Thursday, May 20, 2010
"Time to go into the refridgerator".
Friday, October 9, 2009
Grognard.txt
Here's my $0.02; you may give back change if you like...
When I opened the PHB, I was a shocked by the content. The "meat" of most other RPGs that I have ever played seemed to be missing -- there were a whole bunch of colorful "power cards", but where were all the rules? Wanting to examine it in further detail, I bought the 3 book set.
"It's good/bad because it's old/new." is a logical fallacy that carries no weight with anybody who knows how to think. From that you'll understand why I'm not going to go into comparisons with other RPGs, other editions, or any of that. Everything must be judged on its own merits; and that's how I judged D&D 4th edition -- on its own merits.
I believe the reason D&D 4th edition doesn't "feel like D&D" is that D&D 4th edition doesn't feel like a Role-Playing Game. After reading the PHB and DMG cover to cover, I was left with two questions:
1. Where did all the rules go?
2. Is this how low we've sunk?
I'll expand upon the 2nd question first, and come back around for the 1st question. The second question was prompted by this from the Dungeon Master's Guide:
"Crossword puzzles include crisscross puzzles, where the goal is to fit all the words from a list into a provided grid of crossing lines, and fully crossed puzzles like you find in most newspapers. A crisscross can hide a message spelled out by shaded squares in the grid, while a fully crossed puzzle is better as an obstacle the characters must solve to get past." -- Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition, Dungeon Master's Guide, p.82
HARKEN YE TO THE CROSSWORD PUZZLE OF DOOM! THOU BRAVE ADVENTURERS MUST SOLVE IT, LEST THE ELDER EVIL GOD WEBSTER AWAKEN FROM HIS SLUMBER AND REMOVE ALL LANGUAGE FROM THE FREE PEOPLES OF Hackensack, New Jersey
Sorry, but D&D was never crossword puzzles; not even in the childish games I ran back in grade school where everybody had a magic sword +5, battles between characters happened more frequently than with monsters, and everybody had an astral-plane-rift-free guarantee bag of super-holding to hold all their bags of holding.
The only other game I've seen mention of a crossword puzzle was Cyberpunk 2020, and they only wanted you to use the pattern of black and white squares to create "computer dungeon" layouts for hackers. If I wanted to do a crossword puzzle, I probably would have been doing it, instead of reading that paragraph on p.82 of the DMG. So I really must ask: Is this how low we've sunk; the crossword puzzle of doom? D&D it ain't.
And, I promised to get back to the 1st question, "Where did all the rules go?"
My other impression of D&D 4th edition was that it was very "rules light". At first, I thought maybe I was showing my age. Maybe this new material was like the mental equivalent of eating corn; in one hole and out the other; and I simply couldn't digest it. So, I gave the books a second read.
What's missing? Specific (and sometimes even generic) rules to cover any non-combat situation. If you're on the battle grid, and you're using one of your power card attacks, you're well covered. However, some other situations that might come up in a role-playing game; such as:
Climbing, Digging, Hiking, Holding Your Breath (and Suffocation), Jumping, Lifting and Moving Things, Running, Swimming, Flying, Throwing, Catching, Influencing NPCs, Fright Checks, Mounted Combat, Flying Combat, Hit Locations, Striking At Weapons, Unarmed Combat, Starvation and Dehydration, Sleeping (and Missed Sleep), Acid, Cold, Falling, Fire, Seasickness, Aging ... not really covered in the depth you find in almost any other RPG, including any previous version of D&D.
For example, from the Player's Handbook this time:
"Sleeping and Waking Up
You need at least 6 hours of sleep every day to keep functioning at your best. If, at the end of an extended rest, you haven't slept at least 6 hours in the last 24, you gain no benefit from that extended rest.
When you're asleep, you're unconscious (see "Conditions," page 277). You wake up if you take damage or if you make a successful Perception check (with a -5 penalty) to hear sounds of danger. An ally can wake you up by shaking you (a standard action) or by shouting (a free action)." -- Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition, Player's Handbook, p.263
So basically D&D 4th edition "sleeping rules" boil down to: If you don't sleep 6 hours, you don't get your 1/day powers reset. (O BTW slp = uncnscs KTHXBYE)
COME ADVENTURERS TO MY LAIR. THOUGH I HAVE NOT SLEPT A MINUTE IN OVER THREE YEARS, FEAR NOT, I'VE USED NOT ONE OF MY DAILY POWERS. YOUR DEATHS WILL STILL BE VERY PAINFUL IF SHORT, As i ... ... ... zzz ... zzz ... zzz ... zzz
I mean, would it have been so hard to throw in a paragraph or table indicating an attribute, skill, or even combat penalty for not sleeping? Or indicate a skill check to make when trying to remain awake? (I mean, I've *never* heard of adventurers who need to post a watch around camp at night out in the wilderness or anything like that.)
Then again, maybe it's somewhere in the books and I just missed it. And I guess that's the most disturbing part; the real hunks of meat that make up the rules of most any RPG are scattered to the winds and surrounded by fluff. All signs point back to the "power cards" that dominate the chapter on character classes. Absolutely everything else is given second-rate treatment (if it's treated at all).
So, the reason it doesn't feel like D&D? It doesn't feel like an RPG. Not all RPGs were D&D, but D&D was always an RPG, until 4th edition. 4th edition doesn't suck compared to other editions, it just plain sucks. I forgive WotC for putting it out; they were probably too busy working on crossword puzzles to make a role playing game.
Thursday, October 1, 2009
Pick-up Games: Arcane Legions
After depressing political articles that were a bit TL;DR, I've come back to the point that we're here to talk about tabletop gaming and their many realms of adventure. Today I'll be looking at what I refer to as a "Pick-up Game", meaning that unlike a "Hobby Game" like Warhammer 40,000, Warmachine or Flames of War (all wargames have "war" in their title), these games can be picked up, played, and stored away until some later time, not requiring a large investment of money or time to collect and paint.
