SHOWDOWN !
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.
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.
posted by stompbox at 6/21/2008 04:45:00 pm
3 Comments:
Great, here I am having an 'I've just turned 30 and I'm not pumped about where I am in life' when you throw this in front of me.
(Just learned a friend had landed a job animating Clone Wars for Lucasfilm in Singapore, and here's me getting pissed on by lazy English country boy managers, because a _hard disk_ isn't working, oooooh.)
Can someone lend me change for a cab to the airport, I may spend the next month on standby but it looks more fun than the options over here!
Actually scratch that, let me do one more snow season in the French alps, then I'm coming home to show the nephews that rolling twenties is a way of life, not a statistical anomaly.
Can you track down an Aliens RPG too? That board game we had was one of the greatest gifts I ever received. (Thanks for the memories bro) Imagine a fleshed out system and finally being able to be an arrogant, spineless military flap mouth like Hudson. Talkin' it up but pissing your pants whenever someone knocks over a coffee mug.
Cheers up dude!
Aliens RPG can be done, there was a licenced one with the photos from the movies thru it, but is reknowned for a shockingly bad and apparently un-playtested system of shit. Over complicated I'm told, but not in a good way.
(I am intrigued by Spacemaster, an OOP rpg by Rolemaster guys. Each weapon type has its own tables, tables galore. Apparently the Cypberspace game they did, which is compatible, has a really good netrunning ruleset. I read that book when I was playing cyberpunk at Melbourne uni rpg club and they had the book. It was like trying to read a PC manual without the PC there.)
I want to run a space opera one day, aliens would fit in that. I read online that spycraft, a d20 offshoot of D&D 3rd edition, is a good system for Aliens - working those into a homebrew like our Road Mutants game, in space, would do the job. Don't worry, we'll play against aliens. I like to make the characters really fun, the kids love theirs.
This is going to sound wierd, but the game system isn't really that important for kids when you're playing - that Aliens boardgame had pretty shitty rules, and bad art on the map etc, but we had a lot of fun playing it. Likewise the TMNT rpg is a fucking mess, but we had some of the best games we've had with that. Playing rpgs with family, especially as kids, can't be beat regardless the system.
I have tried "play it by ear" with my kids, and they're totally cool with it, but I feel like I'm cheating and it's not fullfilling to run, and that rubs off and I dont run as good a game.
So I've been working on making the system for Road Mutants grouse, and it's paying off big time.
(We need plastic toy bullets, but for now we track ammo with plastic knucklebones. You fire? Drop a bullet in the bucket. One day someone will go to fire, have no bullets to "pay", and have to reload - soaking up valuable 1/10th second counts...)
I want these:
http://paizo.com/image/product/catalog/QWO/QWOKNUKCZZ_500.jpeg
and this to put them in:
http://paizo.com/image/product/catalog/QWS/QWSBNUK101_500.jpeg
I am thinking we need to buy the full Aces & Eights rules, and the kids agree, because with that you get a shotgun clock, and minigun rules - with those I'm confident we could cobble together a sick gun combat ruleset.
So to clarify what I was saying, in one way it doesn't matter too much about what rules, and you can "fudge" it, but I can't sustain that forever, and GM better in a solid system.
Im so anal none of the systems out there seem quite right to me, but thats ok because homebrewing is proving to be heaps of fun, and Ive found the secret is to involve the kids in the playtesting and decision-making process.
I loved Gamma World, which was another pretty sloppy system. I think with this Road Mutants homebrew we can play in the spirit which made Gamma World so awesome, but in a solid ruleset which I enjoy GMing, maintains everyone's enthusiasm and bears up for long or multiple campaigns.
Our Avalon game is a homebrewed D&D 3.5, and will continue to homebrew it to meet our needs.
I talked a dork at GROTS to run D&D4e, that's starting soon down there, hopefully Jas and I will play. No doubt we'll fall in love with 4e and have to buy it to play a campaign at home also- that's not such a bad thing.
I think I'd keep Avalon 3.5 tho, and the Paizo guys who used to publish Dungeon and Dragon are open-playtesting a 3.5 variant called Pathfinder as they write it, to keep a 3.5 ruleset (and more importantly their own ruleset to write adventures for) in print now 4e is out.
Sounds like they are doing a lot of the fixes we did in our own way for Avalon, like HAckmaster-style hp kickers to keep low lvl characters from dropping like flies etc.
To wrap it up, remember the tiny SD Gundams you brought the kids back from Japan? You can get them from coin machines in Northlands and Box Hill now, and we started a collection ...
- a Mekton Zeta campaign proposal (by and compatible with system by guys who did Bubblegum crisis and cyberpunk rpgs. thats right, mechs/bubblegum crisis suits/cyberpunk cybernetics all in one) was warmly met in my house.
I meant to say, dont sweat it dude, the longer you take to join us, the more consolidated our rpging will be when you get here :)
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