Chronicles of Yore: Open Combat on a Drear Heath

A while ago, I had the privilege of teaching my room-mate one of my new favorite skirmish games, Open Combat. Open Combat is a fast-playing skirmish game. It's main strong points are: streamlined, easy-to-learn rules of play; an easy system for creating characters (more on that below); and a robust combat mechanic that makes for balanced, crunchy, strategic play (MUCH more on that below).

What follows is a battle report, as well as what I have to admit is kind of a bear of a game review. This has been a loooong time coming—I told Carl Brown, the author of Open Combat, that I'd do one way back when I first bought the rules last October (sorry about that, Carl, if you're reading.) 

(I've separated the rule discussion in italicized footnotes at the end, so that I won't bore anyone who's interested in the pretty pictures. If you just want to know what I think overall, you can skip to the bottom—you lout.) 

We set up on my then-new teddy bear fur gaming mat, with a fay circle of standing stones, some ancient barrow mounds nearby, a desolate spinney of trees on a ridge, and some cairns marking the long road between Skeldkryk and Drycud-upon-Gyre.

We decided on using the basic "Open Combat" scenario for simplicity, in which the goal is to reduce the opposing warband to their break point* and make them quit the field.

We also, for simplicity, played with (more-or-less) mirrored forces which I worked up in about 5 minutes.*

For setup, we rolled “Confrontation,” meaning that instead of board-edge or –corner deployment, we took turns placing figures anywhere on the table at least 8” from an opponent. I deployed the bulk of my troops in the circle of stones, deciding that the Fell Glendywr, my wizard, was trying to use the convergence of leylines to work some necromantic majicks, perhaps bestirring the denizens of the barrow-mounds…

Tom (my room-mate) very neatly set up to surround me. He also placed his ogre** (who he named Percival) as a guard at the barrows for, it turned out, this was the burial place of his ancestors and he would not see the place defiled.

I split my band into two forces. I sent one force (comprised of Brittleghast, the Gribbly-wight, and the Flayer of Shins) to pry Percival the Ogre and the Hunchyman Ludwig of Flür from the ancestral tomb…perhaps they would prove useful for Glendywr’s ritual…

I sent the rest of my band to guard the right flank using the standing stones as a defensive picket, with Glendywr supporting the line with his ensorcellments***.    

Above you can see as Bale Grimly positions himself to hold the gap between a carved head and a stack of (oddly cuboid) rocks. Meanwhile, Skjorn Boarkinder pushes along the right flank, supported by Greer. Together, they form a sort of loose battle line(****) protecting the edge of the ring of stones, while Glendywr begins his black chanting.

Greer stalks the flank of the field, looking for an opportunity to strike where the flesh is soft...

...and Tom's leader, Ulthar IV, strikes at my battle line, trying to ride down Bale Grimly before his demonic comrade could come to his aid...

Meanwhile on the other side of the circle, Brittleghast and his complement stop to bandy a few insults and prepare themselves...

...before charging uphill at a stubborn ogre. Percival, doing much honor to his forefathers, holds his attackers at bay on the threshold of the barrow before ultimately forcing them to withdraw back down the hill.

The fight for the standing stones intensifies as the individual duels converge, then break apart, then converge again. On my side, Skjorn is run through and left expire, while Bale Grimly succumbs to his many wounds. As revenge on Tom's side, Mel-tead B'tar and the Viscount of the Flies are bludgeoned into the mud. Tom's reserves begin to threaten my flank but neither side is able to gain the upper hand*****...

...until Ulthar and Greer are finally able to come to grips.

The scrum closes again, with Tom's reserves desperately trying to stave off the combined force of Brittleghast's sweetly swinging axe and the formidable intensity of Greer's battle-ire.  Desperation then turns to despair as Greer's heavy blade finds the breast of Ludwig of Peregrine and cleaves it open (causing Tom's warband to reach their breakpoint). Ulthar's men turn and flee at the sight, broken and lost to reason.

*Force Creation and Breakpoint: Characters in Open Combat have five stats—Speed, Attack, Defense, Fortitude, and Mind. To create a character, you just decide on values for each stat…and add them up. If you want to tweak a profile—say, add an extra point of attack, that change will cost one point. Likewise, all weapons and special abilities cost one point each. On the face of it, this system seems very easy to unbalance, but it’s not…but I’ll get into that at length.

