A Game-Full Weekend (plus!)

 It is Tuesday, May 5th. Cinco de Mayo, but also Children's Day in Korea and Japan. A public holiday. Yesterday (May the Fourth) I had to work, but today was a day off. And we just finished up a really fun Star Wars d6 session a couple of hours ago. 

But before I get to that, I got a lot of writing done on Missions & Mayhem over the weekend.  I did a little bit of editing of the main rules, but mainly I was working on the next campaign module, Bughunts & Bedlam which covers military-adjacent, horror-adjacent sci fi like the Alien series, Starship Troopers, the Ender books (and movie), and games like Contra, Doom, Xenophobe (remember that one?), Halo, and countless others. I finished up the advanced classes (Agent, Cosmosoldier, Planetologist, Space Cowboy, and Xenologist), got started on weapons and gear, and wrote rules for androids. 

On Sunday, Justin, Steven and I joined Peter for a game of BattleTech: Alpha Strike.  None of us had played before, so we stuck to the quickstart rules. It was pretty easy to get into, and not overly complex like the full BattleTech game is (or so I've heard). I ended up winning by getting both of my objective tokens off the board first, but it was close. The mech with the second token was drawing lots of fire, and all its armor was gone. It had three points of body integrity left, and Justin failed to kill me in the second to last round. I failed initiative every round, meaning I got to go first (there's advantage to move after everyone else has) and get my damaged mech off the board. Justin shared some pictures: 

 It was fun, and hopefully we can play it again. But we also want to play more Mutant Year Zero Zone Wars, and more Stargrave. And Peter suggested trying Bolt Action next time. 

 In a related note, yesterday I was chatting with an acquaintance about the upcoming Busan Con (May 23-24). He was asking if there were any wargames scheduled. I said I was thinking about running some Chainmail next time (next Fall, probably), and he said he has over 300 1/72 scale Medieval knights/warriors we could use. I've got plenty of 1/72 scale warriors, wizards, and monsters, so we may make something of this. 

And finally, today's Star Wars d6 game (It is Revenge of the Fifth, today!).  The timeline is now shortly after the Battle of Endor. The last time we played (quite a long time ago), the guys suggested that going after the Imperial Remnant would be fun. So I made an adventure where a mysterious Alliance spy named Fulcrum* sent them on a mission to recover a Jedi Holocron from a remote Imperial base that has been understaffed due to the losses at Endor. 

They came up with a good enough plan to get in, but then came up with (and a lucky die roll improved) a second plan, which they implemented to get in easily. Once in, Michel the Jedi (Steven's character) sensed the holocron in the center of the structure. They managed to sneak in easily enough, avoiding security, then found out the holocron was guarded by a rancor! 

After quite a few useless blaster and slugthrower shots, Michel the Jedi got a lucky roll (and an unlucky damage resistance roll by the rancor) and slew the beast with a single stroke of his lightsaber! He had a 6 on the wild die for the damage roll, I got a 1 on the wild die for the resistance roll. And my other dice were low. They had tripped an alarm, so had to fight a few battles with stormtroopers (stun grenades made it pretty easy), and managed to get away. 

Now they're deciding if they want to keep the holocron or turn it over to Fulcrum.

Peter joined us for this game, and Jada was playing d6 Star Wars for the first time (she's not really into SW, but she's seen a few movies). They both got the rules easily, and enjoyed the game. And both of them came up with some good ideas during the game that definitely helped. 

Back to work tomorrow, but it's been a fun and game-filled weekend and a day.  

 

 

*Yes, if you've watched Rebels, that Fulcrum! 

Mutant Year Zero: Zone Wars

Yesterday, I met with Justin and a guy we met on the TTRPG in Korea Discord group to play Zone Wars, a tactical tabletop skirmish game based on the Mutant Year Zero RPG. Peter wanted to get some war gaming in over the long Chuseok holiday. Sandwiched between National Foundation Day on Friday the 3rd and Hangeul Day (Korean written characters get a holiday...yeah, a day to help prevent Koreans from overworking) on the 9th, we've got an entire week off, 10 days in a row for people who can take the 10th as a holiday. 

Free League link

Board Game Geek link 

The game plays pretty similarly to Stargrave, which my son and I played with Justin a while back. I thought I'd posted about that game here, but apparently I didn't. Both games have players managing a tactical team across the "board" to defeat the other teams or collect enough loot to win. 

