Development

[icycalm]

Let me give an example of how the adventure and roleplaying layers will interact, before I delve deeper in theory and lose everyone. People need concrete examples in order to grasp how this thing will work, because without them it just sounds like I am doing a whole lot of handwaving, which couldn't be further from the truth. All the other GMs throughout the decades were handwaving the adventure- and strategy-layers, but not me. The entire purpose of Master of Heroes is to replace the handwaving with an actual game, with concrete rules instead of GM whims. And boy have I succeeded, as you're about to discover.

So I've already given an example of how the roleplaying layer will affect the adventure layer: the adventure-layer players will only be able to spawn heroes in population centers unlocked by the roleplayers, so they'll be terribly interested in ALL the roleplaying teams' progress; when say the Sandpoint Crew heads over to Magnimar, suddenly everyone will be able to spawn heroes there! When another team steps through a teleporter and finds itself in a city in the Forgotten Realms or some literal hellhole settlement in Planescape, suddenly the entire Battlegrounds can spawn heroes there! The roleplayers in other words will have the power to utterly transform the adventure- and strategy-players' world, and will be doing so regularly as long as they keep progressing in their campaigns. They will even be unlocking new races and classes for everyone to use with future heroes.

At the same time, the game has to also reward the adventure-players' exploration progress, not just the roleplaying-players'. But whereas I made the latter universal, I made the former personal. So that when a hero arrives at for example Irrisen after a long and perilous journey from his starting point in Varisia, he and only he can spawn further heroes there, and all the rest of the adventure- and strategy-players can only look on in envy. But the adventure-player won't be able to unlock possible new races, classes and so on by exploring the world. These are major unlocks, and as such only the roleplayers will be able to unlock them, through their fully zoomed-in viewpoint of the world. They will have to encounter an actual shifter NPC in order to unlock the shifter class for everyone in the overworld. And then the random hero generation engine will also be able to use the shifter class. Also, adventure-layer unlocks of population centers aren't permanent. Once a player has moved his hero away from one of them, he can no longer spawn further heroes there. He'll have to maintain hero presence in all the population centers he wants to use as spawn points, unlike roleplaying unlocks which are not only universal but also permanent.

So that is a good introduction into how the roleplaying layer drastically affects and reshapes the adventure layer. Let's now see an example in the opposite way.

And let's take something happening right now in the game. Right now SriK and Rory are forming a team to tackle the Master of Combat Scenario Black Fang's Dungeon. Little spoiler: Once they've finished it, regardless of whether they survive, they will unlock a bunch of further scenarios that comprise the so-called "Beginner Box Bash" event. That was 10 further Beginner Box scenarios released by Paizo, all playable with the simplified "Beginner Box" rules (which is what we should have started playing Battlegrounds with to ease us into the game, but in the end it worked better anyway since otherwise we wouldn't have had these scenarios now to use with the adventure layer).



So the moment Black Fang is over, a bunch of new black exclamation marks will pop up all over the Sandpoint Hinterlands map [ > ]. It won't be all 10 of them because I think a couple of them take place around Magnimar, so I'll save those for later. But it will be most of them. And anyone with a hero, or who purchases one at that point, will be able to play them.

In what order, though? Because, though the scenarios are nominally equal (all for 1st-level), in reality nothing is equal, and that's before considering cases where some ability or skill that a team doesn't have would be particularly useful for a particular scenario, so that teams with that ability or skill (or item for that matter) will have an easier time, while other teams will have a harder time. So if you knew which scenarios are easier for the team you have assembled, you could tackle them in order from easier to tougher, and massively boost your chances of coming out of all of them victorious, and much stronger and wealthier.

And that's where the adventure-layer's Scheme move comes in.



Ignore their continued use of the word "downtime". None of this shit is downtime, downtime is relaxing. What they mean is DOWNTIME FROM ROLEPLAYING, i.e. that none of these moves WILL BE ROLEPLAYED. You won't sit around with the GM for hours and roleplay researching the servant's uniforms or some shit, because it would be boring. The player will state the move and the GM will register it, a die might be rolled or not, and that will be one adventure-layer turn for that particular hero, exactly as with a strategy videogame. And THAT is what I call ADVENTURING in Battlegrounds. So both Paizo's "downtime" and my "adventuring" are TECHNICAL terms not to be taken LITERALLY. We just need some terms to label our games' various modes, layers and moves, and for better or worse these are the ones we chose; in Paizo's case because they are confused on what downtime really means, and in my case because of historical reasons (which I will elaborate later, as they're very significant to the development of videogames, and ultimately the game of games, my game).

There is also the Research move, which Paizo terms "Research Facts and Lore" which can be used to look into adventure/scenario markers on the overworld and figure out things about them, or gain advantages.

So these are two powerful tools that can be leveraged on the overworld to assist with Master of Combat Scenarios or even with full-blown Battlegrounds roleplaying adventures and campaigns. In Paizo's game it is THE ROLEPLAYING CHARACTERS THEMSELVES who use these tools during their "downtime" from adventuring (meaning from roleplaying), but in my game adventuring heroes can also be used for whom these activities are NOT downtime BUT THE ADVENTURE ITSELF. That's why I call that layer the adventure layer, exactly as it is used in adventure-strategy games like Heroes of Might and Magic. The entire confusion over these terms arises due to their different usage in the roleplaying and videogame industries, which usage differs because of these artforms' differing requirements, and the reason I am the only one facing these difficulties is because I am the only one working to FUSE these two artforms into ONE. So of course I would be mired in conflicting terminology that I need to sort out. But not to worry, I am a philosopher and terminological problems are our specialty. Common people even think that that's all we do (Feynman famously thought so).

So in the case of SriK and Rory, who are currently playing strictly in the adventure layer (Rory's roleplaying character isn't even in the area yet, he will only arrive 6 months later), it will be their choice if they want to spend turns scheming and researching before tackling further scenarios. These same turns could be spent working and making money to buy better gear for example, and it's these kinds of choices that we call strategy. Or at any rate adventure-strategy, because strictly speaking strategy is for war. And don't forget that they'll also have to WALK to the different scenario markers, or to wherever else they need to be in order to scheme about and research them. Actually, since the entire Sandpoint Hinterlands is merely ONE HEX in the overworld, they won't have to walk anywhere. But when the scenarios are in different hexes, they will have to travel between them, unlike Paizo's Organized Play characters who simply teleport everywhere as if they're really playing an SRPG.

Now SriK doesn't have a character in the roleplaying layer, because he's not playing a campaign yet, but Rory does have a character—at least in the future—so one option in the future will be sending his adventuring hero to research and scheme for his main character. SriK could also do that, if for example he's following one of the campaigns' progress and just wants to help the team out. So here we see a kind of continual interaction and feedback loop between the adventure and roleplaying layers.

One valid objection to this last-mentioned mechanic is that why would these people help each other, when the characters are strangers in the game? I was stumped by this for a little while, but then I remembered the Camaraderie Points, and I had my solution. Characters and heroes must spend Camaraderie Points from both sides to become friendly and therefore be cool with helping each other out, and for this purpose I will have to slightly rework the Relationship mechanics and these points. But it's a simple and beautiful solution that totally solves the verisimilitude issue while further deepening and complexifying the game's mechanics.

Note that this whole system isn't Paizo's. Paizo wrote their "Downtime" rules, and they have shown no interest in adding a real adventure layer to their game, let alone a strategy layer (their entire system assumes each player directly controls ONLY ONE CHARACTER, which utterly negates the videogame adventure-strategy and 4X genres). The Camaraderie Points don't come from Paizo either, they come from Legendary Games' rules supplement "Ultimate Relationships" [ > ]. But the fusion of both these systems—and countless more besides, from a multitude of sources—with the adventure-strategy and 4X videogame genres into a perfectly coherent, magnificent whole?

That's icycalm.

[icycalm]

I am now well into Master of Heroes analysis, but I am interrupting my regular scheduled programming to bring an update to Master of Combat that I've been thinking about for a while and finally decided to implement with Alpha 2.0. Best and easiest way to explain it is to copy-paste the WhatsApp messages I sent to Rory earlier today about it.

Dude I found a way to get us back to playing even tonight.

If you look at the list of PFS Scenarios even for Season 0, there are 28 of them.

That's just one season, and we have 16 and counting.

Even to merely play all of those—without counting the standalone adventures and campaigns—would be borderline impossible for us.

UNLESS

...we run them 24/7 asynchronously on Discord with GMs other than me.

Then we have a good chance of being able to run ALL the PFS scenarios without impacting our roleplaying.

