Applied Procrastination

I used to play in a long-running campaign using the fourth-edition Hero System. Ever since the fifth edition came out, and Hero Games started publishing supplements like they were going out of style, I’ve been wanting to check out their work, and maybe throw some cash their way. So after I read some favorable reviews of Star Hero, the science-fiction “genre book,” I thought I’d check it out.

Now, here’s the thing about the Hero System. The basic goal of the game is to be a universal system: one set of consistent self-contained rules useable for any game or genre. So the main rulebook has all of these rules (like a basic textbook on cooking might explain knife skills, and techniques like roasting and sauteeing), and then there are genre books that discuss how to use these rules to model different kinds of game worlds (like a Chinese cookbook, or a barbeque cookbook). Star Hero, then, is all about how to run a science-fiction (sf) campaign with the Hero System.

I’m only about halfway done with the book, and what I’ve read so far is pretty solid stuff. Lots and lots of discussion about how to apply different Hero “powers” to various sf conventions, talk about different levels of realism, all of the good stuff you’d expect from a book like this. There’s even a fair amount of pagecount devoted to guidelines for randomly-generating star systems — based on modern astrophysics, but with alternate rules for more “space operatic” settings.

Hero is a rules-heavy system (maybe “rules-intensive” is a better term), and I’m noticing a lot of this in Star Hero. This isn’t surprising per se; after all, if you’re not using the rules, you can just make stuff up, so published material is naturally going to talk about how to do stuff with the rules. That Hero sets out to allow you to model anything within its rules framework seems, however, to create some odd behavior in its users. I suspect that some people see this as a challenge, and some as a kind of obligation. If you’ve got a thing, and a system that can model any thing, then surely it can model your thing, right? And if you mention that thing in a supplement, than you ought to model that thing, right?

So, in Star Hero, we have rules for blasters, and ships, and space stations, and lightsabers, and aliens, and time travel, and sensors, and all manner of other sf goodness. But then there’s the odd stuff. The stuff I can’t reliably classify as serious or sly or outright self-parody. Stuff like:

• A Hero power simulating the dropping of a comet onto a planet from orbit to improve its atmosphere. (Only 3 Real Points, by the way, so stock up!)
• Mention of how much damage is done by the tidal forces close to a neutron star.
• How to build a jump gate in Hero. (Really, does this need actual rules? You drive through, you’re somewhere else.)
• The different layers of the sun, and how much damage you in each. What’s almost worse is that they only provide the power ratings; I actually found myself starting to count in my head the point value of the sun.

If I’m to be honest, this is actually one of the things that appeals to me about Hero: I like modelling problems, and I enjoy messing around with RPG systems (and computer software) because of that. But more as an intellectual exercise. I find it sort of hard to believe that there would come a time in actual play when that cometary terraforming writeup is actually going to be useful.

Inire, Orion and I had a three-way Full Thrust free-for-all tonight. I’ve been wanting to give the game a play for a while now, and I was not disappointed. (Well, okay, maybe a little. Most of my ships got blown up. Heavy cruisers are good.)

My biggest complaint, just to get it out of the way, is that the rules are pretty spread-out over all of the books published to date. There’s the main rulebook, which has the cinematic movement rules, basic weapons, and an early build system. Then an out of print supplement More Thrust which introduces a number of additional rules. Then Fleet Book 1 for a complete overhaul of much of the game — but not all, so you probably still need the original rules — including a different classification system for beams, much more powerful fighters, and a vector-based movement system. There’s also a Fleet Book 2 as well….

But the rules themselves (once you’ve decided what subset to use) are really quite simple. It’s all d6-based. For the basic beam weapons that are the backbone of the original game rules, to-hit and damage rolls are combined, and the rating of the weapon determines how many dice you roll. There are very elegant mechanics for range and for energy shields layered on top of that. Point-defense systems and fighters work in much the same way. Fighters, by the way, are nasty. They have lots and lots of range and mobility, and a bay full of fighters has more short-range firepower than most dreadnoughts — and are probably harder to kill, to boot.

If there’s any bad point of the basic game, I think it’d be the critical hit mechanic. Damage is tracked by a series of boxes. At certain points, you reach a threshold, and you must roll 1d6 for each system on your ship to determine whether it blows up. On a big ship, that’s a lot of tedious rolling. (I think one of the supplements might have a more streamlined system; but as written, it’s a little obnoxious.)

I’m definitely planning on taking a closer look at all of the optional rules (torpedos! missiles! the wave motion gun!). Hopefully I can convince the guys that they want another go at me.

In other news, my flirtation with Full Thrust, and several recommendations from others, led me to borrow Stargrunt from Inire. I’m not all that far into it, but I fear that this crazy “realism” thing they seem to be striving for is going to get in the way of what wargames are really about: little painted men blowing the hell out of each other. Optionally, stabbing each other with spiky bits.

I fully appreciate that realism is very important to some people. And that most real armies have chains of command. And that most real soldiers would run right straight away from alien monstrosities from beyond death and space and time. And that tanks don’t do that.

