Jeffro’s Car Wars Blog

I periodically dig up the latest version of Inform and try to make it do stuff.  Generally, I think of a really simple project to do… and then end up getting rabidly frustrated of some incredibly stupid syntax issue that would be utterly trivial in a programming language I already know.  I end up frantically pouring over the documentation and trying every variation on the syntax by trial and error until I turn green and start smashing things.  “Jeffro will SMASH!!!”

This time I figured out that the trick is to remain exceedingly modest in your goals.  I now present to you my first complete adventure game.  This time I only spent an hour or so attempting to discover the if-then-else syntax, so I only turned purple.  I’m telling you though, it’s a complete game.  Woah!  (I could still fuss over things like “a vs. the” issues… and printing square brackets in the text, but I’m going to leave at this for now.)

“The Jewell of Terror” by Jeffro

When play begins, say “You’ve found the cave at last!  Can you descend its dark depths and return with the lost treasure of the Precursors?”

The maximum score is 10.

A Dark Tunnel is a room.  “A light glimmers to the south.  A rocky passage slopes downward to the northeast.” Check going south: if the player carries the jewell
 begin;
  award 5 points;
  end the game in victory;
  stop the action;
 otherwise;
  say “What… without the jewell??”;
  stop the action;
 end if.

The Inner Chamber is northeast of A Dark Tunnel.  It contains the jewell.

After taking the jewell for the first time: award 5 points; say “After all these years… now it’s yours!”

1989 was a dark year for interactive fiction: that’s when Activision put Infocom out of its misery.  It’s also the year that Antic released Kevin Sherratt’s Escape from Dispozon as a unique two part “Super Disk Bonus” for the Atari 8-bit computer.

Planetfill, as the author originally called it, was a thinly veiled rip off of Infocom’s well known sci-fi comedy, Planetfall.  The Antic program featured a cynical and argumentative robot pal that insulted you as you entered your moves.  If the parser failed to understand your commands, the robot would insult you all the more….

Back in the day I completely failed to get past even the first puzzle, and I never really picked it up again.  For a long time I couldn’t find a copy, though.  The links to the disks on the Classic Computer Magazine Archive were dead and the Page 6 library only included side A of the program.  Hacking around, I realized that I could move the necessary files from the “zipped” section of the Antic archive to an ATR disk file by using DOS 2.0 to copy from a virtual hard drive– but the files were invisible to the Atari virtual hard disk unless I renamed them from windows.  It only took about 50 Windows commands and 50 Dos 2.0S commands to make the new story disk for the game.  Yee-haw.  (Figuring this out was probably more fun than trying to solve a text adventure….)

Anyway, with this file that I made and the Page 6 file, you can boot up Planetfill yourself on an 8-bit Atari emulator.  Just point your virtual disk drive at my file when the Page 6 program requests the story disk.  (And don’t let the .txt extender throw you– it’s really an ATR file with the extender changed to get past this site’s security restrictions.)  Enjoy!

(Just trying to do my part to preserve computing history….)

I’m still stuck on the first puzzle, by the way….

I’ve always liked the extra skills that were introduced for Car Wars in ADQ issues 4/2, 7/1, and in the Compendium 2e.  The thing was, though, that we never bought very many of them for our characters.  If you knew you were going to be dueling very much, you maxed out your character points on Driver and Gunner skills– and that was it!  Previously, I suggested using “General” skill point awards from duels and adventures to improve non-combat skills, but after playing Traveller I see there’s a less heavy handed approach to accomplishing the same thing– at least in the case of former Boy Scout Commandoes.

Not everyone can claim to have been a Boy Scout Commando– this is only at the referee’s discretion.  Players using these character generation rules have to use them in sight of their fellow players if they intend to use their characters in a game: you can’t just roll up a hundred characters until you get what you want.  (Go play GURPS if you already know exactly what type of character you want to play!)

