DragonQuest Combat houserule

I got a comment on my last post, mentioning playing DragonQuest without a battle map. Personally I have nothing against miniatures with my rpg, unless it slows down play. If you count hexes or squares it will slow down play is my experience. Playing online I find it a bit fiddly. So, I always look if I can do without them.

Thinking a bit about DQ I realized that the big thing is if you are engaged or not, and if you can get engaged after doing a half move. With that in mind, and inspired by the classic Traveller rang band system for combat I present the following:

The dividing line down the middle is separating Team A from Team B, or Attackers from Defenders. Well, you get the idea.

All placed in the green fields are Engaged and play according to those rules for initiative and if you can Trip, Disarm and so on. If you are in the blue fields you are disengaged and far away. Here you can only do ranged attacks, and you need more than half of your TMR to engage. In the areas in between you only need to do a half move to be Engaged.

That sheet can be printed and laminated and you can write on it, or you can use actual pretty miniatures. But, you skip the analysis-paralysis of counting hexes.

I think this i how I would try to run DQ if I did run it online.

If you have any ideas or response, I'm all ears!

Old and new together

I played D&D 3rd ed. yesterday, and it was a very interesting mix of old and new. Most of the players were older than the hobby, which is not always the case these days!

We don't need no stinking character sheets! Graph paper works just as well for us!

 

When I was your age we didn't have no metal miniatures! We used sticks and pinecones and, and... pieces of plastic!

My dude is the d12, since I feel they need some love...

During a trek through the wilderlands of the southlands we were beset by a pride of lions! Six lions attacking a crowd of humans, arguing over whether playing the pipes raises or lowers the morale. All the while birds are circling us, and out in the sea are the mysterious ships of iron, travelling under the surface. Will we get the help we need from the tower of the iron fortress? Never ending drama.

Game giveaway

Now I have rearranged stuff on my selves, and some of the stuff I have put aside to one day put up on eBay have showed up. I'm sick of them.

The first person(s) who send me an email (i.e. the one that ends up higher in my sorted inbox) and agree to pay shipping costs (from Sweden) gets these for nuthin.

1. Rippers - the horror wars : It's a minis game based on Savage Worlds
2. Tales of the Reaching Moon #13 : a great Glorantha fanzine, this issue is a special about the West. I already have a copy.

Email away.

So that was how a con feels like

I'm back home again after the con. To summarize things:

1. Make sure you have a map of the convention area, and a handout to give out at registration about what is going on where.

2. Place your con so it's easy to get there, to get to an ATM and to some source of food.

3. Make sure you know who is there as a dealer, speaker or panel attendee and help them out.

It's not that hard to run a convention, is it?

In the end all the gaming I did was the Blood and Mud WWII skirmish. It was fun, even if analysis paralysis made it far longer a game than intended. Maybe I should have had more coffee. Do stupid things faster, right?

Me and James Raggi and Tomas Arfert sat and chatted a lot. We talked about some personalities in the OSR, experiences of players not-getting-it-at-all. fun was had. Naturally we also analyzed the intricacies of system, play and text in old and new school, some of my old issues. There's a lot of fun stuff coming from both Tomas and James, but I'm not telling you yet what it is.

Miniature wargaming, roleplaying and me

Sometimes the blogosphere is filled with people talking about this or that game is dependant on minis, and if the gaming tables of old featured minis or if everyone just had much more imagination back in the day. Yeah, I'm making fun of the discussions. One thing nobody could possibly have missed, though, is the phenomena called Warhammer. Even if you only play rpgs, you have probably seem how your local game store have been invaded by miniatures and splatbooks. When you talk about miniatures these days, you can't ignore Warhammer.

Back when I started with these funny games where you pretend to be an elf, you could find ads for the fun hobby of using cast and mold to make your own miniature soldiers. Since the one of my friends had a father who worked in printing, we happened to get hold of a bunch of "lead" of some kind, and did try to make some minis. They looked terrible.

A few years later Warhammer 40 000 arrived, and that same friend actually bought it, and played the first scenario in the book, using paper chits. It was a very strange game, which talked about the armies of the future, but had rules for minute details of your own characters. It felt like a weird rpg. Soon newer editions were published and we bought figures and played it a bit. Somewhow I still felt that the weird first edition hinted at something much cooler to be done with this setting.

What goes around, comes around. Right? Anyhow, I finally encountered historical miniature wargaming. My present "home" game club had an enormous stack of figures, since some members used painting of tin soldiers as a way to wind down from work, and gladly let us others play with them. That way I found out how fun it was to play ancient battles with 15 mm figures, with DBA. DBA is a very slim set of rules, but with very subtle effects. It's a little bit like the OD&D, in that serious exegesis can be needed to figure out all the implications of a rule. Almost a game in itself. I have an army of visigoths, which also can be used as franks. Quite fun.

Now, since the people at my game club are fond of their minis, almost any excuse in a rpg session to break out some minis is cause for celebration. Or at least a lengthy search in the boxes for "that figure" which will be just right to represent a PC. I used to hate that part.

So, now I'm back at the beginning. By my side as I type this is Warhammer 40 000 Rogue Trader, and I'm planning to use it as a setting for a roleplaying session. Not only that, I'm also going to be very much prepared for when my players break out the minis. Am I then returning to the roots of the hobby, with table top wargame miniatures turned into a rpg?

It's no wonder it took so long for any official rpg for the setting to arrive, and that they decided to write three games. It's very hard to capture the setting in just one game.I've decided to isolate my players on a hive world, just recently the target of a major invasion of the Empire of Man. Nothing should scream WH40k as much as a warzone, right? Now I'm just going to print out a bunch of character sheets and let the war begin.  

Bless your weapons and go! For the Emperor!