Now with Undead

+Erik McGrath

Ah, holidays. This entire time of year, from Halloween to New Year, tends to get devoured and all I have to show for it is a couple new monsters for 16-Bit Tactics.

Undead

Skeletons and Ghosts make their first appearance. I picked them to get a physical and a non-physical undead up and running and, of course, because I have LEGO figures for both. I have zombies and mummies as well, but those two will have to wait. 

Skeletons have a mix of attack types as they level: a melee attack, a ranged ice attack, and an AE drain. Their physical attack does the most damage, but the others have status effects and can be useful against those with low M.Def/M.Eva. They are pretty typical fighter types otherwise. Good DEF, middling M.Def, high HP.

Ghosts have only magic dark attacks. Two are melee; one sleeps the other drains and poisons. Then they have an AE ranged dark blast. They have lower HP but top rate EVA/M.Eva, and since they are insubstantial they have Resist Physical. So even though they have no defense (it's the same as their evasion ratings so it almost never applies), they still take half damage from all physical attacks. Best break out the spells on these guys. They also float/fly and no one seems to like fighting them for some reason.

The unique part about undead though is that they don't stay dead for long. When reduced to 0HP they gain a countdown effect. When the countdown runs out they revive with half HP. The only way to stop this is to apply an effect that cancels Doom. Holy Water is one way. Reraise is another. If those aren't options you still win the battle if all the enemy are KO'd, so you can time it to take all the undead down within 3 rounds of each other.

Elemental Effects

One major thing adding undead has made me think off more is how to make the elements more distinct. As of right now there is really no difference between them and few abilities reference an elemental type other than to color the damage. Clearly this will not do. 

I already have the Resist keyword so to make this work as a minigame that encourages characters to buy different elemental abilities I need to add two more keywords: Weak and Absorb. There will be no Immune condition since I don't like when nothing happens. With this system either you get less damage, more damage, or you heal the target. 

Undead typically Absorb Dark and are Weak to Fire and Holy. To get this in I will be using some of the white space left on the monster sheets to add an Elemental Affinities section that will list how they react to each element. Broader traits like the Ghost's Resist Physical will not be spelled out here since they are so powerful they will continue to occupy a Support ability slot.

Coming Up

Other things in the 16-Bit pipeline include:

Mounts (Kweh!)

More Monsters (demons, machina and some classic heavy hitters like Behemoth)

Boss Monsters 

Summons

Links

Only Monsters is updated. The others are for convenience. 

16-Bit Tactics Jobs
16-Bit Tactics Gear
16-Bit Tactics Monsters

16 Bit Tactics Usable Rules

+Erik McGrath

As promised, I have been working on 16 Bit Tactics. Below are 4 links to get all the current parts of the game. With these you have everything you need to play, but not everything I want to give you.

What's Missing

In particular there are no guidelines on how to set up battlefields, nor are there any stats on how the power of characters and monsters compares at different levels. A Level 2 creature is undeniably more powerful than a level 1, but I have't crunched the numbers to tell you how much more dangerous it is.

Summoners are also incomplete. All their job abilities are costed and written up, but what their summons actually do is not detailed. This is because I can't decide on what they should actually do. I am torn between them being one-shot spells like in many of the older games, or if they should actually create a minion on the battlefield that the summoner can then control.

The first method makes them similar to Black Mages but with added utility, since some of the summons have status or support effects as well as nukes. The second method makes Summoners much more tactical and would serve as a good base for when Beastmasters are introduced. It would be simple enough to make a monster template for each summon and then let the summoner spend their actions to command the creature each turn.

Any feedback is appreciated.

The Gear section is very bare bones as well. I have not finished the costs of equipment because I haven't finished the loot system for Tactics yet. So this means I have no information on what items you should expect to have by level and there are, as of yet, no consumable items.

What's Coming

Next on the docket is formatting the rules document, then combining everything into a single file. From there the monster section needs to be expanded with more types of enemy, and consumable items are a must as well.

