It’s Mini Monday, where I share customizing, scratch building, kitbashing, and miniature painting projects for your roleplaying and tabletop gaming. This week we’re scratch building a Battle Cat wargaming miniature.
Psst, we have a secret coupon code for a new magus book for Pathfinder 1e, hidden in the text. You’ll need to read everything to find it.
Battle Cat is He-Man’s fearless feline friend, who transforms from the cowardly cat Cringer (erm, tiger) into a red-armored fighting fiend. Besides inspiring alliteration, Battle Cat is He-Man’s inseparable companion, with whom he shares the secret of the Sword of Power and also benefits from its transformative powers.
I’m busy working on my own little D&D Masters of the Universe set, so Battle Cat’s an important miniature to have. It’s possible to find him online, but it’s also very easy to kitbash or scratch build your own, which is why you should give it a go. This project is the perfect beginner project for learning how to use green stuff or modeling epoxy, and you can use the same method for all kinds of original mounts too.
Step 1: Obtain Miniature Animal of the Plastic Variety
Find a suitably sized plastic animal, preferably one with a high enough level of detail that it’ll look like an animal when your primer has made it monochrome. I found a great lioness that was the perfect size and easy to convert into a tiger.
Step 2: Snip and Clip, then Putty and Paste
To make the armored saddle and helmet I used Tamiya Epoxy Putty, which is a two-part clay (white and beige) that you mix together before working. I’ve never used green stuff, which most people swear by, but this stuff certainly does the job.
Saddles are the easiest thing to make, but barding (plate for a mount), isn’t much harder. Find a good reference to work from and break down the full shape into its component shapes and you’ll do fine. The rest of the armor, including the helmet, is just an extension of the same process.
To bulk up the shape of Battle Cat’s beard and chest hair I used hairpieces from some third edition Dark Eldar.
Step 3: Paint and Play
I primed the mini white, then painted his fur orange and the saddle armor red. I then painted green over the fur, to leave exposed stripes. The stripes were a bit tricky, so decide on which direction you want them to run in before painting and you should be fine.
Finally, I dry brushed his beard white, painted his nose and eyes black, and his claws were brown, black, then white. Finally, I gave the fur a black wash and painted the base black. I didn’t texture the base so that other figures can stand on the base, to show they are riding him.
Unleash the Power of the Magus
One of the companies I work for is d20pfsrd.com Publishing, and we just released Art of Magic: Melee and Magic. The book has been doing amazingly well, reaching Copper Seller in under 24 hours. I guess it just proves how popular the magus is.
So, what’s in the book?
New magus archetypes, feats, magus arcana, and spells. Mark Thomas, the writer, did an excellent job of offering a wide variety of builds that should offer something for every magus player.
The book is compatible with the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game (first edition) and is $2.99 for 24 pages.
It’s Mini Monday, and this week I’m going to introduce you to my new favourite kitbashing and converting substance: guitar wire.
Metal guitar wire, as far as I understand, comes in six thicknesses: thin, thicker… well, you get the picture. What matters is that it has many great properties that make it perfect for miniature conversion and kitbashing work:
It’s wire, so you can bend it and cut it like wire!
It’s tightly wound and won’t uncoil like a spring might.
It’s the perfect thickness for detail work and comes in a variety of thicknesses, so you can use whichever size works best for the job you’re doing.
One string goes a very long way.
Once bent, guitar wire maintains its shape fairly well.
Musicians throw it away when they’re done with it. That’s right, it’s literally free if you know somebody who plays the guitar.
Ask Not What You Can Do For Guitar Wire…
Guitar wire gets used for pipes and cables mostly (first mini, above), but here are a few more ideas:
Guts! Check out mini number 2, above!
Arms! Mini number 3 had her arm rebuilt with thick guitar wire and modelling epoxy. The original arm was hopelessly too short, but the bendable wire made this an easy fix. I like the ribbed detailing it gives her arm where I left the wire exposed.
Handles! He-Man (yes, he’s finally here!) has an all-new axe with a handle made from our wonder material. This detail alone brings the axe much closer to the toy axe I got with my action figure. Watch out, Beast Man!
Coins! Because they’re so tightly wound, you could use guitar wire to make miniature-size stacks of coins.
Armature Wire! Because it retains its shape after bending, I figure it’ll work well as armature wire — the wire used as a skeleton for modelling clay when making figures.
Joints! Laid horizontally, you could fill gaps in knees or elbows to simulate more complex joints.
