A tale as old as time: two states with the desire to secure their own futures must clash violently with one another in order to guarantee their own survival. Here and now is no different. Two nations, defined currently only by their players, will have to outwit, outplay, and outkill their opponents in a Great War the likes of which hasn't been seen in ages.
Welcome to the Bay12 v. BPL Great War Arms RaceMe Discord ServerForeword: We are in an active holding pattern. Further explanation at the bottom.
Hello, fellow Bay12 Forum Games and Roleplaying Goblins. I have opted to bring together the two communities I call my internet home in one glorious, devastatingly savage clash of man and machine, a gory tale of mud and blood. You will be facing off against the Black Pants Legion - an online community of nerds best known for Battletech and Spacestation 13 content on YouTube and a growing community on Twitch run by a bunch of fellas more talented than myself. Over the course of the last week and a half I have
run a game here for the creation of an Arms Race map, and thanks to the efforts of the members of this community we have a beautiful battlefield to play on. But before I get ahead of myself, let's go over exactly what an Arms Race is, the rules, and any extra information I can recall.
An Arms Race is a team vs. team game played through a text medium where both sides are pitted against one another in a struggle for survival. The situation at hand changes each turn based on the actions you take during the three player-involved phases - Design, Revision, and Strategy. Teammates are free to collaborate and come up with proposals during the Design and Revision phases. The players then vote for the one proposal that will add to their side's available Armory.
Designs and Revisions are subject to a Difficulty modifier of up to +4/-X based on a number of factors including your current armory, prior fields of advancement, time period, and setting tech level, and final results are determined by a dice roll combined with said modifier. Revisions are more restricted than designs, and are required to be a modification, alteration, or revision to existing equipment.
In the Strategy Phase the teams will determine their plans of actions, often simply broken down into which fronts will be pushed and where the more unique equipment will be deployed.
The final phase is the Combat Phase, where I take both team's armories and write up some glorious war fiction describing the conflict in enough detail for players to figure out what the hell is going on.
While the game starts at a tech level equivalent to the Great War, your technological advancements and successes are determined by dice and creativity, not necessarily real-world advancement. A good example for how to approach this would be the Air War: if you decide you want to try making helicopters immediately, you’ll face the same general level of difficulty as if you’d try to develop biplanes first, and both will help the other slightly when it comes to difficulty thanks to being airframes (but not as much as direct work on biplanes would aid monoplanes, for example). Trying to break into new fields will come with the same general bump in difficulty until you have experience creating designs that provide, well, experience in a related field.
There are a lot of rules and shit for Arms Races that have been slapped on haphazardly over the years, so don't worry if there's a lot here to absorb. You don't have to memorize the rules, that's my job.
The Design Phase is your primary means of advancing the capabilities of your nation. Teammates work individually or together to determine what is needed most in the moment and write up proposals to choose between. A vote is held to select the proposal to push forward, and at that point the process leaves your hands. A proposal should include a name and/or designation, and any desired details should be included.
From there, I determine the difficulty of the proposal based on the setting, scale, tech available to the nation, how far of a leap in development it is, if there are any previously completed projects that could provide enough knowledge to ease the tasks, and a light dose of research. Difficulty Ratings break down in the Spoiler below, but don’t take the examples as strict guidelines in case you find inspiration in them. Every writeup is gauged on an individual basis, so attempting my Normal example might end up Very Hard if you Bradley the project (or easier if you cut corners).
Once I determine the difficulty of a project, I submit the poor thing to a roll of 2d6. I use physical dice (and use dice as the plural form of die), and roll the moment I plan on writing. It just feels right. The base results are defined in the Spoiler below the Difficulty Ratings one.
Part of the final write-up I provide includes the Expense Level of the result of the proposal. Every proposal is given an Expense Level upon creation, taking into account material cost and rarity, complexity, and usability of the design in order to determine what level of availability the equipment gets. Expense Levels will be, surprise, covered in a spoiler beneath the Roll Results spoiler!
Once the Design results are posted, the game immediately moves forward to the Revision Phase. This phase is functionally almost completely identical to the Design Phase. The only difference is that proposals for Revisions must be based on an extant entry in your team’s armory.
Simple (+4): Stupid-easy. Throwing some sheet metal onto a tractor.
Trivial (+3): Excessively easy. Flak vests, comfortable flightsuits, and Pit Vipers for pilots.
