Friday, March 30, 2012

Last Full Measure

We're pushing through the final construction phases for Session 21 now.  I'm very excited.

In addition, my first niece was born last night.  Today I'm driving about two state-lengths to go meet the newest member of our family, and working out how this will impact the construction time-table.  Fortunately, I think it just eats up some of the safety margin, and won't actually impact the timeline.


The only major work left to do is finishing some of the hills and assembling the interior of the SDS facility.  The minis could use a bit more touch-up work, but I'm less concerned with them at the moment.  I've printed all the record sheets for the various vehicles and BattleMechs that the opposition will be using.  If there's leftover time on Saturday I may assemble a foamboard copy of the ranch for the Denver nuclear strike, but that's a nice-to-have rather than a must.

Thursday, March 29, 2012

Physical Aids

I've got the minis up to the point at which they need to be painted.  Right now I'm focusing on a few other steps.

First, getting record sheets for all the vehicles and platoons that will be in play.  That's a keenly important step.  I've already printed the PC's vehicles, but tracking down all the Word of Blake Record Sheets is proving to be an expensive chore (at least if I want the official sheets, as opposed to just dashing off my own numbers.  The Shreck PPC Carrier, for instance, has models split between the 3039 Record Sheets and the 3085 Record Sheets.  The Vedette Medium Tank has both of those plus entries in 3058.  I'm still getting all my ducks in a row there.

I've enlisted my girlfriend to help assemble the SDS set; this kind of arts & crafts project is right up her alley.  We're working on assembling the terrain, although I need to be careful when designing the interior sets to ensure that the stairs up the "tower" inside the cliff face are viable to play on.

Finally, gameplay aids; I want to cut string to lengths that represent cruise and flank speeds for all the vehicles in the game.  These fall over a bit because the movement points required for turning, but I think they'll make good rough-estimates for the bulk of moves I'll need to make.

I'm a bit worried that I'm over-focusing on the SDS assault phase of the mission at the expense of the nuclear attack and eventual capitulation, but I'll cross those bridges when I come to them.

Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Further Construction

I went shopping to pick up a few final supplies.  Rather than use the insulation board that Total Warfare recommended, I elected to go with foam core board, which happened to be on sale.  It has only about half the thickness per sheet of the insulation, but I think it will be rather easier and less messy to work with.  In addition, I got some construction paper to paste down to provide the green or brown surfacing.

I primed the minis today, and will paint them tomorrow.  Then I need to construct the final set on my dining room table for game on Sunday.  Doing so will prevent me hosting any social events at my apartment until game day, but that's a price I'm willing to pay for an awesome set for the game.  Once this is done, I just need to handle setting up the actual terrain, and then finish a bit of writing before we're off to the races.


Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Building The Minis

I assembled the mini's today so they could dry overnight before priming and eventual painting.  The tanks were fantastic -- pop the body on the turret, cement it down, feel a smug sense of accomplishment.

The 'Mechs are another story.  Just opening up the blister and taking out the pieces I feel lost.  It is taking a great deal of close examination and referencing pictures of the miniatures online at CamoSpecs and other sites to get a definite view of what goes where on each model.  It doesn't help that some of them come with multiple configurations worth of weapons; it is pretty easy to tell a PPC from a Gauss Rifle in the artwork, less so squinting at a piece of pewter the size of my smallest fingernail.  Even so, I've assembled the bipeds at this point, and just need to do the Sirocco to have the minis ready for action.

That's assuming the arms don't break off the Warhammer again.


Monday, March 26, 2012

Final Week

I'm now coming into the final week of Ten Years on Terra.  Session 21 runs on Sunday.  There is so much left to do, and I have so many other obligations this week, including probably at least three days of travel.

Tally ho!

Friday, March 23, 2012

Site Traffic

It appears that whatever affliction I had earlier has passed at this point.  I am very happy for that.

This is not a high-traffic blog.  I only average 8-10 hits per day.  What I find most fascinating about the statistics Blogger gives me is where those hits are coming from.  Over the past month, the number one traffic source for this site has been www.buygenericsfromindia.com.  The next more common source is bizrate.com.  I strongly doubt anybody is linking in from those sites to read my content about A Time of War, so I am forced to conclude that the majority of my traffic is actually coming from bots of one description or another.  Ah, well.  Onward and upward.

Thursday, March 22, 2012

Blargh

I've been knocked on my ass by some significant bug, I think.  This is of the "moving hurts" and the "thinking about moving hurts" variety.  I may miss a few updates until I recover.

Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Anti-Infantry Fire

One issue that I'm finding is a problem with the Tactical Addendum is that of infantry platoons.  The rules for Infantry are somewhat awkwardly laid out in A Time of War, so I'll summarize them in this entry.

There are two modes that infantry formations can be handled in under the Tactical Addendum Rules -- "Standard", in which an infantry platoon is considered 28 free-thinking and free-moving A Time of War characters, or "Infantry Cohesion", in which the platoon more or less uses the same conversion rules movement and weapons range that vehicles do.  They change somewhat in that a volley of infantry fire is considered a cluster attack against vehicles now.

"Standard" is pretty self-explanatory, but also amazingly difficult to handle if you happen to be dealing with actual full-strength platoons, lances, or companies.  Infantry Cohesion makes considerably more sense to me, even if platoons are broken into their component seven-man squads.  Alas, the Infantry Cohesion rules are spread out all over the Tactical Addendum, so I'll reference the passages that refer to them here:

Basic Information: p. 201
Unit Cohesion With PCs or NPCs Embedded: p. 202 (Choose Your Complexity sidebar)
Skill Clarification: p. 203 (footnote ** on the Tactical Skills Table)
Movement: p. 206
Weapons Range: p. 210
Damage Conversion: p. 211
Combat Modifiers: p. 217

The other key element in Infantry engagements is that regardless of the mode being used, each infantryman occupies a unique position on the battlefield; presumably with no two infantrymen spaced more than 30 meters apart.  The problem with this is that there's a lot of room in a 30-meter hex, so when the infantry are shot at with 'Mech scale weapons, they need to be almost directly hit to take damage (even a massive AC/20 round only have a splash radius of 2 meters.  To compensate, some weapons are now "Anti-Infantry", and put down large swaths of damage on infantry formations.  Indeed, machine guns can be even more effective Infantry-killing machines than they are in Total Warfare, although it can be lengthy to resolve the attack -- the Anti-Infantry weapons requires a roll against each and every trooper in the area of effect.

In any event, there are the major changes in handling Infantry in A Time of War's Tactical Addendum.  I hope you find this brief article useful if you ever end up running the infantry formations in your games.

Tuesday, March 20, 2012

Let's Get Tactical

One thing that I've been intending to do, since I plan on running Session 21 on the table, is to use the Tactical Addendum rules for vehicular combat.  A Time of War handles them in great detail, but as I expect this engagement to be only a few vehicles and infantry at any given moment, I can greatly simplify them.  Here are the basic tenants of converting BattleTech mechanics for A Time of War's Tactical Addendum:

Initiative: Vehicle initiative depends on vehicle type.  All of one class of vehicle move, then all of the next class, and so on (p. 206)

Movement: Multiply movement values by 15 to get meter/turn (Total Warfare's 30 meter hexes and 10 second turns vs. A Time of War's 1 meter blocks and 5 second turns.)

Weapons: Range in meters is just range in hexes times thirty.  Characters and NPCs up to Battlesuit-size use Size Modifiers when shooting at big or small things.  Anything larger than a Battlesuit has a computer take care of those modifiers for it.  Vehicle-scale shots splash, and those that miss scatter like artillery.  These splash zones are often measured in centimeters, however.

There's obviously more to it, but that's the elevator brief on the Tactical Addendum.  I look forward to getting a chance to run with it.  I think tomorrow I'll talk a bit about how it affects the survivability of infantry formations.

Monday, March 19, 2012

The Challenge of Logistics

I'm on the road skipping from city to city and hotel to hotel over the next week and a half at least, which means I won't be able to do most of the physical construction I was planning for Session 21.  I am formulating a plan for dealing with this issue.

In the meanwhile, I'm drafting up a few more ideas for how the scenario will play out, and figuring out how to manage a potential PvP engagement early in the scenario.  I am not looking forward to that, but I need to have an O-Plan ready to go if it happens.

Friday, March 16, 2012

Building Minis

I finally got together all the materials I need to construct the minis for Session 21; it looks like I won't have to buy anything new besides the models themselves, which is good for my budget.

One of the helpful things in Total Warfare I haven't had good use of is the miniature painting section on page 288 of Total Warfare.  The last time I painted a lot of minis was for a Mechwarrior 3rd Edition game I ran in 2006, but all of those were spacecraft miniatures (fighters, DropShips, and WarShips.)  I'm not sure I've ever painted more than 1 or 2 'Mechs, so this should be a novel experience for me.

