Continuing my fantasy crusade project I’m now calling ‘Crusage’, that’s Crus-age, the age of crusading.
I’ve had my Pegasus Cavalry and Rocket Battery on the painting table, and managed to get the Battery finished this morning:
It’s already been pressed into service and proved rather effective at dispatching the forces of evil (you can see it on the bottom right):
After going back and forth on the rules, writing and then abandoning entire systems, I settled back on what I had originally with the core mechanic based on opposed rolls of polygonal dice. The only reason I was turned off by such a simple idea was the lack of diversity in the common polygonal dice – D4, D6, D8, D10 and D12. I’m not sure why I didn’t see the obvious solution to use the numbers in between. D3s are common enough in games, but a D5, D7, D9 and D11 are easily achieved by rolling the die above and rerolling any maximum result. For example for a D7, I can roll a D8 and if I roll an 8 I can just reroll the die. Simple!
I also had a eureka moment when it came to the points system. Initially I thought a D12 could be 12 points and a D4 4 points, but that didn’t seem right as I said in an older post:
It shouldn’t be too difficult to figure out points with a basic system like that, but it’s not as straightforward as I had initially imagined (D4 = 4 points, D6 = 6 and so on) because in practical terms 3 guys attacking and defending with D4s will get obliterated by 1 guy with D12s. Also the maximum amount of damage that can be done with a D4 is 3, whereas the D12 can get up to 11. So assuming the D4 guys and the D12 guy have 3 lives each, even if the D4s win a round of combat they’re very unlikely to kill Mr D12 in one hit, whereas he’s likely to kill a single D4 guy with each hit.
I only realised just this morning that what I should do is total all the values on the dice giving the following values:
D2=3, D3s=6, D4=10, D5=15, D6=21, D7=28, D8=36, D9=45, D10=55, D11=66, D12=78.
This feels better, a figure with all D12s being roughly eight times more valuable than a figure with all D4s does seem about right.
The only thing remaining is to figure out how many points movement distances, ranges and lives (wounds) are worth. A ranged weapon has to be more points than a melee one due to its ability to reach enemies further away. So I’m assuming it’s some multiplication of the value of the die the weapon uses in the attack.
I’m having a lot of fun figuring all of this out. It’s sad not many hobbyists let themselves indulge in the rules writing process!
Deathzap 