There seems to be some interest in various quarters lately in games that combine minis rules with roleplaying rules, and doing so NOT in the 3.x-with-battlemat-sense, but in some kind of early 80s sense that escapes me.

I remember this coming up on rpg.net (I think Calithena and komradebob mentioned it), then David posts rules to that effect on therpgsite, and a couple of days ago I saw an announcement for a game called .45 Adventures which seems to take the same approach to Pulp.

http://www.rattrap-productions.com/PulpHeroes/

See also this swashbuckling game:

http://www.rattrap-productions.com/Gloire/Index.html

What gives? Can somebody tell me about the special appeal & pedigree of this genre(?), and state preceisely what is different from 3.x tactical combat?

I should add that the announcement in question was on Troupe Berkeley, which, Elliot will agree, is for all intents and purposes North Cal Swine Central.

Well, first you've got the miniatures gamers who turn their noses up at roleplaying and just like to do skirmishes because they're cheap and appropriate to certain genres.  Then you've got the roleplayers like myself who also love minatures games.  Then you've got the people who just want an excuse to buy more miniatures (I've never needed excuses.).

Personally it goes back to what D&D started out as, a medival fantasy miniatures game with campaign rules and epic character advancement.

But I think my biggest inspiration was the moment when I picked up Warhammer Quest and was disappointed to learn that the characters from it weren't game legal for Warhammer Fantasy Battle.  Talk about a missed marketing opportunity.

I guess my interest is that in spite of it being right there from the beginning, nobody has ever actually done it.  Savage Worlds and D&D drop the ball on the miniatures game end and have characters that are too complex to function directly in a wargame.  Warhammer is embarassed of rpgs and won't even talk about their liscenced rpg brand in their house organ magazine.  Rolemaster has a wargame and an rpg and a campaign system but the complexity of Warlaw scares even a grognard like myself.  Besides which War Law isn't a miniatures game it's a counter based wargame where a single chit represents a couple hundred men.


The pedigree is simple.  Before rpgs there were skirmish wargames that were basically rpg combat systems without the rpg.

Then along come rpgs and D&D is always putting out a new D&D miniatures game that fails to measure up (Swords and Spells, Battle System I & II, Chainmail II, D&D minis...)

Warhammer first edition actually called itself a "Mass Combat Roleplaying Game" and was, in many ways the best edition of the game.

It's an imaginary line that isn't crossed enough IMO.

Well I like combining the two on occasion.  Like I said in the RPGnet thread, the only game I've come across that does it seamlessly is the Star Wars D6/Star Wars Miniatures Battle system.  Characters port right over to the mini game and take the part of Heroes (as it should be).  Of course, it's skirmish level, not mass battles.

Of course, as was also said in the RPGnet thread, you have to define "wargame".  Some people consider anything that uses miniatures a wargame, some people consider miniature mass battle systems wargames, while skirmish level ones aren't, some people consider those old games with hundreds of little chits wargames.

I don't know of any RPG that goes beyond the skirmish level of miniature combat.  Savage Worlds and D&D Rules Cyclopedia cover mass combat...but not in a traditional wargame type way.

You should have a look at my Bare Bones thread Grubdude.

I'm workin on it!

Anyhow, another thought occured to me.  Rules lite is all the rage these days, and when I see wargame rules I see fast and simple combat rules.  Why?  Because the only reason for fast and simple combat rules is so you can handle bigger fights!  Therefore the only reason for rules lite games is bigger fights!  Duh!  

You jest, but handling big fights is part of it for me.

It can be fun to have your guy face down 30 morlocks/orcs/bandits/whatever. OD&D was actually good at this. Most games now (including D&D) are terrible (Savage Worlds being a partial exception).

What's appealing about it to me? I guess I'm into minis and gaming driven by visual and tactile aids lately.

What komradebob and I were going off on was moving away from the wargame model of miniature play and towards a not-very-well-defined playing with toys model. I think there's something there (even if I'm a lot interested in fighty bits) that's been underexplored.

I don't think this is a retro thing though, I think it's an attempt to find new approaches to old toys. And as David notes to push against a barrier that's in some sense artificial.

As to 3.x, as someone who ran a lot of combats for characters around 20th level, there's really no connection. 3.x (at high level, at low level it's a lot like old D&D with a few bells & whistles really) is this really complicated ballet of multiple attacks with hundreds of options for each, and it generally takes several hours to run a good fight. I want any given fight to take no more than 10-30 minutes of table time, the high end only if it's really climactic and interesting. So I don't see much connection between the two in terms of playing style though if you say "well you're fighting and minis are important to that" then I suppose you could see them as something similar.

I guess the difference kb and I were trying to crystalize was using the minis/terrain etc. as props to support the imaginative play vs. using them as a chessboard on which structured play happens with the imagination useful primarily for choosing options and visualizing things after the fact.