Very Easy (+2): A familiar subject or smaller project. A new, mildly enjoyable Coke.
Easy (+1): Undemanding or understandable projects. The hop from cars to trucks.
Normal (0): Logical progression with a little effort. Going from biplanes to monoplanes.
Hard (-1): Poking unfamiliar territory within reason. Creating the V2 after the Flying Bomb.
Very Hard (-2): The standard for breaching new concepts. Developing the first tank/mech.
Theoretical (-3): Dabbling in the unknown. The Manhattan Project.
Ludicrous (-4): Prying the unknown open. Fusion power.
Impossible (-X): Kicking the unknown and sanity in the dick. Building the Stargates.
Utter Failure (2): The project results in little else usable besides the lessons learned.
Buggy Mess (3): The design functions, just not too well at all. Some experience is gained.
Poor (4): The design can be used without being a threat to anyone handling it. Usually.
Below Average (5): It works, but there is clear room for improvement.
Average (6,7,8): The design functions as intended.
Above Average (9): The design works, and something about it works out better than expected.
Superior (10): It works much better than intended, and a lot is learned in related fields of research.
Masterwork (11): This is the perfect design.
Unexpected Boon (12): Development of this design goes so well that some sort of extra benefit is provided to the side building it.
Cheap: The design is simple and/or is, well, cheap enough to be used wherever desired. Cheap equipment will often define the backbone of the armed forces.
Expensive: An Expensive design will be seen regularly on the battlefield, but will not be as ubiquitous as a Cheap design.
Very Expensive: Very Expensive designs rarely see use on the battlefield, as the military can only afford relatively small numbers of this equipment.
National Effort: A unique design that can be manually deployed to a front during each Strategy Phase. There is no cap to the number of different National Efforts you can deploy.
Once your revisions are complete, the Strategy Phase begins. In this phase you are generally only responsible for selecting which two of the three available fronts to push on (East, Center, West). It is possible, likely, and even heavily encouraged to develop National Effort-cost wunderwaffen, in which case their deployment for the season would also be determined here. Decisions not directly related to designs or revisions (such as the occasional propaganda contest) will also be determined during this phase.
Fronts will only advance along their lane, so you won't see an attack into the Center from the West. There might be some mild mechanical and flavor text if there’s an extreme overextension going on, but that’s unlikely enough to be a “we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it” situation.
Combat phases will be written out and posted in this thread by me. You just read 'em. After Action Reports will summarize actions across the front with a mix of in-character narrative and a more analytic summary in order to accurately paint the picture you need to respond to.
The Preliminary Act consists of the opening few turns of the game. These turns will be guided with a heavier hand than the rest of the game, and you will be given a prompt or issue to solve or address in some way through your Design and Revision. These actions will all be used to determine the flavor and style of the starting armory choices and National Identity Perk (a +1 bonus to a specific type of design/revision). All choices will be balanced against one another as well as the other team's choices, so while something might have longevity or be hyper-jank, they'll initially be equivalent enough for government work. While these turns might be quicker on this end, this opening act will be used to frontload as many questions and clarifications as the BPL can, so there might need to be a small level of patience while they loosen their war crime belt.
The key defines the borders of the map first, then the river, and then describes each region North to South and East to West, like reading a book.
The Ice Wall (Eastern Barrier): While borders can be quite fluid in nature, the easternmost extreme of the land is harshly cutoff by a monolithic wall of pure ice, 3000 meters tall. The surface of the wall contains somehow fewer features than the barren cliff face: an everstretching plane of blinding white. No plant or animal dares to brave the blisteringly frigid, cutting winds driving ice and snow constant off the wall and toward the continent below.
The Desert of ‘Amit (Western Barrier): The desert of 'Amit shrouds the west in heaps of dazzling white sand. The evening winds stir up sharp, stinging sandstorms which scatter the light of the setting sun and blast the young Cholades Mountain Range separating it from the rest of the continent. Through the heat haze, you can sometimes glimpse the peaks of the Anti-Cholades mountain range, grasping at the far horizon and further reinforcing the rain shadow cast over the desert.
