Mechanics Lab: New Ghost Legions

This isn’t your average milk toast wargaming, this is your fully caffeinated, balls to the wall sort of wargaming. There’s only one rule:

There are no rules!

That’s because we’re going to figure out the rules as we go. So I’ve got a pile of dice, a notepad, a tape measure and some minis on a 4’x4’ table.

Today I’m pitching my WW1 Russians and Medieval Knights against my Afghans and Boxers. This isn’t really what I’m imagining with Ghost Legions moving forwards. I’ve always thought of pitching any historical box against any other, however this way I can get the feel for different weapons and armour.

I’ve also made the initial decision for this to be about single minis, skirmishing, not about bigger armies. My goal for Ghost Legions has always been accessibility, so a lower mode count is another way to make that happen. On top of my already established – any historical minis (the coolest folks play in 1/72) and easy painting.

Some hastily scribbled notes looked like I was heading towards roll to hit and then saving throws a classic.

One mechanic I settled on early on instead of a simple alternate activation system was to allow a player to activate one figure, and then another if they can roll a 2, and so on having to roll higher than the number of minis you’ve activated so far in your turn. It saves me clogging up the table with tokens, and solves the problem of a 20 or 30 minis aside game slowing to a crawl with no one making any significant gain each turn. I started out with a D6, but this quickly turned into a D10 because things were moving too slowly.

I’ve been obsessed with my Simple Toy Soldier Game rules for some time. But I’ve never managed to get them to break out of that very restrictive mould. But here’s another attempt…

With my weapon ranges, rolls to hit and saves, I’m thinking of a Fire Power or Rate of Fire stat, which is more of an abstraction (a big abstraction) of the number of shots a weapon could put out in a minute.

So Muskets, and other black powder weapons get a 1 on that scale for being slow to reload, maybe crossbows too. Single shot weapons get a 1. Semi-Auto weapons get a 3 and Fully Automatic weaponry gets a 4.

Roll to hit, make saves, and then the target takes a number of hits. I mark them on the target with a die. When that figure next activates they get their D6 actions, and the number of actions they get is reduced by the number of hits that they took. If they are reduced to less than zero actions then they are killed. A roll of 6 however, will always remove all of their hits regardless of how many they have taken. It’s a way of baking suppression into a rule set without additional mechanics.

At this point I had to figure out how melee combat worked. So here’s what I cooked up. You put together a dice pool for each fighter:

1 per melee weapon. So two single handed melee weapons get you two dice.

1 per ‘hit’ on your opponent. So in the case above the knight got an additional 4.

1 for charging. Basically whoever initiates the fight.

You the roll the pools trying to roll fails for your targets save… so lower is better in melee. The Knight due to his shield saves on a 2+ so the Boxer was looking for 1s. The Boxer would save on 5+s so the Knight was looking for 4s or lower. Whoever scores the most failed save wins and their opponent is killed.

Although it didn’t come up in this fight, I think a single two handed melee weapon, or a weapon like an axe that’s good at piercing armour should make the targets armour save worse, rather than adding dice.

I cooked up a basic scenario, two forces deploy at opposite ends, you score 1 point for a kill and two for moving a guy off of the board at your opponents end, first to 10 points wins. The scenario worked decently well and is definitely worth replaying with different forces.

The conclusion I came to rather quickly was how mismatched these forces were, so it’s probably worth me cooking up a basic points system for now to balance things a little.

I also suspect I’ll need to add a bit more to melee to make having an all melee force (like the knights) a bit more fun to play. But I think I have got a fun skirmish core to build off from.

More to come!