We played the three game campaign described a few posts ago. Simon took the role of the protagonists, with Greg and I alternating playing the changing cast of foes. This was a full test of the v18 Flashing Steel rules, without exceptions, transposed into a Japanese setting to see if it would work.
Interestingly, Simon had no use for the Swashbuckling rules. They just did not come up as a likely set of actions for these particular heroes to employ. This is a good finding as it fits our intention that the rules should be modular and about introducing (role-playing) choices. They were there but not mandatory, and on this occasion the drama of the game did not falter for the lack of them.
All the Special rules worked as anticipated, though we bumped up against (yet) again the truth that core Songs is a very grainy system. The difference between Q4 and Q3 is great. Throw in a Q2, as Simon is wont to do as he hails from the camp that believes in the myth of the Samurai superhero, and you have a very difficult to beat model. Ultimately, Greg managed it by ganging up on him – and this too is the correct finding.
Ultimately, all of these findings confirmed Flashing Steel as a working narrative war-game system. We told each other great stories about heroes, in other words.
Game one wrapped up with lightening quickness. Simon’s men sprinted to the General’s pavilion in a string of great activation rolls. To get the message delivered he had to make two Difficult Quality checks (one to go through the necessary politenesses, the second to actually tell the news that the attack must be delayed). Greg peppered the samurai with arrows, but since he was using true Japanese style and not aiming, had no effect. In a memorable moment, one of Simon’s men apologised and interrupted his conversation to the General in order to step to the pavilion door and calmly drop an attacker with a well aimed bow shot.
Game two looked more promising with the monks in a defensive posture around the gate of their sanctuary. Greg again populated the board with his latest acquisitions from the aquarium, and it looked great. When Simon’s men rode into the courtyard they were jumped on and assaulted with fanatical intensity. But the mounted Samurai hacked their way to safety. One of the monk teppo men discharged his arkebus, but alas, to no effect. The monks were slaughtered to a man, except for one who surrendered – don’t like his chances.
In Game three, the board was dense with broken ground in the form of a woody belt against sand dunes, and the cluttered streets of the village. All movement was reduced to short. Simon’s men had a harder time of this, compounded by the elusive movement of Greg’s troops, transmogrified at the eleventh hour from Ronin to Ninja (more cinematic). It was here that Greg managed to bail up one of the aggressors, surround him and finally cut him down. Elsewhere, horses baulked while trying to jump fences, and ninjas swarmed trying to separate Simon’s men into individuals so they could be dealt with. However, as the ninja casualties approached 50%, Greg conceded the game, set and match.
From a recurring story point of view, we now know that the original battle would have gone ahead, and would (doubtless) have been successful. Therefore, the clan that conducted the kidnapping has suffered a defeat, as well as having lost face for failing to bring their plot to completion. This must call for retaliation. On the protagonist’s side we have a death. A noble death, as Simon gravely observed, but a death, none-the-less. Therefore, should Simon ever wish to bring these heroes back into a new story, he will need to introduce a rookie and nurture him.
Flaming Plasma is the name of the rules set I am building to enable me to play skirmish games in my Ornithopter setting. It is based on Song of Blades and Heroes, and has inspiration from several older rules sets. Importantly, I hope for it to be generic enough to be thrown into the ring with the plethora of other generic sets. Oh… the dream.
Anyway, I consider my greatest contribution to the world of rules to be in the tools for designing sessions – mini-campaigns. The format for Flashing Steel seems sound: asking Where, What, Why and Who questions and then fleshing out the details. The trick is to remain generic but still give sufficient flavour. Science fiction is just fantasy, of course, and whatever you say can only eliminate some possibilities, and alienate some readers who saw it differently.
I read a set of rules once that claimed to be generic, allowing you to play with whatever miniatures you had. It then went on to describe the politics and economics of a notional world of the author’s construction. He described the factions and force construction principles. In short, he enabled you to play not anything that you had models for, but anything that HE had models for.