The Interbarrial River Network: The Interbarrial River Network is birthed from two points: the geysers and healthy water table in the Wild Savannah and the runoff and melt flowing off of The Ice Wall. These networks of streams join together to form large, slow moving rivers that steadily meander toward the center of the continent. A veritable (relatively shallow) inland sea forms where the rivers meet in the Vale of Waters and proceeds to divert both toward the north and south. Tributaries and distributaries line the entire calm, slow-flowing river, providing the only real navigational issue along the equally calm riverbanks. The arterial river flowing north and south empties into the Northern and Southern Oceans. The Great Lake manages to regulate flow during the wetter northern seasons, providing a steady and reliable flood pattern across the continent and keeping the extreme wet or dry seasons from impacting the reliability of the River Network throughout the region.
THIS IS YOU Monsoon Point (North Capital/Bay12): This area point is bounded by its impressive coast containing multiple natural harbours. Monsoon Point is so named because winds that come off of the coast, off of 'Amit north of the Cholades, and off of the Icewall contact to create a spectacularly broad storm network which ensures Monsoon Point is constantly lashed with rain. An extremely rainy season dominates nine months out of the year, followed by three months of the year that can't accurately be called a dry season as much as a "less rainy season". The landscape in Monsoon Point itself is surprisingly dramatic as a result - a hilly region has been carved out into a land of beautiful red cliffs, with intense and verdant greenery blooming across the slopes - the sole exception being the incredibly wide Interbarrial River Network and the gentle, flat lands that follow it.
Choladaic Rainforest (West Front, North): This region is absolutely dominated by a tropical rainforest. While most definitely less waterlogged than the areas to the northeast and east, it is still a rainforest - you can still expect to get soaked. The tropical rainforest rolls across gentle hills, fed by the Monsoon Point rainstorms which gather here and bowl against the Cholades. While the rain is certainly an obstacle, the unsettling nearly endless twilight beneath the canopy should not be underestimated.
Evergreen Riverway (Center Front, North): The hills in the surrounding regions flatten immensely within the Riverway. The Evergreen Riverway is a temperate pine rainforest - unbelievably lush, unbelievably green, fed both by brunt of the rainstorms coming down from Monsoon Point and the wide, fast-flowing arterial continental river flowing up from The Vale of Water, central Evergreen Reach is... well, it's wet as hell. The riverine environment leads to plenty of mud, fallen logs, ponds, small lakes, and streams, but other than that it's actually quite a pleasant place to be in, if humid.
Frosthollows (East Front, North): Temperatures drop dramatically in this uneven, rough, but beautiful alpine forest terrain. Bitter snowstorms hamper that beauty, driven west by the powerful and biting wind blasting off of The Ice Wall. The deep valleys in this region tend to catch these winds, creating absolutely unbearable conditions within the crags and ravines that crop up in the area. These ravines open up into the foothills and lowlands that dot the area, pummeling them with frigid temperatures rivaled only by the surface of The Ice Wall itself. These Frosthollows, open areas where even the pines refuse to grow, are treacherous, but often the safest and most direct way geographically to navigate the region.
Wild Savannah (West Front, Center): Resting against the shadow of the Cholades and ‘Amit, the land is a savannah of tall wildgrasses and scattered acacia copses. The climate is warm here, but not prone to drought due to a high water table fed by geothermal heat. When one spots a little hillock on this savanna, it is a geyser as often as it is a termite mound. The biodiversity in this region is staggering: giraffes and dwarf elephants in the patches of thin forest, great wildcats and wildebeest patrolling the grasslands. A river cuts this land too, fed by the water table and rare torrential downpours, flowing west to east. The geological activity here has left behind kimberlite pipes, the source of elusive diamonds and other precious gemstones, as well as a fair few rare earth metals.
Vale of Waters (Center Front, Center): The Vale of Waters is where the fresh waters sourced from the east and west join to run north and south. A great lake sits here, relatively shallow but broad. Its waters are flush with freshwater fish and waterfowl. The terrain beyond the lakeshore of brown sand and clay beds is some of the most supremely fertile earth in all the world, a temperate country of low hills and beautifully green grass. The summers are warm but mild to crops, the winters thinly blanket the land in snow for a month or so before melting. Little of the wildlife is dangerous; foxes, burrowing rodents from shrews to beavers, hares and the like.