Today We'll be looking at Arcane Legions.
Wizkids was a company specializing in collectable miniatures games like Mageknight (my first introduction to mini's gaming), Heroclix, and Pirates of the Spanish Main. They had much success since if you can make trading cards playable, you can do the opposite with miniatures games. After they closed down, some of their designers went ahead to form the company Well's Expedition, and in stead of the innovation of their clicky base, have decided to do something more in line of Games Workshop's style. Behold their latest creation.
In the year 42BCE, a mysterious magical force was unleashed upon an unsuspecting world. The miasmic shockwave of pure otherworldly magic spread outward from a point somewhere in the middle east, and in a few short hours plunged the entire globe into chaos. In those terrible moments, human civilization changed forever.
Magic infused their very bones, manifested in their children, came unbidden to the fingertips of their women, and plagued their countryside in uncontrolled bursts of power. Ordinary beasts of the wilderness were turned by these bursts into fanciful creatures of legend. Entire tribes of humans from all corners of the world were altered by the flood of uncontrolled magic, changing before the very eyes of their friends and neighbors into elves, dwarves, orcs, trolls, centaurs, and even minotaurs. Creatures that normally existed between our reality and others were shunted into this one, leaving ghosts, faeries, and other magical creatures stranded in our world in ways they were never intended to be. Even remnants of the Old World, gods of the ancients and their ken, were awakened from their immortal slumber through this great cataclysm to trouble mankind once more.
The world had changed forever.
The year is now 37BCE and the middle-east sits at the center of a vast struggle to control humanity’s fate. Three powerful nations have harnessed the power unleashed by the day of chaos, and they struggle to claim dominance over the known world. Their arcane legions are now yours to control.
Arcane Legions is a collectible game where you control an army (roughly the size of one in a decent sized game ofWarhammer Fantasy) against your opponent in pitched battle, consisting of historical units like egyptian archers and SPAAAAAAAAARTAAAAAANS with mythical things like minotaurs and dragons. It's a pretty neat idea with a nifty mechanic for organizing your men into formations. where there positioning can affect the squad's outcome and performance. I'll copypaste something from BGG:
"Players each field "bases" of variable sizes (Sortie/small and Formation/large) with individual figures inserted into starting positions on the base. The goal is to control victory point areas and inflict losses on the opponent. Movement and battle resolution are conducted through a unique formation management mechanic that allows players to move figures around on the unit bases to increase either movement/melee/ranged combat at the cost of losing capabilities in the other areas.
Figures are highly detailed true 25mm made from PVC 105. Common figures are unpainted with colored tempo prints on banners and shields, while all the uncommon, rare and Commander figures (Booster Pack contents) are fully pre-painted. The game is designed to use both types. There are 9 different unpainted common figures for each faction and at least 20 different fully painted premium figures for each faction. If you buy a legion bundle of a faction you receive around 70 prepainted figures, whereas buying one of each army pack gets you about 54 unpainted figures."
Now as a pick-up game, it should be cheap right? Well:
"With more than 110 figures, the Starter Pack includes small armies for all three factions and enough formation bases, sortie bases and base cards for a complete two player game - all for $34.99
The Army Packs contain 40 common soldiers - $14.99
The Cavalry Packs contain 15 mounted figures - $14.99
The Booster Packs contain 5-10 (depending on the size) Leader / special figures and their associated base cards, plus five additional formation base cards for use with figures from the Army and Cavalry Packs - $11.99"
The final deal sealer is the incredibly campy set of videos explaining their game, like something you'd see out of a Command and Conquer FMV.I'll probably picking up that starter set for a quick spin, and hope that this is all that and a bag of Sun Chips.
Sunday, September 27, 2009
Why Adventure Games Suck
In 1989 adventure game designer Ron Gilbert (of Maniac Mansion fame) wrote a manifesto explaining the fatal flaws of the adventure games at that time (especially the King's Quest games by Sierra). Shortly afterwords he created The Secret of Monkey Island, a masterpiece of the genre (as well as my first real computer game), which combined all his philosophies from the previous document into a classic. Since I'm on a Lucasarts adventure game binge right now, I thought I'd share this with you in its entirety (I'm too lazy for original content right now).
Why Adventure Games Suck
And What We Can Do About It
By Ron Gilbert
©1989, Ron Gilbert
Of all the different types of games, the ones I most enjoy playing are adventure/story games. It is no surprise that this is also the genre for which I design. I enjoy games in which the pace is slow and the reward is for thinking and figuring, rather than quick reflexes. The element that brings adventure games to life for me is the stories around which they are woven. When done right, it is a form of storytelling that can be engrossing in a way that only interaction can bring. The key here is ?done right?, which it seldom is.
One of my pet peeves is the recent trend to call story games ?Interactive Movies.? They are interactive, but they are not movies. The fact that people want to call them movies just points out how lost we are. What we need to do is to establish a genre for our works that we can call our own. Movies came from stage plays, but the references are long lost and movies have come into their own. The same thing needs to happen to story games.
The desire to call them Interactive Movies comes from a couple of places. The first is Marketing. It is the goal of narrow-minded marketing to place everything into a category so it will be recognizable. These people feel that the closest things to story games are movies. The other source for the name Interactive Movie is what I call ?Hollywood Envy.? A great number of people in this business secretly (and not so secretly) wish they were making movies, not writing video games. Knock it off! If you really want to make movies, then go to film school and leave the game designing to people who want to make games.
Story games are not movies, but the two forms do share a great deal. It is not fair to completely ignore movies. We can learn a lot from them about telling stories in a visual medium. However, it is important to realize that there are many more differences than similarities. We have to choose what to borrow and what to discover for ourselves.
