Todays retrospective is Starport Scum. In many ways this can be thought of as a sister to Five Parsecs: More open ended, less exacting and more GM oriented. 

The rules are well suited to a similar sort of "freelancers just scraping out a living" with random job tables, but assume a bit more handiwork in getting a game going. They are playable solo (and a fair few tools are provided along with various random tables) but also support pick up and convention play, particularly as it is pretty easy to detail a character.

Instead of stats, characters use traits like "GUN SLINGER" or "FAST" which mostly add dice to rolls, but can also have more specific functions. Like many things in the game, traits can be built to be very specific or can be ruled on the fly. 

Combat is a simple dice pool approach: Tally up dice, roll and count successes. The typical game can range from a couple of figures to probably 10-12 per side, with 3 figure grunt squads and single characters being the norm. 

There are also a number of expansions available, fleshing out and detailing the rules further.

You can check out the game here https://www.wargamevault.com/product/188598/Starport-Scum 

With Usurper 2 just out, the obvious post for today is a few examples of how things work. 

Let us say our intrepid hero Bimf the Barbarian is planning to do some prime looting, however his considerable ambition is blocked by a locked door in his path. 

Bimf have had it explained to him that battering down doors, while satisfying, makes noise and he is not confident he can fight off all 238 guards that patrol this fortress. So lock picking it is.

The GM decides that picking a lock is well within the possibilities of what Bimf can accomplish and so an Action / Event roll is made. Let's roll 3 times and see how you can interpret various results. 

My first roll is a 91 which is "Success and discovery" 

 Not only does Bimf succeed in this case, but in the process he learns something interesting or useful. The GM might give Bimf's player some information on the guard schedules (so he can dodge them later) or tell him that while he works on the lock, he notices that a lot of the statues in the courtyard look an awful lot like common people from the village but in stone and isn't it weird how their faces are all contorted in fear?

The second roll is a 17, "Failure". 

Bimf did not manage to get what he wanted. Failures cannot be attempted again unless the table says you can do so. In this case, no amount of messing with the lock picks will get Bimf through this door. This is where the Traits come in. If Bimf has a suitable Trait like LOCKPICKING or perhaps ROGUE or even REALLY QUITE CLEVER if the GM is feeling generous, he can "burn" that Trait and roll again. 

The player of Bimf will of course have to narrate how he applies that quality to overcome the obstacle. 

The third is 78, "Success". 

Easy enough: The characters get what they were trying to get out of the situation. In this case the door has been picked and Bimf can proceed to loot the temple (which is certainly not going to be filled with evil monsters). 

What happens if the lock is really high quality? (most medieval locks were not) The GM might rule that this is not possible to a normal person. In this case, Bimf could burn a relevant trait to get an attempt. If as above, he has a trait for ROGUE, the player can burn that to allow a roll. After all a normal person can't pick this master-crafted lock but surely a rogue can do just such a thing. 

This sort of thing is called a Condition and Conditions can also be met in different ways. If the Condition is that the lock is master-crafted, one way to negate the Condition might be to have someone forge you some keys or find a master-crafted set of lockpicks. 

Conditions work best if the GM is open ended in setting up the situation and scenario. It is okay to have some ideas in mind about how it can be solved, but be open to the players suggestions as well. 

Welcome to Usurper.

https://www.wargamevault.com/product/494826/Usurper-2-Procedural-Fantasy-Roleplaying 

With the release of the 2nd edition of Usurper, I wanted to talk a bit about what the game is and what the rulebook includes.

Usurper is a fantasy roleplaying game, you know with the characters and the adventures and all that. It allows you to have exciting adventures in a fantasy world with strange gods and stranger dungeons, where lords battle for control and factions knife each other in the dark. 

The core of the game is the use of traits instead of skill values and stats. Your character is described by a series of traits such as being STRONG, LOYAL TO THE CAUSE or FORESTER.
When you try to do things in the game, your traits lets you roll twice and pick the best result or attempt an action that isn’t normally possible.

Actions are resolved on the “action/event table”. This is a D100 table providing the outcome of an action. This might mean your action succeeds, it may fail with a consequence occurring or your action may even be interrupted. Everything in the game is driven by this table and it helps spur interesting, unexpected and exciting moments in the game.
You pick the lock to the tower and not only do you succeed, but you make a discovery while doing so. Maybe you overhear the guards talk about how there’s a strange package being delivered by ship tomorrow night? 

Best of all this means gameplay is math free. Roll the dice and you know what happened. If you have a relevant trait, burn it and roll again then pick the outcome you prefer. Roll and move on.

The game includes explanations of how to handle things like group tests, difficult situations and more.
Character creation can be done by simply writing down the traits and convictions you would like or can be generated randomly with a small lifepath system that generates the character in stages of their life. 