The Breakpoint is determined by adding up the units FOR and MIN values and dividing by two. During the game, each player tracks his band’s total FOR and MIN (percentile dice come in handy for this) and once it reaches the BP, the band is forced to cede the field.

**Monsters and Mounted units are treated the same in OC. Mainly, they are able to push units farther in combat (which makes them quite dangerous among confined spaces) and they are slightly less reliable to activate: at the beginning of their activation, you roll a die. If you roll poorly, the character will only have limited actions, and if you roll very poorly your monster/mounted fighter won’t activate at all and your turn will end.  I find this abstraction very satisfying for this level of game, and it adds an element of risk-management into using your potentially more powerful units. (This mechanic, by the way, is borrowed from Blood Bowl—and it’s not the only one, as we’ll see.)

***Open Combat does not have a dedicated majick system—which may seem odd for a rule-set that purports to cover all pre-gunpowder periods both historical and fantastical. However, it’s important to realize that the special rules, though named in very concrete ways (dagger, shield, intimidate, etc.), are actually quite abstract and can be used to represent quite a lot. I find that the rules for psychological attacks combined with ranged weapon rules like Crossbow or Javelin can represent quite a powerful wizard; in fact, I find this to be much more flexible than the standard magic rules for SoBH (though SoBH supplements have rules for summoners, necromancers, illusionists, et. al., which OC currently lacks; however expansions are promised). 

****Positioning is very important in OC, because attacking a character's rear facing means that that character will halve their defense value. This is usually the difference between rolling one, two, or three attack dice (see below) which can translate into a significantly greater chance of doing damage. And then when you consider that a character who is surrounded is likely to take damage when they are pushed back into an enemy, you begin to look for ways to get around your opponent.  Scrums in OC therefore, are often decided by who can maintain the integrity of their battle line while compromising that of their opponent. I find this both realistic and strategically challenging.

*****Combat and game balance: remember how I said that the game is tough to unbalance? The reason for that is the combat mechanic, which is the heart of the game. 

Incidentally, it's also the heart of another great game: Blood Bowl. As it turns out, Carl Brown used to play in the GW studio league...and it was reading that little factoid on Gav Thorpe's blog that convinced me to give these rules a try. I could not have been better rewarded, because it turns out that combat in OC is a modified version of the block dice mechanic that makes BB so great.

Here's how it works. When you make an attack, you compare your character's ATK to your opponent's DEF. If your ATK is less than or equal to your opponent's DEF, you roll one attack die. 

On a 1, not only do you fail to do any damage, but your turn immediately ends (just like rolling a skull in BB). A 2 is basically a tie—no telling blows are struck. 3 or 4 allows you to push your opponent back, potentially doing damage by pushing them into other characters or terrain. A five does a point of damage. A 6 deals damage and allows you to push back. I've summarized these results and their probabilities in the table below, but it's basically a 1 in 3 chance each of doing damage, pushing back, or doing nothing at all.

1 Die
Turn Over	Impasse	Pushback Only	Damage Only	Damage+push
1/6	1/6	2/6	1/6	1/6
16.67%	16.67%	33.33%	16.67%	16.67%
			Any Damage
			2/6
			33.33%

Now if your ATK is greater than your opponent's DEF, you get to roll 2 dice and choose the higher one. This has the effect of skewing the probabilities towards the higher results. Instead of a 1/3 chance of doing damage, you have a chance slightly better than 1/2, while your chance for a turnover becomes minimal. Additionally, in close combat you have the opportunity to score additional hits (i.e., if more than one die comes up as 5 or 6). I've included a separate column with the odds for that happening.

2 Dice
Turn Over	Impasse	Pushback Only	Damage Only	Damage+push	Additional Hit
1/36	3/36	12/36	9/36	11/36	4/36
2.78%	8.33%	33.33%	25.00%	30.56%	11.11%
			Any Damage
			20/36
			55.56%

Finally, if your ATK is more than double your opponent's DEF, you get to roll 3 dice and choose one. This skews the results even more, such that you have better than a 2/3 chance of doing damage, and about a 1/4 chance of doing 2 or more damage. Your chances of turning over are incredibly low (though not impossible) and you are equally as likely to score 3 damage as to score either a turn over or an impasse.

