GACKS AAR: Week 13/Post Mortem

GACKS AAR: Week 13/Post Mortem

In the last post, I mentioned that my campaign was approaching an organic conclusion and specified that it wasn't going to collapse. I lied. It did collapse prematurely, so it's time for a post mortem. I have to analyze what worked and what didn't work, and try to understand why it didn't work. In addition, I'll share some fun stuff that wasn't public knowledge.

First, let's see the few SEEN posts that the week produced:

Fall of Shimmerleaf

Shimmerleaf with its weakened garrison was assaulted by a combined army of ogres commanded by a blue-skinned ogre mage from the south and the fainil from the north. Explosives dropped by the night flyers from the sky allowed the armies to breach the gates. The glimmerfolk fought valiantly and desperately, trying to let the civilians escape northward, toward the portal in the woods. Not many managed to evacuate, with most being slaughtered, some captured, and some scattered among the forest.

Thyhalera Mobilizes

Some things cannot be kept secret. The night flyers are gearing up for war along with the orcs of Clan Uggrit. Scouts report that in a month's time there will be at least a hundred of new fainil warriors and twice as many orcish ones.

Moroshi is thinking a lot

Monster slayer Moroshi has sealed himself inside his camp. They say he refuses to speak with anyone. The few outsiders who were allowed into the camp have been turned away. Among the ogres, word spreads that their leader is searching for some kind of artifact.

Stirrings in the Lake

The joint forest re-planting force of Or-Tabram and Mossgrove reports strange sightings from the lake: Bands of strange scaly folk emerging from the lake and wandering into the western forest, dragging with them wooden carts, slick and green with algae. They seemed to disappear among the foliage, only to re-emerge some time later with the carts filled with bodies. The foresters report feeling unnaturally cold upon seeing the strange beings, the hair on the back of their necks standing on end.

Roadblock

After their great victory against a coalition of "do-gooder trash" hobgoblins become active in the east. They join Clan Uggrit in controlling the eastern road and bullying the travelers leaving Or-Tabram.

Bridge Burning

The bridge spanning the river between Mossgrove and Shimmerleaf has been burned down!

Bridge Burning #2

Very soon after the first bridge being set ablaze, the bridge between Mossgrove and Or-Tabram lands burned down as well.

Sabotage!

Explosions rock the foundations of Thyhalera. The extent of the damage is unclear, and the perpetrator is unknown, but something clandestine definitely happened there.

At the same time, Or-Tabram's gate and watchtower blow up, with the remains burning brightly. Whatever is happening surely is merely the beginning of something more sinister.

Faction List

As you can see, things were heating up (both literally and figuratively), but the influx of orders and miscommunication between the players and the referee made me throw in the towel. So, let me give you a quick rundown of the various player-controlled factions and their most notable deeds. Then, I'll get to the problems.

Or-Tabram

This was a small fortress town of dark dwarves who were all about guns and explosives. Being one of the major factions of this milieu, Or-Tabram was central to the action, and the game conc- I mean fell apart when the fortress was sabotaged and about to get raided. The player was extensively using construction rules from LTC3 with minimal input from me, which is nice. In addition, we managed to use the invention rules (without Gadgeteer/Quick Gadgeteer) and successfully so. Turns out that when you're a faction, the enormous sums of money that one needs for various facilities and prototypes actually are quite affordable.

The leader, Baridmun Drakedigger, was a competent commander with Strategy (Land)-14 who led armies personally, but was never in grave danger due to good dice luck.

Sky Riders

Barbarian human tribes that started out neutral towards the dwarves ended up allying with them quickly. The Sky Riders suffered from a poor geographical position of their capital "town" of Wolfhome that was open to every danger possible. They boasted quite a formiddable army, but despite that were first ones to fall to the fainil of Thyhalera and their proxies. In part, this was due to certain unpolished mechanics, but horrible dice luck played a role as well. For the most part, I have no complaints about the faction - the controlling player was the one who interacted with the adventurer party the most, which is a very good things for a patron to do.

Glimmerfolk

The glimmerfolk of Shimmerleaf were very passive. They got some interesting domain encounters, including a semi-permanent portal to the Quasielemental Plane of Radiance, but nothing really materialized from that. The glimmerfolk themselves also are a rather uninteresting race with their main thing being xenophobia, which makes interaction with others less likely than usual, and Braunsteing need interaction to work. Shimmerleaf had a lot of good troops, but aside from utterly destroying a scouting party of Thyhalera at the start of the game, they were only used once, when the controlling player unwittingly sent them into a trap.

Steelwing Company

A merchant company that made its headquarters in Or-Tabram, led by Master Corvin Dresk, who was secretly a juvenile steel dragon in human form. He was trying to play both sides in every conflict, trading with goblins, fainil, and even ogres behind dwarven backs. The secret got revealed when his exploration party got ambushed by orcs, and Dresk had no choice but to reveal his draconic nature and almost die in the process of fleeing.

This faction was not ordinary because it had no "population." How does one assign income then? At first, I tried to calculate it as a 10% of wages of all his merchants, but this soon proved to be unsustainable - the leader of the merchant company was the poorest one among the factions. Then, I introduced a placeholder replacement method based on the population of settlements he's trading with that produced more sensible results, but that likely would be full of holes once you scale it up.

