Migration Woes: Mailanka's Musing is Suspended

 My apologies for being behind on my "the State of Psi-Wars" post, and pretty much everything else, as "vacation" has been rather intense this year.  But I tried to use the time to finally migrate the blog away from blogger.  After looking at a bunch of complex solutions, I decided to keep it simple and try Wordpress.com.  I would do a simple import of my blog posts on a free version, see how it felt, and then if I liked it,  upgrade.  I had it imported, it looked okay, and it just lacked some functionality.  Given that I'm pretty sure I'd be crucified for not having the index up properly,  I wanted to find a way to implement a sidebar similar to the one Mailanka's Musing already has. I couldn't get that to work, so I parked it and went to bed.

When I woke up, my new blog was suspended.  Why? For violating terms and services.  Which one? Well, I could message them if I felt this was in error.  I scrutinized the terms and services and found nothing that I could think of as a violation (this is hardly a porn or gambling blog), but why should I guess at why they banned me?  Shouldn't they tell me? If blogger didn't ban me, why did they? So I sent them not one, but two messages. Nothing back.

And to think they want $50 a year for the privilege of throwing me off their platform with no explanation.  This is why I didn't pay upfront.  I wasn't even on there for two days, and literally the only content there was the content you see here on this blog.

I cannot recommend Wordpress.com.  We'll see if they reply.  Perhaps it's "just a mistake" but I don't think I'll be using their services.

After stressing out about it to a friend, he suggested I park the migration.  Any existential threat posed by Blogger itself for an arbitrary ban like this (which, to be sure, is keeping me up at night now, because if Wordpress.com somehow found something objectionable, is there something Blogger would find objectionable?) is mitigated by the fact that I've backed up the blog several times, and most of the posts still exist as raw files on my computer (not all of them, but I could completely recreate, for example, the wiki if I had to).  He pointed out that with all the other stresses in my life at the moment, if blogging relaxes me, to just focus on that, and worry about the migration when I'm more relaxed and have more room to maneuver.

So I'll park it for now, unless Wordpress.com returns with a sufficiently humble apology, though I'm not holding my breath on that (my experience watching the tech world is that sites like these just let the algorithm rampage across their platform, and if hundreds of innocent users get caught in the crossfire, well, they have tens of thousands, so they don't care). Even if they get one, I expect I won't use a service this shoddy and this prone to failure and miscommunication. So I wouldn't expect to see a migration soon. My eventual solution will likely involve either self-hosting, or hosting on a remote server with a self-configured version of wordpress; the latter is less vulnerable to banning because the configuration will just exist and I can just find a different host if there's yet another rogue algorithm.

Still, I needed to vent my frustration. Happy New Year!

Is Side Effect just Better than Affliction?

As I am wont to do, I've been tinkering with some psychic powers behind the scenes, pondering how best to use them. In particular, I've been thinking about Christopher Rice's Reaving Hand and Mental Stun.  Both of these are handled as Afflictions, but afflictions create an all-or-nothing effect.  Either you succeed and your opponent is stunned, or you don't, and they're not.  Swapping it to an innate attack with a Side Effect creates more of a grey area, where your attack will have some impact, even if it doesn't afflict your target outright.  I did this with the neurolash effect: it now deals about 1d fatigue and has Stun or Pain as a side effect, because this better reflects what we often see in cinematic fights against a neurolash weapon, where the hero heroically resists the effects of a pain whip or a stun baton, but is clearly being weakened by it until at last he succumbs.  With the default Affliction attack, he's fine, fine, fine, fine until he's not. Why not treat powers like that?

But if you do, you run into an unfortunate truth.  Is Side Effect better than Affliction?