One reason Bare Bones is quite a bit deadlier than Warhammer is that I want fights to be decisive.  One thing Rolemaster and GURPS taught me is that complexity doesn't slow things down if you can actually get things done.  Rolemaster fights rarely last many rounds.  GURPS on the other hand can go on forever due to good parry and dodge scores.

What's Bare Bones?

Adventures and Expeditions by GASLIGHT is an rpg extension that is fully compatible with the GASLIGHT miniatures rules, intentionally so.

Amazing Tales! is a great pulp miniatures game which is really an rpg pretending not to be.

I'd love to see this idea better utilised.

It's my Hybrid RPG/Minis game I wrote the first version of about 12 years ago.  There's a thread on the Game Design board that goes on about it a bit.

The first I came across this genre was a book by Donald Featherstone called Skirmish Wargaming, which had a simple but (at least on reading) elegant and flexible set of miniatures rules for individual figures. No advancement system or roleplaying rules (at least that I recall), but I believe the assumption was 1 player=1 figure, and each scenario was preceded with a backstory that explained the motivations of the individuals involved. I remember an Old West scenario, a Vikings scenario, and a scenario of the Defense of Rorke's Drift in the Zulu Wars. So for example in the Old West scenario you were told about the grudges of the various characters leading up to the showdown, and IIRC one of the characters was a woman with a whiskey bottle for a weapon, who was involved in a love triangle with two of the combatants...or something like that. The Vikings included an untested berserker who was hoping to live up to the family tradition and an older warrior who had a few tricks up his sleeve to make up for the steps he'd lost, but who was basically hoping to die in battle. I used the latter as the background for a Melee scenario that I ran in college, with great success.

For people who don't feel comfortable with rulers, there are similar hex-and-paper games such as Cry Havoc (plus followups which varied the basic high medieval skirmish rules to cover vikings, Crusades, siege, samurai, cowboys, and I guess light sabres), Battle Lust (a simplified and wargame-ized version of the Harnmaster combat system, which might explain why the game doesn't really treat roleplaying issues since they're in the main game), and Gunslinger (a self-contained Avalon Hill boardgame).

Cry Havoc! We played that one religiously, especially the first two sets, CH and Siege. Outremer was fairly nice too.

It really made a difference that the counters were named guys with goofy medieval names... you were really rooting for Squire Engerrand to make it to the castle moat. Except he never did because those peasant longbowmen were massively overpowered.

Having written and published .45 Adventure I can tell you what my approach was and the reasons for it.

Though I started out with RPGs, they always had a miniature component. I liked my little lead men and women and enjoyed building the scenics for the games. As time went by, I moved more toward wargaming but all the games that were out at the time involved big spaces with a lot of figures. I lived in an apartment when I began work on .45 Adventure so one of the main components I wanted was for the game to be able to be played in a small area.

The small area served multiple purposes. First, it could fit on my tiny kitchen table or in the dorm room of a college student. Second, building the set would not be an epic adventure. I wouldn't need to take out a loan to build the game board. Finally, it meant that players would be right in on the action right away and wouldn't have to spend half the game moving before anything happened (such tactics are good with wargames but I didn't want this to be a wargame).

Being that the games were going to be pulp, I knew that big armies and squads of guys would not feel right to me. Almost all the pulp stories involve just a handful of protaganists and antagonists in any one scene. There are exceptions of course, but I was ignoring those foor the purposes of game development. So, I was able to generate rules that put more detail into each model. The heroes could be heroic and do heroic things, but there was still enough of an element of chance that the winner was not a forgone conclusion (some games are designed around the good guys always winning and it's encouraged). This also meant that anyone with an interest in the game could start with just 3-5 figures. People would not have to build an army of guys and spend all their time painting.

Now, I think the thing that makes it more of a hybrid game instead of a miniature skirmish game is the fact that I have included many non-combat related abilities and situations. In the newest supplement, there is one scenario that just involves trying to get information. Combat is actually a detriment to winning the scenario. A skirmish game implies that the emphasis is on combat. a Hybrid game has its emphasis on story-telling.

I hope to introduce our whole line of games to more RPG players so I will be attending GenCon this year and have a small demo table set up in the dealer's area (in the GPA booth area). If you plan on being at GenCon, stop by and take a few minutes to try the game out.

Richard A. Johnson
Rattrap Productions
www.rattrap-productions.com

We had a couple games of .45 Adventures at our local convention this year.  The setting was a nice little 3-D museum.  Every other game in the minis room needed 3 or 4 tables and a hundred figures.  The guys at the .45 Adventures game seemed to be having as much fun with their single table and handful of lead.

The thing about small skirmishes is that you tend to want really built up terrain and then you wind up spending as much time and money on scenery as you would have on minis.

Eh...who am I kidding I've spent a small fortune and a life time on both

Have any of you guys seen this? Game Chef '05.

Kpachoapmee AKA Krasnoarmeets