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[grendeljd]

Does anyone really care that much if gremlin #32 off by himself at the side of the board gets 1 less movement point?  Maybe..maybe not.

Hey, quit pickin' on my gremlin swarms already! LoL - *I* care about gremlin#32!!!

[sergeant_hastp]

Well...I suppose if he was important enough to shoot at...he was cared about at least a little...but it'd not his movement points that are worrisome.  lol.

[KrisM]

I like the idea, but only on exact rolls, or perhaps a 'natural 6,' likening it to a 'critical' in most other system's parlance.

Having to constantly flip through hit charts is what killed the Rolemaster pen and paper system for a friend and me.  We not-so-affectionately call it 'Chartmaster' 

[smokingwreckage]

I hate charts.

[Scoutzout]

I and many gamers LOVE charts and detail and crunch. That's whats wonderful about the spectrum of gamers  -  you have Speed Demons who want to roll a handful of dice and resolve everything immediately. You have your chess players who analyze every unit profile and tactic and then you have the PHD guys who want to know what manufacturing plant made those Forcewall Grenades. Instead of saying "hate it" I think "I don't normally like to play that way but I think xyz would be a great option.

The goal is to tailor the game to give all the player types OPTIONS. In the gaming world, if you don't continue to release new options, new units, new expansions your game dies no matter what level of tactical brilliance it may offer.

For example. I (like a million other gamers) am building my own set of rules

Base Rules: Alternating Actions based on initiative with 3 actions per round
Advanced Rules: Alternating Actions with reactions (out of sequence reactions called Counters)
Option rules: Alternating Actions with Counters and  Heroic Actions (Counters that cant be countered except by another Heroic Action)

My group has been play-testing it a lot in the last 6 months and some HATE heroic actions but provide excellent input, about why they hate it. Others love it and provide great feedback on why they like it.  Its great for me because I can take information from both sides and try to find that common ground. Perhaps heroic is ONLY optional. Perhaps its critical to turning the tide in games, saving your ass or just crushing your opponent. Perhaps it belongs in an RPG only  In the end input from all sides makes the game better...

[smokingwreckage]

To be constructive: I work a lot and I have kids, and when I get some games in it'll be because I have some friends visiting and it's kinda a mini-con. Breaking play to check charts chews up time, and getting interrupted partway through a multi-part resolution is more disruptive than getting interrupted in a simple resolution, especially if the multi-part imposes a high cost in terms of working memory. At a personal/social level, if a game looks too complex to me, no-one I know will like it; relative to everyone I know, I'm the one who loves crunch (not always the same as complex resolution IMO).

I am fully in favour of modular, optional complexity.

[Scoutzout]

I agree with you on the simple=fast and doesn't get bogged down approach.  Especially with new players, complex rules shut them down pretty fast, and  I am not evan talking Rolemaster levels 

I just want to make sure that any optional rules get as much scrutiny as the core rules.

[Dave Chase]

MageKnight, HeroClix, Halo Clix, now those are simple rules.

Dave Chase

[smokingwreckage]

Too big a buy-in.

[Scoutzout]

We tried this method this weekend for wounds in L0S

Created an "effect die" like Dave Chase suggested. Its less granular than the Wound Table but easy to remember. I also made Red Cross Tokens in MS Word with -1/-2 and OoA

If the Roll was exact
1 - No effect (Armor, Dud, Luck)
2-3 Light Wound -1 Fire -1 MP
4-5 Severe Wound -2 Fire, -2 MP
6 Medic! Out of Action (OoA) Model is down for the battle but not killed.


Hero Points|leadership could be used to reduce effect score by 1, but no more than one point could be used in this manner. "Watch yer Ass" seemed like a good leadership action...

Observations
We tried Dave Chases idea to roll the effect dice "at the same time." This resulted in a problem for High ROF attacks  -Its a LOT of dice, especially with autofire. Multiple dice had to be thrown separately or special combos of colors had  to be identified. It was actually faster to resolve the attack, determine if there were any exacts hits and then throw the effect dice.

Tracking Wounds-Some used mini red dice for the modifiers, my tokens were paper and a pain since they were so light - some just marked their unit sheet. We only had about 5 out of 23 models the entire game who suffered from wounds so it wasn't a major time consumer.

Wounding became a point of discussion for the medic model (which someone mentioned here as well) Thoughts were that a medic  in an adjacent square could reduce the level of the effect die by one by expending a fire action.

It was faster than wound table and easy to remember.


We tried some Planetstorm with some a few figures, we will do a larger battle next week.

1-2 Pin
3-4 Pin and  Light Wound -1 Fire -1 MP
5-6 Pin and Severe Wound -2 Fire, -2 MP

Since pinning is part of the Planetstorm rules I removed the no effect option and the OoA option. Essentially if you don't Kill you will Pin at minimum and wound to some degree 66+% of the time. You can still use hero/leadership to convert a pin as normal or reduce wound effect die score

[smokingwreckage]

This isn't an objection, just a thought. My maths or my intuition might equally be way off the mark.

How did you handle multiple-kill figures? I'd be a bit peeved if my colossus suffered a "wound" incurring a -2 penalty rather than just losing 1 "kill".

Option one: only take "wounds" on the final kill, makes 2+kill figures slightly less durable, relatively, if you only look at the possibility that a 1-kill would avoid injury altogether on a 1.

Option two: take wounds on first "kill" means you could suffer a -2 where under vanilla rules you'd have no penalty.

Option three: take wounds on any "kill" means a 2-kill colossus or fiend could accumulate -4 in penalties and not be dead.

So, there's the question of balancing, relative to the previous balance of power for troopers versus fiends, the fact that fiends would either lose the opportunity to operate without penalty after taking one lethal hit, or lose the 1/6th of a bonus "life" that the "no effect" roll implies.

OTOH this is not something that you want to complicate with a heap of conditional rules.

[Scoutzout]

Hey Object away..

I agree stacking wound on multi wound units would suck. I think your option 1 is right inline with the rules as written. No "wounds" until the last one. I believe, In fact it makes makes them more durable (which I like) because that last Kill could be a light wound instead of an outright kill. We didn't use any 2 wound units in the game this week. I will add a couple for sure this weekend to see how it goes. I was actually surprised we didn't have a lot of wounds.

Page 37 " In the case of two kill figures the rules are not used until the figure has been reduced to a single kill"


I also dont know how much I like the "no effect" especially when its a high target number to begin with. If I get lucky and roll a 7 on that fiend, and unlucky enough to roll a one on the chart I dont do ANYTHING? It could be a little more tilted in the attackers favor.

1-2 Light Wound -1 Fire -1 MP
3-4 Severe Wound -2 Fire -2 MP
5-6 Kill

[Clark]

Keep in mind the LOS rule that limits the number of wounds per figure to one pluss leadership/hero points.  So for most figs, a wound might be a temporary reprieve but the second time you score an exact kill they are toast because it doesn't matter if that is a wound or a kill, they are still out of action. In a way, this sort of balances high ROF/kill# weapons because multiple kills on the same target are useless when then is no wounding.