Buck's Blog

In several of the Look, Sarge, No Charts rules sets, a number of special dice are used to resolve various combat effects, such as morale checks, rolls to close with the enemy, and rolls to stand when charged.  During a recent G.A.M.E.R. (see previous posts) play test, Chris suggested that the card mechanism being developed for G.A.M.E.R. might work to replace the dice in Bear Yourselves Valiantly.  I made up cards for him for those rules.  The experiment went well, and Dave wanted a similar deck of cards for Fate of Battle.  I ginned them up and posted them to the Yahoo Group.  Above is a sample.

The consensus is that these are a little easier to read than the various dice.  They also remove the table clutter of the dice.  Finally they eliminate the need for players to memorize which dice are used in which situations and the search for the right ones.

In a previous post (http://bucksurdu.com/blog/?p=3749), I described a game that Duncan ran at a club night using G.A.M.E.R. to represent the skirmish fight between two formed units.  That play test was so successful that Duncan sign dup to run it at HISTORICON.  He has been working on how to represent the formed troops are are important to the game but are not controlled by the players.  These pictures of paper mock-ups of what he is building.  I think they look pretty darned good.

After working on the Armies for Kids project (see related post on Chris’ blog), we pulled out Imperial Assault to give it a test run.  We played the tutorial scenario twice.  I as the Empire player won both tutorials, but the second iteration was very close.  My probe droid turned out to be the most valuable player in both games.

In general I like the game.  I like the way that range and accuracy are taken care of with all the special dice.  Simple and elegant.  I can live with the fact that figures have no facing and can fire 360 degrees — it’s after all Hollywood.  I don’t like the fact that cover either blocks line of sight or has not effect.  This worked better in the old Star Wars Miniatures game.

Then we set up the “skirmish game.”  I like the random missions, and the balance seemed about right.  This time, the rebels spanked me 50 points to 15.  Ouch!

We had a good time, and I think a couple of the folks were up for playing out the various episodes of the campaign.

This was a busy weekend of activity with the kids, so I didn’t get much hobby work done.  My daughter’s First Robotics Team had a Cinderella moment at the DC Regional Competition on Saturday and is not qualified for the World Competition in St. Louis.  On Sunday I took my son to Frederick to a store where he could try out and purchase professional darts for the dart board we got them for Christmas.  The we took him to a local Italian Restaurant to celebrate his 18th birthday.

I found this figure in a box of unpainted lead a few weeks back and decided to knock him out.  I haven’t finished painting flocking the base, but the figure is done.

Except for the bases, I also completed these two figures (actually I finished two of each of them).  These are Laurel and Hardy in the French Foreign Legion as depicted in the movie Beau Hunks.  I don’t have any Foreign Legion figures, so I don’t know what I’ll do with them, but I really enjoy Laurel and Hardy movies, so I couldn’t resist these figures.

Last night at HAWKs club night I ran a largish G.A.M.E.R. game.  Chris could only handle six players in his Bear Yourselves Valiantly game, so I too everyone else.  Most of the folks had played G.A.M.E.R. before, so we were able to jump right in.

The scenario featured four German infantry squads (with Panzerfausts and machine-guns) plus two Pz. IV H tanks and a Stug III trying to hold three buildings against three understrength platoons of British and American paratroopers supported by two Shermans and a Cromwell IV.  The initial setup was a bit chaotic with the paras entering two opposite corners, one German squad occupying each building, and the fourth German squad and the German tanks arriving as reinforcements.

I was pretty happy that the rules were able to manage a ten-player gamer with lots of vehicles without bogging down.

The Allied forces did a good job of focusing on the objectives (the three buildings).  The Germans had a good initial deployment with two machine-guns covering the approaches to the buildings.  (Unfortunately for the Germans, Don didn’t seem to be able to hit anything all day with his machine-guns, so the Paras got pretty close to the building in the foreground of the above picture.

Dave’s “die rolling” was typically abysmal.  At one point, all three weapons on one of Dave’s Pz. IVs were jammed.  He did manage to machine-gun Kevin’s American bazooka crew.  Kevin got off two bazooka shots first: one bounced, the other missed.  Dave traded shots with Jim’s Shermans.  When the smoke cleared both Pz IVs had brewed up, as did one of the Shermans.

In the end, while the Allies were very close to capturing the buildings, but time ran out.  Jacob had nearly captured the building pictured above.  Kevin was inside the first floor of the larger, central building that Kurt had softened up with HE from his Cromwell.  Duncan was just outside the third building, and had killed the Germans defending the wall.  Despite heavy casualties, with another hour of game time, the Allies would probably have taken all three buildings.

Chris experimented with a new idea for Bear Yourselves Valiantly in which the units were battling in the Mines of Moria.  Also, I made a deck of cards for Chris to replace the various special dice.  While Chris said the scenario experiment didn’t go well, he said the cards were well received.  Apparently the limited ability to pivot and move didn’t play well with the limited mobility of the caverns.

Below is an example of some of the cards that potentially replace the special dice.  I was able to get more information on the cards and also make the font significantly larger.  I am thinking about making these available on the Look, Sarge Yahoo group for people to download and print for their own use.

