Skirmish Wargame Rules [Part 1]

I love the skirmish style of play. I've experienced it with several games over the years including Necromunda, Mordheim and Warhammer Skirmish, D&D Miniatures, and a few other offbeat indie systems. I'm also a big fan of quick-play and simplified rules, so I'm starting work on a new game that encapsulates fast (and possibly also furious) game mechanics for multiple players. My goals for the system are that it has to:

a.) be easy to learn and quick-playing.
b.) incorporate unique features and abilities of several factions or races.
c.) keep every player engaged at all times.

Easy to Learn/Quick-Playing

Part of the problem with GW stats is that, well, there are too blasted many of them. I'm playing a game with dozens of miniatures running around the table, like 40k, and every one of the little bastards has nine different stats. I could recite them in my sleep; strength, toughness, weapon skill, ballistic skill, etc. But until you've played a billion turns of this game and memorized the charts that tell you how one WS performs against another (you have to look every attack up on a chart, for crying out loud!) along with the WS of every type of unit you have, the game slows down. When my brother and I and our friends started playing 40k as kids, the typical turn would go something like this:

"Your turn. Front to front, man! You can't measure four inches from the front of the base to the back of the base, that's actually five inches. So you just cheated and moved everyone five inches, you cheater. Move them all back an inch. Ok, now it's your ranged combat phase. You have a squad of ten guardsmen, they have a 24" range. They want to shoot at that guy way over there? Sorry, they can only shoot at their closest target. But wait! Three of them are out of range, and the rest are in long range! Add modifiers... seven shots. Ok, what's your guys' ballistic skill? Alright, you need 4's. Three hits. Now, what's the strength of a lasgun? Hold on, hold on... ok my guys have toughness 4 so that's... let me look it up on the chart."

One turn should not take this goddamned long. And that was only half of one unit's attack phase. A game of warfare should be tactical, but it should also allow players to make split-second decisions. So my game can't possibly use charts for stuff like combat. That much is certain.

Unique Factions or Races

Let's say I find a way to simplify my game so miniatures have fewer stats and a round of play proceeds much more quickly. What's going to separate a shambling horde of zombies from a tight squad of muscle-bound star soldiers? Why should I play throngs of puny goblins when I can have a dozen stalwart and highly skilled elves? The answer, my friends, is the X factor. Above the basic rules mechanics should be a layer of specialized abilities that give each army/faction its flavor. The problem (again I say, the problem) with these abilities in GW games tends to be that they stop the flow of the game in its tracks. Wanna use an Ork war machine? Look up the special rules. Read them thoroughly. Roll extra dice. Consult yet another chart. I fucking hate charts.

Keeping Every Player Engaged

This is perhaps the most challenging of the goals that I'd like to accomplish. If there's one thing I've learned about gaming, it's that when it isn't my turn, I'm bored as fuck. This is true most of the time, but let's look at an example of a game where I'm rarely ever bored - Magic: The Gathering. Whenever you get into a game of Magic, you know that chances are likely you're about to be on the edge of your seat for the duration. What is it about this game that makes it so engaging?

There are a couple of things.

First, you draw a card every turn (and sometimes more often than that). Drawing a card is a lot like rolling a die because of the random chance it adds to the game. There is a moment in time when your fingers go down to your draw pile and you whiplash that top card into your hand, or while your die bounces wildly across the table, where your ultimate fate hangs in the balance. But there is one key difference between cards and dice: if you've made what you believe to be a good deck, then most any card you draw should be useful - if not right away, then somewhere down the line. A die roll, on the other hand, can be shitty. And a shitty die roll is no more useful than a blind paraplegic bus driver.

The second thing that makes Magic such an exciting game to play is the ability of any player to use certain game mechanics called activated abilities and instants to respond to the actions of another player at any time. This phenomenon makes you constantly second-guess everything you do, because you know that an opponent can react to it and make something they want to happen, happen before what you just decided to do... uh, happens. It's called 'the stack' and it is a mechanic that makes Magic great and has been incorporated into surprisingly few other games.

