One-Shots

This weekend I'll be attending the Worcester Polytechnic Institute's Science Fiction Society's Gaming Weekend. I've been asked if I'm going to be running an A Time of War one-shot at the convention, or if I'm going to be running a session of Ten Years on Terra. I'm not sure, to be honest; I have emails out to my players to determine if we can make quorum at the event. In the meantime, though, I'm drawing up plans for a one-shot.

One thing I'm thinking about is the "defending the ranch during a storm" scenario. I have the advantage that I've already drawn up the map of Clark's property, and I can easily make the interior layout of his house. I can also be fairly generous with skills and equipment.

The trick of a good one-shot is carefully balancing out the scenario so have a clear start, building phase, crescendo, climax, and victory for the PC's -- at the end of the game, the PC's success must appear to hang on the edge of a razor, and it could easily go either way. The real secret is to achieve this without actually allowing the destruction of the PC's; the illusion of danger is what they want, but at the end of the day, people have a much better opinion of your game if they walk away winners who earned it.

Of course, as a GM, you can't control how the dice fall, so you need to adjust the factors you can control. In this case, I can give myself two levers to control the game with; the side and composition of the Opposing Force (OpForce), and the weather conditions. Incidentally, in this case, I also get to control the character's initial builds.

The last two posts this week will be on Setup and Runtime GMing a one-shot, using this scenario as my example.

Hard Against the Wind

My experience with a hurricane this weekend has left me in the mood to think about weather effects in A Time of War. Pages 236 and 237 covers the mechanics of weather conditions, but they are pretty much exclusively focused on the combat effects said weather has; visibility, to-hit, and maneuvering penalties, mainly. The rules are quite summary and short, and provide little guidance on what kind of damage the weather might do to buildings and vehicles and what not. I expect a great deal of this vaguery is to allow the GM to have the weather do whatever he or she wants it to do, but what if you are, like me, a creatively bankrupt individual with a need for a major storm? It turns out, you take advantage of interconnected nature of the BattleTech games, and dig out your copy of Tactical Operations.

To mix my example cases in a hilarious way, let us suppose a particularly ambitious and terribly lost hurricane stumbles upon Clark's ranch in Colorado. Clark's home has previously been established as a light building for tactical purposes -- sturdily built, but still made mostly of wood. Per the Advanced Building Construction rules in Tactical Operations, the house would be considered a Standard Medium building, with a CF of 20 or so. There will be two major effects on the house -- wind and rain -- plus potentially the thread of lightning.

Wind effects are covered on page 61 of Tactical Operations. We're thinking of a major storm here, so let's use the wind type "Storm." In this case, the building takes 20 points of damage base every turn, after being scaled per the damage scaling rules on page 126 (x1, which reduces the damage not-at-all.)

Well, that's worrisome. By these rules, Clark's ranch house will collapse roughly 10 seconds (1 BattleTech-scale turn) after being exposed to sustained winds at that level. That's more the effect I would expect a tornado to have. Let's re-examine our choice for wind.

Strong Gale, the step down from "Storm", does 10 points of damage per turn to the house -- it doubles the building's survival time to a third of a minute, but still not exactly the effect I would want for my game.

Next is Moderate Gale, which produces no direct structure damage at all, and only applies a +1 piloting modifier to VTOLs. That sees like a particularly strong breeze. It seems the level of damage we're looking for isn't here. Curses. Let's look at rain.

Heavy Rain and Torrential Downpour are the two weather types that best exemplify what we're trying to accomplish. Again, these have combat effects (best to use the rules in A Time of War rather than to try to adapt the Tactical Operations rules) and the terrain effects here convert clear spaces into mud, and cause water hexes to become torrential. That's kind of cool -- I can see that adding a great deal of tactical ambiance if the party ever needs to defend the ranch house. It doesn't threaten the building itself, but makes it rather a haven in the storm.

The real risk to the house would be lightning strikes. The rules for lightning are on page 59 of Tactical Operations, but are somewhat confusing from a game design perspective. There is a 1 in 3 chance of 1D3 lightning bolts striking the ground every turn (10 seconds), in randomly determined squares. The practical upshot is that the larger the map you're using is, the less the risk of lightning is. A large lightning strike, however, could do as much as 15 points of damage to the house, though. Not something to be ignored.

