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Motte and Bailey

The conceit of Motte and Bailey is quite simple. You arrive at the fence of a bailey. Beyond it is the Motte Wall. You must extricate the princess in the castle. Why are you here? 

The mechanics of the game are also quite simple. When it is your turn, you can either declare something about your character in the past tense (create a Virtue) or you can attempt to accomplish something in the present tense (an action). You then roll 1d6. The catch is—declaring a Virtue is on a scale between 3–10 based on how likely it is to be true for any random person in a medieval setting (with magic). Players can see what the difficulty numbers represent, so they are not too surprised. Failing a Virtue roll results in a Curse, a potential event in the future tense. Completing an Action always requires a 10 (on a d6) to, and if you fail, the Character dies (Players can still play with a dead Character, but they can’t take any Actions). 

To accomplish actions (and declare increasingly unlikely Virtues), you can Leverage other Virtues, Actions, and Curses. Each point of Leverage gives +1 to the roll. Players can only Leverage Virtues attached to their own Character, but Actions and Curses are shared. You can Leverage a Virtue as often as the Virtue is true, you can always Leverage Actions, but Leveraging a Curse destroys the Curse and also destroys an equal number of Virtues. 

I don’t want to spoil the game too much. It is a simple game to pick up. It is a one-page RPG, and everything to play it comes with the sheet (besides dice and a pencil). Motte and Bailey is also great to play over Discord. 

The overall idea behind Motte and Bailey is to create a game that specifically antagonizes Players who want to make a “super awesome epic hero.” Despite “drink a glass of water” being mechanically as difficult as “blow up the moon,” you will find that the latter is, in all practice, substantially harder (and probably less useful). 

My favorite moment from a Motte and Bailey game is an example of Leveraging a Curse in a very funny way. Earlier in the game, a Player tried to generate the Virtue, “there was magic in the Bailey,” in order to try and be some sort of spellcaster. In the end, the actual method of getting the princess out of the tower was to orchestrate a peasant riot regarding poor infrastructure due to a plague of asiatic beavers and Leveraged the Curse, “there will no longer be magic in the Bailey” as in “the magic, or joi de vivre, so to speak, of living in the Bailey will collapse due to frustration over poor infrastructure.” Hilarious. Very clever.

@teomos can back me up. Based on one of their projects.

With a straight face, please tell me how removing Tom Bombadil is any different than removing "Nobody." Tell me how we benefited from removing Sam overcoming the Ring's temptation in promising to give him a big garden with huge pumpkins as compared to actual, direct deific interference in the Odyssey? Most importantly, where is all the music? LotR has so much singing that it is borderline a musical based on the ratio of written to sung dialogue. Where is choir boy Aragorn? Where is absolute himbo Legolas? The PJ LotR adaptations actually lost a lot of the themes, tone, and characterization of the books. Maybe not to the same extent as Nolan's The Odyssey, but lost nonetheless.

I think this hypothetical Nolan LotR looks very similar to Jackson's LotR. Except I think Nolan would actually hire any people of color to be in the film.

I do understand that films cannot include everything into a single adaptation of a massive text. I guess I'm just questioning the point of non-transformative adaptations. Oh Brother, Where 'Art Thou is a much more compelling adaptation of the Odyssey than Nolan's because it is thoroughly adapting it. It is using the framework of the myth to tell a completely different story, and I think that this might be infinitely more artistically valid. If Nolan made a story about an American Vietnam War soldier coming home from war and traumatized by the consequences of impealism he enacted, which is much closer to the Odysseus that we get in this film than we do for the character in the original text, and then mythological things drawing from the Odyssey happen to him, I would have much less to criticize. I want to point out that this is different than a "witch in alps searching for neighbors cat" argument because Odysseus in the film has much more in common with Jarhead's Anthony Swafford or FMJ's Private Joker than he has in common with Odysseus from the the poem, The Odyssey. I like Jarhead and FMJ. I think a Life of Pi (as a reference for non-literal/imagined fantasy)/FMJ movie would be good. Which is what this movie basically is. It's a Life of Pi x FMJ x LotR movie, except it's nominally billed as a straightforward adaptation of The Odyssey. And it's just not a good adaptation. Why is Odysseus Private Joker? I guess you could make the argument that Private Joker is a bit of an Odysseus reimagination, and that this is just a massive ouroboros. Why do we exist, except to suffer?

Instead we get this weird eating your cake and having it too movie. It makes me mad. It is phenomenally executed rage bait. I can tell that Christopher Nolan dutifully, and intentionally, directed actors to speak in ways that make it hard for me to hear over the score and sound design (which I know is at the exact level so you can't hear the dialogue). I know he painstakingly chose to make everyone look like they're dressed for a cheap ren faire with occasional greek-esque elements to their clothes. I know he actively chose to not put everyone into a fucking toga (also without underpants) whenever possible because he wanted everyone to wear pants. I can tell Nolan is making these choices intentionally. This is laser-precise slop. Uninterested with the source material of the original text and instead just wanted to make another fucking Dark Knight Movie.

I've pointed this out in other posts I've reblogged, but just so it's also here, the bemoaning about the collapse of civilization as a consequence to the guilt of war is such a weird political theme. It's somewhat extremely reactionary and also anti colonial. Like, I almost felt the specter of Hasanabi scream out of Odysseus' mouth, "fuck it— I'm saying it—we deserved 9/11!" Like, "we defied Zues' law by sneaking into a horse and winning a war, and that is why the bronze age will collapse" is not a valid interpretation of xenia and also a bizarro point. Is this film about the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan? Fuck it, I should make a story about a Siberian kid who gets horribly derailed on his transport back from Afghanistan in the 80's set to Siberian mythology, inspired by the Odyssey, and how the goals of impealism fundamentally undermine your ability to create effective communism, or something. Much more interesting idea than just butchering the Odyssey directly.

