Compact FUBAR

It had been a while since I played a battle using FUBAR 4.0, so I decided to refresh my memory about this great rules system. Initially, I set up a scenario in a board a bit less than 2'x2', with various wood patches and some clear paths around them. The invading squads (on the bottom of the picture) must reach the objective, represented by the red 20-sided die, and spend one turn in contact with it to win.

In hindsight, given greater numbers to the defenders was unfair.

I played both sides in this battle. At the beginning of the game, the forces took positions in cover of the wooded areas. It took me some turns of firing back and forth, suppressing figures and recovering, to realize that I needed other tactics.

The squad at the bottom advanced to the smaller match of wood, and the one at the top-right also moved to cover.

Playing Firefight 2.0 solo

Firefight 2.0 is a skirmish game by Alternative Armies. Players control teams of four soldiers on a map made of various tiles and obstacles. Movement is grid-based and actions are resolved using an interesting dice-rolling system.

Some time ago I purchased the pack with the rules and tiles. Although I wish I had the official miniatures, so far I have been playing with paper miniatures. The book includes two solo scenarios where the player faces automated turrets and mines. I have found that this game works very well for solo play due to some of its features:
- To perform any action, including movement, the player must roll certain values on the dice. This adds uncertainty to the game.
- Any attacked character that has not acted may immediately react to being attacked. Likewise, opportunity fire is available if the active character enters line of sight of an enemy.

I have found this game very good to play quick battles. The only house rules I use are:
1) The human player is always the attacker in the mission.
2) The human player has the initiative in all turns, and must choose to move first.
3) To keep things simple, the Medical Aid action is not available for anyone.

For enemy behavior, I have adopted these guidelines:
1) Remember that the enemies are the defenders, protecting some objective or preventing the player units from escaping the board.
2) Attacked enemies will choose reaction fire if they are at least in light cover, otherwise they will dodge out of the way if possible.
3) Whenever possible, enemies at least in light cover will attempt opportunity fire against targets moving in the open or under light cover.
4) After the human player finishes, enemy units will activate, from closest to farthest.
5) Enemies out of cover will choose melee, move and fire, assault fire, or move (towards cover) as their action, depending on available targets.
6) Enemies in cover will choose aimed fire, move and fire, assault fire, move (to pursue enemies if they are getting away), or stay frosty as their action, depending on available targets.
7) Enemies will pick a target that results in the greatest number of dice to roll. That includes objects, if applicable.

For a quick game, pitting a single team against an enemy team plus a couple of turrets and air mines tends to work well. Even light turrets have significant firepower, and mine explosions add some chaos to the game.

Back to playing Combat Cards solo

Following my first experiences with Torn Armor, I have been looking back at some game rules that can also be played as something between miniature and board games. Two of them are Combat Cards and Firefight 2.0, which I'll write about later.

In my opinion, Combat Cards is attractive to solo players due to small space requirements and easy set up. Previously I wrote my first impressions after playing the free "Bug Hole" scenario. Here is a picture showing the zombie survival scenario in MapTool using only a 16x16 square grid. Based on these two solo scenarios, I wrote a few thoughts about solitaire Combat Cards.

In keeping with the free solo scenarios, I have decided to play Combat Cards solo mostly in defensive scenarios, where I need to defeat invaders or hold for a given amount of time. This may be somewhat limiting but, especially when played on a grid, it works like a fast-playing mixture of miniature game and board game.

It took me a while to realize that I could also use assault actions to move infantry units (even if they were not actually ending their move in close combat with an enemy.) Previously I was tinkering with the idea of allowing any card to be used to make a unit perform a Very Short move.

The free solo scenarios only allow Creature or Swarm enemies, so that they do not have available ranged attacks. I have tried adding also Infantry enemies representing "spitter" bugs or "puker" zombies up to a 1:2 ratio in their forces (subject to point limits.) On the enemy turn, they will perform a firepower attack if possible, or make a very short move as usual. This has worked well, adding to the challenge without need for extra rules to control the enemy. This also makes other actions, such as Dig In and Conceal, more useful.

