Space Weirdos and Other Stuff

Today I actually made it to Das Krieg Haus for a game. A member taught us Space Weirdos, a minis-agnostic skirmish game with shades of Necromunda - at least the way we played it.

Here, a Deathwatch team takes on Infinity figures.

John, who was running the games, had brought lots of minis - mostly Infinity with a smattering of old 40K - 2x2foot mats and some lovely sci-fi "Battle Systems" terrain. This was heavy card with plastic connectors, so pretty customizable, but also came with cool little "scatter" like chairs, tables and signs. I've seen a lot of this type of terrain recently and am leaning toward trying Tenfold Dungeons, which are simply stackable boxes with printing both inside and out. So it was nice to play on for a try-out.

Closeup on the furniture - good for a barfight.

Space Weirdos is a "ganger" sort of game, point-based such that about four figures make up the smaller group of 75 points. I got in one round - Infinity soldiers vs. ancient metal 40K Orks.

My squad: A leader with energy pistol, a sniper, and troopers
with autorifle and energy rifle. Two figures also had stealthsuits,
which make you impossible to target at longer than close range
so long as you're touching terrain.

The rules are simple enough that even I got the hang of them quickly. Figures have defense, shooting and melee statistics measured in die types - typical is 2D8. You always roll two dice - defender rolls defense vs. opponent's attack - but the type can rise or fall, anywhere from D4 to D12, if there are relevant advantages and disadvantages like cover, long range, or the defender having moved (hence the "footprint" tokens you can see. When hit, the victim rolls on a chart - low scores mean he may get to make a snap shot or blow back at his opponent, while higher scores result in "down," "staggered" or "out of action" results. Armor or special equipment can modify results on this table.

Every figure can make three actions, after which an opposing figure can take three actions. An initiative roll determines who goes first. Movement and range are in five-inch increments, easier than rulers if you have measuring sticks of the right length, but ranged weapons have effectively infinite range. Psychic powers typically have "one-stick length" range, which in my game neutered the opponent a bit, though one of his powers was teleportation. And some weapons, like my sniper rifle, cannot be fired at short range.

Each side also gets a number of tokens per turn (two at the size we were playing) that can be used for "interrupt" actions like dodging or recovering injury. At the end of the turn, used tokens are removed from the board and morale tests are taken.

The one game I played went quickly; I rolled high a lot, though positioning made a difference too. Terrain is key in this game since it makes it harder to hit and easier to dodge a shot, but movement is relatively high and any figure can cross the board in two turns if he focuses on it. We didn't have objectives; this was a straight-up bash.

Here I tackle a staggered (ie stunned) Ork.

This psyker Ork has moved once; he has three
actions, so has two more. Unfortunately his
psychic attacks have quite short range.

This figure has moved twice, so could shoot once.

Ultimately, I managed to take out two of my opponent's four figures, including his leader, and the penalties were such that he "bottled out."

The QRS for the game was clear and easy to use, and there are many customization options. The simplicity reminded me of Minceheim. I'd happily try it again, and it has solo mechanisms so quite tempting (there are signs of this in the "reaction" tables with the chances to shoot back if hit). There is a fantasy version, and with a little modifications I could see historicals working as well.

On my own account, I finished Gardeners of Salonika, added a second basecoat to my Italian tank, and undercoated my civilian 75mm gun crew. Not sure what color to paint the gun, but at least I'm making progress. More tomorrow, I hope.

Convention Gaming and Trying DnD5E

 I went to Supercon yesterday, a local geek convention that I usually try to make. Last time I got to go as an exhibitor, at the library system's table, and even demonstrated a couple simple wargames. They didn't do that this year. So for me, this was a shopping trip at a markup, and an opportunity to game. In previous years, there were wargame and boardgame demos set up (mostly Games Workshop), but the gaming this year was a mix of family boardgames, videogames and Dungeons and Dragons. No miniatures gaming.

I partly went to get some dice and a tray. It turns out 8mm dice are not made in bulk by the suppliers I found, so that idea for using my not-quite-12mm unit markers is out. Perhaps I'll buy the 16mm markers and use 12mm dice.

I never have sat down for DnD 5th edition, but the con was an opportunity to play at a table for the first time in forever. I was surprised at how easy the pregenerated character sheet was to read and play - I probably could have run Free Kriegspiel with it:

The GMs were able to run adventures mostly off the cuff. The players were able to just adventure, with, as a commenter pointed out on an earlier post, the nuts-and-bolts of the game safely out of view. Spells weren't described, only the name providing any context, but most weren't combat spells that would require you to know how much damage they did.

There were some nuts-and-bolts, of course. DnD is mostly a skirmish game, and most adventures are mostly about fighting.

My character's at the back, with the excuse that
she's standing on the steps to get overhead line-of-sight.

The stereotypical starter adventure starts with a bit of scene-setting, continues with a march to the scene of adventure, optionally has a puzzle or roleplaying in the middle, and ends with a fight. So the two adventures I played in went. The first one did have an interesting puzzle that I might have to swipe for my own adventures, and the minis were pretty cool, especially given my increasing Paperboys collection. I may need to buy some:

Flat plastics from Arcknight Miniatures. I like the clear bases!

I've learned that character improvement is a useful motivator for bringing players back to the table. I leveled up my character between adventures with help from another player, which turned out to be a good thing in the next adventure. I used a new spell (Sleep) to neutralize an enemy that, under the circumstances, probably would have killed the party otherwise. It was only icing on the cake that our job was to capture this fellow alive. The disadvantage was that we weren't using minis this time, just a map and what is called "Theater of the Mind." A good GM can paint a picture in the mind's eye - I'm not quite there yet.

