Classic Traveller: Striker

Rod Thompson suggested that I look into Striker for Classic Traveller's vehicular combat system.  I picked up the first edition and it turned out to be quite interesting!  My points for comparison are Stargrunt, Dirtside, Battletech, OGRE, and Epic.

If you want to do Hammer's Slammers with Classic Traveller, this is The Correct Thing.

This is the sort of system that I would have adored in high school and college.  Now...  maybe it would work better with a computer for a referee.  Looking at the structure of orders that you can give a normal-initiative unit, it looks a lot like writing a program.

The approach to dealing with orders and initiative is interesting and makes a lot of sense for a hybrid wargame-RPG.  I could definitely see it being frustrating and a fair bit of overhead if not automated, though.

I like that, compared to Stargrunt, infantry operates in stands.  I dislike that you still have to track the state of every infantryman.  The scale is generally more zoomed-out than Stargrunt but more zoomed-in than Dirtside, which I think is "about right".

Vehicle damage is more complicated than Dirtside and less complicated than Battletech.  I think Mongoose Traveller's vehicle damage system is a bit simpler.

The layout and organization do not lend themselves well to reading through and understanding the system.  All of the tables are at the very end, and the rules are depth-first rather than establishing general principles and then enumerating exceptions and special cases (so, for example, indirect fire missions come between infantry firing and resolution of damage).  A lot of things that I would ordinarily consider "rules" are sort of punted out into tables which are far from the relevant text.  I feel like after a cursory read I still didn't have a good idea of how firing on vehicles works.

I was ever so slightly disappointed that there was no fission powerplant option - it would've been funny to build a fission ramjet missile-drone where you don't even need a payload, just a powerplant that explodes on impact.  And support for AI, of course, is negligible (drones are remote-controlled).  Support for enormous OGRE-style tanks seems fine but they will need a lot of crew.  No mechs / walker suspension type but it wouldn't be too hard to add.  On the upside, I'm pretty sure you can build gatling mortars with nuclear shells.  Not that you should, but the point of design systems is designing ridiculous things (...  right?).

I'm...  not sure if there's a way to arm infantry with nuclear weapons.  I think it might be possible to put one in a man-portable missile, but there's the additional requirement for vehicle-carried nukes that they be shielded storage containers with a bunch of extra mass.  So it would be dodgy.

On the other hand, you could absolutely give an infantryman a 9kg 8.5cm mortar round and a detonator, and he could carry it around at full movement speed under the encumbrance rules.  I'm not clear on the morale implications of suicide units, but if you want to model ISIS, infested terrans, or banelings, it wouldn't be hard (though the bang on a single 8.5cm mortar round is not spectacular; at TL5 they're comparable to a TL11 rifle grenade, while at TL11 parity they have about double the blast area and slightly better armor penetration.  And that's before the errata that nerfed TL scaling on HE artillery like that).

No flamethrowers?  How am I to werf flammen and/or barbeque aliens?  Plasma guns with 250m effective range just aren't quite the same.

It would be funny to add a "biological metabolism" powerplant type to the design system for eg carnifexes and other vehicle-sized bugs, with range/endurance calculated based on carried fat stores (or...  alcohol bladders, since it's almost as energy-dense as fats, and alcohol-based metabolisms would be funny).  I guess it's also worth considering that if an animal can operate in vacuum, it must also be carrying its own oxidizers?  And in order to not overheat in the insulation of vacuum, maybe you pump your heat into your metabolism's exhaust gases, which you then vent?

I hadn't looked at the rules for combat on planets with odd characteristics until the oxygen question got me curious and Striker does indeed ban air-breathing engines in certain atmosphere types (and lasers are more effective in such atmospheres, for lack of scatter).  Also: rules for tiny worlds where the horizon might only be 2km away and there's very little gravity.

It tickles my fancy that on very small worlds, artillery pieces could attain muzzle velocities higher than escape velocity (eg, the Paris Gun had a muzzle velocity of almost 1700 m/s, while Pluto's escape velocity is only around 1200 m/s), and what goes up might not come back down if your smallest available unit of propellant is too big.  Not that Striker has rules for this, but it's the sort of thing the system gets you thinking about.