To determine your character’s background, first roll up the standard Traveller attributes for your character.  These consist of 6 2d6 rolls applied consecutively to Strength, Dexterity, Endurance, Intelligence, Education, and Social.  Don’t worry if you don’t know when, where, and how to adapt these values to your adventures: a consensus has never really emerged even among Traveller fans.  You could even throw them out altogether when you start playing your character: in a high tech future, skills are going to be a lot more important than attributes.  If they do impact a skill roll, they should never improve a roll 2d6 skill check by more than +1 or +2.

Scouts begin the character generation process at age 12.  Each year they will make rolls to determine if they survive, advance, and if they persevere.  The survival roll is required because like in the corps is dangerous: that really cool character with nifty skills and attributes is likely to improve each year he stays in the corps… but you just might lose him.  Not everyone advances and not everyone stays involved with their troop; rolls for both of those are required each time as well.

To become a scout, roll your Soc attribute or less on 2d6.

To Survive, roll 6 or more on 2D6.  (Add one to your roll if your Dex is 8 or higher.  Add two to your roll if your End is 10 or higher.)

To Advance, roll 9 or more on 2D6.  (Add one to your roll if your Int is 7 or higher.  Add two to your roll if your Edu is 9 or higher.)

To Perservere, roll 7 or more on 2D6.  (Add one if your Str is 9 or higher.)

Each time you advance, you gain a new skill at base level.  When you advance to Tenderfoot, you gain the Handgunner skill.  First Class scouts receive Paramedic skill.  Star scouts gain Driver skill… and Death scouts pick up Gunner skill.  If a scout fails his survival roll, he’s dead.  When you finally get a character to survive the process, you can use the dead ones as fellow scouts from your character’s patrol that all died on a particularly gruesome mission.  If you fail a perseverance roll, then your character quit scouting for some reason and the process ends there; you do pick up your skills for that year, however.

Each year your character remains in scouting, he gets to roll on a skill table.  If he doesn’t have the skill he rolls, then he receives it at base level.  If he already has the skill, then he gains a level in it.  Low ranking scouts roll on the Skill Awards Table.  Star and Death scouts roll on the Merit Badges Table.  Scouts gain these skills in addition to the ones they pick up for advancement.

Skill Awards
1) Survival
2) Stealth
3) Scrounging
4) Handgunner
5) Runner
6) Climber

Merit Badges
1) Driver
2) Gunner
3) Mechanic
4) Explosives
5) Paramedic
6) Martial Arts

The only new skill in the above list is Scrounging– use that to help determine if your character can find supplies, ammo, and/or spare parts for jury-rigging equipment.

Once you survive your 6th year of scouting, fail a perseverance roll, or drop out, add up your character’s total skill levels in Driver and Gunner (including your base levels.)  If you have less than 3 total skill levels there, then round out your character by adding the difference in new skills or skill levels.  For instance, if your character was Driver-1, you could pick up Gunner-0 at this point.  If your character had no skill levels at all in Driver or Gunner, you might pick Mechanic-2 or even Politics-2.

The first character I rolled up with these rules had 9,9,5,7,10, and 3 for attributes and was Handgunner-1, Stealth-0, Scrounging-0, Paramedic-1, Driver-1, Gunner-0, Mechanic-0.  (Yeah, he actually did make his Soc roll to join the troop!)

Note that Car Wars skills are much more effective than their Traveller “level zero” counterparts.  But these rules can be used in either game, because most of the additional skills the Car Wars character receives will be in non-combat disciplines.  In Traveller, adding a few level zero skills to a character will probably not imbalance the game– in fact many referees do so already– but referees should be aware that this system can yield level 1 skills or even level 2 skills as well.  While characters should technically be able to join a standard military service after 4-6 years in the BSC, referees might want to limit this generation process to only those characters that are from a violent post-apocalyptic world– a world whose citizens might not have access to the usual Imperial careers!