A Fatigue Attack that deals 1d damage with a Stunning side effect is 15 points.  An Affliction that stuns the target is 10 points.  If the Fatigue Attack lands, it'll deal an average of 3 fatigue damage and the target will have to roll HT-1 (on average) to resist being stunned.  The Affliction, by contrast, deals no damage, and is a straight HT roll.  The Innate Attack can potentially benefit from Extra Effort in Combat (depending on how you choose to handle that) for +2 damage, and if they're psychic powers, you can use actual Extra Effort for, say, +1 level, which improves the fatigue attack to 2d (average 7 damage and -3 to the HT roll) and the Affliction is improved to HT-1.  If the attacks can be stopped by DR, then it takes 2 DR per +1 to HT for the Innate Attack, but you have the possibility of stopping it outright (2 DR on average will drop the fatigue attack to 1 damage and HT+0 to resist, while 3 DR will on average prevent the side effect completely, no roll at all), while with an Affliction, and this is a little less clear to me, doesn't have that absolute limitation: 2 DR would change it to HT+2 to resist, 3 DR to HT+3, and DR 50 would change it to a relatively meaningless HT+50, though technically you can still screw that up on a critical failure, but I suspect at some point we have to say that it practically goes away, I just don't know where that point is.  So far that's not so bad.  Sure, the Side Effect version is better, but it's more expensive. If you tried to do something foolish like go to Affliction level 2 to match the HT-1, it's 15 vs 20 points, and then the innate attack is obviously better, but I think everyone acknowledges that Affliction should be cheaper when it comes to subsequent levels.  Going with Kromm's proposed 3/additional level reduces it to 15 vs 13, which is fairer.

But then we get into wonky stuff if we push it further. Imagine I make a lethal toxic "ghost" attack that ignores DR.  It deals 1 damage, ignores DR (+300%) and has a Heart Attack as a Side Effect (+350%).  This clocks in at a whopping 8 points. I'm not kidding, that's the price.  1 point of toxic damage that ignores DR, and since it inflicts at least 1 point of damage, the target has to roll HT to resist the side effect (ie Death) at +0. Even if he succeeds, he's still taken 1 point of damage.  By contrast, the same effect for Affliction would clock in at 75 points.  That's an insane difference! In this second case, the target has a straight HT+0 roll to resist, and if they succeed, there's no additional impact.

"Well, that's just point crock, Mailanka, don't do that" 

I actually ran into this problem in a different context.  I wanted to give a lizard man based on the komodo dragon a dangerous, gangrenous bite. It was mostly a flavor thing, so I wanted it to be cheap, so I gave it to him as an Follow-Up Moderate Pain Affliction on its teeth.  This clocked in at 12 points, which is hardly what I think of as "cheap." By contrast, a 1d toxic follow up attack with a moderate side-effect clocked in 7 points, and I could further reduce the toxic damage: 1 point actually makes a lot of sense here, or 1d-2 or something, because the toxic effect is more of a bonus atop the bite, rather than the main star.  This is a totally reasonable thing to want to do.  Why is the Affliction version so expensive?

"It's not Affliction that's broken, it's Side Effect." 

Okay.  Let's imagine a malediction that instantly kills its target if they fail an HT roll.  For the Affliction version, that's Malediction + Heart Attack, which clocks in at about 50 points. A 6d toxic malediction clocks in at 48 points, which is two points cheaper and generally does the same thing: on average it'll inflict 20 damage that will bypass the target's DR, and they'll have to roll HT or die. The innate attack actually requires two rolls: one to resist the malediction and the other to not die, and it's possible it won't deal enough damage (though it's also possible it'll deal so much damage that the target will have to roll twice not to die), while the Affliction will kill you if you fail a single HT roll.  But if you do pass the roll for the Affliction, you're fine.  Say your target has 14 HT, they'll pass almost every time, and you'll need to hit them over and over, and after each failure, nothing bad happens to you. By contrast, the toxic attack will likely drive the surviving target into unconsciousness, and it'll certainly slow them down and likely stun them.  And if you hit them again and again, death is assured unless they have expensive advantages like regeneration and/or sufficient gobs of HP that they can shrug this attack off longer than they could repeated HT rolls.

Affliction usually represents shock to someone's biological systems: a stunning blast of air, an injection of soporific venom, a surge of pain-inducing lightning, etc.  But innate attacks cause these same effects.  Hit someone with enough fatigue damage, and they'll fall asleep too.  Hit them with burning damage, and it'll hurt.  Concuss them with a blast of air for at least half their HP, and they're stunned. This is the default of the damage system and you don't even need side effects to do it! Afflictions do have the benefit of being non lethal. Maybe you don't want your target to be harmed by the attack.  If you're casting a sleep spell, they should just fall asleep, not take damage until forced to sleep, and those who resist it are pretty much unaffected.  But you're paying a pretty high premium for this non-lethality, which discourages you from using it.  Is that what you actually want?

