Chainmail: My First Engagement

  Last week I attended North Texas RPG Con, and it was a much-needed breath of freedom and return to gaming in person.  NT is a big family, and we all revel in the love of old-school games.  This year I got to play three games for the first time that I had never before tried: Champions 4th Edition, Gamma World 1st Edition, and Chainmail.  I thoroughly enjoyed each and every one of these games, but I felt like I needed to write my feelings on Chainmail as it is a foundational piece of the original 1974 D&D rules.

  Thanks to the debacle that was RPG Labs and the ill-fated video series I was involved with, I have played 1974 D&D using the Chainmail combat tables.  It was extremely illuminating to my understanding of where many of our terms and mechanics come from.  But I'd yet to actually throw down some miniatures and play out a battle using Chainmail.  Our referee was Paul Stormberg, who deftly explained the basics and gave us the choice of three armies - Europeans, Mongols, and... I can't remember because they didn't get chosen.  My was teamed with James and his daughter Neve, who we quickly named our General.  We grabbed the Mongol army.  Our opponents, the Europeans, were Robin, David, and Scott.

  Each team had 100 points with which to build our forces.  We chose two units of five archer figurines, a unit of five horse archers (an option not available to our European enemies), a unit of five medium cavalry, and a unit of heavy infantry.

Our opponents had two units not available to us: a pair of knights, much higher quality fighters than our infantry, and a 10-figure unit of crossbowmen.  These gave us beaucoup trouble, as you'll see here in a moment.  After unit selection  came terrain.  Paul had us draw four random terrain features from a deck for each side of the map, and drew the indicated features onto the battlemat with a wet-erase.  We ended up with a battlefield that had two hills facing one another on the eastern end, relatively flat terrain through the middle, and a hill opposing a marsh on the western end.  Center-right on our side was a ditch Paul ruled we could use to conceal troops- but they could only exit into the center of the map, northward.

General Neve listened to her advisors, and decided to conceal our horse archers in the arroyo, our medium horse behind the hill, and our archers just beneath the summit so they could deploy to the northern face of the hill and take advantage of the range bonus they would get from elevation.  Once we deployed (or didn't, as none of our troops were visible) the European team deployed.  The odd thing is, we were able to deploy hidden units, yet we were somehow the attacker...  Anyway...

The Europeans send their medium horse off to their right flank, but brought the bulk of their force face-to-face with our army holding the hill.  Their infantry charged, and we cut them to pieces with concentrated arrow fire.  That was the best result we got for the entire engagement, for it was at this juncture our opponents realized their crossbowmen outranged our archers by several inches.  They moved up and starting showering us with arrows.

At this point, we revealed our horse units, and charged with our infantry.  The idea was that the crossbowmen would have to split fire or choose one or the other threat to deal with.  They countercharged with their heavy horse, and our medium horse met them after some archery shenanigans.  Our infantry was reduced to two figures, who then refused to fail a morale check and fought to the death.  Our horse archers did respectable damage with their bows, but got in too close and were engaged in  melee by the European medium horse.  The force mismatch in both cavalry battles meant our cav didn't last too long.  Victory: Europeans.  But General Neve's forces did quite a bit of damage before accepting defeat.

So, now that I've played Chainmail, how do I feel about it?

This game is definitely an artifact of it's time.  There are many charts and tables, and different mechanics for different troop types and engagements.  This makes it difficult to get a hang of the game for a first-timer.  I imagine if I played it more often, I'd get the hang of it.  Sometimes the results were static, and sometimes random.  That was interesting, and made me want to look closer at the troop versus troop tables to see if there were combinations that offered a guaranteed disadvantage.  Medium Horse versus Heavy was brutal, as was Light Horse versus Medium.  Archery was suitably brutal, and the crossbows trading the ability to fire twice in a turn (once as a reaction and once on their fire phase) for range was certainly a compelling choice.

I found the amount of movement cavalry had to sacrifice to change direction extremely restrictive.  1/4 move for up to 45 degrees, 1/2 move for 46 to 90, and all movement for 180 degrees.  This seemed overly restrictive given the ranges of our cavalry on both sides, and had a major effect on the employment of the cavalry by the combatants.

So... would I play it again?  Sure.  Especially if I was playing with others who are exploring it for the historical context.  If I am going to play a miniatures game for its own sake, this would probably not be my first choice of rules set.  But it was enjoyable, and informed my feel for what people were playing as our hobby dawned.

Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes...

 Nothing remains quite the same.

  As I write this entry, I'm sitting in my game room.  Or, what was once my game room.  Over the last year this space has transformed into a home office, schoolhouse, and dumping ground for everything else in the house on its way to or from storage, or Home Depot or Ikea.  The Pandemic has done a number on this room, and I feel like my soul resembles this room quite a bit.  In the same way that Strahd von Zarovich is the land, I feel the state of the One-Eyed Ogre, as we call the game room, mirrors my mental and spiritual health.

