Nukes in Scion

...should do about 50 dice of damage.

Arthur3535 at the forums eyeballed it at 50 levels, and then I did some math to confirm that he was in the right ball park.

Here's some math and notes that lead to that conclusion:

4184 terajoules in 1 megaton explosion

W = F x D

W is foot-pounds. F is force (in pounds). D is distance (in feet).

1 horsepower = 550 foot pounds

1 joule = 0.737562149277 ft·lb

1,000,000,000,000 joules = 1 terajoule

1 terajoule = 737,562,149,277 ft lbs

Epic Strength 11 can lift 1,250,000,000 pounds
and throw 125,000,000 pounds a distance equal to (Str+Ath) in yards
that distance is probably 11+5+46 = 62 yds = 186 feet

125,000,000 x 186 = 23250000000 foot-pounds of energy



0.737562149277 x 23250000000 = 17,148,319,970.69 joules
which is 0.017148319971 terajoules

that's without knacks, but obviously anyone with Epic Strength 10 is going to have a few knacks. Hurl to the moon allows you to throw that same mass as far as you can throw a dart before penalties set in. that's 30 feet times 5,000,000 from epic strength. 150,000,000 feet!

125,000,000 x 150,000,000 = 1.875e+16 foot pounds
1.875e+16 mean 18,750,000,000,000,000

0.737562149277 x 1.875e+16 = 1.38292903e+16 joules
1.38292903e+16 means 13829290300000000
which is 13,829.290298944 terajoules

13,829.290298944 divided by 4,184 is the energy equivalent of 3.3 megatons

The most powerful nuclear weapon in US service is 1.2 megatons.

The God of Strength would do around 13 dice + 46 successes with his bare hands, or as high as 26 dice + 46 successes with a by-the-books relic labrys. (And my improvised weapon system would rate the hurl-to-the-moon attack above at 11 dice + 56 successes). He does more damage than the nuke to a single target, which makes sense since his attacks could have 3.3 megatons of energy. But he doesn't have the multi-mile undodgable blast radius the nuke would presumably have.

Cool.

Here's some other things I wrote on the forums in the process of convincing myself that 50 dice is the way to go.

I'd suggest starting with Nukes. Figure out how much damage you want a nuke to do in the system, then reverse engineer everything less by plotting where it falls on the rifle to nuke scale.

In another thread, Arthur suggested 50 levels for nukes, which sounds pretty good. According to the list on page 201 of Scion, only stone walls and blast doors would survive that, and the former would have holes blown in it big enough for humans to walk through.

Epic Stamina 7 would guarantee survival... from the first blast. And as a fun bonus, anyone with Epic Strength 9+ would be able to claim they punch with the force of a nuclear device. That'd be flavorful.

Since damage dice become levels against inanimate objects, you could probably just make the nuke be an undodgable 50 dice of lethal with the penetrating tag. That'd be more than enough to fry humans - it'd be pretty rare that 50 dice doesn't turn up the 10 successes needed to kill a non-extra in riot gear. At the same time, it'd allow PCs a chance to survive as far down the power-scale as Legend 6 or so. Making it dice would seriously downgrade the killing power in regards to Gods and Titans, but it'd still be an effective weapon against the titanspawn army depicted in the wicked illustration on page 156 of Demigod.

By Legend 5 or 6, the PCs have the Epic Manipulation to get themselves an A-bomb, or the Epic Intelligence to build their own, or the Epic Physicals to rob a bank to pay off some terrorists...etc. You can't keep the PCs away from it if they want it. Sure, they probably won't want to start nuking the earth, but, they might not think twice about dirty-bombing Helheim or dropping some Atomic Depth Charges into the Drowned Road.

That's why I vote to keep Nukes in the range where a stamina-heavy god (or god-level antagonist) is almost certain to survive it.