(And let's not dive too deeply into the Side Effect No Wounding rabbit hole.  If you do that, you'll realize you can entirely replace Afflictions at a fraction of the cost)

This is exacerbated in Psi-Wars because Psi-Wars reduces the cost of Innate Attacks to keep them competitive with ultra-tech weapons.  I've toyed with doing the same with Affliction, as the logic of the reduction is to make it cheaper to buy Armor Divisor and thus bypass ultra-tech armor more easily and remain competitive.  But then we run into the other problem with affliction: it's overloaded.  GURPS decided "wouldn't it be cool if" they bundled all of the traits that let one character affect another character into a single advantage.  This means granting someone an advantage is priced and handled the same way as harming them with an affliction.  While technically you could make "Grant Extra Life Advantage" a Side Effect, it's kind of weird to have a power that inflicts toxic damage to resurrect them; not impossible, but it would leave some people scratching their head and wondering what the heck just happened.  But using Afflictions to grant advantages is messy anyway.  In computer programming, I'd say "Look, I get what you're doing, but make that its own function.  It should have a single responsibility."  If we had a Bestow advantage that was priced at a base of 10 points, with +1 point per point of the advantage, then it would be fine. None of this weird "Technically you can roll to resist but you don't have to because this is an odd edge case" as it would be its own advantage.  Then you could reprice Affliction however you wanted (in the very least, the 10 + 3 per additional level, but I suspect you could drop the price further).

I don't know if I'd necessarily change anything for Psi-Wars here, because I actually prefer Side Effects to Afflictions in most cases, and that means Affliction effectively becomes this "Bestow" trait.  But it is one of those things that makes me grit my teeth sometimes.

Corrosion Confusion

A lot of my recent work has focused on toxic and corrosive things, including slimes and nanoblooms (I've been quiet, but I have been working on things).  As such, I've done a lot of looking at Corrosion, and it's... weird.

As best as I can tell, Corrosion works thus:

• For every 5 points of basic (rolled) damage, the target's DR is reduced by 1.
• If a corrosive element continuously affects the same spot of certain materials, such as wood and stone, it treats it as Ablative (this is true of Burning too).
• If you get hit in the face with Corrosive damage, you take 1.5x damage.

Alright, so far so good.  The examples of "real world" Corrosion are:

• Acid: this deals 1d-3 if you get splashed with it, and 1d-1 if you're immersed in it.
• Alkahest: not a "real world" material, but still a standard one from Dungeon Fantasy. It deals 1d on a splash, and 2d-1 if you immerse yourself in it.
• Nanobots. Devourers deal 1d(2) corrosion and disassemblers deal 1d-2(10) corrosion.
• Disintegrators (and similar effects) deal whatever damage they feel like.

 So, in principle, we find that most forms of corrosion deal very little damage at all, which makes them of questionable use for me in a space opera game.

Acid deals 1, 1, 1, 1, 2 and 3 points of damage on a splash and will never reduce DR.  It is useless against any armor that its DR 3+, especially if sealed (ie, all Ultra Tech armor worth discussing).  If you swim through acid, it will deal 1, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 damage, which means you have a one-in-six chance of losing one point of DR.

Alkahest is better, dealing 1-6 on a splash (taking off 1 DR on a roll of 5 or 6, or 1/3 the time), while swimming in the stuff inflicts 1-11 damage (6 on average), which means most rolls will take off at least 1 point of DR and possibly 2, which means your armor will be dissolved within seconds.