The single biggest difference is interaction. You can?t interact with a movie. You just sit in the theater and watch it. In a story game, the player is given the freedom to explore the story. But the player doesn?t always do what the designer intended, and this causes problems. It is hard to create a cohesive plot when you have no idea what part of the story the player will trip over next. This problem calls for a special kind of storytelling, and we have just begun to scratch the surface of this art form.
There is a state of mind called ?suspension of disbelief.? When you are watching a movie, or reading a good book, your mind falls into this state. It occurs when you are pulled so completely into the story that you no longer realize you are in a movie theater or sitting at your couch, reading. When the story starts to drag, or the plots begins to fall apart, the suspension of disbelief is lost. You soon start looking around the theater, noticing the people in front of you or the green exit sign. One way I judge a movie is by the number of times I realized I was in a theater.
The same is true of story games (as well as almost all other kinds of games). As the story builds, we are pulled into the game and leave the real world behind. As designers, our job is to keep people in this state for as long as possible. Every time the player has to restore a saved game, or pound his head on the desk in frustration, the suspension of disbelief is gone. At this time he is most likely to shut off the computer and go watch TV, at which point we all have lost.
I have created a set of rules of thumb that will minimize the loss of suspension of disbelief. As with any set of rules, there are always exceptions. In my designs, I hope that if these rules cannot be followed, it is for artistic reasons and not because I am too lazy to do it right. In Maniac Mansion, in one place or another, I violated all but one of these rules. Some of them were violated by design, others by sloppiness. If I could redesign Maniac Mansion, all the violations would be removed and I?d have a much better game.
Some people say that following these rules makes the games too easy to play. I disagree. What makes most games tough to play is that the puzzles are arbitrary and unconnected. Most are solved by chance or repetitive sessions of typing ?light candle with match,? ?light paper with match,? ?light rug with match,? until something happens. This is not tough game play, this is masturbation. I played one game that required the player to drop a bubble gum wrapper in a room in order to get a trap door to open (object names have been changed to protect the guilty). What is the reasoning? There is none. It?s an advanced puzzle, I was told.
Here, then, are Gilbert?s Rules of Thumb:
End objective needs to be clear
It?s OK if the objective changes in mid-game, but at the beginning the player should have a clear vision as to what he or she is trying to accomplish. Nothing is more frustrating than wandering around wondering what you should be doing and if what you have been doing is going to get you anywhere. Situations where not knowing what?s going on can be fun and an integral part of the game, but this is rare and difficult to pull off.
Sub-goals need to be obvious
Most good adventure games are broken up into many sub-goals. Letting the player know at least the first sub-goal is essential in hooking them. If the main goal is to rescue the prince, and the player is trapped on an island at the beginning of the game, have another character in the story tell them the first step: get off the island. This is just good storytelling. Ben Kenobi pretty much laid out Luke's whole journey in the first twenty minutes of Star Wars. This provided a way for the audience to follow the progress of the main character. For someone not used to the repetitive head-banging of adventure games, this simple clue can mean the difference between finishing the game and giving up after the first hour. It?s very easy when designing to become blind to what the player doesn?t know about your story.
Live and learn
As a rule, adventure games should be able to be played from beginning to end without ?dying? or saving the game if the player is very careful and very observant. It is bad design to put puzzles and situations into a game that require a player to die in order to learn what not to do next time. This is not to say that all death situations should be designed out. Danger is inherent in drama, but danger should be survivable if the player is clever.
As an exercise, take one complete path through a story game and then tell it to someone else, as if it were a standard story. If you find places where the main character could not have known a piece of information that was used (the character who learned it died in a previous game), then there is a hole in the plot.
Backwards Puzzles
The backwards puzzle is probably the one thing that bugs me more than anything else about adventure games. I have created my share of them; and as with most design flaws, it?s easier to leave them in than to redesign them. The backwards puzzle occurs when the solution is found before the problem. Ideally, the crevice should be found before the rope that allows the player to descend. What this does in the player?s mind is set up a challenge. He knows he need to get down the crevice, but there is no route. Now the player has a task in mind as he continues to search. When a rope is spotted, a light goes on in his head and the puzzle falls into place. For a player, when the design works, there is nothing like that experience.
I forgot to pick it up
This is really part of the backwards puzzle rule, but in the worst way. Never require a player to pick up an item that is used later in the game if she can?t go back and get it when it is needed. It is very frustrating to learn that a seemingly insignificant object is needed, and the only way to get it is to start over or go back to a saved game. From the player?s point of view, there was no reason for picking it up in the first place. Some designers have actually defended this practice by saying that, ?adventure games players know to pick up everything.? This is a cop-out. If the jar of water needs to be used on the spaceship and it can only be found on the planet, create a use for it on the planet that guarantees it will be picked up. If the time between the two uses is long enough, you can be almost guaranteed that the player forgot she even had the object.
The other way around this problem is to give the player hints about what she might need to pick up. If the aliens on the planet suggest that the player find water before returning to the ship, and the player ignores this advice, then failure is her own fault.
Puzzles should advance the story
There is nothing more frustrating than solving pointless puzzle after pointless puzzle. Each puzzle solved should bring the player closer to understanding the story and game. It should be somewhat clear how solving this puzzle brings the player closer to the immediate goal. What a waste of time and energy for the designer and player if all the puzzle does is slow the progress of the game.
Real time is bad drama
One of the most important keys to drama is timing. Anyone who has designed a story game knows that the player rarely does anything at the right time or in the right order. If we let the game run on a clock that is independent from the player?s actions, we are going to be guaranteed that few things will happen with dramatic timing. When Indiana Jones rolled under the closing stone door and grabbed his hat just in time, it sent a chill and a cheer through everyone in the audience. If that scene had been done in a standard adventure game, the player would have been killed the first four times he tried to make it under the door. The next six times the player would have been too late to grab the hat. Is this good drama? Not likely. The key is to use Hollywood time, not real time. Give the player some slack when doing time-based puzzles. Try to watch for intent. If the player is working towards the solution and almost ready to complete it, wait. Wait until the hat is grabbed, then slam the door down. The player thinks he ?just made it? and consequently a much greater number of players get the rush and excitement. When designing time puzzles I like to divide the time into three categories. 10% of the players will do the puzzle so fast and efficiently that they will finish with time to spare. Another 10% will take too much time and fail, which leaves 80% of the people to brush through in the nick of time.