Toast! I’ll bet guitar wire makes great toast. Ah, guitar wire…
That’s it. That’s all I have to say. Go get yourself some and give it a try if you’ve never played with it. I promise… this stuff rocks…
It’s funny how some things affect others. Take the weather, for instance. Here in South Africa, in the Highveld where Rising Phoenix Games is based, we have dry, hot summers and dry, cool winters. When it rains, painting is magic.
When it’s dry, which is most of the time, paint doesn’t last long unless you’re using a wet palette. Spray paint, on the other hand, flows well and drys quickly (which is great for second and third coats).
The point of this rambly post is simple: make the most of what you’ve got.
Is it raining and great for painting? Then paint. Is it hot and sunny? Maybe spray some minis or build terrain in the shade.
Think about your momentum. Don’t let the weather be an excuse. Don’t let anything be an excuse. Paint what you can, when you can. Adapt and prosper. When life gives you lemons…
You’re bright and intelligent, you don’t need me to mother you, so I’ll stop there and switch to anecdote mode. Draw up a chair, my dears, and listen…
A Tale of Trial and Tribulation
In the last few years, just before Covid, I was painting like a madman. I’d managed to get through loads of Orks and Gretchin, as well as many fantasy miniatures. I’d jumped into the hobby again and was loving it, learning, and gaining huge confidence.
Then Covid threw its proverbial in the proverbial and I had very little time for minis. Chalk this one up to life experiences and learning to appreciate the time you have! But you can’t sweat the small things. If anything, the pandemic took away but also gave. Mini painting became the way to enjoy the hobby, and there were fewer distractions (no kid’s parties, family engagements, or going to the mall to waste time).
So, we’re back here again, at the point. Do what you can with what you have. And that’s not just with painting minis.
It’s Mini Monday, with customizing, scratch building, kitbashing, and miniature painting projects for your roleplaying and tabletop gaming. This week we’re building Dakka-Mart, our Gretchin Gun Shop.
The trash speaks to me. It tells me to make things. Inconceivable things of waste and scrap.
It’s all very Orky.
The Gretchin Gun Shop uses a bit of hardboard for the base, some corrugated cardboard for the walls, bits of old pens and medicinal sprays for the turret, and spaghetti for the bullets.
That’s right, I chopped up dry spaghetti for the piles of bullet casings. Don’t worry if they’re not of equal length or if they break skew. This is terrain, so it’s not worth stressing over if it’s just going to sit on the tabletop. It’ll look fine when you paint it.
In fact, you don’t want your terrain to outshine your models, so you have loads of leeway when crafting and painting something like this.
The guns and potato-mashers were made from bits of sprue and toy guns I had lying around. The knife was a bit of plastic card cut to shape, with cord glued to the handle. I twisted bits of thin wire around the weapons and then glued them to the walls.
Hold on though, I want to talk about effort more.
I knocked the main shape of this out in my lunch break, then spent another two hours or so on the details. Painting was quick too. I started this on Friday and was done by Sunday evening. It was a slap-dash paint job done in bad light, but I’m happy enough to have more Orky terrain. Which is the point: you don’t need to spend hours and hours on terrain pieces.
Heck, you don’t even need to spend loads of time on your miniatures.
A little effort is better than no effort. A little colour is better than grey plastic. The terrain you have is better than the terrain you don’t have.
So just go for it. Make stuff. Don’t let expectations of quality hold you back.
It’s Mini Monday, and this week we’re making truly modular doors for tabletop gaming!
Really Modular vs Almost Modular
There are plenty of great dungeon tile terrain sets out there that have “modular” written somewhere on the box, but which usually only fits with sets from the same manufacturer. Special clips and connectors become a problem if you enjoy making your own terrain or want to buy sets from another company and have it all sit seamlessly together on the tabletop. Turns out though that making modular terrain that’ll fit with any other terrain isn’t all that hard at all.
It just needs some planning.
My ideas about modular terrain changed when I saw Johnny Fraser-Allen’s tabletop terrain, which is modular because it stacks. Gravity, not pins, do all the work.
Take a look, Johnny’s work is very inspiring:
Truly Modular Doors
Here’s a hobbit door, a trapdoor, and a sewer grate:
I used plastic card, clay, and matchsticks to build these, with a small eye crew for the door handle of the hobbit door. There’s not really that much to them, and they only took a couple of hours to bang out and paint.
But check how useful they are:
As you can see in this last picture, a bit of Prestik (Blu Tack) will get you a vertical door and some burglar bars. No special connectors needed.
