The Hidden Elegance of ACKS...A Little TOO Hidden

General ACKS Forums General Discussion
9

I’m certainly glad that Chapter 8 is present and expect to spend the most time in it. (Although, as long as we’re on the subject, I thought it was very curious as to why Chapters 9 and 10 in D@W:B were so small. Most books I’d assume would come with a half-dozen example scenarios.)

D@W certainly felt easier to read and less confusing than the others, even if I did have a few questions I had to bring to the forum because they weren’t immediately apparent (Although, I suppose the important thing is that there were far, far fewer of them than when I read the core book)

10

As far as Chapter 8, I almost left it out of D@W entirely, but I ultimately felt that it would be an incomplete product without it.

To clarify earlier statements: I think Chapter 8 is awesome. I just think it’s the kind of thing that can easily be overdone, and I wouldn’t want to see the core book rewritten to look like it.

11

The content is vastly different between the products as well - the Player’s Companion is very much a bridge between ACKS Core and D@W as far as presented content.

ACKS Core is, setting aside Ch. 7 & 10 and a few other details sprinkled in, very much a d20 RPG book. It has a very common flow and organization - it is what it is, and that’s fine.

The PC spends two chapters being the same, but then explodes into something very unique and customizable. It very much overrides much of Ch. 2 & 5 of ACKS Core - that’s something you can’t quite do in a “core” book.

D@W is the most ‘technical’ of the texts, but Battles is busy being a real hex war game, and deserves to be technical. Campaigns is very much an extension of Chapter 7 & 10 of ACKS Core, but is extremely focused on one theme.

A book in the style of D@W:Campaigns for the peacetime domain management side of things, with everything that’s been developed on the boards, would be great.

Alternatively, think of it like this: ACKS Core is “Basic ACKS”. It’s what a player expects to get picking up the book of the shelf.

If you spread that out and replace it with the later product, you’re getting Advanced ACKS. Imagine a core book that gives you the Player’s Companion Ch 4 and 5 instead of ACKS Core Ch. 2 & 5. ‘We’re not giving you classes and spells because we know you know DND and can do it yourself’. That’s a hell of a thing.

To me, the direction of ACKS seems to be heading towards building a frame each Judge can finish into his or her own house.

If you want to revisit some of the themes in ACKS Core and expand, keep doing what you seem to have been doing - have Lairs & Encounters be the extended build-out of ACKS Ch. 6 & 8 - lairs and encounters are the bread and the butter of adventures.

Or, listwise:

ACKS Ch 2 → Player’s Companion
ACKS Ch 5 → Player’s Companion
ACKS Ch 6 → Lairs & Encounters
ACKS Ch 7 → D@W:C, Player’s Companion
ACKS Ch 8 → Lairs & Encounters
ACKS Ch 10 → D@W:C

It’s probably safe to assume that the Auran setting book will add more into Chs. 7 & 10.

Heroic Fantasy comes back around and builds on top of the Player’s Companion, as a third iteration of Autarch’s design into a specific theme. Guns At War will do the same for D@W.

Let the iterative process happen.

12

You know, I’ve always felt like ACKS was a little heavy on the DM-bookkeeping side of things, as RPGs go, but I feel like it’s a plus that it doesn’t mandate you homebrew a dozen classes before playing.

13

An example immediately comes to mind.

I read on a forum where one person was singing the praises of ACKS, and another responded with “it’s just B/X … B/X fighters are lame”. The first replied along the lines of, “Actually, ACKS fighters pretty much kick ass. Cleave is great.” “Cleave?” “Yeah, it’s a hidden class feature. Other classes can cleave, too. Read the combat chapter.”

ACKS’ cleave might become “unhidden” to, say, someone browsing ACKS in a store, if it were mentioned in each class description. (Until that’s possible, getting the word out through other means can work, like the article series mentioned.)

Also, IMO, a good set of Judge’s tables can overcome some of the cross-referencing mentioned above. (Preferably part of a Judge’s Screen, perhaps with Thrice-Hidden Secrets of ACKS included, nudge, nudge …)

I too, like sidebars. 13th Age is an interesting example because much of the text is extraordinarily conversational; the sidebars add context to how/why the rules are as they are, and when the authors bend them this way or that. (Warning: if you are not familiar with it, 13th Age takes elements of 3E, 4E and adds player narrative control mechanics. It could be viewed as an “opposite” to ACKS, but is worth browsing, at least, for ideas. There are snippets I’d like to work into some ACKS classes, for example.)

