I love this

So yeah, I know this is not original to me. Fuck off, it's my blog and I can post whatever I want on it. I really like this, so up it goes.

Copyright whoever wrote it.


This morning I was awoken by my alarm clock powered by electricity generated by the public power monopoly regulated by the US Department of Energy.

I then took a shower in the clean water provided by the municipal water utility. Then, I brushed my teeth with that water, filtered to standards set by the EPA and my state.

After that, I turned on the TV to one of the FCC regulated channels to see what the National Weather Service of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration determined the weather was going to be like using satellites designed, built, and launched by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. I watched this while eating my breakfast of US Department of Agriculture inspected food and taking the drugs which have been determined as safe by the Food and Drug Administration.

At the appropriate time as regulated by the US Congress and kept accurate by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the US Naval Observatory, I get into my National Highway Traffic Safety Administration approved automobile and set out to work on the roads built by the local, state, and federal Departments of Transportation, possibly stopping to purchase additional fuel of a quality level determined by the Environmental Protection Agency, using legal tender issued by the Federal Reserve Bank and printed by the Federal Bureau of Engraving and Printing. On the way out the door I deposit any mail I have to be sent out via the US Postal Service and drop the kids off at the public school.

I park my car on the street, paved and maintained by the Department of Transportation, and put quarters issued by the United States Mint into the parking meter.

Then, after spending another day not being maimed or killed at work thanks to the workplace regulations imposed by the Department of Labor and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, I drive back to my house which has not burned down in my absence because of the state and local building codes and the fire marshal's inspection, and which has not been plundered of all its valuables thanks to the local police department.

I then log onto the Internet which was developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration and post on freerepublic and fox news forums about how SOCIALISM in medicine is BAD because the government can't do anything right. Keep government out of my Medicare!

Some fluff stuff

Argh, I swear I am going to do Part 3 of the Balance discussion. I have been busy lately, and yadda yadda yadda it's not a good excuse, but it is blocked out in my head. I know where I want to go with it and I have been having conversations lately that really have helped flesh the idea out in my head.

But today is not that day. Because today we talk about fluff.

"Fluff," to the non-gamers among my readers (lol "readers") is the backstory of a game. It consists of both the setting-- the world in which the game takes place-- as well as any ongoing narrative involving the characters. Fluff is an interesting thing: in some games, it's incidental, while in others it is integrated into the game itself. And of course, in some games it doesn't really exist: Flames of War is based on history and thus doesn't really have a lot of fluff.

I'm not going to get into the etymology or connotations of the word at this point. Let's just accept it for what it is. Let's talk about the fluff community. Lots and lots of people care about it: some don't, and I think you'll find more gamers who don't care about the fluff than there are fluff nuts who don't care about the game, but it is still important. It's also very divisive and you get endless arguments about it. Go figure. We're gamers on the internet: it's an unholy fusion of two of the most argumentative demographics in existence. Many fluff arguments (at least the most tiresome ones) are driven by patriotism. MY FACTION RULES. YOUR FACTION SUCKS. Whenever I see a thread on a forum asking "Who is the most powerful _____ in the setting?" or "Whose gods are the most powerful?" or "Which faction do you think is weakest in the fluff?" I just shake my head and sigh. You are never going to convince a Space Marine player that an Aspect Warrior should be able to kill a Space Marine, so stop trying. (Personally, I'd side with the Space Marine on that score). You are never going to convince a die-hard Protectorate player that Stryker is awesome. It's just a thing.

Another subset of fluff friction is the idea of continuity. Warhammer 40k in particular gets lambasted a lot for this, mostly due to the massive and sprawling backstory that has undergone many, many, many major revisions and retcons. Privateer has had relatively minor continuity gaffes and in any event most gamers are mature enough to handle the concept of a retcon and understand its necessity. I think more of the criticism of 40k's fluff comes from the abrupt tonal shifts between the melancholy tragedy of the Eldar book, the ultra-jingoism of the Space Marine book and the cartoonish violence of the Ork and Dark Eldar books. Expecting a setting with as much printed material as 40k (not to mention as many authors) to maintain a constant tone throughout is not only preposterous but also unnecessary, given the diversity of points of view within the universe.

The one kind of fluff criticism or argument that I find valid pivots on the inescapable fact that fluff is meant to accompany a game. Certain things can't happen: for example, in backgrounds like PP's (with an ongoing narrative) some characters will not die. Expecting them to is silly. Some of this is the aforementioned faction patriotism; if anyone actually expected Stryker to die in the Legends fluff, they clearly weren't really familiar with the setting yet. But drama requires conflicts, and sometimes narrow escapes grow tiresome when they're repeated over and over and over again. PP has done a good job of mostly evading this, and several characters that can't show up on the tabletop have been killed, exiled or otherwise incapacitated. But sometimes characters have to hold the Stupid Stick so the plot can advance. This is something that fantasy fans (and I assume many gamers are also fantasy fans, which I do not think is an unreasonable assumption to make) should be used to, as it shows up in movies and books all the time.

