ETC - Big Gun versus Little Grunt

[Brimshack]

ETC - The Slaughter

Okay, so this was the last game we ran before posting the online version of ETC at Crunch-Waffle. It was between myself and a friend, Chris.

The Game

Stats: It is called ETC, and it works roughly like this. Characters have the following Stats: Attack, Defence, Focus (determines all non-combat rolls), Magic (often left at 0), Movement, Speed (determines actions and initiative), and Durability (which is usually 15 points each and determines death at 0 Physical Durability or flight at 0 Mental). Characters get 5 discretionary points to spend on Stats (with a progressive cost per point of bonus Bonus of 1 costs 1, Bonus of 2 costs 3 total, and so on) and 3 bonus points which we assign to each mini at Crunch-Waffle. Addition, there abilities (Minor and Major) such as "Melee Specialist" which provides a +1 to Attack and Defence rolls in Melee (as opposed to missiles or magic). Basic characters get 1 Minor and 1 Major.

War Party Point Cost: Crunch-Waffle Minis all have pregenerated characters that cost 2 poinst each toward total strength for a War Party. We have an array of about a dozen Templates (Power Boost, Agility Boost, Magic Boost, etc.) that can be used to add power to the characters. Each template adds 3 more bonus points and 1 more of each type ability, all designated by the template itself. The first template costs 1 extra point, the second for the same character costs 2 more, etc. Also, other people's minis can be used as Grunts in the game. Grunts cost 1 point and come with 5 discretionary points (no bonus points) and only 1 minor ability, no major.

Die Rolls: All die rolls are 3d6 with all attacks rolled as opposing checks. A Balance in Favor of Attack yields damage. A Balance in favor of Defence can yield damage to the attacker (for spells and when Loked in Melee Combat), but Focus is used as Damage Reduction in such cases. Locked in Combat means any time a character is activate while in range for melee attack either by or against an opponent. It's worth noting that Durability is divided into 5 slots of 1 point, 2 points, 3, 4, and 5. As each slot is crossed off either Mental or Physical Durability, the character incurs a Fatigue Penalty of -1 on all rolls.

Pregame: Chris arrived and we talked. I went over changes since the last version of the game with him and we decided on a 30 point War Party. We were pretty confident in the overall structure of the game at that point. I chose the Turtle Island Confederacy, which meant I would be fielding Native American characters. At least one character, the Contrary would actually grow more powerful as he was hurt (because his Major Ability turns Fatigue Penalties into Bonuses ...he's a Contrary). I had 1 decent missile character and Two Handed Fighter who would get bonuses when Locked in Combat. I took the strongest of my characters, The Coup Stick wielding Centaur and added the Magic Boost template to him, so I would have at least one spell caster. I added a Suicide Warrior and 2 grunts (old Partha Indians) Chris fiddled and plotted, and I think he had a whole army planned, and then he noticed that 7 templates made for a 30 point character. He promptly chose Jihad, the Fiendish Celestial who has 3 templates to begin with (Avian, Holy, Unholy) and added 4 more. Note that this means she had 24 total bonus points in addition to the 5 discretionary points. Most of her stats were near 10 in a game where a 3 point difference is usually enough. This was cool, because we had never quite tested the upper limits of Template additions. The cost gets prohibitive, but with enough points a character could in theory bury the bonuses of other characters, so we were both curious to see what would happen. So, it was 5 standard characters and 2 Grunts versus 1 uberfrau, the flying angel-devil from Hell, ...Heaven, ...something like that.

