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Messages - fuseboy

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31
The Regiment / XP for failing to help someone in trouble
« on: January 10, 2013, 11:49:31 PM »
Do you get two xp for failing to help someone in trouble?  That seems like too much for one roll.

32
The Regiment / Re: 2.1 Comments/questions
« on: December 07, 2012, 06:29:45 PM »
Fantastic, thanks very much.

33
The Regiment / Re: Acquiring and Losing Equipment
« on: December 07, 2012, 09:53:16 AM »
Thanks very much for your very thorough response, Paul!

34
The Regiment / Re: 2.1 Comments/questions
« on: December 07, 2012, 12:55:49 AM »
Some more questions from tonight's game!

1. On the unit sheet, what are 'Supply' and 'Current Surplus'.  Is Supply the maximum 'current surplus'?  Most of the moves imply that surplus is an amount of supply, though it can also include intel.

2. What happens to heavy weapons obtained by the soldier's at the end of the session?  Reclaimed by the quarter master?  Does this still hold if a single mission spans multiple sessions and/or there's no quartermaster (e.g. as in behind-enemy-lines actions)?

3. During BWCon Bandit Razor, there were times when you applied wounds to multiple enemies (e.g. I rolled 2W and that killed three people).  I'm looking for guidance around when to do it.

It seems pretty clear that a moment-by-moment-scale Attack with a semiautomatic or nonspraying spray weapon will hurt at most one person.

Similarly, if one guy assaults a trio in a machine gun nest, but doesn't spray, he might win the assault and drive them off, but he's only going to hurt at most one enemy.  (Or does the slightly more zoomed-out aspect of Assault mean that the GM is free to wound several enemies?)

Having teammates in a squad action also seems relevant.  If five guys assault with battle rifles assault a trio of enemies, only one person rolls damage (e.g. 3d direct), but it seems appropriate to apply that damage to multiple enemies given that there are five shooters.

When autofire weapons fire without spending extra gear, do they wound a small group, like a spraying weapon?  Or are they no better than semis in this mode?

4. We were unclear on the specifics of medics healing critical injuries.  What I infer is this: When you reach either critical threshold, you get two independently removable conditions - "worsening", and "incapacitated".  Getting someone back into the fight removes "incapacitated" (though they may still die of worsening wounds).  Healing injuries clears boxes, but doesn't remove either condition, I think.  Is this true even if you heal all the boxes?

5. Feedback, not a question - Abstract gear worked really well for me in Bandit Razor.  In our WWII campaign, where we're behind enemy lines, it feels like I'm spending energy rationalizing it.  I feel like I need to consciously decide to hold back gear points, pretending I'm out of ammo with a favored suppressing weapon, so that I 'still have' grenades.  I think it's emphasized by having captured weapons in the mix.  The ammo isn't compatible with my teammates' stuff, so passing gear points around feels like cheating. I have to say I'm tempted to think that just writing '2 grenades', 'German LMG with 4 ammo' as my six gear would be more reflective of how we're playing.

35
The Regiment / Acquiring and Losing Equipment
« on: December 06, 2012, 06:25:45 PM »
Couple of questions from our last session.

1. Our commando's signature weapon ran out of ammo, and we're behind enemy lines (where finding compatible ammo is difficult).  The player was rather attached to it, I gather, and suspect it was a sort of 'playbook entitlement' and that it should continue to work (e.g. in the next session) regardless.

2. Owing to some fast and furious action (on the beach), I found myself burning through four gear in two moves - an assault and a covering fire.  I had been lugging a flamethrower around, and knowing that if I used all my bullets I'd be out of flamer fuel also, I opted to 'be out of bullets'.  Another move with the flamethrower (laying waste to a scout car) left me nearly gearless.  Somehow we wound up with the ruling that you can only donate 'gear points' during a resupply move, though my impression was that it was a little more flexible than that.

a. How does that work, can you just toss someone abstract gear?

b. How do you handle picking up enemy weapons that have been narrated into the game?  Can you just grab the enemy's machine pistol, or do you need to scrounge?

