Logistics and Dragons [No Kaeliks]

[Lago PARANOIA]

Goddammit, I still want to know why Frank, the publisher of the Your Fantasy Economy Is Bullshit posts, thinks that population-increases with immigration is driven by low tax rates.

I can think of a couple of plausible explanations -- for example, fantasy socioeconomics are so hilariously suboptimal that having peasants hoard money under their bed is economically superior to building an aqueduct.

And I can think of a couple of game balance reasons -- for example, we don't want people to set the city lever switches to automatic and just watch the city grow; having it work this way forces the player to continually intervene and make hard choices between infrastructure and population growth.

But I want to hear it from the horse's mouth. I find it completely baffling that Frank's model would predict that more people would want to move to Belarus than Sweden. That's a much bigger leap of faith than giant spiders.

[name_here]

Because medieval-era governments were laughably terrible at just about everything.

[Username17]

Growing a planar metropolis from a podunk village is something that should take generations, a couple hundred years at least. Being able to accomplish it in a few decades even given the best possible conditions is crazy.

The population of Los Angeles was 4,385 people in 1860 and 102,000 in 1900. In 4 decades it grew from being a D&D "large town" to being a D&D "planar metropolis." And that was without any fantasy population growth measures like taking in interdimensional refugees, mass resurrection of previous generations, or cloning/building adults. It just had completely mundane population growth events every decade (civil war elsewhere in country, railroad connection, oil discovery), and it grew by 2,226% in four decades. That works out to a bit over 8% growth per year.

If you keep winning all your adventures, maintain the requisite ever-growing food supply, and take actual steps to grow and develop your city, of course you should be able to hit growth rates of 8-9% every year. And if you do that, you'll get to Planar Metropolis status in like 4-5 decades if you keep playing that long.

This is not a weird and crazy output of the system. It's a solid and reasonable output of the system.

-Username17

[Username17]

Goddammit, I still want to know why Frank, the publisher of the Your Fantasy Economy Is Bullshit posts, thinks that population-increases with immigration is driven by low tax rates.

It's not. At least, not exactly. Population growth is driven by, among other things, high post-tax incomes. So development level minus taxes. Taxes aren't a percentage, they a flat number. Total wealth production is Development times Population, taxes are Tax Rate times Population, and population morale is set by Development minus Tax Rate.

So people are happier with a development of 10 and a tax rate of 4 (public share 6) than they are with a development of 7 and a tax rate of 2 (public share 5). Whether taxes are high or low is not itself something that drives public give a shit. It's the difference between the development level and the tax rate. And these are all flat numbers rather than percentages, because people are supposed to be able to do this at the table.

-Username17

[Lago PARANOIA]

Then shouldn't Development in of itself have a multiplier to it? Like, I'm speaking from a communist perspective here but it seems to me that as observed by the real world a development score of 10 (Sweden) and a tax rate of 8 is more attractive to non-rich immigrants than a development score of 8 (Japan) and a tax rate of 4. Relative xenophobia and immigration policy aside.

[Omegonthesane]

Then shouldn't Development in of itself have a multiplier to it? Like, I'm speaking from a communist perspective here but it seems to me that as observed by the real world a development score of 10 (Sweden) and a tax rate of 8 is more attractive to non-rich immigrants than a development score of 8 (Japan) and a tax rate of 4. Relative xenophobia and immigration policy aside.

The "city development" subsystem isn't meant to be the focus of the game, so no fancy multiplication mechanics for it.

At most there might be an "Actually Sane Investment Policy" option that a town can spend, say, 1 Development constructing or maintaining that adds, let's go with, 3 to post-tax income for the sole purpose of determining population happiness.

[Almaz]

Then shouldn't Development in of itself have a multiplier to it? Like, I'm speaking from a communist perspective here but it seems to me that as observed by the real world a development score of 10 (Sweden) and a tax rate of 8 is more attractive to non-rich immigrants than a development score of 8 (Japan) and a tax rate of 4. Relative xenophobia and immigration policy aside.

That's a pretty huge "aside" there. Japan resists immigration, even of trained, qualified professionals, even when it direly needs those professionals (mostly, in the nursing/healthcare industry). When one person is merely grumbling that you're not a horse of a different color and the other is pouring boiling oil over the gate, you're going to favor the one who is merely annoyed instead of downright hostile. In that case, social factors are overwhelmingly determinant. You can't use a simplified game system to evaluate real world situations when the simplified game system doesn't take into account real world variables by default.