To get to the consumables, a robust loot system is needed so that you know how much GP to expect for each character and what a defeated enemy should leave behind.

A full character sheet is on the list as well. Right now I just use index cards to note what a character has equipped and its cumulative stats. The Job tracking sheets are used to keep track of AP gained and spent.

And with that said, an experience system is needed. How much XP and AP should a character earn? Currently that amount is 1XP and 1AP per level of the defeated enemy. Add up all the enemies and then divide this among the PCs. Since it's linear and the power curve is a very steep linear curve it makes lower level enemies much more valuable for the effort expended. I've also thought of squaring the level of a monster to get its reward. I don't know if this will work yet. 

Finding the right number to level up is tricky as well. 100 is too much and 25 is too low to just be linear. I think 25*(current level) looks reasonable. That would mean that it takes 1125XP to get to level 10 which gives you enough AP to completely master 2 Jobs and make progress on a third.

16 Bit Tactics Links

Rules - No Format
Gear
Monsters
Jobs

16bit Games and 32bit Issues.

+Erik McGrath

Lately I have had what can only be termed catastrophic computer issues. Luckily all my Inspired stuff was backed up outside my machine. Unluckily I had to re-find all my programs and get them installed so I could work on things. I am almost done doing that.

Once all that is settled it's back to work. My current plan is to do some more with 16 Bit Adventures. Once I have an adventure module for each level up to 10, I can call it done. I also need to work more on 16 Bit Tactics and get those monster stats finished. With jobs, enemies and gear done, the skeleton of the system will be usable, after that it's how battlefields should be built.

Personally I use LEGO

This is a 32x32 blue plate divided up into an 8x8 grid using 2x4 blocks. Ultimately I plan to get colored plates to more clearly show the grid but for now I settle for changing the orientation of the blocks. This is a good size for a 3v3 or 4v4 battle. It gets cramped with more and feels a little empty with less, besides which a 2v2 battle is in itself too small for Tactics to handle well.



Each color is a specific terrain type. Green is grass, yellow is sand, blue is water, tan is earth (I don't have brown blocks), and grey is stone. Counting the water as HT 0 there are 5 different HT values shown here. This breaks up line of sight and gives an advantage to the high jump rating jobs: Thief, Ninja, Monk, Dragoon.

Downloads

+Erik McGrath

It's been awhile since I stepped back and looked at everything playable that we've done. Other than the unformatted 16Bit tactics rules these are all presentable PDFs that aren't embarrassing to have people download. Luckily I don't embarrass easily so the ugly one is up here as well.

16 Bit

16 Bit Adventures v2
Adventure in Firstown
Stopover in Secondville
Five Burrows Fiasco

16 Bit Tactics (unformatted)
16 Bit Tactics Jobs

RPGs

Celestial Warriors v3

PNP

Sudden Death PnP v4
Squabblin' Corbies v1

The trouble with layouts

+Erik McGrath

I'm not yet any good at layout. I have been attempting to learn as I go for some time now, but progress has been slow. I only have what I can term 'reasonable results' with Powerpoint and LaTeX, neither of which you could call industry standards for RPGs.

This has been most telling, and frustrating, for 16 Bit Tactics. 16BT has a lot of tables and graphics that require a considerable amount of effort on my part to make them usable by humans. From this experience I have begun weighing other options for getting useful documents into the hands of people who would like them.

Option 1: Screw It

The simplest option is just don't bother. I can always use my notes to play and hand out said notes to others who wish to play. Those are the only advantages I can think of.

The disadvantages are that I'm supposedly making games and part of that is making them look like someone spent some time doing that. Presentation is a big deal if for no other reason than what it says about your commitment to helping people enjoy the game. 

Option 2: Fake It

Powerpoint and LaTeX give me results. Not pretty but it is coming along. I'm very familiar with both programs as well as the rest of the MS suite and I used them constantly in college to put together reports, grants and presentations. All the things I have released so far for 16 Bit Tactics were done in Powerpoint.