That said, I think ACKS Core is more “cloaked” then PC and D@W. PC and D@W have things in them few FRPGs have (and fewer still do remotely well). I suspect/hope PC and D@W result in folks taking a second look at ACKS.

14

Have to agree with this. One reason I like ACKS is because it offers multiple levels of character creation (from templates, to building characters by hand, to building classes by hand) depending on what you want to do. Eliminating the more basic options would make character creation a chore.

15

As you said, some of this can’t be helped. I think two things can mitigate this:

  1. A very thorough index
  2. A Judge’s screen

On the second part, one of the first things I did was make myself a Judge’s screen specifically because of the cross-referencing you describe above. I’ve even thought of making a couple of screens for specific purposes… for instance a screen just for recruiting hirelings.

16

Which was my point with that, however poorly executed - ACKS presents classes in two/three ways:

  1. An unfinished, build your own form

  2. The form that equates to “regular DND”

  3. Then, in a new iterative branch, “Heroic Fantasy” with the upcoming supplement of the same name.

I was imagining the structure of the ACKS product line as “Here’s the engine” (PC) > “Here’s the body of the car” (ACKS) > “Here’s a model trim” (HF).

17

ACKS definitely suffers from the nuanced nature of its benefits. I recently argued with a poster who claimed it was really no different than “Companion D&D (minus the mass combat rules) and the trade system was ripped straight from the GAZ series”…now, aside from the fact that this isn’t even true, it would still be a worthwhile game even if it were true; those are all products that have been out of print for 25 years or so, and some of them (the Gazetteers) were never that popular when they were out. But, if you’ve been around the hobby for thirty-odd years, and then skimmed the book, you could easily be left thinking this. I have argued on other fora with posters (Grognards, frankly) who insisted or suggested, based on this sort of read-through, that it was simply a B/X retro-clone. It’s really not. It’s neither of these things. It’s a “neo-clone”: something new that builds off the framework of B/X and BECMI.

The elegance of the game itself is a large part of what attracted me. I feel it is the most elegant and coherent RPG I’ve played, and I find that stunning when I consider its origin is D&D (a game I love, but that is a long way from “elegant” or “coherent”). It has incorporated reworked versions of many of the best B/X or BECMI houserules I have ever seen, and then gone further with simple additions like Cleave. That’s a great example, actually. It’s a tiny rule in the combat section, but the impact it has on the game, particularly by mid-levels, is huge. It’s the kind of thing that most people cannot grasp on a read-through; they have to play the game to get it.

Another gem that I didn’t even expect to like was the semi-Vancian spellcasting. I really disliked the Sorcerer in 3E, but, somehow, ACKS manages a middle-ground with enough utility and flexibility to mitigate the “problems” with playing a low-level Mage, while still maintaining the strategic resource aspect and tactical application of spells.

The integrated economics and how - it - just - works. But how do you sell “Economics!” as sexy when it comes to the game? I really have no idea. You either like that kind of thing, or you have no problem with infinite Cantrips (Just kidding! Sort of…).

The Racial Classes, and I can hear the Grognards laughing, but a separate suite of Racial Classes for each race has more flavour than any other D&D variant I’ve played. Beats some special skills and an ability score adjustment six ways from Sunday. It also neatly solves the rampant issues with multi- and dual-classing.

The Proficiency system, which adds just enough mechanical differentiation to a character to appease new-school players that don’t want every Fighter to be the same, but is still light enough to avoid the CharOp dreaded by old-school players. It’s really only the hard-core Grognards (not that there’s anything wrong with that) that dislike any kind of widgets, usually because of the time it adds to character creation (neatly solved by Templates).

Alex said: 1. Do you find the rules in ACKS, PC and D@W to be equally ambiguous or is one more than the others? ACKS was written first with some prior retro-clones. Conversely, PC was written from scratch, and D@W was written from scratch with wargaming in mind. Is it apparent?
Yes, it’s apparent, as far as I can tell. The writing is increasingly clear. Mind you, I haven’t delved as deeply into the PC, as of yet (Classes and Templates, mostly), and I’ve barely used D@W, so perhaps it’s more that I’ve spent less time puzzling out the later mechanics.

Alex said: 2. What are some examples of rules that are not placed correctly for reference purposes?
This is tough to answer. The overall way the ACKS core book is arranged requires flipping around, but I’m not sure there is any way to get everything together, as some things would have to be in multiple places. Frankly, this is what a really good index is for, and ACKS has a pretty decent one. The above cited example about Healing could’ve been solved in about 30 seconds by checking the index (Healing, pg. 105).

