Analysis Mr Spock?

Well, with some (substantial) rework and coercing I now have what I consider to be a premium quality excel analysis of my combat system. It compares two equiped fighters and/or mystics (spell chanters, or clerics), and shows the average number of melees it would take, on average, for one to defeat the other. I'm using this to calibrate the variables that make up the Elthos Rules configuration. These include such things as 'Sheild Damage Absorption', 'Starting Life and Mystic Points Bonuses', and so on. Modifying these variables effects the total results of the system which I can now review with mathematical percision. Using this I have now been able to fine tune the system so that two average (requisites) 1st Level Fighters with Leather and Shield, using Medium sized weapons (normal swords), take approximately 6 melees on average to do each other in. The same two fighters at 2nd level take 8 melees, and so on. I can swap out weapons and armors and change requisites in the combat analyzer and see the effects across levels as well. My next goal is to automate the comparisons so that I can then compare two groups of opponents and get the average melees for one group to defeat the other. That should not take long to build. That piece, however, will be part of the Web Application and should prove useful to me as the GM when I want to build scenarios and ensure that the difficulty levels are not out of alignment with the skill level of the adventure groups entering the adventure. Yay!

This is now starting to get past the drudgery part, and into the FUN part! Superior! :)

The Grand Analysis

I asked Evan Jones and David Kahn to conduct an analysis of the ODS system. They did so and provided me with materials that I am using to apply a thorough investigation of the ODS mathematical model.

Right now I am going over the materials to make sure that I have fully verified the accuracy of the formulas so that I can review the recommendations. It is a slow and difficult process, but well worth the effort.

My preliminary investigation appears to reveal that the ODS system is exactly what I expected, only moreso: Stark. Since the numbers are small (Attack Levels and Armor Classes for example being only 1 through 6) it is the case that the effect of small differences in the numbers produces large variations in the results.

For example, two average fighters who are one level apart show a significant difference in percent chance of success against one another. If the calculations are correct, which is still in question at the moment, then it appears that the 1st Level Fighter can expect to defeat the 2nd Level fighter in 24 Melees, while the second Level Fighter can expect to defeat the 1st Level Fighter in only 6 Melees. Thus, the chance of victory for the 2nd Level Fighter is significantly greater than the 1st. Is this difference adequate? Does it work so far as the game is concerned, from a playability perspective? This remains to be seen. I am running a wide variety of scenarios, comparing differences in levels, weapons, armor, flanking, classes and range attacks including magic and missile weapons. It's quite a lot of work, but I plan to automate the process so that once I have the root formulas it should not be too difficult after that. But of course deriving the formulas *is* the difficult part.

In any case I am quite pleased with the work and am continuing to make progress. However, in light of my findings I must reconsider the August deadline for the final first draft of the ODS Rules Book. Given the difficulties I've had in validating the formulas so far, I'm not sure that August 1st can be achieved. However, nevertheless I will try.

:)

Slogging & Bobbing Along

Well things are making progress steadily with the Elthos Project. I'm also, as it happens, taking Aikido and Wudan Boxing six days a week (most weeks). So that's going great too. I'm really loving it. As I learn more about the very esoteric yet superb and powerful martial arts of the body-mind, I'm slowly adding elements to the game from the fonts of ancient and modern Asian wisdom.

The ODS Rules are being Analyzed by my old friend, and game designer comrade-in-arms, Evan Jones. So that's extremely cool. Evan is a consumate analyst and game designer and player. Getting a review and analysis from him is just about as good as your going to get. And to my even greater good fortune he is being project managed by none other than David Kahn himself. And that, as it happens, is both fortunate, and probably quite necessary, as without David it is possible, and even not improbable, that I would be otherwise unable to get Evan to give me what I actually am asking for. David is good that way. And so between them I've recieved some very good feedback and advice. Right now Evan is working on some analysis concepts which we will add as excel sheets to the website.

That's another thing I want to do with Elthos, is provide some really cool analyses of the system and how it works. It should be really interesting overall when you step back and look at the totality of the project. It's definitely big. I would say that most people can not see it at once, but only one level or realm at a time. It really is a large project, actually, even though I started with the smallest most discretely finite piece, the "One Die System" Core Rules Book as a PDF. But the PDF is sitting on top of a veritable mountain of material, concepts and systems that I've developed over the past three decades.

There is, for example, the web application that supports the rules. There is also a much more complex version of the rules. And another client computer application that supports the larger rules. That program is much more sophisticated in ways than the ODS Web Application. It comes later.

Then there is the Cosmology System of the World Weaver's Guide. That's big even by it's lonesome.

And so on. There's a lot to it, but then again there should be by now. I've been chipping at this here stone for about 30 years and accumulating as I go. Which is, as things begin to come together, pretty great to step back and take note of.

So that's how things are going. Not bad. I am working toward having the ODS Rules ready for release hopefully by mid summer. If all goes well I should then be able to finish the application and hopefully have that ready for release by the winter.