  I, too, am cluttered.  I, too, and pulled in so many directions.  I'm serving as an educational paraprofessional to both kids- one of which is ADHD, the other in the throes of puberty and pre-teen angst, and both dyslexic.  I'm trying to keep my actual job duties rolling, which requires doing my work on evenings and weekends most weeks since my days are filled with keeping the kids awake (Zane) and on task (both, but especially Kaylee.)  We're doing some necessary remodeling after our 40-year-old guest shower tub cracked right through the bottom, and that project has experienced some mission creep.  We're just fortunate we have a friend who is a Master Plumber and he knew a great tile person.  On top of that, we're trying to refi the house to take advantage of the ridiculously low interest rates, and pull out some equity to refit the rest of the house, since moving in the Austin housing market is priced for people who make a lot more money than I do, or people willing to live a lot farther out than I am.  Add to that the insane amount of social and political turmoil that has wormed its way into the tabletop community just as it has every other facet of American life... 

So what does this have to do with gaming?  Quite a bit, on a personal level.  I find that I lack the capacity for the way I gamed before all of this set in.  And by all of it, I don't just mean the pandemic, I mean all the politics, all the associated stresses, me sitting here instead of my office on campus, all of it.

Before all of this, I'd run any game for any group.  As a founding member of the Royal Dragoon Guards, way back when we were the Caladan Highland Dragoons, I have run big games for big groups for 25 years now.  As the main GM all that time, it has been my duty to entertain the masses, and for the most part I loved it.  I still look back at those unwieldy games where we had 15, 20 players or more in massive MechWarrior RPG campaigns that had Battletech battles that took up an entire activity center floor at our apartment complex.  Our campaigns felt like the early novels, and we were like the Kell Hounds or the Gray Death Legion.  It was glorious.  Many Arby's 5-for-5s and Taco Bell 59/79/99 menu items died to bring us those days.

As we got older, our games got less ambitious, with the first RDG campaign under that name having only 17 players.  Then we broke into smaller groups, and branched out into games aside from MechWarrior.  This drew in more players, and somewhere along the line I ended up being the backstop GM.  Other GMs had a solid stable of players for their games, and I ran the games for whoever was left.  Which was more often than non a revolving door of casual players, who may or may not consistently attend.  This also meant it was very difficult to do things that weren't one-shots or at most West Marches-style games.  It started to erode my morale a bit, but I have always been a "The Show Must Go On" kind of GM, so we kept it going.

Everything shutting down had some unexpected effects.  With our technology, we should have been able to just transition to Zoom or Discord and keep rolling, and we tried that.  But the lack of in-person contact made meetings feel off somehow.  Individual groups kept gaming, but as a whole our group fractured a bit.  Pandemic fatigue set in, and it was hard to get enthusiasm for anything.  We offered several online options, and very few of them were put to use with any enthusiasm.  When we got to election time in January, the group decided to call 2020 a do-over and just let the 2020-2021 staff roll into 2021-22.

I tried running a 5e campaign.  It died.  I tried running a couple of other games, they never took off.  I got a Star Trek Adventures game going recently, and that's showing some promise as the pandemic thaws.  But for months, I was without a regular game, and in some cases even one-shots or anything, and I started to think about my role as the Game Master by default over the last 25 years.

I realized I'm tired.  I'm frustrated.  And the kind of gaming I was doing right before the pandemic happened wasn't really satisfying me then.  What I need is to get back to what drew me into gaming in the first place.  I need to get back to playing for the love of the game, with good friends, and an ongoing story.  Crafting a tale together that we will recount over drinks for years to come.

And it doesn't have to be anything fancy.  A scrappy group of mercenary MechWarriors, a bog-standard BX Dungeons & Dragons campaign.  Maybe a Traveller game with elements of Firefly and Cowboy Bebop.

Or maybe fancy would be cool.  Run Dragonlance, the original campaign.  Or Beyond The Mountains of Madness for Call of Cthulhu.  

Dig up old favorites, like Marvel Superheroes, Gangbusters, Star Frontiers.

New hotness like Against the Darkmaster, Dune, or Astonishing Swordsmen and Sorcerers of Hyperborea.

There's always Dungeon Crawl Classics and Mutant Crawl Classics.

But the bottom line is, no matter what I run, or play, I want to make sure of a few things.  The players have to be onboard with the genre and tone of the campaign.  I am so sick of dealing with players that create characters completely unsuitable for the game being pitched.  If a game isn't your cup of tea, play in or run a different game.  If the GM and five out of six players want to do The Hunt for Red October, don't do Down Persicope.  Run your own Down Periscope game, and make it the funniest, most irreverent game ever.

Gaming is a group activity, and it's time I ran games I want to run again, rather than selecting my game and players based on entertaining the maximum number of people with the lowest common denominator game.  That's part of the job as president of a big gaming club.  I know that, and I've done it for many years.  But for me, myself, I've got to get back to what I love about games and gaming.  I've got to pitch games I want to run, and run them for the players who are interested in that game, genre, and tone.  And if one or two individuals aren't interested, that's fine.  There will be other games, other GMs, and other players.  I have been of the mindset that I need to cater to the masses in the name of keeping the club as entertained as possible.  And I think that is still a worthy goal- but it should be a goal that is shared with other Game Masters and not on the shoulders of any one person.