The lesson for this particular post is that as I have stated before, BattleTech, and A Time of War, are not simulators, but games. The weather rules are clearly overbalanced to make sure that weather has an effect on the game in the timescales that 'Mech battles are fought in (often minutes.) I think the developers did the right thing in not laying out specific rules for weather effects in the A Time of War rules -- the weather is a dramatic effect used for narrative and plot progression, not as a major element of your mechanical gamespace. Unfortunately for me and those like me, it looks like if we want to use weather to threaten our party or create a sense of risk, we'll need to do it with creative language and perhaps a home-brewed rule or two. The Tactical Operations rules applied to the A Time of War scale will just kill your party dead.

Going Native

A power outage at my home has prevented me from preparing a proper blog post for today. I'm not slacking, I swear! This is going up from my MiFi, which is itself on the edge of dying. Posts will resume on their normal schedule after I once again have secured a reliable source of electricity.

When To Let the Dice Roll

There's a general axiom in gamemastering; if players are willing to roleplay a scenario, you should give them every opportunity to do it, even if you have a simpler and faster mechanic available. These are, after all, role-playing games by proclamation, and so naturally anything that enhances the roleplaying experience should be embraced.

There is one exception I've come across in my time. Well, two, but ignoring me having to roleplay a female NPC being seduced by a male PC, there's one situation that I "fade to black" on and call for a die role; interrogation.

Normally interrogation is a great opportunity to roleplay, and I enjoy playing a scared, witless, defiant, or even punch-drunk NPC having answers beaten out of him. It gives me a wonderful mechanism for delivering information to the party in an immerseive way. Every now and then, though, you run into a particularly... well-educated player.

Every GM knows that trying to run a game with elements of a profession or interest that your players participate in in real life is annoying, because the player will stop and correct you at the expense of gameplay, momentum, and sometimes basic etiquette. When you have a player who knows particularly grisly trivia, though, sometimes it is best to skim over those actions. This comes up most frequently with veterans, or firefighters, or even particularly colorful policemen, but even those pale next to somebody who has studied the art of compulsory interrogation and psychological manipulation.

One of my players has more knowledge of such things that I care to think of (I have never dared ask where he got it) and the one time I let him run with it in a game years ago he fairly seriously freaked out everybody else at the table. Not gory, not messy, not even terribly brutal. Just... disturbing. So ever since then when a situation like that arises, I just go to an Interrogation check. If he asks, I give him a bonus.

The point I'm trying to convey is that while roleplaying is good, remember to keep in mind the sensibilities of your players. Sometimes they vary wildly on a particular topic. Like yesterday's discussion of being the "bad guy" in shutting down the game, be sure to act quickly to shutdown any scene that is trending into an area that is going to psychologically traumatize one or more of your players, or most importantly, you. You are the GM, the accepted moderator of the table. Only you have the social authority to intervene if a situation like the one I've described comes up, and it is your responsibility to your players and to yourself to do so.

No session this weekend, but hopefully more a more cheerful post on Monday.

Finding a Stopping Point

Closing out a session can sometimes be tricky, especially if you're trying to meet a particular stopping time, as this campaign does. This week when our time rolled around, our party was just cleaning up from a firefight and interrogating the survivors. There is often disagreement within the party on how much more should get done in the current session when closing time comes around, and this session was no exception; Bert wanted to push forward with the interrogation and figuring out what to do with the survivors, whereas Anthony needed to get home to his wife.

In times like this, I think it is important for the GM to be sure to support closing the session quickly; remember that even once you're done with character actions, there is still XP to assign and cleanup to do. Even if some players want to continue, if not everybody can it is the GM's job to be the "bad guy" and the session. Although positive relations between the party and the GM are important, intra-party cohesion is more important, so when ending session (or other points of structural strife with game) try to place the stress on the GM/Party relationship, rather than between players.

Of course, I'm not beyond running an extra hour or two when everybody is available and having fun; these comments are only about when there is disagreement on whether to end session on-time.