Mossgrove

Forest gnomes of Mossgrove, who secretly lived in the woods near Or-Tabram. I was quite excited about this faction, because while the gnomes themselves were horrible at combat, their innate ability to speak and empathize with animals made it so all domain encounters that result in animals would simply join their ranks. No such encounters were rolled. Bummer.

Goblins

This was the first faction that became player-controlled. A random encounter rolled by the PC party resulted in a ~400 strong goblin lair. The player did his best, but eventually succumbed to a battle that he had practically no chance of winning. Braunsteins aren't fair. And it's a shame, because he had some fun plans set in motion that didn't reach their final stage due to the destruction of the faction. The goblins managed to intercept a dwarven messenger, capture him, and then had one of the shamans cast Programmed Amnesia to brainwash him into an utterly loyal spy who would report everything that was going on in Or-Tabram. Every time he did so, I made a roll to see if he gets spotted relaying this intel, and every single time he remained unnoticed. Some captured human mercs also were brainwashed like that, and plenty of dwarves would've joined them if not for the destruction of the camp.

The player also provided plenty of opportunities for interaction with the PC party. At the start of the game, he persuaded a bunch of scrags to intercept Sky Rider boats that try crossing the lake, and that became very much relevant during one of the sessions.

Zaesi

A deep dragon leading a small criminal syndicate from an underground lair a few miles away from Or-Tabram. This was the perfect opportunity to test out the hijinks from ACKS II and how they would fare in GURPS (with very much mixed results, more on that later). Zaesi had a simple goal of amassing a hoard fit for a dragon, and she indeed has accumulated more wealth than some other factions. She interacted with Or-Tabram and the Steelwing Company in dwarven form under different false personae. Since I'm a dumbass, I forgot that deep dragons have a constant true sight at any age category. Thus, Zaesi was supposed to know that she's talking to a steel dragon way earlier than the rest of the factions. Her entire syndicate got almost revealed twice due to some hilarious coincidences.

Zaesi played a pivotal role in the fall of the goblin faction. When a joint army was walking towards the goblin camp, Zaesi rolled a random encounter and got two fomorians, whom she persuaded into attacking the goblins. The fomorians instead attacked the underground portion of the attacking force instead of the goblins, because those were in the way. Zaesi herself, however, ordered to have herself quickly and shoddily painted bronze with some pigments. Nothing that would fool a perceptive observer. She attacked the goblins with a wyvern ally, fighting on the side of the joint army. In the SEEN post, I stressed that it's a bronze-colored, sinous dragon that spewed acid from above, and I've been confronted by the players who said that bronze dragons breathe electricity, not acid, and that I made a mistake. Some players believed that I meant a copper dragon, and it became a copper dragon in their headcanon. Some thought that it might've been some kind of lung dragon. Others thought that it's a bronze dragon ally of the Sky Riders (who do have dragon shamans with a bronze dragon totem, which is a fact that was unknown to Zaesi - another fun coincidence). She helped against the goblins, appropriated a large portion of the loot, and hid away, never showing her draconic form again.

Balyrd

This is a deep halfling settlement that came into being from a random encounter roll. It was given to one of the PC players to give a taste of faction play. It happened late into the campaign's lifespan, so nothing consequential arose from it. However, the player asked a very important question that none of the other players did - more on that later. Also, this random encounter made me learn that D&D 3.5 Monster Manual deep halflings, AD&D 2e stout halflings, and Forgotten Realms strongheart halflings are the same thing.

Anuchu

A small tribe of beastmen (some kind of fox/wolfmen from an obscure Dragon Magazine article) that like Balyrd came into play too late to play a significant role. That's a shame.

Thyhalera

The main antagonist and force of evil of this region. A fortress of the fainil - winged drow-tanar'ri hybrids from another world. They had plenty of slaves at their disposal in the form of goblins, orcs, ogres, and later bullywugs as well. In addition, they had some demons on their side and a demonologist who got an attempt at summoning and binding a new demon once a week. Run by a notorious Dominions diplomancer, this faction conducted a lot of subversive and clandestive activity. Flocks of quasits (more on that later, oh boy) were flying all over the map, infiltrating everything. Interestingly, some of them got caught by the dwarven priests right at the start, but the dwarven player ignored that until much later. Succubi were also sent to inflitrate the major factions. A proxy faction of orcs - clan Uggrit was formed. So, the fainil proceeded to create fake camps, sell fake intel, have their scouts lead barbarians into ambushes, create cults, etc. That was certainly the most active players, and one who gave so many orders, that I simply had no time to resolve them all adequately.

Once the dwarves of Or-Tabram understood that their halls are infested by quasits, they used their one or two priests with true sight to root them out. This also prompted to succubi to bail and hastily forge and plant some papers about smuggling wares for the glimmerfolk. Due to the investigation of fake smugglers, real smugglers (Zaesi's syndicate) almost got uncovered, and due to the priests looking for quasits, the draconic nature of Dresk and Zaesi also almost got uncovered by accident.