Somehow it's harder to accept for some people when the characters in question are not only favorites but also your representatives on the table. "Caine should be smarter than that!" you think, and maybe next time you pull Caine out of the case you narrow your eyes a little at him. "Don't screw this up like you did last time," you mutter, and maybe you see a tiny flash of shame in his painted eyes. Caine didn't screw it up. Caine did what he had to do so there'd still be a game. But it's a mark of how invested you are in the setting that you can picture it going the other way, and you can have a wistful moment of regret that he didn't quite manage the finishing blow.

Lastly, if you link to TVTropes in the comments of this or any other post I will IP ban you as soon as I figure out how. Keep that garbage off my blog. Ye been warned.

Chaos

This is something I wrote a while ago. I haven't updated in a few days, so here's this thing.

I have to say my favorite Chaos legions are the Alpha Legion and the Night Lords.  It is no coincidence that these are the two "least chaotic" legions.  By this I mean these are the two with the least actual devotion to the Chaos Gods, least afflicted by mutation, and least zealous.  They have several other things in common: most notably the death of their Primarchs.  Of which more later.
 
This is because the stories of their individual reasons for turning against the Emperor are the most complex and nuanced.  And their feelings towards the Imperium and towards Chaos are the same.
 
First the Alpha Legion.  I think it is not an exaggeration to say that Alpharius was the smartest of all the Primarchs.  While the parallels between Konrad Curze and Batman are too obvious to ignore, I would actually say that Alpharius embodies Batman's ethos much more closely.  Let's just pretend I never said anything as nerdy as the last sentence.  Alpharius takes the "long view;" he is much more interested in how battles are won, using every tool at his disposable to do what it takes to succeed, rather than committing to any narrow definition of strategy or victory.  Even a tactical genius like the Lion has abandoned all of the tools outside of battle, and I believe that in any evenly matched fight, Alpharius would defeat any of his brother Primarchs.  
 
Alpharius's pragmatism is his greatest strength.  His utter focus on achieving his desired goals by any means necessary means that when he saw the Acuity, he focused on one goal: denying the Primordial Annihilator at all costs.  Alpharius saw, however, what even the Cabal missed.  The Cabal hoped that the Heresy could defeat Chaos once and for all, by giving it a brief moment of ascendance and then annihilating it.  They were wrong, and Alpharius knew they were wrong.  
 
  Utopian goals-- the complete destruction of Chaos-- are counterproductive to species survival.  It is best to manage and maintain the flaws of the universe on an ongoing basis.  Thus, they chose to ally with Chaos in order to manage it, prevent its final victory, and keep it suppressed over time rather than attempt to wipe it out in one cataclysmic battle.  It would not surprise me to learn that the failures of the Black Crusades and the defeat of prominent Chaos champions have been due to subtle machinations by the Alpha Legion.  In this way they prevent the final victory of Chaos witnessed in the Acuity.
The death of Alpharius proves his point.  I have heard fanboys claim that Alpharius is not dead.  Believe me, I wish it were so.  But he has to be dead.  Alpharius's death was meaningful because it proved his point.  It proved that no cost is too great if victory is achieved, that dividing command structures are reacting fluidly to developments is a superior strategy to any fixed battle plan, that the Alpha Legion's means of waging war were the right ones.  If Alpharius lived, it simply meant Guilliman's gambit failed.  If he died, it means Guilliman succeeded and still lost because Alpharius's combat philosophy was better.
 
On to the Night Lords.  I feel that the best characterization of the Night Lords is in Aaron Dembski-Bowden's work-- and by the way, ADB is rapidly becoming my favorite 40k author, even if his writing is a bit more bleak than Dan Abnett's.  Konrad Curze is the reason I like the Night Lords.  This is a man who hates his Legion.  He does not hate their methods, or what they've become.  He hates them.  He hates his children and he hates himself.  Konrad Curze is a man who has absolutely no illusions.  He knows the bestial savagery at the heart of humanity.  He knows what it takes to keep people in line.
 
