Star Crawl Space Combat Preview

I've done testing with the Star Crawl space combat rules and I'm pretty close to a final version. This is a big part of the rules and a pretty significant milestone in being ready to publish Star Crawl.  

I used the Vehicle Mayhem rules as a starting point: those rules are excellent at representing relative movement and tracking armor damage. The image above includes the play areas I'm using for space combat. The left board would be for combat, with ships maneuvering around each other. On the right is the pursuit tracker, used when ships attempt to escape combat. My goal is to keep space battles exciting and fast past while maintaining a tactical feel. As the rules tighten up, I'll post more specifics.

Ship stats will again be similar to Vehicle Mayhem, with simple "dot" armor tracking as a key concept. To avoid massive numbers of dots as ships grow in size, I've added Damage Denominator (DD) as a ship stat. The size and class of the ship determines how much damage is required to remove a point of armor. So, a plasma burst rolls 12 points of damage. This would do 2 dots of damage to a fighter with DD 5 or 1 dot of damage to a battlecruiser with DD 10.

GaryCon X

Last weekend's GaryCon X was fantastic. Every year the con is awesome and this was no exception: the organizers go all out to make sure it's the best convention for gamers. We had the entire Geneva Ridge resort this year, providing massive amounts of play space.

I ran 5 games this year, and only 1 wasn't full (which is great for a con of this size). I started with Super Dungeon Explore on Thursday.

SDE is a fun chibi minitaures-based dungeon crawl game; I rarely get time to play at home, so I decided to run a session for the convention. It went very well, but we ran out of time towards the end & had to accelerate the final boss battle. Overall, everyone had a good time, but I don't see myself bringing it again next year: it's a lot of gear to lug & the setup/tear-down time are a bit much to rush through at a convention.

One of my convention standbys is Marvel Super Heroes and I had 2 sessions this year. It's the 5th year I've run MSH at GaryCon and I've got a few players that sign up every year. On Friday I ran "Project Prometheus", an adventure set in 1960. An unknown object is headed towards Earth and the government launches giant monsters towards it in the hopes they can stop or destroy whatever is controlling it. I had a great group who totally got into playing the crazy Jack Kirby monsters.
My second Marvel session was Saturday morning. That scenario was set in 1985, with the New Mutants trying to stop the Circus of Crime from looting Westchester. Again I has amazing players who seemed to have a blast with the game.
The old TSR Marvel system is great at swinging between the cosmic power levels of Fin Fang Foom and the relatively mundane abilities of Wolfsbane. Unquestionably one of my favorite systems.

I ran the first Vehicle Mayhem International Championship (sure, why not) on Friday night. The turnout was excellent, with around 17 players participating over the course of the race. It was very tight competition for the top spot and there were some great moments. One player successfully jumped to another car after his was destroyed. He convinced the driver of the car he was sharing to slam into the car that was in a three-way tie with them for first place (both cars were on the verge of destruction & that was a risky collision). But as the car moved, he successfully jumped to another vehicle. The other cars collided and both drivers were killed. Unfortunately, the jumper's new driver was less open to having a passenger: as the two fought in the car, it went out of control and both were killed.

The last game I ran was a playtest of Star Crawl. It was late afternoon on Saturday, prime time for play, and I had a few no-shows. But the 4 remaining players were spectacular. They took the rules through their paces and gave some excellent feedback. I got to try out the space combat rules, which worked fairly well but still need some work. I'll be running some local games in the next few months & should be able to tighten them up.

A big thanks to everyone who played in my games this year: hopefully I'll get to see you all again at GaryCon XI!

Vehicle Mayhem & Star Crawl at GaryCon X

Photo credit: Drawbridge Games

For those attending GaryCon this weekend, I'll be running games Vehicle Mayhem and Star Crawl.

The first annual Vehicle Mayhem "Disciples of the Wheel" tournament will be held from 4-10:00 pm Friday in Forum AB (table 367). I'll have up to 8 cars on the road at all times: show up any time during that block & jump in when the next car is eliminated!

And Star Crawl will make its convention debut with a session of "Threen Station Zero". I'll be running that 2-6:00 pm on Saturday in Forum AB. The game is full, but feel free to stop by and see the new classes in action. My Saturday evening is open, so if there's demand, I may run a second Star Crawl session off-books after 6:00. 

All weekend I'll have copies of Vehicle Mayhem ($5) and the Vehicle Mayhem playmat ($20), so hit me up if you'd like one.

The header image is from my Vehicle Mayhem demo yesterday at Drawbridge Games. Special thanks to Rico for letting me set up and run!

Vehicle Mayhem Playmats

I got some Vehicle Mayhem playmats printed out on 2'x3' vinyl sheets. Each has a marked out play area, plus commonly used tables at the bottom. They came out pretty nice: I'll have 4 of them for sale at GaryCon at $20 each, so hit me up if you're interested.

Vehicle Mayhem Demo: March 4th

For anyone in the Pittsburgh area, I'll be running a Vehicle Mayhem demo at Drawbridge Games on March 4th. Rules will be taught & copies of the book will be available to purchase from the store. 

If you haven't visited Drawbridge Games, it's a great store with a really vibrant community: I think this will be an excellent event!

New DCC Stats: Perception & Credit

In developing Star Crawl for my home campaign (and putting it to paper for eventual release), I've added two statistics: Perception and Credit.

When running and playing DCC, I (and other judges) seem to be inconsistent with how they handle characters noticing things within the current rules.  Some use Intelligence, some use Luck; some say Int for seeing and Luck for hearing (and my memory just isn't good enough to be consistent). Perception is a catch all for these. This derived stat is the sum of the ability modifiers for Intelligence and Luck. Some classes (DCC Thief and SC Scoundrel) add their levels to this score. 

Credit is a fairly complex stat, and one I'm still working to refine, but the idea is to have a way to simulate the complexities of a modern/futuristic character's financial state without just saying "you have X dollars". Each occupation has a starting Credit Die: major changes in life situation may raise or lower that die, but otherwise it's fairly static. Resource windfalls add a transient bonus to Credit, which will help the character buy stuff now but not necessarily have a permanent impact. 

Here's how Credit would work:

Blutark the Particle Harvester has d6 Credit. During his latest adventure, he obtained a frigate loaded with illicit goods. The judge rules that keeping the frigate will increase his credit die (to d8) and selling the cargo will give him a short term bonus (+2). So Blutark heads to the local market with d8+2 Credit for making purchases. There would be a certain threshold for "automatic" purchases (say something with a value less than half your max Credit roll); otherwise, you need to make a Credit roll to afford that item right now. After a month or so, that bonus will be gone but Blutark will still have a d8 Credit die. 

0-Level Star Crawl Generator

The amazing folks over at Purple Sorcerer Games have been kind enough to add my new Star Crawl occupation list to their 0-level party generator. For now, I've only go the occupations there (no Star Signs or customization), but eventually I'll submit more requests to them. For now, it's enough to greatly assist me in the playtest process: I'm currently transferring 10 sheets of characters to use for 0-level testing. I may even have something to run off the books at GaryCon.

Head over to Purple Sorcerer & make some zeros if you want to start to get a feel for Star Crawl.

And here's the fillable PDF 0-level character sheet I'm using, including two custom stats I'm introducing with Star Crawl: Perception and Credit. I'll talk more about both in a future update.