I usually play according to the original rules, so on my turn I can either play actions or discard. Using the updated rules (according to which you can do both in the same turn) makes the game move faster but also makes it a bit easier. I have been fiddling with the following alternative rule: on each turn, you play what you can, discard the rest and draw a new hand (so you can use situations on the enemy's turn.)

House rule: removing facing from THW skirmishes

The majority of the skirmish games that I play do not define facing for individual figures. The exception (and an important one for me) is in the rules for Two Hour Wargames (THW) skirmish games. Since other games I play do not use facing, I do not get used to it and maintaining figure facing during play becomes distracting to me.

So after some consideration I decided to adopt the following house rule: figures do not have facing. When an active PEF comes into sight of my figures and resolves as a number of enemies, I roll 2d6. If the result is 11 or 12, my figures have been surprised, so they suffer -1d6 in the In Sight test, while the enemy does not suffer the usual -1d6 for being active. The same applies in reverse if my figures, while active, become in sight of a PEF. This "surprise check" is not used when actual enemy figures (not PEFs) are involved.

My rationale for this house rule is that, given the level of detail of THW games like Chain Reaction or After the Horsemen, I feel that the usual hypothesis for other skirmish games -- that figures are not static but rather, looking around and shifting around their marked position -- is also valid for them. Besides, figure Rep and line of sight will already interfere on any In Sight check. The "surprise check" just adds a bit of uncertainty to it all.

Using CROM for post-apocalyptic games

In a previous post, I made a short review of CROM from Matakishi's Tea House and commented on its suitability for solo play. Although it was designed to play heroic fantasy adventures, I do not think it is hard to adapt it to other melee-heavy settings. This includes post-apocalyptic worlds where enough time has passed to make most technology lost.

There are no character creation rules in CROM. Instead, they are described as possessing some capabilities, such as ranged attacks or certain magic spells. The rules describe how these are resolved in game. Therefore, I decided to expand or adjust the rules for a post-apocalyptic setting. Here is what I currently use:

Firearms: these ancient weapons use the normal rules for ranged attacks. Pistols and SMGs add 1 special die for this purpose; rifles and shotguns add 2. That is, every turn a figure with a firearm has that amount of bonus special dice to use. These are also the number of extra wounds that may be caused if sixes are rolled. However, after each shot a die must be rolled. On a 1, the firearm breaks. On a 2, it is jammed until the end of the scenario. Firearms reduce cover effectiveness by 1.

Energy guns: these are powerful ranged weapons from before the fall of civilization. Energy guns reduce cover effectiveness by 1. To fire an energy gun, a figure must use pairs of combat and special dice. Therefore, an attack will roll 2, 4, 6, 8 or 10 dice at most. If the attack is successful, any 6 rolled on a combat die adds a wound. However, after an energy gun is fired, roll a die. If the result is equal to or lower than the number of combat dice used in the attack, the gun explodes, causing 1 wound to its user. For instance, after an attack with 4 dice, I roll one die and get a 1. Since this is less than 2 (the number of combat dice rolled) the gun explodes and causes a wound.

Psychic abilities use the Magic system from the CROM book. Some sample powers:
Mind blast - a target may defend with any available dice. A successful hit causes 2 wounds and the target is stunned (may only defend for the rest of this turn.)
Pyrokinesis - a target may defend with any available dice. A successful hit causes 2 wounds and a roll of 6 sets the target on fire.

Smugglers in the Dark: Dungeon Setup

Here is the card-based dungeon mechanics I will use to continue the Smugglers in the Dark adventure. From a standard deck of playing cards, I will use the following: one red and one black of each face card (jacks, queens, kings) and numbers 2-7. One card is drawn at the beginning of a turn when the party is moving further into the dungeon:

• Face cards mean that a new room is entered and an encounter happens, focused on a given character, Jack: Eryz, Queen: Swyem, King: Ingont. The nature of the event is defined using the event focus and event meaning systems from Mythic.
• Number cards require a roll of a ten-sided die. If the result is greater than the card number, the new area is a corridor or passageway. Otherwise, it is a new room, filled according to the "stocking the room" rules on the Basic game.

