In the smaller communities most trade is done in kind as the number of official coins in circulation is fairly small and residents rely on trust networks to ensure a reasonably fair deal. 

The official coin of the land is the Gold Mark which is used for the payments of debts, major trade interactions and the purchase of fine, crafted goods. 

Far more common are Silvers. Nearly every petty ruler with a claim to land will at some point mint their own coins and treasure hunters often unearth sacks of old coins from times past. 

While money changers make a living concocting complex schemes of exchange, most people simply trade Silvers by weight and purity and outside of official duties, most transactions are concocted in Silvers. Even bartering will often see one side or the other throw in a few Silvers to sweeten a deal that is just short of being fair.

Merchants often carry pieces of silver rods or silver strands which can be cut to any size desired for trading purposes. Such chunks are referred to as “cut silver” and is inspected carefully as scrupulous merchants often intentionally mix in cheaper metals.

Officially the value of a Mark is set at 50 Silvers. Adventurers usually declare the value of anything they purchase in Marks. After all it is better for business if you sound like you are successful and prosperous!

At a typical coach station, a Silver will buy a place to sleep and a stout meal. In the city costs are often higher. Adventurers of course often pay a premium for goods and services, both due to the specialized nature of items they require and the tendency for everyone to try to make a quick buck when a band of adventurers stroll into town. 

Rule number 1 of tabletop gaming: You can always change the rules if you like.

Rule number 2 of tabletop gaming: Most people never do. 

Today we are going to talk about game options and game defaults a little bit.

Long time players know I love optional rules. I usually always put in some and I love designing alternate versions of rule systems.

Sometimes there were multiple ways to do something and at the end of the day you have to pick one, so including the alternative as an option is a nice touch. Other times I think of something later and it gets folded in as an option for players who want more/less/different detail.

Optional rules help players tailor the experience and by including them you can help players do so within predetermined confines. What that means is that you have the insights into the logic behind the system so the options you created will (hopefully) work with them. 

That doesn’t mean players should be discouraged from their own house rules of course, but they run a greater risk of accidentally causing a problem elsewhere.

As an example you house rule combat to be a little more deadly, but now units are also taking more morale tests and therefore running away too much. Sometimes a change can cascade through the game and it can take a bit to get a feel for how these things all link back into each other. 

Additionally options cater to a particular type of player who enjoy tinkering with the game and giving them a little bit of what they want can be extremely valuable. Over the years I find that most people who do modify the rules modify them very little. They might add a modifier for one thing and a sub-system for a specific type of action but its rare for people to do big, sweeping overhauls of core mechanics. 

This also makes sense for compatibility purposes: House ruling that units in cover get +1 to morale doesn’t require any big changes if I play with someone at the gaming club who wants to play the game as written (or conversely they are open to using my house rule). If I have replaced the entire shooting system, it is a much bigger challenge. 

The real risk is making sure that options stand alone. A particular pet peeve of mine is a game with “advanced rules” that are essentially required to play because other game rules feed into them. In my opinion an option should be truly that: An option. A choice the player actively has to make and they should not be left wondering if they made the wrong choice, especially if the book presents one option as the easy one and one as the difficult one. 

This brings us to default options. In software and video game design it is generally held that most people will stick to the default selections. I can attest that I’ve spoken to a lot of gamers who don’t really look through the appendix or advanced rules chapters at all. As such the game presented by the default setup should be as representative of what you intend the game to be like as possible. 

This is especially a stumbling block when we are talking about up front decision making. One thing I underestimated for a long time was the value of a starter scenario. Even if it is extremely basic (we each get 2 identical units and they fight) it gives the player a way to get to grips with the material without making any decisions at a point when they don’t feel they have the knowledge to make those decisions. 

Default options also provide a common base level for players to interact on.

It is fine if you have multiple options for how to do something, but in my experience you are almost always better off presenting one as the standard as one as an alternative instead of giving the player two options and saying they should decide. 

In conclusion: Think carefully about the options you present in your game, how you present them and what they are meant to do.

Publishing questions:

Will you ever do a collaboration with X?

Possibly. I have collaborated in the past but it kind of feels like the stars has to align right: Both people have to be on the same page, into the same style of design and have both interest and time for the same project. It is usually easier for one person to contribute something to another persons project. 

Five Leagues questions

When exactly are pre-game potion use decided?

You can use them at any point during the setup sequence. For example you can use a potion after you have determined what type of enemies you are facing. It's not meant to be all that exact.

What exactly does it mean to survive a game for XP purposes?

A survivor is anyone that took part in the battle and did not die when rolling on the post-game injury table. 

Does Morale apply in Site battles?

Yes but only to enemies in sight of the casualties. 