Incremental reward
The player needs to know that she is achieving. The fastest way to turn a player off is to let the game drag on with no advancement. This is especially true for people who are playing adventure games for the first time. In graphics adventures the reward often comes in the form of seeing new areas of the game. New graphics and characters are often all that is needed to keep people playing. Of course, if we are trying to tell a story, then revealing new plot elements and twists can be of equal or greater value.
Arbitrary puzzles
Puzzles and their solutions need to make sense. They don?t have to be obvious, just make sense. The best reaction after solving a tough puzzle should be, ?Of course, why didn?t I think of that sooner!? The worst, and most often heard after being told the solution is, ?I never would have gotten that!? If the solution can only be reached by trial and error or plain luck, it?s a bad puzzle.
Reward Intent
The object of these games is to have fun. Figure out what the player is trying to do. If it is what the game wants, then help the player along and let it happen. The most common place this fails is in playing a meta-game called ?second guess the parser.? If there is an object on the screen that looks like a box, but the parser is waiting for it to be called a mailbox, the player is going to spend a lot of time trying to get the game to do a task that should be transparent. In parser-driven games, the key is to have lots of synonyms for objects. If the game is a graphics adventure, check proximity of the player?s character. If the player is standing right next to something, chances are they are trying to manipulate it. If you give the player the benefit of the doubt, the game will be right more than wrong. On one occasion, I don?t know how much time I spent trying to tie a string on the end of a stick. I finally gave up, not knowing if I was wording the sentence wrong or if it was not part of the design. As it turned out, I was wording it wrong.
Unconnected events
In order to pace events, some games lock out sections until certain events have happened. There is nothing wrong with this, it is almost a necessity. The problem comes when the event that opens the new section of the world is unconnected. If the designer wants to make sure that six objects have been picked up before opening a secret door, make sure that there is a reason why those six objects would affect the door. If a player has only picked up five of the objects and is waiting for the door to open (or worse yet, trying to find a way to open the door), the act of getting the flashlight is not going to make any sense in relation to the door opening.
Give the player options
A lot of story games employ a technique that can best be described as caging the player. This occurs when the player is required to solve a small set of puzzles in order to advance to the next section of the game, at which point she is presented with another small set of puzzles. Once these puzzles are solved, in a seemingly endless series of cages, the player enters the next section. This can be particularly frustrating if the player is unable to solve a particular puzzle. The areas to explore tend to be small, so the only activity is walking around trying to find the one solution out.
Try to imagine this type of puzzle as a cage the player is caught in, and the only way out is to find the key. Once the key is found, the player finds herself in another cage. A better way to approach designing this is to think of the player as outside the cages, and the puzzles as locked up within. In this model, the player has a lot more options about what to do next. She can select from a wide variety of cages to open. If the solution to one puzzle stumps her, she can go on to another, thus increasing the amount of useful activity going on.
Of course, you will want some puzzles that lock out areas of the game, but the areas should be fairly large and interesting unto themselves. A good indicator of the cage syndrome is how linear the game is. If the plot follows a very strict line, chances are the designer is caging the player along the path. It?s not easy to uncage a game, it requires some careful attention to the plot as seen from players coming at the story from different directions. The easiest way is to create different interactions for a given situation depending on the order encountered.
Conclusion
If I could change the world, there are a few things I would do, and quite frankly none of them have anything to do with computers or games. But since this article is about games?
The first thing I?d do is get rid of save games. If there have to be save games, I would use them only when it was time to quit playing until the next day. Save games should not be a part of game play. This leads to sloppy design. As a challenge, think about how you would design a game differently if there were no save games. If you ever have the pleasure of watching a non-gameplayer playing an adventure game you will notice they treat save game very differently then the experienced user. Some start using it as a defense mechanism only after being slapped in the face by the game a few times, the rest just stop playing.
The second thing I?d change would be the price. For between forty and fifty dollars a game, people expect a lot of play for their money. This rarely leads to huge, deep games, but rather time-wasting puzzles and mazes. If the designer ever thinks the game might be too short, he throws in another puzzle or two. These also tend to be the worst thought-out and most painful to solve. If I could have my way, I?d design games that were meant to be played in four to five hours. The games would be of the same scope that I currently design, I?d just remove the silly time-wasting puzzles and take the player for an intense ride. The experience they would leave with would be much more entertaining and a lot less frustrating. The games would still be challenging, but not at the expense of the players patience.
If any type of game is going to bridge the gap between games and storytelling, it is most likely going to be adventure games. They will become less puzzle solving and more story telling, it is the blueprint the future will be made from. The thing we cannot forget is that we are here to entertain, and for most people, entertainment does not consist of nights and weekends filled with frustration. The average American spends most of the day failing at the office, the last thing he wants to do is come home and fail while trying to relax and be entertained.
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Modular 40K: Ork Grindaz
GRINDA MOB
While many Orks enjoy the roar of the battle cannon or the chop of a hefty axe, there are those who lend themselves to the love of Dakka, the sight of the enemy minced in a storm of lead. Named after the effect of their weapons on opposing infantry, Grindaz come equipped with a heavy machine gun and heavy armor to soak up puny arms fire while blasting back. Unlike Flash Gitz, who primarily use the best guns as a sign of affluence and superiority, Grindaz simply love the clatter of the firearm and the visceral carnage of their targets transformed into tiny giblets.