One thing I perpetually forget to do when painting is to properly wash the minis before construction. I'm learned the hardware that it is an important step; sometimes you can get along just fine without it, but sometimes the glue and paint just won't bind properly unless the mini is washed.  I'm told this has something to do with residues left over from the casting process.  So it goes.

Another challenge on this run out is that some of these minis are infantry, which now that I have them in-hand, are even tinier than I was expecting.  I have no idea how I'm going to do them any form of justice with a paintbrush.

Thursday, March 15, 2012

Keeping Pace is Hard

Apparently sometimes I just have an unanticipated day in which I literally don't have a free moment from wake up to sleep, and I miss a blog entry.  Sorry!

Wednesday, March 14, 2012

A Quick Review Of The Coalition Invasion of Terra

At present, I have a fair amount of work done on the primary encounter of Session 21, the assault on an SDS cannon during the Coalition landings on Terra.  What I need to do is flesh out a little bit around it.  Specifically, I need some kind of coda, something to wrap the campaign up, and possibly a "last gasp" encounter, perhaps at the ranch.

One thing I need to do is nail down exactly when things will be happening, which should give me a better sense of what order things should happen in Session 21.  So, for my reference and your edification:

17 August 3078 - The Coalition Fleet shows up in orbit of Terra. (Session 21)
28 November 3078 - A nuclear blast occurs in the vicinity of Denver.
26 December 3078 - Word of Blake surrender on Terra.

To cover each of these events, I'll need three distinct operations; the SDS attack, the destruction of Denver, and the eventual Word of Blake surrender.  We're planning a six-hour session, so I expect we'll have time for all this, but I'm going to want some good, exciting event for each phase of the session.  The surrender seems a good coda to leave the game on, and the nuclear strike seems a reasonable post-climax stinger, if I can determine how to pull it off successfully.  I'll need to review the rules for being on the edge of a nuclear blast.

Tuesday, March 13, 2012

PvP

One of the more worrisome events to come out of Session 20 was Alex declaring his intent to shoot David the next time he saw him.  I won't go into whether or not this is justified, but it makes me think about how I would have to adjudicate a player-on-player engagement.

Player-vs-player battles are never good; somebody is going to end up very unhappy, possibly two or more somebodies.  Given that NPCs in A Time of War follow more less that same construction rules as PC's, they seem to make fairly good proxies for approximating how a PvP encounter would go down.  Specifically, the probable engagement range of the battle and the weapons used would provide an edge to whoever's skills were most effective at that range and with those weapons.

In this circumstance, Alex has considerably high small arms skill than David does, plus access to superior armor.  Their defensive attributes (BOD and WIL) are similar, although David has the Toughness Trait.  If David can force the combat to melee range, the advantage becomes his (with Martial Arts +8).  Even so, I believe the action would be decided by the first one of them to score a hit; both of them have access to weapons that will begin dealing serious penalties on the first impact, and that will likely quickly skew the victim into losing more quickly.

There are certain cultural barriers to killing off other player's characters for roleplaying reasons, and Bert explicitly asked about those to the table at Session 20.  The consensus (which notably did not include Henry, who missed that session) was that it was acceptable in the last session of a campaign, which is particularly pertinent in this instance, as Session 21 is indeed the last session of Ten Years on Terra.  It is not clear to me exactly when and how Bert envisions this confrontation taking place, and if it will happen before, after, or during the SDS facility attack that forms the basis of Session 21.  I may have to wait and see.


Monday, March 12, 2012

From A Hat

So, hilarious circumstance.  It turns out that David Cho's player missed Session 20 entirely -- slept through the whole thing.  That changed things a bit.  Also, two of my other players showed up pretty badly sleep-deprived, so today was a very low-energy session.

To break into the ROM Archive, the party decided to approach via the utilities tunnels.  Lacking both Cho and Shin, there was actually no Security Systems skill in the party.  After a great deal of discussion, the party reached out to the Missouri Group to get help bypassing the physical and electronic security to get into the building.  They proceeded to knock out a guard, and Simon hacked into the computer system while the rest of the party waded through hard-copy records.

Since there were a number of secrets I wanted to come out in this session, and I didn't have time to write a large number of in-game documents, I tried a different mini-game.  I wrote up a bunch of one-or-two sentence descriptions of what various records contained, put them on slips of paper, and dropped them into a hat.  The party members searching the filing cabinets took 1 per action, while Simon on the computer took Margin-of-Success slips per action.