Now that I ask, I suspect the right way is to roll to scrounge. On a miss the weapon might be broken, unless that was far fetched (e.g. there were a half dozen lying around), in which case it might just take a long time.

36
The Regiment / Re: Don't understand the damage...
« on: November 28, 2012, 04:52:51 PM »
Let's say you shoot at someone using your carbine.  You're at close range (the optimal range for the carbine) and there's no cover or concealment for your target.

The carbine's damage is 3d.  The GM decides if your volume of fire is Incidental, Direct, or Concentrated fire.

(Incidental would be the case if you're suppressed, taking a quick snap shot without properly aiming, running, etc.  Concentrated is if you're really sending a hail of fire in their direction - such as via the Autofire tag, if you have friends shooting along with you, or perhaps if there's really no way to avoid you, like they're trapped in a narrow alleyway that you have clear line of sight into.)

Let's say the GM decides the volume of fire is Direct.  You roll your three dice and get (say) 2, 4 and 6.  Looking across the middle (Direct) row of the damage table, this produces S, W and W.  Your target takes one Stress and two Wounds.

37
The Regiment / Re: Questions and feedback on a 2.0 game run at IndieCon
« on: November 28, 2012, 04:12:17 PM »
The sniper has a "one shot, one kill" move that's normally the right move for trying to snipe individual targets.

Weapons with the 'ordnance' tag use gear every time you attack with them, regardless of what move is used - even if no move is used and you just shoot it at a tree, presumably.  None of the sniper's weapons have this tag, so they only use Gear when you're using one of the more sustained combat moves: Assault or Covering Fire.

The choice of move seems to have a lot of latitude. When I played with John, I was playing a special forces Operator.  I was infiltrating a building, and came across a surprised enemy with an AK-47 - John let me shoot and kill him without even rolling damage.

As a special forces operator, he figured I was trained for this precise thing, my gun was at the ready, my target was surprised and had no cover, so John just declared my target down.

Moments later, I was engaged in a firefight with a guy who was up some stairs.  Here, the outcome was much less certain - the target was responding to the sound of my weapon, had his weapon at the ready, and there was some distance between us to make misses far more likely.  John declared that this was an Attack: we were both just trying to kill one another; both of us just went straight to rolling damage (3D6 Direct, I think).

If, on the other hand, there had been some way for me to get up to the second level, I had thrown a smoke grenade, there was some more interesting tactical element to the gunfight, or I was perhaps trying to drive him back, John might have ruled it was an Assault.  I'd have rolled 2D6 to see how the combat went on top of us rolling damage, and spend Gear.

If, instead, I had been firing steady bursts to prevent the enemy on the second level from drawing a clear bead on me (or my companions), it would have been Covering Fire, potentially allowing a teammate to flank him while he's hiding from my hail of fire.

38
The Regiment / Re: Questions and feedback on a 2.0 game run at IndieCon
« on: November 26, 2012, 12:32:32 PM »
I'll try my hand at some of these.

1. The sniper rifle doesn't use gear every time it fires, no.  (Weapons with the "ordinance" tag do.)  You do use up gear if you Assault or provide Covering Fire, however, since these assume you're doing quite a bit of shooting.

2. Yes, the enemy can use autofire and spray, etc.  Some weapons are defined by their tags, like the flamethrower.  I wouldn't bother recording enemy gear either, instead just handling it approximately.  

3. Attack is how you resolve weapon fire, and it's an integral part of Assault and Covering Fire.  You can also use it directly, which makes sense if you're not trying to gain a tactical advantage, claim ground (both of which suggest Assault), and you're not wasting ammo to suppress the enemy (suggesting Covering fire).

Attack doesn't need to be reciprocal, it's entirely up to the GM, based on what's been established.  If you're trading fire with enemies in the next building, that might be a mutual Attack.  If, however, you're shooting at an unsuspecting target, or a target that's concentrating on something else, then it could be entirely one-sided.

