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Hello

I've recently launched my first skirmish game, it might interest some of you (especially if you're like me and collect all kinds of miniatures from all sorts of places).

The game is called Open Combat and is suitable for fantasy settings (and pre-gunpowder historical periods).

It features a Renown system where you can stat your models up any way you like so you can create the statlines and skills/abilities you think best suits your celt fanatic, dwarf warrior or gribblie slug demon model etc.

It's small skirmish (you only need 2'x2' area to play) and fast play, games last 20-40 mins depending on Renown level.

You can find out more at http://www.secondthunder.com

I designed and wrote it (aided by an old friend Gav Thorpe from my days at GW in the early/mid 90s) so if you've got any questions let me know.

(Quick note to the site admin dudes - apologies if I've put this in the wrong place. It's my first visit to the site for a long time and it seemed the best place)

Cheers

Carl Brown
Second Thunder

Cool stuff, but I'd be interested in a little more info before jumping in- most notably, I'm curious about what the combat system is like (ex: focus on movement, active defense, objective-based, straight up fight, lots of reactionary abilities, etc.), and what prevents a player from creating some ridiculously broken model.

Is there a preview available?

I'd like to have an idea of what I'm getting in to before plunking down the money. Admittedly it's not super expensive, but it's still nice to know something about how the rules work, what I'll need in terms of dice and bookkeeping, that sort of stuff.

Is there campaign play available, or is it just straight one time battles?

 highlord tamburlaine wrote:
Is there a preview available?

I'd like to have an idea of what I'm getting in to before plunking down the money. Admittedly it's not super expensive, but it's still nice to know something about how the rules work, what I'll need in terms of dice and bookkeeping, that sort of stuff.

Is there campaign play available, or is it just straight one time battles?

Seconded. Can you give us a bit more info about the game? Are there any reviews on the net that you can point us to? Any battle reports, gameplay demos, or tutorial videos?

What do you think is the best thing about the mechanics that sets the game apart from other stat-your-own-models skirmish games like Skulldread or Song of Blades and Heroes?

Yeah, more info about the mechanics would be fantastic. A video play through goes a looooong way towards convincing me to pick up a game.

I am also curious about the balance issue, and whether the rules come with any pre-made stat lines for basic fantasy tropes, etc.

Thanks for all the responses guys - I'll try to go through them as best I can. This response might jump around a bit as I'll try to tackle each of you in order of posting.

@spiralingcadaver

The combat system is based on a comparison of the attacking models Attack (ATK) vs the defending models Defence (DEF). It's based on comparing the two values so if a model has an ATK equal to or less than the enemies DEF it gets to roll one attack die. Depending how the ATK and DEF values compare a model can roll one, two or three attack dice. The most you can ever roll is three dice.

Once the attack dice are rolled the attacker chooses one of the dice to score and the result of this could lose you the initiative (plays passes to your oppo even if you haven't activated all of your models this turn), miss, force the enemy back or hurt them.

There are modifiers depending on the circumstances of situation and plus benefits to pushing the enemy into things and other wrinkles depending on weapons etc.

With regards to risk of broken models: the Renown system (the system used to build the warband members) creates it's own balancing behaviour to a certain degree as the more Renown you plough into a model the more risky it is if it was lost.

Plus, and this touches on your other points, if the scenario requires you to search for something or capture something and your warband build is simply three uber warriors - they may individually be very powerful but they can't be everywhere at once.

At a recent event in the UK (Derby Worlds show in donington) we demoed a game with three powerful romans vs seven weaker Celts. The Celts won but it was close. We also had two fantasy heroes vs 4 orcs - wins for both sides during the weekend. This kind of result has been mirrored by one of the early adopters that has recently blogged about his first experience with the game you can see his blog here. He's got some great looking Arcworlde halfling minis there too!

The other thing to bear in mind is the game is designed as a toolbox to play the kind of games that you want to play - if you and your oppos want to set limits to create you own play environment that's fine. We don't set limits in our own games but then our group of players have a similar outlook as each other.

@highlord tamburlaine

With regards to dice all you need is three six-sided dice.

There isn't a campaign system included in the core book - that's something we'll be addressing in later expansions. The main reason being that we'd like to 'focus in' and be more period or setting specific with campaigns to give them more narrative appeal. The core rules are written with a much wider angle lense so the core book is more for one-off battle and encounters although there's nothing stopping you stringing these games together and creating your own little campaign/adventure.

During a game you need to track losses of Fortitude and Mind as these contribute to a warbands break point. When a warband reaches its break point it flees.

@weeble1000

I can't say how it compares to Skulldread or SoBH as I don't own them but I know Neil at Meeples and Miniatures plays SoBH and he has also already posted a little bit of information about Open Combat here. We'll be talking to him at some point in November on his podcast.

I'm going to be putting a few articles together for the Second Thunder blog over the next few weeks including battle reports. I'm also planning the first tutorial videos too - but they'll take a bit of time as I'm juggling quite a lot at the moment.

@Gallahad

See above about video.