The party seemed to enjoy this mechanic, and I was able to reveal bit by bit the Sarna plot line that lead to Alexander's parent's assassination, and Alexander's true past on Sarna.  In addition, the fact that David Cho was, in fact, an assassin who was terminating some of the escaped Sarna HPG employees came out, which makes it particularly sad that he wasn't present, although it may have resulted in intra-party violence; Alex did not take the news well.  Finally, they also found a record indicating that quite recently an assasination order was issued for Simon; Simon has not returned to his apartment since.

We also did some scheduling for Session 21.  It looks like April 1st is our first candidate date; after that the next opportunity to have everybody at the table is at the end of May.

We're in the home stretch.

Friday, March 9, 2012

Touching Bases

One of my hobbies when I was younger, and one I plan to return to if and when I ever have a basement again, was model railroading.  I often find the skills I acquired there most useful in miniature gaming for high-value displays, such as terrain for public play at demonstrations or conventions.  Rolling toward Session 21, I'm spinning up those skill again.  I expect to have a bit more to say on this topic in the coming weeks.

I've largely planned out Session 20 at this point, from the party infiltration to the computer/hacking challenge, up to the exfiltration chase to the chopper, but I still need to type up the documents that they'll find that will reveal the truth behind Alex's parent's murders.  I also need some final hook that will let them know the Coalition is on the way.

Hopefully on Monday I'll be telling you how I made it all work.

Thursday, March 8, 2012

Hurgh

So yesterday I took a day trip to Washington.  It was a very long day.  I am very tired, so I'm phoning in this entry.  Sorry!

Wednesday, March 7, 2012

Player Independence

The minis for Session 21 have come in.  I need to get painting those sooner rather than later.  Alas, I'm on the road a lot in the coming weeks, so I'm not clear on when that will happen.

One thing I've noticed is that players love to be independent.  This is particularly clear with Henry (David Cho's player), who in almost every session so far that's involved any kind of combat or stealth has gone well out of his way to put as much in-game distance between the party and himself as possible.  He'll always be the one to "sneak around", "stay back", or "take a position" somewhere away from the rest of the party.  

Generally speaking, in my experience and the experience of a number of other GM's whose work I've read, this kind of habitual party splitting is driven by one of three motives: first, a desire for individual attention, second, a roleplaying imperative, or thirdly, a deathwish for their character.

The first motive is the most common in my experience; gaming is an inherently social experience, and we all (or most of us, anyways) crave social attention.  It is very easy as a GM to start ignoring some players without realizing it -- other players have taken lead on what's happening, so your attention is there.  Being hyper-aware of how much attention each player is getting isn't terribly helpful (although we all go through the phase of trying to do that), simply because there are different attention requirements players feel from game to game, from session to session, and even from moment to moment.  Sometimes a player who is happy to sit in the background for hours one week will want a disproportionate amount of spotlight the next week, and vice-versa.

If a player is looking for more individual attention from the GM, one of the easiest ways to get it is to move away from whatever the rest of the party is doing.  If a character is in a different room, or even different situation, than the rest of the party, they need to be dealt with more explicitly than the balance of the group.  This tends to come up more in fast-and-loose exploration mode play than tactical play, if only because the initiative system tends to ensure that everybody at least feels like they're getting their fair share of time to act and affect the game.  Going off to explore on your own provides the opportunity for your character to find something special before the rest of the group (and what prestige might be associated with that discovery) and carries relatively little risk if the area is secure and/or you're pretty sure the GM isn't going to gank your character for it.

The second motive is a roleplaying imperative; the character has some reason to go somewhere separately from the rest of the group, be it for reasons of principle, money, or to protect themselves or the rest of the party from some danger.  There are tactical reasons to do so as well (spread out groups are less vulnerable to area-of-effect attacks.)  Generally speaking, you can predict when these splits will happen (or at least are likely or possible), and plan accordingly.

The final motive is the deathwish.  The player is no longer having fun, but simply quitting the game would have social consequences.  As a result, the player is trying to place their character in as much jeopardy as possible, as at almost any game table, character death is a valid reason for taking a break from the game for a few session, if not dropping the game completely.  This motive is easier to see if one knows to look for it; it generally has other symptoms, such as an equipment loadout that favors damage over protection, as well as tactical choices that tend to exposure the character to more than their share of fire.  Behavior like this often prompts me to have an out-of-game conversation with the player in private, to determine if there is some change in the game they'd like to see, or failing that, to give their character an appropriately epic send-off on their own terms.  This is, after all, about pleasing the players.

