Random Encounters and Space Hulk's Blips

Blindsight got me thinking about Space Hulk, which got me thinking about the blips.  Space Hulk has a mechanic where the alien player conceals his forces and moves them as "blips" on the human player's radar until they come into line of sight of a human unit.  It's a nice way to handle information asymmetry and partially hidden movement.  I think something like it might solve one of the issues with random encounters as they are played.

The way a random encounter in the dungeon goes in D&D (certainly in my games, at least) is usually something like this:

• Party is doing stuff
• DM rolls d6, 6 for random encounter
• DM generates wandering monsters
• Surprise roll
• Reaction roll
• Initiative roll
• Combat 
• Return to exploration loop

What's missing here is tension.  The encounter happens, it is resolved, it probably doesn't really link to anything else in the dungeon because it was just generated.  Resource costs are applied and then life goes on; there is no qualitative change unless the random encounter was on the way out while the party was already resource-exhausted.  It's almost like Bad Trap Syndrome, but with a combat intead.

The other thing missing here is that a rule has been ignored - the random encounter distance rule, another roll between generation and surprise.  Nominally should be 2d6 * 10 feet in the dungeon, in ACKS at least.  That's a long way (in expectation).  That's outside torch radius on average (30' of bright light, 20 more feet of shadowy illumination).  It's also outside of average monster infravision radius (60').  If you, like me, tend to not have 70' hallways, generally that's going to be around multiple corners or through multiple doors.  This is not typically a "the monsters come around the corner or through the doorway, roll for surprise" situation.

The reason this rule is ignored is straightforward - tracking runtime-generated state outside of PC line of sight is a hassle.  If you're using a graphpaper map, there isn't a good way to track groups of monsters moving through the dungeon.  Digital tools could probably handle this better.

But if you're willing to pay the price to track these 'blips' outside of PC detection range, the atmospheric and gameplay benefits are, I suspect, significant.  They turn random encounters from "fire and forget" into lingering threat, things just outside your vision, eyes reflecting your torchlight.  Waiting in the dark for you to make a mistake, stalking you, looking for an opportunity to pounce (or maybe just to eat your dead).  A heavily-armored party might not even be able to close with and engage such groups due to speed differences.  I suspect these lingering random encounters might encourage the use of thieves in the shadowed zone (where they can quickly pin down or drive off such enemies; pickets) and other "lightweight" play.  Multiple random encounters might lead to multiple groups of uncommitted creatures - morlocks ahead, morlocks behind, nowhere to run.  Depending on the monsters and the ecology of the dungeon, multiple "open" random encounters might fight among themselves (presenting an opportunity to players) or join forces.  Players might detect them with listening or detect evil...  blips on the paladin-scanner.

These things in the dark become a source of tension, a source of potential energy for the dungeon.  The other shoe, ready to drop.

On reflection, this difference in use is reflected in the old naming - "wandering monster" instead of "random encounter".

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'

Space Hulk and Campaigns

(Forewarning - this applies only to first edition Space Hulk, as that is what I once scrounged the rulebooks from.  Maybe 2nd or 3rd have already done something of this sort; in particular I think I've heard that the marines usually win in 3rd, which was immensely surprising to me)

I had my brother over for Thanksgiving, and we got to talking about Space Hulk.  We really like the premise, but the odds being so stacked against the marines is hard because on some level, even the genestealer player (being a human) bears some sympathy for them.  Personally, I have the difficulty that I like the genestealer flavor ("we are legion and we will eat you"), but when I play wargames I kind of like to take the side with long odds against them, which pushes me towards playing the humans.

These two concerns got us thinking about changing up the scenario design of the game.  Normally, the Marines start strong but have to haul ass to an objective before they are overwhelmed by the genestealers, who keep spawning more-or-less indefinitely.  The genestealers do have strengths other then sheer numbers, though, namely speed, hidden information, and a huge advantage over the marines in melee.  This set of capabilities suggests several variants of the traditional Space Hulk idiom.  The natural extension, it seems to me, is to run a "hunting the hive tyrant"-type scenario with limited or no reinforcements for the genestealers.  One of their blips is the target (broodlord, I guess), and if the marines can kill it, they win the mission.  For the genestealer, then, this is a shell game - if you keep the target in the back, then it's clear that that is the objective (unless you're up against a canny genestealer who puts a decoy in the back...), but if you bring it forward in an attempt to conceal it, then you risk losing it.  You could try to spread your forces out across the map evenly so the marines have to engage each blip to find the target, but then you risk being unable to support the target once it's engaged.  In any case, creating a mobile, hidden objective for the genestealer's defense plays to their strengths of mobility and hidden information and makes it plausible to deny them their numerical strength.  I also considered the addition of trap-like tokens; something like an immobile ambush counter which might be something unpleasant or might be nothing, in order to aid the defense by serving much like minefields in other games.