Jard said: 1) Each seems to get better at more explicit language, but I know recently there was some confusion with regards to the effect of losing conscripts and militia, and I read that section several times, but it wasn’t until someone was trying to actually utilize it that I realized there was ambiguity. I have to imagine detecting something like that is even harder for the person who wrote it.
It’s funny…as I proofread something like D@W, I am actively trying to understand the intent of the rules, just as if I was intending to play it, in order to make sure the writing supports the intent. I double-check my understanding by trying to calculate the examples. But you can understand a rule like this, and still easily miss the greater ramifications (similar to Grognards reading Cleave, actually). I spent ages reading and re-reading these sections while proofreading, but haven’t actually used most of D@W in play, yet. This is probably the area where boxed notes on “design intent” or “author’s intentions” can go a long way towards avoiding interpretation problems. However, no system is going to be perfect, or perfectly understandable. That’s what a Judge’s judgement, or an online forum, is for.

Jard said: 2) the best example I can think of off the top of my head is going on a wilderness adventure:
Your example had me laughing; it’s so true! And yet, I’ve found this relatively straightforward in play, and I think that comes back to years of playing B/X and BECMI, with the procedures somewhat engrained. Once you get the hang of the ACKS equivalents (and get a good Judges screen for a lot of it), it goes much smoother.

Staticispunk said: eah, I love ACKS, and if I were to make one criticism it definitely wouldn’t be anything to do with it being “just” a retroclone, but rather would have to do with the organization and emphasis on “natural language” rather than clarity and concision in the core rulebook. The writing is often super evocative but particularly with class abilities I would have preferred them to stand out from the text in a clearer way. Things like how normal characters open doors, search for traps, etc. being fairly hidden such that I missed them entirely were a problem too.
I vastly prefer natural language, as it keeps the mechanics rooted in the game world. Precise game-speak starts down the path of considering mechanics in a mechanical vacuum, completely divorced from in-world considerations (see 4E, and, to a lesser extent, 3E). From plenty of experience, this doesn’t really do anything to cure ambiguity, it just moves where the ambiguity sits. It also has the side effect of divorcing rulings from in-game or setting logic. That way lies tripping oozes.

Alex said: Nevertheless, I think ACKS Core has considerable room for improvement without adopting an entirely different writing style. ACKS was written as a mash-up of my campaign notes mixed with LL and Basic Fantasy, both themselves based on the D20 SRD mixed with Moldvay/Cook. As a result the language is a mix of natural language in places, 3.5-esque rules in others, and weirdly parsed sentences designed to not be phrased in the (clear, natural) syntax of B/X. If I were to do a revised edition I would certainly work to clear up a lot of the most painful ambiguities and stylistic choices.
I’ve wanted to try and do a read-through of ACKS with an eye to editing for clarity, particularly now that I have experience with it (unlike while I was working on D@W). But it’s time-consuming, and with no prospect of a 2nd edition any time soon (not that there should be, necessarily), and I just haven’t committed the time. Would you be interested in this for the purposes of updating the .pdf?

Alex said: For those of you who have read Domains at War, I am curious as to whether you find the writing there substantially more or less ambiguous and/or natural than ACKS. I personally think it is much better written than ACKS.
It is generally much clearer. It’s slightly less natural, I’d say, but to an inconsequential degree (it is, in part, a wargame after all).

Alex said: As far as Chapter 8, I almost left it out of D@W entirely, but I ultimately felt that it would be an incomplete product without it.
I am so glad you put it in. I’m really looking forward to using it in the future, and I agree that D@W would’ve felt incomplete as an RPG aid without it.

koewn said: ACKS Ch 2 → Player’s Companion
ACKS Ch 5 → Player’s Companion
ACKS Ch 6 → Lairs & Encounters
ACKS Ch 7 → D@W:C, Player’s Companion
ACKS Ch 8 → Lairs & Encounters
ACKS Ch 10 → D@W:C
I love this idea, but I’d like Lairs & Encounters to cover all sorts of encounters, including, for example, what a Thief-type class runs into when creating a syndicate, or what a Mage might deal with, or a Cleric, etc., which would be Ch 7.

18

I actually feel that pathfinder’s writing for their classes does a pretty good job of bridging the gap between abstract and natural language. You have a few tools that help you quickly wrap your head around an entire class: the class progression table with class features and the class features each having their own header. But in each of those class feature headings is an in-world explanation of the justification. Granted, even 4e powers had “flavor text” that was frequently ignored, but I think some degree of using headers to divide units of information about a class can go a long way to helping people quickly understand what their class does.