A-Rogue was published in the May, 1987 issue of Antic Magazine.  Also called “Atari Rogue,” the game is not quite a port of the original mainframe Rogue ASCII-graphic adventure, but more of an adaption.  It is interesting to see how the author simplified the game in order to make it work in BASIC on an 8-bit machine.  (A more serious attempt to implement Rogue on a home computer would have to wait until the original authors could put together commercial versions for the IBM PC, Mac, Atari ST, and Amiga.)

Atari Rogue uses an altered character set to make the graphics.  You can see the typical layout of a level below.  For some reason it took the 6502 processor nearly a minute to randomly generate such a map!  The mazes fit in a 24×12 grid and the player was represented by the standard Atari cursor instead of the usual ‘@’ symbol.  Unlike the mainframe version, you cannot return to previously visited levels, but can only go further down.  The screen is updated by positioning the cursor and programmatically entering deletes and spaces/text, which occasionally makes for semi-animated visual effects.  That technique was not overly exploited, however.

Monsters do not wander in this version and do not remain to block your path if you successfully [w]ithdraw from them.  There are no hidden passages to search for and the items are randomly scattered about more like a random event than as an actual placed object.  There is no “Experience Point” counter on your display, so its not clear that you gain anything by defeating monsters.  On the contrary, your Endurance score (i.e., Hit Points) seems to go up each time you [d]escend to a new level regardles of how many monsters you kill.

Potions are a mixed bag: they can either teleport you randomly, summon a monster, heal you, feed you, or raise your Endurance score.  Perhaps the most insidious one is the one that rots your food supply.  You might think to eat a meal before trying a random potion, but that’s not an option: once you find one, you have to drink it or it completely disappears.  The same thing goes for weapons and armor: if you find a new item, you have to take it or its gone forever.

The simplifications of the game eliminate many of the tactical and strategic options that made the original Rogue so addictive.  In this version, you’re mainly left with choosing when to attack, when to withdraw, when to experiment with weird potions (if you find them), and when to use your limited number of spells.

So far, I tend to die with many resources left at my disposal.  Also, I’m way too reckless in battle and I’m not sure that the risk is even worth it.  I have no idea how far down the dungeon goes, so I’m not sure how close I’ve ever come to completing the game.  I wonder exactly how the experience system works and also what the actual weapon and armor statistics are, but I hesitate to examine the code because much of the charm of the game comes from the slight “fog of war” that ignorance of such things entails.

To run the game, I used the Atari800Win Plus emulator and the files from the Antic Archive.  Be sure to enable the “H” drive from the Settings screen if you try this yourself.  Also, the lines of code referencing the “D” drive should be changed as well once you RUN “H:AROGUE.BAS”.  (It is cool to have an Atari with that much disk space!!)  The code seems to work fine, though I did get an “ERROR 141″ cursor our of range error from line 190 one time….

In conclusion, the game is a cute abstraction of Dungeons and Dragons.  The fact that tunnels and rooms are essentially the same (and also that that objects and monsters are not persisted on the map) eliminates a lot of the point of the randomly generated layout.  While the author did achieve some semblance of Rogue-ishness, one wonders how memory and computing power could have been marshalled to give greater depth and a larger array of tactical options to the game.

I got in 3 games of G.E.V. this weekend.  I played against the guy that had crushed me in several games of Carcassonne a while back, so I knew that he could handle a game like this.  It seems like people either really don’t care about games too much–in which case they won’t even bother to master a relatively simple game like Ogre– or they are highly aggressive and tactically minded– in which case the terrain, spillover, and overrun rules of G.E.V. won’t pose them the slightest problem to them.

We played the Breakthrough scenario three times.  The first game, I played the defense and my opponent split his force into two groups.  I purchased heavy tanks and light tanks.  6 points of infantry and a heavy tank were stranded on the small eastern island and the G.E.V. attackers were able to mop them up without taking any fire.  Oops!  On the other side of the board, my light tanks sallied forth and the attackers were able to hit and run enough to destroy them for free.  I was able to send a couple of light tanks out from the central city to a woods hex and get a couple of shots off, disabling a couple of G.E.V.’s, but it didn’t help me in the end: the Combine forced scored a tremendous 80 point victory!  I hung my head in shame.