The added advantage of this approach is that... it turns Battlegrounds into a mobile game you can play from your phone 24/7. I had already said from Alpha 1.5 that Battlegrounds had become partly a mobile game because the overworld became accessible via a browser, but now even the actual playing will be. At least in the adventure-strategy layer.

There's really only one negative to this approach, but it's a major one. It means I won't be able to offer a cinematic experience with live soundtrack, sound effects, cutscenes, etc. All this media WILL be posted on Discord alongside the action, but it won't be in real-time. It will just be an embedded YT video that you will watch when you check Discord, so it won't have the same impact on you. Plus of course we won't end up with a stream video of the scenario, though we WILL end up with the usual summaries etc. (into which the music and video files will be embedded).

Plus of course the combat and roleplaying won't be real-time at all, they will be 100% turn-based like traditional D&D.

An added advantage is that we can allow ALL players to post comments, advice, encouragement etc. E.g. "Shoot them with your arrows!" or "Cast sleep!"

It will be like a live show with audience participation. And it will be running in the Insomnia Discord 24/7, so it will feel like Golarion and the Battlegrounds multiverse is NEVER on pause; there will always be something going on that people can follow.

I am very close to giving this a try.

This will also make it super-easy for others to GM, because when they have an issue they can just private-message me and we'll have plenty of time to resolve it.

Note that this doesn't mean that all players will HAVE to play 24/7. If you don't have the time, don't sign up for a Master of Combat Scenario. And when you do sign up, it's only for a few days. Because a few days later the scenario will be finished. So there's no long-term commitment for anyone. Not even for GMs, since if they can't play, I can step in (it's my job after all).

This is also how we can play the 20-player 200-unit huge Special battles. I was always planning to play these this way. But now I am thinking of doing all MoC this way.

Really the only negative is the loss of cinematic/dramatic impact. It won't go to zero, but it will be halved. On the other hand, the PFS Scenarios don't have anywhere near as much cinematicness as the adventures and campaigns. And there are so many advantages to this approach that surely they more than compensate for the loss?

As a side-note, it might be possible to set up Foundry so that people log in, play their turn, then log off again. This way, we could have the music etc., but it wouldn't be on Discord for others to watch. I am not sure I can make this technically work, but it's a possibility.

This sounds like a good and convenient way to get the game rolling again, plus the Oppara group sort of already did this, right? When they were trapped in those four rooms?

It would be an insane amount of work if you were to run the APs, PFS Scenarios and MoH normally.

Exactly. Insane amount. BUT not if you consider that I want to do this as my full-time job. You are judging by the criteria of weekend hobbyists whereas I want to work at this 40-80 hours a week, which would make it possible, especially after a couple of years of training and efficiency-maximization.

And yes, we did it with Oppara BUT in a situation in which there was no loss of dramatic impact because the characters in the game were just sort of chilling for hours because they couldn't figure out what to do. So Discord was the perfect way to simulate that situation. It is NOT however the perfect way to simulate the combat-heavy situations of PFS Scenarios...

Ultimately this approach would make the Battlegrounds feel even MORE like a metaverse. That's what's super-attractive to me.

And no one would be able to complain that "I want to play more". I would be able to accommodate any amount of players and desire to play.

And everyone playing would contribute to getting through the hundreds of scenarios faster.

They wouldn't just be grinding for aUEC that would be wiped out in the next update. They would be materially moving the Pathfinder metaplot forward.

This idea feels exhilarating to me, that the overworld would grow practically every day.

Let me give you a concrete example of how much easier this would make my life. Currently in order to restart the game I need to make a game over sequence, especially since deaths in Master of Combat will be more frequent (because it's not a campaign so there's no plot ruined if someone dies or the whole party gets wiped, so the balance will be a touch harder than the regular adventures and campaigns). And I need different sequences for Pathfinder and Alien of course. But to make one of these sequences could take me days. So I will need to invest days when I am in the middle of developing the game, and if the parties don't get wiped I will have lost all these days for no reason. But if we play asynchronously on Discord, I will only make these sequences if and when a party gets wiped.

Same with looking up rules, or introducing a video/cutscene etc. On Discord I only make something when it's needed, whereas in a VTT I have to be prepared for every possibility beforehand.

I barely even have to prepare anything to start playing, if we're playing on Discord. I can start pretty much any scenario with next to no preparation, and prepare on the way as needed.

Another advantage: no VTT help so we'll have to learn all the math ourselves. OR if we want the cool coded math from Fantasy Grounds to enrich our chatlogs, the GM can log in to Fantasy Grounds and, using the players' dice results from Discord, "fudge" the rolls on FG to produce the FG results and copy-paste them in Discord as if we're playing on FG!

That will be tremendous training for GMs.

I could come in to run the metaplot scenarios normally: i.e. in a VTT, in real-time. There are only a few of those per season. Plus there are about 4 or so of the PATHFINDER metaplot in the entire first 11 seasons (because the Pathfinder SOCIETY has its own metaplot). So when you see icy take the reins, you know it's a metaplot episode, and we don't lose the cinematicness there. And of course any scenarios for which we have 2.5D video backgrounds should also be played in a VTT.

It'll be like a TV show like The X-Files where most of the episodes are basically filler, until 2-4 episodes that advance the plot per season. Not saying the filler isn't good. Just sayin' we could save the extra effort of meeting up on a weekend for the big episodes.

I've made up my mind on it, and here's my relevant chat with SriK who'll be the sole player of the very first Master of Combat Scenario, Skeleton King's Crypt.





As you can see from the above, the very moment Skeleton King's Crypt is finished, Master of Heroes will be officially launched so SriK can play his 7 turns, then Black Fang's Dungeon goes, and when that's done, we have 180 turns of MoH to get through with potentially 5+ heroes, plus more MoC Scenarios that will be unlocked with as many players as want to play and as many heroes as they want to bring. Things are about to heat up crazily around here, and I need to finish my MoH introduction and presentation of the starting rules. Get ready to read a lot of cool stuff if you like strategy, tactics, and of course roleplaying!

[icycalm]

With the release of Master of Heroes you'll start to see Pathfinder content (and later Starfinder, D&D et al.) flooding the Battlegrounds overworld on a weekly if not daily basis, and the natural reaction to this flooding is to think, "Hey, slow down, or you'll run out of stuff! What will there be left for the roleplayers to discover in the roleplaying layer, if the adventure players and strategy players reveal everything first?"



I can't stress enough how natural this reaction is. It's so natural, I still react like this every time I think about what I am doing, and I am making the damn thing! So this reaction is natural, but it's WRONG. And the reason it's wrong is because my Battlegrounds, as aforasaid, runs on the twin InfiniEngine™ & InfiniContent™ technologies, so that, not only we won't run out of content, but every month the backlog of content that we must somehow find a way to use will GROW, as it's been growing for decades. Even with all the content I'll be shoveling on the overworld from now on, I'll STILL not be able to reverse the backlog's growth. At most I'll be able to make a dent in its acceleration (and it's accelerating because the GMRPG industry is GROWING).



What we need to do here then is attain a monumental paradigm shift in our thinking: we must transition from a programmer-imposed SCARCITY mindset, to a designer-enabled ABUNDANCE mindset. To put it in terms videogamers can understand, it takes about 3 years for Owlcat to adapt one Pathfinder campaign to run on their Artificial Stupidity algorithms instead of a Game Master's brain. During those 3 years, Paizo has released SIX new campaigns. So merely comparing campaign output, Cult Games Studios (of which Paizo aka Cult Games Redmond is part), we're talking a SIXFOLD difference. So that by the time Owlcat released both their games, my Battlegrounds had got TWELVE new campaigns. By the time they finish their third adaptation—which is doubtless underway—my game will have acquired EIGHTEEN new campaigns. By the time their fourth PF game is out, I will have had TWENTY-FOUR new campaigns. Can you see that the programmers' efforts aren't making the slightest dent in the monstrous backlog they're facing?



And in this calculation I am including ONLY the Adventure Paths (and only the PATHFINDER Adventure Paths, not the Starfinder ones, etc.), I am not including the standalone adventures, or the Pathfinder Society Scenarios, or the regional sourcebooks, etc.



If I included all those products too, it would be the programmer equivalent of a brand-new fucking CRPG EVERY MONTH. Can you imagine a new Owlcat CRPG dropping every month? And not as separate games but as a giant overworld that you and all your friends play simultaneously, traveling between locations and campaigns, teaming up in various configurations, then scattering again to go explore in different directions, before gathering again for massive 20-player 200-unit battles, rinse and repeat ad infinitum, all the while playing 4X on this world via your phone 24/7 in the background!



