Freeway Warrior Multiplayer!

[Zero]

Oh god no. If anything, combat was too complex. I think between me and Zipp we want to strip out some of the detail.

The first draft of the game didn't have phases in combat, for example. I have to say I do prefer the "one action per turn" style of play; when you have an enemy at Close, if you do anything other than engage in CQC, you deal no damage in CQC and suffer a CCS penalty that round. I'd probably want to apply that rule to things like movement too; in Lone Wolf, for example, retreating from a battle meant you had to face one more round of combat and suffer damage.

So: choose to toss a grenade, or move, or fire your rifle, or shine your flashlight in a dude's eyes, or whatever. I don't like the "opposed movement", because it keeps combat rather static, instead of allowing much tactical movement.

The poetry of FW and LW, as I mentioned to Zipp via PM, is that the game is simple, and can be picked up and played by anyone in a few minutes. I think we lost that in the combat rules. From the context of feel, I prefer to take a minimalist approach -- implement as few game mechanics as possible, while still 1) staying true to the Freeway Warrior books' formula, and 2) providing a possible avenue for simulating most reasonable actions. I'm not so much worried about detail; a lot of that can be expressed via flavor, and in a lot of cases is splitting hairs.

[askhati]

Mmm, am curious to see how this develops. Will the Ranged Attack rules also be changed?

[Zero]

Not much. Still Shooting vs. Stealth, range mods still there. Gonna have to think hard about the modifiers for autofire, too; leaning toward the volleys -> bonus method.

[Zipp]

Hey, sorry it took me so long to drop in!

As Zero has stated, I believe the rules need to lose complexity. The phases were a nice touch and perfect for the demo because they showed us exactly where things were slowing down... like Zero, I now believe that combat needs to consist almost entirely of CQC rolls. I think movement and other actions are all too complex.

Here's some further thoughts from me to think about. These are based on things that bothered me while GMing and seemed to slow the game down for the players.

Action phase
Anything not CQC related can be done via "choice sections." For instance, in the gamebooks things like grenades would have an effect pre-combat and it would be decided by the GM based on a roll. I think using things like grenades and molotovs should all be done pre-combat and should initiate a skill test, with positive rolls achieving positive results.

Did the players come across a group of bikers who haven't noticed them yet and Jeremiah has a grenade? Then this should be a series of skills tests! One test should be stealth (can they stay hidden?) and another could be shooting with the grenade (can they toss it well?). If this is a success, the GM can easily rule that several of the bikers are outright incapacitated. The ensuing CQC fight will be much easier! This gets to another issue I had...

stats
Too many stats! A little bit of a speech from me here...

I think consulting scores upon scores of tables is a meta-game that is meant for dungeon crawlers. The early D and D games worked great with all their tables and charts because it kept that "table top" feel to things. But once games started to move away from dungeon crawls and more into narrative play, I think tables and what not only served to slow things down. It's why I love quirky games like Ocean or games like Lone Wolf, which have minimal rules. I think the latest LW rules are a little TOO slim, but our Freeway Warrior rules are a little too THICK for what Zero is trying to accomplish.

The short of it is, there should be no need in Freeway Warrior to look up as many stats as the players and I had to during every combat round. If someone wants to throw a grenade, I don't want to consult a chart to see how much damage it does. I want to just decide what it does as a GM and move on with the story.

In keeping with this, I think many of the stats need to be simplified. Healing injuries for instance (my fault). It should be connected, I think, to fieldcraft still, but it should be a very easy equation. This is also why I think movement needs to be eschewed completely as that was the stat I continually had to look up every round.

Firing Guns
Going back to the style of the books, I think firing guns is something that should happen pre-CQC combat. There should be gun combat and there should be CQC combat and never the twain should meet... it just gets too complicated if they do. I keep going back to the way Joe did gun combat in the books... they were their own separate sections.

DC setting
This is something to be talked about after the other things are worked out, but having a set table of DCs would be nice. I see FW as a very one-shot style game, if only because once characters start leveling up, they become very difficult to set reasonable DCs for. The system seems to work best at the starting level.

I found, while I was GMing, that using "4" as my "0" for DCs and then going up from there worked well. For instance, I considered a roll of "6" to be a decent difficulty, so most DC's were set at 10 (6+ base 4), with 9 being used for slightly easier or more mundane tasks. This meant that anyone specializing in a skill was going to have a much easier time with that DC, while those lacking were going to find it harder.

I would drift into DC 8 for very easy tasks and I'm not sure I ever went much lower than that. DC 12 was my "high" difficulty, with I think maybe one roll being at DC 13...? I used a similar system for setting stats for enemies, though here I found Zero's advice to be very helpful (I believe your advice was to set their stats like the players and then add 6). END and CS I sort've "felt" my way through, which worked fine.

Character Creation
I recommend adopting my system of character creation, wherein people could lower stats to raise others. It allowed for more variance of character and a more interesting group overall. Otherwise, everyone tends to look very similar.

[Zero]

I need to contemplate combat quite a bit more. I'm actually starting to warm up to the super-simple style of combat and using your skills for various advantages, since I read games like Apocalypse World and similar. More on that later.

I will say that I like the variant of skill point-buy you came up with. To simplify the wording:

- Begin with four stats at three points, and the fifth at one
- Assign six points

Having a skill at zero pretty much means you couldn't use it at all, which is why I'm starting the "low skill" at one. What I don't want to do is go way overboard and just say "assign 19 points" because then you'd end up with people with Shooting scores of like 10, which is ludicrous.

[Zipp]

Yeah, I like this. you could have one skill at 9, which would be a very interesting character to play: pretty much a specialist. Or you could bring everything to 4 and be purely average (probably the hardest character to play!)

[Zipp]

As a secondary note, I think you need to keep the basic "skills compliment each other system" that you established. So stealth should still oppose shooting, for instance.

[Zipp]

Interest still high...?

[Zero]

If you mean mine, I'm still rolling a few things around, and I've been busy (and sick!) lately, so not much momentum has been generated. Rest assured I haven't forgotten about it.

[Zipp]

If you have gmail, we should have a real-time chat at some point to talk about the combat rules and what can be learned from the playtest.

Email me. [e-mail].

~ Zipp isn't afraid of spam

[Zero]

Okey-dokey -- if you want to shoot me something in the interim, I'm vagentzero at the gmail.

[askhati]

I'm also curious to see how things are going, would like to see what comes up. Pity the previous system did not make it... It was still better than Classic BattleTech, believe me!