There are example statlines within the book but mainly as illustration pieces for showing how the profile is built. I've intentionally avoided including pre-made stats as I don't want players to feel that there is a right or wrong build for something in the core book.

I want players to have the freedom to build the fantasy tropes as they see them rather than feel the need to follow my direction.

In later micro expansions we plan on producing material which explores particular historical periods and fantasy tropes where we'll provide examples of what we do. Until then I wanted players to have the freedom to create things in the way they see them. It's an enjoyable creative process in itself.

Hope this vast ramble helps you guys for now.

Thanks for the info.

It will be interesting to see what your 'break point' system is like. This is probably just to do with the way I prefer to play games, but I have noticed that some morale-based break points can lead to weird games, especially in terms of 'time on the table'. As a player, I like to both experience and see my opponent have plenty of 'time on the table' in a game, by which I mean time spent during gameplay in which you have had an opportunity to make what feels like a meaningful amount of outcome-related choices.

Games that end too quickly can feel unfulfilling, as can games that seem to end before you have a chance to really get involved, if you know what I mean. Anyhoo, I'll take a look at the system and give it a whirl.

Yep, interesting stuff, I'll be keeping my eye on this.

Cheers for the continued interest guys.

I'll be covering how the Break Point works in a blog post over the next few weeks.

I'll post in this thread as new content becomes available.

Sounds interesting, but I'm not much of a .pdf guy, I prefer dead tree format.

@ Alex C

I can understand the preference for printed book - I certainly want to get to that point but I'm taking things step-by-step, it's digital only at the moment.

In case anyone is interested Gav Thorpe has written a little article about Open Combat over on his blog you can find it here.

Cheers

I downloaded the rulebook and I'll give it a go this weekend.

I gave the rules a quick read-through. Open Combat is a basic system, but seems solid. The game seems to have a trim, no frills approach. The rule set does not strike me as particularly new or groundbreaking, but then I haven't played it yet. There's some old-school mathieness to the rules, and I am interested to see how that works out on the table top. All told it looks pretty simple though.

Models have an Attack and Defense value, and compare Attack to Defense when fighting. You add modifiers for various conditions and then roll a number of D6 depending on difference between the values. Equal or less is 1D6, up to double is 2D6, and more than double is 3D6.

So the operations would go as follows:

Attacker has 4 ATK and is using Focused Blow for plus 3 ATK, total of 7. What's your DEF?
Defender's DEF is 3, plus 2 for being behind a barrier, total of 5.
7 is more than 5 but less than double plus one.
Attacker rolls 2D6, keeps one D6 result.

Pretty simple, so long as the modifiers are trim and players take it upon themselves to count up their proper ATK and DEF values.

You also need to track your warband's Fortitude + Mind total for the purposes of Break Point. Fortitude is basically wounds whereas Mind seems to be like a combination of mental wounds and a mental ATK/DEF value. Your Break Point is half the value of your Warband's total Fortitude+Mind, right, so once you're down to half of your wang, the fight is over. This means that you need to track the number of wounds your models have taken, but your models can get back wounds by taking the rest action. So it is a sliding value.

This will no doubt require a bit of bookkeeping on the side since the value will tend to change and is not clearly represented by a state-of-the-game glance at the table. A little accessory would probably be handy for this, even if it is just a D20 or something.

Initiative shifts when a 1 is rolled in pretty much any action, but if you roll more than 1D6, you get to pick your result, so if you are rolling 2D6 for your attacks, the chances of turning over initiative drop precipitously. This would seem to favor high stat models. Renown is spent on stats on a 1 for 1 basis, meaning that one model with 4s across the board is just as expensive as 4 models with 1s across the board. Those 4 models get more activations, but will just about always be rolling 1D6 on every attack action, increasing the odds of a turnover.

It would be interesting to do the math on this to get a handle on the probabilities involved, but I don't have time for that at the moment. It looks to me like you are most often going to be rolling either 1D6 or 2D6, because model stats are likely going to be pretty comparable. This would suggest that fidgeting with your modifiers will be helpful in gameplay, as you'll want to be rolling 2D6 as much as possible. Rolling 1D6 is a comparatively big liability.

In this sense it is a bit like Blood Bowl or Force on Force where you tend to perform as many high success probability actions as you can before performing actions with a higher probability of failure in order to maximize your probability of performing as many actions as you can before causing a turnover.

weeble1000 wrote:
I downloaded the rulebook and I'll give it a go this weekend.

Many thanks for your support weeble1000!

A quick update relating to Open Combat.

I've put together a blog post which you can see here which discusses building profiles for miniatures.

I've also got a forum running now where one or two players have started to gather - only got it running last friday so it's squeaky new.

I'm going to be working on a series of gameplay example videos over the next couple of weeks.

Little reminder - the special launch price of £7.50 ends this Friday.

Cheers

Carl

I've updated the thread title to highlight launch price ending in the next 24 hours (or so - depending on when you read this). You can buy it here.

Also a reminder that the forum is running with a few topics being discussed which may provide a bit more information if you fancy a quick look.

I'm still working towards getting some video put together (juggling a lot things at the moment).