Now that the holidays are over, we're going to get back on track with a lot of the projects that we had been working on. There's been some (IMHO) very good developments with Skirmishers. The WWII ranged/firing combat always seemed to work well. We playtested the hell out of that, and for a quick, minimal-bookkeeping game, it worked well.
However, the melee portion of the combat always seemed problematic. HOwever, I think now that we've fixed that portion. In effect, it should work with moderns AND ancients.
What we're trying to do now, is an easy translator so that Legends characters can participate in large-scale battles and keep their character strengths.
Ran a couple of games of this skirmishers ruleset and collected some playtest notes, absolutely feel free to ignore, just my ramblings:
--Used a very basic conversion/standard: Shoot is the number of Damage Die of your ranged weapon, Attack is Damage Die of your melee, Defense is your Armor Rating, and Move Rate is basically the same as LAW. Used missile ranges from
FUBAR Medieval, mostly because I happened to have one printed already.
Obsevations/Takeaways:--Played a couple games with armies of 15-20 each time. Felt like it ran very smooth and fast. I'd like to run a game of 30+ a side and see how that feels. Some kind of morale rules once you hit 50% of your starting force would probably reduce the "mop up" rounds, but that kind of thing is very scenario/period specific.
--It was quite fun! I'm a big fan of FUBAR, Song of Blades and Heroes, Mordheim etc, I thought I would miss dicing for activation and Prone/Suppressed kinds of rules but ultimately I did not. The counter-attack concept breaks up some of the "I-Go-U-Go" ism people are scared of in these games.
--Being able to "Zoom Out" of a fight in a LAW game like this would be fascinating. LAW has few rules for weapon range, because in LAW's engagements it is not important information. Skirmish battles shift focus in several ways to longer range combat and it could be very refreshing to alternate between the two systems in a campaign.
--I was initially going to suggest a change to "Low Is Good" dice logic to better mimic LAW, but it never occurred to me again during play so maybe its nonsense.
--The Counter-Attack/Defense decision is very interesting and mimics LAW in a compelling way. It occurs to me that a Fighter with an Attack of 2 and Defense 1 should always Counter-Attack, however. Not sure what one does about that or if anything should be done. Perhaps if Fighters were limited to one successful Counter-Attack per turn? (Unlimited attempts, can only kill 1 opponent. That way a high Attack Fighter may decide to not counter-attack a Goblin who just attacked him if he suspects a juicier target will melee him next).
--We were worried that high Attack and high Defense characters would stall the game too much (since you are almost bound to roll a 6 once the dice pool gets large enough, and you need to Exceed rather than Meet). However, the dice gods are fickle and the 6 defense Chainmail + Tower Shield dwarf died in the first volley of arrows. High Defense doesn't seem to slow the game down that much, and 6+ defense is probably extremely unusual.
--Fighters with an Attack of 1 are unable to Counterattack. Not a problem really, it makes sense that an unskilled/lightly armed Fighter can't effectively counter.
--It is easier to Shoot people to death than to melee them to death. Again, not necessarily a problem, but does mean the game favors ranged attackers on the offensive in terms of dice pools and it is always preferable to shoot a target than engage them in hand to hand. But once again, this is actually true, so not sure its a problem, and I think Shooting dice pools are going to be smaller in general than Attack/Melee dice pools. (At least in Ancients games).
Possible Suggestions/Thoughts: I feel like these two concepts would pull the game away from being 100% time period agnostic, however.
--Group Attacks? In the spirit of keeping the game moving quickly (and getting some tactical positioning in the rules), possibly let melee attackers combine attacks?
When a Fighter attacks a target in melee, up to two allies who are also adjacent to that target can give up their attacks to contribute 1 Die each to the Attack. This means they are not vulnerable to counterattacks, but lose out on additional attack dice if their Attack is >1, and the ability to attack other targets if the attack was a success.
Doesn't make a lot of sense for use in Moderns I suppose, but probably groks for Napoleonics and such?
--Group Fire: Fighters who are adjacent and able to Fire on a target can combine their rolls. (I don't think you can impose any restrictions on this, since it would probably be mathematically superior to always Fire separately, since this is a one-hit-and-you're-dead game. This is just here to speed things up a bit.)
Again, not sure this makes sense for moderns really. Some kind of supporting fire?
