How Easy it is to Adapt 'That Solo Idea' for Two Players

Roll off to determine which player gets the first turn. Each player gets the standard 10 dice. On your turn you declare your action, your opponent then declares their equivalent action. You draw a card and roll your dice. If you succeed you perform your action, if not your opponent performs theirs. It is then your opponents turn, they declare their action, you declare your equivalent, and then they draw a card and roll their dice.

Repeat this process until someone wins!

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WGP

More Playtesting of That Solo Idea and Thoughts

So I played another game again today with similar forces. Sir Gildain his Squire Pharen and their wizard friend Tannik faced off against Lord Urleth and his Zombies. It did not go well for Sir Gildain and his companions. Sir Gildain faced off against a Zombie in the middle of the field and was soon overwhelmed by more arriving and the infamous Lord Urleth. Pharen managed to reach Gildain slaying a Zombie on the way but more soon arrived. Finally Tannik got moving and attempted something drastic, he tried to pull a tree up from its roots and cause it to fall on a Zombie to free up Gildain's withdrawl. Unfortunately it fell on Gildain knocking him unconscious. Pharen then lunged desperately at Urleth hoping to dissuade him, but was knocked flat, and like his liege was out of the fight. Urleth then leapt the fallen tree as Tannik retreated to a ruined house to make his final stand. Tannik attempted a risky spell, casting an arc of energy to shoot Urleth from his horse and out of the battle. However Urleth's apparent magical resistance again came into play. The arc reflected from his black armour and struck Tannik. The day was lost, and once again the vile necromancer Urleth escaped.

I had a lot of fun with the game, and realised the openness of the system really opens things up, especially for those magic characters. All I had to declare was what Tannik wanted to use his magic to do, and then an equivalent - no spell list needed, no long list of points values and the system automatically balances itself.

The card system also really came into its own. The reason things went south so quickly was because I knew I only had a few cards remaining in the deck and if I hadn't taken out Urleth by the time they were gone he would automatically escape, this pushed me to make rash decisions, and it didn't help that at the time I was running low on dice!

I need to play with more ranged characters that aren't mages though. the challenge of thinking of an equivalent action when not using something as chaotic as magic should be interesting. A crossbow will either hit or miss, it's not likely to deflect and hit the firer!

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WGP

Play testing that idea for solo gaming plus some pics of my growing 1/72 fantasy collection

 Lord Urleth and his Undead

 Tannik Druze, Sir Gildain and Pharen Thark, Knights of the Green Blade

 A selection of heroes yet unnamed except for Kora the female barbarian, and yes the one in the middle is a dwarf. The guys without flock on their bases are not quite finished yet.

 Centaurs!

The Centaur leader up close.

So I tried a little game with the top most two forces using the ideas from my previous post, Lord Urleth and his horde and the Knights of the Green Blade. It was a really simple set up as the two forces faced each other on completely open ground, although the way I'm going for movement rules I should really have played with more terrain.

The zombies slowly advanced while all of Tannik's magic managed to backfire incapacitating him before combat had even been joined. The zombie's split with two attacking Sir Gildain and the other two going after Pharen. The zombies seemed strangely tougher than normal with two managing to down Pharen, and as they attempted to bite their way through his armour, Sir Gildain downed his two, but he came off worse for ware. As he stumbled about attempting to regain his composure Lord Urleth charged, his sword at the Knight's neck height. Sir Gildain dodged at the last second and struck a blow that would have easily killed a mortal man. Lord Urleth rode off, leaking his black blood down his horses flank. The Knights of the Green Blade had been victorious but at what cost?

The game played so quickly I didn't really have the time to take pictures, but I have to say it probably was one of the better solo experiences I have had, and thinking about the rules I can see why, it's essentially one step up from playing as a child would with the dice, cards and abilities determining the outcome of events rather than just your imagination. Also it's a fun challenge to manage your dice well, and knowing when to roll lots of them and when to hold back.

It was a simple 9pt game. The forces stacking up as follows:

Sir Gildain - Devastate, Immortal, Elite.

Pharen Thark - Devastate.

Tannik Druze - Ranged, Heal.

Lord Urleth - Devastate, Immortal, Elite, Fast.

Zombie (x4) - no abilities.

Devastate increased the strength of any wounds dealt by 1.

Immortal reduced the strength of any wounds dealt to a character by 1.

Ranged enabled a character to attack at range.

Heal enabled a character to heal wounds.

Fast enables a character to move twice.

A character has a base cost of 1pt and then costs 1pt extra per ability they have.

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WGP

Here's an idea for solo gaming

Grab a deck of cards with all the kings, queens and jacks removed, so you get a deck of Aces to 10s. Then take a large number of six sided dice and take ten of those and put them to one side. The deck is your game deck, and the 10 dice are your dice pool.

Set up your table with your figures and with your scenario in mind.

Declare what you want one of your figures to do and then declare a roughly equivalent action one of the enemy figures will do.