Going Shopping

One item I've found consumes an enormous amount of time is shopping. Before departing for Montana this week, Clark decided to go use his Connections(3) at the local sporting goods superstore to fit out the party. In particular, they wanted rifles. I ruled that they could find target shooting rifles (.22 and the like) and gave them a 2B/2 damage profile. I figured that about represented the damage one could do with a .22 rifle based on my experience and the balance of the rest of the guns in A Time of War.

The party also bought a lot of rope and other materials, then went on to Montana. While they were in that town, Bert asked if there was a gun store in that town. I figured there certainly would be, so I gave him the benefit of the doubt, and instantiated a gun shop in our virtual town. This proved to be something of an error, as he immediately flipped open his copy of A Time of War and started browsing the listings. I recognized that behavior immediately as a big timesink, and tried to short-circuit it by giving a short and comprehensive list of the types of weapons available -- shotguns, bolt-action rifles, and one elephant gun if they needed it.

The key note here is that browsing weapons tables is something for between sessions -- not to be done in-session. The reasons for this are many, but the primary first-order effect is that session is stopped until a decision is made, and the second-order effect is that inevitably much kibitzing about different weapons (or armor, or food, or what have you) follows as theory and application is discussed, and in extreme cases, whole plans of operation are scuttled as players run through hypothetical scenarios. It is keenly important to deal swiftly with these sorts of session-stalling searches swiftly and decisively. A short product list is the first step, but make sure each product has a definite purpose -- a short-range weapon, a long-range weapon, and something heavy, in this case. By doing so, I quickly and with great authority nailed down the available options, and closed off any questions of "do they have this?" that might have bogged us down further.

Things I Wish I Had In Front Of Me, Part 2

When running combat, I found myself flipping through A Time of War more than I would've liked. Here's where I was going.

First stop, page 178, the Basic Combat Modifiers table. It is huge, and poorly organized. This table should likely be broken into two tables, one for Melee, one for Ranged damage. This one is going on my GM Screen.

Second stop, page 190, the Hit Locations Table,which I only realized after the session had the rather important Attack Direction modifier. Directly across from this table, on 191, is also the Location Effects Table, and the Specific Wound Effects Table, both very important.

In addition, I found my ranged combat aids helped greatly, but I need to make a one-page summary of the melee rules, particularly grappling. My players seem to think that the best thing for an unarmed character to do is to grapple with an armed opponent to try to get them out of the fight for a few turns until the armed PC's can deal with him or her.

Finally, a few one-line summaries of easily forgotten details about how injury and fatigue modifiers are calculated (we were doing injury wrong for half the session) would prevent a lot of page-flipping in heat of combat.

Shootout in Montana

So the session went down more or less as expected. The PC's went into town, gave themselves away to a local barkeep who ratted them out to TerraSec, investigated the site, and ended up in a shootout with the arrest squad. Mission accomplished.

A few notes on this session. The opening operations went quite well, and the news story regarding the execution of the ComGuard personnel in New Haven had exactly the effect it was calculated to have on the players; the sense of "getting caught is fatal" is now demonstrably reinforced. The players set out for the hills of Montana the day after the ComStar party got back from mothballing the Firestarter in the mountains of Colorado. They reached a small town near the site, spent the night there, and asked a few questions at the local bar and grill about where the incident in which two hikers had been mysteriously killed had happened. Alexander was particularly blatant and was spotted by the barkeep as a person of interest.

The party set out to investigate the site the following day. I was resistant to give up to much too fast about the presence of branths, so I tried to draw out the investigation to make it more interesting, but I'm afraid I overshot the mark and made it start to get a bit boring toward the end, although three of my four players were involved in a lively debate about the biology of branths. Once we started to peter out, I had the ComGuard members make perception checks. Alexander did fantastically and score a MoS of 13, spotting the TerraSec Marshals as they prepared to ambush the party. As a result, he and Shin started the engagement with weapons drawn. Unfortunately, Simon and Clark were unarmed, so they spent much of the engagement hiding, although Simon attempted to tackle the head of the marshals, and failed miserably.