That is what Battlegrounds will become with the addition of Master of Heroes, and it will become that because I became the MASTER OF CONTENT, instead of letting content master me, like it masters the programmers. Make no mistake, the programmers are responsible for the extreme content scarcity that videogamers are raised with and which they therefore come to regard as normal, while roleplayers are raised, and have been raised, with content abundance since almost day 1 of their artform. And after 50 years of this abundance (D&D just celebrated its 50th anniversary last month), roleplayers have finally attained infinite content for all intents and purposes, while the programmers even seem to be SLOWING DOWN, if such a thing were possible. I am not shitting you here: I've already observed that a full 4X game back in the '90s would take a couple years to develop, while today a mere adventure-strategy game, i.e. a MINI-strategy game like Songs of Conquest [ > ] takes HALF A DECADE, and STILL has the pitiful amount of content the '90s games had, where you basically see everything the game has to show you in a couple of weeks, so that you're forced to keep replaying the same content over and over, if you don't want to wait ANOTHER HALF A DECADE for the programmers to throw some more halfassed content at you while you beg them as if you were a dog. So when you have been raised on this lazy programmer output for decades, your eyeballs will fucking MELT when you see how much content I'll be shoveling on my overworld every week—so much that NO PLAYER WILL EVER PLAY THE SAME CONTENT TWICE, NOT EVEN IF HE PLAYS FOR DECADES—and you'll be certain there's no way I can keep it up.



But I can keep it up, don't you worry about that. I can keep it up forever. Because that's how cool I and my game are. The world is about to discover what a game with infinite content looks like. And more importantly, what it plays like. Stay tuned, and buy some credits. Because the ultimate game is an arcade game. And besides, I need the funds. Infinite content isn't cheap, and it certainly isn't free.

[icycalm]

It bears emphasizing what the consequences of this unleashing of the full potential of the Pathfinder setting are for Battlegrounds, and beyond. It means for example that if you want to adventure in Pathfinder's undeadland, Geb, whose ruling caste cultivate people like plants so they can eat them, you can. Geb was really only fully outlined in the recent Blood Lords [ > ] campaign, in which the players take the roles of agents of the Blood Lords as they rise through their ranks.



This is a Second Edition AP, which means Owlcat will never adapt it because they've stated they prefer First Edition (the real reason is that it would take a shitton of work to make a PF2 engine when they already have PF1 working, but instead of admitting it, they just give a lazy bullshit programmer excuse). So the only way to play with this material is to join a roleplaying group that's planning a campaign. But what if you're already in a campaign? What if you're in two of them? There's only so much roleplaying a man can do because it's so time-consuming. Therefore Alex Kierkegaard's Battlegrounds is the only way that anyone, including non-roleplayers, can visit Geb and play with this material, whether as evil undead (the AP and the accompanying "Book of the Dead" rulebook allow the players to play various types of undead, so once a hero reaches Geb those options will be unlocked for that player), or as a crusading hero making raids into the Blood Lords' territory to free slaves and reclaim some of their land, or as anything in between.





You won't get to go through the official campaign this way, since the events that it describes are far into the future (about 15 years along our current Golarion timeline), but Geb certainly already exists in our setting, and the 600 pages of the AP plus the 224-page rulebook describe the region to a level of detail that 4X programmers don't even know is possible, let alone have bothered to program into their games.

The Dead are Rising!
This blasphemous tome brings the shambling menace of the undead to the forefront of your game. If you wish to stem the ghostly tide, you’ll find tools and skills to fight against the undead hordes. Or you can join the other side and turn your character into a ghost, ghoul, lich, mummy, skeleton, vampire, or zombie! You’ll also find new haunts, as well as information about the undead-plagued lands within the Lost Omens campaign setting, perfect for adding undead to your next adventure! A massive bestiary section full of undead creatures brings more threats for GMs and summonable creatures for players, including more versions of classic undead like vampires, skeletons, and zombies. This book also includes March of the Dead, a grim and dangerous adventure themed around an undead uprising!

Note that all 6 books of the AP are available on Foundry at 4K for $35 a pop, for a total of $210 for the whole AP, plus $40 for the rulebook on Fantasy Grounds. And these things are needed to run this game I am describing, first of all because Paizo infamously doesn't include the full-resolution maps and images in their PDF releases, which some people like to pirate. But you can't run Master of Heroes on pirated PDFs, you need the full-resolution maps and images, and moreover it's terribly convenient to have all these hundreds of pages already in the VTT, with journal entries linked off the maps etc. instead of inputting the information myself. So I need all this stuff, and if I had a spare $1,500 right now I would buy all Pathfinder APs released for Foundry since they started converting them a couple years ago, instantly adding to my overworld thousands of pages of 4K material. I would also like to buy every new AP installment the day it launches, and I'll start doing it the moment I can afford it. I am saying all this to explain why I will be adopting and adapting ALL of Star Citizen's monetization practices, and even adding some new ones on top of them. If you want to play 4X on the Pathfinder setting, THIS is the cost, because this stuff is E-X-P-E-N-S-I-V-E, but the only alternative for 4X players is programmer games where the setting is described in 1 paragraph. Or you can play something on Steam I suppose. I hear Palworld is popular. Or if you aren't into games, you could try something else; every man needs a hobby. You could knit.

But I won't be playing Palworld, or 1-paragraph programmer games, and I certainly won't be knitting; I'll be playing Master of Heroes and Master of Combat and ultimately Alex Kierkegaard's Battlegrounds on a daily basis from now on, for the rest of my life, and I am looking for players who want to play it with me and help build it, so get in touch if you are interested, and get involved.

So to get back to the profound impact that the unleashing of the full potential of the Pathfinder setting will have on Battlegrounds and 4X gaming, I've just given you ONE example of a Pathfinder region that will be available IMMEDIATELY to travel to and play in as soon as Master of Heroes goes live (which is in the upcoming week). Another example is the pirate region of the Shackles. When our 4th roleplaying team was being formed and the players were choosing a campaign, some wanted the pirate campaign, Skull & Shackles, and others wanted Ruins of Azlant, but in the end the latter won, and some people were disappointed. But no more! The pirate-lovers can now head for the Shackles as soon as they've acquired their first hero!





And not only can they travel there and explore the region, but they can get involved with piracy (or anti-piracy), and even build their own fleet if they play long and hard enough. This is a strategy game after all! Moreover, since the entire naval layer of Golarion will be rendered in Cult Engine 3 (because water looks pretty much the same everywhere, so it's easy to render), that means that, the moment they buy a ship, or even merely a boat, they get it in full 3D glory! We already have a full complement of naval vehicles built for the engine, from rowboats to frigates and beyond (see Ultimate City-building: Ships & Boats), and we're getting new ones all the time. Which reminds me that I've fallen behind updating that list; here's a couple of recent additions for which you can start saving your gold the moment you start playing Master of Heroes:





This IS next-gen next-level Sid Meier's Pirates, yet another classic that the programmers never managed to properly update, but I just did.

Of course, forming a party and exploring together will still be the smartest move, even in the 4X layer, and nothing guarantees that one of the parties formed (or it could even be a single megaparty, since there are no party caps in the 4X layer) will want to head for the Shackles. But you can strike out on your own! You won't get as far as quickly as you would in a party, but you'll certainly make progress. And dude, if you're really into it, just buy another hero. Buy your own friggin' party as if you're playing an SRPG. You want to adventure in the Shackles? What's an extra $50 for that? Or an extra $100 or $150? Wouldn't you have paid that much for a Skull & Shackles CRPG? Or a 4X? A "Master of Pirates"?

Well, I made it, and if you want to play it, you can buy it. But I can't give it to you for free. I simply can't afford to (and I WOULD give it for free to those who've supported this project for years with the patience of a saint; I simply can't at this moment).

Or maybe zombies or pirates aren't your thing, and you're more of a stonepunk kinda guy? Then head for the Realm of the Mammoth Lords in the far north, recently explored by Paizo in the Quest for the Frozen Flame [ > ] campaign.







