In the interests of driving Skaffen to book the next flight home, here is an update.
I was rostered to work this weekend, but we're quiet so the boss told me to take the weekend off. Soon I will be 9to5, all weekends off, and we will be ramping up the wargaming action accordingly.
So the wife went shopping and the boys stayed home with Dad for wargaming, today playtesting our latest purchase - Showdown : Aces and Eights skirmish rules by the Hackmaster guys at Kernzerco.
This is the "light" version of A&A, combat only with pistols and rifles only, the full RPG is like $60, apparently awesome full Western RPG with gold panning and cattle rustling mini-games players can run for themselves while the DM is busy running action in town.
Anyway we got this cheap as another western book i'd ordered from Milsims was out of stock (and out of print), it's normally $30 or something, we got it for $15 with post!
The plan is to use this as the backbone for our homebrewed Road Mutants campaign (retro Gamma World layered with homebrew galore to cover combat with Showdown and Road Combat with a modified version of "Redline" post-apoc d20 rpg - I bought the pdf one night shift, and have been reading it on the can. I'm planning to run that with micromachines on graph paper roads - expect eye-poppage from my children coming to a blog near you soon.)
This is the shotclock. (Yes we will be drawing silhouettes for mutants, robots and sentient SMG-toting mutated plant life.)
The little guy drew a bead on his brother with a rifle, and I explained that you put the bullseye of the shotclock over the bodypart you want to aim at.
He replied "That's fine, leave it there. I want to shoot him in the balls."
But he hit him in the shoulder.
Instead of a "you go, I go" round by round system like D&D, warhammer, domestic arguments and so on, Showdown uses a count system - So we used a counting sheet from primary school. One count is 1/10th of a second, you roll initiative, add your speed, and the count starts - when it hits your next count, declare an action, and you take a certain count to complete it. So the game plays out like The Matrix in bullet time, and it's rad. Instead of everyone shooting each round, you're trying to reload before some guy shoots your guts all over the wall behind you.
The little guy drew a bead on his brother...
...who was running for cover...
Rolled a 21, then draw a card to work out where on that "band" the bullet hits. We used the big lad's special deck of airplane cards his grandparents' got him from the plane museum.
5 of Aces. OK. That's the face sure enough.
In A&A head shots have seperate damage stats to the rest of the body, and THEN you additionally look up a wound chart for each body part.
5 points damage to face?
Face blown off, instant death.
