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How did I only just notice this section of the forum? Oh well I've spotted it now and it's great to see something like this here.

So I've got a few ideas for wargames rattling around inside my head and I'd like to try to get one to a playable state. Here's what I've got so far (not much). What I'm looking to create is a fast playing and simple to learn science fiction wargame. As time has gone by I've got rather tired of the old methods of silly numbers of stats and big look up tables. I like clean and simple systems. One particular thing I'm a fan of is a suppression system so I want to work that in somehow. I'm also wary of games that use silly numbers of miniatures and no movement trays *cough* 40k *cough* I tend to prefer smaller games between squad and part of a platoon in size. I'd also like the game to work with a variety of miniature scales from 10mm to 32mm or whatever the standard slightly bigger than 28mm but not 54mm scale size is. Yes I am designing the game for me more than anything else but that should help keep me motivated to complete it. So my design brief when I started this project was as follows:

Science Fiction
Suitable for a variety of miniature scales
Squad to Platoon size forces
Simple Rules with suppression

That's a very wide spectrum to work in and to be honest I've not got much further than the outline of a setting, some core mechanics and the activation system.

So first the basics.

Dice:
D6s, nothing revolutionary but they are a known quantity and let's be honest throwing a pile of them is very satisfying. Yes they can be very limiting with only 6 possible results but that suits what I have planned for the basic systems.

Measurement:
centimetres for smaller scales (10mm to 15mm) and inches for larger (20mm to 32mm). Not really got much to say about this as it's a very simple way of scaling the game for different scales.

Unit Statistics:
For the unit stats needed to actually play the game I wanted to keep things to an absolute minimum, the names aren't fixed yet but the function is:

Movement, Skill, Defence, Bravery

Yep that's it a grand total of four stats to use through the game. So movement, I would hope you can figure out what that's for. Originally I was thinking of getting rid of a movement stat all together but in the end I kept it to give certain types of unit benefits or penalties. For example a unit wearing heavy armour or lugging around a heavy weapon should probably move slower than a lightly armoured scout. Skill represents the unit's combat abilities be it shooting, close quarters fighting or whatever else I come up with for specialist units. I could have split this into two stats but one is simpler. The stat itself represents a dice roll, so for example the skill of a regular solider might be 4+. This means the solider would need a 4 or more on a D6 to pass a skill test. Defence is a mix of a unit's armour, natural toughness and ability to dodge incoming fire. As with the skill stat defence represents a dice roll, a poorly equipped conscript might have a defence of 5+, meaning they need a 5 or more on a D6 to pass a defence test. Bravery is the inevitable will this unit run away or get suppressed if you hurt it stat. Again this is simply a dice roll. So with this system low numbers for Skill, Defence and Bravery are good and high numbers bad.

And now I start to run out of concrete ideas.

The turn order I have at least sorted out, it's good old alternating activation. I wanted to go with this because it ensures that both players remain engaged with the game rather than the old problem of one player doing bugger all for most of their opponent's turn. So in a turn each unit may only be activated once. Once all units have been activated the turn is over. Not really sure how to determine the order of activation yet I guess I should probably sort that sooner rather than later.

Now what will a unit actually be doing when it's activated. Well I'm planning on using an order system similar to Bolt Action and the like. Currently the orders I'm planning are as follows:

Attack:
Hopefully this one speaks for itself. The unit makes an attack (shooting or close quarters) against a single enemy unit.

Advance:
Move up to movement and make a shooting attack with a as yet undetermined modifier to hit or a close quarters attack if you move into base to base contact with an enemy unit. Not sure about the close quarters bit here, this could probably use some proper play testing once I get close to a complete rule system.

At the Double:
Move up to double movement. If the unit ends it's movement in B2B contact with an enemy unit it can make a closequarters attack. Not entirely sure about this but it does represent a bayonet charge or similar attack quite nicely.

Down:
A unit may chose to go down, this makes them harder to hit.

Rally:
A retreating unit may attempt to rally by taking a bravery test.

That's essentially all I've got for the rules at the moment. It's not much but I hope it's a solid start. At the moment my priorities are to work out the systems for attacking and suppression and when to test a unit's bravery.

So on to the setting again this really is barebones stuff.

Location: Mars
Era: 2200s
Basic idea: At some point in the 2100s Mars was terraformed and colonised a century later the Martian colonies are fighting for their freedom against Imperialist powers from Earth. Yes it's essentially any colonial revolution you care to name but in space. Of course neither the Martian colonies or Earth are united, which is a roundabout way of saying anyone can fight anyone else. Which is a good thing for most wargames.


So that's what I've got so far, your thoughts?

Right now you have a concept. It isn't a bad but it isn't completely fleshed out either.

The first piece of advice I would give is playtest. Set up your troops, give them some stats even if the stats aren't balanced and go through the motions. You will find the majority of issues that you can encounter just going through the motions. You will want to do that quite a few times. Then get some friends and do the same thing, have them tell you when done what they liked, didn't liked, etc.

