The Regiment: Colonial Marines

I agree that the game is still a notch too far on the complex side. I'm making some streamlining changes based on playing the Aliens version for a few weeks.

Excellent. I think you're right, it just needs a little more streamlining. Not so much that there weren't answers for issues we had in the game, it was more that we didn't always find the right move on the elements of warfare/GM sheet the first time we looked. Almost certainly an effect of just having a lot of options on there.

Just GM'ed the Epsilon mission with three players on Google Hangouts - pretty intense, I love it!

One of the players, who has played The Regiment before, said it was more interesting than a plain war scenario.

Cool, thanks for trying it! Ryan, the author of the mission, wants to know if there were any PC deaths. :)

We're only halfway into the mission, but so far no PC deaths. They all had lucky escapes hitting the deck when the big smart gun swivelled round and started showering them with bullets, as they were climbing down the slope behind the station.

Inside the building complex they've mostly interacted with civilians - one firefight with a elite fire team, where one PC narrowly escaped getting roasted in a narrow corridor by an incinerator, due to a 10+ Rally roll just before charging.

Breaking in through a window from NE (dormitory) they've spread east and south, and have so far located all the civilian targets - Singh unharmed, Porter facehugged, and Dr. Crane found in shock and blood splattered (but unharmed) in a dissection cubicle in the lab area.

The Synth's Technician move has been extremely valuable to infiltrate and control cameras, doors and indeed shutting the big tower gun down.

We left the action when Sgt Clinton's team found a chest burst lab assistant in the south air lock.

Awesome!

We also chose to infiltrate down the slope and go in through the roof. And we got hammered by the sentry guns, too. :)

It seems my platoon were the only ones to go in through the garage and walk into an ambush, huh?

Version 2.5 is up now:

http://mightyatom.blogspot.com/2013/02/the-regiment-colonial-marines-25.html

Version 2.5 is up now:

http://mightyatom.blogspot.com/2013/02/the-regiment-colonial-marines-25.html

I love all the changes.  On Thursday, we discussed more specific wounds, tightening the attack moves, and a bunch of other stuff, and lo, much of it has happened!  Can't wait to give it a shot!

Heh, cool. :) Thanks for trying it out.

The one thing I'm not super fond of is the interaction between arbitrary wound location and the way that wounds stack up to become critical.

It strikes me that one of the nice things about VOF (or random damage in general) is that the GM imposes a plausible level of threat, about which the players can reason (e.g. "Dare I risk that random, unaimed fire to move up a bit further?"), but then dice determine the outcome.  The GM isn't being vindictive if the enemy scores an unlikely hit.

With arbitrary hit location, it seems that the GM is in the position of choosing critical wounds.

Somewhat separately, if people are having to stick out their necks to do battlefield assesses, do you get a lot of early head criticals?

Also, I'm offering $50,000 to whoever can hack John's PVR to queue up some WWII movies. :-)

Hi, liking the changes so far, looking forward to trying them out. As a squad is 13 men though, shouldn't each playbook sheet's Squad // Bonds section show 13 spaces instead of 9?

Couple of wound questions for 2.5.

1. Can you get hurt in an already critically-wounded location?  (e.g. You're critical in the head. Later, getting shot while peeking around cover, you take a W from incidental fire. The head is the obvious spot to take your wound. Ignore it, or perhaps move it to some nearby location, Battletech-style, signifying system shock or further blood loss?)

2. When you miss a Critical+Wounds roll and take further damage, can you choose wounds or stress, or is your further injury of the same type as the critical?

3. For single shot weapons that happen to do multiple wounds (e.g. the railgun, close-range shotgun, bolt-action sniper rifle), seems to me you'd default to both the same box, critting immediately.  (This isn't really a question I guess!)

EDIT:
4. Regarding VOF and force party, if you have a group of players attacking the same enemy squad, do you use both the "Soldier vs. Group" rule and the "PC Team vs. Enemy" rule?  That would seem to make sense.

@Badgers: There's not enough room right now. :)

@fuseboy: General answer to hit locations: There happen to be six, so you can roll randomly if you don't want to assign the hit.

Just peeking your head out probably means you have 2 or 3 cover, so no, not many head crits from that. :)

1. If you take a wound in a place where you already have a crit, make the critical move again, +1 (for the wound you just took).

2. You choose.

3. You could do that. You could say the shot passes through the first location and hits a second.

4. Yep, that's right. Hopefully that works.

Ah yes, thanks John.  Of course, head hits aren't too likely with all that cover.

4. That's cool.  The sense I get is that with the "vs. Group" rule, you're zooming out a bit and imagining the effects of a short battle.

Does this have a peculiar interaction with the 'area' and 'messy' weapon tags?

Autofire and spray seem simple enough - you just urge the shooter to use the +VOF or +1d mode of the tag.  High rate of fire evens up force parity, effectively.

Area and messy, however, are expressly about hitting multiple people in the same timeframe/gear use that other weapons hit one.  So when we zoom out, it seems we're obscuring a valuable effect of the weapon.

For single shot messy weapons (like grenades, or messy reload like bazookas) I'd be inclined to think the 'messy' tag has no effect:  the messiness is the pretext that lets you fight a squad to begin with.  (Slow or single-use weapons without an area effect of any kind, like a hurled rock, strike me as inappropriate for attacking a squad with, and the GM would have framed the move differently.)

Repeating messy or area weapons, though, seem to get short shrift.  I'm thinking weapons like the incinerator (not merely autofire, but messy to boot), Flamethrower and HMG.

(I realize I'm bombarding you with mechanical nitpicking, this is just my thought process as I read the rules.)

What occurs to me is that for "vs Group" attacks, 'messy', 'area' are like a free VOF increase, while 'expend' and 'reload' are a VOF decrease (since they can't shoot as often).