Friday Roundup 5/2/2025

Busy week with work and ice hockey playoffs, so I didn't do much gaming and practically no posting.

- Played a fair bit of Battle Brothers. The tricky bit for me is that combats can take a while, and you can't save during them. So I've had to avoid playing the game because I'm about to get into a fight and yet don't have the time to complete it. This makes it a bit more of a time investment for a play session than, say, firing up Diablo for a little bit and playing that.

I really like the game - the visual representation of troop conditions are great. So is the combat system, which makes me feel like every weapon has a niche, even if one I don't particularly need to use. I also really like that even a savage beating on a brother can leave them alive, but crippled - and yet still useful. My current group has a one-eyed guy who lost it early on. He's still one of my best front liners. Another suffered brain damage (!) and learns at a reduced rate. But he's tough, good at melee, has a solid base of stats overall, and worth keeping. In any other game he'd be junk. The only guys I shoved aside were so badly mauled as to be useless, or turned out to be useless. Just a permanent injury that doesn't make you do your job less well? Stay on the team.

- I like the idea of "load" for Disadvantages. I tend to get one-two big disads if possible rather than as many minor ones as possible.

- Next Felltower is 5/4. Seems like they'll go through the Air Gate.

Create Servant abuses

Someone asked about abuses of the Create Servant spell in Here a few things people used Create Servant for that I did allow:

- touching basically anything that a PC might touch that wasn't immediately, obviously dangerous (no touching living things, say)

- as scouts. They're terrible scouts, but you can make them act as lookouts and hope for the best with their low Per and IQ

- carrying things

- taking up back rank space so attacks from behind will have to shoot past them, or just take them out and spare a PC a single attack

- opening doors (stuck doors, no, because of ST 9)

Anything that basically had them be a warm body without the will to resist a potentially (but not obviously) harmful suggestion worked out fine.

Here are some things they wanted to do, but I wouldn't allow:

- havng a servant go into the druagr tombs and pour oil all over the place so someone could lob in an alchemist's fire to light it up

- having a servant hold a grenade potion and then drop it at their own feet

- using servants to throw grenades

- pretty much anything that allowed for a combat use except as a speedbump

- set off traps meant for living things (they aren't living and won't detect as "life.")

My logic for these is not that they can't fight well, but that they can't fight at all. They just crumple under the pressure of doing anything remotely violent. Even in combat, they won't stand around and force someone to kill them - they'll whimper and curl up and move out of the way. Bend a little on this, and I expect the floodgates would open. They'd be running out into mobs of foes with grenades and getting shot down by the scout to act as a kamikaze, holding weapons to fend off attackers with their default skills, etc.

This is almost a teaser of a list - if you read the session summaries that feature Dryst, you'll see these guys getting used and abused to the point that everyone assumes Dryst is basically the Evil One of the servants. But this is a start.

Felltower & Mapless Combat

I recently posted a set of guidelines for non-tactical, mapless combat for Felltower. I wanted to get down in one place all of the rules I'd made to supplement the rules in GURPS Basic Set: Characters for my own play. I also wanted to mention the Retreat ruling and the range bands.

All of this, except for the Retreat rules, has been seen in play already.

Before 2020, we played in person. We did mostly mapped combats for anything that was confusing, but also did a lot of mapless combat. All mapless combat used those rules, except that instead of formal range bands I'd just state a reasonable-sounding range based on the map and go from there. Come 2020, though, we had quarantine. We couldn't game together. We swapped first to the Roll20 and then to Foundry based on a Forge server. Suddenly, almost 100% of combats were mapped. Unless it was against a tiny amount of foes - one pudding, two spiders and some swarms, a single giant, etc. - we did everything on the battle map. The fact that we need icons on a map to roll against pushed us even more towards that.

But over the past year or so, I've tried to push here and there for mapless fights when I felt they'd be fast enough and small enough that no one would complain. When I did so, those were the rules I used, except for the "Retreat" ruling and the Reach ruling. I even used Range Bands. I didn't say I was using range bands, but the range penalties I'd offer up were straight from there. No one complained.

It's with that in mind that I decided to push a little more for mapless combat. My players are willing to give it a try. It'll be interesting to see how people react to formal, visible rules for something I ran informally (but almost identically) and with hidden rules determining the rulings.

The goal? More combats resolved in less time. Big set pieces are fun, but 1-2 hour fights for nothing really special just because someone really wants to make sure they clip as many people as possible with their area attack or get a +1 to Parry when they Retreat isn't really worth the cost in gaming time.

Let's see how it goes next week.

Friday Links for 4/25/2025

Made it most of the way through the week. What random stuff is on my mind?

- I like wargames with clever rules. This one, Race to Berlin, is a two-player game, the Allies vs. Russia. How do you handle the Germans? The Allies play the eastern front Germans, the Russians play the western front Germans. This prevents the old issue with 3-way games, which is the losing player deciding to play kingmaker and throw in with one side to let them win. In this case, that can't happen. Nice. Clever.