When we played Stargrave, I quickly realized that the loot collection was the key to winning, so getting loot and getting my figures off the board was my strategy. And it worked. 

Zone Wars has a similar strategy. There are artifact tokens across the board (it's a post-apoc setting, after all) that score victory points. But you also get points for defeating other players' figures.  To cut to the chase, Peter used my strategy from the Stargrave game, while Justin and I were more into duking things out. Peter won. 

The initial set-up. I'm yellow, Peter is blue, Justin is green.

The game has four factions (two in the base game, two in the expansion): mutant humans and mutant animals (base), androids and psychers (expansion). There are five characters/figures for each faction, but you have to choose three of them for your team (at least for the first scenario that we played). 

Justin's dudes teamed up on my gatherer, and stole his loot.

Each comes with starting equipment and mutations set, but with a bonus random mutation. Justin took the mutant animal team, I took the mutant human team, and Peter played as the android team. And we all seemed to take one tough/melee figure, one ranged expert figure, and one balanced figure. I'm not sure about the other factions, but the two I left behind were another ranged expert and another balanced figure.

My melee guy takes out Peter's sniper just before 30-50 feral hogs rampage through me!

The game has a lot more randomness than Stargrave. Not only do you roll dice for actions, but the initiative is done by pulling chits from a bag. There's one chit per figure, and four Zone chits, which trigger events. And there's a ticking time bomb in the form of Trigger events that scale up the acid rain which will kill anyone still on the board once four have been drawn. 

Land Shark! (unfortunately, no one was eaten)

The random mutations and events, and the ability to not only switch factions but experiment with different teams within your faction should add to replayability, but will also make the game take a little longer to really sus out the best strategies for each faction/team composition. There's obviously an optimal strategy of grabbing loot and running over fighting (due to the built in time limit of acid rain), but where's the fun in that time after time? 

My runner recovered and knocked out Justin's dudes with his mutation...but my sniper was downed.

Anyway, we're planning to meet again in a few weeks, hopefully with a fourth player if we can find one, to play it again. Peter also seems interested in trying Stargrave or Frostgrave, so we may try one of those out as well in the near future.  

A robot named Bender grabbed a bunch of loot and made it off the board before the acid rain fell. Fitting.

 

Happy Little Accidents

Back in early January, I posted about painting minis from my 1/72 collection. Over the course of January and February, I did end up painting quite a bit. I hadn't posted about them because I hadn't taken many pictures. But today, I did take some pictures for the TTRPG in Korea Discord group I'm in, and I figured I'd share these little rascals here as well.

I painted one set of Cyclopes and a set of Minotaurs, both from Red Box Dark Alliance. I didn't take a picture of them today, so that will have to wait. 

Then I finally painted the Caesar Goblins that I bought I'm not sure how many years ago. Maybe 10? These goblins look cool, but they're only wearing loin clouts, so I think I do need more goblins with armor on them. The easy way to distinguish these guys are the color coding on their loin clouts.

Then, I got some more of the Red Box historical Russian War Monk Artillery, and some figures from Strelets' Vikings and Scotish Army of Wallace sets that I bought way back around the time I got the Caesar goblins. The war monks make good magic-users/clerics, and the others became a mix of possible clerics (mace/club/war hammer in hand) and fighter-types. A few of the war monks were painted and shown in that post linked above from back in January. 

The Fighters

The Clerics

The Magic-Users

 

No, I don't have enough Thief types. I have an order pending with Michigan Toy Soldier Company, which includes the Red Box Dark Alliance "Southern Kingdom Rangers" (based on Faramir's Rangers of Ithillien) and some more goblins with armor.

Just at the end of the winter break, I but a base coat on my Red Box DA Half-Orcs (based on Saruman's uruk-hai from the movies), but I haven't had time to paint any more than that the past two months. 

For the Discord, I also posted a couple of reference pictures to show the scale of these guys. If you're using Reaper, WotC/Wizkids, or other similar scale minis, these guys can be halfings or gnomes. Here's the WotC Warduke mini next to a goblin and the Macho Man wizard (The resemblance was not intentional, it was the happy little accident of all this painting!).

 

 

Modifying the Mass Combat System (War Machine) again

As advised after a previous post on my War Machine modifications, I took a look at how Dark Dungeons does it, as well as the advice in the Stormbringer RPG, and some thoughts from internet commenters about some other RPG systems' mass combat rules. 