I like that you can equip a weapon with multiple types of fire control.  I suspect the intention here is to let you equip lasers with both direct fire and point defense fire control, but I like that it would let you do Starcraft-style siege tanks that can fire both as artillery and direct fire.

The whole initiative system might actually make adding eg AI and weird command structures like tyranids easy.  Your low-initiative AI troops need constant supervision and wedge (or revert to instinctive behavior) if not actively controlled.  Your normal-initiative AI troops, your armored vehicles with an expert system in them, need orders.  Maybe giving them orders takes double the normal time because you have to be very careful with your language, but they're immune to panic.  The existing Drone Vehicle rules actually work just fine for this sort of AI.  And then high-initiative AIs are just like high-initiative meatbrains, with full sentience and autonomy, but self-awareness comes at the cost of morale.

The inclusion of pikes and broadswords on the melee weapons table makes me want to abuse this system by running medieval combats with it.  We need shields, bows, and javelins too though.  Aaand maybe to change the ground-scale so that your stand of 4 guys with pikes isn't covering a linear area of 30m.

(Bonus: biological powerplant, legged suspension, megawatt plasma cannon "breath weapon" dragons.  Not that powering a megawatt with biological scaling laws is really workable, you'd need to mass a couple of hundred thousand metric tons to have that sort of output continuously, but it's fun to play with)

Come to think of it, since there are revolvers, early gatling guns, and rules for riding animals, Wild West combats might be viable too.  Tweak bolt-action rifles down to lever-action and add bows and you're good to go (pardner).

Zhodani teleport-commandos in battledress with plasma guns are a daunting prospect.

I think I mostly like the handling of infantry armor penetration here, where you roll 2d6, add the weapon's armor penetration score, subtract the target's armor score, and index into a table of hit severity.  You make tradeoffs in ammunition selection, since high-explosive ammunition does more severe hits but has lower penetration than sabot.  This is how they dodge the problem that Mongoose Traveller has with armor as DR, where anything that can hurt a guy in battle dress kills anyone else instantly - sabot ammunition does less damage to lightly-armored guys in Striker than HE ammunition, but has a better chance of hurting the guys in heavy armor.

I'm a little surprised that I'm not seeing any rules for readying actions, like Stargrunt's overwatch?  But I guess in a system that is all about orders, "go to that hill and fire on any enemies that come within xx range" is just a thing you can do without a special rule maybe?  Is that the intent of the segment of the fire phase where the other player's units fire, to do fire in reaction to your movement?  I wish the rules were clearer about this; the Indirect Fire section has a paragraph on "When Units Fire", but there isn't one like that for Direct Fire.  There are also basically no sidebar-style examples of how rules are supposed to work, and looking for after-action reports or youtube videos was, of course, fruitless.  I guess I the old Citizens of the Imperium forums are probably the right venue for this question?

I think the combat rules are rather heavy for use as a mass combat add-on to Traveller RPG play, and the command-and-control is a little heavy/annoying for use as a miniatures combat game.  But it's a thought-provoking set of rules and would probably be a fun toolkit to fiddle with.

Bonus: buried in the back of the Advanced Rules is a section on computing the planetary domestic product of different world types in Traveller, for the purpose of figuring their military spending, of course.  This would be a hilarious launching point for "domain" gameplay.

Morrowind, Starcraft, Drafts

Been a while.  Currently procrastinating on writing binary patching tools for a big hacking competition coming up.  Gaming-relevant things I've been up to in the last...  oh dear, quarter I guess:

