S3 After game thoughts and notes

The games we played highlighted a number of interesting things.

Firstly, children really are worse than useless. Their deficit in Action Points (AP) means they can’t keep up with the adults, and even a single move – two at most - as part of a group will leave them out of the 3” radius activation circle requiring a whole other Order Point (OP – using this terminology to avoid having two rules with the same acronym) to move them which will probably never happen once combat is joined. I think in future we’re going to houserule that they get free activation. They’re only really worth it to ferry things around as they’re worthless in combat with their -8 penalty. Apply that to ranged combat as well and you can arm them and even then statistically speaking they will never hurt anyone even if they’re outnumbering their target.

Speaking of outnumbering, apart from some vagueness around the rules as written melee combat is fast, brutal, realistic and quite satisfying. Outnumbering gives a huge advantage although well-armed and motivated fighters can get lucky and limp away from an unfair fight. The randomness of the wound chart means that there’s always a messy chaotic element to melee (as there should be) but by making good matchups on the turn you charge or counter charge you can more or less predict the outcome of fights.

There needs to be a little clarification around the melee rules. The rule that calls for some models to get half their dice when wounded or outnumbered for instance; does this mean that you half the number rolled on the dice before modifiers or after? We played the former as it seemed to make sense and it worked for us. It made sense as the rules disadvantaged the figures ability to act and not the effectiveness of the equipment he was carrying. Also in two on one fights the rules are not explicit as to who takes wounds in the case of results of X, Y and Z, where X>Y>Z and Y is the outnumbered model’s total. We played it so that both Y and Z took wounds, the idea being that Y managed to do well enough to injure one of his attackers but was injured in turn by X.

And – segue! -  speaking of outnumbering; Don’t Mess With Wolves! They will fuck your shit up! There needs to be a little bit more structure around their use. When they act in the initiative (we gave them a separate roll) and how they react to long range fire or just people moving around outside their rather small 6” ‘zone of control’ isn’t detailed.

Finally, the campaign rules, and even objectives for single games need some work. According to Xander, a common objective is to gather enough food to feed your group, but despite having a dozen and a half search points at least in both games and searching nearly all of them, we only found one food item over the course of both games. When we were considering Campaign-asizing the first encounter we realised that the result would have been a complete wipe of both parties. Some work needs to be put into making this game work as a campaign game. I have some ideas in my head but I don't want to get sidetracked away from my own projects.