One thing that I found hilarious was that the Thyhalera player sent four barbarians (after conquering said barbarians) with some gems to sell and fake intel into the Steelwing Company, and the Steelwing's controlling player believed that he was talking to the PC party, unwittingly enriching the drow. I was used to PC players thinking that every faction is player-controlled, but not the other way around.

Ogres

Controlled by the eliminated goblin player, the ogres came into being mid-game, and they were much more than they seemed at the first glance. Initially, I wanted to have the ogres being led by an ogre mage, but knowing the player's appreciation of all things psionic, I decided to spice things up. There once was the Ecology of the Ogre Mage article in one of the late Dragon Magazine issues, where in a small box, two ogre mage subraces were introduced - the shadow magic-wielding ogre umbramage and the psionic cereborg. Thus, the blue-skinned ogre mage was replaced by the purple-skinned bald cereborg. Just like most of the other faction leaders, he had no full character sheet, but I did roll his stats, psionic abilities, talents, and psionic skill randomly. Moroshi, the cereborg, had IQ 15, which is higher than even the dragon players had, and he had a peculiar set of psionic abilities. First, he had Mind Clouding which made it possible for him to sneak into places unnoticed by removing himself from the perception of others. Second, he has Light Ray, which is a boring, but effective ranged attack. Finally, he had a Psi-Realm - a house-sized pocket dimension that he could open a portal to at any time.

How do you even use this ability in a conventional game? Probably like a backpack. Here, however, he always had a retinue of ~10 ogre barbarians at hand at all times, and he could release them, for example, in the midst of a town by sneaking inside via Mind Clouding.

Moroshi pretended to be a stupid ogre bent on monster hunting who did some monster lair clearing for the dwarves in exchange for heavy armor for his ogres. Mind that ogres hit hard, but are quite vulnerable, and they couldn't forge good armor themselves. Dwarves (and fainil) were happy to help outfit the ogres with heavy armor to turn them into very dangerous fighters, and Moroshi was planning to stomp out the dwarves with them. The first quest he received was to clear out the lair of a mohrg who was bothering the PC players at first, and then the dwarven faction. He did what was asked of him, but instead of destroying the mohrg, he captured it and placed it into his Psi-Realm, feeding it a stream of various captives. Any humanoid killed by a mohrg rises as a zombie in several days, so Moroshi accumulated a sizeable undead force as a result that he could release anywhere he wanted.

I have no idea why everyone was trusting Moroshi. The Steelwing Company eventually sent the ogre force to help the anuchu fight off the hobgoblins. The glimmerfolk sent in half of their entire army to help. Moroshi coordinated a traitorous attack with the fainil and the hobgoblins and opened his Psi-Realm in the middle of the battle, releasing his undead army and then increasing it with new captives.

In addition, the ogres were the wealthies faction, because Moroshi was sitting on ~$500K and some magic gear, which was more than the hoards of both dragon players combined.

Moroshi was such a fun character.

What went right

1:1 timekeeping is wonderful. Having factions under player control makes you understand just how idle factions usually are in conventional games, and drastically change the feel of the game. The game world becomes alive, and only by trying 1:1 time and faction play together you can understand just how big of a difference it makes. All the various PC-tier procedures for wilderness exploration, dungeon exploration, random encounters, weather, etc. worked almost perfectly. It is surprising, but all these random results seemed to create a more-or-less coherent region of the world. Even Appendices A and B worked well, even though some on-the-fly GURPSifications were needed for Appendix A.

GURPS Mass Combat proved to be a good way to quickly resolve battles, even though there were some hiccups.

Braunstein as a game concept worked well, and you could see its full potential. My execution of it, however, was far from perfect.

What went wrong

Everything else, basically. Let's get to the bulk of this post.

Braunstein Type

Initially, I pitched this game as a stress test for me as a referee and the unholy amalgam of GURPS and ACKS II as the system. It was pitched as a game where faction give weekly orders, with communication between players being possible between the orders. Thus, this was intended to be a Type II Braunstein. I don't know when exactly, but when the players started issuing orders, I thought "Why don't I resolve these now and get a batch of new orders? That should move things along faster." I ended up on a slippery slope, and Type II Braunstein quickly became a Type III Braunstein, also known as the Always On Braunstein, notorious for eating DMs alive via burnout.

At first, I thought "huh, this isn't stressful at all," but a couple of months later I was starting to welcome the sweet relief of my final breath with an open heart. I was dreading new orders, especially taking into account that I only had ~2 hours of screentime every day to resolve them. I was simply swamped, and had no time to adequately resolve everything. Players were patiently waiting, pinging me if I forget something, but I still forgot some orders or just couldn't resolve something in time. UMBROS and Brozer weren't lying about the burnout. Well, at least now I know that I failed the stress test. I understand that this stems from players being enthusiastic about the game, there's (hopefully) no malicious intent there.

The lesson here is simple - stick to what you pitched, dumbass.

Scale

I was starting this game with the intention to test out 1:1 time and all the various procedures (see "What went right" above). I wasn't even intending to introduce the faction layer. I simply asked a friend to control the goblins for a bit, and then it snowballed into a full-fledged faction Braunstein and it felt like a natural thing to do.

