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 JohnHwangDD wrote:
I'm just going to note that there isn't any "inherent unfariness of alternating action". If you have 10 gobbos vs 3 Space Marines, the 3 SMs have the advantage, because they make 3 strong actions before 6 or 7 gobbos ever get to act. The general rule should be that the more numerous side always gets to act first.

I will admit it's less unfair than IGOUGO (by a mile!). The system I'm throwing together gives each model a set number of action points, which they can use to react if they haven't spent them, so if a model is swarmed by enemies and has actions left, he can run like billy-o!

I'm basically abstracting AA to try to make the turn more simultaneous - If you save your AP and later dodge an oncoming vehicle or run to cover, it represents the fact that the other models movement happened at the same time and your model reacted to it. with regular AA, you end up with models effectively standing perfectly still whilst a bunch of gribblies run around and shoot them.

Obviously gribblies have the advantage that they have more actions between them, but they lose the advantage of essentially consequence-free moves at the end of the turn.

However, if you use all your AP and have none left to dodge, the character was too concerned with what they were doing and didn't notice the oncoming lorry. (kersplat!)

I'm randomising who goes first each turn, but with the system I have I think it becomes a little less critical who goes first and who goes second.

Igo-Ugo isn't unfair at all, as long as the victory conditions and other mechanics are developed within the context of an Igo-Ugo game.

I invite you to try KOG light, which is Igo-Ugo with the AoS double turn (Igo-Ugo-Ugo-IGo), but it has reactions which break things up.

I've tried simultaneous play and it's not great. You want a game to have a back-and-forth experience, and it works well for organizing card-based games because cards are handy ways of tying resources together. At worst, supposing one card per unit, one army gets all its actions first if all the cards are shuffled into a single deck and then drawn one by one like Battlemasters. From what I've heard the token-drawing of Beyond the Gates of Antares and Bolt Action works like this.

You can do stuff like introduce dummy cards and multiple cards per unit or multiple units per card. So rather than trying to overcomplicate the turn sequence, players think more about making the best of their draw. Tactical Assault's Combat Cards tie this economy of action, players taking turns drawing from their own decks, to success of other actions, and an alternative to actions call situations. Situations are great for complex behaviour, essentially strategems in Warhammer 40k, and adds a nice do (A) now or (B) later uncertainty to the game.

Well, I playtested a bit and I'm not sold on the D20 system. I think the damage system I came up with worked well though.

Essentially it's a damage card system, which I'm initially modelling from a pack of cards. The first system had hearts causing HP, clubs reducing defence and so on, and it dragged too much. Too much bookkeeping. So now I have it that;

Aces do 0 damage
2-10 on all suits does 1 damage
jack queen king does 2 damage
and hearts (except Aces) do an additional damage.

So you could take 0,1,2 or 3 damage per card.

What I playtested was that the cards are all dealt face down. at the end of the turn, they are all flipped up and resolved. This is the simultaneous aspect I was referring to, as each turn imitates a moment in a battle, and the motions of play aren't an exact replica of what is happening

So if your model is on the board at the start of the turn, you will get to use it. If you take a load of damage cards before your action then you can go running out of cover all guns blazing to die in glory. And then find out you had 3 aces, have taken one damage and are standing in the field of fire feeling rather foolish. (and I doubt the "F's" stop there...)

Some of the weapons I trialled had special rules to allow the attacker to look at the damage card before dealing it, which then opens up these units into the realm of bluffing, dealing 1 damage and then suddenly changing their attention, so that the opponent thinks their model is dead and makes a wrong move... As far as I can see it's a fairly unique system and will make the dynamics of play somewhat different to most games out there, as your tactics will be about your whole turn rather than your activations.

If you are using a card deck, I think you'd want to leverage the Suits and Jokers in addition to the Values.

Nothing saying you have to restrict yourself to what's in a pack of Poker cards. Something I've found handy is getting Magic/Pokemon-style sleeves and using Poker cards to stiffen whatever I've printed out that day. Scrap-booking tools are handy for any fabbing you need to do with cards.

