Tékumel Board Games: Corsairs

(This is adapted from the game Royal Jelly by Hempuli.)

Corsairs is a game popular along the southern coast, but especially in Mu'ugalarvya where it has a nautical theme, but in Tsoliyanu it is called Skirmishers and has a military theme. In Livyanu it is played on a Qal board; in most other places it is played on a board with small posts mounted into the centers of what would be hexagonal spaces in a hexagonal lattice. The "corner" spaces are usually specially marked or colored. The pieces are often large and ornately carved with depressions on the bottom to stay (loosely) on the posts.

 

It has an asymmetrical setup: The convoy payer starts with six escorts arranged around a central freighter. The attacking player starts with their six corsairs off the board. The corsair player starts.

On the corsair player's turn they can move two pieces once or one piece twice. A move can be: move a corsair one empty adjacent space, move a corsair from off the board onto an empty corner space, or move a corsair from a corner space off the board. A single piece cannot do both the latter two moves in one turn (ie no popping off-and-on, or vice versa.)

When a corsair moves it can "pull" an adjacent opponent's piece into the space it just vacated. When this is done with a move off the board, the opponent piece is captured; if the freighter is captured this way, the corsair player wins.

On the convoy player's turn they move an escort any number of empty hexes in a straight line. This can be a single piece, or a "formation move": any number of escort ships in a straight uninterrupted line moves the same direction as a unit, the same number of spaces, and all spaces must be empty or else the whole line must stop.

The freighter cannot be moved by the convoy player at all.

At the end of the convoy player's turn, any corsairs that are adjacent to two or more convoy pieces (escorts or freighter) is "entangled" and cannot be moved on the corsair player's next turn. Any corsair piece adjacent to three escorts (but not the freighter) is captured and removed from the game.

The convoy player wins by capturing 5 corsairs, or if the game lasts one hundred turns. Re: the latter case, turns are not really counted, but it is a recognition that the convoy player wins stalemates.

Tékumel Board Games: Bridges

(This is adapted from Portal Field by "Hempuli".)

Bridges is a two player game played in Chayakku, of unknown origin. It is played on an 8x8 board of octagonal spaces, usually marked out by diamond-shaped copper rivets hammered into a painted wooded board. Each player starts with four pawns in the middle squares of their back two rows. The pawns themselves are often fantastically shaped but in the rules they function the same.  Each player has four hexagonal pieces (called bridges) marked with plus-shaped designs that fit nestled into a spot covering a space.

It is played in turns. The first player's first turn is one move are two moves. In a move a player may move a pawn up to two spaces in a straight line, horizontally or diagonally. This move cannot pass through or land on any piece except in one case: the piece may land on an opponent's pawn and push that pawn back one space, if that space is empty.

At the end of the players turn, they must place a bridge on an empty spot on the board. These are never moved.

The bridges have an orientation. Along the indicated directions, pieces that move into them must continue to the space on the other side. When entered from the other directions, the space is normal; a piece on a bridge is ignored by pieces passing through it.

Whenever a piece has two or more orthogonally adjacent enemy pieces, that piece is captured and removed from the board. Exception: pawns on bridges are immune to capture this way.

When one player has captured four of the opponent's pieces they win the game immediately.

Easy Coinage Rules

How much do coins weigh? How big are they? How many fit in that box?

Early D&D has bad answers for these, and if you go looking in Dragon magazine you're going to get a uselessly high level of detail.

So here's my system:

Coins are mostly pure alloys -- pure enough that we will pretend they are for determining weights and values, but still we remember a gold coin is not as soft and easily melted as pure gold.

The rate of exchange between metals is 1:10 as usual.

There are 50 coins to a pound (or 0.02 lbs/coin). This is definitional. The real-life densities of gold and platinum are roughly equal, and both roughly double that of silver and copper.  Thus the coins of the lighter metals is about the size of a US quarter (or 1 euro, or 20c euro), while the heavier metals are a little bigger than a US penny (or a 0.02 euro coin.)

US $0.25 vs €1

These sizes of coins seem intuitive and 50 coins per pound is an easy number to do math with, so this seems like a good baseline. These are a little too big to be medieval coins -- but kill the D&D medievalist in your brain, and contemplate that these coins are roughly the weight/value of the coins of Croesus.

An easy-to-calculate standard amount for trade would be a 20 lb ingot, or one thousand coins of the metal.

How many coins fit in that chest?

When dealing with piles of coins, sometimes we don't just want to know their weight, but we want to know their volume.

For simplicity, we will say that silver and copper have the same density, while gold and platinum have double that density. The density of gold is set at 1,000 lbs per cubic foot and the lighter metals at 500 lbs per cubic foot. (These are both a little less than in reality, but this allows for calculations that assume that we are working with coins which do not fill the volume exactly.) (And while we're at it, stone is about 150-200 pounds per cubic foot, and wood, or water, or fleshly creatures, is about 50 lbs/cuft.)

