More Monsters and Wizards!

It's been a few years since I added to my 1/72 scale miniatures collection, despite getting many of them painted up. I actually need to re-paint quite a few of them, as the summer heat, and possibly the clear top coat I used, caused a lot of the paint to melt/blend, and the figures don't look anywhere near as good as they did when I finished painting them. Looking back through old blog posts, I don't think I posted pictures of the finished products, just a work in progress post and this one from two years ago when I finally painted the lizard men. 

Well, I had a set of Caesar Adventurers which covered a lot of LotR types, plus a few Conan style barbarian types. I had Caesar Elves, Dwarves, and Goblins as well. 

And I had Red Hat Dark Alliance Cimmerians, Amazons, Half-Orcs, regular Orcs...

One problem, and a reason why I still hesitate to switch to 1/72 scale minis instead of standard 28mm minis (not that I'm using minis at all for D&D these days...) is that there just aren't enough spell-caster types. 

I have a few from the Caesar Adventurers and Elves. I had a set of historical Vikings and one of Robin Hood characters (forget who made both of them) that had a few poses that could be a spell-caster. There's one Dark Alliance Cimmerian shaman. Definitely not enough cleric/druid/magic-user types. 

Well, I ordered some more Red Hat/Dark Alliance figures for my birthday. They arrived today. And I'm pleased to say that the Red Hat historical Russian War Monk Artillery make for good spell-caster types! They're all male, but at least I've now got a bunch of robed, bearded little dudes that could be PC or NPC spellcaster types. The tamping rods and fuse-sticks look like magic staves.

I also ordered the Dark Alliance Minotaur and Cyclops sets. I wanted to get their Southern Kingdoms Rangers set (based on Faramir's company in the LotR movies), which obviously are ranger/thief types, but my supplier was out (Michigan Toy Soldier Company -- I always get great customer service from these guys on my international orders!).

Here they are, with a few of the not so nice looking anymore Caesar Adventurers. The cyclopes are nice and big, and the minotaurs look fairly hefty next to them. 

Red Hat figures tend to come with a lot of flash that needs cleaning off, but the cyclops figures are really clean. The minotaurs and war monks not so much.

I compared these guys to a TSR (Dragonstrike board game) figure and a Reaper metal figure. The minotaurs look pretty wimpy next to them, but the cyclops set is still decently big by comparison.

With either scale, I think these will make good additions to the Gauntlet-inspired tactical board game rules I'm working on. 

Time to get these guys off their sprues!

An idea for a simple RPG or Tabletop Skirmish game?

Yesterday, a couple of things happened that proved serendipitous. Flynn, my older boy, has been trying to get a game development group started within the local independent (mostly expat) artist scene, a group called Liquid Arts. Some of you may remember the GoFundMe he made that I promoted a while back. Well, that failed. And yesterday he refunded the few backers that he got. But he's got an idea to start the Liquid Arts game design group working on board games, and if he has some success there, try again with the computer game design ideas. 

I explained this, and the Liquid Arts group, to one of my friends, who was a backer. And it got me thinking about some of the simple board games my best friend and I designed back in elementary and middle school. One or two of the ideas we had may be worth re-developing. 

Also, my younger boy Steven has been playing a lot of the GBA version of GTA on our Super Console X emulator lately, but yesterday he wanted to play some Gauntlet II with me. Which we did. And while playing, he was wondering about more modern versions of Gauntlet. I told him that there were a couple of 3D games during the PS1/PS2 era, Gauntlet Legends (for PS1, which I had), and Gauntlet Dark Legacy (for PS2, which I never had). He got me to look them up and see if we could acquire them for emulation. 

Our box doesn't have (and apparently isn't a good enough processor to handle) PS2 emulation, but I found Gauntlet Legends, and also the arcade (MAME) version of Dark Legacy last night. 

Anyway, ideas converged, and I started thinking about whether the way Gauntlet rates character abilities might work as the basis for a fantasy RPG. I found this pretty quickly. And yeah, with a few tweaks, and the addition of some mechanics for outside combat activities, it could work. Or, it could be merged with something to make a tabletop skirmish type wargame. Something probably more simple than my ideas to use 4E just for tabletop skirmish games.

For a while now, I've been interested in what D&D would be like if Chainmail combat were used. But I've had too many irons in the gaming fire to start up a campaign using the Platemail 27th Edition rules or something of my own devising. 

My thinking, as I was laying in bed last night not falling asleep, and this morning in the shower, were to maybe merge Gauntlet style character ratings with Chainmail man-to-man/fantasy combat (and the Dungeon! board game) 2d6 style combat. Maybe throw in something like the Classic D&D Turn Undead table for a resolution mechanic for non-combat tasks if needed. 