19

Is it that it takes that long to read the Class description? What about if the abilities all had a proper name or term that was bolded (as some currently are)?

20

It may be my own experiences with technical documents, but I tend to favor things you’re going to need to read and occasionally re-read being as clear as possible.

On the one hand, sometimes the prosaic writing is great for getting inspired for what a particular character COULD be like. On the other hand, sometimes I’ve already determined this PC, henchman, or NPC is Class X and I just need to confirm exactly how one of their features works or when they get it.

I don’t necessarily think ACKs should be re-written, absolutely the way it was originally written is a big part of the reason I decided to start playing. But if there was a document that took the rules and distilled it down to the bare essentials (as often happens in 3rd edition SRDs), I would probably use that document for working through my game, and point some of my players to it.

I have players who don’t have the time or inclination to go over the rulebook with a fine-toothed comb and also check in on the forums. They play other games in other systems, and often get blindsided by something and say “Oh! I had no idea I could do that”.

Come to think of it, I think the mental cache thrashing of switching between editions contributes to a lot of our problems. It took several reads for us to realize divine casters have their entire list available as a repetoire at casting time. It was such a large list, we assumed it was meant to be prepared from like in 3.x/PF

21

There is an SRD being worked on. I bet between everyone on the forum and the Autarchs we can add in informational bullets like that where needed - that’d be the perfect place to do it.

The repertoire point is a good one; the cleric’s entry is in no way as spelled out as the Mage one.

May look like:

Mage

  • Can cast a number of spells per day equal to the class progression of spells
  • Has a repertoire equal to that progression plus INT bonus per level

Cleric

  • Can cast a number of spells per day equal to the class progression
  • Divine Spell Repertoire is predefined by the class - see the cleric’s divine repertoire (here)

or something to that effect.

22

I understand. My other question was missed, so I’ll ask it again: what about making sure every ability had a proper name that was bolded in the text (e.g. like battlefield prowess), followed by its description?

23

Sorry, I saw that question but never directly addresses it. The bolding is much better than no bolding, but in terms of quickly assessing what a class does, it doesn’t compare to having a class table with the name of each feature at the level you gain it, and somewhere in the class description there’s a header with the same name. That’s just more clear and easier to reference.

Of course, I could completely understand if, for some people, those big headers break up the flow too much as compared to a string of paragraphs that are essentially telling you the story of what it means to be a fighter, a mage, or a zaharan ruinguard. I do not, by any means, think my preferences for clarity are the right answer for ACKs the way they are for pathfinder. Just like when I brought up 13th age, that is a VERY different animal in how they present their book, and ACKs is and SHOULD be very different from that, but some ideas are strong enough to warrant consideration.

So to summarize (for clarity :stuck_out_tongue: ), bolded in paragraph is good for ease of reading, but not as good as paragraph headers.

24

I understand. Not particularly where I’d want to see ACKS go, but that’s totally subjective. I do think the (hopefully) forthcoming SRD will address a lot of your needs.

25

I’ve been using the text documents posted by Caphenid to great effect, but the lack of formatting makes reading some blocks of text a bit difficult. Is the plan for it to be hyperlinked as well?

26

I could be completely wrong about this, but my understanding was that it would eventually be a hyper-linked version hosted here on the site.

27

I think you’re right about that; the github is just the raw version 1 text or whatever.

I would love to see the classes formatted in AT LEAST a 3rd edition style, in my opinion. I think that could strike the balance between “natural language” rules-in-the-world stuff and actually being easy to reference and use.

28

A book in the style of D@W:Campaigns for the peacetime domain management side of things, with everything that’s been developed on the boards, would be great.

I… don’t know that I’d actually use this. One of the things that gets me with some of the domain houserules/proposed rules I’ve been seeing recently is that they add substantially more complexity that I’m really looking for. Ultimately, I think there may be a disconnect between player-groups who view domain play in-and-of itself as worthwhile, and those who wish to use it more as an enabler / context-provider for adventures. On the flip side, I suppose part of the problem with domain play as it stands for the Context crowd (ie, my former group) is that Paperwork To Excitement Ratio is fairly high; were I to propose further rules for peacetime domain play, I think that would be the focus of my efforts, rather than realism.

I’d also like to see more macro-scale world-enginey material; generating personalities for neighboring rulers and vassals, fomenting or combatting conspiracies among the nobility, arranging marriages, and so forth, as well as Oriental Adventures-style random event charts. One of the things that bothers me about the Vagaries tables is that they’re very flat and quite random in comparison with an OA-style system, where one major event is determined for the year and the rest are (typically) related to that event, either foreshadowing or following from.