Vicissitudes of a hobby butterfly

I've been a bumbling little bee this last week, doing bits and pieces, experimenting, but not playing or making much progress on any single project.

Starting to sort my games, as part of a housecleaning effort. A box's worth of conventional board games that should probably go to work with me, a selection of previously-scattered wargaming and roleplaying books and magazines, a box/folder to keep the scores of pages I've printed out...

Adding to my small medieval project - only a handful of bases, but I'm quite proud of myself for making a whole extra base out of "extra" figures, which are intended to be stuck between ranks for a more irregular look. The way they are presented on the page makes it easy to line them up in the same orientation as on a regular base. Since one of the archers has a standard pole, this becomes a command base of sorts.

Reading another simple RPG - Spotted via my blogroll, no less. The ability to keep track of my favorites is a reason for this site in itself. The game even has some solo tips, and it fits on a single page: Play All the Books

Trying new Paperboys 18mm ACW - Challenging owing to having to glue paper edge-on to the base. My coworkers are flabbergasted that I can cut these so neatly, but it's really not that hard. I have the urge to run First Bull Run on its 160th anniversary, but I doubt they'll let me!

Coloring the edges of Wofun figures - Looks okay. I used a standard brown Sharpie on this WoSS French sergeant. Will try entire bases next.

Demoing Catch the Moon, a Jenga-like dexterity game, at work. Both kids and parents seem to enjoy it. Of course my free-association skill led me to notice that some of these ladders are in scale for 54mm figures to assault something...

Watching five episodes of Sharpe - ... which could easily lead to a skirmish-scale Forlorn Hope scenario. And speaking of Napoleonics...

Basing 1/72 plastics - After a little frustration and indecision, I decided to try basing my 20mm plastics on 15mm MDF bases that came as extra with my last Wofun purchase. Here's the first unit - Napoleonic British militia.

Reading Henry Hyde's Wargaming Compendium - Did you know the Hoopla Digital library app has wargaming ebooks? Check it out! They have seemingly everything by Pen & Sword.

Scots Wha Hae

 Most of Donald Featherstone's old but classic Wargamer's Newsletter is available online at fourcats.co.uk. A very characterful read from the early days of the hobby, with Featherstone's sense of fun and variety. My most recent read from the series is the December 1967 issue. It has a brief profile of one of my favorite wargames writers, Peter Young. It also includes a Hundred Years War battle report and one-page ruleset that I decided to try.

I don't have Hundred Year War figures, but I do have a couple Paperboys books by Peter Dennis that would do: Castle Assault and Wars of the Roses. I picked the former, which covers the turn of the fourteenth century - Wallace, Bruce, Edward I, etc. There are also a selection of Welsh, and a page representing Robin Hood and his Merry Men. There is also a beautiful but complex castle model, which I suspect was the reason one of my coworkers bought this book for me. She's just as creative, we tend to feed off each others' ideas, and she may be hoping I would build the thing for one of her library displays. I haven't dared yet.

Anyway, the rules, like most of Featherstone's earlier output, are basic 1-figure-equals-one-man. This can be tricky with multiple-based figures like the Paperboys. I've tried tracking casualties on a paper chart and by laying dice next to units. In the first case, I have to keep turning from the table to mark them; it breaks the rhythm. In the second, the dice either get picked up by mistake and rolled, forgotten and left behind when the unit moves, or are jogged when the table moves. (I'm clumsy. I also have cats.)

Then I noticed that the space between ranks of a two-rank Paperboys base is just right to fit a six-sider.

This won't work as well for the narrower gaps in a three rank base...

But two six-siders will still work. 

Men-at-arms bases in the Castle Assault book have twelve figures, while knights and archers have six. I'll only require enough for a single base per unit. They will be turned as casualties mount, and at every multiple of six or twelve, a base will be removed and the dice reset. At a small scale, this ought to work alright (she said, suspiciously)...

For starters I now have an English army of eighteen knights, three dozen spearmen and two dozen archers.

Building these guys is very relaxing, especially if you're watching an appropriate movie to put you in the mood. Problem is, the easiest-to-find movie on this topic is Braveheart... so I instead watched several Rifftrax episodes, including Hawk the Slayer, which puts me in the mood to run a fantasy RPG rather than a wargame, and also several episodes of Sharpe.

Which makes me want to pick up the Wofun Peninsular War set.

