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Every wargame design must balance simulation and playability. Achieving this balance is often quite hard, and most games end up tipping towards one or the other end of the range. Balancing Domains at Wars was even harder than other wargames I’ve designed, because I was actually attempting to simulate two things – an ancient or medieval battle, and a battle fought by characters from an ACKS game.

LENGTH OF COMBAT ROUNDS

While designing Domains at War, I frequently tested my game mechanics against available real-world examples. Nowhere was this more challenging than in the area of siege warfare, which is akin to the PhD level of ancient warfare. Below are a few of the historical reference points I relied on in assessing whether the construction and siege mechanics had a reasonable level of versimilitude.

Siege of Alesia

The mechanics of siege warfare, both at the battle and campaign level, presented the most challenging part of the design of Domains at War. Pitched battles are glorious in their simplicity; sieges revel in complexity. Artillery, arson, assault, location, mining, supplies, treachery – all play their part.

Welcome, everyone! The Domains at War kickstarter has just launched, and after just 48 hours we’re already close to meeting our initial goals. It’s an exciting time for me as a designer, as the rules pass from a small closed circle of testers into the hands of the larger gaming community.

We won't have the Domains at War Kickstarter ready to launch this month, despite my stated intentions in a previous post. It's frustrating to have people saying "TAKE MY MONEY" and not be able to! The delays in starting the campaign are because we're trying to plan for everything and avoid a much more frustrating delay in delivering the goodness we'll create with your money.

The nominations for the 2013 Three Castles Award have been announced and we're proud that ACKS is among the finalists! Congratulations to the other nominees; it's an honor to be included among such excellent entries this year, the third in the contest's history (each of which has featured many fantastic contenders). Full text of the announcement is reposted below, and more info about the contest can be found at the NTRPG site. I've attended NTRPG since its inception and always have a great time, but I'm looking forward to this summer's con with special enthusiasm!

Later this February Autarch is planning to launch the Kickstarter for Domains at War, our comprehensive rules for all aspects of waging war in a fantasy world. Planning the rewards for a Kickstarter campaign is one of the trickiest parts because as soon the campaign goes live and someone claims a reward, the text can't be changed. To help work out any kinks in the phrasing of the rewards, and make sure that we're offering all the kinds of things backers would want in exchange for their support, I'm hoping to get feedback on the proposed rewards. The pledge levels for each reward are still being worked out, this being its own kind of tricky.

With the caveat that these are not yet final - and will hopefully be improved by your input - here's what we're thinking of offering Domains at War backers:

Autarch is proud to announce that the Player's Companion, our first expansion for the Adventurer Conqueror King System, is now available for sale as a PDF and a hardback+PDF bundle.

Recently the afterschool roleplaying class I teach for kids 8-12 at a public elementary school in NYC has switched over to using the Adventurer Conqueror King System; next semester it's officially reflected in the title of the class.  Previously we had used mish-moshes of the D&D rules of one edition or another. The class grew out of a D&D birthday party I donated to the school's PTA fund-raising auction. The boy whose family won was part of a group of sixth-graders who knew how to play 4E (or thought they did), so we started out with a greatly simplified set of 4E house rules. However, things like daily and encounter powers make the assumption that multiple encounters will happen in a session, which is rarely true for our 80 minute classes. Advancement has been another persistent problem. Kids want to become more powerful, and we just don't see enough play time to make that happen with the usual XP systems. And new kids enter the class every semester; it makes sense to start them off with easier-to-learn first level characters, but the returning kids bitterly resent having to stop playing their uber-characters and go back to being chumps.

The impetus to start using ACKS - apart from its being a great game that I'd like to see more people playing - was the support for making characters at different stages of play.

Artist and illustrator Michael C. Hayes, whose work will also appear on the cover of the ACKS Player's Companion and Domains at War, unveiled the work he's been doing for the forthcoming Auran Empire Campaign Setting at Illuxcon this weekend. It can be seen in the wild on the far left of this picture of his booth: