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https://grimpgames.wordpress.com/2015/10/01/major-rules-rewrite/

Basically my goal is to create a set of core rules that I can apply to any genre and scale that I might feel like gaming. I've borrowed some of my favorite things from different GW games and brought in my own original (as far as I know) ideas. So far the focus has mostly been on squad level science fantasy (alternate 40k basically), but lately I have veered a little bit toward hard sci fi. I have run test games of modern military, hard sci fi, science fantasy, and medieval fantasy as well as both squad and skirmish scales. With only a few (3-ish) tweaks, the core works just as well for all of these things. Eventually I plan on writing separate documents for each genre and scale as well as detailed campaign and solo-play system (I'll work very hard on these as it will likely be how I play mostly).

I've already gotten some comments and criticism from the folks at TMP and, particularly after the major rewrite that I did today, feel very confident in the system. I really think I'm developing a pretty solid core on which to add all of the various flavors that I like to game.

I'd love to hear your opinions and concerns whether you just skim it over or get it on the table.

Thanks alot,
Grimp

https://grimpgames.wordpress.com/2015/10/01/major-rules-rewrite/

You ever heard of a game called "One Page Kill-Team" or the other OnePage rules?

I certainly have! I took a look at them and quite a lot of other free rule sets a while ago. I just read quickly over them but I remember them being pretty good. A little more streamlined than what I'm going for though.

The core rules of the game are now (pretty much) complete. I still plan on adding a ton of supplemental material (such as solo and campaign rules), but the game is totally playable now. I have a lot of testing and tweaking to do.
I also have divided it into two PDFs. One for the "Squad-Scale" version and one for the "Platoon-Scale" version. The squad scale game is a skirmish in which each model acts on its own. The platoon scale game has models acting as groups.

The PDFs can be downloaded and more detailed information can be read on my blog:
https://grimpgames.wordpress.com/2015/10/15/major-rules-update-core-rules-complete/

Heralds of ruin makes some decent kill team stuff

They sure do. I've played it. Great stuff. That has nothing to do with this thread though...

I've looked at what you've got and I love the bones, but I think it's lacking some meat. Great beginning, though.

I've played a lot of post-apoc games like "Skank" (http://www.skankgame.com/Downloads.html) which are model-specific and not really scale-locked, but of all of them, the most complete one of all, in my opinion, is Wastelands 3: Meltdown (http://s1.zetaboards.com/Post_Apoc_Wargames/topic/4759552/1/), and it's because of the truly kick-ass campaign rules.

I use Mighty Empires tiles, painted sandy and barren on one side, with small structures added (Firestorm Armada Military Buildings bits) to represent the various types of locales in the campaign. It's an unparalleled game system, really. I've applied those campaign rules to virtually every game I play (although Strange Aeons has better "RPG" style character development, but that's pulp) including WreckAge, which I actually helped write.

Keep it up, I'd love to play this once I've gotten my wee soldiers and terrain unpacked from a remodel project.

The only thing I really don't like about your game, though, is the armor mechanic. I'm not keen on taking 3 hits and having to roll 3 seperate rolls to defend. Maybe I'm misreading, though. Seems to me it would be better to have a "bogey" number to hit, and then you roll one die or something for each hit, with each success blocking a hit. It doesn't look like that's how it works, so if it already does that, then please forgive my ignorance.

Thanks a lot! It's nice to actually get an on topic reply and some really awesome, positive feedback.
As for the armor mechanic: I'm not entirely sure what you mean. But as it is now, each model rolls to hit, for each successful roll, the target rolls to defend. So if 3 marines with a S of 5+ shoot at an alien and roll a 3, 6, and 8, that's 2 hits. Because 2 of the shots are hits, the alien rolls 2 armor saves. It rolls a 3 and an 8. Because it's armor value is 8+, it survives one hit but is killed by the other.
Does that make sense? I'll take a look at how I worded it in the rules and work on clearing things up.

 Grimp wrote:
Thanks a lot! It's nice to actually get an on topic reply and some really awesome, positive feedback.
As for the armor mechanic: I'm not entirely sure what you mean. But as it is now, each model rolls to hit, for each successful roll, the target rolls to defend. So if 3 marines with a S of 5+ shoot at an alien and roll a 3, 6, and 8, that's 2 hits. Because 2 of the shots are hits, the alien rolls 2 armor saves. It rolls a 3 and an 8. Because it's armor value is 8+, it survives one hit but is killed by the other.
Does that make sense? I'll take a look at how I worded it in the rules and work on clearing things up.

