BMDev9: Energy
Integration is not just a calculus tool
Man’s hubris knows no bounds! It has been a humbling experience wrangling design notes into the singular, harmonious whole of a rules reference. Similar to other complex projects with many moving parts, the end-stage of piecing it all together is fraught with unforeseen trials and demands for deeper thinking.
We knew that a December 15th target for release was optimistic, but we can now say that (given Christmas season obligations) the release will be delayed until some time in January. Our sights were set for the sun, but we must settle for the moon!
To reiterate, our highest priority is delivering a quality release that supports complete playability and can act as a proper foundation for successor releases down the line.
Let’s examine how subtle contradictions were recently overcome with careful design work, resulting in a more compact and well-realized logistics foundation for the game. Then we’ll have a quick glance at the latest state of the rulebook.
Journey to the Center of the Game
We have thoroughly studied the nature of TTRPGs and how to leverage, from a design perspective, the medium’s strengths. An important practical tool is the core gravity design pattern1.
Because of the complexity and Second-World nature2 of TTRPGs, it is not possible to make a complete visual representation of the game’s hierarchical concepts. But as a starting point and design reference, these charts help identify the Main Ideas and their relative importance. This is a tool to keep design efforts aimed towards maintaining the game’s hierarchy3.
War!
For BMD, the central concept is easy: the Crusade. The Sol Crusaders have declared a free-for-all against the alien powers that rule the galaxy. Everything in the game is about this war. When we are designing systems, we ask, “how does this inform the war?”
Wars can be characterized by internal diplomacy (manpower and morale), external diplomacy (often just called “diplomacy”), and logistics. Each of these three pillars must be properly set to create the necessary conditions for participating in war.
Consider the role of logistics. The alien factions, as the canonical Bad Guys of the game, have a dominant position that comes entirely from their logistics advantages. They have currency and financing. They have raw resources and industrial bases. They have a stranglehold on interstellar travel. By comparison, the Sol Crusaders have a few men in the shadows, a bunch of roughneck volunteers, and some Atlantean weapons tech.
To represent the alien advantage, it is thus necessary that the game not only acknowledge logistical questions but present them in a systematic way—after all, players need to understand, in concrete terms, what can be destroyed or conquered!
Economic Sim
Creating a gigantic logistics simulation is the “obvious” approach, but that has problems. Even die-hard players don’t want to “win” a game through superior logistics; they want the thrill of victory from well-executed plans.
Too much focus on any one system can (and will!) confuse the game’s hierarchy. If it says on the box it’s about killing aliens, then it better not see us spend 90% of playtime on intensive quartermastery.
The biggest problem with this approach, however, is the practical issues it creates. Players want to make smart, well-aimed preparations and then go in guns blazing! If our logistics sim weighs the gameplay down enough, it creates a friction that works against action—against prosecuting the war.
This technique is not wrong—rather, it is a path littered with dangers. For some things it will be the correct choice, but we decide to skip out on this solution.
Targeted Abstractions
If we must avoid a strict simulation, the natural question is: how? One technique is to create abstractions which get the right idea across, placing them carefully at the points of player interaction.
“Can I move my tank column across this bridge without it collapsing?” Instead of invoking stiffness matrices or stress tensors to work out a load-bearing system, we can just say that forces come in classes [Small, Medium, and Large]—and this bridge can withstand a Medium force moving across it.
This technique is necessarily going to work! That should raise our suspicions.
To resolve questions of logistics in BMD, we used a series of these targeted abstractions. Every one of them was Very Reasonable and made perfect sense—but when we formed more sophisticated combinations in sequence, we found that these Very Reasonable abstractions were not consistent. The outcomes they produce could be chained together to create a kind of economic perpetual motion machine.
Undeniable Plausibility
Consistency is the most powerful force in game design. If there was a game design “physics,” consistency would dominate its most fundamental equations. Rooting out inconsistent signals is not only pragmatically important, it is demanded by deep and inescapable philosophical notions.
Inexperienced designers (or curious player onlookers) often assume that game design is a strictly creative enterprise. The designer can write whatever rules they want! They can make things work however they like, without answering to anyone!
Yet, in designing even a very simplistic game, we can see this is not the case. If we create something that leads players to inconsistent conclusions, they will instinctively recognize it as coarse and unworthy. This is often why designers reach for large simulations; inconsistency is the true Designer’s Bane.
