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thevioletharuspex · 10 months ago

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Progress on The Violet Hack, Pt. 2

Here's the link to Part 1.

Today I'm talking about math. I'm going to try my best to communicate things in a way as to not be too confusing or get too bogged down in the weeds. (I make no promises.)

Last time I spoiled this chart:

It's got a lot going on. I don't blame you if it looks confusing; it's very much meant for my eyes only.

When designing The Violet Hack, I wanted to make sure that the monster math and encounter math actually works. I really like that about PF2 (even though some of their monsters are sliiiightly overtuned).

There were some central tenets and rules that I wanted to follow for designing monsters:

A monster of level X should deplete 60% of the resources of a character of level X over the span of a combat encounter.

A monster should have a lifespan of 3 turns.

Attacks between a character and a monster or vice versa should have an average of 60% chance of landing. I want hits to happen more than not because they're more fun for the game.

A monster of level X+2 should be equivalent of two monsters of level X. Thus, a monster of level X+4 = two level X+2 = four level X = a "solo" encounter. (Keep in mind, making a "solo" monster can be done in a second way and I'll get into that later).

Following these rules, we can start to figure out how the math lines up. In that chart above, the only number that is manually set by me is the number highlighted in black: PC effective health at level 1. Note, this is effective health, which will include actual HP, any defenses, the ability to dodge, healing magic, etc. It's a number that represents the durability of the character, using the resources they have available to them.

So, simply, a monster has to dish out 60% of a character's health over the span of 3 turns. If we factor in the fact that it will land a blow 60% of the time, we can calculate how much damage per turn the monster should attempt to output:

Which, conveniently, is simply a third of a character's effective health.

However, a monster should have effective health such that it survives 3 turns. (It needs to lose 100% of its health in this span of time)

Alternatively, we could write character damage as a function of a monster's effective health (How much damage should characters attempt to output to defeat the monster in 3 turns?):

In an optimal scenario, with this math, two evenly-matched characters should use all of their resources in the span of 3 rounds to defeat each other. (One uses 99% of their resources to deplete 100% of the opponents). We said earlier that we want a monster to deplete only 60% of the character's resources. We could have the creature deal 100% the damage of a character and last only 60% as long, or deal 60% the damage and last equally as long as a character of that level would. To find the midpoint, we just square root 60%, which is 77%: If a monster has 77% the effective health and deals 77% the damage of a character of a certain level, it has an overall effectiveness of 60% (0.77*0.77=0.6), which lines up with our prior goal. Now also, this gives room for variability. If a monster outputs more effective damage (it hits more often than not, or has a higher weapon damage die, or has some kind of damage aura), it will have less effective health to compensate, and vice versa. An easy way to calculate this would be to have the two numbers always have a product of 0.6, and thus, some of the following work:

77% damage, 77% health (baseline)

100% damage, 60% health (glass cannon)

60% damage, 100% health (damage sponge)

85% damage, 70% health

120% damage, 50% health

67% damage, 90% health

This gives a lot of wiggle room for various monster roles in combat and makes it so not every monster has the exact same stat block. If you squint hard enough, each of these health/damage arrays are equivalent and exchangeable and of equal "threat".

This gives us a way to determine a monster's effective health as a function of a character's effective health:

This gives us an easy substitution: now we can determine how much damage characters should be outputting as a function of their own health:

The table I generated above assumes a default health factor of 0.77, which we established as the baseline. It's used as a benchmark, and if I make a monster which deals more damage, I make it not last as long (so I can make it the same "effectiveness" as a 3-round monster), and vice versa. A low-damage monster has to last more than 3 rounds to get the same amount of output as a 3-round monster.

If ever need a monster to deviate from this, let's say, by saying I want it to have specifically 14 effective damage instead of 10 as a level 2 monster, I can use the following formula:

In this equation, since it's a quotient, I can exchange health for damage as needed in the structure of the formula. So let's say I want the damage to be 14:

So, it would only have 17 effective health instead of 23 to make up for its higher damage output.

This formula actually opens something up: we can simply multiply effective health and effective damage to get some fancy schmancy "effectiveness" value. In one of our goals, we wanted the "effectiveness" of a monster to double every 2 levels. For simplicity's sake, we assume that the effective health and damage progress at the same rate, so if we split up that doubling across two factors, we multiply each of them individually by 1.4 (since 1.4*1.4=2). Because monsters and characters have an "effectiveness" ratio to them that always stays at 0.6, characters also conveniently double in effectiveness every 2 levels.