Draw a card (always draw the card after you declare the two actions, never before!), if it's red it increases your dice pool by the number on it. Aces=1. If it's black it locks a number of dice in your pool equal to it meaning you cannot use them in the roll. Pick up a number of dice you want to roll and roll them. The action you declared for your figure is performed if you roll a single 6. If no 6s are rolled then the action you declared for the enemy figure is performed. You must always roll at least 1 die, unless the black card locks all your dice in which case you automatically fail.

Return any rolled dice to the big pile, declare two new actions and then draw a card.

Repeat this process until the deck is exhausted or you complete the scenario objective.
If you haven't completed the objective by the time the deck is exhausted you automatically lose the game.

You could play the game as simply as that. You could enforce a stats system on top of it, whereby when an action is 'performed' it still needs to be rolled for. For example, I failed and so get charged by an enemy and attacked, the enemy can only move up to their move stat in inches, and will only hit me when they get there on a roll that is equal to or lower than their fight stat. You could on the other hand impose a system of special rules. For example - I declare that my warrior will strike the enemy causing a light wound on their barbarian, the equivalent is obvious, he will attack me instead and cause a light wound. I draw the card and roll. I score a 6 meaning my warrior hits the barbarian. My warrior however has the special rule 'devastate' which turns any light wounds caused into heavy wounds, so although I declared a light wound I deal a heavy wound. The enemy barbarian does not have the special rule devastate, so had I failed the roll, my warrior would only have taken a light wound.

Thoughts?
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WGP

Randomly Generating an Enemy Force for Skirmyth

Since the system is at present incredibly generic with basically no special rules, it is still incredibly easy to entirely randomise a force creation. This will be good for me in the playtesting and to see if any set up can break or really challenge the points system.

When playing solo you should generate your own force first, and make a note of their own points cost. For example in previous playtests I've been using a 120pt force. You would then roll for the scenario (which is a system I'm working on) which will dictate the nature of an enemy force, it maybe a force you have previously generated so there's no need to randomly generate one again. You then roll for resistance level on a D6, on 1-2 it's low, 3-4 it's matched and on 5-6 it's high. Each of these results gives a rough points cost for the force you will be facing. Matched means the enemy force is roughly equal to your own, with a margin of 20pts on either side (which may be larger for larger forces). Low means you generate the force but as soon as it exceeds you own forces points cost you drop the last character generated. For high resistance you stop at the character that exceeds your forces points cost. For matched you stop when the points cost lands within that 40pt buffer zone (20pts either side).

So let's go with my 120pt force. I roll for resistance - 2 which is low. So I'm dropping the first character to exceed 120pts in the enemy forces total points cost.
CHARACTER 1, INI:6, ATT:3, SPD:2, RES:5. PTS:35 TYPE - WARRIOR
CHARACTER 2, INI:3, ATT:5, SPD:1, RES:5, PTS:23 TYPE - WARRIOR
CHARACTER 3, INI:5, ATT:2, SPD:1, RES:5, PTS:20 TYPE - WARRIOR
CHARACTER 4, INI:4, ATT:5, SPD:3, RES:5, PTS:37 TYPE - MAGE
So that's a running total of 115pts, so I'm certain the next character will exceed the final 5 pts so we won't go on.
So how did I generate those characters?
Initiative, Attack and Speed were all simple D6 rolls. Resolve was D6+2 (I couldn't stop rolling 3s), and the type was determined by a further D6 roll (1-2 Warrior, 3-4 Ranger, 5-6 Mage).
If you can't remember how the points costs were generated it was (Attack+Speed)xInitiative and finally adding Resolve.
You could then go on to generate names for the characters if you so wished.
For forces you have already generated you drop or add characters to meet the resistance level. When dropping I would recommend dropping the character that brings you closest to the points cost.
The system shouldn't cause too many problems and it shouldn't generate hugely outlandish characters, with your lowest points cost at 5 and your highest running to 80. With most stats capped at 6 except for resolve which is capped at 8, it's unlikely you'll get totally wrecked in a single attack from an enemy character. I am however concerned about speed and may apply a D6+1 to it instead of a straight D6 as above. Assuming the character can spend half of their initiative on speed before the end counter is drawn, Character 2 above will cover roughly 1.5 inches per game turn... which is really slow!
The other problem I'm working on is the counter system. Since when generating a new force new counters would have to be made, a total of 18 for the force above. I'm working on a system which means you won't have to, but we'll see what comes of that in the future.

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WGP

The hopefully improved fantasy/scifi name generator

I felt that my previous incarnation with twists on a D6 roll was a little too restrictive and not fast enough. So here's the simpler new incarnation of the system.

Roll 1D10 for name length.
Roll 1D10 to determine starting letter type - Odd = Vowel, Even = Consonant.
It's then the classic vowels on a D6 (including Y) and Consonants on a D20.
This time however you also roll a D6 after you've generated a letter. On a 6 the letter repeats. On a 4 or 5 you repeat the letter type but roll for the next letter, and on a 1-3 you go to the other letter type. You can only have a maximum of two of the same letter or letter type in a row.