Because gold is double the density of silver, you can count a gold coin as half the volume of a silver coin: a horde of 3,000 silver and 700 gold has the same volume as 3,350 silver coins; that many coins is 67 pounds, which is a little more than 10% of the 500 lbs of coins a cubic foot of silver coins is; call it an eighth, which is a 6" x 6" x 6" bag.

The Heavy Spotlight, or: Go-Around-The-Table Considered Harmful

An under-sung problem with D&D is, unfortunately, what people often see as the core of RP itself: "It’s your turn, what do you do?"

Specifically though, in combat. In combat there’s often not that much interesting for someone to do. Just hold the line and swing yr sword bro. And yet we ask the question all the same. Well, not so much people who run some kind of phased combat.

A lotta people have never experienced phased combat as per pre-3E D&D rules. Generally it goes like: you declare actions (sometimes individually), you roll side initiative, then per side actions get resolved by type: eg spells, missiles, movement, then melee. A key optimization is eg all missile attacks can be rolled at once. This is fast, and nice for example when your character has 5 hirelings.

There's various ways to do it, but my goal is not to break down phased combat. What they share is something stunning to consider: that it’s never your turn, not by default.

The more I think about it, and the more I look at my experiences, going around the table, processing turns board game style, giving each player a full turn boardgame style, seems like a huge problem, even an avalanche of problems:

• It kills narrative flow over and over.
• It encourages silly individualist thinking. People feel the huge spotlight coming towards them and it becomes everything. It encourages people to do goofy maneuvers and try to win the day with one weird trick every time. OTOH it is unwelcome to players who don't want the spotlight every time.
• People can’t remember group situation and have to be reminded of it
• Players become bad at taking coordinated actions, requires lots of talking, which people forget and fuckup.
• Rules basically prevent maneuvers eg the party can’t advance/charge as group. However note that monsters can, because they all go at once. DMs monsters have perfect coordination communication and timing.
• Turns for pets, familiars, hirelings etc are now more heavyweight discouraging their use.
• It presents a design surface. Designers want to give players cool impactful feeling choices and mechanisms to do on every turn. Pull lever for fun!
• Now your system is getting bloated. Now each player’s turn requires more system knowledge reducing accessibility.
• DM turns are now slower and more demanding and require more prep.
• Combat overall is more heavyweight so now so you feel combats should count; you can’t have a quick fight; the idea of random encounters becomes ridiculous to you.
• Now PC turns are slower which exacerbates all the problems above — the spotlight is slower and heavier! — plus adds a hundred more problems and basically devours the game.
• And yet also now players can somehow do less. Just pull the lever just turn the crank. No you can’t do anything else. Sim is gone, it's a dirty word. The endpoint here is something like the slow, slow all-encompassing videogame crunch straightjacket of like PF2E.

I'm not saying never have a spotlight in combat. Just that D&D is better w/o going around the table, "what do you do?", full spotlight, every goddamn round, for every goddamn attack. Process combats quickly and get back to whatever else your game was supposedly about -- or at least, be able to do that. Let players learn to pay attention and interrupt when they have a decision, or throw the spotlight on them only at those times.

Phased combat is not perfect. It has jank. At first it is a little alien to people who have been trained to just wait their turn. It does not encourage, or spell out how to resolve, individual actions. But: combat goes fast. It's never your turn; it's our turn. I prefer it.

Some people don't mind all the problems I've listed above. To them, those are features not bugs. They love their silly stupid bumbling superheroes. They love everything enveloped in crunch. They wanna play a slow video game. They want DMs prepping 3 hours for the dramatic set piece combat du jour. They wanna play fantasy Battletech. That’s fine, for them. I like Battletech too. But it's not what I want from D&D.

It's strange to me that this is not discussed much, even in the OSR. It’s not seen as an important area of old rules, it’s seen as more like personal style that doesn’t matter. I’ve seen a 0E lover, who worships old rules down to the smallest footnote, completely disregard the very core of how 0E, BX, and 1E say to do combat, who has never even tried it, who in ignorance condemns it -- just because go-around-the-table is what they know. It is the rhythm of their DMing or it's just the way their group plays. There's a possibility of player habituation, too.

And like... me too. Go-around-the-table is how I learned to play. The first game of D&D I ever played in 5th grade in ~1983 was go-around-the-table, even outside of combat! But, I played other things too, and got exposed to other games and other ways of doing things.

It's kind of shocking and distressing to me how no one is talking about this. Maybe I've missed the discussions. Maybe there are no discussions because I'm simply wrong.  Maybe it's no big deal. But I don't think so.

I think it's worth thinking about. The control of the spotlight is one of the most important things in a TTRPG, it is foundational to the experience.

And you may be really used to running go-around-the-table, and your players may be really experienced with helping it move efficiently. But that doesn't mean there isn't a better way to do things.