It's nanobots where it starts to get weird.  Like, what benefit does armor divisor even provide to such low damage totals?  Consider the dreaded disassembler: it will deal 1, 1, 1, 2, 3 and 4, which will never reduce DR, but it will inflict 1 point of damage against DR 9 or less always, 19 or less on a roll of 4+ and 29 or less on a roll of 5+ and and against 39 or less on a roll of 6.  This is TL 11, so a typical opponent might be wearing a monocrys tac suit which is DR 20, so you're looking at 1-2 points of damage at most... but what does that even mean?  Did they chew through the armor? Did it damage the seal? It says only sealed DR will protect against it, so when is it no longer considered sealed?  I've been hunting over books for rules on Sealed and what it takes to break it (After all, we have rules for armor patches) when I came across this little gem:

Sealed: Impervious to penetration by liquids and gases.  This corresponds to the Sealed advantage (p. B82). It prevents all harm from noncorrosive bioweapons, chemicals,  and nano, as well as ordinary rust and waterlogging -UT 171

So, uh, does sealed armor protect against "corrosive nano" like disassemblers or not?  Either it doesn't at all, in which case, why does it say that "only sealed armor protects against it?" Does it protect fully against it unless the seal is broken? If so, at what point is the seal broken? The armor patch rules seem to imply if any damage penetrates it.  We also have armor damage rules, but only in an LT companion, which obviously doesn't cover sealed armor as none existed in LT periods.  Or does it protect until all anti-corrosion DR has been dissolved, in which case, it'll never be penetrated.

Upgraded Corrosion

I wonder if the intent was to make disassembler 'more corrosive" than, say, devourer or acid.  But if that's the case, we should buff the Corrosion effect.

We actually have a version of improved corrosion in Powers: the Weird, and it stems from a post here, which creates some interesting possibilities.  The core recipe is: Corrosion + Corrosion (No Wounding -50%).  Thus:

1.  Basic Corrosion deals 1-6 damage, and dissolves 1 DR on a roll of 5 or 6
2. One extra "non-wounding" die of Corrosion (equivalent to a +50% modifier) would double the corrosive effect.  You would lose 1 DR on a roll of 3 or 4, and 2 DR on 5 or 6.
3. two extra "non-wounded" dice of Corrosion (equivalent to a +100%) modifier would triple the corrosive effect.  You would lose 1 DR on a roll of 2 or 3, and two DR on a 4, and three DR on a 5 or 6.
4. three extra "non-wounding" dice of Corrosion (equivalent to +150% modifier) would quadruple the corrosive effect.  You would lose 1 DR on a roll of 2, 2 DR on a roll of 3, 3 DR on a roll of 4, 4 DR on a roll of 5-6.
5. four extra "non-wounding" dice of Corrosion (+200% modifier, the one from the Weird) multiplies corrosion by 5 or, more simply, subtracts 1 DR per point of damage inflicted.

Thus we can get some modifiers here:

• +50% intensified corrosion means that the corrosion effect subtracts 1 DR per three damage dealt (more or less).
• +100% intensified corrosion means the corrosion effect subtracts 1 DR per two damage dealt (more or less).
• +150% intensified corrosion gets difficult to measure and probably best to skip (I think it works out to 2/3 DR removed per damage dealt)
• +200% works as the version in Powers: the Weird.

But as interesting an idea as that is as an alternative to Armor Divisors for Corrosive Damage, I'm still a little lost on exactly how corrosion is meant to interact with sealed vacc suits, and how armor divisors are meant to work on corrosive damage with sealed armor, and I can't seem to find anything on it.

The Psi-Wars Fallacy

There's a comment I often get from people who have read a lot of Psi-Wars, especially from the beginning, and it goes something like this:

"I like Psi-Wars, but it's funny.  At the beginning you talked about getting a campaign done with a minimal amount of work, and then you proceed to put years of work into it."

The comment is always given in a light-hearted "I don't mean anything by it" sort of comment, but it reads to me as an attempt by the reader to resolve a tension: either I was selling you goods at the beginning by promising that something would be easier than it was, or I was wrong and setting design is, in fact, hard.

The problem here is a misunderstanding of the underlying meaning of minimal work.  I've been seeing some videos, and I got some time, so I wanted to talk about what I'm trying to show with Psi-Wars, why I do it the way I do, what I think you should be doing with your setting design and how you can avoid some major pitfalls.

The Frame vs the Game

Sometimes when I'm looking at my statistics, I notice that I'm getting a number of views from a particular source, such as a blog.  These are usually GURPS blogs (special shoutouts to Dungeon Fantastic, GURB and Let's GURPS for sending traffic my way) and I noticed one I hadn't seen before called the Disoriented Ranger. It seems my post on the Riddle of Systems triggered some thoughts from him.  It's not really a rebuttal, so much that the post inspired him.