The number of doors found in a room or corridor, including the one used to enter that section of the dungeon, is given by the roll of one six-sided die: 1-2: 2 doors, 3-4: 3 doors, 5-6: 4 doors. Each door will be locked on a roll of 1-2 on a six-sided die.

The color of the card will be used to indicate the kind of encounter, when applicable. Red cards indicate a conflict of physical nature (combat, obstacles, traps to dodge etc.) while black cards are related to mental conflicts (social interactions, puzzles, traps to disarm etc.)

If the adventurers spend more than two turns in the same location, I will make a check for wandering monsters. For this adventure, the wandering monsters are kobolds, and their number is given by the roll of one six-sided die: 1: a single kobold, 2-4: two kobolds, 5-6: three kobolds. However, for every previous encounter with wandering monsters, a +1 modifier is added to the roll.

After six cards have been drawn, one joker is added and the cards are reshuffled. When the joker is then drawn, the players have reached their objective -- the stolen magical trinkets.

Smugglers in the Dark - part 1

There are several entertaining posts about solo dungeon crawling at Tabletop Diversions and Solo Nexus. While I have played some crawls using Dungeons and Dark Dungeon, with the recent re-release of old Dungeons and Dragons PDFs, I decided to try a little crawl using the Basic Set.

Character creation
The first step was to generate a party. I wanted to have a fighter, a thief and a magic-user. I started rolling the three characters' attributes and then assigned them to a suitable class, with maximized hit points. I then used the Universal NPC emulator (UNE) to create a general description and two motivations for each character. To keep things simple, I discarded one motivation from each, trying to make them consistent with each other. Lastly, I rolled on the Mythic description chart to give them a quirk.

From the results I got, I did not think that any of the characters would be lawful, so I used the Mythic fate chart to answer the question "is the character chaotic?" with a likely chance for each of them -- an "exceptional no" would mean the character actually was lawful. I rolled a 50/50 chance for each character to be male or female and finally, I used this fantasy name generator to pick names for them. These are the resulting characters. UNE and Mythic results are marked in brackets.

Ingont
Chaotic Human male Magic-user
Few people would be able to guess that Ingont spent the last several years studying in the Academy. The light-haired man dresses like a peasant and seldom talks about magic, carrying his spellbook hidden in a bag. His actions and words are carefully measured to disguise his plotting mind. Currently involved with a secret society, he is tasked with expanding their smuggling routes to the south of the kingdom. [logical herald, maintain contraband, irritatingly nondescript]
HP 3, AC 9, STR 9, INT 17, WIS 12, DEX 11, CON 7, CHA 12
Modifiers: +10% XP
Spellbook: magic missile
Backpack: dagger, waterskin, flask of oil x5, lantern, iron rations x1, 95gp

Swyem
Chaotic Human female Thief
Swyem is a frail young woman of light and delicate manners. For a few years she has worked for a local trading guild, managing the sale of goods in neighboring villages. Lately, however, she became involved in a smuggling scheme. She is not troubled by exploiting others' weaknesses and needs to serve herself. [habitual drifter, guard deprivation, slowly fancy]
HP 3, AC 7, STR 8, INT 10, WIS 10, DEX 10, CON 7, CHA 11
Modifiers: -1 to hit and damage
Short sword, Leather armor
Backpack: dagger, waterskin, iron rations x1, thieves tools, 4gp

Eryz
Chaotic Human male Fighter
Eryz thinks that they are out to get him: the village elder, the tax collectors, the king's knights. He only really trusts his half-sister Swyem, who arranges jobs for him to guard or sometimes bully others. Physically, he is not very imposing and may even come out a little clumsy but if you look into his eyes, you can see an eerie fire burning. [fanatic bum, agonize the government, quietly messy]
HP 8, AC 5, STR 11, INT 9, WIS 9, DEX 7, CON 11, CHA 11
Modifiers: -1 to missile fire, +1AC
Sword, Chain mail and shield
Backpack: dagger, waterskin, torches x6, iron rations x1, 50' of rope, 34gp

The story so far...