Then it's fine. It almost reads like you need to roll after each attack so you end up going back and forth a bunch which becomes tedious. If you basically have each attacking model declare and roll attacks together against a defending model and then the defending model rolls combined armor to defeat models, it's better, and that appears to be what you're saying.

This mechanism might make having special attacks a pain if you develop them. Let's say you have traits like "Penetrating" or something that passes through armor or gives a + value, if you combine attacks then you have to keep track of various bonuses which may become cumbersome.

I'm more a fan of attackers gaining more dice with stronger models or weapons and just having to roll above armor ratings to hit, with no defensive roll. It speeds up the pace of the game considerably and allows more flexibility with models' traits.

Like this: The imperial sergeant has a S score of 3 so he rolls 3 dice. To hit the enemy model (whose armor is 5) each 6+ rolled scores a hit. No defensive roll and only one statistic that is important: the defending model's armor. If you really want to have opposing rolls to keep everyone involved, just make all the statistics the amount of dice to roll and have a static "bogey" to hit, like 5+. In that system the sergeant has an S score of 3 and the defender has a defense of 5, the sergeant rolls 3 dice to attack and the defender rolls 5; any 5+s rolled are successes. If the defender rolls more or equal successes than the sergeant then the defender remains alive, but if the sergeant rolls more successes than the defender the defender is killed.

If you're shooting for simple, having 2 statistics to roll against is more onerous than it needs to be.

Hmm... I do like that both of those quite a bit actually and I will definitely give them a try on the table top and see what I like best.
The only problem I'm seeing actually is that while that would work well for the squad scale version, I don't see it working well for the platoon scale version. At least not without rolling an absolute TON of dice. A squad of ten guys each with S 3 would be 30 dice. No way.
That seems more cumbersome to me than just having 1 attack roll per attacker and 1 defense roll per hit.
One the core design goals I had was to keep the number of dice needed to a minimum. Right now the game can be played comfortably with 5 to 10.

If that's the case then you can have it be where platoons roll X dice and gain +1 die for every Hero or something, if you wanted to retain simpler dice rules

Well that amounts to basically the same thing as it is now. One group rolling a handful of dice against a target number to attack and the other rolling a handful against a target number to defend. The only difference is that instead of having to figure out the target number, you have to figure out the number of dice. I don't think it's any more or less cuddly or cumbersome. I like the mechanic but in the interest of consistency, I'll leave things the same.
As it is, you can play both scales without needing to learn a bunch of different rules and mechanics. Basically you just make one slight change to combat and one slight change to morale to switch back and forth between scales. I really appreciate the feedback though!

Glad to help!

I'm considering running a short game or two of this over the weekend. If I can get it going, I'll let you know how it worked out.

After reading one thing, though, and want to clarify: Cover. Is the cover value (-1/2/3) basically a modifier to the defender's armor, in that their armor value (6+, let's say) becomes a 4+ if they roll to block a hit? If so, I'd like to go on record stating that I think it makes more sense to put the onus on the shooter. If I had a S value of 6+ and was shooting at a defender under heavy cover (-2) instead of being able to shoot with no penalty, but the defender has a better chance of rolling to block, the shooter should have their S value modified to an 8+.

My reasoning is that shooting at a person under cover (let's say that only 1/3 of the model is exposed, for giggles) is much harder because it's a smaller target area. So, the shooter should have a harder time shooting instead of the defender having their armor bumped up. It essentially doesn't penalize the shooter but gives the defender a slightly higher chance of blocking; the idea of cover isn't to block the bullets as much as it is to make a target harder to hit. So, as it exists now, the shooter is basically only seeing 1/3 of a person, but is allowed to treat it as shooting at a whole, wholly exposed person. Doesn't make sense to me. I'm thinking you just like the idea of both sides rolling dice more often, but the upshot is that when modifiers start stacking, you're forcing people to do more math (simple math, but math) more often, whereas if you make the shooter less capable of hitting the target in the first place, then the defender doesn't need to think about anything unless he's actually been hit.

Just my 2c. I'd express it as "COVER +1/+2/+3" and have that modify the shooter's S value, making the bullet no less lethal but making it harder for the bullet to reach a vital organ in the first place. It also has the added advantage of simplifying all the various modifiers down the road.

That's a good idea. That way the defender doesn't have to mix positive and negative modifiers (AP and cover) and it actually will cut down on the number of dice that have to be rolled which is definitely a plus. I'll try to get an updated version of the rules out before this weekend.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Although it actually does change the odds some and reduce the effectiveness of AP weapons... Oh well. I still prefer it.