My opponent then took up the defense.  I sent my G.E.V.’s up the west side of the map and came up against two heavy tanks and a swarm of infantry.  One mobile howitzer brought up the rear while another one was isolated on the eastern island.  He played much more aggressively than I did and sent his forces as far down the map as he could without any cover at all in many cases.  In the bloody melee, I eliminated the infantry and disabled the tanks.  I lost a couple of units to the howitzer before I could slip in a good pot shot.  The surviving heavy tank proved difficult to kill and followed my G.E.V.’s down off the map, getting in a good overrun and a couple of kills.  I also scored a decisive victory, but with just 60 points.

At this point we realized that, just like Ogre, the key to this scenario is mastering the coordination of the defensive units.  My opponent suggested that the game was unbalanced, but I felt that we were missing something in our unit selection and tactics.

In the final game, my opponent took the defense again.  I ran my G.E.V.’s down the river this time.  We took out a mobile howitzer and six points of infantry at the cost of a couple of G.E.V.’s.  We then used our “road bonus” to move down the map at high speed across the water.  The reacting forces continued to move east to intercept us, but even the surviving mobile howitzer was out of range.  I ran my 10 G.E.V.’s into the swamp hexes on the far side of the map.  Three or four G.E.V.’s were disabled.  The howitzer then arrived to pick up a couple of kills while the rest of my force left the map.  I again scored a decisive victory, but with 64 points this time.

We got into an argument about whether or not G.E.V.’s have to pause (like they do when crossing streams) when crossing from water to clear hexes and vice versa.  I supposedly said they did in the first game, but said they didn’t in the last.  Then there’s the question of how the “road bonus” works in this situation as well….  The one key rule that we completely forgot was the obscuring of the defense’s set up in the Breakthrough scenario.  I would not have been able to choose the absolute best point of entry like I did in the third game had we played by this rule!

I like this game a lot.  It is very violent and full of many difficult decisions.  The spillover fire and overrun rules really aren’t that complicated– they’re just hard to explain to a first time player.  The terrain is also pretty easy to get the hang of once you play a few times: we really didn’t have to refer to the cheat sheet that much for that.  It amazes me how far these rules go in differentiating the various units.  Each armor unit has its own personality: in G.E.V., they are so much more than a move, fire, range, and defense rating.

Ron Edwards says on The Forge that “you remember [role playing games from your teenage years] fondly not because the game itself was good, but because it wasn’t.”  Ouch.  He’s right, though.  The things just flat out didn’t work, more often than not.

I remember this quirky guy we met that said he Dungeon Mastered.  We rolled up characters and he took us through a cave.  We examined everything and he wanted to know exactly how we went about with everything.  It took maybe half an hour just to cross an underground river.  Nothing ever really happened in the game and none of us ever saw him again.

Then there was the guy that gave me a copy of the 3rd edition Gamma World boxed set.  Man, I wanted to play that game.  On my birthday the following year I had set him up to Game Master.  He stood me up.  I’d probably never been so disappointed.  My pals rolled up characters and I tried to run things.  The “rank 1 wimps” fought a few mutant bunny rabbits and could hardly ever hit or do any damage.  Oh, the pain!

Then there was my friend that had cool games like FASA’s Doctor Who, GDW’s Twilight 2000, and Victory Games’ James Bond.  I borrowed the Doctor and even bought a few supplements but hadn’t watched the show much and couldn’t figure out how to run it.  Twilight, we rolled up characters one night and then couldn’t figure out what to do next.  We started playing Octopussy for James Bond one time, but I couldn’t get over the fact that the Faberge egg was just a blood spattered drawing on a crumpled piece of paper.  The props were really cool, but as a player I had no clue how to proceed with any sort of investigation.

I attempted to run the adventure that came with GURPS Humanx one evening.  It featured two bars/night club locations and I ended up arguing with the characters about what had happened where.  Evidently two night clubs was way too much setting for either me to communicate or for my players to comprehend.