And it's also worth noting that for a long long long long long long long time the United States has been one of the preferred immigration destinations even when many other economies are doing better than our own right now. But while the USA has a social factor driving that, it's also just because we're the land of get-rich-quick schemes. People think they can "make it" here. It is definitely at least partially an economic draw.

[PhoneLobster]

You guys are only discussing pull factors, you CLEARLY need to consider a model that also incorporates migratory push factors.

Incorporate moar factors, ALL the factors, simulate ALL THE THINGS!

[Starmaker]

Then shouldn't Development in of itself have a multiplier to it? Like, I'm speaking from a communist perspective here but it seems to me that as observed by the real world a development score of 10 (Sweden) and a tax rate of 8 is more attractive to non-rich immigrants than a development score of 8 (Japan) and a tax rate of 4. Relative xenophobia and immigration policy aside.

You got the real-life analogy wrong. The tax rate in the model is a measure of how much cash you the ruler extract from the economy and stuff into your character's pockets to spend on vanity projects, not how much of their personal income an actual citizen needs to fork over. It does not appear to cover infrastructural spending outside of tiny men:

FrankTrollman[/url]]So for example: a D&D "Large City" has 21,000 people in it... produces 105,000 gp, of which a high tax rate would fork over 42,000 gp to the ruler. If the city had increased the development level to 8, a high tax rate would give out 105,000 gp. Per month.

Maintaining a city of that size requires patrols. So you'll need to hire several hundred soldiers at a cost of 6 gp per month each.

So the Good Kingdom of Sweden in the L&D model will have a "low tax" rate because the real actual SEK go back to Swedish citizens rather than get spent on the king's new luxury spelljammer or controlweathering the Evil Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

[RobbyPants]

You guys are only discussing pull factors, you CLEARLY need to consider a model that also incorporates migratory push factors.

Incorporate moar factors, ALL the factors, simulate ALL THE THINGS!

People interested in this thread: "Lets figure out what to track, that gives us reasonable outputs, while minimizing how much we track."

PL: "You should track more stuff until it stops doing what two of your stated goals are."

WTF?

[PhoneLobster]

No no no silly RobbyPants. You don't understand at all.

I'm just being a helper. Migratory push factors existing at all are clearly a higher simulation/realism priority than tweaking your migratory pull factors to be exactly appropriately politically progressive. It's OBVIOUS they want push factors in their simulation obvious!

And I mean really what's all this about "minimizing" things, now that I've come around to being a helper NO ONE on this thread is in favor of minimizing things, I mean AH was very nice about paying lip service to it to try and placate me, but it's pretty clear he couldn't and given the chance wouldn't simplify a cardboard box.

[Username17]

The thing to understand about PL is that he is so far up his own asshole that he might as well be posting in Mandarin Chinese. He declared a long list of game design ideals back when Bush was president that he absolutely refused to budge on. Some of them were things that a broad group of people could agree with and others... weren't. His list of shiboleths was sufficiently long and demanding enough that literally not one other person agrees with everything on his list. And so, not one other person can meaningfully collaborate on his resultant projects.

As such, PL has been inside a weird bubble for long enough that his bubble could itself attend primary school. During this time he has been working alone and talking to himself, developing his own slang and idioms. When he talks at other people (PL does not talk with anyone), he does so in layered references to an essentially impenetrable internal monologue.

So when people are having a genuine game design conversation, he will sometimes butt in to say that an idea is bad because it doesn't fit his bizarre and idiosyncratic paradigm. Or sometimes he'll butt in to say that an idea is unoriginal because he has something that is on some axis similar in his personal Skinner box. In either case, the critique is meaningless because you are someone who isn't PL and thus don't give a single shit about what ideas PL has and has not had about his personal system because being that you are any other living person you don't share his vast list of design mandates. This means that whether an idea "works" for him or not has essentially zero predictive power for whether it will work for you.

TL;DR: Maybe PL is just threadshitting at this point. I honestly can't tell. PL being serious and PL being sarcastic are indistinguishable states because the criteria by which he defines a rule set as good or bad are completely alien to absolutely everyone who isn't himself. PL trying to be helpful and PL deliberately threadshitting are indistinguishable states because a point at which PL would find a game finished is a point where no other human would find it acceptable and vice versa.

Sometime go find an old PL thread and see how far the rabbit hole you can get into his explanations for why two players shouldn't be able to successfully stab a dragon in the same turn or why it shouldn't matter which order you blow someone a seductive kiss and strike them in the face with a hammer. Ypu'll be able to follow some of the logic, but you won't want to go where it's going because the fundamental premises won't make sense to you. They don't make sense to anyone who isn't PL. And they never will.

