Op-En - A New Skirmish Game by Prim

[Primarch]

Well, the rules have been downloaded 15 times. Does anyone have any questions? I'm hoping that this bodes well for the games day this weekend.

[Konrad]

I'm about halfway through them.
No questions yet.
It's easy to understand. Though the >> << are a little hard to follow sometimes.
Once you add some graphics and examples, I think will smooth it out.
I'm not familiar with d4,d6,d8.... games.
Back in the day, TSR had these "Battlesystem" rules for mass combat that used multiple kinds of dice. You know Kobolds are a d4, Dragons d20, like that. I can't remember much about it besides that.

[YellowStreak]

I've been reading it on and off while communting so still getting my head around it.

Basically your stats are the die type, correct? In that case is it not simpler to call the stat d4, d6, d8 etc.?

For the skills that add +2 to a stat, again wouln't it be easier to class them as adding ">" (the next die type) to your role? Or is the intention that the skill increases your base and then on top of that you can have up to ">>>" (3 levels of bonus)?
Are the stkills and their costs balanced? An increase to the fighting skills (for example) sounds like it's way more likely to be beneficial and used in-game than an agilify or intellect bonus (which may be mnore circumstantial?), but they cost the same.

Have I missed somewhere the base cost for guys? The Character Ranks table on page 6 of honour and glory doesn't list the base costs for the different troop types?

[Primarch]

Basically your stats are the die type, correct? In that case is it not simpler to call the stat d4, d6, d8 etc.?

Yes, and maybe so. This is just the first version and there is still a lot of tweaking to be done.

For the skills that add +2 to a stat, again wouln't it be easier to class them as adding ">" (the next die type) to your role? Or is the intention that the skill increases your base and then on top of that you can have up to ">>>" (3 levels of bonus)?

The Traits are intended to be an upgrade to the base number, not an in-game >. So if you take the Trained trait, your Fight stat increases to the next die up permanently.

Are the stkills and their costs balanced? An increase to the fighting skills (for example) sounds like it's way more likely to be beneficial and used in-game than an agilify or intellect bonus (which may be mnore circumstantial?), but they cost the same.

That is what I'd like to determine through playing games. The way I see it in my head is that people are going to pick upgrades based on what they want characters to do. If your aim is to have someone be a fighter, then you'll take the Fight bonuses and skills. If your guy is more of a 'run over and pick up the objective' type, you'll go for the Agility based stuff. You aren't locked in to picking the same options for everyone. (And in many cases you specifically cannot buy the same upgrades).

My rule of thumb for pricing was that something that adds +1 or > costs 2 points. (Flat Stat increases add to the cost as well as having an additional tax.) Something that significantly improves/offers a new skill costs whatever your Stat is, and things that fall outside those two categories were priced based on my own judgement. This is all subject to change though. Without seeing how everything interacts, it's hard to say if points are truly balanced. My idea though is that the better you get at doing something (stats), the more expensive it will be for you to do it.

Have I missed somewhere the base cost for guys? The Character Ranks table on page 6 of honour and glory doesn't list the base costs for the different troop types?

I really need to add an example "Here is how you build a character" section. That is planned for the next version, along with more example forces, more scenarios, campaign rules, and some modifications/clarifications.
Currently, character cost is based on their Stats plus any Talents and any Equipment.
So Peasants come in around 46 points with no Talents/gear, Warriors are about 54 etc. When you fill in the character cards, you'll see a Cost option at the end of the Stat row, just total up the numbers. It is mentioned on Page 37 of the Core book, but I should make that clear in the H&G book.

[Jye Nicolson]

That is what I'd like to determine through playing games. The way I see it in my head is that people are going to pick upgrades based on what they want characters to do. If your aim is to have someone be a fighter, then you'll take the Fight bonuses and skills. If your guy is more of a 'run over and pick up the objective' type, you'll go for the Agility based stuff. You aren't locked in to picking the same options for everyone. (And in many cases you specifically cannot buy the same upgrades).

This is sort of where I left off, because it didn't seem like I could easily make sense of it without playing.

My guess would be you just want as much shooting as possible, with toughness as the next tier of usefulness. Use a screen of tough but otherwise pretty useless dudes to either lock down any advancing melee types or do the mission, while your shooters stay as still as possible and use all their actions for murder. Ideally you'll have more activations than the opponent (or can kill your way into that being true soon enough). The scenarios have eight turns so "table them and do the thing while they're dead" seems reasonable.

But it would need actual play or much more careful analysis to be able to tell whether that's an accurate read or (more likely) baggage from other games has blinded me to the value of other approaches.

[Primarch]

That is what I'd like to determine through playing games. The way I see it in my head is that people are going to pick upgrades based on what they want characters to do. If your aim is to have someone be a fighter, then you'll take the Fight bonuses and skills. If your guy is more of a 'run over and pick up the objective' type, you'll go for the Agility based stuff. You aren't locked in to picking the same options for everyone. (And in many cases you specifically cannot buy the same upgrades).

