GenCon 2011 Scenario Details

[sgibson260]

Hi all,

I am planning on running my annual Legions of Steel game at GenCon this August. Here all the details for those who can make it:

Legions of Steel: Boarding Action

Imperial authorities detect a derelict vessel drifting towards the weapons research lab at Sartis III. Boarding shuttles deliver Stormtroopers to the abandoned vessel to search & secure the ship. Will the search be routine and uneventful, or will the Empire's shock troops be overwhelmed by the horrors within? Star Wars minis and Legions of Steel rules.

2-10 Players

Saturday, August 6 7PM-11PM

I have decided to use Star Wars stormtroopers again this year. Why? Because they're just awesome! Who are the mysterious occupants of the derelict vessel? If you've played in one of my GenCon scenarios before, you may be able to guess.

I am planning to run the game as 5 separate battlefields, with two short scenarios played by each player during the allotted time. The second scenario will be based on the player's performance in the first scenario (i.e. after a devastating loss in the first scenario, the player will fight a 'last stand' scenario. After a crushing win, he will play an 'overrun' scenario. It will allow me to better playtest the scenarios, and is the start of a set of linked campaign scenarios I'm working on.

Lastly, if you're interested, all of our group's GenCon events can be found here:
http://stevegibsongames.wordpress.com/novag-events-at-gencon-2011/

Regards,
Steve Gibson

Administrator Comment

updated the URL from Steve who (until 3 posts) is prevented from listing real urls

[Kindred]

hey Steve,

Welcome!  This sounds like fun. If I ever made it to GenCon, I'd definitely be interested in playing. However, my one big con trip is DragonCon.

note, I have added your site into the links list (topnav) and listed the PDF into the gallery.

[SgtHulka]

My work schedule prevents me from going to GenCon and the thing I've always missed about that most is Steve's annual Legions of Steel scenarios. You deserve props for keeping the LoS torch lit through the dark days.

[Nukelavee]

I have to admit, I always had a lot of fun running demo games at GenCon...

The worst part of it was that, as an employee/designer, I was pretty damn good at teh basic scenarios, and destroying a potential customer on the table was bad business... but it's REALLY hard to "throw" a game against a "newb", if they have experience with other games.

and....I hope you get a great turn out, dude.

[Clark]

Demo games were always, especially with some experienced gamers and the cops and soldiers because you could see the light going on when they connected rules with tactics.

Then there was Lynda that one year: she kept slaying the newbs in the demo games.

[Vok Ytalinov]

  I always loved, and still do, running stuff at cons.  Cross company scenarios are something we talked about, even in the old days.  I still have photocopys of Clark's 40k to LOS musings, and remember the discussions with Chris Bledsoe about Mutant Chronicle X overs, as well as Walt at Simtac for Kryomek/LOS hybridization.  So far as my aims, it was always to use the LOS engine with their figs.  Nothing official ever came of it.

[Clark]

Odds are nothing will ever come of it because GW is so insular and potentially litigious.

There is a whole rant that I have about conversion by effect and conversion by intent and if Tom is looking at my musings then it is  probably based on the former with the rules at the time wherein bolters could skin the knee of a small child at close range but generally sucked from actually removing other figs from the board.

I've been talking about using the LOS engine as the basis of an open gaming system.  But it's all about ego.  There is the system itself, and what the designers want to reflect or emphasize, but that is easy to work around when you stat out the different figs.  Where the real ego come in is about how deadly your X is to my Y, particularly in relation to me spending twice as much on my figs that totally suck compared to yours.

Look at the whole Star Trek vs Star Wars thing.  As written, you could never have a space battle beteen the two because SW tech is totally off the scale (the Death Star super laser requires more energy than could be generated from converting its entire mass).  I think some other punters figured that Slave 1 (Boba Fett's personal sedan) could take out the Enterprise, based on the published stats. Crazy stuff.

So that is what I think is the real barrier to getting more official cross-universe conversions done.

LOS/Planetstorm are games of powered infantry who wear armour better than some APCs and use weapons that are similarly superior.  Up against a bunch of meat bags in steel suits that are not powered there is not much question. logically, who would prevail.  If we can get non-powered troops out there then this whole problem dissipates to a large extent.

The idea is that anyone at any Con in any part of the world could run a game using the LOS engine with any of the 80+ figs we have or any of the hundreds (perhaps thousands) of figs that others have produced.  I've put the UPV spreadsheet on this site (Tony Lin was close, but I can't figure why Marco didn't pass Tony on to me to make it  better).

I use this term a lot: it is about a common language.

[sgibson260]

Clark, I think you may be limiting yourself too much by saying the game is designed primarily to simulate powered armor troops.  Obviously, the baseline figure for the game (the GM+0) figure is the UNE Commando.  But we have had a lot of success (and more importantly, a lot of fun) running non-powered infantry troops in lots of games of LOS.

The problem when I convert other peoples' figures to LOS is that I have to scale things against each other.  So stormtroopers against rebel troops is easy.  The stormtroopers are the baseline GM+0 troops, and the rebels with their lighter armour are GM+1.  We also run into problems pitting SW rebel troops or stormtroopers against UNE commandos or their equivalent.

We designed the AT-43 Red Blok troops last year as GM+1 troops, with the Imperial Stormtroopers being GM+0).  And we thought it would be tactically interesting to give the Stormtroopers frag grenades (same stats as K-pulse grenades) to clear out rebel defensive positions.  The problem was, the rebels got creamed, since the Stormtroopers just threw the frag grenades in their general vicinity and half a squad of rebels was killed.  The guns the rebels paid for never got used because they couldn't get into firing positions.