Thus, the regional map was small in scale and used 1.5-mile hexes. This was intended to facilitate detailed wilderness exploration and travel for the PC party. For that purpose, it worked well. However, the factions and points of interest were clumped very closely together. On one hand, this did facilitate conflict, but on the other hand, it allowed for basically no time to react to actions of your opponents, because armies usually could reach you within a day. On this scale, precise calculations of army travel time often wasn't necessary, and coupled with the scouting/recon problem that I will be talking about below, this created some very one-sided engagements. If I were doing detailed army travel, tracking the exact position of each army, it would become even more unmanageable, because a hex could be covered in an hour or even faster. And then the players would get mad and send me messages like "Why did we even fight? If my army would've noticed his, we would've turned to the southeastern hex to avoid engagement and strike the undefended base."

It seems that 1.5-mile hexes work well for PC parties (although even this can be argued), but for strategic activities, 6-mile hexes should work much better.

The scale problem doesn't end on hex sizes. As the region was created with the intent of turning PCs into faction-tier players, there was a lot of wilderness and only several small settlements. If you've read my after-action reports, you might've imagined mighty armies clashing together, but in reality this was closer to a few villages duking it out. With such tiny settlements, the faction players had very few resources - the mercs were very few, the specialists were almost nonexistent, and so were henchmen and other hirelings. "Eggplant, I want my armorers to forge 80 sets of plate armor. Wait, are you saying I have an armorer and that I am lucky to have one at all? These 80 sets are going to take 11 years to forge?" To do stuff, one has to have someone to do the stuff with, and the small scale made a lot of fun interactions impossible. And with such tiny settlements, PC players would've had a lot of trouble selling their loot.

Poor Region Choice for a Braunstein

Yet again, I will reiterate that the region was made to test out exploration mechanics by the PC party. It wasn't made with a proper Braunstein in mind. Because of that, the majority of the factions were "neutral" on the alignment chart. Barbarians are neutral with a lean toward chaos, the dark dwarves are neutral with a lean toward chaos, the fainil are clearly chaotic evil, and the glimmerfolk are very neutral and xenophobic (wow, a faction that looks to avoid contact with other is not a good idea for a Braunstein.) The fainil are the clear villains here, but there is no force of good to be found. Imagine if I hadn't found a player to control the fainil. What would've happened then? I think the scenario would've fizzled out even quicker than it actually did, because all the factions would just turtle up and play solitaire, with their SEEN posts merely providing background to the PC party. That'd be subpar, to say the least. I'm lucky that I got a very active fainil player that basically was the driving force behind the entire Braunstein, forcing others to cooperate to take him down. Still, it would've been nice to have at least one good-aligned faction in there.

Telepathy

While most other problems deal with more abstract concepts, this one is a mechanical GURPS problem. In D&D, most demons and devils have telepathy to, presumably, tempt mortals and circumvent the language barrier. In 3.5e, the range of telepathy is 60-120 feet. When converting these creatures to GURPS, I translated this ability as Telesend (Magical, -10%; Universal, +50%) [42], but I really didn't think it through. You see, Telesend in GURPS requires an IQ roll to establish contact, and the roll takes a long-distance penalty. There is no cost or other consequence for failure, so as long as your IQ after all the penalties is 3 or higher, you can just keep rolling and rolling until you succeed. And you can maintain multiple contacts too! After a telepathic contact is established, no further concentration is necessary.

Thus, when the fainil player posted an order that details a telepathic communication network, where babau demons and succubi would be placed in strategic locations to serve as telepathic relay stations for quasits, I realized that I unintentionally made Thyhalera nigh-omniscient. I mean, the plan does work and is clever. My policy was to avoid major changes during the game, so I elected to allow this and rework telepathy later.  Let me tell you, the other players were quite upset with me due to the fainil always somehow knowing where the traps are, where the troops are moving, and what's going on everywhere, as they believed that that was my screwing them over and/or forgetting rules, and not the work of another player who was also sharing the intel with his allies. Eventually, the players uncovered the quasit spies and came up with some limited countermeasures, but that was a bit too late. (The forest gnomes and anuchu had plenty of dogs who could smell invisible quasits, so they were the only ones who didn't get spied on.) This goes on to showcase how a seemingly minor ability can significantly affect the entire Braunstein scenario.

Battle Rating Calculation

For this campaign, instead of using GURPS Mass Combat as is, with premade troop elements with their own preset TS (Troop Strength), I opted to calculate BR (Battle Rating) for every Monstrous Compendium entry. It wouldn't change the resolution mechanics in any way, but would provide much more granularity. The formula for BR calculation was taken from ACKS (an automated spreadsheet, of course), and I came up with a way to convert GURPS values to ACKS stats for this formula that seemed to provide decent results. I was very wrong, it's all fubar. Many troops that are good in personal combat with regular GURPS combat rules are awful in mass combat, and the inverse is true for some as well. The formula also values special abilities way too much, inflating BR of some creatures with somewhat minor magical powers. Flight increases BR massively, and flight also should count as a special ability that would increase BR even further. I opted to ignore the special ability part of the flight bonus because GURPS Mass Combat counts Air Superiority differently, but even without it, the "Flying" formation produced unreasonable results. For example, the vrock has BR 0.228, while a regular soldier is in the ballpark of BR 0.005. Remember the PCs downing a vrock in two seconds during a battle? That was worth 45.6 men. This creates a great disconnect between the different layers of combat resolution and may create incentives for players to, for example, amass large numbers of certain creatures to force mass combats because mass combat stats of these creatures are much better than the actual stats. This feels wrong.