Big Apple Con - Success

The Big Apple Con was a lot of fun! I had two players, Phil and Miguel, and it seemed that they enjoyed the game. I know I did. The feedback about the Elthos Setting and the ODS Rules were both positive. It was a fast paced and exciting game. Here's the synopsis:

I created a group of six characters who are members of the Adventurer's Guild and already an Adventure Group named the Oakenwode Brigade. These are the Characters (all human):

Eric Redford, Male Paladin
Allen Galloway, Male Outlaw (Thief-Fighter)
Carmen Whitestone, Male Fighter
Delilah Galloway, Female Witch (Fighter-SpellChanter)
Ellen McFearson, Female Warrior-Mage (Fighter-SpellChanter-Cleric)
Bernard Oakenwode, Male Fighter

Notice the evocative names. That was enough for background, actually as the players used the names to fill in the blanks for themselves. Background was discussed but only in reference to the town, and that was brief: A tiny pioneer farming village named Lentilsville on the edge of the wilderness. They've been having mysterious troubles with strange creatures doing odd things lately, and so an outpost of the Adventurer's Guild was formed and one group initiated - the Oakenwode Brigade. I let them pick the characters they wanted to play, and so the split the party into two groups of three (I had two players).

Their first mission: To help farmer Jones protect his "unblemished" Black Ox from an old hag who came to buy it for a bag of sticks, stones and crushed up leaves (it was in fact a fair deal as the bag's contents were all magical, but Jones didn't know that). As she left the old woman cursed him and marked (black crescent moon on the left horn) his Black Ox, and this worried him. So he went to his nephew (sister's son), the young Paladin Eric, and asked if he and his group would guard the Ox for a week. They agreed and we launched off into the adventure.

The adventure entailed three parts:

1. 3 kobolds came to steal the Ox at midnight, and used a shrinking spell to vanish into the grass with it. Amber, an NPC, who happened to hear the commotion and knew what happened, came to their aid and agreed to shrink the party down to ant-size so they could track the kobolds with the Ox. They followed them through the grass forest to an Ant-Hill and had a battle there where they killed one kobold, let one escape, and captured the one with the Ox. They returned to normal size with the Ox and their Captive and went to farmer Jones. 1 hour.

2. They interrogated the kobold captive and made him spill his guts on the location of the witch. He agreed (with little choice) to take them to the hut, but could not remember the way at his current size as he had few landmarks he could recognize. However he could only shrink one person. The party chose Ellen. She was shrunk with the kobold down to ant-size and they took a tiny leaf-boat down stream to a rock. They climbed a tiny stairway to the top where they found a moss maze with hovering mosquitoes, worms, and pill bugs. They came to a pillar-stem on which was created a spiral stairway going up to the top of a dandelion where they took one seed puff each and parachuted the rest of the way across the stream to the other shore. There they found a group of dragonflies tethered to a rock by spider web ropes and rode them into the forest for a far distance till they came to the witches hut. Ellen reconned a bit and then decided to head back to her friends to report. She erred in growing to her full size at that point instead of flying back via the dragonfly to the stream, and accidentally alerted the dog who started barking and woke the witch. Ellen, who has a flying spell, cast the spell and flew away, but the witch persuaded on her broom, and was a tad bit faster (being a two levels above Ellen). Ellen was captured by being polymorphed mid-flight (witch has a wand of polymorph) into a small white mouse, just before she was able to make it across the sream to he waiting friends on the other shore. The witch, with Ellen-Mouse in
hand, went her friends and engaged in a negotiation with them for the Ox. 1 hour.

3. The witch agreed to give them Ellen in exchange for the Ox, if the witch would agree to replace the Black Ox with another one of equal value to Farmer Jones. The witch agreed and with a wicked cackle flew away with Ellen back to her hut, the whereabouts of which the party still did not know. Amber again helped them by following the spoor of the witch's flight and gave them magic ointment of silent walking for their shoes. They went to rescue Ellen, and arrived at the hut. Two went in, three remained outside. Inside they tried to pilfer Ellen-Mouse from the sleeping witch's bony hands, but fumbled and woke the witch who put them into a Sleep. Meanwhile outside the party distracted the dog, who attacked them after eating a magical bone from his collar-pouch which polymorphed him into a savage dog-beast with steel teeth and leather fur. They managed to defeat the dog, and rushed the house, ran up the stairs to the bedroom in the nick of time, and in a blaze of good luck scored a critical hit on the witch with maximum damage and chopped her head off just before the witch's black cat could pounce on Ellen-Mouse. All the spells were broken and the party rescued Ellen and saved the day. Farmer Jones was well pleased and Amber received a magical mirror that the party took from
the hut for her. 1 hour.

And so concluded the first adventure of the Oakenwode Brigade!

Note: At several points in the adventure I improvised, and made
extensive use of the Spiral Method.

Overall, I give the experience an A++!

I would definitely do it again. Best sign that the ODS is working: My brain did *Not* feel like mush after the game (which it usually would due to excessive numbers crunching).