Think of Konrad Curze, the primarch.  He was a living demigod, a paragon of strength and wisdom.  He was designed to be the perfect warrior-- stronger and faster, able to formulate strategies in the blink of an eye, able to plan assaults, marshal forces and command armies.  He was not only a warrior but a master scholar and tactician with a brilliant mind.  Why did he squander his potential and become a feral tyrant?  It was his sacrifice.  Kurze knew that to control people, he had to make them fear the consequences of disobedience.  He knew that in order to protect the weak from the predations of the strong, there had to be someone stronger and more terrible.  He made himself an animal-- he sacrificed everything noble and good about himself in order to do that.  He gave up the life he could have had and made himself an exile for the good of the rest of society.
 
Think about that.  Curze knew that only brutality could keep a brutal species in line.  He despised the violence he engendered.  He knew that violence had to be punished, but all that did was create a new offender.  By being the only punisher, the holder of a monopoly on violence, he took all of society's sins upon his shoulders.  I'm not going to go so far as to say that Konrad Curze was a Christ figure, but the parallels are there.  And for that reason, Konrad Curze knew he had to die.  He hated violence, but in order to prevent violence he had to commit it.  And that made him an offender, and therefore he had to be punished.  
 
Konrad Curze's death proved his point.  He refused to apologize or beg forgiveness for the violence and cruelty he had inflicted, because he knew he had to do it to maintain order.  Nor did he shirk away from the deserved punishment for his actions.  He knew that by dying, he was proving what he had said all along: that society must punish the wicked for their crimes, that to do so perpetuated the violence, and that the punisher must pay for the punishment he inflicts, as wholly deserved as it may be.  Death is nothing compared to vindication.
 
The Night Lords refused to compromise.  They refused to take the easy way out-- to claim that what they were doing was right, or that they should avoid punishment.  They knew that what they were doing was wrong, but they did it anyways because it had to be done.  They despised the weakness and corruption of both the Imperium, which claimed that its violent crusade was somehow more moral and acceptable than the violent regimes it overthrew; and the weakness and corruption of Chaos, which claimed that violence was not a sin, that murder and death were not only acceptable but desirable.  The Night Lords exist as a beacon of perfect law and retribution in a galaxy of sinners and criminals, and to punish these foes they must become worse sinners yet.  They do not shirk away from this or make excuses for what they are or what they do.  
 
In the end, they have become perfect nihilists, knowing that they do not deserve to live but denying that anyone else is any better.  They hate themselves, they hate the Imperium, they hate the forces of Chaos, they hate the weak for their weakness and the strong for their cruelty.  They hate the passive for their acceptance of an evil universe and the active for their attempts to justify their actions.  They hate the wrathful for their wrath and the meek for their inability to defend themselves.  To be a Night Lord is to know that you deserve death, but refuse to kill yourself, instead committing slow suicide-by-enemy and refusing to give an inch.  They are the Rorschach of Legions.

Where Men Win Glory

Nothing more about balance today, though I have the third part of that little series blocked out in my head. Instead I want to comment on a book I just picked up: Where Men Win Glory by Jon Krakauer. It's about Pat Tillman, the NFL player who enlisted in 2001 and was killed in Afghanistan. The army orchestrated a cover-up when they learned he had been killed by friendly fire and lied to his family and the nation about it. Coming on the heels of the whole Jessica Lynch thing, it just indicates the degree to which the people in power cared more about their image than the people under their command.

This is hard to read. It's just indicative of the culture of criminality that pervaded Washington during the Bush years. The government was an open sewer. It's tempting to simply blame Bush; and he was a venal, stupid coward, but the rot ran much deeper. Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Rice, Rove, Ashcroft, Feith, Wilkinson, and all of their enablers and sycophants; we'll never get a full account of their criminal actions, and they'll more than likely never be punished for them. History will judge them but I'm a bit too impatient for that. All I can do is throw up my hands in frustration and be glad the adults are back in the White House.

Anyways, it's a great book on several levels. On one, it's a biography of a recent American hero-- and one whose life has been shrouded in layers of propaganda and falsehood, making it hard to separate truth from fiction. On another level, it's an indictment of the desperate, shameful manipulation of the truth by the DoD-- another story that has been shoved under the rug. Finally, it's yet another look in at the ongoing war in Afghanistan, about how critical failures by the chain of command lead to unnecessary and tragic deaths among the soldiers who bear the burden of risk.

It's hard to read precisely because it depicts a bad situation that could have been avoided. Pat Tillman's family-- and the families of all the war dead of the past decade-- are paying for the negligence, opportunism, cowardice, stupidity, corruption, apathy and recklessness of the Bush administration.

Balance, part 2

This is a continuation of my previous thoughts on balance. In part 1, I gave a brief summation and outline of what I consider to be "balance." Re-reading it, I note that I allowed for some wiggle room in my definition: because it is not possible to guarantee that two factions are "balanced" with mathematical accuracy, the threshold for acceptable balance should be where individual player skill and dice become more important.