In addition, there is a secondary effect of wages being based on BR. Thus, the fainil had to be paid a ton of money due to their wings. On the other hand, some creatures with very low BR would require abnormally low wages. Sure, a halfling isn't a good soldier, but a monthly wage of $40 isn't enough to feed oneself! This is a problem of verisimilitude, not game balance.

Another problem was that the cumbersome formula was hidden to the players. Thus, there were several instances of "Eggplant, how would BR and wage change if I were to train my troops to have their skill level higher by 1? What if I give them 1 point in Crossbow? What if I replace maces with axes?" On one hand, I could just say no and force them to use whatever Monstrous Compendium entries they have access to, but on the other hand - why not? Recalculating this stuff takes a while and in a huge pain in the ass, especially when you know that this entire thing will need to be reworked after the game, and essentially is a wasted effort. Also, why does wage suddenly change when you get better gear?

What can be done about it? I have the following options.

1. Just use GURPS Mass Combat. It doesn't matter if you have elven infantry with spears, human barbarians with greatswords, or goblins with crude clubs - they all will be light infantry, possibly with cheap/fine gear and/or high/low troop quality. That does make things simple, but preserves the disconnect between the layers of combat resolution that I outlined above. In addition, this approach would force me to use standardized troop elements of 10 soldiers or 5 cavalrymen, etc. and prevent me from using individual soldiers.

2. Come up with my own formula that doesn't require 7 levels of conversion between systems and is based on GURPS assumptions. (And no, Combat Effectiveness Rating from Pyramid won't work for that.) This isn't an easy task for sure, but if you've been following my work, you know that I'm not averse to difficult tasks. Also, I have people helping me, and that's great. I'm gravitating to this option, even though it's one that requires a lot of work. This is a major problem that needs to be fixed before I start Eggstein II.

Character Advancement

During the entire campaign, there was only 1.5 instances of character advancement. One time, a PC improved a skill by spending an earned character point, money, and time on a teacher, and near the end, Moroshi was using self-teaching to improve his psionic skills, but then the campaign ended before he finished. The reasons for all this stagnation seems to be the following:

1. PCs died a lot.

2. PC players wanted to get into the action as quickly as possible with the same characters, so they simply forfeited the training opportunities in favor of healing/recovering.

3. PCs hadn't brought enough loot to earn extra character points. I don't think this is my fault, that was mostly bad luck. For example, in the mohrg dungeon, the PCs explored everything except the rooms with treasure (and then it got looted by Zaesi).

4. Faction leaders had no clear guidelines for earning character points at all. That's my fault.

What should I do about it? First, I have to present clear guidelines for character advancement. A player cannot have his character advance if he doesn't understand how to do it. Second, I might need to accelerate the training a bit, but I'm still not 100% sure about that. In addition, due to the region being an absolute backwater, few teachers were even available, which doubled the training time and made it less attractive of a choice.

PC-Faction Interaction

I wish there was more interaction between the faction players and the PC players, but in retrospect, I see that faction players did want to interact and send PCs on quests, but either the PCs kept dying, or the problem was dealt with by other factions. The map was small, the points of interest were known to most factions, so things were cleared out fast. I think that a larger scale will fix this issue.

Character Generation

Point buy character creation, the hallmark of GURPS, is a detriment in these games. Even my half-baked random character generators seemed to provide better and more diverse results. In this campaign, I made random generation optional, and only about a half of the players opted for that. The rest made their characters themselves. When characters died, they made new ones and those often looked almost like carbon copies of their old ones. We had a barbarian ranger with a repeating crossbow and bolas who died and got replaced by a barbarian ranger with a repeating crossbow and bolas - literally his brother. A warhammer-wielding, super strong barbarian clad in layered armor with the outer layer covering only the front got replaced by the same character, but a glimmerfolk. In that case, were there any consequences of the characters dying? Before the next attempt at running a Braunstein, I will rework my random character generation approach and enforce its usage. Perhaps, "players deserve less" also refers to choices during character generation.

One PC Party

There was only one PC party active at the same time, which made competition between different parties practically impossible. It seems that this should be a major aspect of the campaign. I simply had no other in-person players to run another party at the same time, nor did I have enough stable free time to run another party online. Next time, I hope that I will be able to run at least two parties or bully somebody into becoming the second referee.

System Mismatch

When starting out on my journey of preparationg for a GURPS/ACKS Braunstein, I stumbled on BDubs's blogpost about ACKS II not being a perfect system for that. I thought "How come? It has everything one might need for that!" and failed to understand the criticisms. Now that I've given some of the procedures a try, I can see that BDubs was absolutely correct. While ACKS II seems like a polished, perfected system for a conventional game, in Braunsteins, it begins to struggle in some areas.