3 Dice
Turn Over	Impasse	Pushback Only	Damage Only	Damage+push	1 Additional Hit	2 Additional Hits
1/216	7/216	56/216	61/216	91/216	48/216	8/216
0.46%	3.24%	25.93%	28.24%	42.13%	22.22%	3.70%
			Any Damage
			152/216
			70.37%

The upshot of all this is that, yes, high ATK characters can be very dangerous. And high DEF characters are relatively difficult to take out. But here's the thing: no matter how weak or outclassed your character is, they always have a 1/3 chance of doing damage. (This is in contrast to some situations in games like SoBH—itself a reasonably balanced game—where weaker characters simply stand no chance of getting a positive outcome in a fight.) 

Furthermore, you can even the odds on a powerful character by swarming them with weaker characters. If you get the powerful model surrounded, this can actually improve the odds of  damaging the character to 2/3—since scoring a pushback into another character usually also causes damage (which would be 2 damage if you roll a six!). The only problem is that for each of these attacks you are at an increased risk for turnovers.

The alternative is to set up a group action that allows multiple figures to add their ATK scores together in one attack. The issue here is that none of the characters taking part in the group action can have activated...which means that you need to move them into combat the turn before and hope that they survive. 

However, if you know (or suspect, or are GMing a scenario in which) there will be a tough character to take down, you can design your force accordingly. Looking at the charts above, you can be pretty sure that your characters will survive if they have 3 fortitude or more when they are against an opponent rolling 2 dice, and that an opponent rolling 3 dice could only kill one character at most in a turn of attacks (using both actions to attack). This is true whether that opponent has 5 ATK or 50. Therefore it is easy to create a group of 4 or so fighters with low ATK and DEF but relatively high SPD and at least 3 FOR specifically to hunt your opponent's beefier characters. (They'd do even better armed with spears, which allow them to attack from an inch away). That profile would look like:

SPD	ATK	DEF	MIN	FOR	Special	Cost
5	1	3	1	3	Spear or handweapon, shield	15

...which at a cost of 15 (or 14 without the shield) would allow you to field a small group of these guys for just over a 3rd of  your total cost in a 'standard' 150 point game. Just make sure they don't get ganged up on or targeted with psychological attacks, because they'll go down quick!

Okay, we're at the part where I tell you my overall impression. Still with me? Wow, that's incredible.

I really like Open Combat. The way it combines ease of play, ease of adaptation, and challenging strategy is highly satisfying. The only drawback, in my skinflint estimation, is the price, which at 10 Great British-style dollars (just over 15 of the US-type 'bucks') for the PDF is just a hair expensive, considering there are only 3 scenarios, no dedicated majicks, and no campaign system. By contrast, the first SoBH book comes with a basic campaign system and a couple more scenarios, along with a comparably abstract system for basic magic, for only 8 bucks. (And I guess now there's Fightin' Fungi which has similar stuff and a detailed magic system for 10 bucks).

HOWEVER, as of the completion of the successful Kickstarter campaign to bring the book to print, there is going to be additional content in the form of more scenarios and a campaign system—which, when you consider the excellent production quality, will certainly make it worth the price. (Which is still basically just bus money, compared to many other game producers we could point to.)

SO IN CONCLUSION AT LAST: I highly recommend Open Combat. It has become my new go-to game for fun, fast, exciting fantasy game play. The mechanics are solid, the design is solid, and the rules are robust, clear, and easy to learn. I also anticipate that it's going to take the pressures of narrative scenario design quite well. It's easily my favorite game I've played in the last year, and I see getting many more years of enjoyment out of it.

You can let me know what you think by writing three comments in the box below, then choosing the best one.

Hund of the Morraine

(All Them Witches)

In the hither Northwest, where mountain hames perch 'midst the bluffs of the groaning vale, and the trails are marked by cairns of unknown heritage, there are some who insist that not all stones are as they seem.

These are regarded by their neighbors as—at best—eccentric. Ever are they moonlight-rambling up the trails and passes with leathern satchels of bizarre tools: tiny hammers, calipers, bits of colored chalk.

When happens a likely-looking boulder, these instruments they will use to tickle and to prod the belly of the stone. If one were to ask, for instance, 'Dear Rooblin, why is it that you so vex the stones?' He might reply: 'because this stone, THIS stone is just pretending.