-Username17

[TheFlatline]

"two players shouldn't be able to successfully stab a dragon in the same turn"

Huh? I can't even invent a BS reason for that.

[PhoneLobster]

"two players shouldn't be able to successfully stab a dragon in the same turn"

Huh? I can't even invent a BS reason for that.

Both a complete misrepresentation and also a bit of an odd thing to pick out considering my damage cap (not actually an attack cap rule) rule has never been particularly controversial compared to, hell, plenty of other material I've produced that I could point at easily enough.

You want to remove focus fire issues from your D&D rule set? Make a rule that removes a major benefit of focus fire (stacking damage within the same very brief abstracted time unit). It isn't exactly rocket science, and I don't recall anyone kicking up a major fuss about it. Anyway, other attempts to do so have always been over elaborate failures, mine is simple and works, and these days on the gaming den that means it therefore apparently must be condemned. Because tribalism and degeneracy into an imitation of the OSR movement.

Though precisely what the fuck this has to do with defending the incredibly over complex and utterly unfocused mess the plans on this thread are increasingly becoming I have no idea. But then, again, tribalism, attack instead of defending, never justify your position or ideas, just distract and attack.

[Username17]

And... scene!

Point made. PL's damage cap is a hamhanded rule that by pretty much everyone else's accounting is a total failure of design. There are people who object to focus fire always being the best tactic, and many people would like to have rules that encouraged it less. So if you suggest getting rid of gang-up bonuses, critical existence failure, and mid-battle monster recovery, you'll certainly get some takers. But when you suggest making it metaphysically impossible for damage to stack from two attackers in the same round, you just get embarrassed silence in return. It's such a stupid suggestion that people don't discuss it as a serious offering and move the fuck on.

PL of course interprets the fact that no one talks to him about his ridiculous idea as consent. The fact that no one speaks of it at all because it is fucking ridiculous is interpreted by his internal monologue as it being "not contentious." Yes, no one contends it, because it is so far out of the mainstream that there is nothing to discuss. As the Flatline pointed out: you can't even BS a reason why that would make any sense, it's completely dissociated from everything, and it is not treated as a serious offering by this or any other community.

It's also puzzlingly unnecessary. If you're one of the people who thinks focus fire is "a problem," it is not a terribly difficult problem to solve. Focus fire isn't a thing in 2nd edition Shadowrun even though that game has ganging up bonuses, because the wound penalties are harsh enough that you reduce enemy offense output more by bringing two enemies 30% of the way to incapacitation than you do by bringing one enemy 100% of the way. There are solid examples of games that successfully discourage focus fire dating back to the late 1970s. It's a game design problem that was solved before I was born.

But PL doesn't understand any of this, because he's been so far outside the mainstream for so long that he's basically encased in solipsism.

---

Anyway, in D&D land you have outright "evil" rulers. Not just governments that rule without the consent of the governed, or governments more concerned about their own comfort than the plight of the peasants - we're talking actual straight up villains who are bad to the people because they are bad. So there has to be room to have the rulers take money out of the system and not put it back in at all.

From the standpoint of game mechanics, any wealth redistribution you do is considered "not taxed." You might have an 80% tax rate and a basic income or something, or you might have a series of wealthy Drow plantation owners and a bunch of slaves, but either way the sum total of all the koku and gold that end up spent by non-overlord sources are considered the untaxed wealth. The taxes are the portion of the funds that are usable for overlord projects. They might get extracted from the economy by evil and absent fiendish monarchs. Or they might be reinvested or used to pay for disaster management and security.

Practically speaking, "good" adventurers are going to spend some of the tax moneys on personal magic items, some of the moneys on construction projects, some of the moneys on hiring armies and some of the moneys on developing the economy. A place with a Development of 10 and a Tax Rate of 5 would be nicer than a place with a Development of 5 and a Tax Rate of 0 if and only if the ruler of the first place elected to spend some of the tax money on flood control and security and development and shit. If they elected to take all the money and put it into a giant santa sack and roll around on it, the places would be funcitonally the same.

-Username17

[Omegonthesane]

If you're one of the people who thinks focus fire is "a problem," it is not a terribly difficult problem to solve. Focus fire isn't a thing in 2nd edition Shadowrun even though that game has ganging up bonuses, because the wound penalties are harsh enough that you reduce enemy offense output more by bringing two enemies 30% of the way to incapacitation than you do by bringing one enemy 100% of the way. There are solid examples of games that successfully discourage focus fire dating back to the late 1970s. It's a game design problem that was solved before I was born.

