DEGRADER: after action report, new findings, continuations, etc.

 

I have finally run a game, breaking the long hiatus. It wasn't a Barony thing - it was DEGRADER, a small, tight, nasty, adversarial pbp wargame focused on sniper characters who use sensor arrays and scifi super guns to respectively locate and then summarily instagib one another. 

IMPORTANT NOTE: beloved Archon has recently written up a DEGRADER extraction shooter map, much to my delight. It is excellent, and you can find it here. 

These were the map we played on:

The ground level, no ceilings.

The catwalks and fluid tanks above, suspended by chains.

I think the playtest went very well. There are some large caveats to that statement, which I'll get into, but by and large the concept worked as planned.

• The mixture of very low info about other player movements (DEGRADER is played in nearly pitch darkness), ultra high lethality (players were routinely deleted from across the map without any warning), and ignorance around the potential patterns and fields of enemy sensor use built a horrible, paranoid little combat space, in which people were try to manoeuvre and jockey for advantage as best they could with limited information. Exactly the vibe that I was aiming for in the writeup. 
• The core loop of sensors spreading across the map, locating ping of heat/movement/noise/heartbeats etc., and the the Superlative Weapons doings their thing, worked great. The specifics were not as clean or tuned as they could have been, and there will be many changes here (specially on sensors and their usability) for the second test, but in the broad abstract, this worked as well as I could have hoped for. 
• People seemed to enjoy it! I think that everyone who played had a good time with it. The two players who got fucked over by DM error were understandably salty - in a game this unforgivably zero sum DM error is a really big deal - but both have expressed interest in try V2 of this thing. I have extremely forgiving players, whom I love :')
• The flavour of play was good. Grimy, desperate, industrial, mediated hyper cat-and-mouse. Good. 
• It was also pretty fun to DM, although quite involved. I used dungeon scrawl to put together the maps, and then powerpoint to compute player turns. It took some time, but it was gratifying to see all the moving pieces come together. In play it looked something like this:

The shot heard 'round the world.

With five of these players running around, laying their gear down, trying to maximise coverage, trying to spoof noise or heartbeats, throwing C4 at one another, setting triplines and other traps, it became a pretty lively and complex little play space. 

A quick blow by blow of the three main 'phases' of the playtest:

• Phase One: Setup. Players laying down sensors, getting their bearings, listening for movement, laying snares and explosives, and generally exhibiting appropriate levels of extreme paranoia. Marked in particular by BIRCH-2-4 (played by the lovely Archon) laying down an absolutely ridiculous penetrating heat scanner that covered nearly a quarter of the map, and wiring it up in their little sensor nest. This scanner picked up Falconer on the second turn, and then Revenant the turn after that, which resulted in the first shot and kill of the game, which in turn lead into the insanity of phase two. 
• Phase Two: BIRCH takes the shot on Revenant, taking first blood. By absolute coincidence, COCKROACH happens to switch on their particle sensor and point it at BIRCH that same turn, giving them a useable ping with which to fire in turn. CUPID lobs c4 down into the room that BIRCH fired from, but since BIRCH moved after firing they are just out of the kill zone. This doesn't save BIRCH from COCKROACH's pistol shot - they become the second casualty. As all of this is going down, Falconer uses a grapple line to ascend to the catwalks on the second level, and make a fateful decision to lay down a movement sensor by hand instead of using their device catapult. This means that CUPID strays directly in the sensor zone on the turn that she makes to throw her bomb down range, which then results in her getting shot in the back by Falconer. The C4 on her rig is detonated, and Falconer is only 5ft from the kill radius - they make their save against the shrapnel, and phase two is ended, leaving only two surviving Degraders: Falconer, and COCKROACH.
• Phase Three: both surviving Degraders now have useless pistols that need recharging, and no idea where the other is outside of extremely vague directions. COCKROACH spends their time laying down spoofers in the vent system that they occupy, while Falconer belays back down to ground level, sprints to a charging station for their pistol, and sets a drone with a very long range directional heat scanner. They sends the drone up, and hover it slowly towards the other side of the map where COCKROACH is sneaking away from the carnage of phase two using the vents. Ultimately, Falconer's drone catches COCKROACH in the vent, and COCKROACH is killed by Falconers pistol shot. 