This also conveniently shows us how to change a monster from effectively challenge one character to challenging a group of four characters:

Double its effective health, and double its effective damage.

This can be done in many ways, but that's a discussion for another blog post.

In the next part, I'm going to move away from the math involved. There's more math, of course, like calculating how much any single point of armour changes things, the ability to heal, an above-baseline attack bonus modifier, factoring in critical hits as 10-over-DC, etc. Instead of talking all about that, I'm going to be talking about simplifying a lot of 5e's core features like resting, skill proficiencies, and spell slots.

#the violet hack

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thevioletharuspex · 10 months ago

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Progress on The Violet Hack, Pt. 1

TLDR: It's taken on a new form.

I'm about to play in a PF2 game soon. I've been diving into the rules, trying to get a sense of them so I don't absolutely biff it at the table. I ran it once before, but I didn't really know what I was doing and I ran it like 5e and immediately TPK'ed the table. Oops.

There's some neat things I like about it! The 3-action economy, monster and encounter math that actually holds up to scrutiny, critical hits and fumbles being on benchmarks of 10 over or under a DC, and a clear division of what classes are trying to do on a macro level while also very much rewarding teamwork and coordination, much more so than the "selfish" class design of 5e.

It has some wonky stuff though. Adding your level to all d20 rolls kinda seems silly? It bloats numbers so much, and, it gets to the point where ACs and DCs and attack rolls are such big numbers that, in the end, the only number that actually mattered is what you got on the d20. Felt like it was needlessly complicated. Also, tracking all the modifiers is still such an extreme headache. It also has the side effect of not being able to have diverse encounters. It's always like "an elite with two minions" or "a big solo" or "a band of 4 minions" etc. You can't actually throw a horde of goblins at level 5 PCs because the goblins literally cannot hit the PCs.

5e has this thing called Bounded Accuracy. In theory, it's absolutely genius. Attack rolls and DCs stay within certain "bounds" and barely inflate, and the game uses other things to measure difficulty and progression. In a perfect Bounded Accuracy world, you can create diverse encounters. A horde of goblins can threaten a group of PCs, just not by themselves. Put an ogre or two in there as well and it actually works! Instead of in PF2 where you have 2 ogres on-level with your PCs and a horde of goblins that literally deal 0 damage because they cannot even hit the party without a natural 20. At least with Bounded Accuracy, that horde is at least a distraction, or even with its measly damage numbers it still contributes to helping out the ogres take down the party. It actually works.

In practice though, 5e doesn't even use it. Numbers inflate. The math, somewhere along the line of the system being drafted up and how it went to print, just completely broke.

Enter The Violet Hack.

Goals:

A mathematically-functional bounded accuracy

3-action system

Critical success/failure as 10-above/below DC

Rigid monster, encounter, and hazard math

Compressed levels to focus on levels 1-12

Deleting the absolute garbage-fire that is spell slots and replacing it with a mana point system.

A new quintet of core classes: Mage, Knave, Knight-Errant, Juggernaut, Peregrine.

Overall cutting the fat and bloat and crunchiness of both systems to make something smoother and quicker.

First up: the Action Point System.

Simply put, you get 3 Action Points. You can spend them on various actions on your turn, and I've put a table below of some of the ideas I have for actions in The Violet Hack. At the end of your turn, your Action Points replenish back up to 3. When it's not your turn, you can spend AP to do a reaction. If you do, you just get less AP on your next turn. You're borrowing from the future.

I've always hated rolling for initiative at the beginning of combat. Describing the tense scene, hearing how the players respond and how they're going to act - only to be bogged down by getting a table's worth of numbers and trying to sort them from biggest to smallest.

Initiative in The Violet Hack instead is just a d4 roll. You roll it and that's how many AP you get on your first turn. If you roll a 4, hell yeah! Your 4th AP goes to someone else. Maybe you want to give it to your mage who rolled a 1 so they can actually cast a spell on the first turn!