4. We used Impose Your Will to interrogate a prisoner, for sure.  Also, it's perfect for giving orders to reluctant NPC allied troops.

39
The Regiment / Re: 2.1 Comments/questions
« on: November 23, 2012, 02:54:05 PM »
at the Direct Fire level, whatever you roll does 1S or 1W, so .. you can just mark off a number of circles equal to the number of dice you WOULD have rolled

Ah hah, right.

40
The Regiment / Six Players
« on: November 23, 2012, 10:42:24 AM »
First of all, hats off to our first-time GM (of anything, ever) Stephen for doing a great job of the chaos!

Seems to me that one of the tricks with six players is managing the 'scale' of everyone's actions - I'll explain.

When it's just three players, it's easy to include most of the 'party' in actions.  Somebody can lay down covering fire, another assaults.  If someone helps either of those two, everybody's rolled dice, even if it's a very tactically simple situation (e.g. your squad vs. their squad).

When you have bigger parties, having the commando or section-8 make an assault roll for the whole shebang seems unsatisfying, so it seems you need to find a way to dole out the action.

Two routes occur to me:

1. Create tactically interesting engagements where the party is tempted to split up to pursue separate, supporting objectives.  We had such a battle where we split into three groups to pincer a german squad car/roadblock/LMG setup that was nestled in some hedgerows.

Here, each group can be free to change their private sub-battlefield quite a bit with (say) Assault (and using naked 'Attack' very little), since a one-roll victory only carries the day for that sub-battle.

2. If you somehow skip this and wind up with an undifferentiated battlefield and/or mob of enemies, "zoom in" a bit.

We were in this situation when we stumbled through a hedge to find ourselves in an orchard, unexpectedly outnumbered by a surprised-looking German section eating at a field kitchen.

Several PCs' shooting actions might just be direct attacks against single enemies, saving the Assault for the explicit heroic attempt by the commando or section-8 to claim some ground, toss a grenade at the kitchen's parafin cannisters, etc.


It also occurs to me that it's sometimes worth polling a few players to see what they're doing to see how to parcel the action into moves.

41
The Regiment / Re: 2.1 Comments/questions
« on: November 23, 2012, 09:13:31 AM »
One correction: Help can't clear the critical condition. Look at the text again, it can temporarily stabilize

Ah, right you are.

A single soldier against a squad is not unit on unit battle, so I wouldn't treat the squad as a 3-hit group.

Cool.

the GM treated the battle moves "as alternatives." Can you elaborate on that?

Sure - when we were shooting, Stephen (the GM) was reluctant to have us roll damage during an Assault, as if Assault and Attack were alternate moves that characterized different types of fighting (or fighting intents).  From our Bandit Razor game at BW Con, I recalled that you'd roll damage dice pretty much any time lead was in the air, but his interpretation looks surprisingly reasonable from the written text (though it led to assaults and particularly covering fire as feeling strangely inconclusive, and it stops you using weapon tags during assaults and covering fire).

Makes me wonder if a slightly different trigger phrase for Attack would be helpful, something like, "Whenever weapons are used against enemies," or something.  Right now, the Attack and Assault trigger phrases are at the same 'level'.  (Of course the full text will no doubt make this obvious.)

42
The Regiment / Re: 2.1 Comments/questions
« on: November 23, 2012, 01:49:31 AM »
Ah, one last one.  Our GM noticed that you need to be very careful when treating a group of enemy NPCs as a single, 3-damage unit.

A medic who had inherited a flamethrower was attacking an enemy section more or less on his own.  The GM noticed that even after reducing the medic's VOF down twice (movement, force parity), 3d incidental would, on average, do a couple of stress and knock out the whole enemy unit.  (This is before considering the flamer's terror/area/burn tags - as if he'd used a single grenade or something.)