Upon reflection, I do not believe that is a stringent enough definition. A good player with Wood Elves will beat a bad player with Skaven in Warhammer Fantasy today. I do not believe the armies are balanced. Similarly, a player running eHaley with bad dice rolls will lose to a player running eMorghoul with good ones. Those casters are not balanced either.

My modification, then, is as follows: balance between factions is achieved when two players of equal skill, with equal mean and standard deviation for their dice results, will achieve a win ratio over time of between 45 and 55 percent against each other when using the factions.

Obviously, this is not really measurable, and I just sort of pulled the 5% margin out of my ass. Still, tournament results give pretty good indicators, as can be seen here:

http://confounding.net/2009/02/26/is-warhammer-balanced/

(An excellent article, if a bit dated now due to the changing metagame).

Within-faction balance is, in my mind, easier to define. Simply, if each choice available to a faction appears with relatively even distribution in high-level tournament lists-- semifinalists and finalists of that faction-- then the faction is balanced. If a unit appears in only 5% of competitive lists, that is a sign of poor in-faction balance. If a unit appears in 90% of lists, that is similarly poor. It should be noted that many armies allow for "core troops" and "specialized troops." For example, taking a Skaven army with no clanrats is extremely unusual; not because Clanrats are overpowered, but because they are simply cheap and reliable and form minimum core choices required in list construction. For this reason, I would argue that a certain degree of common sense is required in interpreting these data.

So this time I am going to talk about why balance is desirable. I argue from two perspectives.

First, from a moral standpoint (or a gamer's perspective), balance is an end in itself. We play a competitive game, and we want it to be a fair competition. Balance is in that sense is desirable for the player base. This is an easy position to take.

Companies, however, must make a profit. They may love their players, they may try hard for balance, but in the end they are focused on the bottom line. Extensive playtesting and mathematical evaluation of various units' performance on the table may lead to better balance, but it is expensive and seems unnecessary given the existing level of in-house playtesting that already goes on.

I would argue that increased balance need not be expensive, and it could lead to financial rewards. By balancing all of the factions against each other, companies are encouraging competitive players to spread out instead of clustering around the good choices. On one level, I am sure that hundreds or thousands more boxes of Karax would sell if they weren't terrible. That's an easy call to make.

But on a more subtle level, increased competitiveness encourages acquiring a second or third army. Most wargamers I know play multiple armies for the same game. (Incidentally, I'd love to see data on the average number of armies for a single system owned by a given gamer.) By making every army competitive, companies are encouraging players to try a new thing, secure in the knowledge that they are not stepping "down a level." Balance between factions means that no army will go unbought, and it means that players will more readily take to a new army. Moreover, balanced factions are a boon to organized tournament play-- a topic for a later post, but one that holds a great deal of financial promise for companies willing to seize on it. Balance within factions has a more obvious payoff, as mentioned above: if I play Skaven, I am going to buy every good thing the Skaven can field for more options. If the army book had no clunkers in it, I would be buying everything available.

Next time, I will talk about how companies can achieve balance, and do so cheaply and effectively.

Balance, part 1

So today, I am going to fulfill the promise implicit in my blog's title (well, half of it, anyways) and talk about wargaming. Today, my topic of interest is balance. Duh.

Balance is a concept near and dear to the hearts of wargamers everywhere. My own personal wargames-of-note are Warmachine/Hordes, put out by Privateer Press, and Games Workshop's own Warhammer Fantasy Battles. These are both games that regularly hold tournaments with an extremely high caliber of player, and as such balance in the games gets a lot of attention. Today I am going to talk about what is balance, why it is desirable, and how it can be achieved.

Balance is, quite simply, the degree to which army choice does or does not matter. The ultimate "balanced" game, to my mind, is something like Chess or Battleship. Everyone has the same forces. In chess, each player has identical pieces in an identical formation. Sure, White gets to go first (and I am not a chessmaster, so that may or may not be a significant advantage or disadvantage), but Black and White are on a completely even footing. Warhammer and Warmachine are inherently asymmetrical games. If two players are playing two different factions, they have different options available to them. If they are playing the same faction, they may still have different army compositions. The point is, except in the rare cases where two players are running identical lists (something I have never seen happen in all my years of wargaming) they are not on an equal footing. But are they balanced?

That is the purpose of the "point" system. In almost every game, each model is worth a set number of "points" corresponding to how good it is on the table. Therefore, in a match of equal point values, both players should have the same power in their armies.