That's "only" a 3-part campaign, but that's still 300 pages of more details than come with any fantasy 4X game you've ever played. And that's still merely one region among the dozens offered at the start of Master of Heroes! It's true that for some of them we "only" have a 64-page sourcebook (the standard pagecount for a regional sourcebook), but ask yourselves if someone asked you to write out a 4X videogame's setting, how many pages would it take? I think Master of Magic's would take less than a page. The original's, probably one paragraph. So 64 doesn't look that bad when viewed in that light: that's 64x more detail than the entire Master of Magic setting! And moreover, you always have the option of avoiding the less detailed regions until Paizo does a deep dive on them. How will you know how detailed each region is? The best rule-of-thumb is the more APs, the more detailed, which is why I am planning to put all the APs on the overworld, and add new ones as they're announced. By this metric, by far the most detailed region is Varisia as it has no fewer than FIVE 6-part APs (with a 7th coming out next month) for a total of THREE THOUSAND pages BEFORE we've counted standalone adventures, PFS Scenarios, and sourcebooks and the like. That's the most detailed region not only in all of Pathfinder, but in all of roleplaying and therefore in all of gaming, so I think it's fitting that that's where Master of Heroes begins with SriK's 7 turns next week. You could stay there and adventure for years without getting bored or playing though all the content, and new content is frequently released. So just like I chose the Inner Sea region as the default starting point for all roleplaying characters, I picked Varisia as the default for all adventure-layer heroes, and players can expand from there as they see fit (and the roleplayers have already unlocked Azlant, so the heroes have 2 continents to play around in right now). Moreover more spawn points besides the Sandpoint Hinterlands [ > ] will become available in Korvosa, Oppara, and finally Azlant once we synchronize our timeline in the coming weeks.

As for how you find out about further regions, so you can decide whether to head to them... Travel. Research. IN the game, not on Google. There are moves in the rulebooks covering all of it, and new rules I am adding to cover what existing rules don't, and I'll be explaining some of the basics in this thread before we launch the game.

The upshot of all the above is that it radically changes the way players view the roleplaying industry. Up till now, new releases were really only of interest to GMs, and even to them barely, since most are locked into campaigns they won't be finishing for many months if not years. So keeping up with new releases is pointless, if not downright depressing, and for players far worse than for GMs, since at least the GMs can read the books if they want. But no more! That cool evil adventure Paizo is releasing in July? It stars an assassin party, and it will furnish us with material to flesh out the Red Mantis organization so players can join it and rise in its ranks in the adventure-strategy layer!

The infamous Red Mantis assassins are feared throughout the world for their ruthlessness and legacy—those they slay stay dead! Yet they are not without honor, so when a group of assassins sent on a dangerous mission are met with unexpected treachery, they must clear their own names while remaining true to their murderous calling, even as greater plots and shocking truths reveal themselves.

Prey for Death is a deluxe hardcover Pathfinder Second Edition adventure for 14th level characters, and gives players the chance to play members of the world's most notorious assassin's guild. The adventure also includes new items, lore, and character backgrounds, as well as a several powerful monsters ready to threaten high level characters!

Or how about the new 3-part AP starting also in July, Curtain Call, in which the players produce an opera?

Rumors abound that an old enemy, a dangerous foe you defeated at the culmination of your first huge adventure, has come back. Yet confronting your old nemesis once again is only the beginning of what's next for your group, for a famous director has singled you out as the subject of her newest opera. How dangerous could it be, helping to produce an extravaganza based on your own heroic legacy?

Stage Fright is a Pathfinder adventure for four 11th-level characters. This adventure begins the Curtain Call Adventure Path, a three-part monthly campaign in which a group of adventurers help to produce an opera based on their own prior adventures while simultaneously facing a new threat that only the most powerful of heroes can stop. This adventure also includes information about theatrical traditions of Golarion as well as an entire potential cast of diverse actors to help bring the new opera to life, several new magical items to discover and operatic abilities to master, and several new monsters from the whimsical to the truly horrific.

Can you imagine programmers being this inventive, and giving you a CRPG in which you produce an opera based on your last adventure? They can't even GIVE you a "last adventure" since all their games have to be standalones! (no one knows why they have to, not even the programmers themselves, they just "have to" because that's what the last programmer game that they're plagiarizing and reskinning did, all the way back to the '80s).

So players will be terribly interested in new releases from now on, since they'll be made available to them in the overworld day and date of release! And since all new APs are released in 4K on Foundry day and date, it means that with a few bucks and a couple of clicks I will have integrated all the material into my overworld day and date!

Every month!

Does anyone understand what the fuck I am talking about, and what a monster of a game I am describing?

But the internet doesn't answer. Instead I get stony silence in response, no matter what genius advances I describe, and demonstrate. In fact the greater the advance, the greater the silence! in full accordance with The Popularity vs. Quality Equation, which solves all art theory questions, and which is therefore also, of course, ignored.

Oh well. Let them enjoy Palworld. I have a ton of work to do, and I have no time for them, because on top of everything else, I have to now start reporting on the roleplaying industry exhaustively, in order to find the best stuff, and immediately incorporate it. Look for that news content to start hitting the Insomnia frontpage as soon as Master of Heroes has started running, and for the release schedules to get fully updated shortly after, now dominated by GMRPG content (though I'll keep reporting on invisible wall programmer gaming for the foreseeable future, out of inertia I suppose, as I've lost almost all interest in it).

[icycalm]

I will now start outlining the adventure-strategy layer's/Master of Heroes' rules, and giving links to them on the Battlegrounds site. But before I do that, a little introduction is in order. Let's first understand what adventure-strategy is. What is the difference with plain strategy?

In a plain strategy game like Civilization or Master of Magic, the player already starts with the resources needed to play on the strategic level: usually, in 4X games, a band of settlers with which to found his first settlement. In an adventure-strategy game, on the other hand, like the original King's Bounty: The Conqueror's Quest which I played close to release I think it was in 1990 and which launched the genre (or at least popularized it, maybe there were earlier proto-adventure-strategy games I am not aware of), the player begins with just a dude, and must amass the resources needed to launch his strategic endeavors.

That's why adventure-strategy is so much more suitable for roleplaying games, because it smoothly connects the single-character mechanics of the roleplaying layer with the strategic mechanics of the strategy layer. And the connecting segment of mechanics we call "adventure" with the understanding that it's NOT the same as the videogame adventure genre that zooms in on the protagonist and shows his moment-to-moment interactions and dialogues with NPCs etc., since this segment is STILL covered by the roleplaying layer in roleplaying games. What we call "adventure" in adventure-strategy games is traveling across the world at a fairly zoomed-out level and fighting enemies mostly at that level in the old videogames (and at a zoomed-in tactical level in newer ones), all the while amassing treasure and companions with which to launch a strategy bid in the second half of the game.

All of which is EXACTLY how Kingmaker plays, but at a level of detail—both in the adventure part (which unlike the videogames is full-roleplaying), and the strategy part (which is way more complex than any fantasy strategy game ever)—that no videogame, or even roleplaying game, has ever neared, let alone matched. That's why Kingmaker is so popular. It really was a revolution in gaming when it was published in 2010, and I should be putting it on the Game of the Year list somewhere.

It's not that GMs had never given players castles and kingdoms before. It's that no professional adventure had ever done so, and that moreover GIVING the players anything is anathema to gaming, the players should EARN everything through PLAYING, meaning through INTERACTION with the world and its supporting mechanics. But the mechanics didn't really exist before Kingmaker, at least not in the TOTALITY needed to fully bridge the roleplaying and strategy layers, and even those fragmentary mechanics that had existed before Kingmaker WEREN'T USED IN PROFESSIONAL ADVENTURES because these mechanics were never part of the core rules; they were mere supplements which therefore sold far worse than the core rules, and which it thus didn't make financial sense for the publishers to support with custom-built adventures. It's like console peripherals not sold with the console itself, as an example that videogamers will understand. The PS2 had a hard drive you could buy, but the games didn't use it because few people had bought it, while the Xbox came with a built-in hard drive, and thus all games used it. What was needed, and is still needed, was a version of D&D with the strategy and adventure-strategy rules BUILT INTO THE CORE RULEBOOK, for these genres to take off in the roleplaying world. And that game would be... D&D2. Not D&D 2nd edition, or 3rd edition, or 4.218 edition, but DUNGEONS & DRAGONS MOTHERFUCKING 2, the real and ONLY sequel to the 1974 masterpiece that has still not really been made.

Until now. Because Alex Kierkegaard's Ultimate Edition IS Dungeons & Dragons 2. I just don't have the IP rights to call it that. So I call it Ultimate Edition.