I plan to run this "battle" as a solo game, but it would probably work well for kids if I could talk my coworkers into letting me run a wargame. Will probably have to wait for a good DnD session with a mass battle for an excuse to put them on the table. Though playing with the adult historicals group would probably work too - they've been generous and willing to try my "old-school" interests on occasion. They've been having live games the last few months, with apparent success; I'm still a bit cautious but will probably venture out there by the end of summer. I've promised to run a game late in the year, and possibly one or two next year. And the games I sometimes bring along are usually small and quick palate-cleansers after our huge, bespoke bashes.

There I go rambling again. Like I've said, this blog is more a stream-of-consciousness for my own benefit than for readers. But I am grateful for what few thoughts, pro or con, are provided. It's been a long year without live gaming!

Ridiculously Easy Roleplaying Games for Beginners

 I haven't said anything about role-playing games yet. Now's the time. Kids are returning to the library, and my county is, as of last week, completely shorn of Covid restrictions. Good idea or not, this means we'll be crowded soon, and require activities to keep those kids busy. We have plenty of board games, a couple card games, a rug with chess and parcheesi boards, papercrafts, stories, my badly-played guitar...

The theme this year is animals, and I may post another time about some of the different RPGs available where you play various critters. (One of the best - but most confusing - things about games is their incredible variety.) For now, I'm going to discuss "lite" rulesets that I've experimented with and found perfect for beginner players (and their parents, and their game-masters).

My first was Tracy Hickman's XD20, which I discovered via this review on rpg.net.

I ordered his book at once. It was a touch disappointing. The thing is, it's not actually a game, or a guide for newcomers to roleplaying. It's a rather bizarre mix of gaming humor, the life of a game designer, how-to-do magic tricks, and advice for dungeon masters (The "D" in XD20). It recommends a rather balls-to-the-wall approach to play. These games are supposed to be exciting, so don't stand back cautiously, throw yourself into adventure!

The game, such as it is, takes up the last three chapters. But, broken down, it all comes down to a single rule for the players to remember. Just one:

"The DM tells you what to roll."

That's it.

You have a knight and he's charging at a fire-spitting dragon ten times his size? Roll an 18 or better on that twenty-sider. Oh, he has flame-retardant armor and a magic lance? A much better chance now, say 11. Does he want to charm a princess? Roll a 5. Cook a five-course meal? A 20 - obviously he lets underlings do that for him and would be lost in a kitchen - though he'd be fine cooking over a campfire in the wild, say 7 or better. Clean his armor? No need to roll, any knight knows how to do that.

Once I discovered this method, I never looked back. It takes no thought. There are no charts, no lists of equipment, skills and spells. The DM picks a number, and you roll. In wargaming, the Germans called this Free Kriegspiel - the DM determines everything, and there are no rules other than those in his head.

This is difficult for him, but it's absolutely wonderful for the players, who just have to play. No math to do, no rules to remember. Just adventure.

Also, these rules (and those following) work for any game, any genre, any period.

Searching for other, similar games, I came across the RPG Tinkerage blog, written sporadically by Andrei Baltakmens. I've tinkered with and playtested his games ever since, and he's been kind enough to let me rewrite and distribute them to the kids and teens I play with.

Here's a D20 adventure game - The first of Andrei's games that drew me; basically a (slight) expansion of XD20. I've expanded on Andrei's rules myself in a few different varieties.

The rough chances - A basic D20 chart is all you need to run basic games. Just assign an appropriate chance of success to a character's task.

And Play - Rough Chances with D6 rather than D20. Handy for giveaways, since virtually any home will have a couple six-siders somewhere.

Play the World A newer game with a more even mechanism, it uses 2D6 rather than 1D6 or 1D20. Why? Because two dice provide a bell curve with "average" results. (This post provides useful guidance as to what the results might mean in-game.) It is deliberately similar to the earliest forerunners of what became Dungeons and Dragons. For that reason, it appeals to me as something I can legitimately advertise as "D&D for Rank Beginners." Because library administrations prefer formal, planned programming.

But that doesn't mean I have to spend hours or days planning it. My game sessions are typically on the fly. When the noise rises in a crowded computer lab, I switch off three or four computers and instruct the kids on them to come to the nearest table instead. Then it takes just sixty seconds (not kidding) to build characters, and we're off, usually with a challenge or small dungeon I've slapped together in those same sixty seconds.