The Game:

Opening Move - Out Like Milke, Make that Michelle Tyson:

Jihad flew directly at my characters. She had a Speed of 4 after all her templates whereas my fastest characters had a speed of 2. That meant she went first no matter what and had 4 actions each round. Mine had 2 at best. She flew right into my Suicide Warrior before he had a chance to stake himself to the ground and she flattened him with one hit. Then she stepped up to the two-weapon fighting character and attacked him, doing 4 points of damage. Now each successive diece roll takes a penalty of -2, hence the low damage on her second attack, and of course the two-weapon fighter did not yet suffer Fatigue Penalties. In response, my Coup Stick Centaur cast a spell enabling him to move faster on the following round. The two-weapon fighting character made one attack pouring his extra action into a 2 point bonus (also a viable option). he succeeded in damaging himself for 2 points and taking a Fatigue Point. The two grunts closed to Jihad, and one attacked killing herself with a roll of 3 to Jihad's roll. She took 15 points and went right out.

The slaughter Continues:

On this round, Jihad smashed the two weapon fighting Indian, and maimed the Contrary, ealving him with a 3 point Fatigue Penalty ...make that Bonus. The second grunt accomplished nothing, and the Coup Stick Centaur attacked, pouring his extra 2 actions (with the spell quickening him, he was up to 3 actions) into a +4 Bonus. He was able to do 3 points of damage. With his benefits, the Contrary actually had a chance of hurting Jihad, but the roll wasn't there.

Calling the Fat Lady:

The Contrary goes down, and no he can't convert that into a benefit, and Jihad goes to work on the Centaur. I have btw had a missile character miss her all along, which he does again. Every remaining character on my side must roll a morale check. They all succeed. The Coup Stick Centaur has a chance to hurt Jihad, but fails. The remaining Grunt does nothing but enable the possibility of a Lethality bonus (i.e. a bonus to dmage that applies AFTER a successful hit is determined). It's a wash.

Listen to Her Sing:

The Centaur goes down, and the only remaining character is the archer (who also has a spear head on his bow ...the mini is inspired by an old anthropological description of an Assiniboine Warrior) and of course the grunt. We play it out, and when the archer spearman goes down, I surrender.

It was maybe 15 minutes long.

Moral to the story:

The differece between the Uber-Character and the set of standard characters wasn't too big, but it didn't need to be. Both Chris and I could envision possibilities, but none quite added up to a possible reversal. I had botched a possible flanking maneuver that could have given me 1 extra point of damage. Had it not been for the amazingly poor roll, the first grunt would have lived for 1 more round, necessitating at least 1 extra attack from Jihad. There were several attacks which could have yielded a point or 2 of damage against her, but they just didn't. Even with a Fatigue Penalty of 1 or 2, though, she would have continued to will the remaining dice rolls. So, it was difficult to avoid the conclusion that Chris had won the game when he first chose a 7 template character. This was not what we had in mind with the possibility of Templates. The idea was to create a measure of flexibility, so a player could transform a slow character into a fast one or a melee fighter into a spell caster, etc., as I had done. It was intended to create flexibility without producing the possibility of fielding a Godzilla. So, Chris' experiment was important. Obviously, we had to make at least 1 more revision in the game (a conclusion which made me grit my teeth as we were already working on the layout for this version).

Options:

1) Reduce the number of Bonus Points from 3 to 2. As Bonus points apply with each template whereas Discretionary Points apply to each character, reducing the former will reduce teh significance of extra templates. Downside, balance issues with Speed (a paragraph I'll skip unless someone asks me), and it's taking something away. On some basic level, more always sounds cooler.

2) Add Discretionary Points (from 5 to 10). Since these apply evenly to every character, in the long run it will adjust the advantage for strong characters slightly downward.

These were the options Chris and I discussed that night. It was all we could think of. In the end, I opted for this instead:

3) Change the bonus for flanking from a 1 point Lethality Bonus (i.e. a bonus to damage that applies only IF the attack is successful) to a +1 to attack and Defence. Characters are flanking whenever they threaten with melee damage (for most this means if they are within 1"). When I go over this in my mind, it woulkd have meant the following. 1 less point of damage to the two weapon fighter on his first batch of damage. The Grunt that killed herself would have lived 1 more round. The Coup Stick Centaur would have ldone 1 more point in damage. If I had done the flanking maneuvre better, this could even have meant 2 more points total on a few rolls. Would I have one, maybe not, but it would have given me a fighting chance.

