1d10 design mistakes in DnD 4e - Tactical movement

Tactical movement speed in DnD is typically in the range of 5 to 7 points per turn. There is no facing and therefore no turning cost. Most squares cost 1 point to enter, with difficult terrain doubling the cost to 2 per square.

The commonly used movement actions are walk (base speed), run (speed + 2) and charge.

You may want to read that again.

Walking is a gait where one foot is always in contact with the ground. Typical walking speeds are around 5 kilometres per hour. By contrast, running humans have a top speed (world record) of 44.72 km/h. That is nine times faster than walking!

This is of course over a short distance and without being encumbered, but even cutting it to a more reasonable 20 km/h would mean running is four times faster than walking. However in game terms, a speed 6 human runs at speed 8, a mere 33% increase. This is painfully gamist for anybody who bothers to engage his brain for a moment to consider the design choices made.

Walking in DnD

Running as fast as you can in DnD

Arguments that this is based on the action split between move and combat activity (such as parrying or attacking) will fail to convince as the same 33% increase applies when doing nothing but moving. Double move at walk speed would achieve a speed of 12, while a double move at run speed would reach 16 speed - this is the same 33% difference.

This can be contrasted with the design in a simulationist game, where the fastest movement speed is five times the base walking speed. A character moving at 15 metres per round (50 feet) at walk speed can dash 75 metres per round (250 feet). This is a far closer match to reality and thus much more believable and the difference is obvious in the illustrations below.

Walking in a simulationist game

Dash in a simulationist game

 More after the break.

Future of copyright update

Today I got a really nice surprise in my email from the folks behind the Future of Copyright initiative:

We are proud to announce, that finally we selected 10 works which will make it to our „Future of copyright” book. Winner is among them, but you need to wait just a little bit more – jury is still deciding. Here are works we have selected, in alphabetic order:

• Jesse Betteridge „The Brick in Room 207”
• Reuben Binns „History of Copyright 2012-Present”
• Eddie „In Session”
• Mike Linksvayer „Future of Copyright”
• Aymeric Mansoux „Morphology of a copyright tale”
• Alf Melin „Remote Kill”
• Carlos Solís „Blurred – a utopian story”
• Roland Spitzlinger „Future of Copyright”
• Togi „Give”
• Jarosław Żyła „Heritage of ACTA”

Congratulations to everybody who was selected!

Retro board game - Fortress America

Published by Milton Bradley in 1986 using a design by Michael Gray, Fortress America is a kitschy thematic wargame that covers the invasion of the U.S.A by socialist armies from Asia, South America and Europe. Only the northern map edge remains safely neutral as Canada refrains from entering the general US-bashing.

All invaders have identical order of battle but choose reinforcement order after turn 1

While outnumbered and attacked from nearly every direction the U.S. forces have the advantage of partisans and other reinforcements through event cards as well as solar-powered lasers that gradually come into play. The invaders hold the initial advantage and must advance quickly to defeat the U.S.A. before lasers can weaken their forces.

However, if the U.S. is defeated then individual victory goes to the invader that has captured the most cities (10 victory points), lasers (5 VP) and resource territories (3 VP). This can lead to rivalry and open warfare between invaders.

It had been at least 15 years since I played the game and I remembered it as being fairly good fun for 4 players, with the U.S. player relying on a strategy of trading space for time while trying to get the invaders to fight each other.

The invaders must grab cities to defeat the U.S. and also want to take out lasers as quickly as possibly (they are built in cities only), with resource territories a distant tertiary objective. They must also consider supply lines and the risk of partisans appearing as well as the possibility of another invader striking at them.

U.S. forces are spread thin as the invasion begins - no partisans or lasers are in play

Recently I had the opportunity to play it again, although only with 3 players (necessitating that one player take on the role of both Asian and European invader). The game turned out to last very long, turning into an unusual protracted battle with huge swings in the number of controlled cities. The invaders regularly pushed the U.S. into loss territory, but could not hold against counter attacks and the game only ends if the U.S. holds less than 13 cities at the end of their turn.

After it finally ended with a victory for the invaders we talked about the high points of the game, the mistakes, the strategy and so on. A couple of points that stood out:

• The use of dice from D6 through D10 but keeping the target number to destroy an enemy unit constant (always 5 or 6 depending on terrain) is really efficient for quick combat resolution. It avoids addition and subtraction, consisting instead of a fast sort that all players can do easily.
• The combination of combined arms to overcome terrain penalties and the targeting system makes for interesting battles with calculated risk taking.
• The supply rules rarely seem to come into play, partially due to map scale and layout and partially because of the balance of forces. However, when out of supply does occur it can change the board immensely.
• It is unclear if the deck of cards can be reshuffled and used again. We played it as 'when you run out, you get no more reinforcements'. This puts a constraint on U.S. forces (60 + the card effects) similar to the invader limit (60 each). In a long game this means a battle of attrition can be won by the invaders if they can destroy lasers quickly enough.
• The rules are written quite verbosely, but are clear and don't seem to suffer from any obvious exploits or other issues.

Few U.S. cities remain but partisans fight back and threaten invader supply lines

One thing that all players agreed on was that it was actually excellent fun and if the game hadn't taken so long I expect we might have had a re-match immediately. I've re-rated the game an 8 out of 10 on Boardgamegeek after this play, previously I had it down as a more average 6 out of 10.

I think the game is getting a re-release sometime in 2012. It might well be worth checking it out, do not mistake it for a R.I.S.K. type game - this is good fun with quick game play and does not devolve into 'biggest stack' type strategy.

U.S. forces are reduced to mostly isolated bands of partisans

Evolution of roleplaying tools

When I first started with roleplaying games 30 years ago a typical adventure would have a simple graph paper view of the place being explored, most often a cave or other underground complex. This guided movement, but combat usually took place mostly in the imagination of the participant. The scale of the map did not really encourage tactical movement and there were few conditions to track.

As games became more tactically oriented it became more important to use miniatures or other tokens to track activity, line of sight and other battlefield considerations. As printed 2D maps were prohibitively expensive and time-consuming to create the most common solution was a dry erase grid.


When insufficient miniatures were available it was common to substitute in other items, with predictably confusing results.

Chainmail Bikini © Shamus Young and Shawn Gaston

Continued after the break

Welcome to Life

From the excellent Tom Scott, this will creep you out.

The older the fiddler, the sweeter the tune

And today the fiddler is a year older, although still only a young forty which is no age at all compared to the Sunland Baobab or Prometheus.

Here is a self-portrait to mark the day.

Word clouds

Since October last year I've been doing an interdisciplinary (politics and economics) course with the Open University. Tonight I submitted the last essay for the ongoing assessment, below is the word cloud for that essay.

The two stand-out words for me were 'et' and 'al', it looks like I quoted multiple-author works a lot.

I wonder if it is possible to string together any cohesive story or argument using each of the words in the cloud just once.