Hi

going to play tonight, exciting!
Anyway while re-reading the rules I noticed in the description of sword-binding it says:
"When you catch your enemy’s weapon with
your own, you can both judge how your opponent is about to move
and also redirect your opponent’s strength."
IMO this would be clearer if you reversed the order of the words both and and judge as it currently reads, to me, as if both you and your opponent get these advantages.
ie
When you catch your enemy’s weapon with
your own, you can judge *both* how your opponent is about to move
and also redirect your opponent’s strength.

More feedback from the table later.

rgds
rob

Hi there,

some quick comments from a 1st playtest in Ireland. We had a trollslayer (sorry! :-), dragonherald and outlaw heir.

We made the mistake of assuming that the Outlaw heir actually had his rights so he is an Earl opposed to the king (his uncle) and controls a population of 23,000. Oops!

Questions
* Unsure if fortunes should be rolled for at session start, we didn't as the players felt we had enough to go with.
* Should it be suggested to create a genealogy for each player? Eg I wish I had asked each "What is your bloodline?" or somesuch.

Issues
* Harder than AW to zoom in on what the PCs needed in terms of NPCs/resources as we spent so much brain-power on the map (which was mega-fun). This resulted in less NPC triangles . Bad MC Rob!
* Players didn't feel that Take stock/Take bearings had strong enough fictional triggers to tell which one was being used. Instead they started to reverse engineer the move from the question lists depending on which ones they wanted to ask
* My map ended up poor in sites/regions relevant to the Religion of the Empire as the players all allied themselves with the old ways and Christos was the main opposition.
* Need a name-list, pref segregated into 3 cultures based on the religions so you can instantly assume which side someone is on (rightly or wrongly)
EDIT: * Everyone felt that being higher rank was simply better and would prefer more inducements to take low rank

Everyone loved
* XP
* playbooks

Best moment:
When the dragonherald tried to sacrifice a monk of bloodless X, found his skin invulnerable to weapons and the Troll-killer said "does anyone else have a sharp sword of good iron that may spill the blood of any mortal being?". The looks from the other players were hilarious!

rgds
rob

Hi

so I finally ran my long threatened Regiment playtest using a Traveller mercs setting. I used the old amber zone "Soft Bunk or what to do when the Zhos attack" as the setup.
The players unit was hired to train a militia on a sparsely populated world just outside the imperial border. They were experiencing problems with the local wildlife. However after 2 weeks of basic training with the militia, the 5th frontier war breaks out and a Zho colonial force is dropped to pacify the dirtball world. Players are imperial citizens and outside the protection of the normal mercenary "rules of war", the local council issues one last order to resist/harass the invaders and...

To be honest I wasn't super happy with the session we played (approx 4 hours including breaks). Part of this was my fault as I was not really familiar with the alpha2 release but I thought there was no point in running it under alpha 1. Also it is the first time I've actually played and teasing out the differences between AW and the Regiment slowed us down a bit. Another problem is that I'm not used to having a longer slot to play any more and so I didn't aggressively scene frame as I might normally.

None the less:

* Not rolling +battle for attacking seemed wierd
* tactics seemed v important as assessing the situation and manoeuvering seemed to be the most vital moves (to us)
* I really liked the v1 map-making read the sitch moves...
* Too much accounting when units of different sizes meet: we had a company fight a platoon (of which the players formed one squad) and whereas stepping up/down the VoF works fine, what actually happens when those hits strike home seems to not scale ie squad fires at platoon => the platoon has 40 guys => 80 boxes of hits (120 if elite) ... too much. When taking a +/- to VoF due to relative unit sizes your hits should scale ie 4 hits = really bad (because you have already paid the penalty in terms of VoF scaling). If you are forced to actually multiply things out then yeuch.
AW gang combat already does this. Classic Trav Bk4 Mercenary abstract combat system does this via %age losses.
* really liked the sniper moves
* really liked the unit sheet
* operational moves worked ok but still issues with player intent not lining up with list of options eg basic scouting - does it require initiative or tactical position to "get what you want"?

In general the alpha 2 seems a bit more confusing than the alpha 1 - bonds missing, regiment playsheet missing.

I'm sure I messed up the rules, sorry for rambling so much.

Hi Paul

thanks

Re: soldier
- Does that mean multiple players can have this playbook? (ie unlike AW)

rgds
rob