An inversion of this scenario would put a limited genestealer force on offense against a group of marines with the aim of assassinating their sergeant, captain, or other leader.  Again, this plays to speed, melee offense, and hidden information, but puts a pretty severe limiting factor on the genestealer's ability to just throw more bugs at the problem.  For bonus points, allow the genestealer some number of ambush counters too.  Both of these missions probably entail some sort of turn limit to push Team Offense towards the enemy, and custom map arrangements to make them workable.

The other possibility that I considered was a system by which the players alternate sides, and a mission is iterated until the humans win or both players agree that it's quite impossible.  This started me towards thinking about a simplistic 'campaign system', which would provide a scoring bases for repeated games much like Starmada's Simplest Campaign System, but without resource management carrying between games.  Perhaps 'series' is a better term than 'campaign'.  In any case, the scheme I propose is as follows:

• Two players agree to play a series of chosen missions, and also agree on rules allowable (equipment availability, psionics, ambush counters, tactical marines, flavor of flamer (1e vs 2e), and so forth)
• For each mission, in order
• Each player attempts the mission with the default forces.  The loser of the previous mission chooses who will play which side first; in the event of a draw in the previous mission, flip a coin for who chooses.
• If both players win the mission as marines with default forces, the mission is a draw.  If only one does, then they have won this mission.  In either case, move to the next mission.  (Variant - if both players win with default marine forces, they instead move to the bidding step below, with a bid cap equal to the value of the default force)
• If neither player could complete the mission with default marine forces, they use the bidding procedure outlined in Deathwing.
• Whichever player bids lowest plays the mission with the forces that he bid.  If he wins, he has won the mission and the series advances.
• If the low bidder loses, then the high bidder must play the mission with the point value that he bid.  Should he lose, the two players may either declare the mission a draw and move to the next one, or they may re-bid.
• Should the high bidder win, the low bidder may attempt the mission with forces with the high bid in points.  Should he lose, the high bidder has won the mission, and if he wins, then the mission is a draw.  In either case, the series then moves to the next mission.
• Once all missions have either been drawn or won by one player, whichever player won the most missions wins the series.  If both players have won an equal number of missions, break the tie using the sum of the bid points they spent on their victories.  If it's still a tie, add another mission as a sudden-death tiebreaker or have a headbutting contest or flip a coin or something.

So, let's consider the incentives here. Winning with the default force is good, because it means you've accomplishes the mission under its intended parameters.  We favor the loser of the previous mission in selection in order to give them an advantage in this round; I expect typical behavior here will be to choose that the winner of the previous round plays marines, so you can watch their tactics and adapt them for your own run.  A lot of Space Hulk was getting to understand the tactical quirks of the map layouts; the first run through is extra-hard for the marines, in our experience.  If both players win with marines, then the mission is possibly 'solved' and you move on to the next one.  With the bidding, we give the low bidder one chance to win and another to draw; this provides a strong incentive to get the low bid.  However, the high bidder is prevented from bidding the maximum possible bid as a viable strategy, since if he does this then the low bidder will have the opportunity to draw his probable win.  It might be possible for a player who is leading in series wins to bid the maximum as a viable strategy; in this case, seeking to generate draws to maintain his lead.  If the trailing player realizes he is doing this, though, he could in turn bid the maximum minus 1, likely achieving wins while maintaining low-bidder status.  Thus, this issue may be self-correcting.  One other possible issue is if a single player wins the majority of missions before the series is completed.  In this case, the outcome of the series is clear, and whether or not to continue or start anew is uncertain.  Probably depends on the circumstances.

(Also, further work - generalization of this structure beyond two players)

Sooo...  yeah.  Hey Matt, up for some Space Hulk?