Another useful thing about DnD is, of course, the gamemaster, who was able to adjudicate rules without resorting to the rulebook. Players (especially new ones) always come up with unusual ideas and actions, and the GM can rule on things the designers never thought of - or things they did, if he's in a hurry and doesn't want to look things up.

Now, the fighting took up the bulk of both sessions, and part of the problem was that there were six or seven players in the adventures. (DnD has a "sweet spot" of four plus GM.) There's always a "hurry-up-and-wait" aspect to combat in war games of any sort, and DnD has a bad reputation in this area. But the low complexity of the rules and the table banter helped quite a bit, and reminded me why I enjoy this sort of play. There are plenty of historical RPGs out there - even variants of Dungeons and Dragons itself. Some of the methods - particularly the Move/Action/Bonus Action mechanism that players choose from on their turn - may work for the skirmish wargames I'm planning.

I'll have to check out DnD again.

Initiative in skirmish games

 One of my interests is skirmish wargaming, for two reasons:

• It's closely related to roleplaying, and is in fact the genesis of games such as Dungeons and Dragons. Since I run RPGs when I can, there's a lot of useful information in both RPGs and skirmish games to "cross-pollinate."
• I work with kids, and the big, bright 54mm plastics attract them to the table like nothing else. Even the simplest rules result in exciting games.

So I've read quite a bit on low-level skirmish games with mere handfuls of figures, starting with Games Workshop's complex Inquisitor rules from about 2000 that blend tabletop wargaming with RPG, and the earlier, simpler, more historical books of Donald Featherstone and Paddy Griffith:

The first one is available free on Archive.org.

Unfortunately, while kids (without preconceptions) get the flow of things instantly and are happy to write brief orders in the vein of these '70s rules when gamers were patient enough to write orders and move masses of single-based figures, my regular historical group prefers "just going at it." While I successfully ran a smaller-scale game for the adults, loosely based on Featherstone's rules, I had to throw away the order sheets I'd intended to use. That's fine, actually, because they still enjoyed it!

(An hour's worth of gaming and two minutes of crawling, shooting and reloading in-character - ably planned by an eight-year-old!)

Granted, writing orders does slow down the game quite a lot, so I'm looking for other options. I found some in one of the Wargamer's Digests I've been reading. The issue in question is from February 1979 (when I wasn't quite two years old!) and the article by Walter Simon, intended for use with 1/35th Tamiya WWII figures but useful in any context.

Several options are presented:

• Cards assigned to each figure (or, in RPG terms, character). They are drawn all through the turn, and when a figure's card is drawn, it may take an action. To keep outnumbered figures from taking extra actions, blank cards can be inserted into the deck, so that (for example) three figures on one side, with three cards, are up against one figure with three cards, two of them blank.
• Extra cards can be inserted for figures with higher speed or experience - say, four for an average trooper, five for an experienced one, six for a hero - or single cards can be marked such that individuals can take extra actions.
• For players who don't want the choice of which figure moves to be taken away from them, a series of points can be used instead, split as the players wish. Simon calls these "Action Factors," and there is one for each figure on the field - but one figure can use more than one, so long as another figure doesn't get one. If you have five figures and five AFs, one figure can take three actions, leaving two for the other four. Thus forcing consideration and choice on the player. The problem with this last is that it assumes one player per side.
• Cards can be assigned to individual actions - All figures of a side move, shoot or fight in close combat as the cards are drawn (Red might be assigned to British, Black to German, for example). This is found in Peter Dennis's "Paperboys" books, which will have posts devoted to them eventually... and also from The Sword and the Flame, a popular colonial ruleset that is very popular with my group. In TSATF, a card draw is assigned to a single unit rather than a complete side. I'm drawn to this one simply because it's familiar to my potential players. I might use other methods with kids.

Another option, drawn from the roleplaying game HackMaster, might be the "count up." In this setup, every possible action is assigned a number of seconds it takes to do, and the gamemaster starts at "one." If a player starts to load his weapon, and this takes five seconds, he will thus complete the task at "six." Meanwhile, another player might fire every two seconds, or spend five seconds running towards the enemy, or be surprised and unable to take action for four seconds. The benefit of this is that players are not trapped in their moves; if the guy loading wants to stop at count "four", drop his rifle and draw his pistol instead, he just starts over. The rifle is dropped at "five," he reaches for his holster at "six" and is ready to fire at "nine" - unless someone else shoots him at "eight."

Another benefit of this "RPG" style is that the game-master can allow practically anything the players want to do, even if there are no rules for it. If a player wants to climb a tree and jump on an opponent, the GM can simply assign a number of seconds this will take.

The detriment is that this is designed for a game where each player has one character to run. In wargaming, this is unlikely, and even at the lowest scale, players will more often have three to five figures to control. (The scenarios in Featherstone's book have six to eight figures a side.) The complexity would grow exponentially, and notes would have to be taken. In that case, simpler mechanisms are preferable.

The scenario I have in mind is based on the "battle" of Picacho Pass, Arizona in 1862, in which about two dozen men participated. While my historical group is large, the number of players on a given day is unpredictable and typically ranges from four to a dozen. A player in this scenario might have six figures to handle, or just two. Of course, this will fall in the course of the game; in the actual action, three saddles were emptied in the first volley, and these were actually the only ones to die.

What initiative methods do you use in such small, characterful games?