But, dammit, I like giant robots shaped like really mean humanoid cathedrals. I also like good, clean mecha design. (Not like most of our American muck.)

Essentially, I’m a shameless devotee of style, even sometimes over substance. Of atmosphere over realism. And of clean game design, even when that sometimes ignores physics, or a half-century of military science.

As a component of our recent Full Thrust obsession, Inire bought a copy of Power Projection from Warehouse 23. It’s a ship-combat game set in the Traveller universe, and based on the Full Thrust rules.

The thing I really like about Power Projection is its refinement of the vector movement system introduced in Fleet Book 1. Instead of tracking the velocity of each ship with, say, a little arrow counter (for direction) and a die (for magnitude), it uses a “future position” counter to track the endpoint of the velocity vector. Underneath the ship mini at the beginning of each turn is a “current position” counter. After movement orders are written, and it’s time to move the ships, each mini is placed on the future position counter, and then moved according to its orders for the turn. Then a line is drawn from current position to mini, extended past it a like distance, and the future position counter placed there.

This means first and foremost that there’s no bookkeeping to track current speed. And the error introduced by nudging the future position counter is much less than nudging a direction counter next to the ship would be. It also means that — as seems fitting in a setting where computer-aided targetting would likely be the rule — the other players have a better idea of where each ship is going to be next turn. This is information they’d theoretically have already, but makes it more clear to all concerned what’s going on.

The other changes I’m not so hot about. Weapons and shields come in more flavors than they do in basic Full Thrust, but have much less variation in terms of rules. All of the beam weapons come in regular and enhanced varieties (mining lasers being an exception), and differ mainly in terms of range. There are also several kinds of missle (including bomb-pumped lasers warheads), and “sandcasters,” which are sort of like smokescreens of reflective particles.

All non-missile weapons use the same to-hit/damage chart. Range, shielding, and other modifiers shift the row of the chart used, and the necessary roll on a d6 to do damage; it’s similar to the way screens in Full Thrust work, but generalized. Shields are really just modifiers. Different flavors of shield affect certain weapons more than others, but most ships seem to mount some of each. Frankly, I’m not all that wild about all of the modifiers, and the need for the chart. I’m sure it gets faster with more play, but it just feels off, somehow.

There are definitely elements of Power Projection that I’m thinking of adapting back into Full Thrust — the movement refinements, sandcasters, and perhaps bomb-pumped laser missles — but on the whole, I think I prefer the simplicity of the original.

We just got the shipment of Full Thrust miniatures we ordered on Halloween. Almost four kilos of metal space goodness from Britain. Just the fricking shipping & handling was £42. But now… now we paint.

(Well, and do a fair amount of filing, scraping, cutting, pinning, gluing, etc. to get these things cleaned up and assembled. Most of the castings are pretty good, but I’m really not thrilled about the look of Orion’s ESU ships. One sprue of fighters is pretty much fused into a single sheet of metal.)

To continue today’s theme, another sort of cool Star Wars-related product that I’ve been looking at lately is the collectible miniatures game from Wizards of the Coast. There’s something sort of irresistable about little toy stormtroopers and rebels (silly teardrop helmets and all).

I’m not thrilled about collectible miniatures in general. This usually means that the stuff you want is super-duper chase figures, and the rest is chaff. Thankfully, in the first set, Rebel Storm, most of the stuff I want is common and uncommon. This is nice because it makes it easy to find, and means that lots of people who are collecting full sets are selling off common lots on eBay pretty cheap.

The newer set, Clone Strike, unfortunately does make the only characters I care about (the Jedi) all very rare. I couldn’t care less about the battle droids and clone troopers. Heck, even the Jedi are mostly random aliens from the few Jedi Council scenes in Episode I, or seen for 9 frames in the Geonosian arena.

I’m also not sure that I care much for the actual game attached to these miniatures. It’s the combat system from the d20 Star Wars RPG, distilled to about 4 numbers. I’m actually contemplating hacking the Lord of the Rings game from Games Workshop for these miniatures. But really, all kinds of rulesets would work. I just need to build up my stocks before Rebel Storm sells out.

Not too long ago, some friends of mine were discussing miniatures gaming, and getting new people into the hobby. In particular, we were talking about folks that might not even know whether they’d enjoy those sorts of games. What would we recommend, then, to give those people a taste without asking them to go out and buy 2000 points of orcs?

There are four main factors in choosing a miniatures game:

1. The toys.
2. The rules.
3. The network.
4. Cost of entry.

The first two things there should be pretty self-evident, because that’s how you choose any kind of product: you pick something that works the way you need it to work, and which appeals to you on an aesthetic level. The initial cost to get all of the stuff you need to play may be quite significant (especially if you’re a new gamer). But the network is just as important if you plan to actually play the game, since you need other people with whom to play.

All of these factors are subjective—a game that’s played by hundreds of people may still not be played by anyone with whom you want to spend time—and there are trade-offs to be made. But I’m going to attempt to give an overview of the stuff that’s out there today, with an eye toward product offerings geared toward someone new to the game, or to the hobby overall.