The thing that inspired him is a comment I often make about "the game" of D&D being about "killing monsters and taking their stuff," vs other elements that other games do better. He wonders if D&D needs those elements and slides into a discussion on metanarratives and how RPGs are a sort of "controlled language," which is an interesting discussion.

But it did get me to thinking about how many people reject the label of D&D being "about killing monsters and taking their stuff."  He doesn't seem to, not explicitly, but I do think about it.  And while I was thinking about it, I came across an idea that I wanted to offer you to sort of show something I think is critical to understanding the bounds of RPGs, what they do, and why people often get into arguments about whether a game is "broken." It's a conversation about what the game of an RPG is, and what isn't "the game" of an RPG. It's an arbitrary distinction as you'll see, but it's useful for having a particular sort of conversation about RPGs.

Rant: My problem with flexible magic systems

If we can set aside Psi-Wars for a second, I came across a video that I want to comment on before I forget it.  The video discusses essentially why Avada Kadavra is a terrible spell, and he's spot on, but this also has broader implications, especially in one of my pet peeves, and why I've not adapted RPM like the vast majority of GURPS fans seem to have.

The problem with flexible magic systems is that, despite purporting to allow unlimited flexibility in magic, they suck all the need for creativity out of a game.

(I was originally working on this when someone asked me for help on a flexible magic system so I, uh, paused it. It was also turning into something longer than I expected and I wanted to put my time on Psi-Wars, rather than a personal peeve of mine.  However, this was the Patron General Topic of the Month, so I posted it; well, actually it was a tie, but this was more ready than the other topic, so this topic went up.  If you'd like to vote on next month's general topic, feel free to support me via the link in the sidebar.  All I ask is $1 a month).

The Eye of Providence Closes

If you follow my blog more than you follow the GURPS Facebook group or the SJGames forums, you might not have heard by Pyramid is closing down.  It's been, what, nearly 30 years?

My own first pyramid was an actual magazine plucked from a store shelf.  I began following it back in the late 90s, and so I've had at least part of all three iterations of Pyramid, and fond memories of all three.  This is definitely a major blow, and I have quite a mix of emotions and thoughts about the announcement, as I'm sure you do as well, so I thought I would share some of them here.

On the Demise of Star Wars

"You were the chosen one"? Or maybe "Strike me down
and I shall only become stronger."

Forgive the provocative title.  My part of the internet bubble churns with much rage at the current incarnation of Star Wars, and especially at Kathleen Kennedy, at whose feet the perceived "Ruined Forever!" has been laid.  There is much angst and schadenfreude over the failure of Solo, but Solo is the crux of what inspired me to write this, as it's the first Star Wars movie in a long time that wasn't an instant "yes," though not the first Star Wars product in a long time that I had looked forward to, and then changed my mind about.

Then I put this post on ice, because I hesitate to post anything that sounds remotely political in this day and age as discourse is getting extremely divisive and it's hard to please both sides (and there are sides here) when you say anything, and because I have better things I should be putting my attention towards (the next post is almost done, I promise!). But as news continues to evolve and the corporate narrative of "a few disgruntled trolls vs the Last Jedi" explodes to reveal that the Star Wars franchise is Not Okay, I wanted to get my two cents in, especially given how my blog seems to eat, drink and breath Star Wars.

I hope you forgive this opinion piece.

Mailanka Rants: It's okay to like bad movies

So, a friend recently linked me to this guy's channel on movie editing and criticism, and he gets into some pretty deep stuff, but the one that leapt out at me, that I felt demanded greater discussion, was this video.  The question he is asked is this:

Jurassic World: I liked the movie because it felt like a bad B-movie.  Do you think movies can be genuinely good because of their "badness"?

 To which Folding Thoughts stumbles a bit, because how can you call something good because of its badness?  Then he begins to discuss genre, but I think his initial confusion signaled something important: the questioner framed his question badly, and I think I know why.

The question isn't really "Can bad movies be good?"  but "Is it okay for me to like a critically panned movie?"

The answer is yes.  It's also not the point.