- I finally broke down and bought Battle Brothers. So far, it's a lot of fun. I expect to get my money's worth in the long run. I didn't sprint for any DLC but it came with one free one that adds a monster and a banner, IIRC. I'm playing my first game on easy for everything except combat, which is on Expert. It's fine and doesn't feel unfair or especially difficult to this point. I do get the occasional issue of not really having a clear idea of what to do next. Whatever. For now, the Cheat Commandos ride across the lands of whatever this land is called.

Enjoyable game, and I finally had some time . . . and it clearly wasn't going on sale for less than $14.99 so what the hell.

- Under Tenkar's Tavern, for levels 1-3. I love it.

Felltower - Loot, Exploration, and Combat, in that order?

What is Felltower about?

"Felltower is all about safety." - Ulf

Well, that, and loot, exploration, and combat, in that order. The XP system rewards loot heavily, exploration second, and combat not at all. Combat is inherently set up in the game as an obstacle to gaining loot and exploration.

PC builds, though, are about combat, almost purely. Some of that is inherent in the game - Sean Punch made these templates combat machines for the most part. In a game where combat can end your paper man, players are incentivized to put their points into combat. That can leave a party a little less able to deal with anything that isn't combat.

Evaluating loot? Can't do that without surviving combat, so that's often set aside.

Finding hidden loot? 1-5 total points in this, if that. If See Secrets and Search rolls with a couple points in the skill don't do it, too bad, that's what we've got. Seek Earth is standard.

Exploration? Cartography gets an investment, sometimes, but not always. Otherwise, exploration is treated purely as a player-facing exercise.

Other ways of interacting with the world are all tertiary to this. If a spell doesn't kill, heal, or help you move in combat . . . it's basically considered a wasted point in a prereq.

I think because the game system gives you so many ways to deal with combat, it's also the way you most want to deal with the environment. Negotiation won't always work but combat always results in combat, so again, combat power gets emphasized.

I am not sure where I am going with this, just thinking that, even if the rewards system heavily prioritizes the results of an expedition over the how, a completely non-rewarded and costly method can dominate how you get there. Phase 1: Maximize combat power. Phase 3: Profit! It's not clear how you could go about changing the desire for combat (and the explantions, both totally correct and heavily rationalized, that drive it.) Putting XP on it sure didn't help D&D become about loot and exploration, and taking XP away for it would likely be counterproductive and unfair, at best. So how to make sure the game spends more time on exploration to find loot instead of combat to find loot?

I still don't know the answer to that.

Friday Post Roundup

A few posts of interest for the week or so.

- Grognardia has a brief look at the Victory Games James Bond RPG Q-Manual. A great supplement back in the day, for your Lotus and Aston Martin driving Bond days.

- I love this picture, although it's very RPG and not terribly realistic. Still makes me want to game ASAP.

- Zero traction so far on my Felltower to do list. Everything on there was my entry. Hopefully I get a bite on this from my players, so "What is there to do?" becomes less of a challenge in play.

Possible Mapless Combat approach for DF Felltower

I'm trying to do more mapless combat in my DF Felltower game, especially because it's hard to get a combat map of every place in Felltower up for the PCs to fight in.

In order to make mapless combat work quickly, but also to avoid player demands to used mapped to not lose out on perceived advantages of their characters, I am thinking of the following rules.

In these rules, the term "narrative reason" is used a few times. Only the GM will decide if there is a narrative reason for an exception to occur.

Melee

Mapless combat will assume that fights are in a rough melee, with multiple combatants able to engage one another more-or-less freely. If narrative reasons dictate it's more of a series of small duels, that will occur instead.

Flanks, Back shots, and Runarounds

These only occur if a GM-ruled narrative reason explains them. Exception: Backstabs work normally, but require the appropriate rolls and situational prerequisites.

Retreat

Each character can Retreat once per turn, unless it is prevented by some GM-ruled narrative reason that prevents it (backed into a corner, especially tight formation, etc.) or rule that disallows it (Grappled, Rooted Feet, took a Maneuver that forbids it, etc.). No actual "movement" takes place.

Range Bands

Characters in melee will be treated as using the Melee ranged band with one another. Characters outside of Melee are at Short range to the Melee, and either Short or Medium to foes also outside of melee depending on the GM-ruled narrative situation.

Movement

It takes a Move or Move and Attack to close from the back ranks into Melee, or from Melee to the back ranks. You can't move "partway" in order to reduce spell penalties; penalties are fixed by range band.

Reach

Weapon reach is essentially a non-factor. You cannot use your longer reach weapon to keep a foe at bay or "step" in order to keep reach. Neither can your opponents. You're just in melee and able to strike at will. Close combat still works as written, for attackers and weapons that require it. Optionally, there can be no Close Combat unless you're grappled, but I'm concerned this creates a big difference between mapped and mapless resolution results for attackers that depend on CC.



I think as an accepted basis of the game, this can work. You can't get flanked. You don't have to worry about "leaving room to Retreat" becuase you just get that bonus once per turn. It should just work, especially for fights that can't be easily mapped. My approach would be to use this by default, and used mapped for cases where it seems like a big potential set-to.

I'll see what my players think of this and try to give it a formal go during our next game.