The fight went surprisingly well for the PC's given their restrictions, and although Alex was hit twice, there was little serious damage to the party. They killed two of the TerraSec personnel, and captured the other two, including the leader. Then cleaned up the site quickly, and took the TerraSec personnel off to the woods to interrogate them. They got a bit of information out of them, and closed the session trying to decide their fate.

I'll get into deeper analysis of this session over the balance of the week.

Final Checks

OK, its almost the weekend and I'm going down my checklist of materials.

NPCs? Check. See Tuesday's entry.

Town? Check. I'm going to wing the town rather than map it, since it isn't that important to the session (what is the faint sound of laughter I hear?) and I know the only bits of it I need to.

Investigation Site? Check. Map in hand, and ready to run combat for the first time this campaign. Not including, you know, Case White.

Books, Notes, Pencils, Erasers, Dice? Check, check, check, check, and check.

Pancakes?

One step at a time...

Mapping Montana

When it finally came time to whipping up the site of the investigation for this week's session, I aware there were a large number of tactical questions that needed to be considered when laying out this map to ensure that the encounter the party has here is fun and interesting. Being aware of those factors, I didn't stop to consider them because I was on a time budget. So I gave the party an easily defensible position and the NPC's rough terrain. I'm OK with our first PC combat being weighted toward the good guys.

30-40 minutes of futzing in Campaign Cartographer (I was quite out of practice) produced this:

I am less happy with this map than I have been with some of my previous work, but I liked how the grid is clearly visible where the NPC's will be standing, and fades to barely-visible where the investigation and roleplaying parts of the mission will happen. It is a subtle effect I wasn't trying for but rather developed as I built the map.

Also, there is no label on this map, because the location is an anonymous piece of badlands. Brilliant artist statement, or laziness on the part of the artist? You decide!

Executing the Operatives

Now, there's a certain art to writing player handouts, especially in-universe documents. BattleTech in general, and the Jihad Arc in particular, is exceptionally good at helping with these documents, as almost every sourcebook is presented as an in-game document. Their very form tells us a great deal about format and syntax for everything from internal reports to newspaper stories, and provides a template to build new materials. So let me talk a little bit about how I formulate these types of materials.

First, the date. My GMing style tends to focus on maintaining continuity, so I typically start any in-game event by fixing it on my timeline. I usually do this by reviewing the printed material in sourcebooks around the date I'm discussing, then reviewing my own custom material. In this case, there is fairly little written in sourcebooks regarding what was happening on Terra between 3068 and 3076, and I'm not a rabid enough GM to wade through the BattleCorps fiction to synchronize with that, so I'm pretty much down to my own written material and a few scraps from Jihad Hotspots Terra.

The three ComGuard personnel I'm referring to here were first introduced in an email from one police officer to another recovered during the Session 5 raid on a TerraSec facility. The correspondence was between an officer in Denver to another in West Haven, Connecticut. He referred to three captured ComGuard fugitives. Although he didn't give the date, it seems this was a current event on the date the email was sent (27 March 3068), so we can put their capture within about a week before that date.

The wheels of justice turn slowly, but we also have Precentor TerraSec Alsace turning up the heat on ComGuard after the death of his wife, daughter, and unborn child. We can presume he uses his considerable influence to expedite the trial and conviction of the three prisoners on, oh, I imagine any charge he sees fit. We can start with treason against Terra, as these people were ComStar and the Word has never seen the need to distinguish between ComStar and the Word of Blake when meting out justice to ComStar personnel. The current in-game date is 17 April. It is entirely reasonable that he is able to prosecute a trial and sentence all three to death within the 20-25 days he had.

While methods of capital punishment in the civil world vary throughout history and from location to location, the military has been pretty consistent; you were either hanged or beheaded/shot, depending on the availability of firearms. Hanging seem an appropriately vengeful manner of execution for a politician on a murderous quest for vengeance. By assembling these little tidbits, we've painted a picture of the document I need to create for my players.