In Cho's case, I believe he is most strongly motivated by the roleplaying motive, although I suspect that a bit of the lack of attention has played a role at some times.  I suspect I'll find out for certain when the whole party is relying on his infiltration skills on Sunday.

Tuesday, March 6, 2012

ROM Archives

I don't think that the party has the resources to take Word of Blake's ROM on head-on, so I'm not sending them into ROM HQ for the next mission.  An outlying archive and field office is much more appropriate to this mission, especially given the alternate goal of closing out Alex's backstory.  I'm thinking this is an opportunity to use some famous real-world building that has been repurposed.  Right now I'm thinking of using the Pentagon, which is located only a few hours from Hilton Head, and provides a recognizable landmark to my American players.

This should also give David a chance to shine in his infiltration role.  I'm picturing a scenario of the party sneaking in with a great number of Stealth and Security Systems checks, accomplishing their mission, being detected, and having a running firefight back out of the base, possibly to the point of the helicopter taking off under fire.

The key MacGuffin of this scenario is to recover a list of Word of Blake agents aboard Coalition WarShips, to prevent another CASE WHITE.  I can have this just be a file on a computer, but I'd like to do something clever and creative with how that data exists, something that complicates the mission.  I need to give that a bit more thought, as well.

Monday, March 5, 2012

Transistioning

I think I have many of the elements for Session 21 in transit, so I'm now turning my attention back to Session 20, now only a week away.  I still need to come up with a clever way to transition the story into the Coalition invasion.  Ideally, I want to close out Alex's plotline.  While I've managed to implicate David, if only at metagame level, I need to come up with an actual climax for this story, and I'm realizing I don't have one.

There's only one point in time and space where Alex can really learn the truth behind the Sarna attack and why his parents were killed: ROM.  Fortunately, a raid on ROM makes an excellent pen-ultimate mission.  Eliminating some elements of the Word of Blake intelligence infrastructure would be an excellent objective for the Coalition to send the party on via the new party member.

This should obviously be another very high-resistance mission, possible with multiple battle armor defenders of the facility.  I will also need to write up a fair number of in-game documents to advance the final points of Alex's plot.

Friday, March 2, 2012

Wave Over Wave

I've spent a fair amount of my downtime considering the issues related to determining the appropriate level of force to use against the party, and I've come to the conclusion that given the circumstances, I need to take a more flexible approach.  I don't know what actions the party will take leading up to the engagement, and I need to be able to react to changes in the tactical situation in case the PC's get very unlucky early on.

The result is that I'm building "waves" of bad guys, groups that I can send in to meet the capabilities of the party.  Since the guard units will be fighting a holding action, I can afford to file units in a few at a time, let the guards shoot them up, then bring in more.  This also lets me adjust difficulty in response to how long the guards will be out there while the rest of the party handles the situation.  The downside to this plan is that I need a number more minis than I would otherwise, so that I can support the number of units I need to have fielded at any given moment.

I also think I'll need to get a Balius miniature to stand in for Lecna's Sirocco -- the latter 'Mech isn't made in miniature.

Thursday, March 1, 2012

The Shortcomings of BV


It is fairly well-known that Battle Value isn't a perfect measurement of the capabilities of a force in BattleTech.  The system breaks when certain metrics seriously differentiate the forces, even when those metrics are ostensibly counted in the equation.  This is especially clear when you're looking to put BattleMechs against non-BattleMech forces.  Light vehicles, especially aircraft, can quickly climb their to-hit numbers well into the impossible 13+ bracket simply by moving at high speed.  Conversely, a force with few high-skill units will usually defeat a less-skilled unit of equivalent BV, at least in my experience.

In addition, BV makes no provisions for environment and tactical situation.  Infantry attacking BattleMechs in an open field are doomed, unlikely to even make it within range of the target, while infantry in a defensive position within a city that the same BattleMechs must enter to achieve their objective is horrifying to the attacker.  Likewise BattleMechs enjoy a serious advantage over conventional vehicles in any situation where particularly hilly terrain restricts tracked and wheeled vehicles to a road or other contained area, while the BattleMech force can climb cliffs and use jump jets to maneuver into superior positioning.

For these reasons, while BV balancing makes a good starting place for similar forces meeting in a situation where the advantages derived from Heaven and Earth are roughly equal, it is almost useless for the kind of assymetric engagement one is likely to encounter in an A Time of War campaign.  As such, I need to develop a better way of estimating what most RPG's would consider Encounter Difficulty without having to run through the engagement several times to determine the risk level to the party.

This is one of those statement-of-problem entries.  I don't have a solution at the moment.  But I mean to find one.