[Kpachoapmee / Krasnoarmeets] Enemy at the Ronnies Gates

[Halzebier]

Hi there!

I've been holding off on posting regarding the November Ronnies because "[The Ecology of the Mud Dragon] First Impressions" (http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=17576.0) didn't garner many responses and I feared I may have started discussion too early.

Now that John L has started in on "[The Saint's Golem vs. The Devil's Dragon] comments on November Ronnies entry" (http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=17627.0), it's open season on the November Ronnies entries and nothing's holding me back as I just have to write about Kpachoapmee (or Krasnoarmeets?).

It's an "RPG/minis hybrid" by James Holloway and centers "on the unglamorous southern flank of the Battle of Stalingrad in the autumn of 1943". You can check it out here: http://www.1km1kt.net/rpg/Kpachoapmee.php*

*How the heck do you hide links behind other words? That would sure clean up my posts.

Title

I found the title just confusing, but the mini-summary quoted above made me click on it amidst all the other links to 24 RPGs on the 1km1kt site.

Use of Minis

I like James' suggestion to use the miniatures' body postures as inspiration for character traits.

I love the idea of putting them on a board and thus physically representing the deep, deep shit - or mud, as it were - they find themselves in. It's probably no surprise, but I have a sizeable collection of miniatures and springing them on my players has gotten lots of Ooohs! and Aaahs! over the years, particularly when their placement indicates a difficult challenge (e.g. when I place lots and lots of minis on the battlemat to surround the characters or place them next to the characters because they have just teleported in).

What surprised and excited me most about James' design is this concept:

The idea behind a Krasnoarmeets mission is that any dramatic tension comes from tactical
factors -- that is, from the need to balance risk and reward, personal safety and the safety
of one's comrades, etc. The board serves to place these factors literally at the center of
play, and sets the idiom of the game as a visual and tactile one. This is not a tactical
simulator, but the tactical questions help to facilitate the overall experience and the board
helps to facilitate the tactical problems. Hopefully.

So far, the rules' tactical depth looks just about right to me (with perhaps a tad too many modifiers). In my opinion, the tactical game should provide tension and a few, good options, but not take over the rest of the game. To that end, doing away with equipment choices and boiling tactics down to the essential stuff is probably the right way to go.

(I like the rules for attacking in earnest and especially shooting because from the look of them, they should create the kind of gritty, drawn-out firefights the source material suggests -- and require characters to assist each other!)

Putting characters you care about at risk and making hard decisions on whether to cut and run or help another player's PC can be really exciting. In my experience, though, either people care too much about the characters (usually because they have long-term plans for them) or not enough (because they lack goals and relationships the player is interested in). I haven't really got much of substance to say here, except that I'm hoping that here's a game that could facilitate just the right (for me, anyway) kind of balance (and the right player expectations).

Misc

I like the game's color, such as James' explanation of what soldiers did with their gasmasks when vodka rations weren't forthcoming...

Regards,

Hal

[Jared A. Sorensen]

So far, this is my favorite game of the bunch, hands-down. Plus it uses the Cyrillic alphabet in the title.

[Gregor Hutton]

I agree with Jared. I read it quickly before I went to work this morning and it really grabbed me. I'll pick this one to give detailed feedback on later.

Initial thoughts are that I found it easy to read, I liked the clear labelling of what wasn't covered in the text, and the idea of painting figures together to create your characters. I have buckets of plastic 1/72 scale German and Russian figures from my youth at my parents house -- something to recover when I visit for Christmas for sure! (Also, the WH40K Imperial Guard figures could do as well, there were some excellent Russian-style figures done there.)

I also really liked the qualities given to the characters, which remind me very much of the abstract qualities given to troops in wargames, as opposed to the common approach that most RPGs take (contrast describing someone's Dex, Str, Con, App, Int, etc. with describing their Awareness, Agression, Steadiness and Motivation).

The avoidance of gun was good too. It is focused on about as much as a peg-less tent is. All good.

More detailed and specific feedback will probably follow this weekend.

[James Holloway]

Hey, thanks for the kind words.

I didn't know anything about the 1km1kt system, so I didn't realize that the title would display that way. I also feel like a bonehead for not including an explanation of the title. I was sure I had used the term somewhere in the game, but now that I look through it I don't think I did.

So, the Soviet Army is the Raboche-Krest'yanskaya Krasnaya Armiya: the Workers and Peasants' Red Army. So a Krasnoarmeets is a Krasno - Arme - ets, that is, a person of the Red Army, a soldier. A veteran Krasnoarmeets is a frontovik, a front-dweller, front-guy. It came out Kpachoapmee because these are the Latin characters that best represent the Cyrillic characters; apparently the character for "ts," not having an equivalent, just got dropped.

Gregor has the origin of the traits spot on; they're inspired by the way things are done in a lot of tabletop wargames. The designs of Chris Peers (At Close Quarters, A Good Day to Die, etc.) were particularly influential. I also bootjacked the idea of fire being dangerous depending on the abilities of the target rather than the shooter from some game or other (Flames of War, maybe? Battlefront? I just don't know), although here it's applied at a much smaller scale.

Here's my question for you guys: based on the text, do you have a clear idea in your mind of how a session of the game, and by extension a group of sessions, would go? I am not at all sure if I provided enough support for this.

I'm also not sure that the soldiers themselves are sufficiently well-developed in terms of their personalities that the danger to them is particularly compelling. That's what all that life-in-the-trenches color is there for; to humanize them, but I think it's important for them to be human beings in a specific way rather than just "life of a Red Army soldier." It needs to be "life of my Red Army soldier." But then I would really enjoy the idea of creating this character, with a family, and aspirations, and so on, and then putting a Romanian MG round in his dome at the start of the game. I'm weird.

Too many modifiers: yes, yes, yes. Or too many of not the right kind.

Overall, though, I'm happy. I wrote "even if it blows, I wrote a game." And I do want to come back to it and try playing it.

[komradebob]

James:
This is an excellent little minis game!
I like the way you've focused this game. I see way too many minis games that try to fit everything and the kitchen sink into them.

I also like the way you've moved away from gun-modelling and focused on the individual soldiers and their connections. It very much seems to have the feel of a war movie.

I can't wait to see what the final version of this game, hopefully with a full-blown campaign as you suggets towards the end, looks like.

[Gregor Hutton]

I'm also not sure that the soldiers themselves are sufficiently well-developed in terms of their personalities that the danger to them is particularly compelling.

Garghh, I just spent some time painting that figure and giving him a name and close buddies, etc. Hell, of course I'm going to have investment in keeping that little bastard alive!

[James Holloway]

I'm also not sure that the soldiers themselves are sufficiently well-developed in terms of their personalities that the danger to them is particularly compelling.

Garghh, I just spent some time painting that figure and giving him a name and close buddies, etc. Hell, of course I'm going to have investment in keeping that little bastard alive!

That was the idea, yes, to develop a connection through physical, almost ritual acts. I do hope it works out that way in play.

[Kirk Mitchell]

I hate always being the guy who says "Yeah, I'll read it in a little while and get back to you", so to cover this up, I'll tell you how to do hyperlinks. Type a word. Highlight that word and click the "Insert hyperlink" button that is third from the left on the second row. The one with the little world on it. After the [url, type ="http://the site you want to link to.com" and close it with a ]. It should look something like:

[ url = "http://www.google.com ]word[ / url ]

but without the spaces. That is how you hyperlink. Also, hit preview before you post it, so that you know whether it worked or not.

Luck,
Kirk

[TonyPace]

I also like this one a lot, although I don't know just how wargamish it would turn out to be in play.

Yes, I am sure that you would be invested in your miniature's safety, as they are your representation in the setting, but it's called pawn stance for a reason. You do what's best for your character, but that doesn't mean you identify with them.

That said, there's no reason this couldn't be a superb small unit tactics wargame with role-playing elements, and I think there's a real desire for that in the market. I can totally see my gaming group totally falling for such a thing - maybe even this game. There's some good discussion about this on the OgreCave podcast.

I also thing that the typical 'roll-to-hit' + morale tests + movement + equipment rules in 'lite' wargames like Warhammer and  WarMachine that I'm familar with has obvious limitations not only for role-players with peripheral interests in minis and such but also to serious wargamers who may be interested in tactical conflict but aren't impressed by the typical offerings, who must realize that individual motivations are a crucial part of what makes war an exciting competition.

But I suppose this sort of game would blow right over the people who really like those games since a lot of their focus is on the cool minis and the gear - not the tactics or the feel of battle.

There's a lot more to be said about the practicalities, design, and marketing of skirmish RPGs, but I'll save it for another thread.

Overall I think this is close to the right balance for me and mine, although I agree that some of the modifiers aren't quite right.

The Picky Stuff

I found it a bit odd that there was no way you could be harmed by anything other than a direct attack. I can see how it would make firefights more drawn out and bloody, but I worry that in play the system might lead to a failure paralysis spiral.

The cumulative modifiers also got to me a bit - does a hard emplacement total to be a +5 modifier from both hard cover and prepared position?

[James Holloway]

I found it a bit odd that there was no way you could be harmed by anything other than a direct attack. I can see how it would make firefights more drawn out and bloody, but I worry that in play the system might lead to a failure paralysis spiral.

The cumulative modifiers also got to me a bit - does a hard emplacement total to be a +5 modifier from both hard cover and prepared position?

Yeah, modifiers need to be reworked a lot. They were written in the middle of the process, and by the end, the rules they were meant to interact with had been substantially altered but they hadn't.