General rules questions

Does a 6 always succeed and a 1 always fail?

Only if the rules explicitly say so. Parsecs and Leagues both do NOT use this for hit rolls. It is possible for a shot to be impossible or for a shot to hit automatically. (This is of course easy to house rule if you prefer).

I found an exploit!

For a game of the size and scope of Parsecs or Leagues there are probably a few. While more egregious (or silly) ones are something I track for future updates, I don't usually put a lot of priority in "blocking" exploits since they are 100% player driven. If you found a way to get infinite Credits somehow, ask yourself if the game would be more fun with infinite Credits. 

Publishing questions:

Is Nordic Weasel affected by the various OGL talk going on?

No.

What do you think of AI for game design?

At the moment, I think AI can be handy for making some quick drawings. You don't really get the benefits of an actual artist like revisions and you know, actually understanding what you are asking for, but some of the results can be quite fun. Rogue Hammer features a few pieces of AI art and some of them are quite cool.

For rules writing and design, I would say it is not useful currently. It mostly produces the equivalent of that guy in your gaming group who has never read the game you are talking about, but has strong opinions about it regardless.

Will we get more nice looking revamps of old titles?

I would like to for sure, but I am trying to not announce plans until I know they are for sure. 

Five Parsecs questions:

Expansion 2: Expanded mission extraction. Leaving the table in 3 turns is going to be really difficult on a 36x36" table.

Yeah, you should probably increase that to 4 turns on the larger table. 

Expansion 2: Non Minis rules. What happens if there is only 1 enemy left?

If there are less than 3 enemies left and you still have 3+ crew you should still generate 3 firefights. In any "excess" firefights you will fire but they will not. This is not clear in the rules. 

Rogue Hammer questions:

Transported units taking damage seems to be broken.

This will be fixed in 1.04. Transported infantry take 1 damage each time an attack penetrates the vehicles armor, 2 damage if it is wrecked. 

Is there a less open-ended option for measuring between units?

The text box on p.9 suggests using the squad leader figure to measure if you want a fixed point. Of course people using Epic troop stands or similar can just measure normally in any event. 

I have occasionally shared various tips on game design here and I figured going forward they will have a specific title: Upgrade your design. That sounds very practical right? 

I think a common flaw of game design is including too much stuff. I don't mean content (though there is such a thing as too sprawling a book) I mean the little stuff: Modifiers, special cases, sub-cases, exceptions and so forth. 

Now this is not always a bad thing: Sometimes you do want to capture a special case to avoid silly situations. After all we expect a tank to act differently than a foot soldier and a particular rule may require a carve out to ensure that is the case. Other times you just want the game to be a bit more detail oriented overall.

Small details can be a trap however because they carry two risks:

The first is the obvious question of weight in handling the game. Players will quickly memorize 3-5 typical modifier situations or sub-cases that are logical but a list of 20 gets difficult unless you scan the list each time. And if players realize they forgot one, they will be hesitant going forward because now they feel like they may have screwed up multiple times. 

When evaluating weight it is useful to look at the overall impact on the grand scale of things. A sub-case that adds a +/- 1 on a D20 roll is probably not worth considering. Odds are you could go through an entire game without ever having a roll where that modifier makes a difference to a single roll, let alone the aggregate outcome. 

Take a look at your game mechanic and evaluate how many individual pieces do I need to keep in my head as a player? For a typical ranged attack I probably need to know the shooter, the weapon and if you are in cover. Do I need to check the range precisely or is it okay if I can eye ball that I'm definitely within range? How many conditions apply to the hit roll? Does the number of shots I get vary? Does it matter if I moved? Are there influences that carry over from previous turns or other actions?

As you can see each of these is individually very small and usually binary questions (did the target evade last turn yes/no?) but they can add up pretty fast.

There is not a golden formula for this, but try to take the shooting mechanic in your game and count out how many "things" influence the attack roll. If any of them require remembering something that is not immediately clear from the position of the miniatures (such as whether a figure moved or what actions the target unit took last) count it as 1 extra thing. If any of them require decisions on the players end (such as aiming at particular parts of a target) count it as 1 extra thing.

How many did you end up with? 10? 20? 30+? 

Now take a long, hard look at the those cases, decisions and sub-cases and ask which of these are integral to the mechanic and which are not. 

For example the skill rating of the shooter is integral because that might be our basic hit modifier or target number. A penalty for moving and firing is not integral as the mechanic works without it. 

For any items that are not integral, start asking yourself if they are worth keeping especially if they rarely apply or if they often cancel out another modifier. They may be but interrogate each in turn to make sure they are. A lot of small hit modifiers or "happens on a natural roll of x" conditions have a high chance of being something you can ditch without ever affecting the flow of the game, particularly with a big die type. 