To show you how quick and easy it can be, here's an entire game in less than a hundred words, complete with sample character (based on my grandfather):

1. Choose a genre (fantasy, adventure, space opera...)
2. Name a character (gruff dwarf, daring archaeologist, crack space-pilot)
3. Add a few skills... (mining, swashbuckling, piloting)
4. ... and some gear (axe and ale mug, pistol, hat and whip, blaster and laser sword)

Start play. When attempting a task, choose a likelihood of success on the following chart and roll that number or higher. If desired, roll again to suggest effect.

2+: Probable

3+: Likely

4+: Even chance

5+: Difficult

6: Exceptional

Name and role: Private Joe, 13th US Armored Division, 1945

Skills: Rifle, Tank Operation, Cooking, Punching Racist Officers

Gear: .45 pistol, goggles, winter clothing

Obviously, you could run a simple skirmish wargame with this character; you could even use these rules for larger battles. But that's for another post...

How many bases to a regiment?

 As I said in the last post, Charge! is among my favorite beginner rulesets. I prefer simple rules for solo games, and especially for running with kids - thoughts about fantasy roleplaying with young'uns will be in future posts. But I'm torn between the old-school each-figure-represents-one-man style and the simpler, easier-to-grok "unit base." 

One set I have in mind is something Donald Featherstone devised later in his career, in which casualties are not even removed, but a regiment is assigned a certain number of hit points, and when they are gone, so is the unit. Simple, but one must track the hit points, which can be tricky if you have a lot of them. You can mark them on a paper army list, but this takes time if you have lots of units on the table. I've experimented a bit with a few derived rulesets found at the Natholeon's Empires blog, and they're very workable, because you can have units of any size.

Another is the 18th-century rules of Wargames Illustrated #75 and #134. I used them recently, and very successfully, to play a solo Jacobite mini-campaign with my new Wofun figures. A unit has four bases and, effectively, two hit points. When hit once, a single base is removed; the second hit removes the entire unit. Assorted variables (flanking, range, fierce enemies) provide pluses and minuses to the roll.

Not having room on my tiny table for four-base units, I used two bases for each, and a casualty figure to mark the first "hit."

This leads up to one of my favorite simple rulesets, if only because it has been used consistently with schoolchildren - Junior General's 18th-19th century rules.

Units in these rules have, as a rule, six bases, with units removed once they have one left. Effectively, they have five HP, but six dice for combat and firing. Smaller units (and, rarely in the scenarios, larger) are accordingly less (or more) effective. One for the Saratoga campaign assigns three bases to all the militia. Two hits and they're off the table.

Most of Wofun's units come in sets of four or five bases.

You might think this is no big deal. But, while I haven't actually playtested it, the writer has, and he probably has a reason for a norm of six. My guess would be that smaller units are significantly less reliable, and disappear from the table quicker. Kids don't enjoy it when they find themselves commanding nothing too early in the game. There is a caveat in that commanders are harder to kill, and a brigade CO can stay on the table and assist other units even with all his own men gone.

Obviously, it's not hard to build up armies with inexpensive paper figures, and the Junior General site has an enormous variety of them. Peter Dennis' Paperboys are absolutely beautiful, and just cutting them out is relaxing like nothing else. And there are plenty of others out there.

But some of the Junior General scenarios require hundreds of bases. This is not that big a deal if you only have two figures per base - even in 1/72 plastic, eight or ten boxes will do you. But Paperboys - with six to twelve figures per base - are so realistic and colorful in comparison I couldn't resist. More fool, me.

It took me weeks, building in spare moments at work, to construct all necessary bases from the Paperboys AWI book for the King's Mountain scenario - ninety to be exact, plus ten commanders. Each base has two ranks. Many for earlier eras have three.

Just the Americans.

Reducing the size is one way to reduce the time and effort. Unfortunately, printing in color at work is not as simple as it could be, requiring several extra steps, and using 8.5"x11" paper (rather than the original A4) also confuses things.

And then I had a thought. Here's the standard Junior General formations:

That line formation looks deep for its width, especially if you are using multi-rank bases like Paperboys. The reason for them, however, is that Junior General uses fewer figures per base, in a single "layer." So to have a proper two-rank line, you need lines to be two bases deep. When playing their scenarios at first with Paperboys, I extended the lines to 1x6 for the look of the thing, as the individual bases are two-rank.