• Replayed Morrowind using OpenMW and the GoG version of Morrowind's data files.  OpenMW is a straight upgrade on the original engine and worked beautifully.  Looking at it now, the game suffers some pacing issues and the wilderness gameplay is pretty boring (hey, like my campaigns!), but by and large I still think it compared favorably to Skyrim outside of polish / graphics.  The learning curve is steeper, but there's actually complexity there to master.  I had fun.
• I also discovered that Kill Six Billion Demons was heavily influenced by Morrowind's Thirty-Six Lessons of Vivec, so that was neat and is probably part of what I like about K6BD.
• Got Starcraft 2 working in Wine, played through most of Wings of Liberty and the whole of the Heart of the Swarm campaign.
• Wings of Liberty was OK.  There was sufficient freedom in choosing the order of missions that the plot (such as it was) got kinda incoherent in the middle of the campaign.  I'm a little sad their portrayal of the strategic part of guerrilla warfare / revolt wasn't better, but this is forgivable because ultimately the campaign layer is a wrapper around a series of games of the RTS mode.  In comparison to the SC1 campaigns, it felt like there was less use of heroic units, and less...  emotionally-impactful events (worlds falling and being destroyed, betrayals and deaths of notable NPCs, things like that).  Many of the missions felt pretty gamey / had silly gimmicks.
• Heart of the Swarm was disappointing.  I did like that they reduced the freedom of mission choice, which allowed sort of coherent subplots to be carried out in close proximity / sequence.  It was, however, shorter than WoL, some of the same gimmicks were repeated, Kerrigan was way over-powered, and at the end of the day it just didn't feel very...  zerg.  Also I dislike the supernatural direction of things, with this prophecy and resurrected xelnaga business - psionics is always annoying to me in science fiction, excusable in small doses, but this is just turning into fantasy.  I have no intention to play the Protoss campaign.
• Did get me thinking about zerg / tyranids / bugs for Dirtside, though - worms for deep-striking, winged locust infantry, burrowed hidden units in attack/defense scenarios, there're just a lot of interesting thing they could do that mix things up.  Then again, given how well my last conversion attempt of bugs to a Ground Zero game went...  meh.  On the upside, morale is much less important in Dirtside, so that might simplify things a little.
• Woke up absurdly well-rested this morning, "as if I'd stolen sleep from whatever supernatural entity is responsible for its allocation."  Which would be an amusing adventure idea; characters cursed with nightmares, lucid-dreaming funhouse dungeon to kill or steal something to break the curse, and if you die you wake up (exhausted) and can try again the next night.  Reminds me of the 3.0 Manual of the Planes' dream-planes.
• Apparently one of our summer interns plays 5e.
• Re-read Dune.  Meh.  For a book so thematically concerned with ecology, they sure do neglect to explain what the worms are eating to grow to 200 meters / how they sustain the sort of energy expenditures observed.  It's a cool visual, but ultimately sort of dumb - swimming through sand is a lot harder than swimming through water.  Did find it somewhat interesting that most chapters (at least early) were structured around a single conversation between two characters.  Also interesting as an index for how much stuff I've forgotten over the last ten years (measured answer: most of it).
• I suppose one interesting, gameable note from Dune was that both of the mentioned mentats (Piter and Thufir) were also their respective lord's master of assassins.  Interesting ties to Strategic Thief?
• Titles of draft posts from the last couple of months that I haven't actually finished or published:
• Hired Help in the Wilderness Game - reducing ACKS' logistics hassle by hiring NPCs to handle it for you
• Do You Really Need a Whole Class for That? - A call for simplicity against ACKS' emerging glut of classes
• Morrowind, 12 Years Later - more complete reflections on Morrowind
• Eight Cliches, Viking England Edition - Against the Wicked City had a post on combining multiple cliches into a single, higher-quality adventure, so I was gathering cliches for Arthurian / Viking-Age England

Dirtside

I've had the 2011 Summer of Starmada on my mind lately.  There were a couple of things that made Starmada successful, I think.  One was that it was simple enough to introduce new players without too much difficulty, with many options disabled-by-default.  This allowed us to achieve a critical mass of regular players and establish a metagame.  Finally, the availability of design rules led to strong participation in the game away from the table and allowed players to play fleets representing whatever science-fiction background they came from.  Unfortunately, it was that same design system that tore the metagame apart.

