Archive for the ‘Wargaming’ Category

I’ve decided that in the game with no name each character (which for a wargame is one figure) has three things that define them.

Their Ability will be a number that represents their overall competence at doing things. This shouldn’t change during play.

Their Bravado will be a number that reflects if they can carry on or not. This will change during play when they are injured, scared or otherwise hindered.

Along with these two numbers they can have Characteristics. Characteristics include anything else that is relevant about them such as skills, natural aptitudes and contacts.

I’m not going to have a point system for buying these instead leaving it to the player’s discretion. I may work one out later but to start with it just adds to the complication and detracts from writing a game to tell stories.

Ability and Bravado will go from 1 to 10 and Characteristics (if they have a score) will go from 1 to 5.

So I want to do stuff for the new web site. I’ve got several stories underway. I should come up with a game idea to work on too. For years I’ve been playing round with an idea for a game that can be used as both a role playing game and a wargame without any changes. I’m going to take another crack at that.

So start with a few important decisions about how it’s going to work. It needs to be simple so it will play fast but not completely devoid of detail. I like the games from Wessex Games using GUTS. They use only a single number for each character. This makes the game fast but being so simple there isn’t any detail on the characters. I also want to separate how effective a character is from how injured they are as I find that systems that link the two completely can become one sided once a few effective hits have been scored.

I want a game that uses a few dice. No buckets of dice being rolled here. I’m going to try to keep to 3 dice in any roll. There should be little maths required in order to keep things quick: addition and subtraction at most. There should be few rolls. No roll to hit, save against the hit then roll for damage. One roll to do the whole lot.

For wargamers I’m going to lean towards 25mm figures because I have quite a few already but so its easy to work in other scales I’m going to list the real world dimensions as well as the scaled version.

I’ve also got to decide on a genre/setting/time frame for the game. It may just be Life on Mars influencing me but I’m going to go for a game set in the recent past something covering the 1960s onward. There were lots of iconic British action fantasy TV shows like The Sweeney, The Professionals, Dempsey & Makepeace, The Avengers and Spooks. I’m going to lean towards the grittier end of things to start with, away from the less believable Bond franchise and The Avengers, but they should be easy to cater for later (hopefully).