'At it's heart is the wily soul of a primeval beast, forefathers of the hund, or the geit, or the ochse, that was deposited here when the world was but an icy thought in the mind of god...'

And here will they become pensive, perhaps winding and unwinding the handle of their tiny chisel in the tangles of their beard. 'I could show you...if I could but make the creature pay heed. Many is the time that I've seen a stone rouse into the form of a many-hornéd beast and slake itself at the lip of a black mountain tarn...' 

Chronicles of Yore: Teachin' Song of Blades

The nice thing about Song of Blades and other games sharing the 'small game, simple rules' philosophy is that new players can pick them up rapidly, even over the course of their first game. So when I invited a friend over to game (sometime in August, I think) and he wound up bringing two of his friends, I knew there was only really one choice.

I grabbed my deck of character cards and had each player choose a couple hundred points-worth of regular characters as well as a personality, just based on which figures appealed to them. Meanwhile I rolled out my gaming mat and some walls, cairns, trees, and stone heads. Then followed a bloody four-player brawl in two parts:

Once every year and a day rises over the 'wold the vermilion moon like the eye of  a dissipated god. It is said to awaken a hunger in man and dwimmer-beast alike, so that they spend the night in bloody carousal. Few, it is said, wake to see the sanguine dawn, but those that do awake renewed, with the knowledge that they have survived to see another foul year.

Among hollow cairns in the northeast, a party of dwimmer-beasts emerge in search of sacrifice. They close on a band of baleful men, sure in the advantage of darkness and surprise. But the men have the insight of the blood moon's rising. They seek struggle. They welcome strife.

Meanwhile in the Southwest, Dire men ride besotted, seeking the glory and bliss of death under the red moon's spell. Fortunately, Bilebroke's hunchymen are about and willing to oblige.

The struggle is joyous and desperate. The stones watch and chuckle their approbation.

At last, and one by one, the dwimmer-beasts are hunted down, and sent squealing back to the pit, while the hunchymen withdraw in terror and ecstasy into the night.

Barely sated, the maddened riders continue their charge across the fells, and the hunting party is glad of the change in sport. The red moon begins to set in the west, and each breath before the carnage stretches interminably like the streaks of red moonlight through the shivering trees. Soon the morning will come, and a new year will bestow it's ghastly, mocking smile upon the 'wold. But for the rest of this glorious witching hour, we all are lost.

Happy new year.

Felbray Trow & Felzig Hurl

Hard of heart, fierce of mind,

False of word to oath unbind,

Swift of wit, slow of tongue,

Deaf to songs of glories sung.

In wait behind a withered tree,

or stalking 'cross the stinking lea.

A trap to spring 'midst the cairns

to drown you in their sacred tairns

 Be you ware upon the wold--

be you not rash or over-bold--

For within the shadow come the beasts

a-waiting for a soggy feast.

Drendolfin Indoomiel

Indoomiel is another one among those ancient pilgrims to Helmrood, who longs only to find the bridge that spanned the bitterbreach of old, and to find the road that winds among the cairns and howes of unknown heritage...

...and thence to come to the Groaning Vale and to mount the stair to the needlesheets, and to see the towers of opal and onyx, of iron and rust, surmounted overall by Direspike, the Mountain of Asps.

Like all those who seek the Hidden Fastness, the mind of Indoomiel is sunk in the darkness of knowing that he will never find his home, for the icy northern sun can attest that it was lost long ago. 

Follow the Cairns

Pilgrim:

Just follow the Cairns to the Groaning Vale, 

The land where the wind does cry;

Follow them thence to the Needlesheets,

Where the Mountain of Asps does lie.

But dare you not to disturb the stones, 

Lest bestir you the envy of forgotten bones,

For lonely's the soul beneath the rock--

'till a pilgrim it does descry. 

Follow the Cairns, my dear pilgrim: 

Just follow, follow the Cairns.

Just a bit of atmosphere in the form of rhyme, to get the imagination tingling. I'm going to try doing a little more of that now. Maybe the added interest will keep me posting a little more frequently, while perhaps adding some zest to otherwise fairly dry how-to articles.

Anyway, here are the final products of my little series on quick n' dirty cairn terrain pieces. You can find the previous article here.

Since that article, I have coated the CD base with sand and PVA glue, primed the pieces with gray automotive primer, and then dry-brushed the pine bark "stones" with lighter and lighter gray mixes to achieve the stone texture.