The Perfect Fit, Anywhere
I really appreciate this sort of modularity when I’m building dungeons on the fly, such as when I’m playing with a dungeon to get inspired for a session or some module writing.
And if you think about it, you can apply this principle to so many other types of terrain too.
The Gear Heart of the Mechamancer
We recently released the Mechamancer, a cybernetic reimagining of the barbarian for fifth edition fantasy. You can check it out on Drive Thru RPG. If you already own the Grimdark Pamphlet then you’ll be getting the mechamancer, for free, in a future update of the pamphlet.
I suck at skateboarding. I’m terrible at it. But you know what, it’s good to suck at something. Here’s why…
(And yes, there will be an RPG angle to my story.)
There are a bunch of things I can get cocky about. I’m not bragging though, because I still have far to go, but I’m a fairly competent writer and editor, I know a deal about design and layout, and my puns are perfection. When it comes to skateboarding though, I suck.
But all the suckage is a good thing. It keeps you humble. It teaches you. It gives you perspective.
Humility and Real Motivation
So we’re going to talk about game design a lot here, and we’re going to talk about motivation too. Motivation’s the fuel that gets game design done, that pulls game devs through the tough times.
Motivation fascinates me.
People say our minds are like a computer, so then understanding motivation is like learning to hack our brains. That’s tastily cyberpunk.
But the motivation I’m talking about isn’t the Tony Robbin’s flavored shlock you find in a lot of self-help books. I’m talking about understanding what makes your brain think like it does, then knowing how to deal with those thoughts.
In skateboarding, sometimes the most unnatural movements are the right ones. Take dropping in.
Dropping in is where you have your skateboard’s nose up, then lean forward so that you and your board’s nose come down, onto the ramp. Your body’s natural instinct is to pull back, but this always fouls up and could put you on your bum. Ultimately, you have to trust the physics and lean into it, fighting through the fear.
You quickly realize that fear’s keeping you back. The only way to hack your brain is to fight the fear. So how do you fight fear?
School of Hard Knocks
We all know how to run, but riding a plank, that’s odd. You might be lucky to have learned it as a kid, but otherwise it’s an alien activity. In this way, skateboarding is a perfect model for how we learn.
I see it when I compare mini painting to skateboarding. Both take practice, and practice pays off for both hobbies. The best synonym for practice is “baby steps”. You learn to master mini painting by focusing on one new step at a time.
Gamemastering? Same. Writing games? Same. Nobody ever learned all the rules of D&D before running their first game, they learn enough and add to that knowledge later.
It’s Mini Monday, where we share miniature projects for your roleplaying and tabletop gaming. This week we’re rounding off our tabletop skirmish wargame with hero powers. We’ll also touch on playtesting one last time, because it’s important.Dagger Lords won’t feel like a complete skirmish game without some hero powers, so let’s look at building some today.
We’re updating the public Dagger Lords game document as we go, so be sure to check in and see what we have so far. Don’t forget to leave a comment too, because it gets lonely here in the lockdown.
Final Thoughts on Playtesting
Before we jump into the mechanics we’ll be developing, let’s look at playtesting one more time, to get the bigger picture.
Throughout our project, we’ve created mini prototypes, which we’ve tested and iterated on. These small games help to pick out the fun and broken mechanics, which we can then keep or fix. It’s like getting to hold and feel your ideas, which does a lot for knowing if you’re on the right track.
One of the hardest aspects of game design, for a small studio or a hobbyist, is getting enough playtesting in. Now especially, with lockdowns and Covid still impacting the number of face-to-face games, it can be hard to get players in front of your work, especially when it’s new, buggy, and not connected to a well-known IP.
This is one reason why we made the game’s work file publically accessible, to allow players to check out the game and provide feedback as this series continued. Online virtual tables, like Tabletop Simulator and Roll20, provide another way to reach fans across borders and time zones. Still, people only have so much time, and you can’t expect people, even good friends, to set aside a few hours to play.
Ultimately, you often need to try the game for yourself, as often as you can.
For Three Stone Stories, which is currently nearing its final draft, we set a rigorous in-house playtesting schedule to check every one of the campaign threads that’ll be included in the book, testing each multiple times. GunStars, also in development, has had multiple playtests focusing on various core mechanics, even though it’s still only in its early days of development. Finally, my home RPG sessions are usually focused around whatever content I’m creating at the time, like our undersea campaign that tested a lot of the content for the Undersea Sourcebook series. Apart from that, we try to keep the lines of communication open between ourselves and the players that buy our books, so we can keep improving.