As for not being harmed by unaimed fire -- originally there was a teeny outside chance that you could get hit. I forget what the deal was, but it basically amounted to troops in the open with low Steadiness who rolled shitty dice being able to be hit. But the chance of it was so unlikely that I figured what the hell. The way I see it, a group will lay down suppressing fire on a target until it's pinned, and then the members of the group with high Aggression will start trying to pick off individual troops with direct attacks. The only thing that needs to be added is that moving into or out of an area under fire should be risky.

The real risk from unaimed fire is that it causes Stress to get pinned, and Stress can lead you to do something that will get you shot, either by the enemy or when you get back to the Base.

I need to add a section on how the Red Army views combat fatigue (it's called "cowardice," and it's a shooting offense). Maybe I did already.

Tony, you also talk about the pawn thing -- like, the miniature delivers a layer of detachment and insulation between the player and the character, and makes "pawn" play more likely, robbing the game of some of its impact. This is exactly what I'm worried about, too, and I added some of the player-figure identification stuff in order to counter this, but it will probably still happen. I have to either get comfortable with this or do something about it. I'm just not sure what.

[TonyPace]

Only you can really decide where to take it, but I can tell you that I really believe that there's a real market for a character driven skirmish RPG. And the personality driven mechanics are just as important there.

To take one example, D&D Miniatures may be a decent commercial success, but to me it's a failure on every level, because tactically, it's too slow and as a role-playing system the SiS elements of D&D like unbounded problem solving are eliminated. And what's left are your combat moves and your magic and your gear and your will save and movement rate. Which is the same as warhammer, only at about 1/4 speed.

To put it a different way, I was just reading an essay on John Kim's site about personality mechanics. The gist of what I took from it was that personality mechanics can be very useful in a game, but they don't necessarily encourage acting out those traits per se. They can do lots of other things, like signal to the GM what you're interested in seeing in the game, or regulate experience, or add an interesting tactical dimension. And I think your system has strong potential to do the last one in a way that addresses the needs of both role-players and serious wargamers looking for a fairly light skirmish level game.

[contracycle]

Its very interesting... but what strikes me is that the real driver of play is the campaign, and so I would expect to see more detail on mission design.

Your mechanics do seem to capture certain elements of the setting and situation, so I can see the play of the skirmish wargame part will likely be quite satisfying.  But without a strongly developed mission structure, I think its likely that over time the pawn funciton of the character will beceom more and more enforced, and the other concerns like stress will be steadily stripped of significance.

For example, unless there is a "mission" in rear areas, the effects of stress are only significant in terms of combat and survivability - which might likely lead to "psychotic sociopath" syndrome as observed in other games.  That may be no bad thing in and of itself but if you never get to exhibit and express this trauma, has it any relevance?

I think some system of mission selection and design would be required to reinforce the RPG mode of play, and would also enhance replayability.

[James Holloway]

For example, unless there is a "mission" in rear areas, the effects of stress are only significant in terms of combat and survivability - which might likely lead to "psychotic sociopath" syndrome as observed in other games.  That may be no bad thing in and of itself but if you never get to exhibit and express this trauma, has it any relevance?

I think some system of mission selection and design would be required to reinforce the RPG mode of play, and would also enhance replayability.

Hmmm. Yeah, definitely. OK. Something to think on.

[Halzebier]

I'll second what's been said about the attributes (motivation, steadiness etc.). I think it's really nifty that they function both as personality mechanics (in a loose sense) and as combat mechanics.

(This reminds me of some mangas (and manga RPGs), where one's chances in a fight are less about skill and more about rage, pent-up hate, relationships and so on. If you're angry enough, you will succeed. =)

Also, it really adds to the realism. In many traditional RPGs, combatants move and act with machine-like precision and totally disregard psychological factors. That is one of the reasons why fights in these games are so damn short. If you use the rules for large-scale warfare, you often have what should be a three-hour engagement of two armies finished in 20 rounds (however long those are).

(Incidentally, the first-person sequence at the end of the "Doom" movie is a near-perfect rendition of what such combat would/should look like. Way cool, but not realistic.)

Hence, I'd consider a "failure paralysis spiral" as mentioned by another poster a definite plus (as long as it doesn't paralyse the players as opposed to the characters).

Regards,

Hal
--
P.S.: Thanks for taking the time to give me instructions on inserting hyperlinks, Kirk!!

[komradebob]

I'll add a little weight to what others have said. This game looks really good in campaign potential. It might be interesting to see you turn the next part of your effort to this aspect of the game and let considerations about modifiers and whatnot wait.

You mentioned that you have some very real ideas where you want this campaign to go- Basically we get to know these characters, watch them develop, and then basically get to watch them die when the Big Push comes. Which is cool. It's suitably tragic, very Eastern Front.

Is there a way to tie the accumulation of experience and coping mechanisms into the moving forward of the mission/campaign timeline? Perhaps some mechanic where the death of characters with a certain total value (above starting values) moves the scenarios forward?

I think it could work thematically.