NPCs are handled very simply and make it effortless for the GM to add new characters to a campaign. Unless they are a major villain or monster, all they need is a Demeanour (Surly), Motivation (Chase off any intruders) and any Exceptions that apply (can walk on water). Random tables provide additional details if you need a more in-depth NPC.

A world builder chapter provides tables to create your game world history, building exciting cities AND allow the game to progress within that world through random events and story development. There is also a system to reflect characters working to overcome an evil overlord or similar grand quest, rooted in the mechanics.

Rounding out things you get rules for learning magic from the gods, delving into dungeons, ruling a domain and leading an army into war. 

What I want to emphasise here is that the use of random tables is not just petty detail (though we do provide a lot of flavour as well). Instead the tables are created to try to push things towards creating story opportunities: A faction changes its leadership or the evil overlord decides to subvert your allies. Every die roll (we hope!) Drives the game towards something interesting happening.

The game became a bit of a hit with solo gamers, due to the wealth of random generation included and is imminently suitable to solo gaming, when combined with a traditional RPG oracle. It is however also quite playable as a conventional game with a group of players or with one player controlling multiple characters. 

This second edition has had its text cleaned up by the tireless work of Bill Hamilton and should be much easier to use. Almost every aspect has been touched up in some way and I think you will find this to be a much clearer expression of the game and its ideas.

This is also the launch of the game as a “living” rulebook. Updates and additional material will be made available periodically and supported by Patreon. This can include things like scenarios, variant rules, a more conventional spell casting system and more.

This will also allow us to take fan feedback and suggestions into account better. 

The initial release will not feature any art work or flavour text, but will be available at a slightly reduced price. Think of this as similar to a pre-order but you are getting the full game up front and can start playing right away.

Usurper can be purchased here

You can support our ongoing projects at patreon.com/nordicweasel  

You can grab it from https://modiphius.us/collections/five-leagues-from-the-borderlands/products/five-leagues-from-the-borderlands-expansion-2-paths-in-the-wilderness-pdf or from Wargame Vault. 

It covers a vast amount of new material to add to your games, including new origins, magic options, enemies and much more. A particular emphasis this time has been the world map and making that come alive more. 

I will have a post this weekend discussing some of the new material and generally the philosophy that went into it, so stay tuned. 

As a game creator you have to hold two thoughts in your head simultaneously:

A: Everyone says they hate new editions.

B: When yo u do a new edition, everyone gets really excited.

I am not convinced that "perpetual update" / "living rulebooks" are ultimately viable though I am intending to set out to prove that they can be (through Patreon, please consider swinging by!) and if you are aiming at print first and foremost, the option is not really open to you in any event.

I wanted to just chat a bit about some of some of the motivations for a new edition, since I think from the players perspective it can be a bit opaque. (also it is not a given that a new edition costs money. When we went from Renegade Scout 1e to 2e, it was a free upgrade for example).

First you may want to significantly change a core mechanic. My gut feeling is usually that within an edition, it is okay to change up things but it should remain roughly along the same lines and principles. To use an example tweaking how often morale tests are taken or how the modifiers work is not something people will have an issue with. But changing from "break tests" to a multi-tiered morale stage system will be a pretty dramatic departure within an edition. 

My guess here is that when people know it is a new edition they are reading, they are more likely to take bigger changes in stride and give them a try, since it is a clean slate to an extent. 

Second it may be time to just pull the book apart and put it back together. A lot of wargame books have somewhat haphazard organisation and being able to go back through, reorder everything, pull in some new ideas and material and so on can be a really helpful thing. 

When doing this sort of thing within an edition, you risk bothering people who are used to looking up things in the current book ("Okay the morale rules are next to the picture of the guy with the sword"). Once again, when you signal that it is a new edition people will tend to accept that it is time to relearn a bit.

Third the game might just need an overhaul mechanically. A lot of good games will have numerous things the designer would do differently today, has changed their mind about or which just turned out to have a problem that wasn't predicted. I suppose this is another sort of maintenance update where the general approach of the game remains the same (unlike case 1 above) but you go in and root around the fine tuning of all the pieces. 

Now all of these can co-exist and most new editions feature elements of all three.

Finally there is the one nobody likes to admit but a new edition will sell copies. Updating core game rules does not ever correlate to increased sales in my experience. There is likely an indirect effect in that an updated game will stay on its players minds, but the effect is likely fairly small. Meanwhile a new book will show up on the front page of Wargame Vault and gets you a nice pile of cash immediately. It also gets a bit of talk going on the forums and message boards where gamers congregate. 

I want to see if this can be replaced through Patreon, but time will tell on that front. 

Sound off in the comments what you think.

This comes up occasionally, usually in the guise of people who want to assert they are not game designers but merely an amateur in the field. 