Why is any of this important?
Because making a good game matters, and the only way to ensure that a game is fun is to play it.
By the Power of…!
A game just doesn’t feel complete without some showy powers to deploy against your opponent. Powers also give us an opportunity as designers to showcase the core mechanics and the theme of the game.
Here are a few examples:
Dagger Lords is about fantasy street gangs. Think Gangs of New York, but with goblins and dwarves. Powers that showcase the gang element might have names like Backstab, Cut Throat, For the Brotherhood, Betrayal, Brawl, Club to the Noggin, and so on.
We can tie these to the Reflex Point mechanic easily by making powers cost a number of Reflex Points, but we can also have powers that influence Reflex Points. Ambush, for example, might let you roll a die to steal Reflex Points at the beginning of the game.
Powers give us a good way to prototype racial/heritage abilities and class abilities, which we can later bake into the stat blocks for the various units that populate our game. We can also test weapons as powers, which gives us a lot of modularity.
Let’s jump into the prototype, where we’ll see some initial ideas for powers.
Dagger Lords — Prototype: Street War
The objective of this game is to destroy all of your opponent’s units.
Setup and Rounds
Each player controls 4 gangster miniatures, with the player representing the gang boss. A game has two players. Any miniatures can be used, and for these rules, only close combat weapons are considered because of powerful magic influencing the battlefield. Each mini has 2 Reflex Points, 2 Reflex, +2 Brawl, and 3 Hit Points.
Before the start of the game, each model can purchase a power from those listed below. A model must meet all requirements of the power to be able to use it:
The game is played in a number of rounds, and each round has three phases:
Initiative
Activation (Combat and Movement)
Top-Up
1. Initiative
Each player rolls 1d10 for their gang. Each miniature can spend 1 of their 2 Reflex Points to add +2 to the roll. Play proceeds in order from the player with the highest total to the player with the lowest total.
Dice off for ties.
2. Activation
Each player then acts in initiative order and can activate their miniatures in any order they wish. At the start of the player’s activation, their models gain a number of Reflex Points equal to the following equation:
The minimum number of Activation Reflex Points a model gains is always 1.
To activate a miniature, you must spend a Reflex Point to make an attack, use a power, or move 6 inches.
To make an attack against an enemy model within 2 inches of your model, you roll 1D10 and add your Brawl modifier. The target rolls 1D10 and adds their Reflex modifier. You can each spend a Reflex Point before you roll to add +2 to your total roll. If you equal or beat the target’s score, you have scored a hit. The target loses 2 HP.
Any model can interrupt another model’s attack to attack instead by spending 1 Reflex Point. The order is decided in the order of declared interrupts, so it’s possible for a model to interrupt another model that is interrupting it, the player only has to declare their interrupt after the interrupting player does, and spend the required Reflex Points to do so.
3. Top Up
After all the models on both sides have activated, each model that isn’t destroyed regains 1 Hit Point and Reflex Points equal to their Reflex ability score. A model can never have more than their starting amount of these points.
Winning and Losing
A gang member is destroyed if they lose all their Hit Points. The winner is the first player to destroy all their enemy’s units, or who has destroyed the most enemy units when the time is up.
That’s it for today. Next time we’ll be polishing off the game, so give Dagger Lords a shot and, if you have any feedback, be sure to let us know.
I turned the big Four Oh this month, and to celebrate we’re running a bunch of sales all month long.
On our store, you can use the coupon code “40for40” to get 40% off your cart’s total value at checkout. You can use the coupon as many times as you like, until the end of the month.
It’s Mini Monday, where we share miniature projects for your roleplaying and tabletop gaming. This week we’re drawing our daggers and charging into combat! Blades out, everyone! Dagger Lords is a skirmish game, so expect lots of stabby stabbing.
We’re updating the public Dagger Lords game document as we go, so be sure to check in and see what we have so far. Don’t forget to leave a comment too, because it gets lonely here in the looney bin.
Sexy Simple Systems
Movement, activation, and combat are all systems. Many games that fall into the tabletop gaming hobby are made up of many different systems, often built around a core mechanic such as rolling dice or drawing cards. Dungeons & Dragons and Pathfinder use the core mechanic of rolling a d20 and adding modifiers to it. Combat, skills, and saves — all separate systems — all use this core mechanic.
As a game designer, you have to balance the number of systems well and reuse the core mechanic wherever you can, otherwise you risk creating a system that’s too complicated. Reusing systems is a great way to keep a game manageable, even as it grows. For example, if my combat system and my magic system are essentially the same, I can spend less time explaining it in the rules and players can jump into those rules with less cognitive effort.