Once you have identified a couple of targets for deletion, try playing through a couple of quick firefights without them. Did you even notice their absence? Did the lack of it affect the tactics that seemed useful? That will inform your choice. 

An added danger is that by applying a rule for something you may end up overemphasizing it. Let us say you are writing an ultra realistic fire fight skirmish game and you set up a rule that guns jam on a natural D20 roll of a 1. Guns jam in real life so it is realistic right?

Well, maybe. Statistics are hard to come by but some time ago I read that some model of modern military rifle had a failure rate of around 1-2% in typical conditions with limited maintenance. Lets just assume this is accurate. 

By assigning the malfunction rate to a 1 in 20 chance, we have raised the chances to 5% meaning that our shooter in the game is many times more likely to jam their weapon than the actual rate should be. 

This is a simple example and compound probabilities get hairy but I hope it goes to show what I mean: By assigning a mechanic you emphasize the chance of a particular action or event occurring even if it is statistically not very likely. For most games not having a jam mechanic at all is probably closer to the statistical reality than assigning a 5% chance per attack.

What do you think? What have you cut from your game? What do you wish you had cut in hindsight? What did you cut that you realized you actually needed to keep?

Rogue Hammer v 1.03 has been made available to patrons. It adds 2 new orc walkers and a rules tweak for orc vehicles in general, a new "scout" unit for star knights and elves respectively, a mercenary robot unit (not really based on a specific unit but seems like it fits the vibe), 2 new unit upgrades and a few other touches and tweaks.

It will be generally available later after testing.

Five Men in Normandy v 1.05 has been uploaded to Wargame Vault and features minor rewordings throughout the book, as well as tweaks to a couple of skills and random events. There is probably no need to print the book out again, but you will want to download the new PDF to make sure you have the most up to date version.

I answer a lot of questions but they are scattered across different locations and often don't get noticed. So I am going to try to capture some and post them to the blog every so often.

A round up of various questions from the last weeks. Questions are paraphrased and edited from their original format on facebook, discord or email and are thus not verbatim. 

Publishing questions:

Will the Five Parsecs expansions be available in print?

Yes, once the third expansion is released, the plan is to do a print compendium with some cool bonus content.

Five Parsecs questions:

Expansion 2: The Duck Back dramatic combat rule does not say how far the character moves.

Their basic move. In testing this was 1D6" instead but I decided to cut the die roll out. You can do it either way if you prefer. 

Why don't new characters roll on the character creation tables?

Originally I liked the idea that new arrivals would be blank slates to be developed in the game, but people really enjoy the character creation tables. Until we can make an updated game revision I suggest doing the following:

New characters roll normally but ignore all results of starting Credits.

Five Leagues questions:

How does Defensive Tactics work when I have a Parry?

As intended, Defensive Tactics is meant to use the highest die score, however I don't think you would break anything by letting the player pick either die roll. 

Weasel Tech questions:

Does the PL-C Beam weapon roll two dice to hit or roll once and hit twice?

It rolls two separate attack dice against the first target.

Questions about me:

Is Nordic Weasel Games your main job?

Yes. 

As the question comes up occasionally it is worth noting that I play almost everything in 15mm and the game rules usually just assume that. There are a few exceptions such as Laserstorm which targeted 6mm but the baseline for me has always been 15.

It turns out that the weapon ranges and movement distances I like in 15mm also happen to match up pretty well with what is the norm in 28mm so there is rarely a need to modify distances to fit another scale. For example a 4-6" move feels pretty good in 15mm and thats about what figures tend to move in games written for the larger scales. 

The area where this can get a little awkward is when it comes to interacting with terrain. A 4" climb looks pretty casual for a 32mm space marine but is a pretty epic endeavor for a 6mm trooper! I tend to not worry too much about things like that, but if it is a worry you should probably tweak those specific distances (halving for 6mm works fine).

On that note if you do want to scale down the game (particularly for playing on a little table) I used to suggest swapping the inches for centimeters (so 6" becomes 6 cm.) but I think that can get too fiddly. Instead these days I would suggest just halving everything. A 6" move becomes 3" and a 24" weapon range becomes 12". Try it either way and see how you get on.

The latter is also useful if you want to play on floor tiles or a grid and count squares. Most grid surfaces don't give you very many squares across so 1"=1 square is often going to make things move too fast. 2" = 1 square requires a bit of rounding up or down but tends to work better in my experience. 

I am slowly working on a project regarding the history of science fiction miniatures gaming. As part of that I want to track down some experiences of people who were around at the time.

Things will be a little bit quiet as I am hard at work on the next big thing. Stay tuned.