ELITES CHOICE 0-1
GRINDA MOB
WS BS S T W I A LD Sv
4 2 3 4 1 2 2 7 4+
Mob size: 5-15 Grindaz
Equipment: Big Shoota, 'Eavy Armor, Close Combat Weapon
Special Rules: Mob Rule, Power of The Waaagh!!!
Thursday, September 10, 2009
The Proper Size and Role of Government
In determining the best size of government, we should first note that both governments and markets do the same thing: they exchange goods and services for money. For example, a customer may pay $10 for a restaurant dinner, whereas a citizen pays tax money for police protection.
But if they both do the same thing, then why not let the market do it all? Or why not let the government do it all? The answer is because it depends on the goods and services being offered. Governments and markets are better suited for providing different things.
Below is a comparison of how government and markets make transactions. First we’ll describe the general model, and then show how both the market and government fit the model. To make the comparison easier, letters will mark the appropriate analogs:
The General Model: A group (A) delegates power to individual providers (B) within an institution (C) to provide goods and services in exchange for money (D). The group has their choice of many providers competing to provide them goods, and they give consumer satisfaction units (E) to their preferred choice. Those providers receiving a sufficient number of units will be delegated to power (F), and those that do not will be denied power (G). This competition keeps prices down, quality high, and incompetent providers out of the system.
The Market: Customers (A) delegate power to individual companies (B) within the market (C) to provide goods and services in exchange for money (D). Customers have their choice of many companies competing to provide them goods, and they give dollars (E) to their preferred choice. Those companies receiving a sufficient number of dollars will stay in business (F), and those that do not will go bankrupt (G). This competition keeps prices down, quality high, and incompetent companies out of the market.
Government: Citizens (A) delegate power to individual representatives (B) within government (C) to provide goods and services in exchange for taxes (D). Citizens have their choice of many candidates competing to provide them goods, and they give votes (E) to their preferred choice. Those candidates receiving a sufficient number of votes will be elected to office (F), and those that do not will be denied office (G). This competition keeps prices down, quality high, and incompetent representatives out of government.
The fact that customers vote with their dollars while citizens vote with their votes is an important difference with enormous implications. Consider how this difference affects the issue of natural monopolies:
Natural Monopolies
In any marketplace, competition is essential to keep things efficient. Providers who have no competitors are called monopolies. Economists consider monopolies to be a market failure, because monopolies can raise prices, drop quality, and receive extra profits for nothing. People could better spend this wasted money elsewhere, on things that actually raise their standard of living.
Monopolies arise in several different ways, but a common one is the natural monopoly. This is a monopoly where competition is prevented by the very nature of the market or technology itself. Examples include telephone, electrical, gas and water utilities. The only way these services could see competition would be to install competing electrical lines and water pipes in the neighborhood — an absurd and wasteful idea. Because private competition is not desirable, public competition is the best solution. Governments restore competition to natural monopolies because the elected officials running them must compete for votes. Most nations allow their governments to run their natural monopolies directly, but the U.S. has a hybrid system, in which private utilities are publicly regulated to avoid monopolistic abuse.
Sometimes improved technology can turn a natural monopoly into a competitive marketplace, as in the case of cable TV eroding the monopoly power of network TV, or fiber optics introducing competition to long-distance phone service. But new natural monopolies are always arising, often created by new technology. For example, the invention of cars created the natural monopoly of roads. (You can't have several competing roads leading to your door). The result is that the number of natural monopolies in the economy remains fairly constant, even if their constituency changes.
Utilities are not the only example of natural monopolies. Most public goods are natural monopolies as well.
Public and Private Goods
To understand this part of the debate, it's important to distinguish between a public and private good. A public good is non-exclusive and non-rival. Non-exclusive means that it’s difficult to keep non-payers from consuming the good. Non-rival means that one person’s consumption doesn’t subtract from another person’s consumption of the same good.
The classic example of a public good is national defense. National defense, once established, protects payers and non-payers alike. And one person’s enjoyment of national defense is not decreased by an immigrant who enters the country and enjoys it also. In other words, once the nation is defended, it doesn’t cost more to protect 200 million citizens as 100 million.
By comparison, a merchant selling apples is selling a private good, because he can exclude non-paying customers from consuming his apples. And every bite of an apple that a paying customer eats is one less bite available to others.
As it turns out, private markets cannot provide most public goods. The reason is the free-rider problem. Suppose private companies, not government, supplied our national defense. Customers would pay these companies to defend the nation, and their decision to buy the protection would be voluntary, otherwise it would not be a free market. Unfortunately, many citizens could decide to take a free ride, enjoying national defense for free while others pay for it. But if everyone took advantage of this, no one would pay for national defense at all.
Public goods are best provided by public institutions like government. The government requires citizens to pay for the good by law; citizens then become forced riders, or compelled taxpayers. This "coercion" is justified because the majority of voters prefer it to the alternative, which is defeat and enslavement by the Hitlers and Stalins of the world.
Examples of public goods include environmental protection, public parks, law and order, standardizing weights and measures, a common education, a common language, public health, printing and controlling a national currency, and more. Examples of public goods provided by private merchants include fireworks displays and street musician performances — although getting paid for these services by all who enjoy them is impossible.
The ultimate public good: law and order
Imagine a land with no law and order. Everyone would be free to commit violence and aggression without worrying about police retaliation. Greed would spur individuals to rob, cheat and steal at every opportunity. Jealous lovers could kill with impunity. Nothing could stop your neighbor from driving you off your land and taking your property, except your own use of defensive force.
In such anarchy, only the fittest and luckiest would survive. But even after these survivors won their first battles, they would only find themselves in a new round of conflict, this time against proven and battle-tested survivors. The price of continual war isn’t worth it, even to the survivors. Society avoids this bleak scenario by agreeing to cooperate for survival, or at least limiting the competition to fairer and less harmful methods. This more stable and peaceful approach makes everyone richer in the long run.