Otherwise, the aforementioned deadman's switch starts looking like the optimal in-game tactic, and that's not the game i want to run.

and here's the explanation of the deadman's switch comment:

Or imagine a God carrying a briefcase nuke with a deadman's switch on a 1-second delay. You take a guard action till your target takes any 3 to 5 tick action, then interrupt yourself to spend 1 tick dissolving your physical form. When the bomb goes off, you're safely immaterial, but the target's still waiting a tick or two before they can react. Ugly.

Wild-Die vs Drama Die

Please forgive my calling Last Unicorn's "drama die" a "wild die" in several posts the last couple days.

I've only played ICON Star Trek once, but I've played lots of d6 Star Wars and lots of 7th Sea.

In d6 Star Wars, the Wild Die is the one that indicates critical success on a "6" and critical failure on a "1". Last Unicorn / ICON Star Trek calls that The Drama Die. In some versions of the d6 system, this die explodes.

In 7th Sea, "drama dice" are something completely different. You get them for good roleplaying, or taking cool actions. Later you spend them to boost only the most important rolls.

Because of years of those contexts, I'm likely to continue to use Wild Die and Drama Die as I first learned them. If I say "Wild Die", know that I'm referring to a die you always get to roll that is somehow special (probably involving crits) from the other dice of the roll. If I say "Drama Die" know that it's some sort of reward die or limited resource die that will probably be used sparingly.

Two Trek Links

I've been thinking about the Star Trek RPG since playing it the other day. The scenario we played was fairly fun, but the mechanics were lame. After several campaigns (in the last few years: Cyberpunk, Continuum, Amber, Scion) of very murky morality, it was refreshing to play in the "we're the good guys" Trek setting. Refreshing enough to inspire me to google the game. I found two links I felt compared to share.

1. I read up more on the mechanics here. It's a fairly critical article that briefly digests the issues of the ICON system mechanics.
   
   That article pointed out to me that we were using a house-rule in the scenario last weekend. Getting a 6 on your wild die is supposed to let you add your second-highest die to the total. Jason had us roll the wild die again and add them together. Using that house rule has two effects:
   
   1. Slows down the game by a couple extra seconds every time you roll a 6 on the wild die.
   2. Makes the non-wild dice of your pool matter less*.
      
   Now, I suspect this wasn't an intentional house-rule. Jason said it was his first time running the system, and some mistakes are to be expected when that's the case. The game's mechanics already have an unfortunate habit of making dice beyond your third nearly irrelevant, but that house-rule just made it worse. Jason struck me as a bright guy, so I imagine it was probably a misread, not intentionally altered for the worst.
   

   *= For example, let's say the captain and first mate rolled 5 dice and 3 dice respectively, and got these results:
   Kirk: 6, 5, 5, 4, 3, 1
   Spock: 6, 2, 1.
   Assume the 6's are their wild dice. Kirk's roll looks better, and by the official rules he's have a "11" total to Spock's "8", so Kirk would triumph. However, the house-rule wouldn't care about that - they'd each reroll the wild die, and have a 50-50 chance of beating the other. Having extra skill dice becomes less beneficial with that house rule.

   I can clearly say that while Jason's game left me wanting to roleplay more in the Trek universe, it (and the articles I've read on the mechanics since then) gave me no desire to play in the rules sets used by Last Unicorn. It seems mathematically flawed - as that article pointed out, Deanna Troi has a 23% chance of beating Data at arm wrestling, despite Data having super-human strength.
   



2. The second Trek-related link I wanted to point out was the Star Trek Crew Replicator. It's a cute little on-line tool that lets you build your own paper Star Trek miniatures. You pick the gender, race, skin and hair color, accessories carried, and era/uniform, and it makes you miniatures you can print out. It's very cool.

Turns out the books on my shelf are for the Decipher CODA system, not the Last Unicorn ICON system. While it looks like CODA fixes the dice-odds problem I was just complaining about, the newer system seems more fiddly than I like.
I'm not looking to simulate the minutae of the Trek technology and canonical Star Fleet hierarchy - I'm looking to capture the feel of the best Trek episodes. If I end up running a Trek game of my own someday, I'll probably make up my own lightweight set of rules. I've got a concept for how to handle starship combat...