But in terms of turn order, that's easy. Just bounce back and forth between the party and the GM until one side is all out of turns they can take. Then, the other side has the rest of their team take their turns. This will only happen if one side vastly outnumbers the other, like if it's a party vs a solo boss, or a horde of a dozen goblins vs the party. Normally the party gets the first turn, because it's so easy to be like "This thing emerges from the ground and gives a bellowing roar. What do you do?". But if the party gets jumped because they're surprised or something, the GM gets the first turn. pretty simple.

I'm going to cover the other parts of what I've done in future blog posts, but as a teaser for the next article, here is a fun (for me) image where I'm kinda being actually insane about math:

Next: Progress on The Violet Hack, Pt. 2

#the violet hack

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thevioletharuspex · 1 year ago

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Musings

It's been a while since I've written here. Ngl, I wanna do it more. My life has gone other places, so far, away from musing about d&d, ttrpgs, and worldbuilding. Been playing magic a bunch, and while competing is fun, I've been feeling pretty burnt out by it lately.

Enter again my ttrpg musings.

It always comes in waves, I find. And right now, we're in the rise of one. I don't really have a point to make, exactly? Kinda just a flow of consciousness. Getting these ideas from my head to page.

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I went to see Furiosa this weekend. It was INSPIRING. The worldbuilding focus, the atmosphere, what it asks of us about barbarism, so good.

It got me to think about Dark Sun again. A world bled dry by those in power. A topical world, all things considered. Are we not facing the biggest climate crisis we have ever seen? Is it not caused by those in power - the greatest power gap we have ever seen?

A wasteland, bled and drugged. Barbarism, or death. What does it mean to take back just a little bit - to fight against everything - to do something small, yet so big, against all odds?

I love wasteland worlds. I love their aesthetics. I love their appearances. I love their themes, what they ask about humanity, about personhood, about the value of connection. It rips the human spirit bare and naked, a large contrast to the web of lies that everyone lives in our day to day lives.

I love the raw savagery of it all. Feels more real, somehow, describing life at a razor's edge. There's something captivating about it all.

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I've also been thinking about tragic villains. I've been looking at the release of the new Vecna adventure that wotc dropped, and just like, how uninspiring it was? It doesn't really move me. It's trying to be a big capstone on an intellectual property that's been in the works for decades now.

"I can do better" I think to myself. I probably *can* do better.

I've always wanted my own personal world, y'know? With its lore, recurring characters, homages, all that good stuff. I've got a lot of writing, a lot of campaigns that I've ran, that all *feel* like they're in a shared universe. Might as well make it one?

I like tragic and sympathetic villains. Ones that feel real. I've got a recurring one that's popped up in a few of my campaigns now; an alchemist (the cool kind, not the potion kind) named Junal.

He first appeared in my Damnatio Elpharel campaign, where he was the central Bad Guy to the whole campaign. He had captured and butchered a fallen angel, extracted her divinity in order to outlast death. His biggest motivator is that he fears death, and he has done everything in his power to be immortal. He has absorbed the divinity of a fallen angel, creating a ball of light that hangs in the sky as his own philosopher's stone - his own phylactery; he has transmuted his form into a perpetual colony of insects; he has carved his own guts and soul to be that of a dragon (more on the transmutation of guts later, it's a recurring theme of mine). Unfortunate for him, the butchered fallen angel would every so often regain consciousness, reincarnate, and cast the world into damnation. For the last few centuries of these cycles, Junal has been hunting down these reincarnations and slaughtering them so that the damnation doesn't last that long and he can carry about his (immortal) life.

In my Eventide of All Things campaign, Junal was a pathetic creature trapped in a prison of his own making. This campaign was set in the farthest of futures, where heat-death has claimed the world. Junal, still immortal, has lived a million lives, reduced now to the form of a single moth (an important motif for those of you who know me well) that dies and hatches over and over from a million chrysalids - those chitinous casing cover the cave floor. He is a shell of his former self, captivated by a tiny mote of light in this cave - the remainder of his divinity from that other campaign. (The one player who played in both of these games was absolutely stunlocked seeing this scene - she knew its implications :3c )

In a campaign I'm currently running, Junal is a mad wizard who is trying to transform into a dragon, and his role in the story is practically nonexistent at this point - we haven't had a need to explore his character at all yet. Granted, this is a campaign for beginner players, so I've been focusing on "traditional" elements of D&D for them. They've been eating it up.

Junal is a character I kinda always try to find a way to bring over - he's a pathetic character, a coward, one who is trying to outrun death. Weirdly too, his character is about transformation? A theme that is very important to me (y'know, cuz of the whole transsexual thing).