Warhammer 40,000: The Battle for Macragge

Warhammer 40,000 is the 500-pound gorilla of miniatures gaming. When it comes to network, this game has them all beaten. You probably can’t walk into a decent game store on a weekend and not run into a game of 40K. Since Games Workshop is one of the biggest game companies around (and, incidentally, are marketing mostly at boys 12-15 years of age), they can also afford to produce a starter product like The Battle for Macragge.

This product is probably the cheapest (in absolute terms) and gentlest introduction you’ll find to miniatures gaming. It’s got the rules, dice & templates, plastic snap-together minis, and a bunch of simple scenarios specifically tailored to what’s in the box. Quite a deal for $45.

Why isn’t this a slam dunk, then? As much as I love the “grim darkness of the far future” and the sort of World War I in spaaaace! vibe that much of 40K has, I’m not sure that it’s actually a good game. The rules aren’t very robust, there are lots of fiddly special rules for all the different armies, it’s not always very well-balanced, and I’m not really fond of the “IGOUGO” turn structure.

(Worth mentioning is that GW’s other major lines have similar intro boxes. Warhammer has Battle for Skull Pass, and Lord of the Rings has Mines of Moria.)

Collectible Miniatures

Not one game, but a class of games I’m going to lump together, including products like Star Wars Miniatures and HeroClix. These games occupy a strange middle ground between toys and games: they’re really more like board games with randomized playing pieces. In a lot of ways, they have more in common with card games like Magic: The Gathering than 40K.

I mention them really to say that a) the cost of entry is very low on these products (a starter set may cost you as much as $25 for one person), there’s no hobby stuff like assembling and painting miniatures, and you can be playing in next to no time. But a lot of the things that are central to miniatures gaming in my mind (terrain and maneuvering and such) are entirely missing.

Warmachine & Hordes

Outside of Games Workshop’s offerings, these two games from Privateer Press might be the most widespread miniatures games on the market at the moment. Both are set in the same world, and use compatible rules. Warmachine is a game of magitech mecha (“warjacks”), while Hordes replaces the technological heavy-hitters with monsters.

Both games offer starter boxes for around $35-40 with a basic force for one player, and the “quick start” version of the rules. Typical games don’t get all that much bigger than this, so a starter box can easily form the core of a larger army if you like the game. Privateer is also somewhat unique in that they continue to playtest new units and rules against starter box armies, so the escalation of forces that is often seen in Warhammer isn’t as prevalent in these games.

On the other hand, the models can be somewhat finicky for a new hobbyist, requiring more complicated assembly. And you don’t get much help in terms of pre-built terrain and whatnot.

Urban War

Although 40K is the undisputed leader of 28mm sci-fi infantry games, it’s certainly not the only player in the space. Urban War is clearly a descendant of the 40K rules, and to some extent the aesthetic, though its future is definitely cleaner, and higher-tech. Like Warmachine, the focus here is on smaller games of around 5-10 miniatures per side, though it can scale up.

There’s an intro game box that provides basic stuff for two players, including some terrain ($48 at the TheWarStore). There are “starter” and “booster” boxes for each army to make selection easier. All of the rules and army lists and such are available as free downloads from the Urban Mammoth site.

On the other hand, I’ve never met another gamer that was aware of this game, so the network coverage may be sort of spotty.

AT-43: Operation: DAMOCLES

I include Rackham’s introductory product for their AT-43 line, Operation: DAMOCLES because I think it exemplifies a growing trend in miniatures gaming. This big box isn’t cheap ($80 MSRP, $64 at TheWarStore), but it has everything you need to get going, including pre-painted miniatures—rare outside of the collectible games, and of a much higher quality in this product.

It’s probably too early to say much about the quality of the rules (though what I’ve read is pretty mixed), but what I’ve seen of the miniatures so far is pretty cool. And if you’re averse to the hobby part of these games, you could do worse.

The Battle of Five Armies

Including this product is a marginal choice on my part. It doesn’t have a very big network, it’s not very easy to find, and if you want anything beyond the initial box, it’s not all that cheap ($80 from the GW Online Store). But I think that Games Workshop’s The Battle of Five Armies is worth mentioning for a number of reasons:

1. It’s based on The Hobbit, which might be an ideal hook for someone new to the hobby.
2. The rules are based on Warmaster, which I’ve read many, many good things about.
3. It’s very different from the other games I’m including in this list, and hearkens back to old-school historical wargames.

In Closing

There’s no one right choice for everyone (nor is miniatures gaming even something everyone enjoys). But if you’re considering getting into the hobby, I hope the foregoing helps you find something you might enjoy, without committing too much money and time upfront.

Also, rules these days are becoming a commodity thing. It’s easy to cook up some simple (not to say good) miniatures rules to package with your figures. So most everyone does. More and more companies give away at least the basic version of the game on their web sites, because it’s the miniatures that have the real profit margins. And there are a number of systems out there designed to work with whatever miniatures you have on hand. So if you like the figures, but don’t like the game, don’t despair! You can find new rules that suit you better.