Tag: game design

skirmish games

DIY Wargaming: Fleshing Out a Character

Circling back to my Wargame Heartbreaker*, I’m realizing the only way I can test out what I’m working on is by creating some characters and letting them fight it out. Drat. What a drag… how ever will I survive the fun?

I’m going to start with my Witch Hunter Captain. We’ve seen him before, he’s a dashing lad and should be entertaining to stat out!

Here’s the stats as they currently stand:

-Movement (MOV): Usually 6″, can be more or less, never less than 4 or more than 12 without use of powers.

-Melee (MEL): Fighting in close contact with an enemy

-Ranged (RNG): If it shoots or fires something, this is the parent stat for using it.

-Willpower (WILL): Used for break tests and deflecting supernatural attacks

-Endurance (END): Used as the base for figuring out Hardiness, and for working out how much damage a model can take.

-Strength (STR): Base score used for determining damage dealt in melee combat. (Strength+weapon damage)

Finally, his Wound Capacity (WC) is derived from his END stat.

For the Witch Hunter Captain, I want him to be above average (d6) in a few areas, and I want him to have a few perks and hindrances that give him that witch hunter energy.

MOV: 6 MEL: 8 RNG: 10 END: 8 STR: 6 HRD: 6 WC: 8

Skills: Perception (6), Stealth (4), Faith (8), Intimidation (12), Persuasion (6), Taunt (8),

Weapons: Sword, Hellbringer (signature flintlock pistol) Range: 5/10, AP 1, DMG: 2d6, Reload 2

Armor: Thick Leathers (armor 2)

Perks: Signature Weapon (+1 to RNG with Signature Weapon), Arcane Protection (-2 on offensive spells cast against this model), Command (grants +1 to allied WILL checks within 12″), Fearless (immune to fear effects and spells)

Hindrance: Suffer Not the Witch (+1 to MEL and STR attacks against spellcasters, cannot break from combat or retreat.

That’s an awful lot to digest, and I still need to work out a points-buy system, but it’s a beginning. Now I need to work out some opponents and make sure everything flows okay.

If you’re interested in seeing the rules system I’m cobbling together here, let me know in the comments and I’ll share my progress with it!

Again, apologies for the lack of minis progress, I’m still on the mend from the fourth major abdominal surgery I’ve had in the last 2 years!

*The team “heartbreaker” was originally coined for games that were designed to be “better” than the game that inspired it, most often Dungeons & Dragons back in the day. The term was a little mean-spirited when it was coined, but I kinda like it!

skirmish games

DIY Wargaming: Pillaging from the Best

I’ve been going on a lot lately about wanting to build out a game system that works for me and my tabletop preferences. If you’ve read this blog at all, you’ll know that I’m frustrated with a lot of what Games Workshop calls rules these days, and that I’ve found a lot of other games that are too hot, too cold, too firm, too soft, and nothing that’s just right. Yup, I’m Goldilocks. And none of these damned bears have anything I want.

Just your standard group of Beastmen, Beastmen who need stats! (from my collection)

I spent the better part of February valiantly trying to hammer out my own system, jabbering like a hundred crazed monkeys clanging away at the keyboard. And just like those metaphorical monkeys, I produced a mighty heap of, you guessed it, gibberish.

Game design, it turns out, is really tricky. I’m not an un-clever person, but the web I was weaving myself into was getting pretty sticky. I was getting stuck. I should ease off on metaphors…

So, like many people before me have done, I am going to pillage my way through stacks of inspiration that are currently lining my bookshelves. I have collected a massive library of game rules over the years, so I have plenty of sources of inspiration to draw from!

After going through everything, I think a bit of what I am looking for can be adapted from the Savage Worlds role playing system. It’s a universal system that is setting agnostic, and I like the base mechanics. After spending a little time under the hood, I think that stripping out the RPG elements and focusing on the stuff I like will give me a good framework to build off of.

Is there a way Cyberpunk dudes can fight Beastmen? I guess we’ll find out! (from my collection)

One of the things I was working on in my own homebrew system was a way to use different polyhedral dice to represent skill levels and attributes. Savage Worlds does something similar, but they’ve been at it for 30 years and have done a bit of streamlining that flows a lot smoother than the aberration I was building.

Basically, each Attribute or skill is ranked as d4, d6, d8, d10, or d12, with the higher numbers being better than lower. Since Savage Worlds is an RPG, there’s a ton of skills and special effects baked into the system, some of which work with a table top skirmisher, some of which absolutely don’t. That’s fine, I can work that part out. Mostly I’ll be using the Attribute system as a springboard for everything else. I’m throwing about 1/3 of that out, though, because it’s a little clunky for the flow I’m looking for on the table.

At the end of the day, I want a system that lets me put Cyberpunk assassins, Beastmen, and murderous orphans on the same table. Not all the time, mind you, just when the spirit hits me! (from my collection)

There are aspects of other games, like Relicblade, Necromunda, Mordheim, and Frostgrave that I’ll be adapting as well. The biggest challenge currently is developing a points buy system to give some approximation of balance, but that’s not going to be impossible… I hope!

Apologies for the lack of minis progress in this post, I am recovering from surgery and can’t spend much time sitting at my paint station yet!