Saint Paul Irregulars

[JCS]

Summary

Since the movement system survived the initial alpha test pretty well, most of the changes under 0.2 will revolve around damage allocation. There were way too many critical rolls with indecisive / uninteresting results with the net result of effectively slowing down gameplay. Consequently, the damage / critical hit mechanics will undergo the most drastic change in this version of the rules.

Changes

1. Damage to individual wheels / tires is no longer tracked - instead this is abstracted into a handling damage. Handling damage will gradually make it more difficult for vehicles to maneuver without some degree of control loss.

2. Similarly, braking and acceleration have also been given their own damage tracks - braking and acceleration damage will gradually erode their respective capabilities.

3. Acceleration slightly increased for most vehicles - this makes for a slightly faster game and permits some degree of performance degredation.

4. Critical hit tables reduced from seven to two - just internal and external. This should make things a bit more concise.

5. Instead of rolling for each critical hit, the total critical damage will simply be added to the die roll on the critical hit table. Total bonus caps at 12 points and will rollover (ie: you recieved 14 points of critical damage so you will make one roll at +12 and another at +2).

6. Concept of catastrophic damage introduced. Some critical hits are catastrophic - running out of regular hit boxes grinds your vehicle to a halt - running out of catastophic hit boxes makes your vehicle go boom.

7. Damage for machine guns and miniguns reduced to one. Autocannon damage reduced to two. Rocket pod damage will probably be reduced to four. These changes are accompanied by a corresponding reduction in armor and are necessary under the revised critical hit system.

8. Movement widget scaled up. A movement impulse is now ~2.5" instead of ~1.5"

9. Range increment increased for rocket pod - probably to 16".

10. At this point, rather than add cards to the deck, half moves only occur if you are travelling an odd speed and a movement card matching your exact speed comes up.

11. Control table expanded slightly with minor, major and severe skids. The former will be slightly more common. Skids will now cause some speed loss.

12. Completely redesigned record sheets and a vastly improved reference sheet.

- John
_________________
“I much prefer the sharpest criticism of a single intelligent man to the thoughtless approval of the masses.” - Johannes Kepler

[JCS]

I want to extand a big thanks to everyone who came out to play - the larger group helped me uncover and identify some problems in the system. I let my impressions sink in overnight so I want to open the discussion by talking about the things I consider to be a problem.

Movement
The central design philosophy of the game is speed - everything from movement to gunfire should be resolved quickly. Most people seem to like the current movement model (my gut feeling is that a plotting system is the wrong approach) and the widget seems to work really well. But the main problems I see with movement in the current version are twofold:

1: There is no incentive to be moving fast because the most effective general strategy is to ram someone and unload your weapons.

2: Its too difficult to accelerate and, when presented with the option to accelerate or shoot, most people will shoot.

I can think of a couple of ways we could get people to spend more time driving and less time shooting.

1: Permit acceleration, deceleration or maneuvers on movement cards. This would remove the "drive or shoot" choice presented by the action cards but the nature of the deck still makes it difficult to get going again. Pehaps we need to permit acceleration / deceleration on *any* movement card, not just those your acting on. Or perhaps we need to allow greater acceleration on action cards (NO2 or KERS are real-world examples with the latter being a rechargable regenerative braking system for use with traditional combustion engines).

2: Make speed defensive. Drop range and lose dice for speed instead (it really doesn't matter what we use for a hit modifier since the system abstracts so much of it anyway). This has the added benefit of eliminating the need to measure (except to see if you're over max range) but would require a bit more retooling. Alternately, always roll the same number of dice, but reduce the hit number based on your speed.

3: Reduce the number of action cards. If we did this we may have to permit fire at any point but change action cards to a reload function (sort of like how it works in Piquet).

Combat
A lot of the issues here revolve around weapon balance but I think the bigger question resides in the role gunfire plays. If gunfire is to be infrequent, it should also be more decisive:

1: Critical tables are limp. These need to be revised upward or replaced entirely.

2: Too many dice are being rolled. The constant heaps of dice being passed around and picking through them for hits is slowing down play.

3: Gunfire is, in general, indecisive. I would rather have fewer shots connect and instead, have the shots that do hit, really hurt.

4: Ramming is too favorable to heavy vehicles. This was my mistake - I inadvertantly compounded bonuses.

Some of these things are pretty easy to fix - some less so. I think the number of dice rolled needs to be reduced regardless of what happens. But it seems like I need to focus on how combat integrates into the movement system. Consequently, the biggest question on my mind is what I stated above:

Should the primary modifer for combat come from speed and not range?

Feedback and ideas are appreciated.

- John
_________________
“I much prefer the sharpest criticism of a single intelligent man to the thoughtless approval of the masses.” - Johannes Kepler