So then: What makes someone a game designer? 

If it is a case of simple making a game, then that's a pretty easy answer but I've talked to people who have made games and don't consider themselves game designers? 

When I started out, I don't know if I really did. I usually appended something like "beginning" or "aspiring". At some point along the way, I embraced the term but I don't know that I could say at what point or why. Maybe it was simply that it was something other people said?

So I want to turn it over to the audience: What is it to you? At what point are you a game designer? And at what point are you no longer a "beginner" or "aspiring to be" or "amateur"? 

No End in Sight is one of the earliest titles of the NWG catalogue. It was a result of trying to do a couple of things:

First there was very little in the way of platoon level cold war gaming available. Most of the games at the time were aimed at much larger battles, but I had little interest in those. My main interest has always been the platoon level, where things get personal. 

Second at the time the attitude on the forums online seemed to be that cold war gaming was mostly about turkey shoots where NATO tanks shot up legions of Soviet armour and then everyone got to knock off for tea and biscuits. 

However reading memoirs and books discussing Vietnam, Afghanistan and other conflicts made it seem clear to me that at the individual level, regardless of who is winning or losing in the grand strategic sense, it was going to be messy, grimy and nasty. I wanted a game to reflect that.

So then No End in Sight is something a bit different: Things like soldiers being pinned down, rushing across open gaps without suppressing the enemy first is a gamble as reaction fire is always a threat, the stress builds on your squad leaders as you push them, wounded soldiers have to be contended with. It's a very gritty and messy experience and yet you can run a full mechanised platoon pretty easily and on a small table. 

As a reviewer said "I recently bought No End in Sight, and I think the game better models the central problem of modern infantry combat--crossing that "deadly ground" in the face of enemy opposition---than any other game I've played"

I am slowly going through the book to update it, so this is a perfect time to check out the rules as the updated version will be available to you at no cost. 

https://www.wargamevault.com/product/135451/No-End-in-Sight-Cold-war-and-modern-platoon-combat

Since Patrons often trip people up, here is a brief overview of everything you need regarding patrons. This is also available in the FAQ on Discord, but I am getting it nicely done up by the overlords as well.

When you create your crew, they may know a number of Patrons. These are people you have done work for in the past.

In the first turn of the campaign, each known Patron will give you a job offer. This is a one time benefit to get you started. 

Normally to get a Patron job you have to take the "Find a Patron" action. Your number of known Patrons is added to the die roll for this action, so if you began the campaign with 2, you would add 2 to the roll. On a final roll of a 5 you get a job offer. This is from one of your existing known Patrons (if you have any). If the roll is a 6 or more you get an offer from an existing Patron and an offer from a new Patron. 

Patrons become known and add to future Find a Patron rolls if you accept their job and successfully complete it. 

The Patrons you begin the game with are also known automatically (You completed a job for them before the campaign started).

Once a Patron is known you can decline jobs from them without any risk. They remain known.

If you fail a job for a known Patron, they are removed from your known list ("We are concerned about your recent performance" / "we have decided to synergise with a different freelancer brand" / you blew up an orphanage for robot children).

You are allowed to accept multiple jobs at the same time, if the time limits permit. A job that isnt completed by the time limit is considered to have failed.

So a lot of arguing about AI and creative works is going on right now and a lot of it is not really all that constructive, since it seems people are often not arguing about the same things. 

I am not really here to delve into that debate. I am mostly a tech-sceptic in that I tend to assume that new technologies will end up being useful, but rarely as monumental as they are hyped up to be. And in any event there is zero reason for me to join the hype : If a new tech becomes a corner stone of our existence like the internet did, these days I am pretty content waiting for the idiot-version that actually works.

Is LLM / "AI" tech currently valuable to me as a game developer?

Well, I need to do basic internet tasks like quite a bit of email, I need to write game rules and I need to listen to heavy metal at obnoxious volumes.

Internet and email:

I answer a lot of rules questions by email. Can chat bots answer rules questions correctly? I tried a random question about patrons in Five Parsecs and it paraphrased an answer on Board Game Geek ...which itself got part of the answer wrong. 

A second test was for Rush movement in No End in Sight where it summarised the mechanic fairly accurately, then when I asked it how it got that information it corrected itself to say there is no tabletop game by that name. 

A third test was how many miniatures you need in Weasel Tech, which gave a non answer saying that you can use any miniatures you like. 

These are not scientific tests of course, but a 33% accuracy rate means I would have to go back and double check the answer instead of just taking the 10 seconds it would take to type out the right answer. And this is assuming this is not an obscure interaction where I'd have to double check the book anyways, because it is something that has literally never come up before. 