It feels like testing for the highest rate of lowest quality engagement with media. There's never a "explain how the themes of Frankenstein evoked feelings and changed your worldview" contest. Think you had a more moving emotional experience by engaging with the melancholic feelings of the inevitability of child birth, despite not even being a woman hey that's weird don't think about it, than ME!?

Well, step right down and prove it contestant—on this week's episode of

"CROSSING THE RIVER, THEMES!!!!"

With your host,

Waaaaaaayne Brady!"

*paintings flash on the screen in quick succession.

"Overrated"

"Derivative"

"Amateurish"

"Pass"

"I hate this job.

I hate everything.

I hate my life."

I could SWEAR you’ve made this post before, or perhaps this is such a characteristically “you” concept that I already imagined a world in which you had

Asked 7 years, 4 months ago, by [staminamina]

Modified 2 hours ago

Viewed 1k times

Just like the title says.

The rules text for Fine Materials from Principia says

Fine materials […] when used for an enchantment project, allow you to create things beyond your normal limits, including beyond the normal level cap of 30. […] wondrous materials allow an increase of three levels.

It’s obvious they meant this to go past 30, since they say it, but notably, they also extend the enchantment time/cost/difficulty table to level 33, and add 31 to the prime table, so they clearly have support for it.

The problem is that Toil and Trouble adds tandem enchantment, and I don’t know what to make of its rules!

The text reads:

While enchanters normally guard their secrets jealously, working alone, they can perform remarkable feats together. […] if allowing total cooperation, where no secrets are kept from each other, the boost increases to 5.

Which, unlike Principia, doesn’t stipulate it can go past level 30, but also doesn’t specify otherwise.

Muddying the waters, Toil and Trouble doesn’t extend the time/cost/difficulty table, but does give the appropriate formula for how to calculate those values at each level past 25 (which do line up with Principia).

Perhaps most importantly, if these modifiers did stack, we would have access to the prime 37 enchantments, which are not described anywhere in the book to my knowledge.

My instinct is that tandem enchantment caps at 30, or else does not stack with wondrous materials.

--

ACCEPTED ANSWER by [goodgriefer] (+12)

P.125:Principia states the following on the topic of stacking buffs.

When multiple effects modify some element of the creation process, they apply only to what portion of the process makes logical sense. A 10% reduction to the cost of reagents will not reduce the cost of shipping the final product. When two effects modify overlapping sections of the creation process, additive/subtractive effects are applied simultaneously, then multiplicative effects are applied simultaneously.

Then on P.169:Principia, we see

Drunkenness – A state of intoxication, whether by alcohol or other, more exotic substances, caps an enchanter’s effective level at 2 levels below their actual level, regardless of any other buffs

From this we can gather that multiple ‘effective level’ effects should be able to stack (there just wasn’t another such effect that increased levels, as of Principia), and that if they intend something to set a cap, they probably will.

That implies that, yes, you can technically create a level 38 enchantment (or 37).

As for what the theoretical prime 37 enchantments would be, I would point to P.56:Principia on the existing prime enchantments, which says:

Often, a player may wish to create an enchantment that is outside the scope of the primes, especially as it is recommended for a character to have an eventual capstone goal for their enchanting career. In such cases, it is worth remembering that the only enchantment known categorically to be impossible is one that confers true immortality. It may be possible to approximate using a combination of primes, or else by adding the functionality to an existing prime. Page 287 lists commonly used prime combinations.

Which is to say: A prime can have whatever functionality it needs to for a game to make sense. Considering 37 is so far beyond normal enchanting as to be unthinkable to the average enchanter, it makes a logical place to put whatever macguffin result overarches the whole game.

And to be clear, when I say ‘unthinkable’ I mean unthinkable; taking a look at the formula in T&T more closely, as well as taking into account the cost of using Wondrous Materials (or even Marvellous Materials, if you just want a new prime)

First, a theoretical level 38 enchanted item would take over 40 years for an enchanter to create (and no, you don’t get the assistant improvement to creation time from tandem enchantment, you’re doing it purely for the level boost).

Second, the cost, (including the increase from wondrous materials), would be on the order of 12 million gold.

Even if you had the time and the money, you’d still be stuck, because setbacks are rolled for on a monthly basis, and lose a percentage of progress. Without mitigation, you’re looking at losing 4 to 20 years of progress, about every two years. Mathematically, your odds of completing this project, are basically zero, especially if you’re mortal.

The only way to have a reasonable chance of creating an item with level 37/38 enchantments is to have two lead enchanters of level 29/30, with functionally limitless funding, and then also, to have some significant number of assistants, who, I will note, will have to be of at least level 27 to 28, due to the 10 level gap limit for assistants. Doing the math, a quick and dirty estimate suggests you’ll need at least 5 such assistants to maybe break even, and realistically, you’ll the maximum 18-19 of them to actually get the project done in a reasonable timeframe, which, may I note, is still ten years, which is probably more like twenty years, due to the probability of setbacks.

That is to say, to create a prime 37 enchantment, you need a team of about 20 world class enchanters to spend 10-20 years of their lives, with limitless funding (likely in the realm of 50 million gold, after accounting for who you have to pay, and the increased material cost from setbacks), to put their lives entirely on hold, and pool the entirety of their knowledge without reservation.

That is not a two person project. That is the manhattan project. That is the project that your players will, in the endgame, either get pulled into, or have to resist getting pulled into. That is an overarching plot thread that is running from the very beginning of the game.