And at this point, coming out the far side of a year-plus without sitting at a table and rolling dice?  It almost feels like rebuilding from scratch anyway.  So, maybe the silver lining of this dark cloud is that we rethink the way we do our games as an organization, and do them more like regular campaigns. 

Back to Basics - Old School Essentials

 

As my chronicle of experience with roleplaying records, I began gaming with the 1983 D&D Basic and Expert sets in 1986.  It was only later I got a copy of the 1981 versions of those sets, and for, oh, decades, when I played "Basic" D&D I was playing a version of BECMI (Basic, Expert, Companion, Master, Immortals) D&D.  The original boxed sets, the Rules Cyclopedia, or the Black Boxed Set from 1991.  It wasn't until I started to really look into the history of the game for its own sake that I began to look closely at the 1981 Tom Moldvay Basic and the 1977 Holmes Basic books as more than curiosities, as they'd predated my involvement with the hobby.

As a younger gamer, I enjoyed ever more complicated games.  Basic D&D took me to Advanced D&D, Palladium Fantasy, Rolemaster, and GURPS.  Palladium had a different fighting style for each fighting class (this was before the RIFTS-ification of their 2nd edition), Rolemaster had those amazing critical tables, and GURPS combat rounds were second by second, with an allegedly "realistic" approach.  I ate it up.  Loved every minute of it.  On the not-fantasy side, I loved crunch in other games.  I built many ships for Star Trek and Traveller, designed BattleMechs and Car Wars cars, and even tinkered together my own set of rules for the old Wheeled Warriors toys to give stats to all the interchangeable gear included with the toys.

At the pinnacle of this love of crunch in my rules, I had a spreadsheet for tracking maintenance hours for a BattleMech company, down to assigning individual techs to individual 'Mechs and prioritizing certain repairs.  I had a set of parts compatibility rules for BattleMech parts - need a knee for your Wasp?  Well, that Stinger knee is nearly identical, but the Locust knee will need a lot of modification.  I had a spreadsheet to calculate the prices of parts and ammo depending on location within the Inner Sphere - it took the table from MW 1e and expanded the variables to include Traveller-type planet classifications.  I even used The Robotech Reference Guide to engineer GURPS stats for Robotech weapons by mathing out explosive yield to mega-joules of energy and cross referencing that with GURPS existing stats for sci-fi weapons, and their rules for damage based on TNT.

I look back now, and I'm proud of about half of it, and horrified that I wasted time on the other half.  This brings me to where I am now in my head.

There is still a big part of me that wants to know if the players are carrying enough rations, water, arrows, etc. for their journey.  I played enough Oregon Trail as a kid and did enough backpacking in Scouts to feel like being prepared is an integral part of any adventure.  I like the need to plan an expedition, to give the situation some thought.  At the same time, though, my gaming time is extremely limited in comparison to my younger years.  Gotta get the bang for the buck, time-to-fun-ratio wise.

Enter my growing love affair with BX and derivatives thereof.  The Basic/Expert rules set is cleaner (arguably) than Holmes, is the bones upon which the BECMI edition was based, but only goes to Level 14 for humans, rather than the 36 of BECMI.  This has many effects, not the least of which is a less punishing (but still frustrating) Thief skill progression, less disparity between the Demihuman class level limits vs. humans, and less of a massive gulf between starting characters and max-levels.  Remember, Level 3 is more or less a fully trained professional if you take the level titles into account, like Priest, and level 4 is Hero according to the Fighter progression.

The more I read the editions before mine, the more I grew to respect their place in the D&D lineage, and understand more about the hobby as it was, and as it is now.  Now that I've played the original 1974 rules with Chainmail, and Holmes, and Moldvay, I find that there are things I enjoy quite a bit about all of them, but especially Moldvay's BX.  This has been cloned quite a bit - Labyrinth Lord, B/X RPG, and more.  But the version that has stolen my heart is Old School Essentials.

Now, I won't turn my nose up at the D&D Rules Cyclopedia as my "Desert Island" all-in-one-volume book.  But I find that I rarely use levels above 9 or 10, if that high, and that while I love The War Machine rules for mass battles, I don't use the weapons expertise rules as written in BECMI as they are sometimes quite overpowering to the campaign, especially at high levels.  This is where the current single-volume version of Old School Essentials comes in.  OSE takes the form of a smaller-than-standard book, A5 or Digest size, clocking in at 296 pages.  It's got some color plates, and sewn-in cloth bookmarks.  Swanky.

Why choose OSE over other implementations of BX, or BX itself?  Well, it's a one-volume hardcover that takes those rules and restates them with 100% fidelity where possible, and when there were contradictions between the Basic and Expert rulebooks, or between two entries in the same rulebook, a decision or correction was made.  The end result is an eminently easier volume in which to find things, with a full index and straightforward organization.  There is also a player's version of the rules, with the DM-specific information excluded.