Dirtside 2 shares some, but not all, of these characteristics.  It does have a design system capable of modeling a wide variety of forces, and if the rulebook were better organized it would be easy to separate into a simple core and a number of optional components.  Compared to its brother Stargrunt, its morale system is simpler, it is larger scale, and it has a greater focus on combined arms. Unfortunately, as a ground-combat wargame, it depends heavily on terrain, and it uses a weird miniatures scale (6mm "microarmor").  Also, like Stargrunt, it does not handle alien psychology very well.  Finally, it uses a really weird damage resolution system involving drawing chits from a bowl; simple enough in practice, but an annoying number of moving parts.  If you lose a damage chit, your probability distribution is going to be skewed forever.

I've had my eye on Dirtside for a long time, but it just never seemed viable, due largely to hardware.  I looked at using roll20, but roll20's support for facing is very awkward, the asymmetric DM-player model isn't a great fit for wargames, and it sort of chugs on large maps in my experience.  I considered writing a VASSAL module, but java.  Now I think I might've found the correct tool, though - Tabletop Simulator.  TTS is already widely-available to the group that I game with, and is cheaper than miniatures.  It is easy to import hexmaps into it (I've looked at just taking Google Maps screenshots, imposing a hex grid at 100 meters per hex, and dropping them in), which solves the terrain problem.  It supports the "drawing damage chits" idiom very nicely with either decks or bags.  There are already steam workshop mods for it with models from the Dawn of War games, intended for playing Epic 40k, which would be perfect for representing units (I've been looking at using NATO-standard counters instead, but for some reason NATO has no symbols for "antigrav tank" or "giant mecha".  Gotta get on that, guys).  It seems like a very good solution to the "need miniatures", "losing damage chits", and "terrain is complicated" problems (though it may introduce some new problems, like "playing against opponents face-to-face is fun, and so is standing over a big physical map".  Maybe I need a ceiling-mounted projector aimed down on to a real table for that "war room" effect...)

The "poorly-organized rulebook" problem remains, however.  The rulebook is also not OCR'd, which is pretty annoying.  These two facts combined lead me to the conclusion that maybe I should transcribe / rewrite the rulebook, cutting it up into independent modules like Starmada had:

• Core / Armor
• general sequence of play, units, objectives
• armored vehicle (tracked, wheeled, GEV, grav, mechs) movement
• big index of combat actions, direct fire, guided missiles, damage resolution
• Infantry
• Artillery
• Aerospace (I'm conflicted about VTOLs; most of the time they play like armor, but then they're also vulnerable to air defense)
• Engineering (mines, fires and smoke, bridgelaying, ...)
• Optional Stuff (oversized vehicles, experimental rules for drones and aliens, ???)
• Vehicle Design and Points

It's already mostly organized like this.  The problem is that (for example) infantry movement is in the movement section with armored vehicles, rather than in the infantry section, and chit validity for artillery fire is in the direct fire chit validity table rather than the artillery chapter.  That's fine for a reference, but bad when you're first learning the game.  It's (only) a 60-page rulebook, so cutting it up and figuring it out is less work than learning all the quirks of an RPG, probably.  Combined with making tokens in TTS and a unit design spreadsheet (though there is already an online vehicle design tool, but it doesn't really support houseruling), it should be a reasonable, but not overwhelming, prep effort.

A Return to Wargaming?

Jimdad suggested on the recent organizational resources post that it would make sense for me to do some test runs of all the tech before trying to run a full-blown campaign with it.  This is sensible, but one-shots are unsatisfying as a rule.  Unrelatedly, I've had VBAM and space wargaming on the brain recently for no apparent reason.  But they do suggest an alternative means for tech-testing, in that wargames are primarily one-off affairs (at least in our group) which work well with a small and irregular player pool.  Playing one-off wargame scenarios also leads nicely into campaigns, which might beget universe generation and lead to workable RPG settings.

I'm sort of looking back at the Starmada Summer of 2011 as a model, but hopefully with a less flexi-fragile system (or a gentleman's agreement that if something is broken, you use it to win once and then can it).  I think Full Thrust in one of its several incarnations would probably serve us well, as it is a very simple core game with lots of optional things to experiment with (I for one would be curious to try Colonial Battlefleet's initiative system on top of FT's general mechanics; I'm just not a huge fan of pre-plotted movement).  Full Thrust is also old enough and well-enough vetted that its exploitable flaws are known (documented and discussed in the expansion books) and can hopefully be avoided.  It also has a nice-looking sample campaign in the back of the FT2E manual.