The pro here is that it does eventually give me results and I already know how to pull the levers. The con is that I'm pushing the limits of my tools so there will be a maximum benefit wall reached soon in terms of time input vs work output.

Option 3: Suck It Up

Just keep banging my head at it and work toward a breakthrough. My experience with GIMP (used heavily for Battle Tank, mainly by +Christopher Andersen ) has not been positive in the Suck It Up column. I have done some things with it; they have been awful.

I'm basically starting at the bottom so there is nowhere to go but up. The downside is new programs are time intensive and these ones are hardly intuitive to me.

Wargaming

+Erik McGrath

Recently I've been doing a lot of wargaming.

The first kind is Epic: Armageddon. It is an unsupported Games Workshop game based in the Warhammer 40k universe. I play Imperial Guard, Orks, and Dark Eldar and it's a tremendous amount of fun. The scale is 6mm so it is about companies of infantry and dozens of tanks, rather than the handful of units you would use in 40k or Warmahordes.

You can find out much more about it at Tactical Command or our G+ Community.

The second kind is a 25mm skirmish game that is being invented as we play. In this case, "we" refers to myself and my father. My old man is a combat veteran who served as a Field Artillery Surveyor. We're using WW2 and jumping around to include all the various belligerents. Yesterday was our first crack at using tanks and AT guns, specifically T-34s and a PAK 75. Previous scenarios have been located in Europe and focused on the Western Front with only a few games in the eastern theater. We plan to do a Stalingrad scenario soon.

Scale and Goals

The interesting thing about this, for me, is trying to keep a solid scale that can still allow meaningful activity. Rather than use telescoping distances or artificially low ranges on guns, we've opted to make 1"=10' (2.5cm=3m for our friends outside the US) and use a standard 6'x4' (180x120cm) table. This means that a rifle can reach out the entire length of the board, though it is not very accurate at that range.

A guiding principle is that casualties should not be high on a turn to turn basis when the units involved are standing off and using small arms. To accomplish this we are using a D12 roll-under system with a typical, regular infantryman having stats of 4. So to hit an enemy with his rifle you need to roll a 4 or less on a D12 assuming you have no modifiers, which is pretty rare. Cover, distance, whether the shooter moved, if the shooting is reactive vs active, is the shooter is pinned down, and other things all make it hard to hit. So far in play the most common scenario is that you get a -2 to hit, so you would need to roll a 2 on a D12 for a 1-in-6 chance of having any effect whatsoever.

Then when you do hit, you roll to see what effect you had: KIA, Wounded, Disrupted, or Nothing. KIA generally requires a critical hit and Nothing needs a Fumble. A unit that is Wounded gets a saving throw to determine how badly they are hurt. Disrupted is automatic and is a measure of suppression and loss of command and control.

To sum up our goals:

• Realistic casualty levels
• Leaders are vital
• Each soldier matters
• Objective based
• Encourage use of real tactics
• Playtime under 3 hours

Issues and Methods

The main difficulties encountered so far are mainly bookkeeping issues. Tracking who is wounded for instance as well as morale states take up a lot of time. Another related thing is damage to vehicles and structures. Tank armor varies a great deal, especially when you can turn your heavily armored turret to any direction.

So far there are tables upon tables to refer to. Streamlining those is going to be a major theme of the next few playtests.

The game has evolved and grown a lot in the past couple weeks. We began with only a few assumptions that I mention above and add 2-3 new rules or special effects each game. A new thing can be as simple as a weapon we haven't used yet or a new nationality or type of soldier. It can be complicated such as how to handle smoke. Smoke interacts with the visibility, area fire and windage rules, and it moves and disperses as well.

It is a lot of work, but it is also a lot of fun.