Advantages:

- Far easier and more elegant than re-assigning 5 more discretionary points to every character we have.
- Far more tactically interesting. This means grunts CAN defeat big guns, but the player still has to arrange his War Party in such a manner as to take advantage of this possibility. And of course crowded characters are easier to hit with magic, so bunching to aid one another presents a trade-off. In the end, I'll take a solution that requires strategy over one that impliments itself any day of the week, so this was the winning consideration.

Whether or not this choice really restored the balance to the game that I was hoping for remains an open question. We haven't tried the 30 point monster since, so I have only my general sense of teh game to go on.

[Brimshack]

Note to self: There is no edit function. Double check befpre you pist ...post.

[Brimshack]

For thos who found the first post too painful, I cleaned it a little...

ETC - The Slaughter

Okay, so this was the last game we ran before posting the online version of ETC at Crunch-Waffle. It was between myself and a friend, Chris. Chris is very familiar with the game, having been active in game testing from an early stage.

The Game

Stats: It is called ETC, and it works roughly like this. Characters have the following Stats: Attack, Defence, Focus (determines all non-combat rolls), Magic (often left at 0), Movement, Speed (determines actions and initiative), and Durability (which is usually 15 points for both Mental and Physical Durability and determines death at 0 Physical Durability or flight at 0 Mental Durability). Characters get 5 discretionary points to spend on Stats and 3 bonus points which we assign to each mini at Crunch-Waffle.  The Discretionary Point cost for Stat Bonuses is progressive. A Stat Bonus of 1 costs 1 Discretionary Point, A Stat Bonus of 2 costs 3 total Discretionary Points, and so on. Bonus points fall outside this, and so they grant characters a permanant edge in the Stat, one which outlasts level gains (which provide aditional Discretionary Points). In addition, each character gets Special Abilities (Minor and Major) such as "Melee Specialist" which provides a +1 to Attack and Defence rolls in Melee (as opposed to missiles or magic). Basic characters get 1 Minor and 1 Major Ability.

Point Costs and Building a War Party: Crunch-Waffle Minis all have pregenerated characters that cost 2 points each toward the total strength for a War Party. We also have an array of about a dozen Templates (Power Boost, Agility Boost, Magic Boost, etc.) that can be used to add power to the characters and give them unexpected abilities. Each template adds 3 more bonus points and 1 more of each type ability, all designated by the template itself. The first template costs 1 extra point, the second for the same character costs 2 more, etc. Also, other people's minis can be used as Grunts in the game. Grunts cost 1 point and come with 5 discretionary points (no bonus points) and only 1 minor ability, no major. You can add templates to a Grunt to if you want, but they are always a little weaker than basic characters.

Die Rolls: All die rolls are 3d6 with all attacks rolled as opposing checks. A Balance in Favor of Attack yields damage to the defender. A Balance in favor of Defence can yield damage to the attacker (Mental Damage for spells and Physical Damage when Loked in Melee Combat), but Focus is used as Damage Reduction in such cases. Locked in Combat means any time a character is in range for melee attack either by or against an opponent when it is first activated during the course of a turn. It's worth noting that Durability is divided into 5 slots of 1 point, 2 points, 3, 4, and 5. These are crossed off from the largest to the smallest. As each slot is crossed off (either Mental or Physical Durability), the character incurs a Fatigue Penalty of -1 on all rolls. This is cumulative and between Mental and Physical damage a character can rack up quite a few penalties when they are on the verge of dying.