This is sort of where I left off, because it didn't seem like I could easily make sense of it without playing.

My guess would be you just want as much shooting as possible, with toughness as the next tier of usefulness. Use a screen of tough but otherwise pretty useless dudes to either lock down any advancing melee types or do the mission, while your shooters stay as still as possible and use all their actions for murder. Ideally you'll have more activations than the opponent (or can kill your way into that being true soon enough). The scenarios have eight turns so "table them and do the thing while they're dead" seems reasonable.

But it would need actual play or much more careful analysis to be able to tell whether that's an accurate read or (more likely) baggage from other games has blinded me to the value of other approaches.

Tabling someone ends the game, so you'd probably want to keep one or two enemies alive. A static gunline is one option that is available though.

[YellowStreak]

Have I missed somewhere the base cost for guys? The Character Ranks table on page 6 of honour and glory doesn't list the base costs for the different troop types?

I really need to add an example "Here is how you build a character" section. That is planned for the next version, along with more example forces, more scenarios, campaign rules, and some modifications/clarifications.
Currently, character cost is based on their Stats plus any Talents and any Equipment.
So Peasants come in around 46 points with no Talents/gear, Warriors are about 54 etc. When you fill in the character cards, you'll see a Cost option at the end of the Stat row, just total up the numbers. It is mentioned on Page 37 of the Core book, but I should make that clear in the H&G book.

I see that now. An improvement suggestion for ease of use etc would be to put the base cost in the supplement next to the troop type (e.g,: Noble, Peasant), as if i understand it right the base stats are 'set', you're just decuding which stat goes into which attribute.

[Primarch]

Yes, but you can change stats using a Trait, plus the Move and Body stats vary more and will change the final value... unless I set a cost for those too. That would probably be easier on anyone who isn't the rules writer.

[Primarch]

Sooo.... based on today's feedback from playtesting, I'm looking at making some minor corrections and amendments to a variety of rules, and also one or two big changes.

One of the big suggestions was that the 2-stage combat system could be reworked to a single stage. Right now you have to pass a Fight Vs. Fight roll (Or Shoot Vs. Agility) and then a Power Vs. Toughness roll to cause damage. The comment that came up was that it feels bad to roll a high number on the attack, but then whiff on the damage roll.
The other big suggestion was that there are two many stats and they should be trimmed down a little.
Looking at my options for the first idea, there are several possibilities, but they all end up adding extra maths steps to the game. But when I look at the second suggestion, the solution seems to be to cut out the Power Vs.Toughness roll, by doing away with Power entirely and making Toughness into Defence.

So instead of rolling FightVs.Fight and PowerVs.Toughness, you'd simply roll FightVs.Defence. Similarly instead of ShootVs.Agility and PowerVs.Toughness, you'd roll ShootVs.Agility. The result of that single roll would determine damage.
To represent Stronger fighters, you could increase the base damage of their weapons. I'd also probably switch Shields to buff the new Defence stat and Armour would reduce incoming damage.

There is a loss of some granularity with this new system, but it would streamline combat somewhat and eliminate the NPE of massive to hit followed by failed damage rolls. You could also build more Offensive and more Defensive characters depending on which Stat you maxed out.

Any thoughts?

[Jye Nicolson]

Apologies I didn't make time for the playtest, so take my opinion with a grain of salt:

I agree that going to one roll is probably more fun. The old "great attack, bad damage roll" is familiar from D&D and is always a let down. So is "bunch of hits, but oh look at all those 1s and 2s for the wound roll in 40k". So it feels a bit old school in that the most prominent examples are in places where they like to preserve the old sacred cows.

That doesn't mean it's bad necessarily but you need some context where that granularity gets you something and you don't have other ways of easily getting it. In a 40K scale game you have a lot of attacks targeting a lot of models of wildly different profiles, so at least all the faff of wound rolls, saves etc plays into the decisions of where to allocate them for best effect, the drama of trying to chip off Ghaz's last wound with bolters etc. But for the skirmish games even GW dropped that, so you get the simpler Warcry style single roll (of a pool, but only once and then count damage) and the only slightly more complex Kill Team variant where there's some saves to hook into the cover system. In both cases they have substantial HP on the models so the attacker can feel like they're achieving something while the defender isn't just picking up models.

In a roleplaying context I've long disliked how whiffing can feel to players, eventually came around to really liking D&D style HP after many years of games with health levels, armour as damage resistance etc. A big HP pool lets low damage folks do *something* rather than *nothing* (in that tougher characters don't have to no-sell the damage completely to function) and that feels substantially different even when the statistical outcome is very similar. Your game is still a competitive game, but it feels like it wants to be closer akin to an RPG so you probably want players feeling their warband members are accomplishing *something*.

The real question for me is whether in the existing system it'd ever be useful to have a high Fight, low Power fighter, and I'm not sure it would be? If that's so (I may have missed a use case), I think the proposed new system is significantly better.