But what if I just use three bases, rather than six? Then with two ranks, I essentially have six "elements" on three bases. And I can use a casualty marker to note when a single rank is lost, counting it as a base for purposes of the rules. When two ranks are lost, remove a base. Ranks can be removed from the Wofun bases instead, but as I've mentioned they're a touch fragile, so the less handling, the better. Also, there are plenty of casualty figures available. It would also be possible to make single-rank bases from the paper figures if desired.

This has advantages:

• More space, either for a more open tabletop or to fit larger armies.
• Larger armies, as formerly six-base units can be split into two. Not as useful for the Wofuns which come as eight- or ten-rank units rather than twelve, but there are some combinable units like Irish picquets and converged grenadiers.
• Smaller units for smaller tabletops.

I'm not positive how well this would work for kids. Teens would probably get it quickly, but for younger players having six bases is still probably preferable. It will, however, work for home games - time to experiment!

Wofun Imagi-nations

 The first wargaming book I read was Charge! or How to Play Wargames, by Peter Young and JP Lawford. One of the charming elements of this introduction to 18th-century wargaming is the willingness of its authors to invent their own units and countries, offering the chance to tell unique stories and use whatever figures or paint schemes appeal most.

I've bought several collections of Wofun's unique plexiglass soldiers; presently I'm messing about with some of their conversions of Peter Dennis' delightful Paperboys. Which I have the books for and COULD just cut out, but the Wofun versions are just hefty enough not to go flying when my cats jump on the table. They are very slightly fragile, but so long as they're held from the side there's no trouble; snapping them out of their sheets and into their bases is the tricky part. They will be my home-game figures; paper and "green army man" plastics will remain my go-to at work, as they're disposable and can be taken home by kids.

A lot of people like to dull the edges with Games Workshop's Agrax Earthshade ink. I may do that next time I get to a store, but for now I like the toylike look of these figures.

I'm in the process of organizing them. Most packs come in sets of four or five bases, which for the Paperboys means 32 or 40 infantry, or 24 or 30 cavalry. There are four or six gunners to a gun. This will work for the "beginners' version" of Charge!.

In addition to the entire set of '45 figures (one unit of each available), I bought enough extras for two more regiments of Highlanders, enough extra "Irish Picquets" to make three differently-faced regiments, and a starter pack of Spanish Succession figures. Though I could easily run a 1715 'Rising action with the Highlanders and WoSS Brits, I mostly bought the figures for French-on-British gaming in the vein of Charge! and The War Game. The uniforms are mainly different in their length, and, if you look closely, their wigs. At 18mm they mix together alright, so I'm declaring this a "1730s" pair of Imagi-nation armies. 

On the Franco-Scots side we have:

A brigade of Highlanders... 

and one of two Lowland musketeer regiments and a "light skirmish" unit.

A French brigade, of Navarre ('45), Bourbon and Saillant (WoSS) regiments.

An Irish Brigade, of Roth, Dillon and Bulkeley (blue, black and green facings), backed by Royal Ecossais.

A cavalry brigade, of Cuirassiers, Carabiniers, and itinerant Scots. According to my reading, the WoSS French cavalry wear the same uniforms as those they had in the '40s.

Three artillery batteries, one heavy, two light/medium.

Left over, a Bavarian regiment for WoSS.

For the Brits/Hanoverians:

A brigade of line infantry (blue, white and yellow facings): 

A brigade of WoSS infantry (line, Guard, and Dutch):

(Small enough that it's easy to mistake the direction figures are facing!

A brigade of grenadiers (blue, white and yellow facings):

A Highland Regiment (the future "Forty-Twa"). Also their skirmishers:

A pair of Hessian units, one line, one grenadier. Might break this up to create a "foreign" brigade of Hessians and Dutch, adding the grenadiers to the British grenadier brigade:

A blue-coated English militia regiment:

A cavalry brigade, of WoSS dragoons and Scots Greys, and '45 Dragoons and militia cavalry. The militia might join the militia infantry for a small "invasion scare" scenario:

Four batteries - the same heavy and two medium as the Jacobites, plus a pair of Coehorn mortars off at the end. Not sure what rules I'd use for the latter in Charge!

My cat Lex appears in a few of these pics. She's a gamer kitty, who steals unattended dice. She appears to have claimed the soft, comfy Cigar Box mat...