I was going to post that focus fire surely must be a problem and that you said so in the nWoD review - but actually, now I think of it, focus fire is a symptom, the problem is "this combat system that wholly rewards focus fire is simple where it ought to be complex (and may separately be complex where it ought to be simple, looking at you Exalted)".

Anyway, in D&D land you have outright "evil" rulers. Not just governments that rule without the consent of the governed, or governments more concerned about their own comfort than the plight of the peasants - we're talking actual straight up villains who are bad to the people because they are bad. So there has to be room to have the rulers take money out of the system and not put it back in at all.
...
A place with a Development of 10 and a Tax Rate of 5 would be nicer than a place with a Development of 5 and a Tax Rate of 0 if and only if the ruler of the first place elected to spend some of the tax money on flood control and security and development and shit. If they elected to take all the money and put it into a giant santa sack and roll around on it, the places would be funcitonally the same.

I was originally thinking in terms of a Tax Policy toggle, now I'm imagining more of a price list.

"President Derptopia, you can spend your wealth units on the following:

Trickle Down Economics - the deliberately named option of just converting it into personal GP or magic items

Hookers and Blow - improve loyalty of your living troops relative to what other factors would suggest

Development Budget - spend enough here and Derptopia rises to a new development level

Agricultural Subsidies - convert wealth units into koku

Military-Industrial Complex - hire new troops of one variety or another"

Probably more things that would fit, but I need to get to work some time this morning and City Simulator is already looking complex if it's meant to just be a subset of Dungeon Simulator.

There definitely should be "default" City Simulator settings if we're going to make it any more complex, since not everyone is going to care about the options available to cities that their dungeon is stealing things from.

[maglag]

Practically speaking, "good" adventurers are going to spend some of the tax moneys on personal magic items, some of the moneys on construction projects, some of the moneys on hiring armies and some of the moneys on developing the economy. A place with a Development of 10 and a Tax Rate of 5 would be nicer than a place with a Development of 5 and a Tax Rate of 0 if and only if the ruler of the first place elected to spend some of the tax money on flood control and security and development and shit. If they elected to take all the money and put it into a giant santa sack and roll around on it, the places would be funcitonally the same.

Out of pure curiosity, what happens when you have both evil and good rulers in the same place? Since I guess this would be a group game and not a solo experience.

Does a selfish player who keeps stuff for himself gets to benefit from the improved growths from generous Goody McGood?

[Grek]

I think that is a bad nomenclature and a missed opportunity. The first thought that comes to mind when people think Tax Rate is "Government Revenue per capita" not "Government surplus per capita". Contradicting that will just confuse people to no benefit. If you instead have a Development Rating, a Tax Rate and an Investment Rate, where morale is based on Development-Tax+Investment, then you open up several policy options for governments to pursue, including "Tax the colonies in order to improve domestic happiness", "Keep taxes high and investment high so that we can cut domestic spending if we ever suddenly need to ramp up our military" and "Micromanage domestic spending in order to attract certain skillsets to our town/dungeon." Those all seem like things a Logistics and Dragons campaign should have you doing.

[Omegonthesane]

I think that is a bad nomenclature and a missed opportunity. The first thought that comes to mind when people think Tax Rate is "Government Revenue per capita" not "Government surplus per capita". Contradicting that will just confuse people to no benefit. If you instead have a Development Rating, a Tax Rate and an Investment Rate, where morale is based on Development-Tax+Investment, then you open up several policy options for governments to pursue, including "Tax the colonies in order to improve domestic happiness", "Keep taxes high and investment high so that we can cut domestic spending if we ever suddenly need to ramp up our military" and "Micromanage domestic spending in order to attract certain skillsets to our town/dungeon." Those all seem like things a Logistics and Dragons campaign should have you doing.

Given that you clearly want there to be room to model an evil government that doesn't invest a copper piece in its domain, you already want at least three settings for city wealth, so seconding the suggestion to make Tax Rate the government gross instead of the government surplus.

Possibly with an option to redistribute some amount of your taxes back to the people at a disproportionate benefit compared to letting them keep the tax in the first place, either in boosting Happiness more than just not taxing at all, or in increasing an investment track as well as increasing Happiness.

(Would go with a fixed amount rather than a fraction of tax income because fuck fractions in gameplay.)