GwenCon Recap

The last couple hours were spent posting about GwenCon. For those unfamiliar, GwenCon is a micro gaming convention that takes place in the home of Gwendolyn Kestrel and Andy Collins every year. Attendance has varied between roughly 50 and 120 people in the years we've been participating. This year seemed a little lower than the previous two years, but still pretty busy.

We attended from 5pm Friday to 1am Saturday, and then again from 11:30am Saturday to 3:00am Sunday. Much fun was had by all.

Index of blog posts about other games I played at this years' GwenCon:

• Cthulhu
• Star Trek
• Blank White Cards
• San Juan, Lost Waaagh, Zitterix, and a touch more of Are You A Werewolf?

We skipped going today. Sarah's usual bedtime is between 9 and 10 pm (and I trail just shortly after her). Last night we got home about 6 hours past that, so we were barely able to leave the house at noon today. If I'd gotten into Andy's "Something Extraordinary" scenario, that would have been worth setting an alarm, and another 2 car hours on limited sleep. Since it filled up before I could email my prereg, we decided to rest.

• (While I'm at it, I'll point you at this post about my favorite GwenCon game from last year, cause that game was just that good: League of Extraordinary Cowboys.)

Sleep isn't the only thing holding us off from Sunday, to be honest. It's also that Sunday is kid's day at Gwen Con. There's all these little rug rats running around, and a lighter schedule of almost entirely kid-friendly games. Honestly, I suspect the Kid's day on Sunday is part of why attendance is down this year. On paper, having a kid's day is a way to include families, and ensure the tykes don't show up to more adult games on the first two days of the con. However, it means the third day is less fun for those who don't have kids. Anecdotally, it seems that before there was a Kid's day, you'd end up with 2 or 3 kids at the whole event, as most gamers would send the tykes to grandma's house for the weekend. Now, instead of geeking out for a whole weekend, some parents are just coming for Sunday while non-parental gamers are avoiding Sunday. When we first started going to GwenCon, we just assumed we'd go every hour it was running, and make a mini-vacation out of it. Now, the prospect of 20 or 30 kids running around makes us think twice before driving down on the last day. One day, I may have kids of my own and reconsider that stance, but for now I'm most comfortable gaming with adults.

Werewolves Lynched

I played in 4 games of "Are You A Werewolf?" this weekend, and was a spectator at a 5th. It's hard to remember another time when so many wolves died. The Seers were hot in game after game, and despite adding the werewolf-favoring "The Twins" roles and such prone-to-backfire roles as "The Hunter" and "The Witch" the games were for the most part short, brutal, and they always ended with werewolves swaying from a rope.

GwenCon RPGs - Pure Evil

The second RPG one-shot I played in at GwenCon was Pure Evil. It was a very unique Cthulhu scenario run by Mike Lee. Rules were BRP - that is to say, he was using Chaosium's Basic RolePlaying system, not technically their Cthulhu rules. I've played a fair share of Cthulhu before, and I had a hard time telling what was different mechanically. The sanity rules were a little off (but I think that was house-ruled, not a BRP change) and the skill list was more extensive, but beyond that I couldn't spot any differences. Oh well, the system wasn't the main selling point of this particular one-shot...

We were all members of a Death Metal band called Pure Evil, playing a concert at a creepy mansion near Shreveport, Louisiana. Our last album had flopped, and we were likely going to break up after this one last pathetic little gig. While our albums were packed with satanic iconography, none of us had any reason to suspect the supernatural was real, nor any reason to approach the "mystery" from the angle of trying to solve it. Those of you with Cthulhu experience are shaking your heads already, and with good reason. Our sinister patron was using our music to summon up some horrible body-warping entity from non-euclidean space, and there wasn't a chance in hell of us stopping him.

Out of 5 PCs:

• 1 went insane.
• 2 died.
• 1 went insane, and then died.
• Only 1 PC escaped with his body and mind mostly intact.