The reason that targeted abstractions will always “work” is that intelligent people can always come up with a Very Reasonable (simplified) proxy to represent underlying complexity. This is a spot solution; it’s something that’s applied at a point in design space.
If we have several point solutions applied on different systems all across design space, why can they be inconsistent? The implication is that “approximate” solutions only work in the close neighborhood of the points at which they’re applied—this is a principle consistent with mathematics counterparts. But even further, it implies a deep connection between those systems! After all, if they were truly independent and parallel structures, why would we be able to combine them to form contradictions?
Whenever we see this behavior, it’s a clue. The systems that are colliding with one another should be combined and integrated explicitly.
Energy
In BMD, energy underpins almost all economic activity. Consider a high-priority facility guarded by a sophisticated military presence.
How did this facility physically come to be? Its modules, or segments, were built either on-site or in a specialized factory and transported there. The same is true of the military vehicles!
But how did that factory build those segments? Building materials belong to batches of different Material Grades, ranked by their protective qualities. The factory used the batches of materials to construct the segments.
But where did the materials come from? These Refined Materials Batches have raw material antecedents which are summarized as belonging to the same Material Grades. Thus, a number of batches of Raw B1 Grade materials is sent through a refinery to recover a batch of Refined B1 Material.
And where did the raw mats come from? Whether it was an asteroid belt or a lucky vein on a settlement, these raw batches must be mined.
Each one of these steps requires energy! Something has to power the mining process. Then power the refinery. Then power the factory. Then power the transports! Then power the facility itself. And all the vehicles need power. Many of the weapons and much of the equipment the security personnel utilize will require power!
Establishing Necessity
Designers are infamous for their tendencies toward scope creep failures. We must have the discipline to question whether adding yet another system is necessary.
If a system was not provided to mediate these points, we are implying that energy is one of the following:
unimportant
handled invisibly in the background
left up to referee decision
Put simply, 1) will not work! Energy is wound up in the process of creation and destruction of almost every object in the game. It exists all over the BMD galaxy as a kind of universal currency via the trading of power-cells, which are consistently desired by every sector of economy and military. Power-cell farms can be big money-makers if they are in the right places. Power limitations act as an essential maintenance equalizer and capability cap.
For 2), this is a hard sell (cell? ho ho ho). If we are not tracking energy usage, we are not tracking power sources! This would make practical logistical questions into trivial affairs unworthy even of inclusion in the game. Many weapons use power-cells as ammunition directly. Vehicles are range-limited and time-capped by their (stored and carried!) supply of power-cells. Space travel is limited partially by the sheer cost of powering the FTL drive. These are all considerations that beg for points of intervention—and players cannot intervene on something that is handwaved.
And with 3), we know that leaving this up to the referee is equivalent to handing them an incomplete game and demanding they finish it for us. This is one of the worst behaviors in TTRPG design. If a system needs to be there, designers owe it to the players to work it out.
Dialing in a Solution
The energy system is necessary; the next step is to determine the weight of its impact on gameplay. We’ve already said that energy touches every aspect of gameplay, but that doesn’t imply that it should be the primary focus of the game! This is an important distinction that simulationist games struggle with.
Energy is everywhere because it is a supporting feature. When players have a specific question, the answer should be available for them to find in the rules. A player that wants to know how much it’s going to cost to keep his riflemen shooting is not concerned with the bigger energy economy picture—he doesn’t need to see or even comprehend that the lander who brought him there runs on power-cells.
But when he makes the decision to buy or sell, it should be consistent with the rest of the power-cell offerings. He should not be paying pocket change for something that another gameworld denizen considers to be of supreme value!
Copying God’s Homework
Thus, we set about to ground all these energy questions in the basic energy relations of physics. From a design perspective, it’s not exciting—we didn’t come up with some great and clever mechanism. It was a tedious but thorough and systematic process.
Importantly, this work is not directly reflected anywhere in the rulebook. If we desire the second-order effects of a sound energy hierarchy, it doesn’t mean we need the first-order notions haunting the rulebook! This is another point where simulationist games often struggle. It is satisfying to have, use, and manipulate a system. It may be entertaining to know that the system has realistic roots or was made from patterns in the Egyptian calendar or so on, but that knowledge is not necessary to the joy of manipulating the system.
