The "other day" Stuart and I played some Blood & Steel. It's a competent platoon-level wargame but doesn't feel much like the era and setting it's purporting to model. It does have some compelling mechanics, not least the initiative rules and I am always interested in interesting initiative rules.
(I tried to get more "i" words in there. I really did.)
In Blood & Steel you roll a number of d10s based on your army's size, one per discrete unit, at the start of a turn. A four or higher means that dice grants two actions, otherwise it's only one.
If you roll more ones than tens, something bad happens, which is generated from a random table. If it's more tens than ones, then you get a bonus, also from a random table. Some of the mishaps almost seemed like benefits, and vice versa, which I think is by design.
Then each player selects a dice -- in secret! -- and the players reveal their selected dice together. The player with the highest revealed dice goes first. One assumes that in multiplayer games, other players would go in order of results.
The winning player selects a unit and then takes one or more -- depending on the result -- actions, before handing over to the next player. Then the players select their next dice.
I like a lot about this. It has the basic simplicity of rolling high to go first, but the benefits/mishaps add a bit of extra randomness and surprise to it. The secret selection brings in a little bit of strategy so it's not totally random, and you can make plans even with a terrible set of rolls.
(I can imagine there are situations in which you might want to select a low roll, or even engage in a bit of bluffing. I don't really have the personality for bluffing, and in the game with Stuart, I kept rolling tens anyway, so it didn't come up.)
This seems like it would be easy to bolt on to other wargames, and I feel like it could probably be adapted to a role-playing game too.
I like the sound of that. I'm always intrigued by interesting initiative mechanics that could work in a variety of games. (In my little bit of experience "designing" miniatures rules, I feel like I've spent like 15 years trying to come up with something as cool as Song of Blades and Heroes... ;)
ReplyDeleteI'm also curious...what about the feel of the game seems like a mismatch for the era/setting?
I find initiative rules of particular interest because it's often one area where games just seem to give up on innovation and just go for some variant of "who rolls highest goes first", which is simple but a bit dull.
DeleteAs for Blood & Steel, it's not a mismatch as such, just that there's nothing that really evokes the setting. The firearms are a bit unreliable, which is a vague gesture to the colonial era, but otherwise it's a generic -- but solid -- set of rules that could fit any setting.
I gotcha...I read more of "bad fit" than I think you intended (which seems to have been more like "fit-agnostic").
DeleteThere is a medieval version called Blood & Crowns which could be interesting...
ReplyDeleteGames where players alternate moving one unit at a time go much slower than where players move all their units on their turn. For skirmish games, this can be a feature, rather than a bug, kind of. But my experience is that the trade-off is really noticeable, that you get a lot less turns in in an evening, especially when there are 2 or more players on a side.
ReplyDeletePerhaps give some thought to house rule modifications to speed up play. A system with promise is to emulate games that use simultaneous movement by having with a limited number of "orders" units can get (picture putting a counter with an arrow on it next to your unit, showing both that it plans to move and which direction). Bolt Action uses this system. I say "with promise" because these work quite well for what they intend: enabling simultaneous movement (which is efficient in that people spend much more time placing orders and moving units as opposed to standing around watching someone else) without a lengthy "order writing" phase. Of course, lot more scope for altering from one's original intent in light of what one observes happening, and hence for disputes. Apart from difficulties accurately recording what a unit is going to do, and from working out what happens when orders would conflict, simultaneous movement, in the abstract, feels pretty ideal, right? The devil's in the details
Returning to the present game, while I appreciate the attempt to add some gameplay choices to initiative determination, I worry the nuance won't be worth the extra time in the end -- when one must pack up the game unfinished to get back home to the wives or to sleep for the job and whatnot.
Well, in this case we both liked the initiative/orders system a lot, and we got through the whole game in an evening, but it was a skirmish-level game.
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