For example, some procedures are written with a single party of PCs in mind. Even though buying/selling stuff on the market assumes one party being able to only buy X items, two parties splitting up and buying X*2 items, and the absolute maximum being X*10, the question of a faction leader buying things from his own market remains unanswered. If the dark dwarf faction player wanted to buy up all the available shattersand (alchemical black powder equivalent), does he buy X lbs. or X*10 lbs.? What if there is not one, but two different actors trying to do exactly the same thing? What about hirelings and mercenaries? I appreciate ACKS having rules that let you determine how many artisans, laborers, etc. are available, but it's unclear if this is yet again per-party or a total amount. Also, tying GURPS skills to these artisans and hirelings sometimes was not very obvious.

Speaking of buying/selling, certain GURPS aspects didn't overlay well on the Market Class concepts of ACKS. For example, you can buy X items in the price range of $1-$40. A crossbow bolt costs $2. These items are treated as being sold in batches of 20. Thus, you can buy X batches of 20 bolts. That sounds fine. But what if you wanted to buy 20 Fine crossbow bolts? These cost $6 a piece and fall into the same price range. So, you can buy X batches of 20 regular bolts and X batches of 20 Fine bolts? If we go even further, we could buy X batches of Balanced bolts, X batches of Cheap bolts, X batches of Balanced Fine bolts, etc. Does an axe and a double-bitted axe count as the same item? You see the issue here, right? Armor is also sold piecemeal in GURPS, so, if you don't adjust the rules, you can have an armorsmith tell the PCs "Sorry, we only got one plate breastplate, but we can sell you 50 plate codpieces." This needs to be taken into account. I already know how to deal with piecemeal armor, but the rest is still under construction.

Zaesi, the leader of the crime syndicate, also tried out some hijinks described in ACKS II RR. A successful smuggling hijink lets the perpetrator smuggle X gp worth of some ware, and 10% of the earnings go to the syndicate leader. The smugglers smuggled multiple tons of dried meat, fish, etc. with each attempt, earning Zaesi money, but this did not affect the dark dwarven faction at all! Considering the small size of the settlement, the smuggling should've significantly affected income of the faction, prompting the faction leader to investigate what's going on. Without it, these hijinks were simply printing gold pieces out of thin air, with smuggling being merely flavor, and the ware type playing no role at all. Also, I have no idea where a settlement of 2,000 got like ~50 tons of grain to be smuggled.

In addition to all of the above, some procedures, including smuggling, are uninteractive. The perpetrator makes a roll and manifests money. In a conventional game, that's fine, I guess. In a Braunstein, where the smugglee is another player, what can he do to counteract smuggling? In GURPS terms, this must be a contested roll of some sort, but against what skill/attribute/value? Shouldn't something like Control Rating play a role here? In short, the domain management procedures need more work to be adapted to GURPS - my initial reaction to them being usable almost as-is was wrong. Simply rolling every two weeks to materialize money out of thin air with 5% chance of not materializing any money and 1% chance of the perpetrator getting caught just isn't it. (I'm exaggerating things here, but only a little bit.) The Zaesi player did complain about this feeling video-gamey instead of something that interacts with a living world, and I agree.

Rules for reconnaissance call for so many rolls that they become too cumbersome for use in a Braunstein. More on that in the FoW section below.

However, I must say that exploration procedures from ACKS II did work excellently. In short, between the campaigns, I will check ACKS II to see what procedures are required, but it seems that I will have to come up with the actual mechanics myself, making them more GURPS-y. In addition, I definitely will reread AD&D 1e DMG to see again how things work there, because that system is intended for Braunsteins. (Also, isn't ACKS 1e more like AD&D 1e? I might need to check it out as well.)

Economics

Most faction players were dissatisfied with the economics system of domain management. In my opinion, ACKS II strikes the perfect balance between extreme bookkeeping and excessive abstraction. You have hexes, you have population (counted in families), and those produce gold. You may spend gold to improve land, construct buildings, hire and maintain troops, conduct magical research, etc. There is no notion of "resources" in a sense of tons of grain, stone, timber, etc. After all, this is a game about conflict and conquest, not about painstakingly building up cities and managing finances. I don't want multiple people sitting there playing solitaire and asking me to resolve it.

While there may be a temptation to give in and introduce resources, one must carefully consider the consequences. In theory, this should provide more grounds for conflict and other inter-faction interaction. If your domain lacks iron, you can purchase it from another faction. If a faction relies on heavily armored troops, you might want to disrupt the supplies of iron ore. But how would that work in practice?

Imagine yourself as a domain player. To build a wall, you need to know the dimensions of the wall and how much stone you've got available. If you're using GURPS LTC3, it becomes important whether this is rubble or shaped stone. To know how much stone you've got available, you need to know how many quarries you've got and how many people work there. If another player wants to disrupt your stone supply, then you probably want to assign guards. Were this an iron mine instead of a stone quarry, the amount of available ore in the vein also would be very important. Perhaps, if you are controlling a small town with a single quarry, this can be tracked, but as soon as you scale it up even a little bit, this becomes unmanageable, probably even with a spreadsheet. A finely detailed resource management simply isn't viable at anything but the lowest scale.