This is how it went down in play. There were several mistakes that I made in running, which had major deleterious effects on the game. 

• The first and larger systemic problem was that I calculated the directional cones wrong: I used corner to corner counting to calculate their range, which resulted in very large triangles of coverage - hugely more area that the more appropriate 'pie slice' shape would have generated. I realised this early on, but had already calculated several turns using the bad method, and didn't want to retroactively change the rules of the game mid-play. This directly lead to two early pings, and more generally shaped the game meta exclusively around long range, directional, penetrating scanners - with this setup they were really the only winning move. Lots to learn from this (breakdown further down this post), but in the first instance calculating as pie slices would make a large difference in efficacy. My apologies to Revenant and his player AntiTime for getting them killed this way - I was looking forward to seeing what a knife Degrader could do, and they never got the chance to find out. 
• The second large mistake was in the final confrontation. The arena took place in an environment without ceilings, which meant that Falconer's overhead drone had an extremely broad AOE and very high efficacy. When they passed over COCKROACH's location, I awarded them the ping which ended the game, forgetting that COCKROACH was hidden in a vent that absolutely did have a ceiling. Falconer's sensors were not penetrating, and so should not have pinged COCKROACH, rendering the official final result moot. A huge shame, and something I blame myself for. Apologies to COCKROACH and their player Locheil - you deserved a better sendoff!

Outside of these two discrete errors in resolution, there were lots of things that became clear in play, and which will be tightened up for the next round. 

• The first and most obvious takeaway is that penetrating long range scanners are very clearly superior to other options inside these rules. Penetration generally is ludicrously overpowered, and I have several ideas about how to change this for a new version. Thanks to the team of observers in the Observation Deck for chatting through these with me over the last few days!
• Related: the large numbers of scanners, spoofers, and bandwidths on which people can be detected leads to some unsatisfying gameplay: in order for spoofers to be effective, they need to correspond to the scanner type your enemies are using. Since you are making a blind guess at this, they are almost not worth using at all - what you really want to be doing is laying down your own scanner grids more quickly and comprehensively than your enemies. This is not ideal and also has an arbitrary character (inside a ruleset that is already heavily based on arbitrary lethality). You need to have some counterplay.  
• The big change would be reducing the number of sensors, or including more broadly useful, multi spectrum sensors. Combined with depowered penetration, this will hopefully lead to a situation where pings are less binary, and where overlapping sensor fields is important. 
• Data and power cables don't need to be different - finicky in a bad way. 
• Radio and hacking frequencies didn't come up at all - neither did console relays. Would like to find a way to get these better integrated so that this sort of thing becomes a viable strategy. Some of this may be that everyone died before encountering anyone else kit, so no one ever got the chance to switch frequencies. 
• Players should get the map before they pick loadouts. This one is super obvious but didn't make it into this round. A no brainer. 
• The map generally needs to be way way smaller for movement ranges like this. The map we played on was pretty accurate to an irl factory floor, which makes a bad match for a deathmatch between stealth operatives sneaking 20ft per turn. The next round will be in a series of cramped, labyrinthine, borderline domestic spaces, which I think will suit the scale of operations much better. It will also give the knife Degraders more to do than simply sprinting towards pings with a hope and a prayer.
• Related to the above: the map needs way more interactive stuff on it. This one had tanks of fluid and machines than ran variously hot, loud, and kinetic. None of this made any difference at all for the game: the machine were static, which meant that anything moving on any sensor at all was either a spoofer or a player. Good to introduce more noise onto the maps. Sensors generally being less precise will help with this. 

I think that's the breakdown? A V2 of the rules, and a new map/game will be coming soon I hope. 

If you'd like to play, or follow along in the observer deck, reach out to me on the purple or phloxservers o7 o7 o7