This, by the way, is one reason why I hate objective cards in Warhammer 40,000. Give me a table and make me roll for it, please. And don’t ask me to roll dice in Magic: the Gathering.
Of course, each system covers a different aspect of the game and needs to be tailored to those specific needs. Our goal is to keep things as simple as we possibly can. This is the essence of all design: to find the simplest, most elegant solution to a given problem.
We’re covering hand-to-hand combat today, but you could extend these rules to cover shooting, magic, and other systems, with a little work.
Dice
Choosing which dice to use has a big effect on our game’s mechanics. Die sizes impact the roll ranges, probability of a result, average rolls, and the totals we can expect from a die. For example, rolling 2d6 will give us a result of 7 much more often than a result of 12, while a roll of 1d12 has an equal chance of giving us a 6 or 12. Dice and dice probability is a huge topic that’s worth understanding, so do your own research if you’re serious about game design. We’ll just cover some basics needed for our own game of Dagger Lords.
Certain dice map neatly to percentages. A d10 gives you a range from 10%–100%, in tens. A d20 gives you a range from 5%–100%, going up in fives. Put another way, you have a 5% chance of rolling a nat 20 on a single d20. This gives us a useful benchmark. If we know that most champion boxers land 20% of their punches, then we can map this directly to the dice: hitting requires a 9 or more on a d10 (the probability of getting a 9 or 10 is 20%).
We’ve already got our Reflex Point mechanic and our initiative system, the latter of which includes rolling dice. Previous versions of that system used 2d6 for initiative rolls. Let’s change to ten-sided dice, across the game. This is an important decision because a game is a sum of its parts; the better those parts sync, the better the game will play.
Developing Hand-to-Hand Combat Rules
Let’s break down combat into its component parts.
Core Mechanic
I do like my d20 systems, it’s true, probably because I spend a lot of time developing rules for d20 games. Stealing from what you know is a good way to start out, so let’s steal from D&D. We can always modify things as we get further into development.
Our core mechanic, then, might look something like this:
Roll = 1d10 + Ability Score + Modifies – Penalties
Abilities
We’ll need to decide on abilities next then. We could simply have a Brawl ability that works for attack and defence. We might want a more complicated system including Brawl, Dodge, Strength, Damage, Armor Penetration, Armor, and so on. Some of these will be tied to weapons, but they still describe the abilities of a single model.
Think of it as a continuum, from super simple on one side to extremely complex on the other. We need to find the best balance of complexity for the game we’re making. Part of this is about knowing your audience and the level of complexity that’s right for them. For a skirmish game, we might choose a level of granularity that’s more complex than a large wargame, which has hundreds of miniatures, and less complex than an RPG, which has a single character per player. If our players are teens, we can ramp up the complexity, while very young players might only handle three abilities, at most.
Tying things back to Reflex Points, we could have the following abilities:
Reflex: Determines your reaction speed and ability to dodge. Your starting Reflex Points are based off this ability. Reflex is 2 for our prototype.
Brawl: Your ability to fight in hand-to-hand combat, both with and without weapons. We’ll set this to +2 for now.
HP: How much damage you can take before you die.
Attacking
To make an attack against an enemy model within 2 inches of your model, you roll 1D10 and add your Brawl modifier. The target rolls 1D10 and adds their Reflex modifier. You can each spend a Reflex Point before you roll to add +2 to the total roll. If you equal or beat the target’s score, you have scored a hit. The target loses 2 HP.
Dagger Lords — Prototype Game: Daggers Out
The objective of this game is to knock your opponent off a pillar. Neither you nor your opponent can move, all you can do is stab at them in an effort to knock them off their perch before they get you off yours.
Setup and Rounds
Each player controls 1 gangster miniature, with the player representing the gang boss. A game has two players. Any miniatures can be used, and for these rules, only close combat weapons are considered because of powerful magic influencing the battlefield. Each mini has 2 Reflex Points, 2 Reflex, +2 Brawl, and 3 Hit Points.
The game is played in a number of rounds, and each round has three phases:
Initiative
Activation (Combat)
Top-Up
1. Initiative
Each player rolls 1d10 for their gang. Each miniature can spend 1 of their 2 Reflex Points to add +2 to the roll. Play proceeds in order from the player with the highest total to the player with the lowest total.
Dice off for ties.