[icycalm]

By this point you might think I am making it sound as if Kingmaker is Dungeons & Dragons 2, and it certainly is proto-D&D2, and much more so the "Ultimate Campaign" rulebook that followed it, and which expanded on the new strategy rules. But none of that was integrated into Pathfinder Second Edition, so no further adventure-strategy campaigns were published by Paizo. In fact, these rules were not even converted to PF2 at all until... Paizo REMADE Kingmaker for PF2 a few months ago. You would think that they'd be interested in releasing further Adventure Paths in the same mold, since it's one of their all-time bestsellers, even inspiring a CRPG that brought yet more players into their world. But who knows why they haven't bothered. It's certainly a lot more work developing such an adventure, and so it is imperative that the developers WANT to do that work, and I am afraid with all the women, sexual deviants and non-Whites at Paizo today, no one gives a damn about strategy anymore. browns are infamous for their disinterest in strategy (which is why they lose all wars), females and gays of course have no brain for it either (they can barely future-project a week into their lives, let alone the months and years that strategy requires), while even the smartest yellows stick to child-level tactics in Fire Emblem and child-level strategy in Koei's strategy games; they don't even have an interest in roleplaying at all, let alone the monstrous complication of adding strategy to it lol. And you can see how in their own strategy games they have failed to follow the Civ 4X revolution that took place, what, 33 years ago lmao? 33 fucking years and not a SINGLE yellow attempt at a 4X game. I don't even think they understand that the genre exists lol, I've never seen a japanese mention 4X. And the reason 4X is so repulsive to them is because its key feature is EVOLUTION, scientific and technological innovations that radically transform the game world and game mechanics, over and over and over, throughout the course of the game. And the yellows just can't deal with it, since it requires tremendous amounts of forethought and improvisation, while yellow genetics are basically Feudal Era genetics, pre-scientific revolution. That's the maximum era they can reach on their own, beyond which they must be carried (kicking and screaming no less, until you drop nukes on their heads and force them to shut up and just follow).

But you should be able to see by this point that, even among Whites, adventure-strategy (let alone adventure-4X-strategy) will be deeply unpopular. Most people don't like strategy at all, let alone when it's fused with the most complex roleplaying mechanics ever. Both genres, RPG and strategy, are unpopular even among the White race that invented them, so when you fuse them PROPERLY, as I am doing, only a handful of people will be interested in playing.

But didn't Paizo fuse these genres properly? And how did Kingmaker achieve such success if even most Whites don't like adventure-strategy?

Well if you read the actual books you'll see that every other page the authors say that the kingdom and mass combat rules are entirely optional, and the GM can choose to run the "kingdom in the background" by basically... leveling the kingdom at the same rate as the PCs level in the standard tactical battles that comprise half of the campaign. So the players don't have to engage with half the game at all if they don't want to, and judging by GM reports in the Paizo forum I would say a significant percentage of the roleplaying community went that way. Then you have the CRPG which massively dumbs-down the strategy AND performs all calculations for you, so that the genre becomes much more accessible to people, and that's why doubtless the CRPG has sold orders of magnitude more than the GMRPG. It's a far simpler game but STILL massively more complex than any previous adventure-strategy videogame (King's Bounty, Heroes of Might and Magic and such), just as the GMRPG is massively more complex than any previous GMRPG—when ran PROPERLY with the FULL array of rules it introduces.

In fact a third-party company, Legendary Games, released a supplement that more than DOUBLES Paizo's "Ultimate Campaign" rules, thus doubling the complexity, and that was used by a pitiful percentage of the roleplaying community, and of course we'll be using all those rules too in my game.

But even THAT wouldn't count as D&D2, quite simply because many fundamental rules are missing.

Such as for example traveling and combat rules meant for hundreds if not thousands of characters, as opposed to roleplaying's standard 4-6. There's no way Paizo's and Legendary's rules can handle a hundred fucking characters running around the world and running their own kingdoms, so their system isn't even multi-party; it's just meant for one party as usual, so it's basically PVE, and quite limited PVE at that too.

Moreover, there's no proper support for what happens to the kingdom AFTER the end of Kingmaker. So the players now run a kingdom, fantastic. And what happens next? Where's all the rules for diplomacy with the neighbors? Where's the rules for when the neighbors should attack, or what happens if the players attack them?

Even more crucially, where's the integration with the FUTURE roleplaying adventures? Once the players are 20th-level at the end of Kingmaker, their roleplaying careers are over because the game doesn't go beyond that level (with the exception of the mythic rules' 10 mythic tiers, but even those come to an end at some point), so what happens in the GAME WORLD if the players choose to KEEP playing AS rulers, i.e. as players in a videogame strategy game just administering their domain from month to month? Shouldn't more roleplaying adventure-style events happen in the world? How would the consequences of these events interact with the players' strategic decisions? How would they affect their domains?

Rather Paizo expects the players to STOP playing JUST as they have acquired a whole kingdom! Paizo expects them to just fucking RETIRE their king and his ministers, turning them into NPCs and handing them over to the GM before just rolling up new 1st-level characters and starting a new Adventure Path lmao top kekkkkkkkkkkkk

You can see that even the Paizo writers aren't really strategy players and they just happened to push their game to the heights of strategy THAT ONE TIME, VERY EARLY on in their game's existence btw (it was merely Pathfinder's year 3), when their company was a mere upstart and struggling to compete against the D&D behemoth. So they had a bunch of extremely intelligent and extremely ambitious Whites in their staff who competed with each other every Adventure Path installment to see who would outwrite and outdesign the rest. Consequently, almost every early Adventure Path introduced a small set of bespoke mechanics—the sins in Runelords, the Harrow readings and chase mechanics in Curse, the caravan rules in Jade, and so on—but all those were mere mini-games compared to the monster that was about to be unleashed when this competition between peers reached its peak in mid-2010 with Kingmaker, an impossibly complex design featuring not two but THREE distinct mechanical components, each of which could be its own full-fledged game, but which here were (almost) perfectly fused into an enormously complex whole: the return of the then-long-dead hexcrawling genre and sandbox campaign fused with a brand-new kingdom management and mass combat system fused with full-on 6-seconds-per round roleplaying.

But, at the end of the campaign, they dropped the ball, simply because they weren't real strategy gamers, they were roleplayers—and indeed the best roleplayers ever—and thus it never entered their heads that the game could and SHOULD continue past the 20th-level, once the campaign concludes. Indeed, for real strategy gamers, that's when the real games STARTS; but no one at Paizo could see this in 2010, let alone today when the barbarians and deviants have overrun the Redmond kingdom, and the company is a mere shade of what it once was.

[icycalm]

Paizo essentially dropped the ball to play White Savior to people who have no business involving themselves with advanced culture at all, let alone its cutting-edge. But that's okay because icycalm and Cult Games picked up the ball they dropped and are running with it at hypersonic speeds, so no harm done, and Paizo can enjoy the zoo they're turning their offices into.

So let's set aside the theorycrafting for a moment (because there's more, oh there's quite a bit more coming) and set down some concrete fundamentals of how Dungeons & Dragons 2, aka Ultimate Edition, works. By now the reader should more or less know how the game operates on the roleplaying layer via the introduction of the videogame-style overworld and multiple teams of players moving through the world on it and choosing which adventures and campaigns to tackle. Players by this point also know the basics of how the SRPG component works, with the simulation of organizations such as primarily the Pathfinder Society which hands out missions for players and teams of players to tackle with heroes that exist primarily on the overworld.

But how does the adventure layer and the strategy layer work? What do the players do, turn-to-turn, in those layers?

• For a start, they do everything they can do in adventure-strategy games like King's Bounty and Heroes of Might & Magic.
  
• Then they can also do everything they can in pure strategy videogames up to and including the most complex 4X ones like Master of Magic and Age of Wonders (to cite just the fantasy-themed ones, but the sci-fi and historical themes and mechanics are also coming).
  
• Then, they can also do everything that's in Paizo's and Legendary's "downtime", kingdom-building and mass combat rules.
  
• Furthermore, they can also do everything that can be done via other companies' attempts at integrating strategy into D&D, up to and including Matt Colville's latest attempts, "Strongholds & Followers" and "Kingdoms & Warfare".
  
• And finally, they can do a bunch of brand-new stuff devised by me specifically for Ultimate Edition and which, unlike all previous efforts, LEVERAGES traditional roleplaying mechanics to enrich the strategy instead of SIDELINING them in favor of the strategy.

That is a LOT of stuff you can do in D&D2, and not all of it will be available right at the launch of the mechanics in the coming days and weeks. But still quite a lot will be available, so it will take some reading to get a feel for it, and quite a lot of playing to fully grasp how it works.

[icycalm]

Time to talk about rules, and specifically the ones that will be used at launch late next week when SriK will play the first 7 turns in the adventure-strategy layer (really only adventure at that point), i.e. the starting ruleset.