Much simpler. Let's give it a whirl!

Fji Qxiag
Kkiwecihy Szyyduy
Uuwe Mtoe

Those are our 'raw' results. Just what the dice dictate, and with some editing we get -

Ji Xia
Kiwe Szyydu
Uwe Toe (I was hoping for Boll... but Toe will have to do)

Eventually I'll get a system together that stops those bad letter combinations but until then the system will always have a chance of churning them out. Though it's true purpose still works, to generate names that don't all sound the same, which is what I can't do when I come up with the names myself.

Skirmyth - The Solo Skirmish/ Light RPG: A Second Encounter

I played a quick solo game this evening using my second incarnation of the Skirmyth rules. A system with more visible stats, but still with no real need to look anything up. Characters are activated when a counter with their name on it is pulled from a cup, the counter has written on it not only the characters name but their speed and attack stats. The number of counters a character has in the cup is equal to their initiative value. Speed determines the distance a character can move in inches when their counter is drawn and attack determines the number of dice a character will roll when making attacks. They do damage equal to the number of successes they score on the dice rolled (Warriors 4+, Rangers 5+ and Mages 6+). Apart from character counters there are also joker counters in the cup. Jokers stay out of the cup until the 'end' counter is drawn but return all other counters to the cup. When the end counter is finally drawn the number of jokers determines which column on a table is rolled on to determine a random event. For example in my game, two jokers were drawn and so when the end counter was drawn I rolled a die and consulted the event table, for two jokers and a roll of a 6 there was a small earth tremor which caused both sides to take morale checks. Morale is currently an extremely simple system. When a character is killed or you are forced to take a morale check by other means pick up a die per character still alive on your side and roll them. You pass the morale check if you roll a single 4+, if you fail to roll any 4+s you fail the check and lose the game. I thought it might be too simple initially but it creates a really interesting dynamic - you don't want a small number of hugely powerful characters because you'll get less dice when making morale checks, on the other hand you don't want a huge number of weak characters because that will normally mean you have to make more morale checks. I also thought it might create unrealistic scenarios where heroes flee from much weaker foes, however should a band of heroes lose a character surely their concern is no longer the mission, but protecting and restoring that fallen character to health? So in that sense it portrays greater realism. The real strength of it however is in the fact that morale is controlled by a standard dice roll meaning you never have to look anything up. The number of dice you roll being the number of remaining characters you have!

This evening I played a simple 4 vs 5 line up and charge at each other game.
On the one side we had -

Sir Gildain - I:4, A:4, S:3, R:6, PTS:34, Warrior
Pharen Thark - I:3, A:4, S:5, R:5, PTS:32, Warrior
Terse Kolf - I:2, A:6, S:5, R:5, PTS:27, Ranger
Tannik Druze - I:2, A:8, S:3, R:5, PTS: 27, Mage

And on the other we had -
Prince Lorek - I:2, A:5, S:5, R:10, PTS:30, Warrior
Harken Drane - I:2, A:7, S:3, R:5, PTS: 25, Mage
Kel Krace - I:4, A:2, S:2, R:4, PTS: 20, Warrior
Skorth Dar - I:3, A:3, S:4, R:5, PTS: 26, Warrior
Ajen Low - I:1, A:12, S:7, R: 5, PTS: 24, Ranger

The game was supposed to be 120pts, however while writing this up I realised that Prince Lorek's force was 125 points... but considering Sir Gildain tabled him without losing a man it's not like those extra 5 points really helped.

The game played exceedingly quickly. I remember reading lots of rulebooks where games claim to be 'fast paced' but this one truly is, with a standard skirmish like this taking around 10 minutes to play. You may also notice I was intentionally trying to break the game with characters like Kel Krace and Ajen Low, Kel having a huge number of activations but being pretty weak and Ajen only a single activation but devastating when he does activate.

So what have I learned and what questions have this little playtest brought to light?
Primarily I need to decide what route I want the main focus of the game to take. At present I'm playing it much like your average skirmish game where two evenly matched albeit different forces face off, rather than a dungeon crawling, hack and slash style game with multiple enemies each far weaker than our main characters.
Secondly I need to decide how damage dealt is increased by circumstances - at the moment if your characters remaining resolve is double their targets the amount of damage they do is doubled, and tripled if triple etc. Alternatively if  two characters are ganging up on another the damage dealt is doubled. I need to playtest further to see if this is too dramatic an increase and maybe adding rather than multiplying would be more appropriate. Obviously +0 if no damage is dealt, +1 if resolve is higher, +2 if double, +3 if triple, and +1 per additional character in the combat.
Thirdly I need to develop the actual solo AI mechanics.
Fouthly I need to develop scenarios to make the game more interesting/ narrative.

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WGP