But cooperation requires rules that everyone lives by. Unfortunately, private markets cannot provide such law and order. Take, for example, the law against murder. How could the market enforce such a law? With government, the answer is simple: the police enforce it. But how would the free market provide police protection? Some libertarians have proposed imaginative solutions, like having private police agencies compete on the free market. You might subscribe to Joe’s Security Forces, and I might subscribe to Bill's Police Agency. But suppose one day I steal your car. You could call your police agency to come and arrest me. But I could claim the car is rightfully mine, thanks to a bad business deal between us, and call my own police agency to defend against your theft of my property. The result is tribal warfare. What’s worse, the richest citizens would be able to afford the largest private armies, and use them to acquire yet more riches, which in turn would fund yet larger armies. Libertarian scholars have attempted to save their idea with even more imaginative arguments, but the exercise only proves the unworkability of the idea, and the vast majority of scholars reject the whole approach.
The folly of this exercise becomes even more apparent when you consider how the free market would provide the law itself. Again, some libertarians propose private legislative companies competing on the free market. By paying a legislative company a few hundred dollars a year, you could buy whatever slate of laws you would like to live by. Unfortunately, two people might claim sole ownership of the same property, and point to their different slate of laws awarding them ownership. In that case, the law is of no help in identifying the true owner, and the two parties are left to negotiate. These negotiations would occur under conditions of anarchy, and the side with the most power, influence or police force would win the negotiations. This would be a society of power politics, where might makes right.
True law and order can only be provided by a single entity covering the entire group in question. That is, law and order is a natural monopoly. A single private company can’t run this natural monopoly for two reasons. First, it would have no competition, unlike government, which could restore competition through voting. In other words, governments are democracies, but private companies are dictatorships, and if only one company provides law and order, you might as well have a monarchy. Second, true law and order is also a public good, much like national defense, but one that offers protection against internal enemies instead of external ones. Free riders could enjoy the benefit of the private company’s law and order without paying for it. Having democratic government provide law and order is the only way to solve these problems.
The true extent of law and order
When most people think of "law and order," they generally think of police officers fighting street crime. However, the most important laws in society are actually the laws that set up our social, property and business systems.
For example, business laws protect us against fraud, false advertising, breach of contract, copyright infringement, embezzlement, insider trading, monopolistic abuse, unfair market manipulations and hundreds of other ills that would occur under true anarchy. Without business laws, the market could not even operate. For example, if we did not have copyright laws discouraging people from pirating all their software, computer programmers could not even make a profit, and would have no incentive to produce.
Property laws protect us against theft, invasions of privacy, trespassing, pollution, vandalism, and disputes over property boundaries and ownership. Without these laws, we would have no stable system of private property.
Social laws guarantee our freedom of speech, religion, press, ballot box, due process, and equal rights. Without these laws, we would not live in a free society, but in tyranny.
Again, the free market could not provide these public goods without suffering from free riders and tribal warfare. This leads to an important conclusion: the public sector creates the rules that the private sector needs to operate.
Public infrastructure
Another irreplaceable role of government is providing national infrastructure, which includes roads, electricity, telecommunications, postal systems, and other large-scale underpinnings of the national economy. Historically, private enterprise has been unable to afford building national infrastructure. Only government has the pockets deep enough to fund such huge projects. Almost always, these projects lay dormant or underdeveloped until the government takes them up, and then progress is rapid.
Nor would we want private companies so large that they could provide national infrastructure; any company that large would surely be a monopoly, for competitors of equal size would be a waste of the nation's resources.
The classic example is road building. Private companies tried building toll roads and turnpikes in the early 1800s, but the projects were not viable. Most companies lost money in the long run, and only a few made slim profits. As a result, America’s road system languished. But a dramatic boost in road building came with Eisenhower's Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956, which authorized the creation of over 40,000 miles of interstate highway. These highways expanded, interconnected and accelerated the U.S. economy, with profound results. They allowed the middle class to migrate from the cities to the suburbs, with an enormous increase in privacy and quality of life. They also breathed new life into commerce.
Another reason why governments are better at road building is eminent domain. This is the power to build roads where they are logically needed, by compelling land owners to sell their property at fair market values. Critics protest the coercive nature of eminent domain, but consider the alternative. If private road-building companies asked landowners to sell their property voluntarily, roads would either not be built at all, or they would zigzag crazily across the map.
Why? Because some property owners would not sell their land at any price, for reasons of sentimentality, convenience, stubbornness, or misjudgment. Others would jack up their price tenfold or a hundredfold, knowing how keenly, say, two cities would like to connect to each other. Some libertarians argue that such a high asking price would reflect the true value of the land between the two cities, if they were willing to pay it. But the problem with that argument is that if every individual landowner asked an astronomical sum, the total costs of the project would skyrocket. The costs might easily exceed the budget of the road-building company. And they would certainly make tolls skyrocket, reducing the potential economic benefit and activity between the two cities, and diverting it instead to the former landowners who do not produce anything more for their windfall. So eminent domain makes society richer in the long run.
Highways are but one example of how publicly funded infrastructure has increased commerce. Others include:
Settling the West: The U.S. government played a primary role in settling the West. It conducted massive land purchases like the Louisiana Purchase ($15 million), the Texas/California purchase ($25 million), and others. It then gave the land to American settlers for a song, thanks to the Homestead Act and other giveaways. Conquest, where it occurred, was done primarily by the U.S. Army, not gun-toting pioneers. The government also subsidized the Wells Fargo postal routes, agricultural colleges, rural electrification, telegraph wiring, road-building, irrigation, dam-building, farm subsidies, and farm foreclosure loans.