:)

GMing in NYC

Ok well further hints of progress are afoot. I will be GMing at the Big Apple Con in New York City on June 8th. That should be fun. I think I will run a small side adventure off of the Hamfest Campaign related to the Revenge of the Weasel King. I'm drumming up the details of that, with the assistance of my soon-to-be-trustier Elthos ODS software. Yay!

Elthos Alignment

In response to this thread on theRPGSite:

John Morrow: I think that's a failure to use the alignment system properly, not a failure of the alignment system, itself. I also think a lot of NPCs get tagged as being Evil when they are relatively benign. We have a joke quote in my group, based on a misstatement by one of the people I used to role-play with, "Evil and benign" spoken in a sinister voice (the person meant to say, "Evil and malign"). If your Evil is benign, harmless, and would make a good neighbor, then it's not really Evil in my opinion. Put another way, I think people have a failure of imagination when it comes to making really good or really evil PCs and tend to make them all pragmatic and thus, in my opinion, Neutral. I'm not sure if that's a side effect of moral relativism and the idea that we can understand all human behavior in pragmatic terms or an inability to imagine selfless Good and truly cruel and vicious Evil.

Yup. I agree.

I've always found Alignment to be a fascinating concept, and have used it extensively in my game for years, having modified the rules to fit my homebrew system. So I don't run a standard D&D alignment system, but I have one I cooked up that works for me.

The basics are as follows:

1. Players can state whatever they want about their Characters intended Alignment, and the Character at start is officially that. However, Alignment shifts according to the actions of the Character over time. If the Character behaves evilly, then that Character's alignment will migrate to Evil.

2. The alignment works according to the standard vectors of Good vs Evil, Law vs. Chaos which forms a matrix on which the character's alignment is plotted with X Axis being Good-Evil, and the Y Axis being Law-Chaos. A Lawful-Good Character would be (+2,+2). A Chaotic Good Character would be (+2, -2). So obviously there Character can be charted according to the degree to which he is a given Alignment. Everything within a specified distance of zero is considered Neutral. This allows me to have both, an Absolutist system, and a Relativistic System at the same time. Absolutes get measured from (0,0), while Relatives get measured in context to one another.

3. My world assumes a Moral Absolute exists. I as Gamesmaster assign an alignment evaluation in points to various actions of the Character which may have moral implications. I do so according to two attributes, Moral, and Legal. The Moral relates to the Good-Evil Axis, while the Legal relates to the Law-Chaos axis. The Moral attribute is assigned according to the motive of the action, of which I ask the Player to tell me what the Character's motive is. The Legal attribute is assigned according to a list of actions which have a Law-Chaos value assigned to them. So Building a Town is Lawful (+5). If the motive is "In order to control people so my Character can use them for vile disgusting experiments" then the Moral is Evil (-5). So the Character's alignment would shift (-5, +5) from what is was, and be tagged with a date of change and the event that caused it. This way I can track the Character's alignment over time. Sounds complicated, and it is, but I created a computer program to help me with this.

4. The tendency of this system, unless the player is reasonably careful and consistent, is to drive characters towards neutral alignments (which is what most people turn out to be). Only the dedicated and careful get to any extreme.

5. When approaching extremes of Alignment the world's Deities begin to take notice, causing them to become either for or against the Character. The entire system of Deities is aligned to the Alignment System and there is a Deity representing each Alignment. So the Lawful Good Character who becomes noticed will make an enemy of the Deity (and minions of) of the Chaotic Evil Realm. The Character in fact makes himself their enemy. He also becomes an ally of the Lawful Good. This helps me to determine during the course of the game which factions align with which Characters. I find it useful from a story coherency perspective.

6. I never tell Players what Alignment their Character must or should be.

That's the basis of my Alignment system for the Elthos World. There are some additional rules in the background that enhance the coherency of the system which I intend to publish eventually with my Elthos World Weaver's Guide, but whether or not I manage to get that far reamains to be seen.

I've always been a fan of Alignment and wanted to make a system that would allow the concept to work for me in my world. So far it's worked out well and my players have always given me positive feedback on it.

The Tarot Deck

Things are going along very well lately. The tarot deck is coming together, and I have even thought of a couple of new ways of using it to build back story for my world. The artist who I hired to work on the cards is really great. He's easy to work with and does really fabulous looking stuff. His name is Jason Moser. So we have the first six cards finished after approximately two months of effort. On to the next six! :D

The cards will have a series of correspondences on each one, though some of the correspondences will be variable depending on the element of the card. Here's the current list:

Elthos name of the Archetype
Roman & Greek names of the Archetype
Element (air, earth, water, fire) by color and symbol
Planet & Constellation relationship glyphs on Zodiac Wheel
Various glyphs
Number
Animals
Trees
Flower(s)
Symbols
etc

There's quite a few other correspondences which I'll be adding to the booklet that will form the basis of the Elthos RPG World Weaver's Guide. So things are coming along... slowly, but surely.

I've also gotten some good and helpful feedback lately from the people on theRPGSite in regards to the Elthos ODS Core Rules book, the Introduction in particular. Hopefully I can publish that piece soon!

:)