Pregame: Chris arrived and we talked. I went over changes since the last version of the game with him and we decided on a 30 point War Party. We were pretty confident in the overall structure of the game at that point, and this was probably the first game we had decided to just play for the sake of playing. I chose the Turtle Island Confederacy, which meant I would be fielding Native American characters. At least one character, the Contrary, would actually grow more powerful as he was hurt (because his Major Ability turns Fatigue Penalties into Bonuses ...he's a Contrary). I had 1 decent missile character and a Two Handed Fighter who would get bonuses when Locked in Combat. I took the strongest of my characters, a Coup Stick wielding Centaur, and added the Magic Boost template to him so I would have at least one spell caster. I added a Suicide Warrior and 2 grunts (old Partha Indians) Chris fiddled and plotted, and I think he had a whole army planned. Then he noticed that 7 templates made for a 30 point character. He promptly chose Jihad, the Fiendish Celestial who has 3 templates to begin with (Avian, Holy, Unholy) and added 4 more. Note that this means she had 24 total bonus points in addition to the 5 discretionary points. Most of her stats were near 10 in a game where a 3 point difference is usually enough and the average character has 4 or 5 bonus points in their best Stat. This was cool, because we had never quite tested the upper limits of Template additions. The cost gets prohibitive, but with enough points a character could in theory bury the bonuses of other characters entirely. So we were both curious to see what would happen. So, it was 5 standard characters and 2 Grunts versus 1 uberfrau, the flying angel-devil from Hell, ...Heaven, ...something like that.

The Game:

Opening Move - Out Like Mike, Make that Michelle Tyson:

Jihad flew directly at my characters. She had a Speed of 4 after all her templates whereas my fastest characters had a speed of 2. That meant she went first no matter what and had 4 actions each round. Mine had 2 at best. She flew right into my Suicide Warrior before he had a chance to stake himself to the ground and she flattened him with one hit. Then she stepped up to the two-weapon fighting character and attacked him doing 4 points of damage. Now each successive die roll takes a penalty of -2, hence the low damage on her second attack. The two-weapon fighter did not yet suffer Fatigue Penalties, but he wouldn't last long once she got going. In response, my Coup Stick Centaur cast a spell enabling him to move faster on the following round. The two-weapon fighting character made one attack pouring his extra action into a 2 point bonus (also a viable option). He succeeded in damaging himself for 2 points and thus taking a Fatigue Point on successive rounds. The two grunts closed to Jihad, and one attacked killing herself with a roll of 3 to Jihad's roll total of 18. She took 15 points of damage and went right out.

The slaughter Continues:

On this round, Jihad smashed the two weapon fighting Indian, and maimed the Contrary, leaving him with a 3 point Fatigue Penalty ...make that Bonus. The second grunt accomplished nothing (and was suitably ignored), and the Coup Stick Centaur attacked, pouring his extra 2 actions (with the spell quickening him, he was up to 3 actions) into a +4 Bonus. He was able to do 3 points of damage. With his benefits, the Contrary actually had a chance of hurting Jihad, but the roll wasn't there.

Calling the Fat Lady:

The Contrary goes down, and no he can't convert that into a benefit. Jihad goes to work on the Centaur. I have btw had a missile character attacking Jihad all along, which he does again, to no avail. Every remaining character on my side must roll a morale check, because the casualty count is too high. They all succeed. The Coup Stick Centaur has a chance to hurt Jihad, but fails. The remaining Grunt does nothing but enable the possibility of a Lethality bonus (i.e. a bonus to dmage that applies AFTER a successful hit is determined). Since no-one hits again, it's a wash.

Listen to Her Sing:

The Centaur goes down (splat!) and the only remaining character is the archer (who also has a spear head on his bow ...the mini is inspired by an old anthropological description of an Assiniboine Warrior) and of course the grunt. He tries to break her charge with a free attack, but that does nothing. We play it out, and when the archer/spearman goes down, I surrender.

The whole battle was maybe 15-20 minutes long.

Moral to the story?

The differece between the Uber-Character and the set of standard characters wasn't enormous, but it didn't need to be. Both Chris and I could envision possibilities, but none quite added up to a reversal of the outcome. I had botched a possible flanking maneuver that could have given me 1 extra point of damage, but that wouldn't have resulted in a single point of Fatigue penalty. Had it not been for the amazingly poor roll, the first grunt would have lived for 1 more round, necessitating at least 1 extra attack from Jihad. That could have given the Centaur a chance to do something more, but this too wasn't clear. There were several attacks which could have yielded a point or 2 of damage against her, but they just didn't. Even with a Fatigue Penalty of 1 or 2, though, Jihad would have continued to win the remaining rolls. So, it was difficult to avoid the conclusion that Chris had won the game when he first chose a 7 template character.