This book gives me a solid foundation for a simple D&D game that lacks the arcane complexity other versions of D&D, even other vintage versions, include.  AD&D is something I also love, and OSE scratches that itch as well with their Advanced Fantasy books.  These take the BX core and add concepts from AD&D to it.  So, this isn't OSRIC, it's not a rules-faithful AD&D clone, it's a rules-faithful BX clone with AD&D concepts.  And that's... pretty cool, actually.  Like, if you want full-on AD&D, you can go with AD&D or OSRIC.  But if you want something where you can remember all the Ability Score modifiers in your head, go OSE with the Advanced Fantasy books.

There is a big part of me that wants to go back to the simplicity of a straightforward fantasy campaign like the ones we played in the 80s.  Like the pure joy we see in the Stranger Things crew or Michael's friends in E.T. gathered around a table and rolling dice.  I am those kids - I remember many carefree evenings and afternoons with close friends, tossing dice and slaying foul creatures.  Before I had to worry about bills, or pandemics, or diabetes.  Hell, all we worried about back then was nuclear annihilation.  No big.

I'd love to sit down with a band of chosen family, roll up characters, and save the world Old School.  I think the BX iteration of D&D strikes a pretty clean balance between enough rules to do stuff, and not so many rules as to get in the way.  I still love my BECMI, but 36 levels is just excessive in practice.  I say that, and still want to run a game where the players ascend to immortality.  Maybe I can make that happen at BX levels...  Hmmm...

Anyway, Old School Essentials hits a sweet spot with me.  A nice, well-organized hardcover that can supplement my Lulu one-volume prints of Moldvay Basic and Cook/Marsh Expert.  Thumbs up from me.

D&D And Me Volume 4: The 2nd Edition Stretch

 2nd Edition was around from 1989-2000, when 3.0 dropped.  An eleven year stretch, currently second only to 1e, 1977-89.  As I mentioned before, 2e was my jam in High School, seeing as it came out the year I started my Freshman year.  Fittingly, for my personality, I was the final class to be able to say they started High School in the 80s.  This was a very formative time for me as a gamer and as a person, my high school and first round of college years.  I got married during 2e's tenure, so one could say I literally grew up with 2nd Edition, and all these years later I still love it.  I have grown to appreciate other versions of D&D on their own merits, of course, but 2e is tied with Basic (BX or BECMI) as my favorite D&D.

  Now, 2nd Edition had a lot going for it.  Personally, I loved the original presentation of the Monstrous Compendium, in a big three-ringed binder full of monsters each of which had a full-page or more entry.  In practice, one needed a lot of those little hole reinforcement stickers to keep pages from coming out, but in theory one could add pages to their binder, like the Forgotten Realms and Kara-Tur packs I purchased.  Along with 2e came the brown leatherette splatbooks.  The Complete Fighter's Handbook, The Complete Wizard's Handbook, etc.  Books for Demi-Humans, books for setting-specific classes like Ninja and Shi'ar, books from the green historical line, like Rome, and Charlemagne's Paladins.

  THIS was 2e.  It went everywhere and did everything.  The Realms, Dragonlance, Al-Qadim, Maztica, Spelljammer, Planescape, even my favorite setting of all time, Mystara, got some 2e support.  And yeah, Ravenloft.  My other favorite setting.  It's no wonder we had such a blast with 2e, as there was so much of everything to inspire and inform our games.  Too much, from TSR's financial standpoint.  But that's not really what I wanted to talk about.

  To me, 2e was everything I had wanted in a Dungeons & Dragons game at the time.  The rules we often see as clunky in hindsight were fine for those of us who grew up with 1e and Basic.  In fact, they were a genuine improvement in many cases.  All the support materials were just icing on the cake- and a crap ton of icing it was.  But then something happened that really upset me, and to this day I'm only partially sure why.  2e got a facelift, and I hated it.

  The core books were reformatted and given a new trade dress in 1995.  Gone was the natural progression of cover design from the 1e redux to 2e, these new "black border" covers just felt... off.  And the interiors?  Ugh.  Gone was the iconic artwork of the original run of 2nd Edition, and the new layout went from the friendly blue and black to a more aggressive red and black.  The font styles changed to a less readable style, and on the whole made the entire corebook line look closer to what the later Ravenloft-themed stuff looked like.  It just felt... wrong.  Now, the art isn't bad, at all.  Both covers were done by the legendary Jeff Easley.  But the tone of the art was... different.

Now, I'll admit if someone jumped into AD&D at this point, they wouldn't have been so used to the previous presentation.  So this just might be my age and my prior D&D experiences predisposing me to dislike, nay, loathe the black-border redux.  But this wasn't all- the reprints of the splatbooks changed to a cheaper cover, no longer the faux leather of the original issues, the reprints felt less awesome and in hindsight, maybe a harbinger of TSR's financial woes.  To this day the only reason I own any of the black-border "2.5" books is because they have been given to me.  I have never bought one of my own accord, and at the time of this writing I feel I never will.