Glacial Taiga (East Front, Center): The freshest remnants of The Ice Wall’s glacial activity can be identified here; gravel beds, moraines and the like. This land is a taiga of warmly-colored shrubs and sedge grasses intermixed with the occasional copse of spruce and birch, grazed by herds of caribou that alternately can be found migrating to the Evergreen Riverway. In summer, multicolored wildflowers blossom from the earth, areas of which are warm enough to tolerate agriculture. The morning sun lights the crags of the Ice Wall like a bonfire, and sends a glut of meltwater to swell the banks of a river heading west. Beneath the permafrost are vast beds of anthracite coal and petroleum.
Great Dry Sea (West Front, South): Once an ancient inland ocean, the Great Dry Sea is a massive salt flat that exists in a depression stretching from the edges of the Painted Land outward toward the 'Amit desert, where the ground begins to elevate once more and transfers from salt into sand. While outwardly unremarkable, the Great Dry Sea holds a unique characteristic of a deceptively active groundwater environment, forming and dissipating subterranean rivers at will. This results in turning the Great Dry Sea into an invisible minefield where one false step can send a man plummeting into a thick brine pool if he's lucky, or a many dozen foot drop to his death if not. The reprieve for these hazards is the rises in the flats that ages ago were once islands surrounded by water but now are encased in salt, dotted across the Dry Sea like freckles.
Sandoras Thornsea (Center Front, South): This entrance to the Painted Lands is host to a myriad of cactus families and hardy flora that take advantage of the presence of running water - thousands of species ranging in size from a child's fist to taller than a man, interspersed among a splattering of cork oaks and stunted juniper trees. The cacti mainly stick to the banks of the river and the distributaries that break off from it, creating thick bands of cactus that form the main hazard in crossing this region.
Motoro Conelands (East Front, South): Volcanic energy in this region is just powerful enough to breach the surface before running out of energy and forming the squat towers of basalt known as “splatter cones”. Ranging from only one meter in height to over twenty, these miniature volcanoes pocket the land in the thousands. Many of them are still active, needing only a slight disturbance to ooze molten rock from the ground. Despite the danger, the Conelands have long been a source of intense mining efforts - splatter cones contain high concentrations of metals across the entire range of metals available beneath the surface. In the areas populated by inactive or dormant vents, there is a large coverage of greenery that feeds off the rich volcanic soil and the Interbarrial River Network.
Painted Lands (South Capital, BPL): The riverway flowing south from the Vale reaches its southern terminus in the Painted Lands. What began as a clear flow of babbling water has been transformed into an even wider, slower thing laden with sediment. Millions of years of river action have carved a canyon through the country's soft rock strata, sharp and jagged at first but growing as broad as the horizon by the time it reaches the sea. Wandering distributaries branch off of the river, leaving winding shallow bands of fertile soil behind when they inevitably wander off again or dry up between flooding seasons. The land takes its name from the bands of rock exposed by the river to form a panoply of color: white limestone, black shale, and sandstones in pink, red, yellow, and every color in between.
The fertilized highlands beyond the water-carved walls (a distinction less marked as one proceeds southward) are relatively arid, with hot summers and cool winters. Groundwater is exposed to the highlands by limestone sinkholes, or cenotes. Papyrus reeds and olive trees grow in abundance and alligators sun by the riverbanks with regularity as one travels further south. The coastal bay experiences a cooler climate, with sea breeze coming off the ocean to regulate temperatures year-round and provide gentle winter rains.
The sedimentary rock of the Painted Land bears countless karst caves, connected by underground rivers and home to strange species of eyeless fish and cave-adapted lizards.
This post is here so that the trigger can be pulled the moment the other team is ready. The BPL is currently determining the parameters of a +1 bonus for the setting. Since Bay12 has, what, a decade of experience with the genre and the Legion has none of that, I've decided to let them choose what sort of advancement is
lightly favored by the setting. They have free reign - bolt action rifles, teslapunk, organ harvesting, infantry QoL, wizards, the limits are very loose but will always be adjusted to fit into a WW1 setting properly. You will
also receive this bonus, and will have a +1 clearly notated as a result of the bonus in any results. You won't ever know explicitly what the parameters for the bonus are from me, which I hope is enough of a balance to make up for the experience gap. We'll see!
Anyway, here we go, doing war crimes again. Feel free to ask questions about rules, theorize on the bpl's ideas, talk shit, or brainstorm while we wait for the proper kickoff. Since the BPL is getting time to mentally prepare, you should too!
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Topic: Bay12 v. Black Pants Legion Great War Arms Race (Prelim 5 Design) (Read 15057 times)