 Nurglitch wrote:
Nothing saying you have to restrict yourself to what's in a pack of Poker cards. Something I've found handy is getting Magic/Pokemon-style sleeves and using Poker cards to stiffen whatever I've printed out that day. Scrap-booking tools are handy for any fabbing you need to do with cards.

That's a good idea with the sleeves. I was using the pack of cards as a guide, ultimately I will produce a deck of damage cards bespoke to the game. I may even have damage cards split, so there's an effect for infantry and an effect for vehicles. I'm trying to come up with damage effects which don't require huge amounts of bookkeeping - so far all I've got is HP damage, knockdown and morale checks. With all the damage cards being resolved at the end, I'm planning on only having half the cards in the deck actually cause damage, so it's a gamble whether you think you're going to have killed the enemy. The aim is to get away from the mysteriously perfect efficiency of armies represented by these games - models dealing precisely the right amount of damage to the opponent to kill them, and the other models knowing that has happened before picking the next target. If there's only half a chance your damage is actual damage, then you might elect to pour overkill into each model, or you might gamble on just the right number of cards.

Originally I had movement reduction and defence reduction, and it was hell to keep track of. I'm contemplating "next activation" effects, so put a counter on the model, next activation it affects them and then is removed. It should be easy enough to keep track of.

Dice vs target do an excellent job of modeling the uncertainty of doing the "right" amount of damage, etc. simply by virtue of being able to miss / not wound / save.

Cards would use a "high card" or other mechanic to create uncertainty.

I really, really like the 'hidden damage' as dealt by cards representing adrenaline kicking in and preventing a model from feeling how hurt they were. Having dealt cards to turn over makes it easier to track than remembering to roll dice later on.

I'd very much use it as the basis for a system though and either have the hidden part as a special rule for some tough (or drugged?) troopers or have lots of high damage (explosive?) weapons able to put immediate face up damage out as you're not going to be walking off a missile that separates each limb from your torso.

 Riquende wrote:
I really, really like the 'hidden damage' as dealt by cards representing adrenaline kicking in and preventing a model from feeling how hurt they were. Having dealt cards to turn over makes it easier to track than remembering to roll dice later on.

I'd very much use it as the basis for a system though and either have the hidden part as a special rule for some tough (or drugged?) troopers or have lots of high damage (explosive?) weapons able to put immediate face up damage out as you're not going to be walking off a missile that separates each limb from your torso.

I have a couple of mechanics to make it interesting. One is weapons which, as you said, can be resolved immediately due to their somewhat powerful nature. Another is weapons used by skilled models (EG assassins) where the attacking player can view the cards dealt before they are placed face down.

I am considering having critical hits resolved immediately and regular hits at the end. Missiles would have a high chance of a critical hit, snipers as well, but regular guns would have to be lucky.

I'm redesigning the game to run on D6's now, so it's something of a departure from the title! But I could have it that if you double what you need to get to wound (as a missile likely would) resolve damage immediately. As such critical hits don't deal extra damage, but they deal it out of sequence and can kill models before they activate, which would be quite a bonus in a game like this, where your tactics would revolve around getting to use everyone, and *SPLAT* oops, frank died! change the plan!

It would make specialists like snipers more key in the game. I like it a lot.

I like that you are getting your hands dirty and finding out what does and does not work.

That being said, I think you are still working in a bit of a vaccuum and have not adequately set your guide rails for what you are work to create. For example, a game that is a mass battle game would have a very different combat mechanic than a 1-on-1 skirmish and those would be different from a squad vs. squad skirmish game. That is only 1 broad example of what you need to define.

Typically, I recommend starting with a basic high level concept like..... Cowboys vs. Zombie, Space Fighter Planes, Ninja Assassins, etc. Then build what you want the game to do from there.

Cowboys vs. Zombies- AI Zombies vs. Cowboy tropes controlled by the player

Space Fighter Planes- A Weird World War II around a Nazi moon base.

Ninja Assassins- Stealth Missions where two teams of Ninja with specific skills try to accomplish stealth missions against a third party AI.

You can see that all of these games would require very different design goals and mechanics. I am not sure you have defined what you are trying to accomplish yet.

