[Story Steps] WWII Campaign - II of III

[Bill Cook]

Session I.

(Though actual play, I thought this post would be better suited to this forum since play concerns an author-created system in development.)

I had a good deal of trepidation prior to last night's session, but it turned out to be pretty wa-hoo fun. I was having (what is for me) that classic twisting of the gut between calling prep done and reserving myself for improvisation.

One thing I didn't like about our first session was the quick exits. I sat around playtesting a shootout for hours, trying to work it out, and began to feel like the system was hopelessly broken. (Concern over lethality with arms fire has always been a psychological bugbear of mine.) And then it occurred to me: why not double capacity to exit? It seemed kind of cheese ball, band-aid fixy, but it tested well.

Another thing that seemed a little off was not having a mechanic for pain. To some degree, I want "taking it on the chin" to be a sound option, but not to the degree of "budgeting blows to your last quarter and then getting serious." Tight margins are prevalent in this system. I like the punch that adds, but it makes pain more like playing chess without the queen where it should be like losing one or two pawns.

So now that I had twice the range, I decided to penalize rolls by the second series of lowering. And it felt about right. There was pain, but it came at the end; so the fear of it kept you on your toes before it hit. Also, the first count goes away while pain persists.

Another little tweak that popped up during playtest inbetween sessions was changing a rule from "may strike to defend" to "may strike to oppose." When group A ran from group B, where B had already fired, they couldn't strike to pursue, even if they shot for shit. With the change, they get to scrap the shot and keep pace.

I tooled around with the group mechanic, also, trying to formalize it. Instead of adding dice equal to Man Advantage, it's now as follows:

Code Select Expand


Ratio Add Dice
----- --------
 2:1       +1
 3:1       +2

So now there's no skip from no bonus dice to two bonus dice. Crowding caps access at 3:1. (There can be exceptions, but that's the default.) Also, significantly, Membership becomes the capacity for exit (as opposed to .. something like D&D hit points). So margin applies to create troop losses, as it should.

Before I drove to Jason's, I sat down at a Taco Bell booth and wrote five complications. (Earlier in the week, I had written one pure exposition scene.) So I released some fears by creating a fresh starting point to interject.

** ** **

While waiting for Cory, I explained some of the changes to Jason, and we revisited how man advantage applies to the newly doubled capacity to exit. I used clear beads to represent the "soft damage" and red for "lasting effects." Unlike skill, equipment or position, man advantage applies sharply to Membership.

e.g. Accept a base pool of three dice. Group A has three men. Group B has ten. Add two dice to B's pool for man advantage. Where B slaughters A, the first three degrees of effect merely approach. The next three penalize the pool and measure losses. Exit at zero.

Where A slaughters B (like black giants battering an unlucky band of Zingarans), the first five degrees approach. The next series causes pain, loses by degree (two men per, in this example) and exits.

I agonized a bit over whether (1) losses surrender base and man advantage or (2) dice are dice. Still not sure, but we went with (2).

** ** **

Cory showed up and Nick, unexpectedly, was also able to make it a little later. There were a number of highlights:

[*]Jackson (Cory) and three others split off from an advance party of 20 to recon the main Jap base and inadvertently mixed their position with an enemy field exercise of 40 men.
[*]Watch alerted  Lt. Saltzer (Jason) to a Jap counterforce passing his flank in the night. The next morning, he pursued with a staggered formation and derailed into a wombat burrow!
[*]Jackson killed two Jap soldiers, knifing one and masking a shot to the other against a monkey hunt, avoiding detection.
[*]Base Commander Gardner ordered Sgt. Zilder off construction duties to lead a group of 10 men and re-establish communication with Saltzer, having had no radio contact for two days.
[*]Saltzer backtracked and picked up the Jap counterforce trail. By mid-day, he realized he was adjacent to the water hole bunker they'd secured last week. The group he followed was headed toward the main base! As he barked orders to his radio op, he heard the popping of gunfire, coming over the horizon.
[*]Jackson's other pair was spotted by two motorbike riders who'd stopped along the trail. They dropped one. The other fled into the jungle as bullets bounced off the parked bikes. The US soldiers pursued. Jackson and his partner, Peter Davis, hauled ass to the spot. Jackson drug the Jap casualty off the trail and plugged the motorbike oil pan with his sock. Shouts and gunfire rang out. Davis returned.
- "They're swarmed."
They rode off.
[*]- "Base command, prepare for enemy fire. We are tracking hostiles approaching your position, over."
- "Zilder, is that you?" Jones voice crackled over the radio. Zilder? What the hell? thought Saltzer. He heard the sound of Comm. Gardner, shouting orders in the background. Saltzer ascertained that Zilder's group was likely pinned down, forward of the base, and ordered his men to hump it up the hill.