This was not what we had in mind with the possibility of Templates. The idea was to create a measure of flexibility, so a player could transform a slow character into a fast one or a melee fighter into a spell caster, etc. (This is what I had done with my Centaur.) The Templates were intended to create flexibility without producing the possibility of fielding a Godzilla. So, Chris' experiment was important. Obviously, we had to make at least 1 more revision in the game (a conclusion which made me grit my teeth as we were already working on the layout for this version).

Options:

1) Reduce the number of Bonus Points from 3 to 2. As Bonus points apply with each template whereas Discretionary Points apply to each character, reducing the former will reduce the significance of extra templates. The downside is balance issues with Speed (a paragraph I'll skip for the moment), and it's taking something away. On some basic level, more always sounds cooler.

2) Add Discretionary Points (from 5 to 10). Since these apply evenly to every character, in the long run it will adjust the advantage for strong characters slightly downward. Disadvante: Lots of work, and we begin to flood the small stat system with more bonus points than it needs. But more sounds cool, so there is a little appeal there.

These were the options Chris and I discussed that night. It was all we could think of untik the following morning. In the end, I opted for this instead:

3) Change the bonus for flanking from a 1 point Lethality Bonus per flanking ally (i.e. a bonus to damage that applies only IF the attack is successful) to a +1 to attack and Defence. Characters are flanking whenever they threaten the same enemy with melee damage (for most this means if they are within 1"). So, the main difference in this change is that it adds to the chance to succeed on an attack in the first place rather than simply the damage done when an attack scores. It also adds to Defence which would be helpful as well.

When I go over this in my mind, it would have meant the following:

- At least 1 point less damage to the two weapon fighter on his first batch of damage.
- The Grunt that killed herself would definitely have lived 1 more round.
- The Coup Stick Centaur would have done 1 more point in damage.
- If I had done the flanking maneuvre better, this could even have meant 2-3 more points total difference on several rolls during the game.

Would I have won? Maybe not, but it would have given me a fighting chance.

Advantages:

- Far easier and more elegant than re-assigning 5 more discretionary points to the Quickstart version of every character we have.
- Far more tactically interesting. This means grunts CAN defeat big guns, but the player still has to arrange his War Party in such a manner as to take advantage of this possibility. And of course crowded characters are easier to hit with area-of-effect magic, so bunching to aid one another presents a trade-off. In the end, I'll take a solution that requires strategy over one that impliments itself any day of the week, so this was the winning consideration.

Whether or not this choice really restored the balance to the game that I was hoping for remains an open question. We haven't tried the 30 point monster since, so I have only my general sense of the game to go on.

[Callan S.]

Perhaps don't change anything? I mean, you learnt that a certain set up is a winner - why not make that part of the rules? That if after play its agreed that a certain combo is 'the win', its written down on a page with the name of the person who found it, and it can't be used again. As people discover new ways of doing it, they get their name added to the sheet (it's kind of a sheet of pride) and that combo is eliminated.

That's assuming people want to play again. Some people play chess or monopoly and don't feel like playing it again, which is fine. Are you trying to get things balanced because its not fine to play once then never return? For example, do you have it in mind that a series of sessions should be played, not just one (ie, that series is experiencing the game - you don't experience it in one session - it has to be a campaign)?

[Brimshack]

Thank you for the input Callan,

Yes, we definitely would like people to try the game more than once, not simply because there are some interesting features at the campaign level, but because there are enough tactical options to explore a variety of approaches. If we've done it right, there should be plenty to try from one game to the next.

I do like the idea of a list of disallowed auto-wins, but I think we'll do that after we've run out of options. That is a really neat idea, and I think we will use it once we go to print.