The problem is when you try to pit GW Space Marines (powered armor PLUS extensive biomodifications) against Necromunda (essentially unarmored civilians).  It makes for a very UNfun game since the troops are orders of magnitude different. 

We had the opposite problem about ten years ago when we tried to use those cool Ainsty see-through Predator movie figures, and more recently when we tried to simulate Star Wars Jedi knights.  We gave them GM-2, 2 wounds, and amazing weapons.  But the figures were just too expensive, and were killed very quickly by cheaper troops with plasma projector equivalents.

This is why I'd love to see a future version of LOS use D10's instead of D6's.  Without more possible armour variations, you are much more hamstrung when trying to convert all the really cool miniatures that are out there.

But the GenCon game should be very balanced!  :-)

Regards,
Steve Gibson

[Dave Chase]

...
LOS/Planetstorm are games of powered infantry who wear armour better than some APCs and use weapons that are similarly superior.  Up against a bunch of meat bags in steel suits that are not powered there is not much question. logically, who would prevail.  If we can get non-powered troops out there then this whole problem dissipates to a large extent.
...

So, I am curious, did you ever see the game material from called Maximum Metal, a Cyberpunk supplement from r. Talsorian games?

It is amusing, thoughtful and puts Battletech to shame when dealing with realities.

Dave Chase

[Clark]

Steve, check out the draft NonPoweredInfantry rules I have posted in the media section. Generally, NPI are about half as good as PI but it depends because many PI weapons can toast NPI but don't have a better chance to actually hit them. The big difference is with many AOE weapons. So NPI are a different class of figure which, when combined with light vehicles, creates a rock-paper-scissor effect when you have a combined force.

However, when non-powered infantry fight against each other there are no special rules because they are all the same class.

In general, when non powered infantry go up against powered infantry, it won't be "fun". See tge story "Survivors" or look at what happened when one Terminator got into the human encampment.

Some tweaks to the UPV system can put everything on an even keel to let you know just how un-fun it will be to put one army up against another.

[Clark]

Dave, haven't seen it.

Steve, I've seen your stuff all over the net and it looks like a hoot. As mention in the New BROE thread I want to make roll upgrades standard (if you roll a natural 6 then roll again with 4+ making it a 7 and a second 6 making it an . With that mechanic, it actually maps closely to using a 2d6 roll but you only need one die 83% of the time.

And many PI weapons simply don't use the GM of NPI targets rather than getting some ridiculous bonus. On the other hand, most NPI weapons get -2 vs PI targets, but there are weapons they can carry that don't have that penalty.

Send a bunch of GIs with M-16s against standard UNE PI and you get a good fight because the weapons are mismatched: 5.56 tends to bounce off Chobam delta while a blast from a RAM laser will go clean through an NPI. . . if you can hit them.  On the other hand, a horde of G1A Nightmares would shred a platoon of NPI in short order because you can't hide from their scatterguns which are particularly lethal against non or lightly armoured targets.

I'm not going to tell anyone how to run their game, especially someone like Steve whonmakes it a whack load of fun.  But the aim is to have a larger community of people on the same page to run similar games.

[grendeljd]

I'd be very interested in seeing what kind of impact it would have to change the game to a d10 base. I always found desperation fire so discouraging a chance to actually roll the target numbers, I would often pass on trying. Bringing some NPI figs into the game would probably make a d10 system a really nice fit...

[SgtHulka]

I'd be very interested in seeing what kind of impact it would have to change the game to a d10 base. I always found desperation fire so discouraging a chance to actually roll the target numbers, I would often pass on trying. Bringing some NPI figs into the game would probably make a d10 system a really nice fit...

Stalingrad and, if I remember correctly, Inferno, tried to solve the problem with dice pools.

I remembered Marco telling me about your NPI concept Clark. I liked the idea, and now that I've seen your rules I like it even more. You could already see your concept of seperating different class of figures in Planetstorm with the vehicle rules. IIRC Marco had also mentioned something about a tank class. Is that correct? i.e. the best Carl Gustavs and AT-4s could do was take down Collossi, but when faced with a real tank PI was SOL.

I've been meaning to play a dense-terrain game with Fantasians trying to take down a Superfortress. There was a FASA game set in the Battletech universe called Battletroops where puny humans had to take down giant battletechs and it was loads of fun.

[Clark]

I'd be very interested in seeing what kind of impact it would have to change the game to a d10 base. I always found desperation fire so discouraging a chance to actually roll the target numbers, I would often pass on trying. Bringing some NPI figs into the game would probably make a d10 system a really nice fit...

Even the name "desperation fire" was rather disheartening.  From our experience, if you want to plink at 6, 7, or 8+ kill rolls the whole process only slowed down by one beat in that particular circumstance.

I am hesitant to switch to a die other than d6 because it just wouldn't be Legions of Steel anymore.
 
Inferno was a pure dice pool while - if I recall - Stalingrad had a slighlty different system for support weapons as they scored kills on 5+ rather than 6 and could ignore a certain number of other penalties.

I posted an Excel spread sheet that tried to relate real world armour and penetration to LOS weapon/target classes.

The classes were:

Non Powered Infantry
Powered Infantry
Light Vehicles
Heavy Vehicles
Naval

And I suppose the last would get broken into light naval and heavy naval and potentially it could go up from there.

As envisioned, "standard" weapons would fire at their own class normally, at their own classs ignoring GMs and at a higher class at -2.

But it comes back to the "signatures" that I have discussed elsewhere that take targeting and armour into account and then cancel them out and round then off to give you a kill number.

[smokingwreckage]

Sheer opinion: Re-rolling dice to get higher numbers is annoying.