The middle ground would be what Serious DM uses in his game - make it possible to extract common resources (food, stone, metal, wood) from hexes by completing a standardized construction project that represents not just the extraction facility, but the entire supply chain. Each tapped resource from a hex provides an abstract unit of that resource that does not accumulate. It represents not only your domain's ability to monthly extract the resource, but also to store and use it. Certain construction projects require you to expend these resource units. You probably could even trade them, but at a lower rate (you lose 2, the recepient gains 1) to represent logistical complications. Perhaps, these resource exploitation facilities could also count towards the ACKS II land improvements that increase the value of the hex. This sounds much more manageable.

What about rare resources? Something like adamantine, mithral, etc. I think they also could work on the abstract unit basis, but each unit would let you do less than a common resource unit would. For example, when a unit of iron would let you outfit 100 troops with armor, a unit of adamantine would allow for only 5 suits of armor.

On a personal level, for example, when a PC party locates an ore deposit (like what happened in this campaign), you could calculate the output in fine detail to the purpose of crafting or trading, but these resources shouldn't count as abstract domain resource units, as there are no proper facilities, and the PCs are the craftsmen, etc. I don't know - not sure about this yet.

Aside from resources, economics are concerned with troop training. By ACKS and GURPS RAW, this takes a long time. For poor troops, like militia, this is still within the viable timeframe for 1:1 time, but anything more skilled (cavalry, for example) requires way too long. How would one handle this? On one hand, the players could rely on mercenaries that refresh monthly. On the other hand, one of the players suggested spending the leader's unspent character points to accelerate training of troops or construction of projects. Is this a good idea? I don't know, but it does seem like something worth considering.

GURPS Mass Combat

I did say that GURPS Mass Combat seems to be well-suited to resolve battles quickly and abstractly. However, there are some relatively minor issues that need to be taken care of. Reconnaissance has some issues that will be discussed below, but the main thing is that battles require a referee. Commanders choose their strategies in secret. Thus, this cannot work without the referee as an intermediary. I'm sure there must be an easy way to remove the referee out of the equation to allow two players to resolve battles themselves - this would make things much smoother.

Faction Creation

Some players were upset about factions not being "balanced." I don't really care about balance, but this issue is adjacent to something more important - faction creation. Many of the D&D Monster Manuals (at least the good ones) list the organization structure for creature enrties, such as an orc tribe having X combatants and Y non-combatants, Z Nth-level fighters, X1 archers, Y2 priests, Z2 war dogs, etc. How does one come up with this structure if there are no guidelines? Right now, Serious DM has a WIP method of using "blueprints" and "themes" to create factions alongside with their hoards, lairs, etc. for his Clubhouse 5e. Despite being a work-in-progress, this is an interesting approach that definitely has a lot of potential, and I'll see if I'll be able to GURPS-ify it.

Of Command and Control

Near the start of the article, I mentioned that the Balyrd player, the one with the least amount of experience in the hobby, asked a question that nobody else (that I can recall) did - "Am I controlling the faction or the faction leader?" To an outsider to this style of play, this may seem like an irrelevant question, but it's actually a very important one that makes things drastically different. One who controls a faction usually has an absolute rule and can micromanage everything, while expecting everyone to follow his orders to the letter. One who controls the faction leader operates very differently, by giving orders to various (often unnamed) NPCs who, depending on their personality traits and loyalty, may alter or even ignore orders. On one hand, this increases the workload on the referee, as he might need to make loyalty rolls, generate personality traits for NPCs, and he would have to basically adjudicate the orders himself, or at least give the player a green light for every order that is performed without any interference from the NPCs. On the other hand, it creates something of an internal fog of war, where the faction leader may operate with uncertain information about his own domain.

Practically speaking, I think a hybrid approach should work best here. Internal affair could be micromanaged (unless some orders are really extraordinary enough to require loyalty checks) by the faction player, but battles can only be micromanaged if the faction leader is personally leading the army. If he sends a hireling or henchman, the referee can play out the battle himself and simply provide the faction player with a report that he might've received in-universe. This definitely would've made mass combat in this campaign less of a hassle, as you wouldn't have to constantly wait for the input of both parties involved.

To learn more about this, I highly recommend you read Of Command and Control by Crossface.

Fog of War Management

Many of the previously listed issues are tangentially related to the fog of war management. The fog of war is very important in a Braunstein - it's even mentioned in its definition! As of writing of this post, the most relevant developments on this front are GOSS and SEEN. I've had some issues with GOSS in this campaign, where the GOSS checks using the UMBROS method sometimes produced nonsensical results, and also resulted in way too many hidden actions. Doomstone Crom, the inventor of GOSS, suggested the original version of it that was adopted in this campaign and produced better results.