2. Activation
Each player then acts in initiative order and can activate their miniature. At the start of the player’s activation, their model gains a number of Reflex Points equal to the following equation:
The minimum number of Activation Reflex Points a model gains is always 1.
To activate a miniature, you must spend a Reflex Point to make an attack.
To make an attack against an enemy model on the next pillar, you roll 1D10 and add your Brawl modifier. The target rolls 1D10 and adds their Reflex modifier. You can each spend a Reflex Point before you roll to add +2 to the total roll. If you equal or beat the target’s score, you have scored a hit. The target loses 2 HP.
Any model can interrupt another model’s attack to attack instead by spending 1 Reflex Point. The order is decided in the order of declared interrupts, so it’s possible for a model to interrupt another model that is interrupting it, the player only has to declare their interrupt after the interrupting player does, and spend the required Reflex Points to do so.
3. Top Up
After all the models have activated, each model that isn’t destroyed regains 1 Hit Point and up to 2 Reflex Points. A model can never have more than their starting amount of these points.
Winning and Losing
The first gang member to lose all 3 Hit Points falls off their pillar, and their opponent is the winner.
I turned the big Four Oh this month, and to celebrate we’re running a bunch of sales all month long.
On our store, you can use the coupon code “40for40” to get 40% off your cart’s total value at checkout. You can use the coupon as many times as you like, until the end of the month.
It’s Mini Monday, where I share customizing, scratch building, kitbashing, and miniature painting projects for your roleplaying and tabletop gaming. This week we’ll add movement to the skirmish minis game we’re building and we’ll try out a new prototype of the game. Our little game is coming along, we’ll be half finished with writing it up by the end of this article.
Now, let’s consider how far minis move in our game. We also need to think about everything that affects movement, like terrain, and also the types of movement we’ll allow in Dagger Lords.
Episode 1: Concept and Theme
Episode 2: Initiative and Turns Episode 3: Movement
Episode 4: Combat
Episode 5: Powers and Playtesting
Episode 6: Polishing the Game
We’re updating the public Dagger Lords game document as we go so that you can see the latest version of the game.
Actions and Free Activations
Movement might cost something — such as an action or activation point — or be free. There might be penalties (another cost) attached to movement, such as in Warhammer 40K, where some weapons can’t be fired if the model moves. In Pathfinder 2e, you have to take actions like a Stride to move, leaving fewer actions for attacking or casting spells.
Essentially, these costs are saying that it’s important for the player to consider if they’ll move or not, adding a layer of tactical depth to the game.
We might decide that everyone gets to move, and there’s no cost for doing so, but let’s consider our theme. We’re making a game about fantasy gangs fighting on the streets. It might seem great to let everyone move around for free, but then we’ll never have exciting moments wondering if a character shouldn’t have spent that extra action point.
We already mentioned Reflex Points, so why not use them as action points? I’m hoping we can build a more fluid game here than, say, Warhammer 40K or Age of Sigmar, and Reflex Points might be an ideal way to do that. We’ll get back to this in a moment.
Movement
“Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. His hands can’t hit what his eyes can’t see.”
— Muhammad Ali
How far a model moves affects the game’s pacing. Short movement distances slow the game down, while too much movement will have units zipping around the table faster than bullets. In my gaming experience, most tabletop miniatures games at 28mm scale average around 5 inches of movement per move. Double that for a run. Let’s go with 6 inches for a faster game. That’s the benchmark, and some units will be slower, others will be faster. We can always tweak this value later, but let’s not waste time figuring that out now, I want to play.
Running
In our last version of the game, our first prototype, a model could move twice if they wanted to run. Let’s formalize this a bit more by nailing down how we want to use Reflex Points. In the prototype, you were effectively getting two free Reflex Points when your model’s turn happened. You could move, attack, or do either twice. What if you got a free Reflex Point when your turn happened, but you could still spend Reflex Points outside of your turn. However, your Reflex Points would do far more during your turn. Effectively, we’d be incentivizing saving your Reflex Points for your turn.
This sounds complicated though. I’m sure we can simplify it.
What if your turn multiplied your Reflex Points. You didn’t need to spend them during your turn even, you could wait to interrupt another player, but because your turn had happened, you got a big reward. To be safe, we could double your Reflex Points and subtract one.
Turn Reflex Reward = (Reflex Points x 2) – 1
Are we making it too complex again? Maybe, but this seems like a good time to stop and try things out.
Dagger Lords — Prototype Game: Paint the Town Red
In this small tester game, the object is to paint your opponent’s minis before they paint yours. If you want higher stakes, turn the paintbrushes into vorpal daggers that send their victims to another plane. The point is that we’re concerned with moving and turn order here, combat is a super simple, one hit, one kill affair, so we can focus on the mechanics we need to test now.