And the two books we will need are the following:

Pathfinder Roleplaying Game: Ultimate Campaign
https://akbattlegrounds.net/w/multivers ... e-campaign



Pathfinder Roleplaying Game: Ultimate Kingdoms
https://akbattlegrounds.net/w/multivers ... e-kingdoms



Note that only active players will be able to access these pages, plus Adjudicator who wants to play, and trev because he's basically a staff member by this point. So the 17 people listed here: https://akbattlegrounds.net/followers

If you're on that list and can't access the above links, I must have screwed up somewhere, so get in touch and I will fix it.

The pages are again optimized for 4K displays, so if you're running something lower and want to see what I want you to see, zoom out with your browser for a couple of levels. Also hit F11 for full-screen. Obviously you won't be able to read like that, but check it to see how 4K players are seeing things. It's gorgeous.

If reading the PDFs on the site isn't optimal for you, there's a button to download the files and use any PDF reader. But I would rather you used the site if at all possible. It would be especially cool if you did that while playing and streaming, though I am not sure how effective that will be, so if it's not good I won't insist on it. I suppose it will depend on people's setups.

As you can see I have a new, appropriate background for the adventure-strategy rulebooks, with the Kingslayer cover on the right, and a kingdom illustration on the left. I am not super-happy with the kingdom; it's charming but not to the level of the Kingslayer cover, so I am looking for a replacement, and ideally two of them so that each book can have a unique left side. The right will be the same for all of them. The goal is for each and every page of the site to be stunning so as to inspire the players to want to play more of the game every time they visit. I want people to be ultimately saying, "I don't know what I am doing with my life if I am not playing Battlegrounds", just as, when Game of Thrones was running, people were saying the same for that show. My game HAS to become the ultimate gaming event, indeed the ultimate artistic event, or it's a failure. I am not interested in any lower goal, it'll be depressing whatever it is, and I won't tolerate it.

I have removed a chapter titled "Sample Kingdoms & Organizations" from the second book, for obvious reasons; you'll discover those in the game. But apart from that, these are the full books, and they total 556 pages of dense rules. You have never seen a strategy game so complex, where you can construct rooms wall by wall, engage in romance, invest in stocks, and work weekends. There is even a brand-new class called the "general" that I'll be introducing in Kingslayer! And there's an alternate version of that class called the hordelord! And he gets 6-9 zombies at 1st-level! And you can be a hordelord in Kingslayer from day 1 if you want! With all your zombies rendered lovingly in Cult Engine 3 and following you around everywhere!

But let's not get ahead of ourselves. If you want to skim the books and have your minds blown, go right ahead, but the pressing business is to learn the basic rules we'll need next week, and these are:

From "Ultimate Campaign":
Downtime (=Adventure) pg.74-131
Exploration pg.154-159

From "Ultimate Kingdoms":
Buildings & Strongholds pg.127-158
Factions & Intrigue pg.159-178

Note that page numbers are always book page numbers, not PDF numbers, which are different because the PDF counts the cover etc. as pages.

So it's about 120 pages, which is quite a lot because these rules are much more densely-written than the regular roleplaying rules you're used to up to this point. But even within these pages you don't need to read everything, you don't need for example the siege engine rules right away, so just use common sense and you can probably trim that pagecount to under 100.

There's only one mechanical component that we'll need straightaway and which these rules don't cover, and that's combat... Don't be surprised by this, remember that these rulebooks expect you to use standard Pathfinder rules for combat, but we won't be using those on the overworld because it'd make no sense with my target of dozens of heroes to start with, hundreds within a year or two, and thousands in the long run. So what combat rules will we use? I'll elaborate in the next post. It's a very complex and very interesting topic, so it'll need its own section to be explained fully.

[icycalm]

Almost the final wallpaper, still needs my name on the title plus some work in equalizing the size of the portraits.

And below is the first chapter of Ultimate Edition to be published in its final form. There's almost a review of both Master of Magics in there, plus the requisite programmer-bashing, plus 4X history and insights. Make sure you hit play on the music before you begin reading (is this the first rulebook with a soundtrack?) and don't miss "Blood Moon", it's my favorite.

Gifted Heroes
https://akbattlegrounds.net/w/multivers ... ted-heroes

(Hit F11 for full-screen, and zoom out with your browser if you're not on 4K for the full effect.)



It took me WEEKS to stat out 66 heroes in FOURTY-TWO freakin' classes in the deepest tactical combat system ever. I almost quit several times, and I am utterly exhausted now. But I learned so many things, I had no idea how deep the rabbit hole goes. You can spend your entire life playing PF1 and still not know everything. I'll show you soon, I've saved examples, multipage Reddit threads with crazy multiclassed necromancer builds with 260 zombies or some shit. It will make your head swim.

You will note that everything on that list has a pricetag and can be purchased, so if you see something you want, and you can easily afford it, don't hesitate. I can use the help.

I am going to sleep for a day then come back with the combat/exploration system that will surprise you. It's never been done in any kind of game before.

Then I build the hex overworld in Foundry where I think we will be able to play by logging in asynchronously.

Then we play.


P.S. You can use the #master-of-heroes Discord channel to strategize with other players. For example, there are two paladin brothers on the list. Maybe two players want to grab them and go adventuring together. And maybe the LG cleric wants to come along. There are also evil equivalents, and everything in between. The range of possibilities is much greater than in the campaigns, because there's no player cap, or even hero cap per player. And have I mentioned you can go anywhere in Paizo's world and do anything?

[icycalm]

It finally happened, what I had been expecting for some time: official recognition that Cult Games is the world's top game developer and publisher.

This screen is from the top game journal, Insomnia:



They placed all my games ABOVE their Play and Hype release schedules. This position is permanent, a daily reminder to their readers and the world of who is the top dog—and will remain so forever, they have no doubt of that now.

Their editor-in-chief called me just now, and first words out of his mouth were "Wow. Just wow." He's been playing my games for some time now, and could no longer restrain himself from letting them take over his website. "I don't even know what other games are coming out anymore", he said, "and I don't care." And he continued, "I only have one question to ask: How was it possiburu to build all these astounding games in a mere three years?"

I replied that if you're a Greek genius, it is possiburu. If you're not a Greek genius, then yeah, it's not possiburu. And we ended our chat there.

[icycalm]

The adventure layer aka Master of Heroes needed a new combat system because it's not possible to play out the countless battles that will eventually be taking place in that layer every turn in full PF1 rules, or in the rules of pretty much ANY roleplaying game ever. So a simplified combat system was needed, but one still deriving its stats from the PF1 system underlying it. Think of it as programming languages: the bottom layer is machine language/PF1, that is the most complex and powerful, so all higher languages/systems must be built on it, and the higher up they are, the simpler they will be.

To my knowledge, the system I needed does not exist in the roleplaying world, because roleplaying games don't need it. They are built to handle a handful of characters in extreme detail, after all, not thousands of heroes in zoomed-out view. So I had to look elsewhere for inspiration and guidance on the simplified adventure combat, and the natural place to look for it was in strategy videogames. And I looked specifically in the Civilization games, because that's my ultimate goal with Master of Heroes: a fantasy 4X running on Pathfinder rules, in Golarion.

So I remembered back to how Civ 1 combat works, which was extremely simple. Each unit had an attack and a defence rating. Say your unit had attack 6, and the unit you were attacking had defend 4. That meant you had a 60% chance of winning and 40% of losing; the computer rolled a die, and gave you the result. All Civ games up to and including 3 had that system, as far as I know, and I think later ones did too, but other 4Xes like Master of Magic and the latest Age of Wonders, plus the recent Humankind, have tried zoomed-in tactical combat, with varying degrees of success. For the record, I don't like how the Age of Wonders games do it (can't put my finger on exactly why; their combat just looks boring to me), so I always auto-resolve combat in those games, and Humankind does it entirely retardedly by randomly spawning your units on random squares instead of simply leaving them where they are; it basically TELEPORTS units around the map right before combat, for some reason. Everything about that game is retarded basically, except the graphics. And with all the black scientists, a case could be made that its graphics are retarded too.

But Master of Magic had fun tactical combat, and I never auto-resolved those battles. That's when you saw your heroes—and especially the OP ones—kick ass. So a case could be made for using THAT combat system in Ultimate Edition's adventure layer aka Master of Heroes. However, I don't know that system's rules, as they are embedded in its code. Maybe I could replay the game and figure them out. But even then, they wouldn't be usable as-is, they'd have to be adapted to fuse perfectly with the PF1 rules. But even if this were done, it would massively increase the bookkeeping of the adventure layer. And besides... the adventure layer will feature THOUSANDS of Master of Combat Scenarios that last anything from 1 to 6 hours (most of them clock in around 4) and run in full PF1 rules. We've already played the first such scenario, Skeleton King's Crypt, and that took us a couple hours on Discord and was a million times more fun than any Master of Magic zoomed-in tactical combat I've ever played, so I am confident in saying that that combat system won't be missed in my game; it's laughable when compared to the thousands of hours of full-on roleplaying combat we will be playing. What we need then is an ADVENTURE-style combat system that highlights precisely the adventure aspect of the game, and not the combat itself. The combat we've already got covered.