However, Serious DM, the author of SEEN, has incorporated GOSS differently, and I have to say that I really like his new method. In short, now you roll 2d6: 2-8 means an open action; 9-10 means hidden actor; 11+ means hidden action. Every significant event will produce a SEEN post, as even on the result of "hidden action" you still get to vaguepost. In addition, if you've read my AARs, you probably have seen that not all SEEN posts were made equal. Some might look like irrelevant remarks, while others basically invite interaction. Serious DM has included guidelines of what makes a good SEEN post, which is greatly appreciated. I'm definitely stealing this for my next Braunstein attempt.

Another thing that I noticed during this campaign is that some players seemingly hate the fog of war. A report of "there are about 20 orc warriors in that hex" just isn't enough, they have to ask the exact number, exact equipment, what DB does their camp provide, their patrol composition, zodiac sign, social security numbers, etc. A SEEN post about the fainil and ogres sacking Shimmerleaf, where the fainil were said to drop explosives from the skies, prompted the question of "Were they dropping the same bombs that we make or something else?" even though that was happening at night 30 miles away from the askee. Come on! Some players were getting mad at me for various FoW reasons. For example, the goblin patrols were evading all the dwarven traps, and the dwarven player was persistently asking me how they are doing that. I just couldn't tell "They are avoiding the traps because they are nudged the right way by the invisible quasits who know where all the traps are" because that would compromise the quasits! Reports and SEEN posts should be treated as WYSIWYG, unless the referee privately provides extra info. Another player was treating every SEEN post as truth despite having written tons of disinformation in his own SEEN posts and got mad at me as a result.

Player: That post mentioned boarmen duking it out with the wolfmen, my scouts saw no boarmen. How many of them were there?

Me: Your scouts saw no boarmen.

Player: So, where did they go?
Me: Your scouts saw no boarmen.

I can't tell the player that there were no boarmen there in the first place. All this made me feel like a DM instead of a referee, because the players were expecting foul play from me, as if I'm intentionally screwing them over. I'm not even the one writing the SEEN posts (well, most of the time), and you all know that!

Player frustrations aside, there were other problems with the fog of war that are intertwined with some of the other aforementioned issues. For example, remember the telepathic network thing? Now, remember the crime syndicate player? ACKS II has some hijinks that are concerned with information gathering - carousing and spying. Carousing, as most hijinks, required 3d6+10 days to perform, and then 2d8+3 days to lay low. If you succeed (and you probably will, because this is an unopposed roll), you gain a valuable rumor - if the referee has something important in mind, he could reveal that; if not, then this is an abstract rumor that is worth some money. That's how the syndicate player is supposed to obtain intelligence. But what about the network of telepathic, invisible quasits? Do I have to go "Uh, sorry, this intelligence will need two weeks to arrive to you, and the quasits have to stop spying for a week afterwards." This just doesn't make sense. This was another huge disconnect between the systems both on the layers of mechanics and verisimilitude.

Finally, the reconnaissance/scouting thing. The problem of it being unclear when an army approaches and how much of your garrison you are able to muster to react to the threat that I described in one of my previous posts was basically the main reason behind this campaign's failure. So much depends on it that you can't just wing it. Every time I did it, both players were mad at me - one for being in a losing situation, and another for not winning hard enough. The lack of proper recon rules made it impossible for the players to make meaningful strategic decisions. I do not blame the players here at all.

How does one solve it, preferably in a way that requires minimal referee intervention? I don't know yet, but I've been mulling this over for days. Currently, I'm thinking about having every army, be it garrisonned or moving, have a portion of its troops dedicated to reconnaissance. This portion is set by the army's controller, and will define not only the reconnaissance radius, but also the value that is used in the contest (something akin to passive Perception). Perhaps, the player could also decrese this value in exchange for an extended radius. This approach probably is flawed, but I will see once I put it into words on paper - then I should be able to spot the flaws and iron them out.

In addition, I think it might be a good idea to borrow ideas from PBEM strategy games, as some of them are Braunsteins. For example, Arno's Atlantis (I'd link it, but the link is dead; however, there are other variations of this game that are still online) lets you set attitudes with regards to other factions - ally, friendly, neutral, unfriendly, or hostile. This attitude determines the default reponse to an army of the other faction that enters the same hex. A similar approach could be formalized here, I think. Now that I think about it, maybe I should reread the Atlantis rules to see if there are solutions to other procedural problems.

Overall, the fog of war management is one of the most important things about a Braunstein, if not the most important, and it is tied with scale, Braunstein type, and some other issues that I've outlined above.

Final Thoughts

The campaign was a disaster - you can see how much longer the "what went wrong" section is compared to "what went right". There's a lot that needs to be done to make the next attempt run more smoothly. This post mortem post allowed me to localize the problems, so now I at least know in which direction to go next. However, the main takeaway from this campaign was that a GURPS Braunstein can work, and that even in this absolutely broken state it was a much more enjoyable experience than a conventional game. What you've read above might seem like doom and gloom, but I'm actually excited and motivated to improve. Steve Jackson never played that way.

#ThankYouJeffro #ThankYouBDubs #ThankYouRuleOfThule #ThankYouSeriousDM #ThankYouCrossface (and the rest of you too)