A very long time ago I had a different blog, I recently rediscovered some of the posts there and they were long and rambley, with very little in terms of content that would be interesting to anyone other than myself. What I did discover there though was several attempts at producing ‘stat less’ skirmish games. Since the majority of my gaming is solo the bane of my existence is having to constantly refer to stat lines, it slows things down and means I’m spending most of my time consulting a spreadsheet instead of watching battles or adventures unfold before my eyes. Using some of the ideas I found on my old blog I came up with a card based system for resolving those small scale fantasy clashes.
Across the plains of the dusty hobby sofa two forces face each other, on the left is a warrior, a mage and a ranger, and on the right two warriors and a mage. I’ve reduced all the various fantasy classes down to three.
When a figure activates you flip a card from the deck:
In this instance the mage had a miss result, meaning he did nothing this activation. Whereas the opposing mage below was able to put his target to sleep!
Here’s a basic example of combat, the warrior on the right wants to charge his opponent. Provided he doesn’t get a miss or fumble result on his card he can use the card to move into base to base contact with his target. The glass bead means the warrior on the left has already activated this turn, the die shows the warrior on the right has already taken two hits.
The warrior used the ‘Light Wound’ result to move into contact. Unfortunately he then drew a fumble.
Later in the game the other warrior got his opportunity to strike, on the right his attack card was a ‘Light Wound’, enough to finish his target off. His opponent flipped a card over to see if he could save himself, unfortunately since the description for warrior on the card didn’t end in an ‘X’, it’s a failed save and the warrior is slain.
Here’s an example card by way of explanation.
If a warrior flipped this they would fumble, but if they flip it for a save they would be successful. A ranger can cause two light wounds, either on the same target, or splitting them between two separate targets, but would not successfully save against an attack, a mage won’t save either but can use their magical abilities to move any character in play 4″.
It’s all fairly self explanatory which is what I like most, but also includes pretty much everything you’d expect from a skirmish between small numbers of fantasy adventurers.
Deathzap 