If I Were to Run a 40k RPG...

It would probably be more like Traveller: New Era meets ACKS than Deathwatch or Dark Heresy.

I have a love/hate relationship with a lot of the 40k universe.  On the one hand, I quite like the "everyone dies" aesthetic, the laughter of uncaring gods, Space Hulk, the Ravenor trilogy, the tyranids, Mechanicus, Inquisition, and the doom of the eldar.  On the other hand, there are the space marines, the tau, the ecclesiarchy, the rogue traders (who always felt a little too free for such an unfree world), and those goddamn orks.  Further, for an empire where much technology is lost and forgotten, there always seems to be an abundance of powered armor, plasma weapons, and other fancy gizmos fit for cracking tanks or continents.  These combined always made the prospect of running an RPG in the 40k universe somewhat offputting.

Well, says I to myself late last night, we can fix that.

Consider, for a moment, what happens to the 40k universe if, one day, the Astronomican goes out, permanently.  Imperial ships in the warp at the time are lost, and further long-range interstellar travel becomes an impossibility.  Military campaigns on ten thousand worlds grind to a halt for lack of resupply, and the units abandoned there must either go guerrilla, make peace, or be slaughtered.  Many hive worlds, reliant on imported foodstuffs for their sustenance, suffer starvation, unrest, and descent into anarchy.  The enemies of man, still capable of interstellar travel by their usual means, go on the offensive, bypassing strongpoints where Imperial units remain active, and conquering ripe, undefended worlds with little effort.

The space marines, scattered across the galaxy in forces as small as platoons, must reintegrate into human society, becoming leaders of men.  Bolter ammunition, already scarce, becomes vanishingly rare, and powered armor, lacking spare parts and untended by the ministrations of the techmarines, falls into disrepair.  The homeworlds of the various chapters, such as Fenris, Nocturne, and Macragge, continue recruiting, impanting, and training more marines of their chapters, but most worlds with space marine deployments lack the specialized medical infrastructure for the growth of implants from the gene-seed.  On those worlds, the marines tend to form long-lived military juntas, which provide a gateway into stable, moral governments backed by tempered force.

On many worlds, the Ecclesiarchy remains in power for some time, holding forth with the doctrine that the faith of the people is being tested.  They are supported by the astropath network, providing news and maintaining mankind as a single culture.  As years pass, however, the astropaths begin to die off (and new ones cannot be taken to Earth to be soulbound), and salvation seems less and less imminent; many planets rebel and overthrow their religious rulers.  Most of these insurrections fall to chaotic influence, but some, perhaps, are successful, staving off corruption under the watchful eyes of former inquisitorial agents with little love for the zeal of the Ecclesiarchs.

The Forge Worlds, too, weather the transition relatively well, with the beliefs of the Cult Mechanicus unshaken and its power largely intact.  Many, however, suffer from resource exhaustion, turning to desolate anarchic wastelands a la the Road Warrior, and without safeguards against chaos, more still fall to the lure of dark sciences.  The forge worlds are likewise juicy targets for the enemies of mankind, for while they maintain their Skitarii fighting forces, they are rich in technological plunder.  Some, however, endure, arming themselves and stewarding their resources while their best minds seek a safer means of FTL travel.

And so it is that, a few generations after the collapse of the Empire, on one of these stable worlds, PCs appear.  Foolish young souls with a penchant for adventure, an eye for profit, the cojones to explore a drifting space hulk, and a dream of distant stars...

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....).

Asymmetric Hidden Information

King of asymmetric hidden information

So I got to thinking about Space Hulk while overseas (as often happens), particularly in light of this post at Solo Nexus (there's more to be said about this particular post, but Space Hulk first).  Many competitive games feature hidden information; in Magic and other card games, you have the hand.  In Starmada, you have plotted movement orders.  In D&D, you have "what's in the next room".  But in most cases, these sources of hidden information are the same for both players; in Magic, neither player knows the other's hand.  In Starmada, neither knows the other's movement orders.  D&D's an odd case, naturally, being many-and-one and an RPG and whatnot.