Other options:

• Starmada: Nova - we never really gave this one a fair shake, and the seeker rules are pretty neat.  On the minus side, forum reports that stacking up weapon traits is still pretty broken.
• Colonial Battlefleet - sort of hampered by lack of good shipyard spreadsheet.  I have one half-thrown together, but got bored.  Good stealth and initiative rules, and the Raider type from the expansion book looks like fun.  On the minus side, fairly heavy bookkeeping for shields.
• Battleshift - Fleet engagements with some cool tactical warp mechanics.  If I recall correctly, though, it needs a pretty big playing area, and I've seen roll20 lag out under less. 
• Space Hulk.  The problem with Space Hulk is that it's unusually stressful, because there is some serious "oh god oh god we're all going to die" going on continuously  (...  holy cow, this must be what it's like to play in my ACKS games.  No wonder they keep disintegrating!  On the other hand, if you play ACKS well, it's less of a problem than if you play Space Hulk well, because the DM is slightly less actively malicious than the 'stealer player).  Also the maps are deceptively expansive.
• BattleTech Lite - light to medium mechs from the earliest time period only, and perhaps no melee.  Could be fun as long as you keep the total number of armor / structure points low.
• Domains at War: Battles - Our experiences so far suggest that DaW:B is too heavy unless there's some significant investment in the outcome (ie, a PC realm at stake). On the other hand, two games between inexperienced players is not a whole lot to go by.  I've been meaning to write some scenarios for this - the system could definitely use one highlighting the fortification rules, and everybody loves Helm's Deep.
• Hell, a sample DaW:C campaign would be fun too, and if the battles were resolved using the Campaigns rules, it might work alright for one-off afternoon games (though I sort of expect a lot of overhead from the recon rules - TODO automate recon).  I could steal something from Crusader Kings and keep the magic-and-wyvern-cavalry level historically low for ease of use.
• Anything in the 15-25mm infantry sphere - I have my doubts about how well roll20 would handle these, and Vassal suffers from limited plugins.  Options include Stargrunt, Gruntz, WH40k, and many many others.
• Dirtside or other 6mm microarmor games - Again, I don't think this one would do well on roll20.  Also chit-based damage.

So if anybody from the old Starmada crew is reading this, hit me up via the usual channels if something here's interesting.

Still Alive

News since last update:

• Foremost - going to DragonCon next weekend.  If anybody still reads this and will be down there, let me know!
• Space Hulk - was down in Matt's neck of the woods for work the other week and we played two games of Rescue the CAT using the 1st edition rules.  My dice rolled horrifically when I was playing humans; at one point I rolled 5 1's on 6d6 for flamer mortality (which let a bunch of bugs get through the firewall and into my dudes), followed by no 6s on 12d6 of overwatch fire.  Matt did somewhat better as the humans, but I got one bug up behind his CAT-carrying sergeant, took him out in one attack, and the CAT broke on impact.  Scenario probably winnable, but the north entrance near the CAT entry is concerning.  We also debated whether 'twas better to have a sergeant carry the CAT or a flamerman; I believe we concluded sergeant, since you want your flamers firing and your carrier moving, so stacking both duties forces you to split that model's AP between conflicting purposes.
• Located a FLGS last weekend.  Mostly a Warmahordes / MtG / Pathfinder shop, but supposedly they have two killer GMs already so maybe I'd fit into the RPG lineup nicely.
• Considering taking up minis wargaming; found a mint-condition copy of Dirtside II (with chits!) on Amazon for $5, so I snatched that up.  Also gave Fast & Dirty 4 a read; there are parts of it which are better than Stargrunt, and parts which I do not much like.  Review possibly forthcoming.  I anticipate difficulty finding opponents for any GZG / generic system, though, and last I checked I have little aptitude for painting, so perhaps I should stick to ACKS.
• Went to DEFCON, had a good time, didn't get pwnt (that I know of)
• I have started reading dead trees again, most recently Time Enough for Love.  I suspect book accumulation is some sort of nest-building behavior.
• .i ui mi cilre fi lo lojbo
• Have a bunch of non-gaming personal projects queued up
• Getting back in shape
• Building an OpenEEG (and learning enough EE to do it right and not toast myself)
• Couple of machine learning / AI things I want to look into, including a CUDA artificial neural network implementation (there are several of these already out there, but I need the practice)
• Software defined radio / listening to the parts of the EM spectrum I can't see
•  wechall.net, overthewire.org, and other 'wargames'

