Sci Fi skirmish play-test 2

So, after the first playtest of my sci fi skirmish rules, which are called Raiders Of The Outer Rim (ROTOR), I made several amendments, particularly to the shooting, close combat and initial game turn rules.

Yesterday at the club, I had an opportunity to play-test again, with Matt from last time plus two new players, Wayne and John. John is John Curry, who runs the History Of Wargaming Project, so I was happy to get him involved as I hoped that he might offer up some real insights.

I didn't take any photos this week, because I wanted to concentrate on the game, so this will be a text-only (BORING!) post.

I wrote up a simple scenario, that would concentrate on working through the combat mechanisms;

The teams have been hired by a large Agribusiness Corporation to carry out a seek-and-destroy mission inside a damaged and abandoned orbital agricultural habitat, which the corporation wishes to bring back into production. Unfortunately, a gang of Feral Alien intruders, led by an Alien Psyker have occupied one sector of the habitat and are trying to penetrate the AI core. These feral aliens only have H2H weapons, but move quickly. The habitat is still active and is patrolled by small combat drones, which are controlled by the habitat’s damaged AI systems. Before the repair teams can move in, the alien intruders must be eliminated. Unfortunately, because the AI is damaged, it cannot distinguish between lifeforms and the drones will attack anything that moves.

The teams were all fairly similar, with combat droids, who are powerful entities in ROTOR, plus a variety of basic grunts and specialists (in this case heavy weapons, psykers, scouts and techno ninjas) led by Leaders and Sidekicks.

The role of the aliens was given to the Snakemen warriors from my Saga: Age of Magic Otherworld warband, with the Hamata taking the role of the Leader Psyker and with a Feral Alien Paladin as the Sidekick. The Defence Drones were from one of my HOTT armies.

Anyway, the game played out a lot more smoothly than last week, but it did throw up some new talking points and questions. The most important issue was how the Turn Sequence should work, and I have made some changes to this for ROTOR V1.3, which will form the basis for the next play-test. I have also changed the way that Droids and Scouts are activated, to speed up the Turn Sequence and give each player a bit more thought about what they can and cannot do.

I have also made a few tweaks to how Psykers operate, because there was a real risk that they might be too powerful as things were in V1.2. There are now risks attached to using psychic powers, and repeated use becomes harder.

Finally, my Techno Ninja was shown up to be too weak, something that my initial solo testing had highlighted, so I have made the stats a bit stronger for this specialist type.

I think that the game we played out was OK as a test, but lacked the variety of the first game in terms of the kind of actions the payers had available. Still, the is a work in progress, even though I think that I am getting closer to a finished article.

Sci Fi skirmish play-test 1

On Sunday, I finally had the chance to do a full play-test of Version 1 of my science fiction skirmish rules, which are called Reivers Of The Outer Rim, or ROTOR for short, because I like games rules which are an acronym.

I'll post a few pictures first, mainly because of Clive's excellent post apocalyptic scenery, but also because blog posts always look better with pictures, and then talk about the challenges of writing and testing rules.

We played a basic sort of scenario, with five different teams. My main aim was just testing the movement, combat and shooting mechanisms, but I also wanted to make sure that people enjoyed their game. Thanks to Andy, Matt, Nick and Clive, I think that we managed to achieve both objectives. Andy played with a Scavenger team, while the rest of us had variants of the other basic team structure.

This face-off between my Combat Droid on the left and Clive's larger equivalent lasted almost the entire game, until my droid was knocked out, which prompted a discussion on what happens to scrap droids. I've subsequently written a rule on this, which may well be subject to further revision. 

The purple thing with four arms is a non-player character, in this case, a Mutant. I have clarified certain rules covering NPCs, because of a few inconsistencies. These are included in V1.1 of the rules.

OK, so my thoughts.

1) My Firing rules were too complex, and asked questions that, once I thought about them made no sense. I have subsequently simplified them, removing some really unnecessary Hit modifiers that I have forgotten why I wrote them in the first place.

2) Hand-to-hand combat worked OK, but I have still tweaked it a bit, because I think it needed clarifications regarding combat outcomes.

3) I had pretty much forgotten to explain how the initial game turn would work to bring players onto the table. Luckily, I was able to deal with this and have now written a section for the first game turn, which is slightly different to what we did on the day, but still within the spirit of the solution we used.

4) There was a lot of tightening up of rules required, which was always going to happen. Games systems, like battle plans seldom survive contact with the enemy unscathed. If they did, play-testing wouldn't be necessary. In my former working life, I spent a lot of time writing manuals, technical guides and operational procedures for IT systems. I quickly learnt that once a first draft was written, it had to be read through by someone who didn't know the system, but was technically experienced in general terms. Just because something makes sense to the author, that doesn't mean that it will to other people.

5) Spell-checking and proof reading is essential. I really should have done this before making ROTOR V1 available.

6) I was conscious that I might have written rules that had created one or two almost immortal characters that would be impossible to kill. There was a risk of that, but we made some changes on the fly to reduce the risk. It is almost inevitable that there will be more to come in later iterations.

Anyway, I have now written V1.1, proof-read it and made corrections which are included in V1.2. My next task, to avoid leafing through the rules for everything is to write a Quick Reference Sheet. This won't be very fancy at first, because it will undoubtedly need amending and updating after first use.

I have also added in a final section suggesting some basic team types that players might want to use, which might give games a different feel each time.

I have to say that there is something really satisfying about seeing a set of rules come together and actually get used in a game, warts and all. Hopefully, the next play-test will be a bit easier and the game will feel a bit more streamlined and quicker to play.