But Space Hulk's unusual here, in that there are two sources of hidden information, each of which is hidden only from one player.  For those unfamiliar, Space Hulk is a 'dungeon crawler'-type boardgame with a squad or two of space marines trying to achieve their objectives in the face of a horde of fast, angry, and deadly aliens.  The marines can attack at range and act during the alien turn, but are slow, few in number, very weak in melee, and almost always on the losing end of things.  Thus, Space Hulk is already a strongly asymmetric game, even before you start adding elements of hidden information.

The marine player has access to a limited pool of off-turn actions, called Command Points.  The size of this pool is determined at random each turn, and is kept hidden until the end of the alien player's following turn when it is re-rolled.  Thus, the alien player never knows for sure if the marine has one last reaction left (until he's spent the maximum possible number that he could've drawn).  The alien, however, has a much larger store of hidden information.  In most scenarios, the alien starts with few forces on the board, but has them enter over time from the edges.  Rather than having actual units enter, though, he instead draws 'blip markers', each of which has a number on the backside denoting how many aliens it's actually worth, which could be anywhere between 0 and 3 (or more with the expansions).  He then deploys these face down; thus, his actual strength is hidden from the marine player, who is left to guess and speculate the strength of each marker until it is revealed (either voluntarily by the alien player so that he can attack with it, or when it comes into line of sight of a marine unit).  The inclusion of zero-value markers is particularly worthwhile, I think - these pose a challenge for the alien player, since he has to bluff with them.  There's a final, doubly-hidden form of information in the expansions by way of ambush counters, but I don't particularly want to go into those just now.

Why am I bothering to discuss this?  Well, first and most personally, I'd kind of like to play more Space Hulk (perhaps with all kinds of crazy tweaks), but it's kind of a hard sell.  Second, I think hidden information is part of why I'm supremely unmotivated to play Starmada: Nova.  There is no hidden information in it; gone are movement orders, allocation of screens, and cloaking.  About the only thing left is pre-declaring dual mode weapon mode for the turn, and that's...  not enough for me.  Third, I think this kind of asymmetric hidden information (and general lack of balance between sides) is something we could stand to see more of in games in general.

Super Dungeon Explore!

Classes start tomorrow, so people are filtering back into town.  We managed to get together for a game last night, and Ethan had acquired and built Super Dungeon Explore over winter break, so we gave it a shot.  SDE is a dungeon-crawling boardgame with a video-game aesthetic which is kind of endearing (to paraphrase Ethan, "Most companies that make minis are really really grimdark.  These ones are kind of cutesy but also good looking and good price per mini."), though the female PCs...  ah, let's just say that their defenses seem a bit high for the amount of armor they're wearing.  While the rulebook is not particularly clear / well written, Ethan had been spending a lot of time on forums and knew what was up, so we chose PCs (with Matt as the Console / DM) and went for it.

The structure of the game revolves around the PCs trying to destroy the spawn points scattered throughout the dungeon, thereby preventing the Console from placing more monsters.  Every wound taken by anything (PC, monster, or spawn point) advances a counter which determines when the minibosses and final bosses appear.  Additionally, damage inflicted by the PCs advances the loot counter, which awards a draw from the Loot deck every 3 hits or so.  Treasure from chests comes from a separate (better) Treasure deck.  Loot / treasure (stuff?) adds to the various stats of each PC - Attack, Armor, Dex, Will, Actions per Turn, or Movement, in addition to adding special features like a Slow condition on all of your attacks, immunity to some conditions, or special actions.  For example, in the first treasure chest, we found a Horn of Fire that added a green die to Attack and also allowed the holder to create a giant cone o' fire at the cost of two actions.

The dice subsystem deserves some mention, both for how awesome and how annoying it was.  The annoying bit is that the game uses custom d6s in three colors - blue dice have two sides with 1, one with 2, and one with a heart (if you roll a heart on an attack that hits, you heal a wound), while red have higher values and one side with a potion (as with hearts, gives you a potion on a successful hit), and greens have the highest values, plus one with both a potion and a heart.  Pretty much everything is expressed in terms of these dice.  I had a sorceress, for example, with Attack of two blue, Armor of three blue, Dex of...  don't remember, never had to roll it, and Will of one red and one blue.  Buffs and items add dice in the same way; Tim's paladin had an armor buff that increased the Armor of all allies within three squares by 1 blue until end of turn, and by the end of the game, I was suited up in wizard gear for two red and four blue on my Will-based spells.  When you make a check with a stat, you roll the listed dice, your opponent rolls his own for Armor or Dex, usually (most units use Armor to defend, though some use Dex), and whoever has the highest total wins, with ties going to defender.  It's a remarkably simple and easy-to-grasp system, but it's also plenty granular, in that there's a huge range of possible combinations of die colors for different effectivenesses and variances - a unit with like...  six blues for attack will be really swingy, but capable of hitting high-defense characters, while one with just one green will have lower variance and a lower mean, with most critters falling somewhere in between those two extremes.  But, again, the trouble is that it's hard to use one's own dice; you could certainly temporarily relabel / have a conversion table from numerical side values to results based on color, but it'd be a slight pain.