Here it is important to differentiate between within-faction and between-faction balance. Both are important. I would argue that the second is more important, but that's neither here nor there. Within-faction balance is how different options available to a player when constructing an army stack up. If I am building a Skorne army, I will always always always take Praetorian Swordsmen over Praetorian Karax. Swordsmen are just a flat out better unit. This is a failing of within-faction balance. Between-faction balance is the advantage one faction has over another, regardless of precise build. This is often difficult to establish, since some players may simply pick poor choices from within their faction (a consequence of within-faction imbalance) and consequently repeatedly lose against better-constructed lists from other factions. However, at tournaments and other events, players are often highly skill and practiced army builders who take the absolute best options available to them. Indeed, tournament results indicate a large degree of between-faction imbalance. The classic offenders are the Warhammer Fantasy Daemons of Chaos; an army so powerful, and so imbalanced, that anyone else playing against them was automatically at a significant disadvantage merely for not playing as Daemons of Chaos.

Balance, then is two things. To be balanced, a game must have all of its factions able to compete with each other on an even footing. To be balanced, a faction must have all of its choices bring something to the table so that none is simply inferior (or too corner-case; because lists must often be built as generalists, having a unit that can only do one thing often means it will rarely or never show up unless it is truly superlative at that thing). It is important to note that balance need not be mathematically perfect. We play games with dice; if the difference between factions is small enough to be entirely swallowed by the natural "random noise" of dice outcomes and individual player skill, it is acceptable. In the absence of broad data sets and statistical regressions (of which some have been done, actually) balance is inherently a subjective thing. However, results from tournaments and broadly agreed-upon ideas from the playerbase form a solid foundation upon which to build.

Next time: I discuss why balance is a good thing for games, and how it can be acheived.

A new era

This is the first post in a new blog. I have never had one of these before, but it seems like I might as well jump on the bandwagon. Better late than never.

The title of this blog comes from my two interests: Wargaming and economics. I study one and do the other as a hobby. No prizes for guessing which is which (and sometimes it's hard to tell).

Today seems as good a day as any to begin. "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" was just repealed. My first instinct is to gloat. The Freeplets are certainly blowing their stacks over this, and the sustenance their delicious little tears bring me is enough reason to celebrate. But this is a landmark decision in many, many ways.

For starters, it is one step towards bringing America into the 21st century. For being a major military and economic superpower, we are curiously backward in a lot of ways. Progress is inevitable, but sometimes it's slow. I firmly believe that attitudes toward homosexuality, race, religion etc. in this country are inextricably tied to the 60s counterculture that flowered here. Extreme regressivism is a backlash to rapid progress. People are scared of change, in other words, and it calcifies their opinions. Fortunately, progress moves in only one direction. Allowing gays to serve is, morally, the right thing to do. Ending discrimination should never be a means to an end, but an end in itself.

Beyond that, I laugh at the accusations that allowing gays to serve openly will "undermine the greatest military in the history of the world." For one thing, I think the Mongols, Spartans, Ayyubids etc. can all make pretty good stabs at claiming that title, depending on the definition of "greatest." But beyond that, it's laughable that homosexuality undermines military effectiveness. In fact, in the case of Sparta, widespread homosexuality within the army helped cement bonds of loyalty and support the discipline for which Spartan soldiers were famous. Simply put, despite stereotypes of "limp-wristedness" (stereotypes that are now held only by the old, foolish or both), homosexuals are no more or less effective in combat than heterosexuals; and just as in the general population, only homosexuals interested in joining the army and fighting will join the army. As a result, they'll naturally self-select for aptitude in combat-- just like every single other person who joins.

Beyond tearing down the flimsy opposition to this measure, we should dwell on its implications. In my view, the repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell has made gay marriage inevitable in all of America within fifteen years. I hope it doesn't even take that long. Public support for gay marriage will skyrocket now that they cannot be kept out of the military. Who wants to tell a soldier he can die for his country but not marry the man he loves? As soon as Democrats regain the House in 2012 I expect we'll see DOMA repealed as well. Perhaps we will have to wait until 2014 or 2016, but not much longer than that. In fact, I would guess that the majority of states will have gay marriage within ten years, with a few holdouts taking a bit longer before either the Supreme Court or public pressure forces them into line. The bigots will grumble as they always do, but what else is left to them?

In this post I regrettably mentioned neither minis nor money, but it's a special day. I did touch on some topics I would like to revisit in the future: demographic transition, age and conservatism, social backlash, history (another interest, though not an academic one), gay rights, and predictions for the 2012 election (hint: it's going to be a lot of fun). Join me next time for... something.