Setup and Rounds
Each player controls 3 gangster miniatures, with the player representing the gang boss. A game can have up to six players. Any miniatures can be used, and for these rules, only close combat weapons are considered because of powerful magic influencing the battlefield. Each mini has 2 Reflex Points and 3 Hit Points.
The game is played in a number of rounds, and each round has three phases:
Initiative
Activation (Movement and Combat)
Top-Up
1. Initiative
Each player rolls 2D6 for their gang. Each miniature can spend 1 of their 2 Reflex Points to add +2 to the roll. Play proceeds in order from the player with the highest total to the player with the lowest total. The player with the highest score regains 2 Reflex Points to share among the models in their gang.
Dice off for ties.
2. Activation
Each player then acts in initiative order and can activate their miniatures, one after the other. At the start of the player’s activation, each model in their gang gains a number of Reflex Points equal to the following equation:
The minimum number of Activation Reflex Points a model gains is always 1.
To activate a miniature, you must spend a Reflex Point and can do any of the following:
Move up to 6 inches
Make an attack
To make an attack against an enemy model within 2 inches of your model, you much roll a 4, 5, or 6 on 1D6 to hit. If your attack hits, remove the target from the game — they’ve been painted red.
Any model can interrupt another model’s movement to perform one action from the list above by spending 1 Reflex Point. The order is decided in the order of declared interrupts, so it’s possible for a model to interrupt another model that is interrupting its turn, the player only has to declare their interrupt after the interrupting player does, and spend the required Reflex Points to do so.
3. Top Up
After all the models have activated, each model that isn’t destroyed regains 1 Hit Point and up to 2 Reflex Points. A model can never have more than their starting amount of these points.
Winning and Losing
The last gang with any remaining models in it is the winner.
More Movement Rules
We don’t want to get too big, but we need to be sure we cover enough situations to make the game complete. Following are a few more rules you can add to the prototype. Try coming up with your own rules to replace these, or cover instances I didn’t think about, then let us know what you came up with in the comments.
Jumping
A model can jump 1” up and 1” forward, once, for every 4 inches they move. Effectively this lets a model clear three 1” cubes if they run, for free.
Vaulting
A model can vault over a 2” obstacle, once, for every 6 inches they move.
Flying
Most use one of two methods for flying: minis can “hop” and must land at the end of each movement, or they have a height indicator, which might be constant or incremental.
Let’s think of our theme again though. We’re making a street-level skirmish game, so flying doesn’t make much sense. At most, we’d expect a few characters to drop from rooftops or fly magically for a short distance, but there’s no room for wings between tall buildings, and anyone flying would have to be low enough to avoid cables, so we’ll skip flying for now in our minis game.
Creeping
Since interrupting is a major mechanic, having a way to counter an interrupt becomes invaluable, and fun. Let’s add a creeping mechanic:
Creeping is a move action, requiring a Reflex Point, but you move half your movement, rounded up. If a model is creeping, it can’t be interrupted by a model that can’t draw a line of sight to it. Creeping must be declared at the start of the action.
Climbing
Moving up an incline greater than 45 degrees reduces your movement to half its normal distance. In our prototype, this means models can climb 3 inches.
That’s it for this week’s go at building a minis game. Remember to check out the game and let us know if you have any other ideas to improve on it.
Our newest D&D class is an alternative option for the bard: the Apothecary. This class is all about healing and buffing allies by supplementing cleric spells with healing abilities in the form of potion-like concoctions.
As a special offer, we’re giving away 10 copies of the PDF forfree, on condition that you’ll play the class during your next D&D session. Sound good? You can grab the book here.
It’s Mini Monday, where I share customizing, scratch building, kitbashing, and miniature painting projects for your roleplaying and tabletop gaming. This week we’ll continue building a miniatures game by adding an initiative system and a turn order. When we’re done, we’ll make a simple prototype game so we can get playtesting!
Last Mini Monday we looked at a concept and theme for our little miniatures skirmish wargame, Dagger Lords. Now we’ll get started on an initiative system (woohoo, stealth pun) and the turn order. This is an important bit to get right because everything else we do will happen in the order this subsystem dictates.
Once we’ve got the activation mechanic worked out, we can put it into a simple prototype that we can test out. That’ll help us see if our rules are fun on their own, if they take too long, and if they’re intuitive enough. We also want to be sure our rules tap into our theme of fantasy crime lords fighting a turf war. That might sound like a big ask, but I think we can do it.