Last night Tommy and I played Star Wars miniatures.  He was once again the Rebels, and I was the Empire.  This time we used figures from the battle on Hoth.  We each took 100 points.

Tom had Han and Luke on Ton-Tons, Leah, some kind of snow machine-gun thing, and some troopers.  I had Darth Vader and seven snow troopers.  The snow troopers were significantly harder to kill than the Storm Troopers from the other day, having twice the hit points and better defense values.

Tom had really cold dice, and we learned that Darth Vader is a BEAST in hand-to-hand combat.  Though it was touch and go for a while, my Imperial forces eventually prevailed.  I was down to Vader and one snow trooper, but I finally took down Han and his Ton-Ton.

I found the error in my Excel workbook for this.  The table above is the corrected version.  Everything sums to 100% properly now.  Yay!

For many years I have had interest in implementing an opposed-die roll dice progression mechanic in a game.  Many years ago Cory Ring and I wrote a small set of rules for the HMGS MidSouth Dispatch (newsletter) that featured such a mechanic.  The problem is that there isn’t enough variance between a d4 and a d12 and then there is the big gap between d12 and d20.  The gap can be filled with two dice, but then you don’t get the same uniform distribution of results that a single die achieves.

Recently, I found a company (http://mathartfun.com/shopsite_sc/store/html/DiceShop.html)  that sells d14, d16, d18, d22, and d24.  I wrote to them, and they were able to sell me 10 of each such that each type of die was a unique color.  Since these are uncommon shapes I wanted to be able to say, “roll the blue one and always mean the d14 — or whatever shape was blue.  They arrived recently, and I have begun to think about how to employ them.

The basic notion is that abilities would have a base die as a part point.   Modifiers would then change the die rolled.  The attacker and defender would each roll a die, with the higher roll winning.  I have also thought it might be interesting if the difference in the rolls somehow indicated the level of success.  For instance if the attacker’s roll is three times the defender’s that might indicate some sort of critical hit.

On a recent flight for work, I began to wonder about the probabilities of winning under these types of rules.  One of the reasons that this die progression approach appeals to me is that someone rolling a d4 COULD defeat someone rolling a d24.  But what is that probability?  So out came Excel.  The table below shows the chance of the attacker (rolling the dice along the left of the table) defeating a defender (rolling the dice across the top of the table). 

So, if an attacker roll d4 and the defender rolled d24, the attacker would have just a 6% of winning.  Note that the attacker must roll higher than the defender to get a hit, so ties go to the defender.  On the other hand, if the attacker rolled d24 and the defender rolled d4, the attacker would have a 905 chance of winning.  Again, ties go to the defender.

Looking at this chart, I was pretty happy with the way the probabilities laid out.  Then I stated wondering why things weren’t summing to 100%.  For instance, why was P(Victory, d4 vs. d24) + P(Victory, d24 vs. d4) not equal to 1?  Then Duncan made a comment that helped me figure it out.  It’s those ties.  Since some rolls are losses for both d4 vs. d24 and d24 vs. d4 those were the missing percentages.

The table (above) shows the probabilities of ties that are always failures.  For a d4 vs. anything, there are 4 rolls that are always ties: 1:1, 2:2, 3:3, and 4:4.  For d4 vs. d4, this is 25% of the total rolls possible (16).  To check my math, I then inverted the first table…

so the defender is down the left and the attacker is across the top.  Then I added all three tables together, yielding this:

Except for one cell (it looks like two, but this table is symmetrical about its diagonal) at 99%, all the math adds up.  I rechecked all the math and didn’t find an error, so I’m chalking it up to round-off errors.

So, if anyone has stayed with me this far, I think the math shows that from a probability standpoint, the die progression mechanic is viable.

I am planning to implement this with something melee heavy so that weapons get a base attack die and skill and circumstances modify the die.  The defender’s armor gets a base defense die, with skill and circumstances modifying it.  I may try this in a couple of weeks with some Robin Hood figures.

I have been working on these for a couple of weeks.  In a much earlier post, I showed some pictures of these old Ral Partha “Death Jaws” on which I mounted some female hussars.  I bought a second set of the creatures when we got Iron Wind Metals to pull these mold out of mothballs for us.  I have been waiting to figure out what to mount on them.

Many years ago, I built up a nice collection of Pass of the North figures for the Mexican Punitive Expedition and Americans vs. the Moros.  I learned recently that the Pass of the North figures are still available.  I ordered some of them and mounted them on the Death Jaws.  I like they way they turned out and look forward to seeing how they do against a bunch of crazed Moros.

Sometime before Christmas I finally got my hands on this Plasticville kit.  Greg, one of the HAWKs, had one in one of his “Dr. Who does something wild and crazy” games.  Since then, I have been coveting it.  My dad found it somewhere — he knows a lot of model train people — and I finally got it assembled in a painted.

The bank has a sign molded to it that says “Plasticville Bank.”  I made a “Granville National Bank” sign with PowerPoint.

Several years ago, I found a box with this sled in a “blow out” sale from RLBPS.  The box said a piece was missing, but when I tried to assemble it, all the parts seemed to be there.  Anyway, I had this partially finished on my painting table and completed it this weekend.