Look, Sarge, No Charts: Near Future and Sci-Fi Rules Development

Buck

Dave Wood, Greg Priebe, and I got together this Saturday for a session to work on the LSNC: SciFi rules.  We focused on the cyber fight and spotting.  It really needed to be a small event, because we were changing the rules on the fly, sometimes during the same turn.  In the end, I think we worked through a number of challenges.  There is only so far I can go in my head while running.  At some point you have to put figures on the table and see how it works in practice.

I think the spotting rules feel pretty good.  I was hoping to use the same spotting dice as the original WWII rules.  We tried a bunch of different things but eventually came back to that.  The trick was to reflect visible and thermal sensors at different ranges.  In the end we are going to use the normal spotting dice, but go to long and short range instead of losing a die for every 10″, and add an additional (special thermal) die if the unit has thermal sensors.

For the play test games, we are not affixing the normal base labels but using rosters.

The cyber fight worked very well, I think.  At some point, I’ll probably ask Sally 4th to make some MDF “cribbage board” looking game aid to keep track of the status of the cyber fight.  I also want to explore having special cyber dice created.  Depending on how a side’s cyber forces are doing at penetrating the enemy’s networks, the side can hold some number of cyber effects cards that they can play during the turn.  Both Dave and Greg used theirs effectively to slow down or disrupt the enemy.

Greg was having an unusually hot dice day, and he was spanking Dave’s forces left, right, and center even though Dave had the upper hand on the cyber fight for most of the game.  Both sides started with identical forces in a meeting engagement.  This was about testing the rules, not winning a game or testing a scenario.

At the end we started to test the radio frequency (RF) spotting and firing RF-guided munitions, but by that point in the game, Dave’s forces were shredded and we called it a day.

We are bringing the rules to a club game on 1 June, so stay tuned for further updated.

from Buck’s Blog http://bucksurdu.com/blog/?p=7671
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from Tumblr http://tumblr.hawks-club.org/post/173873977833
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Author: hawksgameclub

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