They caught the rear of the Jap counterforce and sandwiched their line, giving tremendous relief to Zilder's meager force. Caught in crossfire, the Jap's suffered terribly. Saltzer's men hemmed in their fleeing sides and killed every last surrendering one. Zilder's group, likewise, lay half dead.
[*]Naval Capt. Halloway (Nick) ordered Danny Beard to fly a supply plane to Halmahera and relay Gardner's progress report to Lt. Harker once he returned.
[*]Jackson and Davis passed a jeep of six Jap's. They wheeled about, crazily, and gave chase. Davis was shot to pieces. Jackson dropped a dynamite stick under their tire, but the driver kept it on the road. Turning a corner, over his shoulder, Jackson saw branches flying off a tree and palm leaves disintegrating. Shit! He briefly thought of loosening his satchel charge. Rifle fire rang out, and he crashed to the ground.
[*]Days later, happy US soldiers waved at Beard's approach when suddenly, a group of Jap planes crested the tree line, on course to intercept the supply plane! Men scrambled to the anti-air guns. A fierce air battle ensued, and the US forces got the short of it. All four ground guns were destroyed, and the supply plane was shot out of the sky; but not before Beard air-dropped along the shore and parachuted into the water.
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Cory was a terrific reference for weapons and equipment capabilities, from wombats to radio range to plane rear gunners. We implemented a couple of rules to capture technicalities during the air battle over the base: (1) tanks default to challenging attempts due to incorrect application and (2) a plane's rear gunner may only attack if attacked; this opportunity is inserted as a secondary action. These improvised rulings made the vehicles come alive.

We got into some mechanical issues with splitting groups. An issue that arose from last session was splitting them to perform multiple actions. Well, now that we've got the man advantage bonus ironed out, at least the consequence of that choice is clear. What we learned this session is that you can secure third-party advantage with splits, as an exploitation of turn ordering. The way it works, you can only declare one action per round. And in a way completely opposite of systems like DitV, for example, responses are not free; were you to respond, that would count as your one action.

e.g. Three Jap fighter planes attack the supply plane. But instead of making one roll (with a two-dice bonus), Cory splits them into individuals. After the first attack and Nick (the supply plane's controller's) maneuver, the next two attacks are unopposed.

The value of sub-grouping is so high that I want to keep splits. But third-party advantage should be reserved for a third unit type. So this is what we hashed out: "sub-groups must perform unique actions or have unique targets within a round." An example of GM enforcement follows:

[*]Cory: A fighter shoots the supply plane. [Rolls.]
[*]Nick: I maneuver. [Rolls.]
[*]Cory: Next attack. On the plane again.
[*]Billy: [Interrupts.] Hold on. You can't share targets between group members within the same round. You can either retro group and add the ratio dice to your attack or pick another target.
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The only other elephant in the group mechanic room is how to allot counters of exit progress to sub-groups. Hmm ..

Getting good compliments on how cirumstancial shifts in difficulty promote tactics and express fidelity. The two implementations that are really winning: (1) "after you take cover, difficulty of targeting actions becomes challenging for both sides until you acquire" and (2) "unopposed actions are easy." (The scale is easy = 1, significant = 3, challenging = 5. You have to roll higher than difficulty on one or more die to succeed.) So there's huge motivation to re-acquire your target or oppose some advance, even though it pains you to spend your only action to do it. Gun fights are f-ing confusing and third-party attacks (i.e. ambushes) are devastating. As it should be, IMO.