So I started thinking about reducing PF1's combat down to a single stat, if possible, and I immediately zeroed in on the most important stat in the entire game: the Challenge Rating (CR). Every NPC and creature in the game has a CR so that the GM can build balanced encounters quickly and reliably. This didn't exist in AD&D 2E that I played as a child, it was introduced with 3E that came after I had quit, and it was one of the game's many great tactical innovations. And... that's all you really need to run 4X-level combat in an RPG. If one side has CR of say 6, and the other has 4, then there is a 60/40 chance of one side winning. You just roll A SINGLE DIE, and there you have it: combat resolved. This way you can run dozens if not hundreds of battles every turn with no problem. And that's how Golarion finally comes alive.

Note that my system reduces everything to one stat—the CR—while Civ has two: the attack and defence ratings. But I only need one because PF's CR is a summation of ALL of a creature's abilities: offensive, defensive, ranged, healing, absolutely everything. Is this CR system perfectly balanced? Fuck no, you can't "perfectly balance" a system as complex as PF, these numbers are merely rough guidelines to help with building encounters and random encounter tables, but the GM (or the adventure designer) are expected to be experts who can fine-tune everything before running the game or printing the adventure. Balancing in roleplaying games is as much art as craft, and systems like the Challenge Rating are part of the craft, but not the whole story. Do I have to WORRY about all of this in the adventure layer, though? Do I CARE if two creatures that the rules say have equal CR... aren't really equal in an actual zoomed-in fight? Fuck no, I don't have to worry about that! I will worry about that... when an actual zoomed-in fight takes place; it's part of my job as a Game Master. But the adventure layer can be easily run by simply assuming perfect balance, and using the CRs as-is from the books. Nothing is lost by doing this, and everything is gained: a real 4X RPG is gained, ultimately. So that's why in the adventure layer we will assume what we can't assume in the roleplaying layer: perfect game balance. It's genius game design, if you think about it, turning a flawed game mechanic in one layer (the CR) into THE VERY BEDROCK of a higher layer.

Of course there are further problems; turning Pathfinder into a 4X strategy game couldn't possibly be as easy as the above. And it isn't. But though the problems are all massive on the face of it, they're solveable. And I am happy to report that I have solved them.

The main problem that occurred to me almost immediately after I had designed the above was what to do about hero death. The system as-is would have DECIMATED heroes; any given goblin wondering around the map could have one-shot any hero with enough luck. And with hundreds of combat rolls being made every turn, that would mean heroes dying left and right in ridiculously unbalanced fights. Btw, that's also how the early Civs worked: you could kill a battleship with a spearman now and then, out of sheer luck. Even if you had only 1% chance, you would still make the roll every now and then. Not sure if/how this was resolved in later games. But though it's not a HUGE issue in a Civ since each player has hundreds of units and churns more every turn, it IS a huge issue in a fantasy 4X where your handful of heroes are at stake. You can afford to lose the odd battleship to a spearman in Civ, but you can't lose your hero to a goblin in an RPG, because it would destroy the illusion, and thus the game.

So I devised a kind of "hit point" system. But before I get into it, let us examine WHAT EXACTLY each adventure-layer battle is supposed to represent, because this is NOT the same thing as each roleplaying-layer battle (or each upcoming strategy-layer battle).

In the roleplaying layer, when combat starts, each turn is reduced to 6 seconds, and each square on the map to 5 feet. So that is 100% real combat as we understand it in real life. In the adventure layer, on the other hand, each turn is 1 day—a full 24 hours—and each hex covers an area of just under 95 SQUARE MILES. THAT is the zoom level at which adventure combat takes place. That means these engagements AREN'T pure combat, therefore the combat rolls DON'T represent pure combat. This btw is true to an extent even in roleplaying combat. The attack roll in PF1 doesn't represent a single sword slash, for example, since 6 seconds is way too long for that; a single slash barely takes 1-2 seconds. So the combat roll in PF1 represents dodges, faints, parries, possibly several sword thrusts, some of which might land on shields or miss entirely, etc. All this is explained in the rulebooks.

Similarly, then, a single combat roll in the adventure layer doesn't represent... a single battle. Rather, it represents a possible SERIES of engagements spread out ACROSS 24 HOURS and 95 SQUARE MILES.

Are you starting to see what I am getting at? I even solved Civ's problem. Let's take the case of a powerful NPC wizard with a CR of 19 going up against a PC party with a CR of 1, i.e. four 1st-level heroes. In a zoomed-in roleplaying fight, there's no way the heroes could have won. No way. Ever. UNLESS with extreme OUT-OF-COMBAT subterfuge. Maybe the wizard is sleeping and the players sneak up on him. Maybe they set a trap and he falls into it. Or maybe they just rally the townsfolk with their diplomacy skills to swarm him. I could devise practically infinite scenarios of how the weakling PCs took care of the archwizard, but I can't BEAT the archwizard in a straight fight with the PCs. In my adventure layer, on the other hand, all a 1st-level party would have to do to wipe the wizard out is get lucky with their 5% chance of beating him. And then them killing an archwizard would sound as stupid as a spearman killing a battleship in Civ.

UNLESS I take advantage of the adventure layer's HUGE hexes and turn length, and FANFICTION a STORY about how the weakling PCs took care of the wizard. So you see, the adventure layer's combat roll is merely a representation of AN ENTIRE STORY. When your hero or party enters a hex and encounters an enemy, the roll merely gives the RESULT of the situation, not the actual details of it. The details of it are filled in by YOU on the basis of the roll!

So maybe the party met the wizard at an inn, and they had a friendly chat. But something about him felt off, and after parting they followed him around town. Hours later they observed him meeting with the head of a local assassins' guild, but while spying on them the wizard noticed them, and they fled, with the wizard in pursuit. Finally they were able to escape him, and that's... the end of the turn. I.e. the end of the 24 hours that an adventure-layer turn is meant to represent.

So their winning the roll does NOT mean they wiped the wizard out. Given the absurd power difference between them, it merely means... they narrowly escaped with their lives. If the enemy had been a bunch of rats instead, then the winning roll would have of course meant their wiping the rats out.

And what if the fight had been roughly balanced? Say a handful of goblins against a 1st-level party? I really don't care how the players fanfic the interaction. You can think that you wiped them out if you want, or that you killed some, and the rest fled, or whatever. All that matters to me is that your party survived, and it gets the XP and treasure the goblins give. Of course, it wouldn't get the wizard's XP and treasure in the earlier scenario. So I am scaling XP and treasure based on the difference between the players' and their adversaries' CR: if the players have higher or equal CR to the enemies, they get ALL the XP and treasure, and we presume they practically wiped out the enemies. If the enemies have higher CR, on the other hand, the players get less and less XP and treasure for "defeating" them (i.e. for surviving the interaction). 1 CR above them means they get 80% of the spoils, 2 CR means 60%, 3 CR means 40%, 4 CR means 20%, and 5 CR means they get nothing and are lucky to be alive. This btw matches almost perfectly what's written in the PF1 rules about CR disparity. The players are supposed to be able to beat a CR +3 encounter by expending ALL their daily consumables (spells, hit points, et al.), whereas an equal CR encounter is only meant to use 1/4th of their consumables. And if they play REAL WELL by using good roleplaying to set up fights, advantageous terrain etc., they can occasionally beat CR +4, and maybe even CR +5 encounters. Anything beyond that though is near-suicidal, and my simplified adventure-combat system reflects that.

All the above was said about heroes defeating (or "defeating", as the case may be) enemies. What about the opposite though? How do heroes lose, and even die, in the adventure layer? It can't come down to a single roll, just as it doesn't for the archwizard. There must be some more factors to take into consideration, so that heroes don't die from single goblin attacks.

