of view.

The mission the Word's commanders would be attempt to fulfill would be to destroy every living creature within about 2 km.  The Word would have on its side the advantage that everything would be soft targets; nothing military-grade to resist its weapons.  So what would the astute Word of Blake commander choose to accomplish this mission?

Now, H:RW gives us five classes of nuclear ordnance to play with: Type Ia, Type Ib, Type II, Type III, and Type IV.  The blast radii of Type II is 1.3km, while the blast radius of Type III is about 2.7km.  For our purposes, nothing within these areas will survive the blast; hardened vehicles stand a chance, but this is a sleepy mountain hamlet.  Everyone within twice that range has a 41.7% chance of being killed outright by the secondary effects.

Let's presume for the moment that the Word commander was more concerned with containment than subtlety; he has the Type III 50-kiloton bomb dropped on the town.  The entire valley is wiped out.  The airburst leaves no crater, but it is clear that a horrible explosion has occurred here.  What are they going to tell everybody?

Now, a 5-kiloton blast could conceivably be covered up  as an industrial accident; such explosions have occurred before in our time.  50 kilotons, however, either means natural disaster a la Tunguska, or a weapon of mass destruction.  ROM's immediate spin on this would be to pin the explosion on a group of Terran Resistance members.  I suppose a fabricated message taking credit for the incident could easily be created, whipping popular opinion against the Resistance.

The practical upshot is that it is reasonable to assume that Word force on Terra had access to these weapons, and deployed them to stop a Class V bioweapons outbreak on the Homeworld, and now I have better information to describe the scene as the characters find it.

Weaponizing Pestilence

Frequent commentor ChinookHK was good enough to point out the WMD rules I had been searching for for Monday's post but couldn't find because I was expecting them to be in one of the Jihad Rules Annexes, and had completely forgotten to check Historical: Reunification War.  The rules for Biological and Chemical agents start on page 296.

Simply put, all BC threats are broken down into five classes with differing mechanical effects.  Class I is at worst 3D6+6 turns of penalties and possible morale checks, whereas Class V is a make-this-check-or-die-in-1D6-days affair, without possibility of cure.

I imagine that the actual disease I'm looking to deploy here would be a Class V, although I really don't want to expose my players to the possibility of catching that, so I think a Class IV (an "unfinished" version) will work just as well for my purposes.  Under the current rules, here's how the disease will manifest.

From the moment of contact, the disease has a latency of 3-8 days (1D6+2).  Symptoms will last 1-6 days (1D6), and the target zone will be "hot" for 2-12 days (2D6).  If a target is fully susceptible to the disease, they will take a +1 penalty to all skill checks, a -1 penalty to all initiative rolls for each full day of the infection, so that at the start of Day 6 of symptoms (if they have 6 days of symptoms), all skill checks are at +5 and initiative is at -5.  In addition, if the character suffers the full six days of symptoms, one final check is made at the end of the sixth day to determine if they recover or die.

A character who is only partially susceptible to the disease takes penalties every 48 hours rather than every 24, and never has to make a check to avoid dying.  Both types of infection regenerate their penalties at +1/24 hours once symptoms have passed.

So these effects are fairly scary, but hopefully the players not expose themselves to the disease at all.  To help give them hope in case they do, though, I'll make sure the Word has documents on two different diseases this might be (they're here to find out which), that has statistics and information on each.  The alternate disease it could be would be the Class V virus that Word is throwing around shipyard worlds about this point in the timeline.

For an average human (3 BOD/3 WIL), you'd be nearly guaranteed to be infected (a Stunning Success [A Time of War, p. 41 could save you) by a Class V virus, which gives it very close to a 100% kill rate among civilian populations.  The news is only marginally better for the Class IV virus.  For the characters in this campaign, Clark, Simon and David are the most susceptible to the disease; they require a on their check to avoid the full effects of the disease (about 97% chance of infection), and need a Stunning Success of 16+ total to avoid the partial effects.  Alex is only marginally better off (92% chance of full infection.)  Shin is by far the most resilient to disease in the party, with only a 66% chance of full infection.

Now, in each case of infection, there is a 16.67% chance of it going the full six days, and opening up the possibility of the disease killing the patient.  The check against dying is the same as the infection check, meaning that if you need to make that roll, the odds for you are pretty grim.  Total probability of death from an untreated infection ranges from 7.41% for Shin to 15.75% for most of the party.  Not high, but not something I want to be making my save-or-die check against.