Why do these updates offend my sensibilities so?  You got me.  I mean, I have something I like in each and every edition of D&D.  Of this one I can say, well, it's 2e, and it includes any errata that had been compiled at that point.  But above and beyond that, I just really feel repelled by this incarnation of the game, and was doubly sad when the commemorative hardcovers were released using these versions of the book interiors.  Second Edition is blue and black, dammit, and if there's not the Elmore painting of the proud dragonslayers just inside the PHB, it's wrong.  Now that I'm looking at the covers and the interiors side-by-side for this article, I do see something I can put my finger on.  The first version looks bright, optimisitc, action-oriented.  The second looks dark, desperate, and gritty.  To be fair, Dungeons & Dragons can be both, sometimes in the same campaign, or the same adventure.  But flip to the interiors, and that theme persists.  The art and interior design of 2.5 is more subdued, and made harsher by the red chapter and section titles and borders.

So, even as 2nd Edition waned, and Wizards of the Coast purchased TSR, and I finished my AA and ended up unable to pursue my Army career due to Obstructive Sleep Apnea, I still clung to my high school version of AD&D 2e in what might have been my first expression of unreasonably hostile grognard-ism.  I can say that at age 45 I realize I am being unreasonably judgey about what is essentially a cleanup and re-release of one of my favorite versions of D&D.  There's nothing rules-wise wrong with it.  But the look?  The feel?  All kinds of wrong.  At least to me.

2nd Edition's tenure brought me so many things I love about D&D, though.  I read the 2e splatbooks for fun, they had so many great ideas that were executed with more or less effectiveness.  The Priest book even had some kits that were explicitly less powerful than the average Cleric, which I found neat.  I mean, not everyone is a hammer-wielding, heal-casting badass.  Kits allowed some great fluff and options to keep the base classes from feeling samey.  And the settings - holy crap the settings.  SO MANY SETTINGS.  My favorites to read were Ravenloft, Maztica, and Al-Qadim.  Sad thing is, I've only ever met one other hardcore Al-Qadim fan, and none who liked Maztica.  So Ravenloft is all I've ever gotten to really run.

Here's a problem with my burning out on 2e due to my prejudice against the 2.5-themed products.  I missed out on some truly cool stuff.  Decades later, in 2019, I discovered Jakandor.  This mini-setting flew under my radar as I was abstaining from buying stuff with that 2.5 look.  It was an attempt to turn some AD&D tropes on their head, and it succeeded.  I devoured it as part of a web project I was involved in (that crashed and burned) and discovered that I had really missed out on a cool bit of D&D history.  I've looked back to see if I missed anything else cool.

When I met my wife in 1997, we weren't playing AD&D, we introduced her to tabletop roleplaying with West End's Star Wars.  She wouldn't make a D&D character until 3.0 was a brand new thing in 2000.  So that sort of sums up the end of my 2nd Edition Stretch.  It was, and remains, a favorite of mine, though I am struggling with my blind spot for its closing years.

31 Character Challenge Part 31: Gangbusters B/X

Prohibition. It's one of my favorite periods of American history to study.  When we lost our collective minds and instituted a massive attempt to legislate morality and created of our law-abiding citizens a nation of scofflaws.  Flappers, G-men, bootleggers, bathtub gin and speakeasies.  Chicago typewriters, hits, smuggler's row, "I would advise yas ta keep dialin', Oxmyx."

I first played TSR's Gangbusters in High School.  I loved so much about the game.  First of all, it allowed players to be on the other side of the law.  Sure, you could play cops and G-Men, both of which were a lot of fun.  And you could play private dicks and reporters, both also with tons of potential for adventure.  But holy crap you could play the gangsters.  You could manufacture, transport, and sell illegal hooch.  Run a speakeasy. Set up a numbers game.  Build a criminal empire.  And I loved every minute of it.

Recently, my friend Glen "Ol' Man Grognard" Hallstrom told me there was an OSR version of Gangbusters in the works.  I love games built on the OSR engine, so I was intrigued.  This led me to Mark Hunt's Gangbusters B/X.  This is a rework of the original Gangbusters RPG based around the 1981 Moldvay version of the D&D engine.  You know, the one we all played back in The Day.

So, let's throw on a fedora and grab a tommy gun, and make a character for this new old game.

Character Creation

Like many games based on the Old School Renaissance, we start by rolling 3d6 in order for Strength, Intelligence, Wisdom, Dexterity, Constitution, and Charisma.

• Strength: 11
• Intelligence: 9
• Wisdom: 11
• Dexterity: 11
• Constitution: 8
• Charisma: 9

 Pretty average.  The option exists to swap two points of Strength, Wisdom, or Intelligence for 1 point elsewhere, but our stats are so low already...  Let's move on.

Our class is going to be Street Smart.  As a Street Smart character, this PC will have a bonus to striking from behind, and the Nimble Fingers, Move Silently, Hide, and Word on The Street skills. A d4 for Hit Dice, I roll a 1, and modify it by the -1 for low Constitution.  So... 1 measly Hit Point.  Now I'm thinking of a dozen Basic D&D characters I've played.  Gotta play it smart to stay alive.

We choose an alignment, the choices are Law Abiding, Neutrality, and Dishonest.  Since we're going to probably work as a gangster, we'll go with Dishonest.  We roll 3d6x10 for starting money, and end up with $130.  Random rolls say we speak French in addition to English, and our nickname is "Lucky."