Funding Railroads: In the late 19th century, the government gave away 131 million acres in federal land grants, at enormous cost to itself, to railroad companies to build their railroads. Four of the five transcontinental railroads were built this way. To help them, Congress authorized loans of $16,000 to $48,000 per mile of railroad (depending on the terrain).
Rural Electrification: In 1935, only 13 percent of all farms had electricity, because utility companies found it unprofitable to wire the countryside for service. Roosevelt's Rural Electrification Administration began correcting this market failure; by 1970, more than 95 percent of all farms would have electricity.
U.S. Mail: Many people think that the privately owned UPS, which delivered 3 billion pieces of mail in 1997, is America’s postal success story. But this figure pales in comparison to the U.S. Postal Service, which delivered 190 billion pieces of mail that same year. The U.S. Postal Service also achieves a 91 percent on-time delivery rate charging among the lowest rates in the industrialized world. No private organization could hope to match these numbers. It is also interesting to note that the privately-funded Pony Express was a financial failure that lasted only a few years. The government subsidized the Wells Fargo Company, which succeeded delivering mail to California for rest of the 19th century.
The Internet: In the 1960s, the government created ARPANET, which was used and developed by the Defense Department, public universities and other research organizations. In 1985, the National Science Foundation created various supercomputing centers around the country, linking the five largest together to start the modern Internet we know today.
NASA: Thanks to America’s space program, today we have a fleet of satellites that conduct global telecommunications, weather observation and warning, ozone and global warming studies, intelligence missions, high-resolution and high-accuracy mapping, as well as detection of forest fires, oil spills, El Nino events, natural disasters and earth-threatening asteroids. Space exploration was so inherently difficult that it took decades and hundreds of billions of dollars before the practical benefits became possible. Private companies could not have possibly afforded such investment, or waited so long until it bore fruit.
The Treasury and Federal Reserve System: The Treasury prints the very money the economy runs on. And using Keynesian policies to expand or contract the money supply, the Fed has completely eliminated economic depressions in the last six decades.
Federal Emergency Management Agency: Today FEMA has won widespread praise for its response to natural disasters like earthquakes, hurricanes, floods and tornadoes. No private business could wait the long intervals between disasters like FEMA does, or bring relief to entire cities or states.
Human Genome Project: The government provides the money and the organization for this 20-year project, which will give medical science a road map of the human genetic code. Researchers have already found genes that contribute to 50 diseases.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: This legendary American organization, popularized by the movie Outbreak, isolates and wipes out entire plagues and diseases that strike anywhere in the world. "The CDC," says Dr. James Le Duc of the World Health Organization, "is the only ballgame in town."
Mass education: This is probably the most remarkable example where the government overcame a market failure. Prior to the 1840s, the vast majority of Americans were illiterate. What few schools existed were private schools that educated boys only from the richest families. However, during the 19th century, the government began funding mass education at both the elementary and high school level. Between 1900 and 1996, the percentage of teenagers who graduated from high school mushroomed from 6 to 85 percent. The government also began issuing grants and loans for college education, and college enrollees aged 18 to 24 mushroomed from 2 to 60 percent. In essence, the government is responsible for the educated workforce that causes today’s economy to excel.
Market Failures
Finally, government is useful for correcting market failures. Economists define market failure as "an imperfection in the price system that prevents the efficient allocation of resources." There are many types of market failure; here are the definitions of the most important ones:
Asymmetric Information: This is any difference in information and expertise between two negotiating parties. For example, in the used-car market, the seller's information is based on sales that he conducts every day, but the buyer's information is based on a purchase he conducts only a few times in his lifetime. The resulting exchange is likely to be unfair or one-sided.
Adverse Selection: This is any unfair exchange based on asymmetric information.
Externality: Also called the spillover effect. This occurs when someone other than the buyer shares the costs or benefits of the product. The classic example is pollution. Factories can either treat pollution, which costs money, or dump it for free into the air or water. If they dump it, then not only are customers paying a price for the product, but local citizens too, in the form of higher mortality and disease rates, less fertile land, environmental catastrophes, etc. Sometimes the spillover effect is both positive and negative. An airport benefits its flying customers, but it also subjects the local neighborhood to various externalities. Positive ones include increased local business; negative ones include noise pollution.
Imperfect competition: This is any situation where a monopoly or oligopoly controls the market for a certain product. The lack of competition raises prices, lowers quality, slows down innovation and exploits customers.
Path dependency: This is the tendency to stick to a certain path, trend, technology, method or location, even after more promising alternatives appear. The most commonly cited — and now disputed — example is the QWERTY typewriter keyboard. This 19th century system placed the most commonly used letters far apart on the keyboard, purposely slowing down typing to avoid key jamming. Of course, today's electronic keyboards do not suffer from jamming, and a better system, DSK, cuts down on typing time by 10 percent. Unfortunately, society is committed to the old system, because it is too costly to retrain all typists and retool all keyboard production everywhere. Conservatives have raised objections to the QWERTY example, but path dependency has been found in thousands of other places in the economy as well. Examples include the English vs. the metric system, steam vs. gas engines, water-cooled vs. gas-cooled nuclear reactors, and the centralization of entire industries in a single city, like auto production in Detroit, or aircraft production in Seattle, or movie-making in Hollywood.
Failure to provide public goods: As outlined above, free markets cannot provide most public goods, or goods that are non-exclusive and non-rival. Attempts to do so result in a free-rider problem, where consumers may enjoy the good without paying.
Because markets are the cause of market failures, it follows that markets cannot correct them. But they are solvable by government. For example, governments can educate consumers, regulate polluters, break up monopolies, subsidize retraining, retooling or relocating programs, and provide public goods like national defense.
Once you consider all the goods and services that only government can provide (or provide well), it should become clear that government plays an extensive, beneficial and irreplaceable role in society. Conservatives and libertarians who wish to scale back government would only create more problems than they solve.