Alrighty so I named the game, launched a website, and updated the rules.
The updated rules as well as general info and an introductory battle report can all be found on cryhavocgame.com

http://cryhavocgame.com/

I think there's about 5 other rules sets using the same name, so do a search on that before you publish it.

I did a search. The only thing I found was a 30 year old board game...

So, we did get a game in. We found the following things/came up with the following ideas:

1. Initiative. It seemed to be wholly based on lucky rolls and didn't seem to be interesting. Some ideas:
a. Add a +1 for each Sergeant ( or something ) to the initiative, which would make killing Sergeants a priority. OR
b. Add your model count to initiative, so that keeping models alive has another benefit, and is more "thematic" because the guy who is winning should have higher morale.

2. Movement. With such a simple set of rules, I (me, personally) thought that it might be better to get rid of the rulers altogether. Go with something like Crossfire's rules, where your movement is from point to point (like moving from one cover position to another. Movement was fine, we all got it and it was fine, but we found ourselves thinking about Crossfire's ruler-less rules, where you basically move from one point to another and can shoot with unlimited range (line of fire only requirement). Gets rid of rulers, which is the simplest thing of all. Not saying movement was bad, though, just positing alternatives.

3 (related to 2). If you did something with the movement mechanic to get rid of rulers, then you could make range unlimited with regard to "Shooting".
a. We all agreed that movement should be a stat that shown in the little spreadsheet box. Sometimes we had a momentary lapse and forgot how far each model could move.
b. We actually liked the way that you could move half the max and shoot or move up to the max and either fight or not shoot. Pretty fun, and makes for tough choices.

4. Stunts: We all LOVED the idea of this. There's other games we play that do similar things, like Strange Aeons.
a. HIGHLIGHT: At one point one of the players had an opportunity to drop down off a 2nd story building onto an awaiting enemy who was in cover. The idea was to drop down and stab him in the neck. He rolled the stunt roll and miserably failed. His fall was aborted, and his turn ended.
a1. This is where we didn't like the fiddlyness. If you fail a stunt, you should just die. Having to calculate the height and save against armor sucks. Armor should protect from knives and ballistic attacks, but not falling from the 2nd story. If you fall, your neck is broken, and that's that. Makes it much more dangeous, exiciting, and FAST.

We didn't use Grit. There were no spells. We prefer games that haven't got magic or psionic bollocks so we would've ignored them anyway, to be fair. We used post-apoc miniatures for this.

OVERALL:
We enjoyed the simplicity of it, but it seemed like you started out with a "keep it simple" design philosophy and then started adding layers of complexity (Valor, Grit, Luck) which don't really do much for core gameplay but add some potential complexity. It's definitely not a completed game, but it's got good bones. We all agree that some things should be trimmed out if "simplicity" is the final destination, and that the model profiles really aren't very interesting or different at all, other than number soup. Each model should have one special rule (aside from the lowliest peons) that is simple to implement and also gives a specific tactical or strategic reason for people to want to use them. Less model profiles and more interesting ones.

One thing my buddy brought up that I think is brill:
Instead of "Ork So and So" and "Imperial So and So", create a very small set of core profiles, and then let players pick one "trait" for each model, so you can take a "Generic Sergeant" at X point value, and then taking the "Greenskin" trait or something, for Y point value, it becomes a "Greenskin Sergeant", with a certain ability that all Greenskins have in common. Thus, he'd have 2 abilities - the Sergeant's ability and the Greenskin's ability. Simpler than having 100 profiles to choose from while retaining some strategic or tactical differences between models. Examples we bandied about:

Assassin: May move +2" when Charging. If this happens, add +1 to your Fight roll.
Leader: If within 4" of another model, the Sergeant can forfeit his activation and give it to that model; that model would then take 2 consecutive turns.
Pikeman: May Fight non-adjacent enemies up to 2" away (base to base).


ALSO:
Cry Havoc is a relatively old game which still has an active community, which I'd refer to as a "cult classic". Might wish to rename it to something that is more interesting, to begin with, and less cliche'.

How long have you spent on the whole project, if you don't mind me asking?

Hey I'm sorry for the long delay in posting. I have been ridiculously busy with work and I haven't had time to do any hobby-related stuff at all for a few weeks.
To superflytnt: That's awesome. I'm really glad that you had a good time. That's great to hear. I have read your suggestions and seriously consider implementing some of them. In particular I like the final suggestion that your buddy came up with. That is a cool way of doing it and would definitely make balancing forces easier.

To adzila: I've been working on it since early September. As far as actual hours spent working on it, I don't know. If I had to guess I would think somewhere in the realm of 20-30 hours of actual writing and testing.