Author: Toby

Flames of War

I was going to put up some pictures of my Ottomans, but there seems to be a monsoon outside and the figures are in the garage. Since my Panzer Lehr FoW figures are actually in the house, I will put up some pictures of them instead.

Platoon Command Sdkfz 251/10
Platoon Command Sdkfz 251/10

First up, a platoon commander 251/10 with a 37mm AT gun. Fairly useless against tanks at this stage of the war but very handy against enemy half tracks.

Grille H
Grille H

Second, some organic fire support, in the form of two Grille H. Basically a modified Pz II chassis with a 150mm heavy infantry gun mounted in an armoured box. Hopefully these will be useful for knocking dug-in enemy infantry out of their fox-holes, while still being able to keep up with the rest of the company.

Pz IVH
Pz IVH

And finally, some divisional support, in the shape of an attached platoon of Panzer IV(H). The last version of the Panzer IV and still fairly handy although seriously outclassed by the Panther. Perfectly capable of handling itself against the Sherman or T34, but showing its age against the Firefly or T34/85.

Task List

Right, the painting the lead mountain I already have rather than buying more policy is starting to bear fruit, although I am now getting the ‘just 4 more figure to finish the army’ urge.

Anyway. my Ottoman Turks got the treatment on holiday, so there will be some pictures of them up soon when I have taken some OK ones.

Also on the list are:

Marian Romans in 25mm – using the Wargames Factory figures which have had a bad se of reviews but which I have felt paint up quite nicely. Nine elements done, seven more required for the minima of 16 in the Marian list (and who takes more than 16 Bd(O) in a Marian list?).

25mm HOTT armies. The Undead Egyptians are progressing nicely but the Dwarves have all stepped backwards as their basing is rubbish so that needs to be redone.

15mm FoW – a Gepanzertepanzergrenadier Kompanie for the Panzer Lehr division. I think I only need to buy another 4 Sdkfz251/1’s and I have all the figures for 2000 points, and the vast majority of them are painted as well, so the end is in sight here.

15mm Later Achaemenid Persians are still stalled while Xyston get round to producing some Massagetae, but I need to paint the rest of what I have got and sort out an army list for them.

Further down the line:

Remodel the Lizardmen and get some more Stegadons – we hates you GW, we hates you

Finish off the Necrons (maybe they will get a decent codex one day?)

Finish off the High Elves – but for which system?

Rebase the pyschodelic Dark Elves for HOTT

Kofun Japanese – at least paint what I have while waiting to be able to afford a bunch of figures from the US.

Another burst of activity

Actually this is something I painted a while ago now, but I am putting a picture up here now to see if I can put pictures up, and then if I can, I will put up some pictures of the Ottomans that I painted while I was on holiday.

Anyway this is a GW Sisters of Battle Rhino in my new black and flames paint scheme…

Sisters of Battle Rhino
Sisters of Battle Rhino

The colour balance is pretty poor as its taken on a phone camera rather than a proper camera.

Here is one taken on a proper camera, admitted under a horrible combination of daylight and incandescent light, so it errs the other way and is over-warm. Suits it though. Need a post-apocalyptic bit of terrain to photograph it on now.

SoB Rhino
SoB Rhino

The new combat system…

…as used this evening. And when I say new, I mean stolen from Pendragon.

This is to avoid the problem with high-skill Runequest where combat is just a series of successfully parried attacks. Realistic, in that two highly trained swordsmen will keep fencing with each other, but tedious because it is only resolved as fatigue starts reducing skill levels.

So instead the Pendragon system. Here the aim is to roll under your skill, but more than your opponent. So there is an advantage in having a higher skill than your opponent because it gives you more headroom – the range of numbers where you are succeeding and your opponent can’t because it is more than his skill, so if he rolls higher than you he fails.

Obviously a 01-05 can’t be a critical in this system so instead your skill is, and the numbers immediately below it. So if you have a skill of 43, 42 and 43 will be a critical. 01 – 41 will be a success, but if you roll 36 and your opponent with a parry skill of 55 rolls 44, he has parried your sucessful attack.

More Magic

Although these are actually earlier thoughts about how a magic system should work.

Combat systems in RPG are normally well honed, based on actual experience, and allow a number of rounds of sparring and gradual degredation of the enemy. In systems like RuneQuest, you have the opportunity to parry, and you can decide how much armour to wear in a trade-off between skill levels (modified by encumbrance) and protection.

Magic systems on the other hand tend to be much simpler (caveat here – I haven’t bought a new RPG in 20 years so they have probably moved on). What I am looking for is the tussle of power between two opponents as they strive overcome each other’s power. The touchstone is the scene in the Lord of the Rings (the book stupid, not the film) where Gandalf is trying to seal the door from the chamber of Marzabul (sp). To misquote – ‘…the counter spell was terrible and in the end the door was destroyed, along with part of the chamber…’.

This is what I want – the ability to start casting a spell, for the target to realise it and start casting a counter-spell, the for the original caster to increase the power and so on. As part of this there needs to be a separation between the amount of raw power that a caster has access to and their ability to control it, so there is the temptation to use more power and suffer the backlash. The use of magic should be instrinsically dangerous, especially with powerful spells.

