Pictured- Somebody's Lego WW2 Medic I found while Google searching for WW2 images, cool eh?
I am thinking that perhaps my initial rough playtest was too "finished" a presentation for the players present and that the players were out of sync, a little or a lot, with my design goals for this project. When I had them make characters it was to test the character generation process and get accustomed to the new names for the stats and classes. Certain classes don't really translated directly from B/X D&D simply because there is no magic and, much as I hate skill systems, the Thief skill system became the template I used for certain class based skills, such as the Medic's Wound Treatment and First Aid skills. I wanted them to be vaguely defined so we wouldn't get bogged down in the minutia of trying to make a D&D based game realistic, which is always a death knell.
I also wanted them to be able to jump right into play, so I guess I didn't clearly define the style of "heroic-comic book-action film" style I was going for here, and it showed in the way the various players took to their roles. Mona, as squad leader, treated the game like a D&D dungeon crawl and tried to avoid combat at all costs to accomplish the mission while expending few resources. Ashli, having just watched the entire run of HBO's The Pacific was looking at a much grittier and more violent and somewhat more morally ambiguous way of playing her character, apparently having decided that her character Pvt. Pyle would be the weird southerner that looted the corpses of the enemy dead and, at one point, had to be told not to attempt to extract the gold fillings from the teeth of the dead German soldiers. John wanted a much more hyper-realistic game with hit locations and degradation of effectiveness over time due to fatigue and injury. Lee Ann was mostly just along for the ride, but as a nurse in real life, was kind of annoyed at the vagueness of her character's Medic skills, but had no problem being a Medic that carried a weapon to fight the Nazis; which I had made an optional rule just because I figured, probably correctly, that nobody would really want to be the Medic if they really had to JUST be the Medic and heal people.
So, I have tinkered with some rules after the initial playtest. I have had some time to mull things over because we got a forced week off from gaming due to Ashli's Army Reserve commitment and a friend's college graduation. It was suggested that Snipers should maybe roll 2 dice and take the better of the 2 for aimed shots, I am still thinking on that one, but inclined to go with it. What I discussed with Mona earlier today though was that maybe when Snipers have surprise on their side, like they have not been detected by the enemy at all and there is no combat taking place, that they should get to negate all cover bonuses there target has for their first shot. My thinking on this is that if you aren't trying to duck behind cover or hide, but are caught completely unawares, it is pretty easy to get a shot in, even if you are standing in a guard tower or behind some sandbags or are in a foxhole; the next guy is going to dive for cover and be harder to hit, but the surprise round is deadly for a Sniper's enemies.
The other thing I was thinking was that I needed to have them fight an enemy patrol, just infantry on infantry, to test the system. I tested the automatic weapons fire system and it proved as deadly as I suspect it should, when the squad tried to take out the machine gun nest. The only downside to this was that the squad missed with their surprise round and then lost on initiative. Pvt. Pyle took them out with a Bazooka round, but I suspect grenades and small arms fire would have done the trick too. I need more combats though to make sure things work right. I am still not sure how long I want a combat round to be; a one minute combat round was excessively long for D&D, it's ludicrously long for a game featuring modern weapons on a tactical man to man level. I am thinking six seconds, which will rescale movement and rates of fire a little.
I am going to remain tight-lipped about vehicles and armor for now, because I keep tinkering and changing and I have a couple of completely different competing ideas I want to try to see which works better; either way it revamps the way anti-tank weapons work, so there is at least a chance of surviving a nearby hit from a bazooka blast.
Very interesting and good ideas and conclusions.
ReplyDeleteI like the sniper negating cover idea. It does need to be the first shot of the game, once the shooting starts everyone is going to be hunkering down. At least Mona will have a reason for sneaking, getting the sniper into position.
ReplyDeleteAlso, a case could be made that Veteran troops are always going to be worried about snipers and so will get cover mods even with surprise.
Six seconds sounds right, but it also doesn't. Once you get the rules working, I bet you will have games where at the end you are thinking "48 seconds? No way ALL THAT happened in 48 seconds!"
Most battles/fights have these weird lulls where people are catching their breaths, summon the courage to expose themselves to fire, communicate or just try to figure out what's happening and where is it happening right now. But I don't know of any effective way to implement that. The best I can suggest is to use 6 seconds as your barometer of how much can be done in a turn e.g. how far a guy can run etc. but if the overall length of the battle is important use 30 seconds or even the minute time scale. and just accept that even though these guys are doing this, here; and those other guys are doing that, there, in the same turn, it may not be happening at the same time, especially if it isn't directly affecting one another.
I would propose that GSV's lulls in combat are actually non-combat time within the 10-minute Turn, and that combats only re-start when the fighting does, so that a time-scale of six 10 second Segments (a la AD&D) of Firearms Combat does still work within a 1-Minute Round.
ReplyDeleteIt sounds like the game is off to a good start!
ReplyDeleteOne alternate option that could be considered for snipers is treating their sniping attacks as something akin to a thief's backstabbing ability (hefty modifier to hit + multiplied damage), as opposed to linking it specifically to the surprise round. The argument would be that any time the sniper gets off a shot at a target unaware of his presence, he would get the bonus. So for example, if in the middle of a confused, smoky, noisy firefight, the squad's sharpshooter displaces regularly (and unseen) to a new position he would be able to repeatedly take careful aim getting the bonus as often as he displaces, not just in the initial surprise round of combat. All in the same way a thief could theoretically sneak in and out of shadows to backstab more than once given the right conditions (ample darkness, confusion, distraction, etc.). But once he shoots, he's detected, and needs to displace again to keep getting the bonus. One could even stack this on top of surprise by saying that a shot in the surprise round does not reveal the sharpshooter's position, only the fact that there is a sharpshooter is out there. So in essence, with surprise, the sniper would get a free shot.
I also agree with Gratuitous Saxon Violence about the time frame. A lot of skirmish games for example fudge the time scale for the very reasons GSV mentioned. Often times they say that a combat round is "equal to the amount of time it takes a soldier to do one useful thing in combat," such as fire a weapon, move a certain distance, reload, clear a jam, etc. including gritting his teeth and making the decision to actually do it.
Sounds like your progress is substantial – I really think this is one of the most exciting projects I've seen in a while! Keep up the great work!