For equipment, we'll buy some typical clothes (AC5), a hip flask, a revolver, a blackjack, and we'll keep the rest of the money ($65.50) for future uses.

The Character

Frank Leroux never used his given name, Francois.  The Boys thought it was "too French."  The day that G-man's bullet was stopped by a half inch wide strip of metal in a car door was when they forgot all about "Francois" and started calling him "Lucky."

Lucky wasn't strong, like the boss' enforcers.  He wasn't as smart as the idea men and the accountants.  But what he was, was Lucky.  He was sneaky, he could find things out. He had informants that could get him the word on the street.  And when it came to taking people out- sometimes you didn't need to be tough.

Today, Lucky spends his days at the boss' most profitable speak.  He listens, he finds things out, and he helps the boss in ways the other folks can't.

My Thoughts

Gangbusters B/X has a couple of advantages over the original.  The OSR engine means the mechanics of the game are automatically intuitive to many players.  It also means tons of material for other games using the engine can be borrowed and plugged straight in.  Want to do supernatural roaring 20s?  Borrow spells, undead, and ghosts from any number of products based on the early D&D engine.  I dig that quite a bit.  Want to do your own version of A Piece of The Action? Grab Starships & Spacemen 2nd Edition to roll up Koik and Spocko and Gangbusters for Oxmyx and Krako.

The only thing missing from Gangbusters B/X are the many subsystems in the original Gangbusters that I love so much.  So I asked the author about that- and it's coming in the Expert set, due out soon.  So Gangbusters B/X will mimic the original Basic and Expert Dungeons & Dragons by having two rulebooks, one basic, and one with more advanced information and rules.  I'm looking quite forward to the release.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

31 Character Challenge Part 30: Behind Enemy Lines

 

World War II.  Possibly the most studied conflict in the history of mankind.  I remember when The History Channel was nothing but wall-to-wall WWII documentaries.  The Hitler Channel: All Hitler, All The Time.  So it's only natural that there are a few roleplaying games out there that cover good old WWII.  Many of them add non-historical elements, like Weird War II with Nazi "Wehrwolves" and Gear Krieg with dieselpunk mecha.  But FASA's Behind Enemy Lines is not one of those.  This game intends to be a "straight" WWII roleplaying game, by default from the point of view of an American US Army soldier.

The game has a sort of lifepath character generation, and with its 2D6 task resolution it's hard not to see a bit of Traveller influence in the game.  It has some very wargame-y elements, but that's to be expected of a game where the main setting is the conflict in Europe.

I have to admit that I have rolled up characters for this game many times, but I have yet to actually run it.  I've owned it for decades, but never found a group that was interested in playing WWII "straight."  No supernatural elements, no mecha, no nothing.  Most players I've talked to felt it was far too grim, too easy for characters to catch a stray bullet and die horribly.

I think this game is in a genre where I'd stick to playing the dice as they fall, rather than my more modern mode of saving character deaths for dramatically appropriate moments.  No, in a WWII game the grim brutality my players have always feared is probably pretty appropriate.

Without further adieu, lets' see who got drafted.

Character Creation

 We begin by determining our physical characteristics.  They are Strength, Endurance, Weapons Handling, Agility, and Stamina.  All but Stamina are rolled on 1D6+4.  Stamina is then the average of Strength and Endurance.

• Strength: 10
• Endurance: 10
• Weapons Handling: 7
• Agility: 5
• Stamina: 10

Well, Agility crapped out, but the two sixes right off the bad help. Rolling on the 2D6 table tells us our character's weight is 170-180 pounds.

Now we roll for background skills, but we have to figure out if our character came from the city, or the country. 4, our character is rural.  So we'll roll to see if he (these characters are universally male) picked up useful skills before basic training.

We now have a level 1 Rifle skill, a level 3 Pistol skill, Drive at level 1, and a level 2 Swim skill.

Now, for basic training.  Our Rifle skill comes out to 4, First Aid at the maximum of 3, level 2 Hand-to-Hand skill, and level 1 skill in Bayonet, Rifle Grenade, BAR, Bazooka, .30 machine gun, 60mm mortar, and submachine gun.

Now we determine how experienced this character is.  We roll an 8 and are a Private First Class.  Our character has seen action only at Normandy. He has 1 Combat Experience point, and 5 acquired skill points.  We'll spend 3 on a level of Rifle, and 2 on another level of First Aid, qualifying our character to be a medic.

Jot down gear, and this character is ready to play.

The Character

Charlie Carlisle grew up in the small town of Taylor, Texas, son of a farmer and one of six children.  Charlie and each of his siblings worked hard helping keep the farm afloat, with Charlie being the only member of his family to have graduated High School, with Charlie spending late nights trying to help his younger siblings do the same, then waking at dawn to help his father with the chores.  That was the way things were until Sunday, December 7th, 1941.  News from outside Texas didn't travel terribly fast most days, but by Sunday night even the sleepy little farm town was abuzz with news of the Japanese attack.

Charlie had a talk with his father, a veteran of The Great War, and set off for Austin the next day, to enlist in the US Army.