Future

Once the rules are more settled, we will be doing some hacks for using popular 25mm games in our rules because I have a large number of models for them that don't get much use. A small unit of heavily armored superhumans vs a vast tide of aliens has to happen at least once. :)

We're also planning to do a demo this summer. We've already picked out a scenario: French Resistance vs German officers in the Paris Opera. With that we'll be able to showcase more than a dozen special rules including unarmed combat, bystanders, snipers, and heroes, as well as having several different troop types present.

Sometimes we just game

+Erik McGrath 

Recently I've been working on a few more things. Some are Inspired things as always but some are just things that I want to play or run. 

Inspired things

I'm a wargamer. 

I've played many varieties of wargame as well as other miniatures games that I prefer to call skirmish games. My personal favorite for company scale is Epic: Armageddon. It does all the things I like and requires a combined arms approach to win. For those skirmish games though I don't have a favorite. I have hundreds of models for several but I'm not sold on the rules for any. 

What gets me about them most is the treatment of linear distance. I understand that a 6'x4' table is not that big a space even at 25mm scale when you compare to the range of a rifle. But that just means I prefer to see that fact used, rather than worked around. I don't want there to be small squads of infantry running around with a mix of tanks and aircraft all playing in that same tiny space with their low ranges. If there is artillery on the board it ought to be an objective in this scale from my perspective.

To that extent, I've been working on a 25mm game that uses only the smallest amount of abstract range: 1"=10' but the models have 1" bases so it's a little loose at melee range. In this case, I like the fuzzy range because hand to hand combat is extremely chaotic and I don't want the game to bog down in an area that will typically not be a huge part of the action despite often being a decisive part of the game.

It uses d12s, one of my old favorites, and your basic trooper has 4s in their stats. There are 9 stats in 3 categoies: Combat (Firefight, Close Quarters, Hand to Hand), Discipline (Command, Initiative, Morale) and Physical (Carry, Move, Wound). We played a few test games using squads of WW2 soldiers (Russians vs Germans) taking a farm house.

So far the rules are behaving and giving pleasant results.

Just things

OSR Romance of the Three Kingdoms

For those that aren't OSR players the acronym means Old School Revival and refers to a collection of D&D editions and clones. My poison of choice for this game is Adventurer Conqueror King System. Normally just called ACKS.

I'm using ACKS basically intact though I customized the classes for this game (Courtier, Strategist, Doctor, General) and added Weapon Mastery adapted from the venerable Rules Cyclopedia I got in '91. I've also lifted some concepts from Flying Swordsmen. Not much of the rules from FS are getting used but the idea of Chi Abilities is there because I want to emulate the proto-wuxia flavor of the novel. The specific powers come mainly from Qin: The Warring States and are adapted to ACKS rules. 

One of my goals was to allow players to make anyone from Lu Bu to Zhuge Liang. So far I think it worked.

The game begins with the Yellow Scarf Rebellion in 184. The PCs are officers in Bing Province under the command of governor Ding Yuan and his chief secretary, Lu Bu.

Vampire Blood & Smoke

I'm a big fan of the new WOD reboots so far. Blood and Smoke has a lot of things going for it, specifically making the vampires more monstrous and their powers more interesting.

My game is set in Greater Boston in 1890. I've removed Clans as a rule and as an in-setting thing. Mechanically players get to pick their 3 Clan Disciplines, their Clan Bane and where their free Attribute dot goes rather than those being predetermined. Covenants et al work as written. For chargen I put a few limits and also give out more points in Disciplines: 6 total dots in Clan Disc ranked 3,2,1 and 1 dot in anything (can raise the 3 to a 4 or but a non-Clan Disc). The 10 Merit points also can only be spent on Merits and Blood Potency is 2.

I created 3 NPCs for each PC: 1 rival, 1 enemy, 1 neutral. The players got to define their rivals and enemies, the neutrals were essentially random. This gives us about 25 Kindred to populate the rather considerable area involved. It feels like a good amount.