The game balance is also remarkably good.  Matt made some tactical mistakes as Console, though we made a few questionable moves ourselves, as when Ethan split the party to open a second front and try to flank one of Matt's strongpoints - I'd argue that this was actually a good move, but if I hadn't moved to support Ethan at range, it mightn't've gone so well, which is saying something since Ethan was on the verge of death when we fled that room...  and then died twice later.  We'd found a Resurrection Charm that triggered when he was killed by a mini-boss, and then he died again under a relentless pile of dragon whelps while trying to rescue Tim's paladin from a mimic during the final boss fight...  Glisson's support character, whose primary ability was generating and distributing potions (each hero has an ability that can be activated by spending a potion; some, like Tim's massive healing and effect removal, were awesome, and some, like my +Will and Flight, were less so), was also killed by the minibosses, though not before killing one of the pair.  The final boss and the minibosses were serious threats to our survival, and even the kobolds in the second room managed to lay a good bit of hurt down on us.  The game felt really close / skin of our teeth - we ended up having to overextend ourselves into a really nasty position in a desperate bid to down the dragon this turn, punching a hole through the wall of dragon hatchlings to give Jared's ranger a clear shot at the boss.  If he'd been a little less lucky, we'd've been overrun next turn.  The balance between PCs was also pretty good; though each PC had distinct stats, strengths, weaknesses, and abilities, everybody was useful.  The paladin provided excellent healing, the +Armor buff, and decent melee, the Barbarian could lay down a ton of attacks really quickly and also regenerated wounds (which was good because we didn't have to heal him as much, but bad because it encouraged him to take lots of damage, which advanced the injury counter to hit the minibosses and bosses before we'd taken out all the spawn points), the Ranger had a ranged burst that was good for hitting foes around cover and an ability to remove status effects (like On Fire), Glisson's potion support powered the Paladinic Healing Engine and was no slouch in melee either, and my Sorceress was for putting damage and negative status effects on the monsters at range.  I was actually relatively useless at the beginning of the game, when we were up against monsters with only 1 Wound (impossible to status-effect; if I hit them, they would die), so that was disappointing, but once we started going up against the dragon hatchlings, which had two wounds, I was suddenly useful, and I felt pretty clutch against the minibosses and boss, who I was causing to drop their highest die roll for both attack and armor (ex: Rex the Kobold Ogre miniboss was rolling two reds for armor, I believe.  If he was under my effects, he'd roll two red, maybe get a 3 and a 1, drop the 3, and end up with 1, which made it much easier for everybody else to hit).  So I was a better late-game character; c'est la vie.  There were also another 4 heroes that we didn't get to play - a teleporting tiefling rogue, a druid with shapeshift into a giant bear, a pyromancer with lots of ranged damage and On Fire conditions, and a dwarf fighter with extra HP and good armor.