I can't think of which games there are because I don't play them normally, but I know there are a couple games that have a basic set of 4 attributes. I am not sure if they use D6 or D10. So you have to ask yourself what is going to make your game standout, what will make it unique and have its own identity. Someone will want to know why they want to play your vs a different game. You aren't quite at that stage yet, but it is something that you have to keep in mind as you test and go through the motions.

There is nothing wrong with simplicity. Being too simple though can run the risk that all the troops are basically the same, which there is nothing technically wrong with. That means someone shooting, shoots just as good as they fight in close combat. Are there grenades, can we throw them? Is there heavy weapons (heavy machine gun, grenade launcher, etc) someone shooting will have the same skill for all attacks?

There are technically a couple stats that I didn't see mentioned. The base one being hit points or wounds. How many hits do the units take, are they all just one or do they take multiple hits? And then damage, is damage determined by the weapon or is it just simply a successful attack means a wound?

Overall looks like a decent start. I will second the concern about the few profiles making everything the same, however. While I think that it sounds like a good way to do a bunch of very similar troops, I'm worried that the simplicity could be undermined by a need for a ton of special rules to make different units feel unique.

Simplest game I can think of in terms of unit profiles would be X-wing, which has Firepower, Agility, 2 "HP" stats (Shield and Hull), Pilot Skill, and Speed (Maneuver Dial), plus the action bar. So simple stats can definitely translate into a great game.

Thanks for the feedback on my ideas chaps. I hope to get a chance to do some proper playtesting over Christmas. In the meantime I'm going to work on a few holes that need filling between now and then. Namely weapons and how they work and nailing down the systems for actually shooting stuff. I certainly want to have a wide variety of weapons that actually feel different to each other beyond range, number of shots and ability to pierce armour, at the same time I'm still aiming for simplicity. Could be tricky to find the right balance there.

Dark Severence, I wasn't planning on a wound system at all. If a model takes a hit and fail a defence test then it's out of action. Not necessarily dead but certainly in a spot of bother that enough to keep it out of the rest of the game. Unless I added medic rules to the game. Which is something I'm now seriously considering, so thanks for that.

Special rules are something I'm not giving much thought to at the moment but I certainly don't want to be relying on a whole load of special cases to make units feel different to each other.

Ideally I want to use a unit's equipment to differentiate it as I'm making the assumption that even in space one trained solider is pretty similar to another. For example powered armour is something of a sci-fi staple, often without any drawbacks. In my opinion powered armour should offer excellent protection at the cost of being bulky and sluggish so how about something like this.

Here's my current thoughts for the average trained solider in this game.

Mv 5 Sk 4+ Df 4+ Br 4+

This chap (or chapess) is pretty vanilla, he (or she) can move at a reasonable pace and stands a 50/50 chance of doing anything. So here's the same soldier in my impression of what power armour should be.

Mv 3 Sk 4+ Df 2+ Br 4+

This is looking rather different, movement is massively restricted but defensively this is as good as you'll get (a 1 will always be a fail). If you were to assume equal weapons, In a shoot out the power armoured unit would probably win every time. However if it's a race to claim an objective well all I can say is good luck if you're stuck in that power armour. Obviously a points system will also be useful to help balance things out, but I'm not going to think about that for ages.

Thanks again to both of you, you've given me a lot to think about over the next few days.

You're pretty much describing the Warpath beta rules, with a few differences (no multibasing, so what you're describing has more in common with Warpath:Firefight which won't have it):

https://manticblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Warpath-KS-Alpha.pdf

Simplicity is always a good thing to focus on when designing a rules set, complexity can be added later if needed.

I'm not going to read or rate anything, but I do have some good advice that I give everyone who wants to get into sci-fi design.

If you haven't already, read Ambush Alley's Tomorrow's War. Not the mechanics, which are kinda naff, but the discussion on the possible future evolution of warfare and the questions you need to ask if you want to realistically represent that evolution.

I would also suggest that anyone looking to design their own rule set look at a variety of different games to get a feel for different systems. It helps to not reinvent the wheel, but also to try new concepts you may never have thought of. I would include board games in this as well, as they often have clever mechanics.

For example, I wonder if the OP has ever tried Two Hour Wargames Chain Reaction? A simplified stat system but exchanges a turn model for a reaction based system. Or, as acrletsquig points out, Warpath, which is very similar to OPs design.

Thanks for the suggestions all.

RE Warpath, bugger. I guess I'll have to do some work to ensure my rules are further from the Warpath rules. I'll be completely honest despite backing the kickstarter I pretty much forgot that Warpath Firefight existed.