Putting it All Together

Easier said than done, right? Well, that's kind of the purpose of this mindvomit of a blog post. So here again are the goals, and some ideas we've come up with for making them work. The game must:

a.) be easy to learn and quick-playing.
* Reduce multiple rolls for attacks.
* Do not use charts.

b.) incorporate unique features and abilities of several factions or races.
* Create special qualities that don't bring the game to a screeching halt.
* No fucking charts.

c.) keep every player engaged at all times.
* Provide an aspect or mechanic in the game that players are able to 'hide' from one another.
* Make use of 'interrupts' that let any player react at any time.


In Part 2 I'm going to try out some specific ideas for making this system work. Stay tuned, fair reader.

Parchment Bonfire: D&D 4th Edition

The Parchment Bonfire is a segment in which I provide an inept and lackluster review of a book, aid, software program, or other gaming product, and then decide whether every copy of it in existence should be burned in a gigantic bonfire (or not). Since a lacking review of the world's most popular role-playing game's latest spine-tingling version is such a rarity among all of the thorough and well-thought out reviews out there, I felt it my duty to toss the following around as a riposte.

There's this phenomenon that happens when you're playing 4th Edition. I call it the 'Same Thing Over and Over Effect,' and it's where your character does the same goddamn thing infinity times. Your At-Will Powers (otherwise known as your O-and-O Powers) are things like the Wizard's Magic Missle, where your Wizard zaps some blithering fuck every round until it dies. In gameplay terms, it's quick and easy to do, makes combat more balanced and streamlined, and cuts down on complicated spellbooks. It also gets real boring, real quick.

To date I've been involved in two different 4E campaigns, one with each of my two gaming groups. Being a lazy gamer, I did not go to the trouble of choosing two characters of differing roles in the party. I did roll up two, but they are both male Elf Rangers in the most wicked way. I think I chose maybe one power differently between them, so besides their attribute scores being roughly dissimilar they are pretty much the same guy. So while I own the three rulebooks in the basic set and a copy of Thunderspire Labyrinth, and I have perused the books to a large extent, my actual play experience is limited to the heroic tier (a.k.a. the first few levels).

Let me tell you an adventure story. In the first session I ever played of 4E, we're strolling through the quintessential kobold-laden 1st-level dungeon, minding our own party business, when all of a sudden my Ranger gets slaughtered by a pack of lizard-y dog beasts. That's the dramatic and condensed version of the story, but my character did take it. Hard. The ranged Ranger (sic) is quite the beast himself, but his Prime Shot ability is a deathtrap. I'm not sure who thought that it would be a good idea for a distance-oriented fighter to have a power that requires him to be the closest dude to the enemy, but I'm not gonna lie: even the measly to-hit bonus seemed well worth it, especially at first level.

So the whole thing happens like this: as I advance into a room chock full of kobolds chucking rocks down on us from a parapet above, a pair of double doors open and these lizard-thing-beasts run out and devour my character. It doesn't take them long to drop my precious elf, and then the DM allows them - and in fact, directly causes them - to continue eating his tasty elf flesh until death occurs. I'm not sure why our DM is so unrelenting; maybe it's because I have been texting for half the game session and I'm not really paying attention. Allow me to explain.

As I lay dying, I'm wondering to myself what the hell having more hit points means if I'm going to die just as quickly. In 4th Edition I get 25 hit points instead of 8 to start out, but instead of doing 3 damage per hit, 1st-level monsters do 9 damage per. That's fantastic. Of course I'm exaggerating, and my complaints come from the fact that I am bitter because I'm such a horrible D&D player that I couldn't even make my character survive a single gaming session before taking the shaft.

My full review, as you can see, and my overall opinion of the game, is that it's quicker and more simplified than 3.5, but I'm also more bored by it when we play rules-heavy. As a skeletal system, it does the trick to balance the game out, but I think in this case balance has reduced variety in a significant way. I will end with this; my thoughts on 4th Edition, as well as my opinions thereof, are inconclusive! So for now, I'm going to spare this game from the Bonfire. Keep it secret, keep it safe!