Meanwhile, some unspeakable crystaline "god" awoke, ate 200 concert goers, and then rampaged across Louisiana, ushering in a new era of terror on the bayou.

What made the game fun was the PCs. Figuring we were doomed from the get go, we just chewed the scenery. The lead singer was constantly chasing tail, and spent half the scenario in his bedroom. The lead guitarist was a Prima Donna, constantly beleaguering us all with bitchy tirades about artistic integrity. The drummer was continuously drinking and/or snorting coke, and/or brainstorming ridiculous ideas for stage shows. The bassist was just the replacement bassist, and no one could remember his name nor give a damn what happened to him - and the little bass-playing puppy loved us for it. I played the bitter, jaded, artificially sleazy manager of the band, who was secretly siphoning the books and gambling away all the band's profits.

Everyone's character sheet indicated that they hated all the other PCs, and gave good reasons why. On some level, we felt more like a Paranoia party than a Call Of Cthulhu party.

In the end, I switched sides, sold my soul (and the band) to "The King In Black And White", and delivered the PCs up for sacrifice. They knew it both in- and out- of character, but we were all more or less okay with it. I had a blast.

My wife didn't enjoy it nearly as much as I did. She played the lead singer, doing a understated parody of lusty juvenile gamers of the "if there's any chicks there I do them" sort, without ever delivering the too-often quoted line. Watching her chase skirts made me giggle. She repeatedly put character before plot just like the rest of the band did, however, her heart really wasn't in it. She'd signed up for this event expecting a more traditional Lovecraftian problem-solving/mystery game. She'd played in two such games last year, and really enjoyed trying to puzzle them out in time to save the world, but this just didn't have the same taste.


One small criticism on my part, which despite it's seeming triviality, I just cannot stress it enough. When making a one-shot scenario, it's a really good idea to trim down the character sheets to the bare minimum necessary. The character sheet for this otherwise excellent game was a maze of tables and boxes. My character had a 17 intelligence, and I didn't notice till more than 3 hours into the scenario 'cause the sheet was too obtuse and crowded. I'd played him as kind of weak-willed weasel, when in actuality his stats made him sharp and intuitive with double the sanity points of any other character. Oops.

BRP has a ton of skills, and technically you have default ratings in things based on your ability scores. This meant that I had listed values of 30% for Artillery and Martial Arts - and no clear indicator whether or not that meant the character had some sort of military background. I had three skills listed as "Pilot", "Pilot 2", and "Flying" with no clue what the difference was - not that it mattered since all were in single-digits in a game that uses a percentile system... I wasn't about to fly anywhere even if we'd had a plane. But seriously, if there's no plane available in the scenario, why do I need to know if I have a 1% or 4% chance of flying one? Trimming about 40 skills off that list (and alphabetizing those that remained) would have made the relevant items far more noticeable and minimized player information overload.

Dissapointing Star Trek RPG Dice System

As mentioned in my previous post, I played the Last Unicorn Games' edition of the Star Trek RPG last night, and I had something to say about the game...

The dice mechanic is (in my limited experience) in a word, dumb.

You roll X number of d6's, and use just the highest, then add Y. X is determined by your Attribute + SubAttribute + Advantages. Y is determined by your Skill + Specialization + Advantages.

The only thing shaking this up was that each roll gets one wild die that can explode. But of course, it does so only 1 time in 6 and typically results in a +50% increase when it happens.

My Vulcan Chief Engineer rolled 5d6 for most science or engineering rolls, which almost always meant his best number was a 6. I then had 3's in nearly every tech skill/specialization, so I rolled a very consistent "9" for my final value. Out of probably 15 or 20 rolls for the evening, I had one "7", one "12" and the other 14 to 18 rolls were all "9"s. Since the most common difficulty was 9, and generally no benefit for rolling above the difficulty, it felt like the dice were irrelevant.

It is very unclear to me what they were trying to model. Not even Commander Data was ever that consistent.