I need a new article, dated around 17 April 3068, describing the execution by hanging of three ComGuard soldiers for several counts of premeditated murder, invading the homeworld, and anything similar that comes to me while I'm writing. Quickly typing up a conventional inverted pyramid story is good enough for a hand-out to communicate the mortal danger the players face if captured. All told, the entire exercise should take less time than it took to write this blog entry.

Building An Arrest Squad

OK, constructing the take-down squadron, the TerraSec men who will go and arrest our party of evil ComGuard invaders and bring them to justice! There's a flavor-vs.-gameplay issue here, in that traditionally when law enforcement engages in an operation like this, they bring overwhelming force to bear on the fugitives, or at least they try to. Doing so in this situation would likely succeed in overwhelming the players. For the sake of gameplay, I need to make this a reasonably sized force of marshals, but still make it look like a genuine attempt to bring "armed and dangerous" targets in.

I also received word that Henry won't make this session, so his character (David) won't be present either. That is unfortunate, as David is an expert marksman (Small Arms +4) and would likely acquit himself admirably. His absence leaves us with two combat characters (Alex and Shin) and two civilians (Simon and Clark.) Alex is excellent (+7), Shin is also quite good (+4), as is Simon (+4), but Clark is less impressive (+2). Based on this spread, I expect that facing down reasonable law enforcement officers with +4 Small Arms is not unreasonable for the party. I always try to place a squad leader character who is slightly better than his mooks in any squad attack, so I plan to put a +5 Small Arms officer leading the attack.

The characters have laser pistols primarily, plus Clark's rifle, which orients much of their damage toward the Energy type. That gives the party 4E/3 damage toward the police. I'd like each of the mooks to take one shot to put down, and their captain to take two. That means giving each officer a BOD score of 3, which is low but not terrible, and providing them with armor that doesn't stop a laser pistol. Fortunately, I can give them reasonable armor (Flak jackets) which the party's Laser Pistols will cleave right through (the Flak only having 1 BAR vs. Energy). A party member connecting with an officer will likely knock him out and possibly even start him bleeding on the first hit with a laser pistol. Clark's 4B/4 rifle will actually do just the same damage -- the Flak's 5 BAR vs. Ballistics will reduce Clark's hit to 3 points, on par with his party member's.

The part that requires a bit of thought will be the Captain character. By boosting his BOD to 5, he'll have 10 Standard Damage, and assuming he makes his consciousness check, will still be up after one of the party's 3-point hits. Indeed, he may stay up for a second three-point hit. Pushing his WIL to 7 will make him more resistant to falling unconscious.

Finally, weapons loadout. Last session the party picked up a concealed Flak jacket, so I want to use ballistic ammunition against them so they feel like their item is getting use. As mentioned previously, I thought about giving the mooks 4B/4 revolvers, but such a weapon will go right through the concealed flak's 4 BAR vs. Ballistics. Instead, I'll downgrade the mooks to 3B/4 auto-pistols, which the concealed flak will downgrade to 3 damage on the character wearing it, and leave the revolver for the captain character to make him even scarier to the party.

So there we have it, three mook officers and one captain armed with ballistic weapons and flak armor to go bring in the characters. With a little bit of talking up in the town, they'll project the image of a force to be reckoned with, while carefully engineering of their statistics keeps their actual capabilities in a manageable range for the party.

Outlining the Road to the Next Session

Sunday is in six days, and all the lights look green for another session that morning. I feel extremely prepared for the upcoming session, if for no other reason than I've run what I expect to be the main combat half a dozen times now; we are ready to rock.

Normally these long gaps between sessions are a liability; I forget what I was doing in them, and when I get back to the table I spend a bit too long working the numbers again before I can really get to the meet of the plot. For this session, I feel like I have been strengthened by the downtime. I suspect the proximate cause is the time I spend writing this blog; maintaining the once-a-day rate ensures I spend at least 3-5 hours actively thinking about A Time of War every week. Unfortunately for my readers, this is a case of observation affecting the measurement; if I weren't writing this blog, I expect my experience would more closely mirror what I'm used to.