The advantages of markets
Markets do have their advantages over government, depending on the type of goods and services offered. Markets are better at handling most private goods. Why? It is a truism that democracy only works when the people are educated. Voters would be overwhelmed trying to educate themselves on the best prices for bicycle parts, the best safety features for surgery or what 32 flavors an ice cream store should sell. It is easy to see that a lot of ignorant votes would be cast in a system where voters attempted to run every aspect of the economy. In a free market, customers can become experts only on the things they want to buy, and then vote with their dollars.
Under the current (and imperfect) system, markets also have other advantages of specificity. First, elections take place only once every two or four years, so consumer choice mechanisms are much weaker in government. (This could be solved by holding more frequent elections, initiatives and referendums.) Also, markets allow people to vote for very specific things — like Ben & Jerry's ice cream over Haagen Daz. In an election, people vote on generalities — like a politician's overall record, which may include disagreeable as well as agreeable policies. (This, too, could be resolved by allowing voters to vote on more specific issues and offices.)Thursday, September 3, 2009
Rogue Trader: To pillage where no man has pillaged before.
Here's your bizarre crossover fantasy.
I don't know how to really explain this so I'll leave the first post of the Something Awful Rogue Trader thread to explain:
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"In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war.
Armies rage across the galaxy, fighting for power, ideology, or genocide.
Countless trillions of human beings slave in the depths of hive cities, eking out a meager existence.
Billions more are employed keeping a tenuous control over the bloated infrastructure of the Imperium of Man.
Out in the Koronus Expanse, where men once were and now are again, colonists uncover strange monstrosities in the ruins of once-great cities, and raiders strike with impunity.
Beyond the borders of known space, terrifying alien races wait to strike at this new tendril of humanity.
And as ever, where mankind goes, it finds it has brought daemons with it.
The Koronus Expanse is a dangerous place, where wars of all forms rage, where alien terror waits without and eldritch terror waits within, where the only laws are the laws of the gun, and the only certainty is chaos.
But all that aside, it's a great place to make some money.
Okay, so the good people at Fantasy Flight Games have come out with the second of the three planned tiers of the Warhammer 40K roleplaying experience, and I'm giddy as a schoolgirl about it.
There are many, many complaints that can be levered at their previous game, Dark Heresy. Among which:
"A stray shot can and quite possibly will kill me!"
"Having a failure rate lower than 50% is only achieved by extreme specialization!"
"I'm basically playing the scrubbiest scrubs in a universe with so many badasses that my existence is pointless!"
"A plasma gun will very literally cost me ten times my net worth AND when I get it odds are still good the thing's going to explode on me!"
"Within the framework of the game, you are stuck on some level supporting the generally evil-as-fuck Imperial hierarchy!"
"This book was laid out by someone who actively hates their readers!"
"The psyker was trying to heal me, but instead he exploded in a shower of gore and a demon jumped out of his torso who proceeded to dismember us all!"
All these problems except for the last two have been addressed, because that last one is awesome!
The best way to describe what you play in Rogue Trader is the following. Have you ever seen this episode of Star Trek? And thought that being a captain in the evil alternate universe would basically rock?
In Rogue Trader, you play the bridge crew of a Rogue Trading vessel, an ancient, enormous ship armed to the teeth, crewed by several thousand loyalish crewmembers, with a stated mission of "fuck bitches, make money, smoke obscura." And when they say bridge crew, they mean like the Star Trek bridge crew. There are rules for letting the redshirts handle just about everything, but let's face it, you're going to want to beam down with the away team every once in a while and kick some rear end.
The two biggest mechanical additions to the game are ship combat rules (in a combat round, which is half an hour, the ship moves and fires, and every player gets to make an extended action. extended actions include 'active scan,' 'Emergency Repairs,' 'Hold Fast!' and 'Work Harder, You Scum*') and the Acquisition rules. As a Rogue Trader, even one on the scrub end of the scale, you've got more wealth on hand than some planetary governors. It takes a -lot- of effort for you to lose an appreciable amount of that money. It follows a similar pattern to standard Dark Heresy rolling; roll d100, get below your Resources number, you win.
The interesting part is there are two sets of modifiers; scale, and rarity. Sure, a Crusade-era power sword is a definite rarity, but if you're only looking for one, well, you know, some people are so -lax- about their private storehouse security. Conversely, if you're looking for a lasgun, suppliers will be asking you how many hundred you need.
Character creation has been improved; it's a bit less random, and characters are given several more freebies. On top of these freebies, a starting Rogue Trader character is the equivalent of a 5000-XP Dark Heresy character. To take this back to Star Trek, Dark Heresy characters are the redshirts. You are the bridge crew. "
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At the beginning of the game, the players have a set amount of profit to spend. They could get a small dingy ship and spend the rest on Power Weapons and Space Blow, or purchase a giant cruiser with a crew of 1000's. Hell, Space Marine squads can probably be bought as personal guards.
Adventures come in the form of Endevours, odd jobs or expeditions into the dark frontier, ranging from looting space hulks to trading with alien species (by that we mean kill them and take their stuff). The players don't have to take orders from the Imperium if they don't want to or play intern for an inquisitor. They are their own bosses. Hell, the game advises players to make up their own endevours to play through. It's a sandbox game in every sense. And with big jobs comes big money, like purchasing a giant moonbase and an army of mercenaries capable of holding a coup on an Imperial world. The scale of the player's decisions are massive. I think this type of gameplay would meld better with the group than having the inquisitor demand his acolytes to file those TPS reports and solve mysteries then get their soul sucked out by a daemon. I know the good Commisar is marshalling Deadlands, Kit is goofing off with D20. But this, this demands I game master it, if only to see what the hell happens with this many options. Come on, the Dark Fronteir is waiting...
Also, anybody want to buy my Dark Heresy Stuff?
The first half of this video is Rogue Trader in a nutshell