In other words, grouping NPCs and giving the whole group only 2/3 damage points is a big deal, and is probably the right course of action when attacked by groups with similarly aggregated hit points.


- What does this line mean: "Apply both stress and wounds inflicted
to the strength damage track (so there’s no need to roll damage when
NPCs take direct fire, unless you need the added detail)."

I get that if you do 2S, W to an NPC unit, it just takes '3 damage'.  But why don't you need to roll?  (Is this because the GM is just converting the narrative in to damage points?)

43
The Regiment / Re: 2.1 Comments/questions
« on: November 23, 2012, 01:32:38 AM »
Very helpful answer, thank you Paul.

- So it seems that 'help' runs the gamut of mundane assistance to people who could just use a little help from a friend, to running to save a buddy whose number is just about up.

- re: HEAT - cool.  Perhaps it should say +2d vs. armored targets instead of +2AP?

Bit of feedback after tonight's game:

Our GM (who did an excellent job coming in totally cold) interpreted Attack, Assault, and Covering Fire more or less as alternatives, and was reluctant to have us roll damage during assaults.

My sense, however, is that Assault and Covering Fire generally lead directly to Attack (as a byproduct).  I think this is what's meant by 'hammer the enemy with your weapon', but it could be clearer.

Anyways, great stuff!

44
The Regiment / 2.1 Comments/questions
« on: November 22, 2012, 06:36:56 PM »
In advance of playing tonight, some questions and comments:

* Under recovery/healing, what does 'get worse' mean?  Is this purely narrative, or does it mean boxes get progressively crossed off?

* NPC Action - might be good to say: (contrast w/ unit action)

* Help: the "If you ignore" rule - I assume this is a broader rule than merely refusing to use the help+bond roll.  For example, if someone's trapped across the street and it requires you to expose yourself to enemy fire, this isn't a "Help move" situation, but I think it should be stressing.  Maybe what I'm saying is that refusing help seems like a different move.

* Help: clearing a condition.. even 'Critical'? Even non-medics?

* HEAT: What does +2AP mean?  Is this a bonus to the die roll, or is it about neutralizing armor?  (I can't seem to find the armor rules, that might answer it.)

* I took 'ex' (e.g. under mortar) for Expend, which confused me.  Maybe 'ext' is a better short form for extreme?

* Critical - it doesn't seem to say, but it seems like the implication is that being critical means you can't do much (other than cry for help maybe, and Push Past it).

* Crew: under-crewed weapons do less damage, but are just as effective in assaults (I think that's the implication of -1d)

* Flamethrowers are 'messy' AND 'area'. Is this right?

* GM moves: Thought of two that seem rife in what I've been reading lately:  Shot at by friendlies; Uncertainty whether those guys are friend or foe.

* Well-armed units - what does the 'when you attack' mean.  Is that when the players attack along with their unit?  (It seems weird for a well-armed unit, for example, to boost an individual's attack.)  Or does it mean you're so flush with ammo everyone can go bananas?

* Officer's logistics move: When a unit 'has surplus' does this mean they're restored to the default of 3 supply?

Thanks!

45
The Regiment / Fog of War
« on: November 09, 2012, 12:50:53 PM »
I was thinking about the Assess move, and it occurred to me that the fog of war of th tactical environment was particularly dense in the 20th century.  In previous eras, you could stand in your formation and look around the battlefield.  But in WWII, firepower was so deadly that to stand up and have a gander puts you at serious risk of being brained by a sniper, or riddled by MG bullets.

In Tonight We Die as Men, there's an account of paratroopers fighting just inland of Normandy against stiff German resistance and it takes them several hours of enduring very heavy fire before they realize that the supporting unit on their flank is no longer there and that they're totally exposed.

Toward the end of the 20th century and into the 21st, radios and GPS become a lot more portable so that while the battlefield might still be horribly messy, more information is available about how units are doing.  (Though I don't want to overstate this.)

I'd love to hear more informed thoughts!

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