It should also have some sort of moral hazard, because it normally does in fantasy literature. And this I think should be tied into how you obtain power. Magical power should be ubiquitous, but low density. An individual caster should have enough power to light a match. To cast powerful spells you need to concentrate power, and half of the magic system should be ways of doing this. At the moment, a number of schemes spring to mind:

1. Cast for a very long time – ritual magic, hours or days of chanting, requiring endurance rolls, as the power builds and builds.

2. Have many people casting – the metaconcerts of the Many Coloured Land or the ur-vile wedges of The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. The interesting question here is whether the ultimate caster can handle it all.

3. Divine power – all the catsre does is open the gate and lets the power from the other side stream thorugh. If the source is not beneficent though who knows what else may come through.

4. Black magic – tap into the power of a thousand human sacrifices. This is the fast route to power, and therefore gives the players an essential moral dilemma and the chance for the NPC baddie to circumvent all the irritating PC restrictions.

Social Magic in RPG

I have had a long running issue with the power of magic in D&Desque role-playing games. They allow too much power without any corresponding responsibility – no society could possibly survive in such a situation. It would only take one disaffected 20th level magician to destroy 1000 years of progress.

Runequest had a more realistic system, where powerful magic was utterly embedded in the system, so you had to be part of the social structure in order to gain access to it. The problem was that it lacked the pzzazz of the D&D system.

What I am looking for is something in the middle, and today’s idea is this. Many systems have the idea that metal or encumbrance interfere with magic, to reinforce the standard trope of the unarmoured mage.

What would happen if people interfered with magic as well. The more intelligence there is in the area, the more difficult it is to cast spells. You need to open yourself up to the flow of power to cast spells and people make that more difficult.

The advantage of this is that you can still cast the powerful fireball down a dungeon where no one is around, but you can’t cast it so easily in a village and it is very, very difficult in a great metropolis. A self-levelling system? I think I need to think through the ramifications of it, but it could be a nice little idea.

May resolution

Right, lets see if I can actually keep this up to date and be bothered to post to it more often. I’ll make it my front page as well, if I can work out how to 🙂

Having deleted over 6,000 bits of comment spam I will also try and see if I have managed to stop people commenting on things.

WAB Armour

I quite like the Warhammer Ancient Battles rules for doing small scale skirmish battles, although I think they don’t give a good feel of a larger scale battle very well at all. This is a problem with some of the army lists, like the later Byzantines, where you want a unit of really nice looking kataphractoi but can’t really justify having an imperial guard regiment in an army of 80 men, which would really have just been the garrison of a frontier fort.

There are a couple of things that I would like to change though, to give it a better feel.

The first is purely nomenclatural. The names of generals are always too important. My 80 man byzantine force (its not an army) will be let by a Turmarch or similar, not by the emperor. Its easy to change this though.

The second is a spin-on from WFB. If the unit width to qualify for ranks were upped to 5 it would give the battle-lines a thinner, more realistic feel, rather than the deep company columns you often seem to get at the moment.

The third is the big one. It dates from the very first days of Warhammer, back in the ’80s. At that point there was a fundamental misapprehension. Being on a horse does not give you extra protection if you and the horse are a single entity. It makes you more vulnerable. Because of this mistake, everything thereafter has to compensate in WAB to make up. Ideally the situation should be:

Missile fire should have a +1 to hit cavalry, as they are a larger target. In hand to hand the larger target is outweighed by the extra height the cavalry-man has.

Saving throws should be:

None as a base for everyone.

+1 for a shield.

+2 for a large shield for infantry (-1 move).

+1 for light armour for infantry.

+1 for heavy armour for cavalry.

+1 for light armour and cloth trapper for cavalry.

+2 for heavy armour for infantry (-1 move).

+2 for heavy armour and barding for cavalry (-1 move).

+4 for cataphract armour and barding for cavalry or mediaeval full plate and plate barding (no extra bonus for shields, -2 move).

So the saving throws would be:

None – anyone

6+ – infantry with shields or light armour, cavalry with heavy armour, cavalry with shields, cavalry with light armour and light barding.

5+ – infantry with large shields, infantry with light armour and shields, infantry with heavy armour, cavalry with heavy armour and barding, cavalry with light armour and light barding and shields.

4+ – infantry with light armour and large shields, infantry with heavy armour and shields, cavalry with heavy armour and barding and shields.

3+ – infantry with heavy armour and large shields, cataphract cavalry with full armour and full barding.

No-one would have 2+ or 1+ saving throws.

Stamp Duty

Sitting here looking at the stamp duty bill for moving house. This could turn into a standard tax-is-too-high rant, so I’m going to try and avoid that. I don’t have a problem with paying my entire salary in tax this year at all.

No, instead it occurred to me last night that we always go on about how corrupt these 3rd world governments are where you have to grease palms to get anything to happen, and how this makes them inefficient and poor. And yet stamp duty is just a chunk of money I have to pay to a bureaucrat in order form him to process my application to buy a house. The only difference appears to be that there is a set tariff and it goes to a central department. Is that they key difference between taxation and graft?