Then there was the time that I thought that Dungeon Magazine’s short and simple adventures would be the key to making this stuff work.  I tried to run “Roarwater Caves” from issue number 15.  I was always the mapper in our group, so there was no one that cared to do that if I was Dungeon Mastering.  The players wandered aimlessly through a few rooms and then backtracked….  They were completely lost.  The bad guys of the adventure weren’t goblins or orcs, but… xvarts.  And, boy, did I get my fill of fart jokes that afternoon!

The only way I’ve ever gotten anywhere in a game was to ignore combat– in fact ignore all the rules– make stuff up, and start in the middle of the action.  Don’t require excessive map making or note taking: just present them with a situation and let the players go.  If they start barking up the wrong tree, then steadily introduce a crisis that they have to respond to.  If something’s not working, introduce totally new events until something takes.  Clichés are your best friend in all of these matters, because the players will immediately know what role they have to play.  But never ever name the bad guys something that rhymes with a bodily function!

In a recent post I remarked that in judging the elegance of a game “it is important to understand the design differences forced upon a game by its [designer's] choice of scope and granularity.”  Chris Warren has similarly concluded that when he attempts to make his game designs elegant, he’s “actually trying to make the game as un-complex as possible… for the amount… of emergence” that he’s trying to foster.  He defines emergence as being patterns that occur during play “that are not directly defined by the rules of the system.”

Under this measure, Conway’s Game of Life does very well.  Chess has many more than its fair share of openings, combinations, and killer tactics for a game with such few rules.  But interactive fiction’s hardwired emphasis on one-shot puzzles cause it to come up short here.  Computer Role Playing Games might, as a class, fair a bit better if the design is good enough: their model world construction might develop an emergent ecology of sorts in the course of play.  But the Role Playing Games from which the CRPGs originally sprang are an entirely different can of worms.

Role Playing Games seem to be so dominated by the requirements of an adaptive and coherent narrative that most rules tend to get thrown out the window in the heat of the game.  Take Traveller as an example: it didn’t take long for players to realize that excessive space combat lead to a depressing amount of character generation.  Sophisticated modern referees such as Karl Gallagher nearly eschew combat altogether– ultra-violence is reserved for orcs in other settings.  The throws that I require in the course of the game are mostly improvised according to each situation.  In terms of hard and fast rules that actually get used, I’d say that about 90% of them come from the character and world generation.  But those rules are only used to prepare for play.  What gets used during a game is probably only a page or two of charts and core rules.

I wish that modern play-tests for RPGs were more like… well… play-tests.  What usually happens is that the rules get tinkered with, proofread, checked for various flame war inducing factors, and so forth.  You rarely hear about, “when I ran a session with this new rule-set, this is what happened.”  You certainly don’t see transcripts of actual sessions!

I wish there were similar tools for RPG testing like what we have for software development.  I’d like to give a new game to five or ten different groups to play with for a few sessions… and I’d like to not only have a full transcript of the games, but I’d like to have each group’s rulebook automatically highlighted for each rules section that actually got used.  I’d especially like to have sections that were flatly contradicted or house-ruled highlighted in red.  That would give the designers some real information to work with, but I’m not sure that many designers care.  Sometimes I wonder if we’ve really come that far since the seventies.

But back to Warren’s remarks….  How can RPG rules be designed to maximize elegance and emergence?  Are there any good examples of this?  I mostly play the old stuff, so I wonder if I’m missing out on any major improvements….

We got together last night for the second installment of our Spinward Marches: 1111 campaign.  Last time we had travelled from Bowman to Flexos.  The players had helped a Darrian merchant out of a little scrape and so were offered positions helping to crew his far trader.  On Flexos, a small adventure seed spun out of control as the players ventured into the unknown.  Tensions ran high as they were sure they were all going to die for nearly every moment.