 Easy E wrote:
I like that you are getting your hands dirty and finding out what does and does not work.

That being said, I think you are still working in a bit of a vaccuum and have not adequately set your guide rails for what you are work to create. For example, a game that is a mass battle game would have a very different combat mechanic than a 1-on-1 skirmish and those would be different from a squad vs. squad skirmish game. That is only 1 broad example of what you need to define.

Typically, I recommend starting with a basic high level concept like..... Cowboys vs. Zombie, Space Fighter Planes, Ninja Assassins, etc. Then build what you want the game to do from there.

Cowboys vs. Zombies- AI Zombies vs. Cowboy tropes controlled by the player

Space Fighter Planes- A Weird World War II around a Nazi moon base.

Ninja Assassins- Stealth Missions where two teams of Ninja with specific skills try to accomplish stealth missions against a third party AI.

You can see that all of these games would require very different design goals and mechanics. I am not sure you have defined what you are trying to accomplish yet.

My aim is to make a gang vs gang skirmish game, revolving predominantly around vehicles. I aim to have the same damage mechanics against troops as well as against vehicles, for simplicity, but to do it better than GW did with 8th edition (if you try to stab a tank with a knife, it's fair to say that nothing will happen unless you're very, very, insanely lucky!).

Current mechanic I'm trialling is D6's with exploding 6's, count up the number of successes, like in Dystopian Wars, which I enjoyed thoroughly. the attacking model has a "Skill" value, in the form of "4+" or "3+", which is what constitutes a success on each D6, and the attack he uses has an "Attack" value which is how many dice to roll. Defender has a "Save" value and a "Defence" value, in the same format, but generally lower numbers as the attacker has to equal or exceed the defence value to damage them. if the attack doubles the defence, then it is a critical hit. subsequent multiples (triple, quadruple etc.) deal extra face-up damage cards.
so, in practice:

skill 4+ attack 4 vs save 5+ defence 2
attacker rolls 4 dice, needing 4+ to succeed with each, and gets 3 successes.
defender rolls 2 dice, needing 5+ to succeed with each, and rolls 1 success, which cancels out one of the attacker's successes.
attacker now has 2 successes vs defence of 2, so the shot goes through and the defender gets dealt a face down damage card, to be resolved at the end of the turn.

if the attacker fired an anti-tank missile and, after the defender rolls, had 6 damage, this would be triple the defence, so would be 2 face up damage cards, resolved immediately.

However, the defender could keep rolling 6's and come out unscathed. This would be to represent insane luck (it's a dud, he dodged it in an epic backflip, bent down to pick up his lucky locket which he just dropped and it sailed over him, that sort of thing!)

I don't expect this system would work well for big battles. I could muck around trying to scale it though...

It's common enough in mass battle games, though some small battle / skirmish games use it too. If I recall correctly, both Stargrunt 2, and its unofficial successor, Tomorrow's War, use a single stage of rolling (attack rolls vs target's defence rolls). I personally think 2 stages of rolling is the best, as it allows interesting consequences for a unit being hit, but not killed such as suppression, stun effects, morale checks, etc. 3 stages like in 40k is excessively granular, the only purpose beyond giving the defending player a chance to roll some dice.

Number of roll stages aside, I agree with you on non-armour "toughness" being a somewhat questionable concept, at least where conventional life forms are concerned. If a successful hit roll represents a solid hit, then even a basic rifle bullet would put an unarmoured human out of the fight 80% of the time at a guess. But if you're incorporating massive creatures, ones with stronger physiques, creatures made of solid stone, wood, ethereal creatures, zombies, etc, these aren't armoured, but it's well conceivable that firepower will have diminished effect on them. Muliple HP could cover such units, but does add considerable extra record keeping.

Stargrunt and Tomorrow's War can both stramline things a bit with their assumption that most models will be ordinary humans (underneath whatever armour they're in); In 40k terms, they're basically assuming that everything is T3, and so they can bake the "Wound roll" probability into the hit roll.

For including morale effects from shoting, you could just as well base those on the number of shots being fired, and then do the hit rolls to determine any actual casualties.