As I think I mentioned before, Dark Dungeons X switches from d% to d20 rolls, so all the bonuses from War Machine are divided by 5. It also (I don't think I mentioned this) has a table look-up for basic troop quality as with War Machine, and a Troop Quality based on how much you pay for your troops. That gives you a number. I don't mind chart look-ups in general, but the original War Machine gave me a number without a clunky chart reference, and I prefer that. 

Stormbringer basically says the DM decides who wins or loses the battle, and characters involved roll to see whether or not they took damage/died, and if not whether or not they improve their skills. Too abstract for me. I want something a bit crunchier, and out of the DM's hands. I like to be surprised. Plus, we're playing a game. Taking your character's forces into battle should pose some risk. 

So I'm sticking with my basic idea, although this evening I went and streamlined a few things. This moves it a bit farther from War Machine (a good thing, if I want to publish this), and also hopefully makes things a little easier for the players to calculate. I've tried to stick to simple bonuses/penalties (+5, +10, -20, etc) for most things after the initial force calculations. 

Another change that I made this evening is that for the tactical choices (engage, overrun, surround, feint, hold, withdraw), which is pretty much as in War Machine, certain armies will get an additional bonus. Archers help with normal engagement, heavy troops (foot or mounted) with overrunning, mounted troops with surrounding, magical/spellcasting troops with feints, pikemen/halbardiers with holding, and light troops with withdrawing. 

That's something I think was lacking in the original rules. A more balanced force will get more bonuses for troop composition, but the specialized force gets a tactical bonus if you play to their strengths (but of course, the opponent may select a tactic that counters the optimal tactic...).

I'll try to play test these rules soon.

Rules for Mass Combat: Fiddling Around

This week, I've been fiddling around with Frank Mentzer's War Machine rules from the BECMI Companion Set. I've always liked these rules. They can handle huge wars or small skirmishes with just a few calculations, a pair of die rolls, and some table look-ups. The only problem is that those calculations can be a bit clunky at times. 

For those that don't know, the War Machine has you first calculate a Basic Force Rating (BFR), depending on the leader's level and mental ability scores, the level/HD of the troops and their officers, and a few other things. This score determines the Troop Class (Poor through Elite). 

Once the BFR and Troop Class are determined, there are more calculations to get the Battle Rating based on things like training, arms and equipment, and force composition (how many archers, what percent of spellcasters, etc.). These bonuses are based on a percentage of the BFR, so different for each force. This produces the Battle Rating (BR).

Oh, and then when the army finally takes the field and meets the enemy, the BR of both forces gets modified by various factors of the encounter (relative force size, high ground, favorable/unfavorable terrain, defensive positions), and there are options to add on battle tactics with a 6x6 table reminiscent of the Chainmail Jousting table. 

Once the BR has been modified for each side due to the battle conditions, each side rolls a d100 and adds it to the modified BR. The higher total wins, and the difference in totals is referenced on a chart to show how many casualties each side takes, whether or not the forces are fatigued by the battle, and whether the loser has to retreat and whether the victor is allowed to hold the field or advance. 

Sounds complicated, but when we used to use it as kids, it worked really well for us. Most of the calculations get made when the force is created, with updates for training or for purchasing better equipment, or hiring a different cohort of troops (adding more cavalry, for example). And once a battle happened, it was kind of fun to go through the list of factors to see what we could add or subtract from our forces. Then then die roll! Sweet victory, or agonizing defeat all in one roll. It was pretty exciting. But it can be a bit time consuming.

So I've been looking to streamline the process. I've got a first draft of a simplified version of the rules, but they're not actually all that simplified looking over them again. Basically, I take out the Troop Class and separating BFR and BR. Just calculate a BR from the factors I've kept to consider. The factors that make BR based on a fraction of the BFR have just flat values now. Most of the things to consider in a battle I've kept the same (or nearly so, I did change around a few numbers, and incorporated many of the optional rules that we used to use). 

Now, the Companion Set does include a "quick BR" formula, which ignores a lot and is a lot faster to calculate. We would usually have full long-form BRs for our Name Level PCs' armies, but when a rampaging horde of orcs and trolls showed up, we'd use the quick BR to get their values (which often gave us a big advantage, as the quick BR ignores a lot of things that might give bonuses). 

This weekend, I plan to run a few war games with the boys to try out my current first draft. If it goes well, great! If it's a bit clunky still, I may modify it to be more like the Quick BR alternate system, as it is very fast and no fuss, no muss. I think that if all armies are made with the same system, it will be more fair.