Ingont, Swyem and Eryz grew up together and used to cause all kinds of trouble in their village. Eventually, Ingont went to study the magical disciplines in the Arcane Academy and Swyem moved to another town, taking Eryz with her. She kept corresponding with Ingont and they started to smuggle magical trinkets in and out of the kingdom.

Ingont paid a visit to Swyem when one of their couriers went missing. She had found out that the courier was poisoned and died in the woods, and a group of kobolds took the magical trinkets to their lair in some ruins. The three characters bought the necessary supplies and are now ready to enter the lair, to recover their "merchandise."

... To be continued.

Alien Bug Safari

There are many ways to create an "automated" opponent for solo battles. One of them, which is often used for "A.I." in computer games, is based in Finite-state Machines. Dale's post in Solo Battles has an interesting discussion about using FSMs for solo games.

Since last November, when I started again fiddling with behaviors and simulations for my little computer game experiments, I was thinking about trying to use them in solo games but so far I had not done anything about it. Dale's post inspired me to return to the subject and, since I still had some free hours during the Carnaval holiday, I proceeded to make a first test in the form of a simple solo game, presented here.

Alien Safari

After the Bug War of 2200, several planets were left with small colonies of stranded bugs. In some cases they decayed and died off, in others they became part of the ecosystem, turning into predators. Shady travel companies offer illegal "safari" trips to some of these worlds, where the rich and adventurous can have the thrill of their lives hunting these dangerous prey.

Setting up
Terrain: the game is played on a 3'x3' board and the entire board counts as covered in low vegetation. You may place terrain pieces representing woods, lakes and rivers as you see fit.

Your force: you start with three hunters standing in base contact with each other in the middle of one of the board edges. Figures do not have a defined "facing."

Weird West and Emulators - Part 1

Recently I found out about the Universal NPC Emulator, on the Mythic discussion group. This universal system, written by Zach Best from Conjecture Games, consists of two parts: the NPC Creator, meant to give an overall description and motivations to an NPC; and the NPC Association Emulator that takes care of the interaction between the NPC and player characters.

So I decided to combine it with the Mythic GM Emulator and run a solo game of the Weird West Role Playing Game by Stuart Robertson. I started creating a party of three characters. I allocated the attributes for all three, then used the NPC creator to get the motivations of Strong Tom and Doc McPherson.

William Hays (Adventurer): Fighting 1, Grit 2, Skill 1, Stamina 7. Equipment: leather duster coat, six shooter, knife.
William came to the west on a caravan of settlers and prospectors when he was eleven. He was fascinated by the weird things that would scare other people, and soon he started his carreer as a traveling jack-of-all-trades. [This is the "main" character and as such I didn't roll for his motivations.]

3:16 Solo Play

I bought 3:16 Carnage Amongst the Stars and fell in love with the system. It has a very competently designed "light" rules set, and allows play ranging from mindless alien slaughter to deep character development. In my opinion, it's not the kind of game well suited for solo play, as any other RPG that builds tension based on the creative uses that players make of the authorial power granted to them, like Fiasco for instance.

Anyway, I wanted to try the game and I'm still not sure when I'll be able to find a group willing to play it, so I thought I'd use good ol' Mythic GME along with a couple of house rules and see what happens. My main inspiration regarding solo Mythic stuff, by the way, is the Solo RPG Gamer blog, which has a lot of interesting posts on the subject.

To start the game, I created four "player" characters in the following manner: first, I used the Mythic random description tables to get inspiration for each character's reputation. Then I rolled one six-sided die, adding one for their Fighting Ability, re-rolling on a repeated result. From that, it's possible to figure the rest of each characters' information. I rolled for the weapons and on the names table for each character. Thus were born:

Sergeant Hicks - reputation: Lunatic
Corporal Miller - reputation: Pushover
Trooper Abe - reputation: Sleazy
Trooper Sims - reputation: Righteous

I randomly generated the planet and alien attributes, using the game rules. Since I had 20 threat tokens to use in alien encounters, I decided to roll one six-sided die, adding 1 for each encounter after the first, to figure how many I'd allocate to each encounter. Once I had eight tokens or less left, I would go to the final encounter of the mission. Lastly, I rolled for the NPC who would brief the team. Lieutenant Goodman got a result of "oficially odd" on the Mythic description table. I asked "is he seen as too informal for an officer?" on the fate chart, getting an Exceptional Yes answer. Then I was ready to start...