Episode 1: Concept and Theme Episode 2: Initiative and Turns
Episode 3: Movement
Episode 4: Combat
Episode 5: Powers and Playtesting
Episode 6: Polishing the Game
Remember that, as we go, we’ll update a public document so that you can see the latest version of the game.
Design Goal
I’d like our activation system to do a few things:
It should be fun
It should involve a wager, supporting the “crime lords” theme
It should allow for up to six players taking turns, but without too much boring wait time
In the aforementioned video’s chat, a bunch of wargamers weighed in with some great activation systems from other games, including rolling against a target number to activate, pulling dice from a bag, or activating one unit per turn.
We can also look to games like Dungeons & Dragons and other tabletop roleplaying games for ideas. Personally, I’m a big fan of systems that let players make choices about who goes when, such as Marvel Heroic Roleplay that lets the players decide when heroes and NPCs act. In those rules, whoever goes last picks who starts the next round, so it’s always in the PC’s favor to have one of their group end off the round. This gets especially interesting when there’s a chance of finishing off the enemies by going before them: miss, and the baddies are going to get in a lot of shots before you can do anything about it.
Dagger Lords Initiative System, Draft 1
Here’s my proposal for both the initiative system and the structure of each round:
Each miniature gets between 1 and 3 Reflex Points, which are replenished at the end of the turn. Because the average is 2, we’ll assume all minis have 2 Reflex Points for now. We can specify the exact number for each model later in our design process.
A model can spend a Reflex Point to jump the initiative queue, but it’s a gamble.
A model can spend a Reflex Point to interrupt another miniature’s movement or attack.
A round consists of the following phases: Initiative, Activation (Movement and Combat), Top-Up
Dagger Lords — Prototype Game 1
Let’s break these concepts down a little more by jumping into a prototype game.
Setup and Rounds
Each player controls 3 gangster miniatures, with the player representing the gang boss. A game can have up to six players. Any miniatures can be used, and for these rules, only close combat weapons are considered because of powerful magic influencing the battlefield. Each mini has 2 Reflex Points and 3 Hit Points.
The game is played in a number of rounds, and each round has three phases:
Initiative
Activation (Movement and Combat)
Top-Up
1. Initiative
Each player rolls 2D6 for their gang. Each miniature can spend 1 of their 2 Reflex Points to add +2 to the roll. Play proceeds in order from the highest to the lowest total. The player with the highest score regains 2 Reflex Points to share among the models in their gang.
Dice off for ties.
2. Activation
Each mini then acts in initiative order and can do any two of the following:
Move up to 6 inches
Make an attack
To make an attack against an enemy model within 2 inches of your model, you much roll a 4, 5, or 6 on 1D6 to hit. If your attack hits, you must roll another 1D6 to deal damage. A roll of 4 or 5 deals 1 point of damage, and a roll of 6 deals 3 points of damage.
Any model can interrupt another model’s movement to perform one action from the list above by spending 1 Reflex Point. If two or more models from different teams wish to act at the same time, they dice off to see who goes first. The order is decided in the order of declared interrupts, so it’s possible for a model to interrupt another model that is interrupting its turn, the player only has to declare their interrupt after the interrupting player does.
3. Top Up
After all the models have activated, each model that isn’t destroyed regains 1 Hit Point and up to 2 Reflex Points. A model can never have more than their starting amount of these points.
Winning and Losing
The last team with any remaining models in it is the winner.
Some Final Thoughts
Reflex Points might be compared to actions in D&D, but they also let a player play when they want. Reflex Points are replenished at the end of the round, and no Reflex Points are carried over, so there’s plenty of motivation to use them. They’re our currency for the action economy, and there’s some risk involved in spending them, especially if you’re trying to go early.
We’ll be able to tie abilities to the Reflex Points later, which could get interesting. Imagine if ghouls can spend their RP to steal RP from other minis, or if wizards can cast a haste-like spell to grant their allies bonus RP.
Our prototype is very basic, and probably not tons of fun yet, but it does let us test out some ideas that’ll be at the core of our skirmish game. In fact, we already tested an earlier version of the initiative system and found it needed major tweaking. We want to get this core right, so it pays to test it out and tweak it before we continue. If you do play our little game, please drop your thoughts in the comments below. What worked, what didn’t, how do you think the initiative system could be improved?
You can check out what we have so far by clicking on the button, which will take you to the Dagger Lords working document.