Basic Training was educational, but not too tough for a boy whose body had been conditioned to hard work.  Like most boys in the country, he already knew his way around firearms, and knew how to drive the family's Ford pickup.  These skills came in handy, and he was made a PFC aboard the ship taking him across the Atlantic for the invasion of Europe.  Then the waiting started.  Training, training, training.  Practice and more practice.  Some units invaded Sicily, Italy. And still Charlie waited with his unit.  Drills, field problems, waiting.  Waiting.  Then one day, the paymasters paid the men in francs.

D-Day.  Charlie had never seen so much vomit, and hours later he had never seen so much blood.  The whole thing was a blur of sound and motion, blood and water, men and machines.  When the whole thing was finally over, God knows how long later, and he and his company caught their breath- there were just over half of them left.  Charlie's own squad had lost their squad leader and both BAR men.  He wondered why he'd ever wanted to hurry up and invade.  But here he was - in Europe.  He joined the Corporal who now led his squad in pissing on a burned out pillbox.  So much for Fortress Europa.

Now begins the long road to Berlin.

My Thoughts

I'm currently watching Band of Brothers with my son.  We've also watched Saving Private Ryan together.  I wonder if I could use Behind Enemy Lines as a teaching tool, to pick up some WWII history by walking students through some of the scenarios soldiers lived through.  I doubt I could do a better job than Spielberg or Hanks, but the idea that the students could choose their own paths and see the outcome might be worth looking into.  I'm reasonably familiar with both US and German squad-level tactics and unit compositions, and could bone up on specifics without much trouble.  I mean, I spent way too much on a graduate degree in military history, I might as well put some of it to use.

This could also be interesting to play D-Day in the same "character funnel" style as Dungeon Crawl Classics, rolling up, say, four characters per player and seeing who survives hitting the beach.  Rather than an irreverent kill-fest, the point would be to show the players just how horrifying the real thing was, again, make it an educational experience.  Role playing games have a potential to allow us to step into the shoes of people we are not, and in some small way place ourselves in situations we have never experienced.  Perhaps this would be a worthy goal at some point.

31 Character Challenge Part 29: Twilight: 2000

 

Ah, Twilight:2000.  See, kids, when I was your age, we were sure there would be another World War, and it would be with the Soviets.  So sure, in fact, that when we were doing our schedules for sophomore year I decided to sign up for our pilot program by which we would take Russian via satellite.  I thought it would be a useful skill in a military career.

I had read and owned some books for the first edition of Twilight:2000, but we played the 2nd Edition throughout High School.  The original 2e came out in 1990, which was my sophomore year coincidentally, but the original had been around since 1984.  The Steve Venters artwork for the vehicles in the first edition vehicle guides alone was worth the price of admission. I can skill see the Cadillac Gage Stingray tank with "Pink Cadillac" painted on the side.  Also, the M1A3 "Giraffe" style tank, and the LAV-75 that never was.

Being in Marine Corps JROTC at the time, myself and most of my game group were keenly interested in games with military themes.  Robotech was a favorite, Battletech of course, and even our Star Trek games had a distinctly Nicholas Meyer feel to them, more Navy than most Trek films or episodes.  Twilight: 2000 was a shoe-in when the revised edition arrived at King's Hobby Shop.  We were all in.  At this point in time, GDW was developing their own house system, which eventually appeared in Traveller: The New Era, Dark Conspiracy, Cadillacs And Dinosaurs, and of course, Twilight:2000.

It's kinda fun that in the Version 2.2 explanation sheet, GDW refers to the revamp of their house system as the D20-system.  GRIN.  But this version we played quite a bit of that summer, and into the mid-90s.  So this is the version for which I'll make a character.

A neat thing about T2K is it uses a very Traveller-esque system of lifepath in 4-year terms, and skills that are picked up along the way.  Go too old, and age starts to take its toll.  Unlike Traveller, you can't die before the game starts, but you can accrue radiation and combat experience.  If you choose to create a civilian character, every tour there is a die roll to see if war breaks out, and when it does, you're drafted.  This occurs so all the characters can be in Kalisz for the start of the campaign.  So that's what we're going to do.  I'm going to make the character I was when I joined the State Guard, an academic working in higher education and then the balloon goes up.  Let's see how that works out.

Character Creation

First, we choose a background and native language.  American, and English.  Rolling a d10 to see if I speak any other languages, I end up being fluent in only English.  Now we roll for attributes.  There is a point-allocation option, but you guys know the drill.  If it can be random in this series, it will be.  The attributes are Strength, Agility, Constitution, Intelligence, Education and Charisma- very Traveller-esque.  Rolling is 2D6-2 for each, re-rolling any snake-eyes results.

• Strength: 8
  
• Agility: 5
  
• Constitution: 1
  
• Intelligence: 10 (Wow.  I rolled a 3 and a 12 back-to-back)
  
• Education: 3
  
• Charisma: 4
  

 Now, we select four background skills.