I'm not sure I see the value of a system that leaves so little room for variance, yet requires so many layered dice-modifiers to get there - the same thing could have been accomplished by "roll a single d6, and just hope you don't get a 1" or by a far more elegant diceless mechanism of some sort. Why have all the extra bells and whistles if most don't matter at all?

One of my fellow players rolled 5 dice on something and got four 6's (and a 2) which caused him to cheer! However, since his wild die was the lone non-six, it didn't explode. His skill and specialization only added +2, bringing his total to an 8, and he needed a 9 to succeed. Having "the whiff factor" on a roll that elicited an instinctual cheer was really frustrating, and led to us all wondering why we even roll anything but the wild die.

I've got two Star Trek RPG books on my shelf. We've never played, but we like the show (well, some of them) and so held on to the books just in case we ever get a Trek itch. Now I need to look more closely at them. If the core mechanic is such a let-down, it may not be worth keeping the books.

GwenCon RPGs - Star Trek

I played in two 4-hour one-shots last night. The first was a Star Trek RPG scenario run by Jason Anderson (-sen?).

He was using the Last Unicorn Games edition, with some elaborately upscaled starship combat rules. This game was heavily into the Simulationist style of play.

He had print outs of what we saw on our tactical stations and view-screens, and had printed out sensor read-outs for every scan type we could do in every scene. The goal to that was to eliminate the annoyance of "bridge crew parrot-ism." That's the phenomenon where a player asks the GM what the sensors say, the GM answers them, and then the PC has to repeat what the GM said to the rest of the group. Something similar occurs in all RPGs with "the party" organization, but the nature of Trek really draws attention to it. One or two "what he said" comments are all most games need, but for a Trek bridge crew, it'll happen 10 times per scene.

The hand-out heavy work-around functioned quite well for a linear one-shot game. We'd say what we're scanning for, and he'd toss us the appropriate clipping, from which the Science Officer (or whoever) would draw a conclusion and pass on the info in-character. Between that and the sound-effects on the GM's laptop, he did a stellar job of creating the feel of being on the bridge of a Federation Vessel. Kudos to Jason, "A" for effort, etc.

However, I imagine that system would have broken down heavily if the PCs had somewhat more nebulous goals and/or the freedom to fly the ship outside of mission parameters. I'm glad to have had the experience of seeing it in motion, but overall I doubt it was worth all the additional effort on the GM's part. It also made us feel somewhat "railroaded". Having clearly defined goals isn't a bad thing on 4-hour one-shot, but I've known some players that would have rebelled over the principle of the thing. Luckily, they weren't at our table.

I've toyed with a similar approach to GMing before, and learned a lot from this example - but mostly I learned that the extra work isn't worth it.

The game had an overall much higher level of detail than was needed. We had a one-page "transfer of duty" assignment papers hand-out, plus a full page character background sheet, plus a 2-page crew roster, plus a 1-to-6-page handout that explained our role (and options) in starship combat, plus a very busy character sheet with lots of skill entries, specializations, ad/disad-vantages... While that wouldn't be too much for a long-term game, it was an awful lot to have to process before the action could start (especially with a 4-hour time slot).

Starship combat involved maneuvering, power allocation, shield modulation and so much number-crunching that the GM had built a separate excel spreadsheet for each ship, which did all the math you'd never want to do mid-battle. While I was very impressed with the amount of work (and attention for detail) that had obviously gone into the scenario and systems, I couldn't help but wonder if it was necessary.

In a one-shot, simply getting the feel of a Star Trek episode is probably more important than "realistic" devotion to the specs of an Excelsior-class vessel. There was so much detail we couldn't parse it all, and not enough time to really appreciate what we were given. My advice for one-off games: simplify and reduce. Less really is more.

GwenCon Ate Blank White Cards

At the start of Day 2 of Gwen Con '08, I hosted Blank White Cards. I organized two different 2-hour blocks of it.