And that factor is... my resilience points (RP). I define resilience as constitution + intelligence divided by 2. So a 12 CON and 8 INT would give 10 RP. And THESE are the "hit points" of the adventure layer, as they represent a hero's physical capacity for punishment, plus his craftiness in devising ways out of difficult situations. Remember that we're trying to simulate a whole 24 hours' worth of action taking place across 95 square miles in a series of interactions. So intelligence would be just as important here as constitution, and mere hit points don't do the job for this scale of simulation. My resilience therefore is the perfect Pathfinder-derived stat to act as "hit points" for this level of zoom. The only question left to answer is how many RP are lost when losing a combat roll, i.e. 24 hours' worth of interaction. I COULD institute another roll to resolve this, like roleplaying combat has different rolls for attack and damage, but I want to keep things as simple as possible so that the adventure layer can scale to dozens of players and hundreds of heroes and still be playable. So I am sticking with the 1 combat roll and the CR-difference mechanics, so I decree that the RP hit a hero takes for losing a combat roll is equal to the CR difference between him and his opponent; higher CR enemies simply hit harder. So the CR 19 archwizard would have caused 18 RP loss to the 1st-level party, meaning 4.5 RP per hero, which rounds down to 4 RP/hero. Quite survivable, but then they have to run the next turn, if the archwizard chooses to pursue. If, on the other hand, the players make the roll, then as aforesaid they lose no RP, but barely survive. The wizard meanwhile gets all their XP and everything they were carrying, as they are presumed to have had to dump everything to survive—maybe they stripped naked and lay perfectly still at the bottom of a swamp or something, I don't know and I don't care: it's up to the players to fanfic the interaction to match the rolls, and if they don't want to fanfic it, no worries, I don't mind. Do you fanfic the interaction between two Civ units when playing 4X? All you care about is the result, and the game continues. But for players who like to write stories, the possibility exists in Ultimate Edition, and that's why every hero gets his own thread in the forum. Go wild.

How do you recover RP? Half as quickly as hit points. Mechanics are exactly the same, but it takes twice as long, because it's not only your body that has to heal, but also your mind. Remember that a typical roleplaying battle takes mere minutes, but a hostile adventure layer interaction spreads out to up to TWENTY-FOUR HOURS with tons of running around a 95 SQUARE MILE area. They can therefore be extremely taxing on the organism, especially if they resulted in defeat, and should therefore take quite a while to recover from. And healing potions and the like don't restore resilience. Maybe I'll make new potions and spells that work specifically for resilience. I might also give bonus resilience to classes that would seem suitable to this sort of scale, e.g. the ranger for example would seem to me a particularly resilient class due to his expertise in overland exploration. Another interesting mechanic would be recovering faster "at home" or in luxurious surroundings like expensive hotels and spas, which would incentivize players to buy or build homes, or lead an extravagant life. But to start with, we stick with the most basic of mechanics, and take it from there.

This system ultimately means that you can't die from single goblins wandering the map, nor can a single OP encounter wipe you out in one roll. Rather, the only thing you can die from is LACK OF PREPARATION and bad logistical planning: i.e. bad strategy. Which is exactly what we want in a strategy game! So as long as you have done your research beforehand, and know the kind of dangers you'll be facing in that new region you are entering, and have planned ahead the nearest safe heavens in which to recover, and taken sufficient and sufficiently-strong companions with you; you should be fine, and have little to worry about. But if you stray too far from town, into totally unknown territory, completely alone, and get hit by a couple of bad random encounters in quick succession; you are dead, and you'll deserve it. Buy another hero-credit from Cult Games Studios Worldwide Corp. Inc. and try your luck again in the greatest arcade game ever: Alex Kierkegaard's Master of Heroes.

[icycalm]

Today I realized something important. With technology putting in my hands all the tools needed to build as complex of a game as I wanted, I would of course go right to the edge of my cognitive capacity, thus rocketing well past anyone else’s, meaning a game that only I would want to play.

It was inevitable that I would arrive here. And now here I am.

There was no preventing this result. It was “programmed”, as my favorite crypto influencer would say. It was destined to happen, and it is awesome.

No change in plans will result due to this. I’ll keep redlining the machine (my brain) to see how far it’ll go. Honestly it’s the most fun I’ve ever had, and I think it shows. It has completely taken over Insomnia, and it’s barely even begun.

[icycalm]

Now the above combat system might sound too easy and exploitable, especially to roleplayers. After all, what's preventing you from making little forays from a town to grind XP and loot against easy foes? As long as you duck back to recover when you meet a stronger foe, you should be able to get to 20th-level eventually with this extremely safe method.

That's why I put the level cap for the adventure layer at 7th-level. So yes, it's easier, and safer, to level in that layer than in the roleplaying one, but it will only get you to a fairly mid, if not low, level of power, and the characters who successfully make their way through a full roleplaying campaign will tower over you with their 15-20 levels. One of them could probably take out an entire party of adventure-layer heroes.

But there is more, because at least in AD&D 2E the GM isn't supposed to be giving out XP for wildly imbalanced encounters in the players' favor. You aren't supposed to get to 20th-level by going down in a tavern's basement and killing a million rats or cockroaches. Unless there is a certain challenge to the encounter, you aren't supposed to gain any XP from it at all. I don't know how PF handles this, if it handles it at all, but I will look into it. Either way, if the rule doesn't exist in PF, I will add it myself. So even in the adventure layer you will have to challenge yourself by pushing into reasonably dangerous terrain in order to level.

That said, the higher levels will be reserved for roleplaying characters because it makes sense not only mechanically, but even thematically. Epic fantasy isn't supposed to be about 4X-style zoomed-out overworld-navigation. There's nothing epic about that, it's mundane no matter how much fanfic you write to flesh it out. And that's fine for the purposes of adventure-strategy, that's the adventure layer fulfilling its exact purpose. I am just trying to show that the level cap I picked is not something artificial, but strongly suggested by the setting itself. James Jacobs wants the 1-20 campaigns (1-17/18 usually for the First Edition ones; it was only with Second Edition that they moved to 1-20) to be about epic, world-changing events, and he explains that it's only in the fires of THIS temperature that the strongest characters will be forged. I would be trivializing his work in campaign-building if I allowed the adventure-layer heroes to reach such heights. And I picked precisely the 7th-level to cap them because that tends to be the level used in the campaigns for a master villain's lowest lieutenants. They usually have a few right-hand henchmen at about 12th-level, and then THOSE henchmen tend to have THEIR lieutenants at about 7th. So you see, I intend the heroes who restrict themselves to the adventure layer to play the role of second-order LIEUTENANTS for the roleplaying characters who successfully complete an epic campaign.

And then to train the first-order lieutenants I intend to use the Master of Combat Scenarios which tend to max out at about 11-12th-level: exactly where I need it. A handful of these scenarios DO reach all the way to 20th-level, but these are so few that players can't rely on them; even if one is unlocked on the overworld, your intended hero might not be able to reach it in time, or even have the required levels to play it, and of course other players' heroes might get there first, shutting your hero out of it completely. Even the 11-12th-level scenarios are few and far between, so I believe that the average hero will max out quite a bit earlier than that even if he's willing to play any and all MoC Scenarios that are unlocked around him. So the theoretical level cap for Master of Heroes is 20th-level, but the practical is 12th, and probably even a bit lower than that, simply because there aren't that many high-level scenarios available—and that's precisely how I want it.

And don't forget that on top of their possible 20 levels, roleplaying characters have something entirely beyond that: 10 mythic tiers that effectively put them at "30th-level", reaching practically demigod status to the point of being nearly unkillable.

So no, I don't think my concept of adventure-layer combat is too easy or imbalanced in any way. In fact I think it's perfectly designed to meet the needs of that layer, mirroring and massively expanding the traditional videogame-style adventure-fantasy mechanics all the while feeding the Master of Combat Scenarios with an infinite stream of sufficiently-leveled heroes to keep tackling their entire 1-12 range. So on top of everything else, adventure-layer combat is meant as a reliable, always-available way to level heroes to replenish those who've fallen in MoC Scenarios. So if say a 7th-level MoC Scenario appears on the overworld and you don't have any 7th-level heroes to tackle it, what do you do? You could outright buy a 7th-level hero, but it will be expensive (pricelist incoming), or you could buy a 1st-level hero instead and level him up through adventuring until he's ready for the scenario, and assuming, of course, that other players' heroes haven't tackled it first.

[icycalm]

It’s Inside Star Citizen day today and it occurred to me that these huge-ass posts are my game’s equivalent to that show. Only difference is plenty of people follow that while no one’s smart enough to follow this. Also why they do it in video form while I do it in text. If I was doing it in video I’d need a whole TV season for every article to convey all the information and insight that I am. One of my posts contains as much game design as the entirety of Star Citizen.

Also why I don’t have a homosexual doing the presenting and I am doing it myself. No homosexual can grasp what I am making, or care about it. In fact no human can grasp it, period. So I have to do it myself, on top of everything else I am doing.

And I wouldn’t have it any other way.