Gauntlet ratings (taken from the original version) could be translated to: 

• Speed (how many spaces you can move per turn)
• Armor (how much damage is reduced by your armor)
• Attack Power (how easily you hit when you attack, melee)
• Attack Strength (how many hits you inflict on a successful melee attack) 
• Attack Speed (how many melee attacks you can make on your turn)
• Shot Power (how easily you hit when you attack, ranged)
• Shot Strength (how many hits you inflict on a successful ranged attack)
• Shot Speed (how many ranged attacks you can make on your turn)
• Magic Power (how easy it is to successfully cast a spell)
• Magic Strength (how powerful are the effects of the spells you cast)

The above Speed, Armor, and Strength ratings would all be set numbers. The Power ratings would be modifiers to 2d6 rolls. The Strength ratings might have a few levels with variation, such as:

• Lvl 1: 1 hit
• Lvl 2: 1-2 hits (roll d6, 1-4=1 hit, 5-6=2 hits)
• Lvl 3: 2 hits
• Lvl 4: 2-3 hits (roll d6, 1-4=2 hits, 5-6=3 hits)
• Lvl 5: 3 hits

For the Attack/Shot Speed, I'd probably look to AD&D attack progression:

• Lvl 1: 1 attack per round
  
• Lvl 2: 3/2 attacks per round
  
• Lvl 3: 2 attacks per round
  
• Lvl 4: 5/2 attacks per round
  
• Lvl 5: 3 attacks per round
  

Of course, one thing to consider would be that Gauntlet characters have hundreds or thousands of hit points, and can kill hundreds or thousands of opponents on each level (and with emulation, adding a "quarter" for more health is as easy as pushing the Select button on the game pad). Monsters do large numbers of hits compared to PCs, and armor reduces that damage. That's something that would need to be changed. If this were an RPG, it would probably be more difficult to scale it correctly. But for a tabletop skirmish game, it might work out alright. 

A variation of this system may also work for one of those old games from my youth that I mentioned above. The game was probably the best (and most complex) game that Todd and I made as kids. We made a map of our home town. Since the home town is tiny, it was a fairly accurate map, as we had every actual house, store, and church on it, minus a few people's sheds and whatnot. The game was an alien invasion game. We over-complicated it by having just about every type of alien from UFO lore that we could think of, plus a few from sci-fi movies (little green men, Men-in-Black, Grays, Critters, robots, etc.). In the original, the aliens had the goal of planting bombs in buildings, while the heroes (us) had to raid buildings for tools/supplies/weapons (all on cards) to fight off the aliens and prevent the bombings. 

It was a tough game, as we made way too many aliens, and we played them ruthlessly. 

I was thinking as well that this might be an idea to revive. Instead of bombing the town, though, maybe it would be an abduction game. And it could be played either cooperatively (like our original game) or competitively, with one or more players as the Heroes and one or more players as the Aliens. 

Again, I'm wondering if a 2d6 style mechanic like my Gauntlet idea above might be fun for this. Originally, I think we had just a regular d6 mechanic. It's been a LONG time, and Todd had our only copy of the game.

So, it looks like this year I may be experimenting with some table top board/tactical game designs in addition to RPG stuff.

Tactical Board Crawl

So thanks to some advice and prodding from cavalier973 and Dean (Tallifer), I took another look at 4E with an eye to run it just as a tactical board game. And they were right. 

Dean suggested that the stat blocks, while complex looking, are actually convenient and lay out all the rules you need to run the monster right there. Now that I've refreshed myself on some of the basics of 4E, and what the stuff in the stat blocks mean, he's right. It's not so bad. 

And cavalier973 suggested that I look at the sample adventure in the back of the DMG. I did so, but then I also pulled out the module Keep on the Shadowfell, which Pat had also given me. The module actually goes over the basics, and I think I could actually run the module without the other rulebooks if I wanted to. I'll probably run that DMG kobold dungeon first, though, then KotS after that. 

And I'll take the more complicated version of things by letting the players (whoever they end up being) make their own PCs. Of course, KotS has some pregen PCs, so if anyone wants to just grab one of them, I'd also allow it. 

Now, I'll probably run this for my boys one of these days. Spring vacation lasts for another week or so. I may also try this with some more adult gamers, if any are willing. I'll ask the crew and see what they think.

What was I thinking? Am I still thinking it? Really?

I mentioned previously that I inherited Pat's 4E books. I tried 4E when it came out, and it wasn't for me. But then Dean ran a pretty fun game using it (before he converted the campaign to 5E), and I had a pretty good time with it...the way Dean ran the game. But honestly, I showed up to more of his games once he converted to 5E, which I like a lot more. 

So we've been playing this campaign style dungeon crawl board game. I mentioned that as well. And I was looking at the 4E books the other day, having played some Heroclix with my younger son last weekend (heavily simplified, because I don't really remember the rules for all the powers that well anymore), and thought, "Why don't I try to use these rules to just run some miniatures skirmish games? That's what these rules really do best, after all."

Then I started looking at the Monster Manual. And I'm not so sure I want to do this after all. 

The monster stat blocks are so complex, with so many fiddly little powers. I understand letting the players have a selection of powers to choose from, but the monsters just seem so...over done. 

I do think a lot of the powers are fairly standardized, so after a bit of experience with it, it will probably get better. But do I really want to spend a bunch of time on this? I could set up some fantasy tactical battles with Chainmail, instead, and that would be a lot simpler. 

Anyway, that's a maybe. The idea is still appealing, but I've probably got better things to do with my time.

____________

Oh, and if anyone's wondering, in the Heroclix game...I was playing with my figures from the 00's. Steven had his figures that he picked up in the US 3 years ago. I had Dr. Doom, Magneto, Kang, Hobgoblin, and Doc Oc. He had Captain America, Iron Man, Thor (Sakkar arena version with swords), Terror, and Hawkeye. I was way over points with my squad, but the newer versions are a lot cheaper for more power. Anyway, he smoked me. Magneto was my only figure to survive, and that's because I had him run away after everyone else went down. I was only able to damage Hawkeye. The game really doesn't work with mixed older and newer figures.