• Spanish: 2
• Computer: 2
• Ground Vehicle (Wheeled): 2
• Unarmed Martial Arts: 2

Well.  We hit my first problem.  We can't go to undergrad college, because we rolled an Education of 3.  So... I guess we're enlisting.

In Basic we pick up the following skills:

• Armed Martial Arts: 0
• Autogun: 0
• Grenade Launcher: 0
• Ground Vehicle: Wheeled 1 (up to 3)
• Small Arms (Rifle): 2
• Swimming: 1
• Tac Missile: 0
• Thrown Weapon: 0
• Unarmed Martial Arts: 1 (up to 2)

We go to Armor AIT and pick up the following skills:

• Autogun: 1
• Ground Vehicle (Tracked): 2
• Heavy Gun: 2

Promotion: Yes!  With the INT bonus and 10 on the die,  we move up to Specialist-4.  Yeah, when this was written, it was still SP4 rather than SPC.  I used to get shit when I'd write my own rank as SP4 decades after it was changed.  Anyway, we get one contact, and I rolled to see if it was foreign, and it was not.  For secondary activity, we take CON+1.  The war does not break out this term.

Term 2: Sticking with the Army, and taking night classes. Term 2 gets 5 skills.

• Heavy Gun: +1=3
  
• Autogun: +1=2
  
• Ground Vehicle (Tracked): +1=3
  
• Mechanic: 1
  
• Observation: 1
  

Promoted to Sergeant!  Huzzah.  That means we pick up a level of Leadership, Instruction, and Persuasion from NCO school. Another military contact.  +1 EDU as Secondary Activity. War does not break out.

Term 3: One more Army term and we can go to college! 4 skills for Term 3.

• Autogun: +1=3
  
• Mechanic: +1=2
• Observation: +1=2
• Small Arms (Rifle): +1=3
  

Promoted to Staff Sergeant.  One more military contact.  +1 EDU as Secondary Activity.  Our soldier is now 29 years old, and wants to get out to go back to college- but a die roll of 2 means war breaks out.  So much for that.

Term 4: War breaks out.  Automatic promotion to Sergeant First Class (the book calls it Platoon Sergeant, but it hasn't been called that since the 50s.  Platoon sergeant is a billet now, rather than a rank and a billet.) 3 Skills.

• Observation: +1=3
  
• Navigation: 1
  
• Small Arms (Rifle): +1=4
  

 Roll for promotion: nope.  Contact: US military. Secondary Activity +1 CON.

Now we finish things up. 1D6 for Initiative yields a 5. 5D6 for Rads = 15.  The character is now 33 years old, so must roll to avoid losing a point of Agility.  Roll 1D10, if it's less than the current attribute, lose one point.  5 rolled, 5 Agility, it stays where it is.

We calculate the derived attributes, like throw range, load weight, personal weight, and how many hits we can take to the various parts of our body.  We get the US Military basic load- and would have a vehicle if we were making a group of characters.  But as a solo character, no vehicle for us.  So I guess we are a tanker without a tank.  We get $5,000 worth of scavenged equipment per term in the military, so that's $20,000 worth of stuff. It just so happens that the game values a HMMWV at $20,000 exactly, so we just stole one from somewhere.  Finding fuel?  That's a problem for the day after... erm... The Day After.

The Character

TC's Log.  Stardate- Today.

 

  This will be the final entry, since there's not a single chance we're getting the parts we need to get the turbine running again.  Not that there's fuel if we did.  We're taking everything we can salvage, and the engineers are going make sure the rest isn't useful to anybody.  The few tanks that are running will pick our track over for spares before that.  But it's a damn shame.

 

  I'm feeling all Charlton Heston when he saw the Statue of Liberty.  We saw some of the flashes, some of the mushroom clouds, way off in the distance.  Had our company been where they were supposed to be, we'd probably be glowing in the dark right now.  For one glorious moment, our lack of fuel worked in our favor.  The Green Weenie blew right by us this time like the Angel on Passover.  But yeah, they did it.  The sons of bitches pushed the button, and here we are.

 

  The front... is gone.  The Colonel has no idea what the hell we all do now.  He said he's not throwing good troops in after bad and rolling us into a radiation zone with no clear idea of the objective, now that the objective is a glassed-over crater you can use to make Hot Pockets. He's got less than half a battalion left, and of those we're mostly running on empty tanks.  In empty tanks.  With empty tanks.  It's that kinda situation.

 

  They're talking about taking those of us who are suddenly dismounted and folding us into the mech infantry, we've even been handed some scrounged rifles and carbines and one guy as a Kalashnikov he picked up somewhere along the way from an Ivan who won't be needing it anymore.  We've got food for about a week, two if we're careful.  Water's plentiful, but we gotta make sure it doesn't make the Geiger counter go clicketty clack.  We just need to-

 

  OK, just finished a quick and dirty talk with Top.  Our illustrious First Shirt wants me to take a Humvee and see if I can link up with 2nd Battalion, who were behind is about 20 miles last we checked.  So I guess it's me, my crew, and a Humvee.  Fuck it, we're totally snagging our Ma Deuce before someone else does and bolting it to this Humvee somehow.  Division said we're on our own.  So here we go.