Tomorrows War I already have though I've not read it for a while, I should probably do that as I did like quite a lot of the ideas used in the game despite the messy nature of the rules.

jmurph I have played a lot of tabletop games, wargames, boardgames, card games and pen and paper RPGs. So I've got plenty of "inspiration" lying around to be read at some point

Though I haven't read any of the Two Hour Wargames rules. I've meant to pick up some of their rules for a while but never got around to it I guess I've got no excuse not to at least look at Chain Reaction since it's free (just downloaded it).

I'm getting close to trying a quick play test hopefully I can do that today. Just need to sort out a couple of things first.

EDIT:

Ok I got enthusiastic about this and a few minutes after this post went up I threw together some quick shooting and suppression rules, along with a basic weapon. Put some minis on the floor 36" away from each other and played a brief game. I really do mean brief that was extremely bloody.

For those that are interested the weapon was just a basic rifle, 24" range and 1 shot, no armour penetration or anything like that to deal with. One model, one shot, kept things simple for what was the first playtest. I set up two squads of 6 minis for each side (Space Marines vs Fallschirmjager, an odd contest but it's all I had to hand). I used alternating activation with initiative determined by a simple dice roll each turn (I think this will need changes, probably some sort of command stat to differentiate the factions a bit), the order system seemed to work ok. I might change the rally order a bit but aside from that the orders seemed to be reasonable.

As I said the shooting was very bloody. Even though it was at most two kills per turn, the impact of the suppression and retreat rules I threw together caused havoc amongst the squads that got hit. One squad was shot turn one after making a double move. This resulted in a casualty which forced a retreat test. They never rallied, every bravery test they took to attempt to rally they failed (simple luck of the dice there). The other squad for that side was simply shot to pieces by the opposition who at the end aside from a bit of suppression in turn three were untouched. A very lopsided result which is interesting for what were theoretically equal forces. Shooting first is currently a massive advantage, probably too big of an advantage.

Here's a quick summary of what I've learned from the first playtest:

The basic mechanics mostly work.
The order system needs a bit of tweaking, especially the rally order.
The suppression and retreat mechanics need serious work, currently they are too harsh.

So what I am going to do is rethink the suppression and retreat mechanics, plus the rally order. Once that's done I'll do another playtest under the same conditions, to see how things change. Then I will attempt to test close quarters combat and see how that works. After that I will look into a cover system and take another look at the activation/initiative system.

 Nick Ellingworth wrote:
So that's what I've got so far, your thoughts?

I think your basic design brief is OK:

For what you've stated, KOG light is essentially similar. If you are wanting unit suppression to feature prominently, I would tweak KL with Overwatch and Fire Markers, in lieu of Infantry and IF/FO. In your game, OW / suppression is how you negate direct fire. Your game will play slower than mine, but that's OK.

For folks designing a new game, my main questions are:

What is the game about?
What kind of play is involved? How does the game feel?

I think these are the best starting points for game design. Too often people start with mechanics or trying to improve on some other game, which leads to a lot of samey games. A different dice mechanic, or different turn sequence, or a different way of causing pinning, etc. only gives you different flavors of relatively the same game (2 forces squaring off, fighting to control objectives). There are a ton of these types of games around, and you need to ask how your game will be different, truly different, and not just a different flavor.

I think the most interesting thing you said was at the end when you were talking about how the setting is a near-future Mars colony. I would personally explore that and see what kind of game is in there. Then go into mechanics to reinforce that game and setting.

Also, try to play some of the more innovative games out there and see how those play differently then the average objective controlling game. I think the two most innovative games in quite some time are X-wing and Deadzone v1. Deadzone v1 may be a bit rough around the edges, but it's rules and material design is quite brilliant. I'm sad to see how Deadzone v2 is departing from a number of its innovations and moving toward becoming more "samey".

IMO, there is nothing wrong with building off well-known pieces, if those pieces are selected with care in order to drive a particular playstyle or effect. Also, some familiarity helps with getting new players playing sooner rather than later, by flattening the learning curve - assuming that is part of the designer's intent.

The key is having a clear idea of how the game should be, and what sort of criteria should drive the various design decisions.

Carboncopy: What did you find particularly innovative or compelling about the original Deadzone rules?

 jmurph wrote:
Carboncopy: What did you find particularly innovative or compelling about the original Deadzone rules?

Overall I think deadzone does well in tying theme, mechanics and physical design together. A good example of this is the cube system. It allows for simplification of movements, ranges (eliminates the need for a rule), allows for attacking and suppressing an area without templates, etc. It also ties nicely into the modular terrain system, and allows for a lot more vertical play, eliminating the need for larger tables. The boxy terrain also ties into the theme of these makeshift industrial settlements that have been abandoned and can be looted. The starter box is one of the few miniature wargame starters that has a quality mat and 3D terrain all included.

Another good notable aspect of the system is the asymmetrical hidden army objectives. It gives a lot of flavor to the individual factions and allows factions to win in a variety of ways and keeps your opponent guessing.

I also liked that at least v1 had varying degrees of success. If you double and/or triple your opponent, additional effects would happen, depending on the action.