• The first game was a very low-scoring game. I won, with a measly 47 points. Sarah (my wife) was 2nd place with 12 points. Mike Lee was 4th, at -200, and Aaron Cooke was 5th at -350. My favorite score was Logan Bonner's 3rd place total of -192.8541 points.
• The reason for the low scores in that game was a card I made in the pre-game card generation called "Orky Maff" - it overruled all positive scoring cards to cap them at no more than +6 points. It's a GW Ork reference. This dropped everyone's scores by a ton, till it got killed by a card Logan made named "Elfin Math". But then later, another card was used by Sarah to resurrect Orky Maff, 'cause Logan's score was getting far ahead of everyone. The point of the game isn't really to win, but cards that jostle the whole table's scoring tiers are always appreciated.
• The second 2-hour block had more traditional scores. Kevin Smith (not the famous one) won with 900 points (Clown-filled Manicotti FTW). 2nd place was Aaron Curtis at 701 points, Jennifer Clark-Wilkes was 3rd at 220pts. I and my wife filled out the bottom of the rankings at -150 and -444 points respectively.
• Logan Bonner made really fun cards, by the way - he had us drawing mustaches on existing cards, shouting "Hey you guys!" at the top of our lungs, and doing other goofy stuff.
• Aaron Cooke had a great illustrative touch. He cards look really sharp, and it reminded me of playing with my friend Jeremy back in Albuquerque. (Jeremy's cards have traditionally been the most artistic and grokkable, cards that you just love to have in your deck. Comparing Aaron's to Jeremy's is a high compliment for the new player.)
• There's a natural tendency for each consecutive game of Blank White Cards to get stranger and more complicated. Game 1 always has lots of elegant "just points" cards, while subsequent games get more and more text-based cards. That really bit us in the 2nd 2-hour block. Sarah and I were unintentionally making more advanced cards, but 2 of the 3 other players were just learning the game. The error of our ways became obvious when both those players used a rule on a card to intentionally make themselves lose a turn so they'd have time to figure out what all the other cards in play did. By that point, it was hard to undo the damage. If I host it again next year, I'll run only one 2-hour block per day.
  

If there's interest, I'll take some photos of at least a few of the cards and post them here later this week.

Last night at Gwen Con

GwenCon Ate started last night. Here's what I played:

1. San Juan - I really enjoy this card game. Why have I only been playing it yearly? At one time I was pretty good, but my old strategy failed me last night. Three games (4 players in each) resulted in me coming in 3rd, 2nd, and 3rd. Two things I noticed:
   
   • All of us got better the more we played in a row. 1st place was in the high 20s on game 1, low thirties in game 2, and low fourties in game 3. The 4th place score was always in the 20s, but went up about 4 points per game.
   • Despite that obvious anecdotal evidence that practice improves your skill, the game still feels incredibly random. To win the game you need certain "combos" - there's a production strategy and at least two different "violet" strategies you can choose from - but in two of the three games I failed to ever draw key cards for those strategies. In the third game I did get what I needed, but was barely beaten (mostly because I chose to play a free building that was low-points early on, and should have held out for better).
2. Lost Waaaaaaaaaaaaagh! I just barely got my Orky 'Eresy scenario assembled in time to run it. For a crazy light-hearted game of 40k Orks and references to ABC's lost, I needed rules that were fast-playing, easy-to-explain, and encouraged crazy orky hijinks. That wasn't going to happen with Dark Heresy's rules, so a lot of elbow grease got applied. Overall the scenario went well, the four Orky PCs got off the island, and everybody laughed repeatedly. I'll furnish more details (and character sheets) in the next couple of days, but right now I have to get ready for Day Two of GwenCon.
3. Zitterix: Weird little manual-dexterity game. Kinda like pick-up stix, but with a stronger game element and occasionally a tactical decision to be made.
4. Are You A Werewolf? Only played one game, since we had a long drive home. 2 werewolves in town, and the villagers managed to lynch them on days 1 and 2!
   

We're off to Day Two of Gwen Con Ate, where-in I will host several rounds of Blank White Cards, and play in a couple of RPGs.