O, For Sci-Fi...

Disclaimer: ACKS is fun.  I'm enjoying running it, and I think that my players probably don't hate it either (quoth Tim - "I want to try running an old-school 3.5 game in the fall.  Wait no, ACKS is more fun.").

But sometimes, you just want to go all-out with the kind of shit we pulled in Starmada two springs ago.  To find a crunchy, buildy wargame and go to town with it.  Also because tanks and mechs and lasers and tech is just fun sometimes.

Basically, I've got two itches that I want to scratch:

1 - Gritty, nasty man-vs-aliens dungeoncrawling.  Could be Space Hulk with expansions (namely: thunder hammers, autocannons, and the force bidding rules), could be a Star*ACKS one-shot with whole platoons of L1 marines-at-arms.  Deathwatch is built for this, but it's too heavy for me.  StarGrunt could work too, but it's lacking strongly in the aliens department, and our previous attempts at them...  well, maybe could be tweaked into a workable shape.  It also doesn't seem well-suited to indoor combat, though indoor games would be short and fast since close assault is where casualties really happen in SGII.  SG also, of all of these candidates, has the least hidden information (though their artillery mechanic is a beautiful exception).

2 - Crunchy, heavy mechanized warfare.  OGREs and other supertanks, mechs, guided missiles, attack helicopters (or antigrav equivalent), tactical nuclear weapons, ideally some form of campaign system, the whole shebang.  BattleTech seems to be the most popular option for this in this part of the country, but what it possesses in wonderful construction rules it makes up for with a painful damage resolution system and a model of futuristic warfare inconsistent with modern facts (BT cannon ranges top out at under half a mile (~2400 feet), compared to modern cannons with effective ranges of upwards of two miles) and sometimes physics (melee mechs make me sad).  BT's Operational Campaign system from Tactical Handbook is pretty sweet, though.  Wardogs inherits a lot of BT's problems, and while generally lighter, is not well written and rather confusing.  Dirtside would probably be great, since it has a construction system and seems relatively lightweight, but the randomization using chits is just...  arg.  There is also here the persistent problem of lack of models.  Dirtside has more hidden information built in by default than most of the games in this category, though, between its beautiful objectives system and decent artillery rules.  Epic suffers a similar miniatures problem, but does at the very least not use chits.  You do have to deal with the default (crazy) assumptions of the 40k 'verse, though, and the rules are hard to find these days since the Specialist Games page was taken down.  CAV could work too, but I'm pretty much unfamiliar with it except for a few reports from Sergeant Crunch.  It does seem to be lacking in the construction system department, but the damage model is really simple and reminds me of Starmada Nova's to some extent.  Guess I could hack together a S:NE ground project like I was looking at doing with Admiralty...  Certainly the new Seekers rule would work nicely for guided missiles.

Anyway, I think part of this speculation and grumbling is that running ACKS twice a week means I'm prepping all the time.  Switching one game a week to something more wargamey would mean that I could have a few days off to come up with ideas, rather than strictly reacting to my players.  Variety being the spice of inspiration and all that.  Or, if I can't convince people to switch to one RPG night and one wargame night a week, I might have to do something dangerous, like throwing Expedition to the Barrier Peaks into my ACKS world (though with the average Int score of this party, particularly Drew's henchman brigade, that would be absolutely hilarious.  Hmmmm....).