So this is what must be avoided. The goal is to be specific enough for the players to design their forces and decorate the table from the random items, but to be generic enough so that they do not have to share the same art sensibilities as the author.
StarBlazer Adventures may come to the rescue again, as it has already when I was attempting to overcome the problem of shooting at armoured vehicles. There are some great random tables in there. And these are the basic design principles I had in mind: http://shichitenhakki.wordpress.com/rpgs-using-mythic/ornithopter/ Is this too restrictive already? The stuff about no aliens? Should that be relaxed? Probably, or at least the language needs to be modified so the existance of creatures that are not-like-man is definitely possible.
Another test of Flashing Steel last night, this time bringing every element together in an asymmetric encounter (heroic characters versus ordinary). The scenario was based on one of Greg’s sample campaign scenarios: on the road to Calais, a captive is being held.
I had five powerful models (for example: Philippe. Q3C3. Rapier, Pistol, Panache, Blur of steel, Danger sense, Hero. There were others with variations on this theme having special rules including Impetus, Multiple foes, Follow on and Great defence). Greg had a whole bunch or ordinary soldiers who did not have the crucial specials of Panache, Blur of Steel or Hero.
The key finding was that the system, as we have designed it, holds together well. It still falls far short of the free-wheeling And One For All, but that was a specific set designed for a convention and really tailored for a role-playing audience. Flashing Steel, on the other hand, allows plenty of cinematic action, while still holding it together as a coherent rules set. Players will be able to ‘work the rules’ just as much as they can work their imagination to come up with thrilling stunts. And this is good since most wargamers I know are shocking rules-lawyers. Most importantly, we confirmed that these extensions to the Song of Blades and Heroes engine do not break the fundamentals of that system.
Specific findings: guns work exactly as intended. They either have no effect in a clean miss, or the victim goes down like a sack of potatoes. A little more clarification is needed for visibility.
Barring disaster preventing these final few edits, we are well on track for the self-imposed submission deadline of this Sunday. And already we are thinking of the next, and the next after that, era and setting that we wish to work on.
How to achieve a mass fire effect, but still have hits against individuals. This is the problem of tactical, but not so personal that they are really role-playing, miniatures games.
The goal is to allow the volley, because ten men could actually get together and do that. But at the same time we want to allow sharp shooters. Just because the matchlock had a low rate of fire and short range, there is no reason why some men would not have chosen to master the weapon and get the most out of it. Most would not, of course, but at the individual level it is only reasonable that we make provision for the individual shot.
It’s easy enough to have one man shoot at one man. It’s easy enough to have a mass of men shoot at a mass of men when at the end you are removing abstract homogenous casualty figures. But if you have a mass fire effect, say from a volley of muskets, when every shooter is a known individual shooting at a group of targets who are also known individuals, the problem of hit allocation rears its head.
Guerra Floridas apportions the hits according to the target ranks – an automatic assumption that cannon-fodder get it first.
Avalon Hill’s Up Front applies a base number for the volley, and then adds a random modifier and inflicts this on every target figure. But in this case they are modelling potentially high rates of fire.
But then again, to talk of rate of fire is to talk about time. And what is the time scale for More Escarmouche? Certainly a personal scale, measured in minutes. But is it so short that we are addressing individual discharges of matchlock muskets, as we are in Escarmouche?
These thoughts have been chasing themselves in my head over the last 48 hours. The main cause is my natural revulsion at the idea of a table. The idea of table implies a slowing down of the action. Tables have gone right out of fashion. The second is the fear that the dice economy will either level out differences so greatly that any talk of individual differences in the characters is simply window dressing. Or worse, that individual differences become so strong that the dice roll is irrelevant: “Sgt Cleft never misses”. Or, even worse still, that the whole thing becomes too luck driven.
These are normal considerations, and they only really come out at play test time.
Posted in Rules design, Wargaming
Tagged 30yw, design, dice, ecw, escarmouche, guerra floridas, more escarmouche, musket, Rules design, skirmish, sniper, up front
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