Double Banana

Aka "Green Shirt + Red Shirt = Rosarius!"

I've been away from 40k for awhile, due to cost and losing my American crowd to play it with, but my hunger to be a part of that universe has driven me once again into the unloving, cold arms of GW, and I'm painting a Crimson Fist army (it's going very well, thank you, the prettiest minis I've painted yet, though still not up to the standards of Koen, Roomie or Walter). I've also been getting to know a group of people at a place called Gameforce, and it's been nice. I was really making inroads today, which is a shame, because something really got beneath my skin and made me walk out early.

I'm watching a battle between Orks and Space Marine, and the Ork player is a little iffy to me. The way he measures bugs me (for range: front of model to front of model), and "accidentally" snatching up failed rolls and tossing them with the next batch (unless someone points it out), forgetting rules if they inconvenience him. Really, smaller than I'm making it sound, more "round up for me, round down for you," sort of gameplay, and this already begins to bother me. But then he really starts to pull something that really gets me going.

He keeps saying his units, in plain sight, have cover. I finally get up and say "Dude, look, he can see all of them but like four. You don't get a cover save!" Then he argues that his units are intermixed, so he does. And the thing is, he's right.

Lemme explain:

If you have a bunch of guys behind rocks, they get cover saves, like so:

SSSSS (space marines)

RRRR (some rocks)
OOOO (Some orks)

If the Space Marines try to shoot the Orks, the Orks get cover. Makes sense.

Units provide cover too.

SSSSS

GGGGG (Some grots)

OOOOO

The Orks are behind the Grots. If the Space marines wanted to shoot "through" the Grots to hit the Orks, the Orks would get a cover save. This makes sense, as the point of sending a vanguard is for them to die first. Duh.

But he pulled this:

SSSSSS

GOGOG
OGOGO
GOGOG

Now, he can only see about 3 of the 8 Grots, and 2 of the 7 Orks. If he declares he's firing at the Orks, the Grots give them cover. If he declares he's firing at the Grots, the Orks give them cover. You can only fire at one unit, and since these are technically two units, each unit has a cover save (even, incidentally, if you hit them with artillery). They just march around, ignoring cover, because they don't need it. Orks that are supposed to have a 6+ armor save suddenly all have Rosarius, superior even to Space Marine armor, for a third the cost. Victory was assured, because he picked the ideal army to use this tactic. Completely cheesy.

The worst thing? Completely legal. Completely legal asshatery, if you ask me.

(He's not the first to come with this, after a brief perusal online. You find plenty of discussions, replete with the foul-mouthed offensive-defenses you'd expect from twinks defending practices they know are twinky. A common house rule is: You cannot both give and receive cover to/from a unit," and that seems reasonable to me.)

"Ok, so just don't play against him" says Bee. Well, I don't plan on it. Even if he relents and admits this is a crappy way to play, or if GW (finally) comes out with a rule against it, his attitude bugs me. See, I know I'm going to lose when I play. It bugs me, but I accept it, because playing will be fun. It'll be competitive too, as players use superior strategies to defeat one another. Feelings will be hurt but, hopefully, friends will be made, and I'll have stories to regal my friends with. Yeah, I've been on the benefiting side of overpowered cheese (Space Wolf 2e codex with that magical teleport device), but I remember realizing it was cheesy after a few games, and honestly enjoying my "invincible" SW scout "Roark." (He never died. Really.) I remember losing alot as Black Templar, and never winning as Chaos. That's how these things go. As one fellow (Tommie, I think) said "Whatever happens, just smile." That's a good attitude to have.

But I don't want to play if I have to get into yelling matches about the rules, or have people tell me to look up stuff on the internet. Just because a loophole isn't against the rules doesn't mean it's a good idea. The fun of the other player matters too. As Tony said "I want to have someone to play against again after I win," and that takes sportsmanship.

I'm really disheartened. I was hoping to get back in, and now I'm nervous that this sort of thing will be wide spread. If so, I'll focus on friends I make, and playing with the Knights (they play 40k too). I feel bad I walked out, but I wasn't really planning on it, it just sort of happened because I needed to cool my head and I wanted to paint (needed a new brush). Hopefully, though, I'll feel better next week.