Going into the second session, I was perhaps a bit overconfident: things had gone well the first time mainly because I was lucky.  I made several mistakes this time around– or at the very least, several sub-optimal choices.  The overall narrative was forwarded somewhat, I learned a few things, and we did have our moments, so it wasn’t a total loss by any stretch.  A weekly Traveller game session is actually pretty demanding, though.

I have a lot of conflicting goals as a referee.  I want the players to have significant choices and I want the narrative to remain coherent.  I want every stat on the character sheets and world listings to impact the game.  I want failure to have real consequences… and yet I don’t want to ruin an adventure just because of a die roll.  I want to emphasize travel across many star systems as the backdrop, but I also want each world to be individualized and recognizable.  I want to balance all of these factors, but I also want everything to flow naturally with a sense of inevitability.  I want to run a good game, but I want the players to be able to take center stage.

Walston and Datrillion were very similar worlds.  The players had two brief stops on both of them and I even got them mixed up myself during the heat of the game.  I need to have a better cheat sheet next time….  One thing that threw me was that a bit part I had planned for Walston was thrown when the medic failed the roll to revive an NPC from Low Berth.  If Doc had only been Medic-2….

Another thing that hampered the session was that I was using Kenneth Bearden’s T4 task system with CT generated characters.  It was all rigged up for people with skill levels between 2 and 5 or so, I think.  Using it with the CT characters left the 2d6 “Average” task rolls too easy and the 3d6 “Difficult” task rolls too hard.  After a valiant effort, I gradually slipped back into roll-your-attribute-or-less on two dice with healthy modifers based on the situation.  I really have to come up with a better system for the next time.  What I really want is to have several possible outcomes with a single roll and  I want to avoid using multiple die rolls to determine a contest or to figure out how long it takes to accomplish something.

Another thing that seemed to drag was that the players would get to a world and then they wouldn’t really know what to do.  On Walston, my planned adventure seed just didn’t seem to fit the narrative when we got there.  On Datrillion, I felt like I set up the seed too overtly.  On both worlds I wanted to show several of the world details instead of just reciting the facts, but I just didn’t seem to pull this off.

Next time, I want to have some sort of play aid that shows a few options for them when they arrive.  This might be somewhat like the map of the town from Ultima I.  The players can decide to go to the bar, find out about tours, look for odd jobs, etc.  The options should vary from world to world, of course, and I should have some NPC’s or scenes worked out the communicate something of the culture of the world.  I want to try to use the old rumor technique to allow the players to investigate what interests them so that I don’t always have to bonk them over the head with an obvious crisis or cliché.

Let’s see what we can come up with for next time….

HERO fans are now set to get their own official rendition of the classic Traveller sci-fi setting, though the “launch” has left a few fans a bit confused.  The “core book” containing the HERO stats of Traveller equipment, classes, ships, etc. is in fact not out yet, though it may turn up this summer.  The official setting for Traveller HERO will be 1248, so the two core 1248 books are currently being listed as part of the launch even though the books are systemless– but the line will not be restricted to 1248 mileux alone.  The two new items for the launch consist of Michael Taylor’s previously released Golden Age starship books converted to HERO stats with bonus computer files for tinkering with them with existing HERO software.

Unsurprisingly, there is a bit of grousing among the faithful, but I don’t really see this as a troubling issue.  I have no idea how big a following the HERO system has, but it can’t be a bad thing for Avenger Enterprises to have at least one modernized rpg system on their plate– especially now that they can’t do T20 anymore.  As long as Avenger puts out two versions of each of their PDF’s (one with Classic Traveller stats and one with HERO stats) things won’t really change that much.  1248 would have existed with or without HERO, and Avenger’s products have tended towards being fairly system agnostic anyway.

While the announcement of the new launch will trigger much rejoicing only among a small slice of an already small slice of Traveller fans, the celebration sale of 20% off should have at least somewhat broader appeal.  If you’ve been putting off purchasing Golden Age Spinward Marches PDFs, or if you’ve wanted to see what 1248 was all about, now’s your chance to see why so many referees are praising Avenger’s products.  The sale lasts until this Friday, so don’t wait too late!