The one thing I still need to set up before the weekend games would be "mercenary prices" for various monsters. I've included the mercenary tables from the Expert Set in TS&R, but that just covers humans, dwarves, elves, orcs, and goblins (plus halflings in my version). There are no prices for having ogres, manticores, ghouls, dragons, or giants in your forces, although the War Machine has rules to handle armies containing creatures like these. I never had a set price guide determined when we were kids, as the DM (usually but not always me) could just create opponent armies from scratch, and our PCs mostly stuck to standard mercenaries (and the occasional subdued dragon) in their forces. 

I think it's time to open up my Chainmail PDF and compare point costs for troop types with point costs for fantasy supplement creatures and get some ideas.

Mass Combat Rules -- Do we need them? Do we want them?

I was involved in a discussion of the BECMI Companion Set War Machine mass combat rules recently, and it's got me thinking about them. 

I had thought about adding a version of them to Chanbara, but I'd given myself the arbitrary and artificial constraint of 64 pages, and there wasn't room. I did manage to work in a revision of the domain management rules from the same set, though. 

For Treasures, Serpents, & Ruins, I easily could take the time to revise/streamline/simplify those mass combat rules, but should I? 

I have never done hex-and-chit war games, although it's something I would love to try one day. I've only done a small amount of miniatures based war gaming (a homebrew system my brother and I worked up for little green army men as kids, a game of Chainmail once). My friends and I did use the Companion War Machine rules fairly often in our old campaign we had as kids, though. 

The system of the War Machine is designed to give you an overall result of a battle, not a play-by-play of every move and every tactic. You do some calculations before the battle for each force. You figure any modifiers at the time of battle (with basic tactical options as optional rules that can be added on). Both sides roll dice and add the force rating, higher result wins. Check the difference in the results on the table to determine casualties and disposition of each force. 

Is it perfect? No.

Is it realistic? Not at all.

Is it simple to implement? I think so.

Does it allow you to add mass combat actions to D&D without overshadowing the PCs and their adventures? Yes. 

As I said already, I like this system because it's light and easy to implement, but it allows for some options to make it more complex if that's what the players want. So, audience of mine, I really would like to get your opinions on this. Would it be worth my time to go to the effort of revising/restating these rules to add to TS&R? Would you like to see something like this? Would it be useful to you? Should I spend a bunch of time on this, or not? 

My wife is wonderful (gaming related)

My wife just graciously allowed me to order three more boxes of samurai minis from the Michigan Toy Soldier Company. This is in preparation for my "Siege of Dongnae" Chainmail game I want to run.

Sure, I could have filled in the ranks with other minis--using my Caesar Elves, Dwarves and Goblins, or the Red Box Orcs I recently bought, not to mention my 1/72 scale Robin Hood, Moors and Viking minis from way back to supplement the ranks.

But I'd like for the Japanese army to look mostly like they're Japanese. I've got two boxes of Red Box Koreans (heavy and light infantry), so about 100 figs.

I've had a box of Zvezda samurai infantry for years. Now I've ordered the cavalry set from Zvezda, along with two boxes of ashigaru--one of spearmen, one of archers/arquebussiers--from Red Box. That's about 170 samurai figures total.

In the actual battle, the Koreans were outnumbered around 6 to 1, so I'd still need to use some supplemental figures if I want to get that accurate, but I will likely give the Koreans a fighting chance and leave it at that.

Chainmail: The Siege of Dongnae

Looking for fun things to do with my group involving war games, and the 2nd confrontation of the Imjin War (Toyotomi Hideyoshi's invasions of Korea) might be fun.

According to Wikipedia on the battle, 3000 Korean soldiers fought to the end defending Dongnae fortress against roughly six times as many Japanese.

I have nearly enough Korean soldier minis (in 1/72 scale) to handle their side, but not nearly enough Japanese. Vikings, Moors, Orcs, Elves and the like may have to round out the numbers.

I do have this:


It could serve as the centerpiece of the battle, with some walls and slopes around it for the Korean defenders.

This could be fun both because it would allow me to try out the Chainmail rules in a historical setting first before throwing in the ogres and pixies and wizards, and also because it's in our back yard. I've been to the Dongnae Fortress on a field trip with the kindergarten I teach at.

I might see if I can find some time to go back and get a good look around for purposes of study.

[Side note: In the first 24 hours since I posted my documents, I've had 16 people download the weapons one, and 6 each the armor and w/s/r documents. Hope you all enjoy them!]