[Username17]

The amount of money that transfers to the player's side for discretionary spending is important, while the amount of money that is given to temples or spent on administration or lost to corruption or whatever really isn't. But I think it's clear that the name "Tax" implies certain things about where money comes from and goes that are deeply unhelpful. It's a modern word, and people bring modern understandings of how it's supposed to work to the table.

It seems to me that there'd probably be less confusion if taxation per se wasn't mentioned at all and the term for how much money moves from the economy to the discretionary accounts of the ruler was "Rent." Base public happiness is Development minus Rent, and the number of gp you make (pre-expenses) per month is Population times Rent.

-Username17

[Aryxbez]

Unfortunately economics design is something that goes above my head in critiquing, can only probably see if its execution reads clearly for the game in question.

There are solid examples of games that successfully discourage focus fire dating back to the late 1970s. It's a game design problem that was solved before I was born.

This however, I do find quite notable to ask about. What games were these that solved the problem, and how would one solve the problem for a New Kitchensink Fantasy RPG? (since I imagine pre-existing D&D just a problem gotta live with)

[DrPraetor]

Runequest (1978) had (ahem) serious problems - but it had essentially the same solution as Shadowrun - you would stab someone in the leg and they couldn't fight any more, so you'd move on to another target.

Arduin (mid 70s) had a notably-flatter curve than D&D (HP = Con + level), with a hodge-podge of injury rules depending on whom you ask - I think Hargrave himself had knockdown for doing 50% damage in a blow. This was sufficient that you'd try to knock your opponent down.

Finally, I assume Frank is talking about Warlock (also mid 70s, although harder to track) - different groups had house rules which tended to be some mix of Warlock and Hargrave's stuff - which had rules for facing, intercepting charges, and positioning that would discourage focused-stabbing - you basically wanted to form a line in combat, as I recall. Being outnumbered was unpleasant, the game engine *intended* that when outnumbered, you would go all 300 and try to find a choke-point to not get flanked. If you were ganging up on dragons it worked out differently, but only PL objects to people ganging up on a dragon.

[PhoneLobster]

but only PL objects to people ganging up on a dragon.

Fuck you it used to be utterly ubiquitous agreed upon standard opinion that focus fire was one of the primary problematic issues of 3.x and in general D&D combat, here, on these boards, before it went to shit.

And also fuck you to any idiot calling DOOM SPIRALS a solid solution for anything.

[virgil]

but only PL objects to people ganging up on a dragon.

Fuck you it used to be utterly ubiquitous agreed upon standard opinion that focus fire was one of the primary problematic issues of 3.x and in general D&D combat, here, on these boards, before it went to shit.

Looks like somebody missed the point. But, hey, reading comprehension is kind of a secondary concern for you.

[name_here]

Well, Frank named Shadowrun.

To solve focus fire, you've got to get at the reason why it's a common strategy. In games with critical existence failure, damage output only goes down on deaths, so in general you want to stack all of your damage on one target at a time to make that happen sooner. To make people choose not to focus fire, you need to make splitting fire more efficient at reducing total enemy damage output.

The wound penalties approach puts in intermediate points where damage output falls on partial damage by enough that you'd rather have two guys with wound penalties shooting at you than one healthy guy shooting at you. The potential problem here is incentivizing rotating focus fire, where you just focus fire people down to the wound penalty level. I've heard the video game Banner Saga has a particularly degenerate version of this, where there are severe wound penalties and when units die their action gets given to their surviving allies, so you want to get every enemy down to low health before killing any of them.

There's also the option of giving people bonuses for not being attacked; the only actually implemented example of this I can recall is channeled/charged abilities interrupted by taking damage. Not sure if anyone has made it part of their general combat system.

Sort of similar to the above, if attacks have stun or debuff riders that don't stack, it's often good to spread them around and hit multiple targets so they're all weakened.

Games with grids and absolute positioning often leave all the focus fire incentives in place but make it hard to actually get everyone in position to do it without disrupting whatever the locally-ideal formation is, which might have actual formation bonuses or might just block the enemy from putting knives in the kidneys of your squishy types.

If the game has a mix of attack/defense types, then it's generally best to up your total damage output by having people target whatever they've got the best damage against.

It's a bit difficult to solve for a Kitchen Sink game, because you don't have enough players for the tactical positioning option to be viable, wound penalties are a bit out of genre, the attack-defense mix is reliant on party compositions on both sides, and riders aren't applicable to all character archetypes.