This is not to say there is nothing to do pre-session. I need to settle on final statistics for the TerraSec squad, draw out a map for the town and the encounter area, and prepare the pre-session tidbit about the execution of the ComGuard personnel in Connecticut. Once all that is done, I'll be mopping up the additional tidbits of minutiae regarding setting the hooks for the session after this one, and we'll be off to the races again!

Battle Armor

I've talked a great deal about the combat mechanics of A Time of War recently, and I look forward to getting back to other topics next week, but there's one last thing that my investigation of the combat rules turned up that's really worth talking about. Battle Armor.

When I first started playing BattleTech, the Clan Invasion arc was just beginning, and the appearance of Elementals on the battlefield was horrifying. Fairly soon we learned how to deal with them, but for a while there, battle-armored Clan troopers were a nightmare. Now, looking at them again from the perspective of a man with a gun, they are once again absolutely terrifying, but for an entirely different reason.

A Time of War makes a distinction between Personal Armor and Tactical Armor, the latter being the kind of armor that is put on vehicles and 'Mechs and the like. Battle Armor occupies one of those strange middlegrounds that anybody who has played in this universe long enough will be all-too-familiar with. For the most part, it is treated as Tactical Armor, except for the fact that it potentially delivers damage to its occupant.

What does that mean? OK, from the top.

Battle armor is full-body encasing armor. The protection it provides is given in the same format as personal armor (M/B/E/X), however, those values work rather differently than they do for personal armor. For the sake of simplicity and familiarity, I'm going to use the Clan Elemental suit to illustrate how Battle Armor works. (Amusingly, while researching this post, I discovered the Clan Elemental was never printed in a Technical Readout until Technical Readout 3058: Upgrade was printed; before it had always been in the Record Sheets.)

A Clan Elemental Suit has 10 points of armor (we don't count the trooper inside for these purposes.) To determine the equivalent BAR ratings, we flip to page 187 of A Time of War, and look up Clan Armor with a 10 points. That gives us a rating of 9/8/8/8. That's a horrifying amoount of armor under the Personal Armor rules, but wait! It gets better.

When Battle Armor is hit with an attack, we calculate the damage as befits its type (note that per page 186, it appears Splash damage does not get its +1 AP when attacking Battle Armor without the Hit Location rules in effect). The damage is then reduced by the amount the BAR for the damage type exceeds the Armor Penetration (BAR - AP, if BAR is greater than AP), just as is done with Personal Armor. Then, and this is the terrible part, we divide the damage by the relevant BAR, and round normally. This damage may round down to zero.

Then there's the issue of actually damaging the pilot inside -- that's sometimes easier than trying to destroy the armor in A Time of War. The battle armor deals 1 point of damage to its pilot for each point in excess of 1 that it takes in a single attack; so as long as the armor is getting pelted with 1-damage attacks, the pilot will be fine. If a 5-damage attack hits it (after all BAR reductions), the pilot will take 4 Standard damage, and the pilot is subject to all the consciousness checks and the like you'd normally get from that kind of pain.

So let's talk about that Revolver that's so likely to kill our dear friend Clark, shall we? That same 4B/4 shot at a Clan Elemental will hit its 8 Ballistic BAR and get reduced to zero outright by the BAR - AP being equal to its base damage. Even if it break through that by picking up damage on the Margin of Success roll, it would need to get 4 bonus points of damage (+16 for those of you keeping track at home) to score 1 point of damage on that armor.

OK, so beat officers can't deal with Battle Armored Clanners. We've known that for going on 30 years in-universe. What does it take to stop an Elemental?

Well, to be a Clan Elemental, you have a BOD minimum of 6. That means the frailest elemental needs to have 7 points, or 56 points before applying the BAR, of damage come in one blow before he's even rolling for Bleeding. Consciousness might be easier, but with a WIL minimum of 4, unless he's already badly hurt, you'll likely destroy the suit before you render the pilot unconscious.

To put even a single point of damage on the suit itself, though, you need something that will do at least 4 damage through BAR 8 armor. What in A Time of War meets that spec? In Melee land, some of the nicer Vibroaxes and Vibroswords could get up into that range with a high STR stat and good MoS on the roll, but then you're contending with the 9 Melee BAR instead of the 8 Everything-Else BAR.