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Another character I've had in the works, who has captivated me, is Typhon, the mother-father of monsters, The Fell Star, He Who Shall Break the Wheel. This character hasn't appeared yet in any of my worlds, any of my games, remaining entirely within my head at this point. I'm particularly a fan of the mythological in my fantasy, the idea that fiction can show greater truth about reality and ask questions of ourselves. As one of his titles suggests, Typhon is about the idea of breaking cycles, breaking status quos - especially ones that have harmed us.

One of my motifs that I like to bring to my writing is the Ouroboros, the snake that eats itself. I got the idea partly from Berserk, where "Fate is a Spiral", the idea of history repeating itself. I also like how it embodies autophagia - eating yourself (again, to transform, there's a pattern here) but there's also a desperation to it, a resignment to it, an instinct to it. The ouroboros is the inner critic, the transsexual, the starving snake, the embodiment of time's loop. Radiance is in the guts and the snakes eats itself to try to find the truth.

In one of my nascent world ideas, the Ouroboros is the Lord of Kings, the patriarch of conquerors, the Divine Right of Kings. In the world's mythological prehistory, the Ouroboros descended with his clutch of dragon offspring and baptized the world and made it his. Part of this crusade was banishing Typhon back to the stars, becoming the Fell Star.

So then, when the Fell Star is in conjunction with the world (about every 500 years or so), that Typhon reincarnates, gathering followers and cultists to Break The Wheel (that is, to undo creation itself because the world is merely an arena, a domain conquered by the Ouroboros). Typhon grabs on to the tragedies that have befallen those in the world; How unfair it must be, to have your world bathed in a sea of red, and yet the wheel keeps turning?

Who knows if this villain will ever reach the stage. Just an idea that's been stuck in my head for the last bit. Who knows if it even makes sense to anyone that isn't me.

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Circling back to wastelands, transformation, the radiance of guts, dragons, autophagia and the ouroboros, the mythological, I've (working with a friend) had another idea in the works:

Moon-Mad and Dragon-Hungry

You were some great soul once - now you have awoken here, upon the moon, silver-meadowed and of regolith wastes. You are in a statuary - a garden of statues - tended to by a gorgon. She has awoken you from your stone-cold slumber. She tells you this:

Look to the heavens above, and see that planet, sea-blue and jungle-green; that is the Afterlife, a Pale Blue Heaven.

You have been left behind here, upon the moon. See the dragons above; radioactive, bizarre as they are almighty. These beasts alone can fly to and from the afterlife. If only dragons can claim freedom from the moon, then a dragon is what you must become.

Hunt them down. Consume their powers. Ascend to the Pale Blue Heavens above.

Why then, are her eyes so serpentine? Her breath, drunk on radiant death? Her scales glister like those of dragons?

What have you awoken as? A psychopomp? An oculith lunatic? A penumbrist? A gravity dragoon? A dragon bride?

She tells you of haruspicy; of communion, of divination, of exorcism, of mutation, of curses. The flesh has its secrets; so too do the stars. Haruspicy is the secret to dragon ascent, to soar as they do; to unshackle you from the cold-lit silver moon.

UNFOLD YOUR RIBS; LET THEM BE YOUR WINGS

Moon-Mad and Dragon-Hungry is about dragon-hunters that butcher their prey, graft dragon parts onto themselves, have communion with dragonblood, all in a savage plea to escape the purgatory that is the moon.

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The idea of the haruspex is kinda core to me? In some ancient cultures, the haruspex was a priest that could divine the future from the entrails of animals. To me, extrapolating, it represents the magic held within the flesh? And so too, if one's fate is trapped within their guts, can you not shape your own future by remaking yourself? This is what Radiance is to me, and why I say it is in the guts.

radiance is trapped within the innards - it is the light that lets one see; those with more innards than radiance are trapped by Fate's hand - spill them, let them be free

In The Eventide Of All Things; I had a faction of haruspices: the Blood-Augurs, who avoided ordained extinction by removing their own guts - to no longer be beholden to fate. It was neat, this idea of cutting out their humanity - becoming monstrous - to become better, to become what they wanted to be, to let them live and thrive in a dying world.

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Sorry for all the random thoughts. Wanted to get them all out before the boring parts of life make them slip through my fingers like smoke.

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