Writing game rules:

The problem here is that the LLMs basically write like a reddit idea-guy. It is often writing in very broad terms, but tends to omit the sort of detail that game rules require. A quick example asking Gemini to give me a ranged combat system for a ww2 game produces a broad overview but does not answer questions a gamer would ask, like how do I select the target, do units have to shoot at the same targets and so on. It also uses a lot of vague concepts like saying that there are modifiers but does not give exact values. The mechanics it suggested also seem to borrow from D&D and 40K quite a bit (which again fits a reddit idea-guy, not surprising since LLMs are trained on reddit posts).

Now you can continue asking questions but if I am writing this myself, I would already have answered those questions. 

This might be useful for someone who has no idea how a miniatures game works, but in that case pick up literally any rulebook or rip off Warhammer like we all did :)

You can test this for yourself pretty easily. Load up one of these systems and ask it to create you a game, then sit down to play it and see how long it takes to actually get something you can sit down to play without having to ask further questions. 

The system might have value as an idea generator. I've messed with asking it for RPG scenario ideas and some of them were not bad at all (And a few were legitimately funny), but that seems like it is just finding a way to avoid doing the fun part of writing a game. I am not sure why I would want to do that.

Conclusions?

I don't know man. I guess I am not really seeing the value for my particular niche. 

Sound off in the comments but keep it polite. I am ignoring the art portion since that is not something I am interested in. 

An area of particular interest to me is people who have an interest in miniatures gaming and might well be interested, but who are discouraged for this or that reason. So I wanted to talk a bit about some of those discussions and what my take is, possibly in a series of posts.

Please note that this has nothing to do with persuading people who are not interested at all, it is aimed at an audience who are or might well be interested, but who are concerned about a specific issue. 

It is also not applicable to every possible situation in the universe, so let's be reasonable.

Lastly it is intended to address common arguments I see made, in the interest of accuracy. 

Anyways, the most common objection I see is that miniatures gaming is too expensive / an expensive hobby.

This I cannot agree with for the simple reason that I began miniatures gaming when I had almost no disposable income and did much of my most energetic gaming during periods where my income for miniatures was extremely limited.

When I lived in Portland, we played a ton of miniatures gaming, particularly Nuts, Crossfire and Stargrunt 2. In all three cases I supplied the miniatures for both sides. 

Here is what armies for all three games cost me (using todays prices, not 15 years ago): 

Stargrunt 2: We played in 15mm. The figures in question were a mish mash of stuff but several squads from GZG were used. 

For a platoon sized game, you need 3 squads for each side and the GZG 15mm figures come in packs of 8. Looking at their website right now, it looks like 3.6 pounds per pack of 8 so that is 28.8 pounds for two armies. You will probably want to grab an extra pack for each so you might have a mortar team or a few officers, so let's call it an even 36 pounds. 

Crossfire: Again played in 15mm. I based mine with 3 figures to a base. I ended up buying two of the Battlefront platoon packs since that was more than plenty figures to fill out two battalions for Crossfire. 

Looking online, it looks like prices are all over the place but 20 dollars for a platoon seems average. We will want a few extra bits like some machine gun teams and my choice at the time was to fill in extra stuff with Peter Pig minis, which are 6.75 per pack of 8 from Brookhurst hobbies in the US. If we say 2 platoon packs and 4 extra packs of Peter Pig, we come in at around 65 dollars.

Nuts: This is even easier because we played with 1/72 scale plastics (though if you built the armies above, odds are you would have enough left over to mount up a squad or two for skirmishing).

A box of 1/72 scale plastic figures will cost between 10 and 15 dollars at the good folks over at Michigan Toy Soldier Company, so for both sides (and with more figures than you would ever know what to do with) you are probably below 30 dollars.

Conclusion:

Now this is omitting terrain since I am assuming if you are highly price sensitive, you are going with paper and felt or DIY'ing from scraps, but if you want throw in another 100 dollars on top of this to get a fun table setup with some stuff. 

That puts you at somewhere around 30 dollars on the cheapest to below 200 dollars at the high end to get started. As noted this is for fielding TWO armies so it is a complete play set. If you are doing this with a friend, halve the expense and then spend the rest on buying yourself a starter paint set.

Is that expensive? Well, that depends on the person but I think we can agree that this is hardly insurmountable.

(and this is omitting that you can play miniatures games with paper minis, on a virtual tabletop or any number of other solutions, but I am focusing here on what people usually mean when they say miniatures game). 

But but but:

When I have had this discussion in the past the objection usually comes as some sort of "but I want to play Warhammer 40.000".

Sure. If the only game you want to play is an expensive game, then it is an expensive start. But then the discussion should be "is Warhammer 40.000 expensive?", not "is Miniatures gaming expensive?". 

Your turn:

Is miniatures gaming expensive? What does your other hobbies cost? Sound off in the comments if you like.