The Federated Barrett M42B (page 266) in Standard Mode would "only" need an MoS of 5 to put a point of damage on the suit. Unfortunately, that weapon is difficult to get your hands on even if you are FedSuns. An Avenger CCW (page 268) loaded with solid ammo, effectively a ClanTech shotgun, would do the job. The excessively difficult-to-obtain Gauss Rifles (Small Arms, not 'Mech-scale) on the same page could also put a point of damage on this target with a reasonable MoS. Even a Heavy Gyrojet Gun will likely be unable to hurt this suit.

Once you start getting into crew-manned Support Weapons, you can start fantasizing about putting multiple points of damage on this suit in a single hit, but the point is that these suits are incredibly resilient, and given the enormous amount of effort it would take to drop even one of them, I'm getting very worried about how I'm going to handle Shin getting a suit of Battle Armor at some point later in the campaign; it will undoubtably mean me having to deploy some serious hardware to even threaten him, but anything that can put a dent in his armor will obliterate anybody else in the party.

Edge is Hitpoints

As previously discussed in earlier posts, one hit from a relatively weak weapon is enough to drop an unarmored character, and without immediate medical assistance, they are as likely as not to bleed out. There are direct suggestions on reducing lethality on page 192 of A Time of War. From my simulations, though, I've found that overwhelmingly, the winning is the character with the most Edge Points at the start of the engagement.

This seems fairly obvious once said; the ability to force a reroll on a hit in a system where any given hit is potentially lethal is a huge advantage. The only exception cases to this rule I've found is when the character with more Edge is massively outmatched by the their opponent -- to the point where the ratio of probable hits exceeds the ratio of Edge.

The practical upshot I've found is that because they have multiple Edge points, PC's using Edge points defensively have a staggering advantage over NPCs with 0 or even 1 point of Edge. How much? That I don't have good data on, but it is quite significant.

Tracking Wound Effects

As I get more and more into A Time of War, I realize how much information that needs to be tracked has no place on a record sheet. Today I wanted to talk a bit about Wound Effects, because I've been running a number of simulation combats and tracking wound effects in a way I'll actually remember to apply them is becoming something of a trick.

Damage is generally recorded in the Combat Data section of the record sheet -- both on the regular sheet and the custom ones I've seen various members of the community come up with. The problem here is that although there is unfailingly a track for Fatigue and Standard Damage, and checkboxes for Stunned and Unconscious, there's nothing for other effects a character might suffer. Let's make a quick circuit of all the things that might befall a character that aren't here.

First, Bleeding. Bleeding is, as far as I can tell from my simulations, what kills characters. Rarely have I had a character die immediately from a bullet or other weapon -- almost invariably they collapse unconscious to the ground and bleed out in 2 to 6 turns. Yet there is nowhere to put that effect on the character sheet.

Second, we have all the effects listed on the Specific Wound Effects table on A Time of War page 191. Dazed and Knockdown can be given a pass here, because the both only have effects that can be recorded elsewhere on the sheet (fatigue damage and character orientation on the battlemat respectively), but Deafened, Blinded, Internal Damage and Shattered Limb all carry serious and potentially long-term effects. Surgery checks are required to clear all of these conditions, so why is there nowhere to note them? Granted, Internal Damage is only listed here because of the lack of anywhere to record Bleeding, listed above.

Finally, there are weapon- and armor-centric effects that need to be tracked. This is a bit easier, because there's a notes field, but weapons with, for instance, the "Jam on Fumble" property, need a way to indicate if they're jammed. With personal armor, the BAR in all categories is reduced every time a round make it through.

I'm trying to come up with a good means of tracking all this information in a reasonably small amount of real estate, but no luck so far. For NPC's, I'm tracking them on notepaper anyways, but I'm worried about my players maintaining their records when individual actions can take minutes to resolve -- some details need to make it to paper. Some of this can be handled with swift erasing and re-entering, or flipping the sheet over and over to keep track in the notes, but those solutions are inelegant, so my search continues.