The bases were treated to a similar dry-brush method working from a base of chocolate brown. I then added a decorative lichen, soaked it in more PVA and some ground foam, and then treated the whole base with a home-made blend of dried coffee grounds, dried tea-leaves, ground foam, and home-made grass flock.

Here's the result again, from another angle.

Easy peasy. Let me know what you think!

Hardcore Foamcore: Ruins II

Continuing the series on *reasonably* realistic terrain made mostly out of foam core. Here is a picture of that first test building with the parts all assembled. 

The building went together pretty easily with some white glue and paper clip pins for strength. I am pretty happy with how the stone work is looking. I't not perfect, of coarse; you can see the line where the two foam layers come together, making the wall look as though it were made of two rows of stones. However, I feel that this minor flaw is balanced by how easy the stonework effect is to achieve. I'm also hoping that the painting stage will help to sell it.

As you  can see, I also textured the CD base with some sand:

You can see the foundation for a second section lurking in the background, alongside the omnipresent cairns.

I half built another section before realizing I should probably cut out all the components so I could build everything at once:

Two assembled ruins and 'various bits and pieces,' as Niel Shuck would say...

I traced the building parts onto the foam core sheet using a template I drew on graphing paper. I actually designed four unique corners...the templates just made it easier to draw the pieces to scale. Also, if I ever decide that my hobby will include resin casting, it would be handy to have those templates around to make a 'Fantasy Ruins' garage kit.

As anyone who has worked with foam core will tell you, the toughest part is actually cutting the bits out of the sheet, what with having to cut through three layers. Having a design that was full of greebly nooks and corners didn't help, but I felt they were essential to the feeling of detail. Next time I might just try peeling the paper off of one side of the sheet before I cut out the bits. Then, in theory at least, I might be able to cut each component out in one go.

Finally, it was time to add some further detail. I splintered up some coffee stirrers to use as broken rafters and scattered some of the splinters on the flags. Then I took a walk. And discretely made off with some bits of my neighbor's gravel driveway. This was for larger rubble to represent masonry that had fallen from the wall more recently, but had not yet been carried away by scavenging masons, or otherwise disturbed.

Stay tuned next time for the final details, some creative texturing, and pics of the other three sections. And as always, please comment. I like questions. I like criticisms. I also like jokes.

Leave your jokes here:

Hardcore Foamcore: Ruins I

This post is the first in a short series on some terrain that I've been making using foamcore. Today, I'll show you the first part in my take on that wargaming terrain staple, the ruined building.

This whole idea began when I stumbled across this amazing modeling project.

I realized this was the perfect opportunity to push my own limits of 'realism' in terrain, as well as an opportunity to prove that another cheap, readily available material can be used in place of harder-to-find media like EPS, or 'blue foam.'

What follows was my first test building. The plan was to make three more like this and base them on CDs so that they could be placed as individual ruins or together as one building.

A door wall, a window wall, a section for flagstones, and some buttresses.

The main problems with a lot of foamcore buildings that I see are that the surface often ends up featureless, and the edges tend to show. This bothers me because it breaks the realism.

To fix this, I decided I would peel the paper off, as suggested in the above article, so that I could scribe textures into the foam itself. However, in experiments I found that the foam became dangerously thin and fragile when I peeled the paper off of both sides. I decided that the best way to deal with this was to cut two of each piece and then peel the paper off of the opposite sides.

The exception, of course, was the floor. Only needed one of those.

Peeling the paper was a bit of a pain, but with patience and the blade of an exacto, I eventually lifted off the majority. Once that was done, I glued the paper sides together.



My walls in progress hanging out with my cairns in progress.

Once the walls had dried, I began scribing the lines of the bricks with the back of my exacto blade. I took this opportunity to also cut a slot for the window sill, which I made by cutting a coffee stirrer to size.


You can see that I've blocked out the spot for the buttress to the left of the window. I would later push this section in with the butt of my pencil for a more realistic join.

I then went through my brick layers and scored the lines for the individual bricks. I did my best to make them match up along the edges. I then went back through with a pencil and gently widened each of the scored lines. Finally, I went over each piece with a chunk of porous stone, to add some textural variance.

Here is the result so far. Stay tuned to see the rest of the building come together.