Overall impressions - would play again.  One weakness is that PCs, once dead, tend to stay dead and leave that player out of the game until terminated (which can take a while...  we took ~4-5 hours, but we got distracted by sandwiches at one point).  The game feels, to me, much like a cleaned-up, balanced, multiplayer version of Space Hulk With Stuff.  I'd be kind of interested to tweak it to a future / bughunt setting; it would be fairly easy, actually.  The nine heroes could be replaced with modern / sci-fi archetypes; Sniper (ranged point damage), Heavy Weapons Guy (low mobility, lots of attacks at range, suppression fire?), Sarge (potion gen or status effect removal), Medic (wound removal), Joe Grunt (generalist, possibly strong potion ability), Cyborg (melee tank), Demolitionist (area bursts at range, traps / mines, Knockdown), Assassin (backstab, Stealth, teleport, &c), and Firebat (great burnin' cones of fire).  Thanks, TF2.  The core set has five flavors of kobold (weak melee, ranged attack, melee with reach, high-defense buffing melee, and a ranged buffer spellcaster), three of small dragons (one flying, one with two attacks and two wounds but low armor, one with one attack, one wound, and higher armor), one of miniboss, and one big boss.  That's not that many monster stats the would need to be cooked up; from a Space Hulk perspective, you could easily do something like Genestealer Hybrids as kobolds / tier 1 monsters, Gaunts as dragon whelps / tier 2 monsters, Purestrain Genestealers as mini-bosses, and a Carnifex or something as the big boss.  The real trouble would be items; there are a lot of items in that deck...  probably the easiest thing would be to keep using the items as-is and just kinda handwave the flavor text away.  Likewise, chests -> ship's lockers / xenotech lockers.  So that'd be a fun project if we ever exhaust the fun reserves of the core game, though it was mentioned last night that the producing company is working on an expansion where the opposition is giant stony turtles, so it appears that the flexibility is going to continue to expand.  It's clear that the game is meant to be expanded even from the rules that exist already; the Paladin's Smite ability, for example, does extra damage to Demons and Undead...  none of which exist yet.  Likewise, there are some effects (Choke, I think) that nothing inflicts yet, but that there are rules for.  So it's pretty clear that they aim to keep making more stuff, and keep the game fresh.

Miscellanea 2: VBAM Race Updates, a Return to Traveller, and Space Hulk Meets Alien Swarm

It's another light, mixed post like the first miscellanea post back in September.

Got some good feedback on the proposed trope-based VBAM races from the VBAM yahoo group, so here are the updates on those:

Bugs: Swapping out Stalwart Defenders for Aggressive (all owned ground units gain +1 attack) and Hungry Hungry Hydralisks (when genociding enemy census, you gain 20% more EPs than normal).  This generates a much more offensively-scary, all-devouring species of bug, rather than the turtling-type bugs in the older version.

Bots: General consensus on the yahoo group is that Robotic is overpowered as a result of being able to build lots of census wherever they want.  Thus, probably swapping in Cybernetic (like robotic, but can't build census, lower population maintenance, and not collective-only government) and some other small bonus...  not sure what to do for that yet.  Possibly Efficient Industry (+10% construction capacity on all owned planets), something military, or a social trait like Closed Society.

Savages: Only suggestion on this one was to allow varying of the military traits to differentiate different savage empires.  Easily done on the fly.

Puppeteers: Agreed that these are probably nerfed, and suggested adding a small bonus to Sneaky like ability to modify scenario length up or down by 1.

Merchants: Not much here...  suggestion to add non-player empires for the Puppeteers and Merchants to spend their free diplomatic intel on, and for the Merchants to trade with, but that's not really a species trait change.

So that about covers the VBAM stuff...  unfortunately, the more I think about VBAM-Traveller integration, the more issues I run into, particularly with economic and planetary scales.  Traveller population, for example, grows exponentially, while VBAM population grows linearly, and then there's the ugly question of "How many megacredits is an EP worth?".  These issues, combined with trepidation on Matt's part with regards to reading all of VBAM's rules, suggest that maybe a straight Traveller game would be a better plan.  I've had a premise for such a campaign on the back burner for a while, so maybe that'll see play next semester (with prep and handout construction over winterbreak).

Finally, I was thinking about Space Hulk and Alien Swarm in the shower today.  Space Hulk is a classic Games Workshop game which pits a squad or two of marines with guns against terrifyingly fast aliens who are deadly in melee.  The game is heavily skewed in favor of the aliens, but this means that when the humans do win, there's usually a hell of a story to go along with it.  Alien Swarm, on the other hand, was a short-lived freebie game from Valve which pitted four human players of marines with guns against a swarm of mostly-weak melee aliens, with a few special / scarier genotypes around to mix things up (parasites.... urrrrgh...).  It was a significantly less lethal games than Space Hulk for the humans, but was a lot of fun.  The multiplayer community has mostly died off, though, which is sad, so I'm kind of curious if I can tweak Space Hulk / 40k to run something similar to Alien Swarm without getting bogged down in massive complexity like Deathwatch did.