From the designer perspective, it’s boring. But from a player perspective, all the tables are populated with information that will answer their energy-related questions.
“How much fuel does my ride need?” The vehicle has a power component that needs certain power-cells, and it has a refueling time for low, normal, and heavy load.
What about more subtle questions like “How much does my ammo cost?” In the munitions table, there is a listing for each ammo type with their price given, but where did the price come from?
Power is necessary to manufacture munitions, but power is also an essential direct inclusion in the consumable “magazine” of many weapons. Consider traditional rifles and their concept of muzzle velocity—the speed of the projectile as it leaves the rifle. If we know this speed and the mass of the projectile, the energy of the bullet as it leaves the rifle—½ × mass × speed² (kinetic energy)—tells us how much energy was imparted to it by the process.
Either the rifle somehow provides the energy or the cartridge itself provides the energy (as is the case with traditional firearms) or some combination. But the point is, that energy has to come from somewhere; therefore, it has to come to the weapon by means of the magazine one way or another.
The closest analogue to energy-dumped-on-target in BMD is the weapon score called Lethality, but it is abstracted to the unit-level. Weapons that are “higher caliber” will have a higher Lethality score, and this can be reflected in the notion of “energy per shot” of the weapon. However, all this consideration exists in the background! It’s a solved problem, and there is no need for players to work it out—just pay the listed cost for the ammo!
Rules Outlooks
Firstly, we are pleased to announce that the Signals & Intelligence chapter is back! It will be included in the First Blood4 release. The Intel system is such an important aspect of gameplay; it simultaneously empowers players to drive the campaign forward while also unseating them from passive conventional-play patterns they may have adopted elsewhere. More than that, it’s just cool. The chapter will have a small core of the Intel system design; future releases will see refinements and growth.
Another chapter added is the Spoils chapter, playing the part of a “Treasure” chapter in other TTRPG books. As more enemy forces were added, it became clear that listing their equipment and other goodies on their entries was impractical. The Spoils chapter provides listings of equipment batches by faction and force-strength, and it’s also a more convenient place to put miscellaneous stuff like Atlantean tech, the contents of military outposts, and so on.
In combination with the energy refinements discussed above, the integrated energy and materials system provides straightforward answers to logistics and economics questions. If players want to build a school, a factory, an anti-air fortress, or whatever else they can imagine, BMD’s materials system provides what is likely the best combination of ease and flexibility that exists in any game for building. We are eager to show our cards on this bet!
As discussed above, energy mediates the steps between industry. Material Grades summarize protective qualities. Vehicles and structures are unified in that they are built from “segments.” A car or APC is a single-segment vehicle, whereas a C-130 consists of many segments; these segments convey a sense of location and are used to design the larger vehicles.
Structures work on exactly the same principle. Each segment is both a locational and possibly a logical segment. This segment is the “main office,” and that one is a “classroom,” and so on.
If we want to create a facility, we must identify the various logical requirements and associate at least one segment to each logical requirement. A factory needs an admin center, a wares & supplies center, and a construction area. These are three structure segments. One is a general-purpose (admin) and will be cheaper, one is a Cabin (storage-focused), and the last is a specialized constructor segment. The construction costs for all these can be looked up in a table. Because structures and (large) vehicles are modular, we could add capacity to this factory by increasing the number of constructor segments.
Finish Him!
Other than these points, there is a substantial effort to clean up and simplify the organization of different sections; clarity and the reduction of unnecessary cognitive load is important for a project of this scope.
The Equipment chapter is being filled out, and the chapter on The Enemy is approaching completion. There are minor areas all throughout the rulebook that need slight touchups. The chapter on The Campaign, which describes how to create a new campaign and then what to do once it’s created, is getting significant attention because of its importance for new players.
We’re nearly there! The war-drums sound! Who will draw First Blood?
Thank you for your readership! Primeval Patterns thrives on the basis of the sincere interest and support of hobbyists like you.
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Check out BMD, a far-future wargame-infused TTRPG about slaughtering aliens. See the latest intel on the war.
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The strengths of the TTRPG medium and the concept of core gravity design are found in Unlocking TTRPG Supremacy.
The logical continuation of the wargame concept, the Second-World Exercise, is discussed in The Nature of the TTRPG.
How should we structure and place a game’s elements? This question is the topic of Hierarchy, Contrast, Alignment.