Splash Damage

OK, the last of the damage-type charts. This one covers Splash Damage, which is usually paired with something else, it is true. Splash Damage as represented here uses the Hit Location rules. If the hit location rules are not in play, then the AP of the attack should be increased by one to represent the weapon's hole-finding capabilities. Splash damage represents things like flamethrowers, that get through holes in armor and find ways to damage the target.

Blast (AOE) Damage

Today's flowchart is Blast Damage, or Area-of-Effect. Blast damage is unique in that it does not factor in margin of success at all -- only distance from the damage area's center impacts the damage the weapon does those in the blast radius. The PDF of this chart is here.

Subduing Damage

Subduing Damage is probably the simplest of the damage types, simply because there is no possible Bleeding Check, and all damage is allocated directly to Fatigue. Consciousness rolls still apply, though. PDF is here.

Burst Damage

Fundamentally, Burst Damage is very similar to regular damage. The key difference is the divisor on the Margin of Success (MoS) bonus. With Burst Damage, you gain a full point of damage for each point of MoS you have, but it is capped at the weapon's burst value. Again, here's the link to the PDF of this flowchart.

Untyped Damage Resolution

The first of my damage flow charts is now available at this location. Originally I hoped to integrate the hit table and wound statuses, but I couldn't fit it on reasonable chart -- the size of the chart is much larger when I break it out by hit location. Creating these charts is proving something of a challenge, but I expect they'll greatly help remember key steps in damage resolution.

Shoveling Against the Tide

OK, my plan for how I was going to cover three weeks is now complete, and I have three more weeks to go before I'll be running a session. Scheduling adults with full vacation schedules for a month is a troublesome activity.

So we're going to change pace over the next few weeks. Instead of my sultry prose, I'm going to start putting out game aids here. The first are going to be a series of flow charts I'm creating for damage resolution. Studying the combat system rules have lead me to two conclusions:

1) The damage resolution rules are very complex.

2) The damage resolution rules are quite poorly laid out in the rulebook for quick reference.

It happens that the process for resolving damage is quite different depending on the Base Damage Factor, or damage type, of the attack. For my sanity, my players' sanity, and hopefully your sanity, I'll be putting out a series of flow charts for how to resolved different BDF's (A,B,C,D, and S) over the next five days. I hope you learn as much reading them as I learned making them.

Revisions to Combat

Despite not having game yesterday, Morgan and I were going back over the rules to help him think through the party's combat tactics, and he pointed out a key error in my understanding of the combat rules. Previously, I had said that in last week's example Clark would avoid a bleeding effect from a 4-point revolver hit because it was not more than half of his Standard Damage. In fact, the rule is half his BOD score, which is actually a quarter of his Standard Damage, or two points. For clarity, I want to revise the "Clark Getting Shot" scenario to explain how that actually plays out.

After Clark has been shot, falls over, and loses consciousness, he makes a Bleeding Check. The Bleeding Check is an unmodified BOD Check, i.e., a 2D6 roll plus the characters BOD score against a Target Number 12. Clark's BOD is 4, meaning he'd need an 8 or better to succeed -- he probably fails, and starts to bleed. What does this mean?

A Bleeding character suffers one point of damage every turn until the bleeding is stopped, in the End Phase, which means he loses this point the turn he's shot as well. Clark has already taken four points of damage, which means at the end of the fifth turn, Clark will take one more point of Standard Damage than he has, and die. In metaphorical terms, Clark has 25 seconds to live unless somebody can stop the bleeding.

Clark needs a MedTech check modified by his injury modifier to stop the bleeding. If he was still conscious, he could do that himself, but as we ascertained earlier, Clark likely lost consciousness when he was hit. If any of the ComStar personnel can get to him, they each have a +2 to MedTech, canceling the -2 of the injury modifier and making the roll require a natural 7 or better. It is reasonable to assume they'll stabilize him in a turn or two at 5 or 6 standard damage.

A closer review of the party revealed the frightening reality that David's BOD is only two, making him susceptible to bleeding on any hit whatsoever, and meaning that a revolver hit at +1 anywhere that doesn't have a natural damage reduction (such as extremities) will result in an immediate kill. This party has a serious problem the next time they go into combat.