Playtesting small boards on MDRG

I got some time today to playtest the suggestions to better accomodate my Mutants and Death Ray Guns skirmishes in 2'x2' boards with 28mm figures, as I'd like to do for the Wasteland Wandering scenario. For these tests I used a board with only three terrain pieces and two warbands of three figures each -- not very different from the encounters I expect to have in the scenario.

Each team has a mutant with a Long-range weapon that grants +2 to combat, a human with a Medium-range weapon that grants +2 to combat and a robot with Heavy Armor and no ranged weapons. The idea was just to get a general feel for the options, not to test extreme cases (like all melee vs. all ranged, for instance.) They were deployed within 1 Short from the board edges.

Wandering the Wastes

Recently, some people started talking about Mutants and Death Ray Guns (MDRG) on the Cardboard Warriors Forum. This was the game that won me over to skirmish gaming and since I haven't played it in a while, this made me willing to go back to it. Then I read Glenn Williams review on a game called Space Infantry and was interested in the game's structure as a series of encounters. Granted, this is done in other games (for instance Larger than Life, from what I've read of the description, or Chronicles of Arax, although in that case the encounters do not use miniatures) but when I read about it in that review, it got me back to the random encounters in Fallout -- probably because I was thinking about MDRG.

Those random encounters happened as you crossed the wasteland from one settlement to another. Some were good, many were bad and then there were the (relatively) rare special encounters. So why not create a custom MDRG solo scenario that plays like a series of random encounters while traveling from one place to another?

One thing I found interesting in the random encounters from Fallout was that the maps were small. You didn't have much room to run or hide and often the action started right away. I want to preserve that characteristic, so I'm looking at encounters played on, say, a 2'x2' board for 28mm figures. The problem is that with a smaller board, morale checks may end the encounter too soon. So instead of using the standard morale rules, I'll adapt some of the fear mechanics from Fear and Faith. This way, most of the time figures that fail their morale checks on one or two dice will have to move a shorter distance and will not be allowed to leave the map, but they may be knocked down or even become transfixed in the process. I'll have to see if this works.

Well, for now I'm starting to write down the scenario rules, which will be posted when a first draft is ready.
[Edit: following a reply from Andrea Sfiligoi on the Song of Blades discussion group, I'll try using a rule where figures that fail a morale check run for cover instead of the board edges. Only figures already in cover that fail a morale check try to flee tha map.]

Uncle Cucuy's Lucha Libre Solo Play

I got Uncle Cucuy's Lucha Libre as part of the Red Cross Earthquake Relief bundle and I'm slowly taking a look at all those books. I'm also always looking for games that can be solo-friendly and from the first read of the rules, it seemed so.

Tiny kobolds, huge elemental

I have recently created and played another solo scenario for Song of Blades and Heroes. This time, a kobold scout spots an uncontrolled -- and huge -- earth elemental moving in the woods, near his village. The kobold village chief consults with the shaman and finds out that he has an amulet that may hold the elemental in place, so that his archers can safely destroy it from a distance.

Forces
Kobolds (controlled by the player):
1x Kobold Chief (Q3+ C2, Leader)
1x Kobold Shaman (Q3+ C0, Magic-User)
2x Kobold Archer (Q4+ C2, Gregarious, Shooter: Long)
The Elemental Threat:
1x Huge Earth Elemental (Q2+ C5, Artificial, Huge, Savage, Tough)

Lightning strikes

Here's a house rule I've been fiddling with to add the risk of lightning strikes to the weather effects present in Song of Wind and Water.
Lightning
After each player's turnover, before the next player starts attempting activations, roll one die. If the result is a 6, lightning strikes somewhere. Divide the battlefield into four sectors around the center, as shown below: