Classic Traveller: Azhanti High Lightning's Combat System

Background:

I've taken an interest recently in the "boxed set" Classic Traveller games from the late 70s and early 80s.  Previously, I looked into Snapshot, a board game about starship boarding actions using a fine-grained action-point economy.  A comment on boardgamegeek suggested that Azhanti High Lightning had a more refined boarding combat game along similar lines, so this week I sat down and read the rules.

Summary of findings:

This seems like a much more reasonable system than Snapshot.  I like that you never need to handle more than six action points at a time.  There are some rules here that are novel and weird (like having to commit your characters to courses of action for the turn and then sticking to those courses through five 6-AP "phases") but mostly I like they direction they're going here.  Compared to Snapshot, a morale system has been added, damage to structures has been clarified, ammunition tracking has been made optional, some of the extraneous counters like target markers and explosion markers are gone, and overall things do seem improved.

There are still a couple of rules I would change.  Stacking up four combatants in a 1.5m square seems at the very least clunky from a book-keeping perspective, and the explosion damage rules and scatter probabilities are a bit wonky.  In terms of play aids, the weapons table is terribly opaque and requires reference to a couple different places in the rules text to make sense of; I'd definitely be penciling in some notes on which columns mean what there.

I think this exists in a bit of a weird place as a boxed-set game.  On the one hand, it is mechanically less integrated with Traveller than Snapshot was, because the stats on the chits are derived from Traveller stats rather than being literal Traveller stats.  The damage model has also diverged from attribute damage to accumulating "wounds", and the action points don't depend on your Dex and End.  So this might make it a bit uncomfortable to use as an alternate combat system for Traveller.  But it also has some features that might make it uncomfortable as a stand-alone boardgame; the biggest thing that springs to my mind are some ambiguous rules like morale checks for taking "unexpected" fire, which seems like the sort of thing you might want a referee for.

There's a note about integrating with Book 4: Mercenary, and I think this game makes a lot of sense in that light.  This is a slightly higher-abstraction game than Snapshot (or Traveller's default combat system, outside of grids-vs-range-bands) with a lot of support for heavy weapons (like automatic grenade launchers) and heavy armor (three armor types: cloth, combat, and battle dress.  No fine distinctions between cloth, jack, and reflec here...).  This seems like a really good fit for supporting Mercenary play, where you have a slightly higher number of combatants than a party of four PCs and a similarly-sized opposition force (hence wanting less detail per combatant in their stats and ammunition counting and such) and they're armed with military-grade hardware.  I also like that this personal combat fire sequence is nearly-identical to Striker's (released one year later), so there's some consistency and carry-over; if you have spent the time learning AHL's fire sequence for your small-unit mercenary actions, and then you accumulate more troops and more hardware through your successes, it slightly lightens the lift to migrate up to Striker.

Maybe the most unfortunate thing about this is the name - "Azhanti High Lightning" sounds like the name of an adventure, or a book detailing a class of ship (which, to be fair, half of this book is), or maybe a ship combat system for High Guard.  Infantry combat system would have been far from my first guess.

Raw notes:

Published 1980, so just one year after Snapshot.

Only one set of playtesters credited.  Uh oh.

Same 15-second rounds as Snapshot

1.5 meter squares.  Weren't Snapshot's 1-meter?

As with Snapshot, only about 25 pages of rules, then some scenarios.  The second part of this book, originally published as Supplement 5, deals with the eponymous ship class in great detail (the name and date laid down of every ship of the class build in the Third Imperium, for example).  Also, of course, deckplans.  Lots of deckplans.  I'm going to focus on the system rules here and maybe examine the deckplans and other supporting material some other time.

"No square may contain more than four active characters at a time".  Good lord that sounds tough to keep track of.  And on tiny 1/2 inch squares!  With facing!

Turns are cut up into five action phases.  Each phase, each character gets 6AP.  So this still provides a large number of AP per unit of in-game time (30 AP per 15 seconds - double that of Snapshot) but cut up into single-digit installments so you aren't doing double-digit arithmetic constantly.

They've abandoned the inverted high-optionality initiative system for simultaneous action within a series of steps within each phase within each round.

In general I love systems where you write down orders secretly before all players reveal them simultaneously (including spellcasting commitments in TSR D&D), and this sort of has one of those.  This is an odd one though, because the commitments you make are 1) quite vague, just one of three general courses of action (move, covering fire, aimed fire), and 2) binding across all five phases of a turn.  My first inclination is to think that that sounds like a long time to be stuck with one plan, but maybe the plans are loose enough that it's OK?  I really don't know if 15 seconds an unreasonably long time to re-evaluate your plan of actions - how long is an OODA loop cycle in actual combat?  And the good news is that if you pick move, you can still take snap-shots - but you'll shoot last.  Maybe being stuck in aim/covering fire mode is the worse end of the deal, since then you can't move (I think?  There is some ambiguity here around what exactly each course of action prohibits you from doing).

Climbing ladders is really slow.

Elevators have RNG for how long they take to arrive.  Love it.

I'm confused about this note about covering fire on exposed characters on page 9.

This is possibly the simplest set of range band DMs I have ever seen in Traveller (8+ to hit at effective range, 10+ at long range 12+ at extreme range).  I like this.

Reloading is gone but you have to commit to ammunition types at the beginning of the game.

Cover gives a penalty to hit but a bonus to damage as "only the vital areas of the target...  are exposed."  Battletech "You were behind a hill so the odds of a headshot went from 1 in 36 to 1 in 6" vibes.

Three levels of wound - light, serious, and instant death.  Light wounds do give penalties to actions, while serious wounds put you out of action.

This wounding system reminded me of Striker so I dug up Striker and had a look:

Looking at Striker's fire combat procedure, this is very similar, with slightly different DMs for eg cover and concealment, but also significant use of some shared terminology like Danger Space.  Same range bands and DMs, and the example of the RAM grenade launcher with flechette rounds is even the same.

And Striker's personnel injury rules are also very similar (including an identical example), though the bits about exposed vs in cover are organized a bit differently.

What year was Striker?  1981.  OK, that tracks.  So they borrowed some of the infantry fire procedure from Azhanti High Lightning for it.

End Striker digression.

Returning to Azhanti High Lightning, they do clarify this idea of being in cover but exposed; the difference between crouching behind something, unable to fire or be fired upon, and putting your arms and head up over it to fire but also be fired upon at a penalty to hit (but a damage bonus if hit).

Stray shots against certain backstop objects can cause them to explode.  Love it.  "The explosion of red-coded equipment is equivalent to the strike of a fusion gun".  Oh boy!

Grenades with a 3.75m radius seem...  a little on the low side?  And even if you're in a 1.5m square adjacent to an exploding grenade, you still only get hurt on 10+, so your odds if you aren't in the same square as the grenade are pretty good.

These grenade scatter diagrams are a bit wonky.  They definitely thought about the probability distribution on different directions, but I'm surprised they weighted it in favor of overshooting rather than undershooting.  Grenades also scatter 2d6 1.5m squares, which is...  a long way, and a weird distribution of distances.

Melee seems pretty straightforward and a little higher-abstraction; no parrying, your melee rating is just subtracted from the other guy's attack on you.

This morale system is...  interesting.  Needing to make a morale roll to stick your head up into covering fire makes a lot of sense.  Needing to make a morale roll to move into melee is not unreasonable.  Needing to make a morale check for taking "unexpected" fire seems like it might be contentious to adjudicate in a board game, rather than in an RPG with a referee.  Having all of your dudes have to make morale checks before any of them move is interesting but seems like it kinda doesn't capture the collective nature of morale as a phenomenon.  Having morale check results interact with the rank system, where your high-rank dudes have to roll first and then their results influence the results of the rolls of their subordinates, is probably a decent fit for military actions but tougher to fit to PC crews operating on informal lines.  But I guess I haven't gotten to the bit on integrating with Traveller campaigns, who knows what they'll say about the interaction between PCs and morale.

I suppose I should be happy to see a morale system included at all after Snapshot, really.  Progress!

That brings us to the end of the core rules of the game on page 17, and to the beginning of special rules for unusual situations, like energy weapons, fighting oozes and robots, vacc suits and explosive decompression (incidentally, it's surprising to me that they say that the interiors of starships are usually pressurized - I thought there was a note in Classic Traveller's combat system about pre-emptive venting before combat to prevent fires?).  Rules for structural damage are much more developed than in Snapshot, though they have their quirks.  If you set the timer right on your satchel charge, you can guarantee that it can't be disarmed because there won't be enough time.  Grenades might be better at damaging hardware than at injuring combatants.  I went down a rabbit-hole trying to figure out grenades' penetration values and ended up discovering that the weapons table is quite inscrutable; documentation on what the columns mean is solely embedded in the text for the fire combat rules, nowhere near the table itself.

After "Special Rules", we get "Advanced Rules", which are actually just ammunition/reloading and zero-g combat.  So ammunition tracking is still here, it's just optional.  Zero-g combat looks broadly similar to Snapshot's.  I do like that you can injure yourself by running into things while moving in zero-g.  I find it a bit odd that you can't make melee attacks while using a hand-hold?  I feel like "hand-hold in one hand, cutlass in the other" isn't deeply unreasonable?

Finally, on page 23, "Integrating with Traveller", which has a couple of interesting bits in it.  There's a note about changing the ground scale to meters "if using this system for outdoor battles".  The "melee value" on the counters is derived from the Brawling skill and no mention of Blades is made.  There are some bits about higher-range and higher-rate-of-fire weapons like VRF gauss guns, which I don't remember being in CT Book 1.  And then finally at the end, "Morale and leadership bonuses...  are generated as specified in Traveller Book 4, Mercenary."  Which might also be where the gauss guns came in, and provides a good reason to want a combat system aimed primarily at handling high-powered weapons against combat armor and battle dress.