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The team have made it to Reading, the town where we live that we destroyed on the first night and they have settled in. They made a few contacts and traded some bags of high quality grain for high tech paramilitary body armour (SDI 4) and some cool weapons. Each character has their signature weapon and I wanted them to have a particular weapon that makes them special in a certain way, this is how that panned out.

Aggro (not his real name, I'm not even sure he has one) - sniper. I gave him an obscene automatic Plasma Sniper Rifle with SDI of 5. It charges off a hefty power supply and has limited ammo before it runs out.
Byrn (sounds like his real name but isn't) - Likes swords. I gave him chainswords, SDI 3 (like normal swords) but with +2 attack dice.
Rob (the other one) - shotgun. Gave him an automatic shotgun, SDI 4 (same as before) and +2 attack dice.
Fish (that's just what we call him) - Crossbow, SDI 4 with +2 attack dice.
Sian - Machete (how cool is that?) - SDI 3 with +2 attack dice.

The reason I pumped them up was that I wanted to throw something nasty at them. They took a mission that sent them out into the wastes, where they were met by...

The Tank
Last night, I threw a big reanimate at them. I modeled him on a Tank from Left 4 Dead: SDI 4, Necro factor (hits): 25. His drawbacks were poor hearing, sight and hands too big to use weapons outside of improvised ones.

The tank fight worked brilliantly. A mixture of sneaky sneaky (Fish and Byrn), snipey (Aggro) and downright cavalier disregard for one's personal safety (Rob). The tank was shot at and rammed with a combine harvester that Rob miraculously got started.

We knew beforehand that bumping up a weapon's SDI made it more powerful so it needed a balance. When shooting at the Tank, Aggro was rolling clutchfulls of D4s and just about managed to have enough ammo (thanks to the scarcity dice).

Scarcity dice work brilliantly. With the tank defeated, he used the plasma rifle to blow the back door off the farmhouse he was sniping from. He rolled a D6 for scarcity (only a single shot but he had had his trigger finger pulled back most of the way) and hit 6, running out of ammo. Poetic statistics.

Byrn demonstrated that having 2 more D6s to roll doesn't mean you automatically do it 2 more damage. I've never seen such unfortunate dice! It is quite nice fishing out 8D6 to have a go at the bad guy, though.

The locals
With all the noise, they attracted a bunch of locals, who turned up to take their stuff. A fight ensued. The drop in SDI compared to the tank was welcome by all and as a first proper Human vs Human fight, I think it went well. The PCs armour made it difficult for me to do damage (although I got a point or two through). The PCs won, having taken more damage.

The locals had between 6 and 9 Animus (hits) and a SDI of 2. They were firing normal rifles but without burst and had ranged at 3. This was not an even match but then I had just thrown the Tank at the player group!

Fish was using burst with his assault rifle to hit more than one target, which worked well. The damage he rolled was applied to all the bad guys, which feels overpowered but isn't in practise.

Things we learnt
Having a high animus (and thus hit points) does make you rather hard to kill. Byrn faced off a shotgun for a number of rounds of me rolling 7,8 on D8s. Animus is one of Byrn's character's strength. He was reduced to a crawl.

I could not remember how to use Deadening in the thick of it and my cheat sheet didn't have much on it. We used it as giving extra attack die per deadening, which is not in the rules (Strength and Quick). It worked OK but was a bit harsh: Byrn took himself down to 1 Deadening during the Tank fight so when the locals turned up, he was too tired for anything fancy and, exhausted, walked into the fight with the shotgun. Cinematic and ruletastic.

Burst is rightly powerful and gave the team much more damage capability. Perhaps there should be something similar for close combat people? Byrn was burning Deadening 1-for-1 die, which was quite harsh in retrospect! Perhaps Deadening can be used to give 2 dice in close combat? Sort of fits - if you really throw yourself physically into the fight then you get to do more damage.

Combat is slick.

Next...
No game next week because of the Queen's Jubilee celebrations (wooo! free holiday). There is one area of the rules I really want to test next but I'm not going to give it away, although I probably just have.

That is awesome.

I'm glad to see combat went so well, and with so much excitement. I was a little worried combat might become boring dice fests, which is part of why I was considering various changes to the system. The exact balance of which maneuvers alter initiative isn't quite ready yet, but its something I want to help give focus beyond guns. Burst is trading ammo scarcity for power, hand to hand might be either spend deadening, or trade defense for offense.

Generally deadening in combat isn't so much a bonus to the attack, as free hit-points or the ability to boost speed. Lucidity is the one with more combat focus (extra attacks or DR bonus). Your method works though, and does seem to be a good way to get them to burn through resources.

Type Three: Tank like. Lambda Sub-type: Tank with cybernetics and guns. Probably shouldn't mention they got off easy if you want them to trust you ever again, right?

Mechanically speaking, few things actually can instant kill an average ten animus human if they don't over-match SDI. A burst from an assault rifle by an average user is six dice (three ranged plus three bonus) though stripping out levels of speed (2+2+3+3 for ten animus) is very quick. With zeds about, knee-capping and then running is a pretty viable tactic.

On one hand, I've been trying to avoid certain elements seen in a lot of SF - Humanoid robots, hover cars, full conversion cyborgs, and energy weapons. (Also- stupid pointless invaders) A back-pack fed DEW (Directed Energy Weapon) might be possible, but unlikely. Then again, you Brits are sneaky and at the forefront of so many things - naval cannons, Dreadnaughts, aircraft carriers, angled decks, VTOL jets, Chobbham armor - that I'm not too inclined to complain about it. For the most part, DEWs are for the aliens (and not on a personal level - that is rocket guns) and electro-mag or electro-chemical for human heavy weapons.

While I've considered some in-between weapons (like high-powered handguns or slug shotguns) to get bonus dice, most weapon mods would tend towards role-playing matters. A crossbow is powerful in that it already is mostly silent, and bolts can be retrieved. If I ever make range dependent on the weapon rather than absolute distance, a rifle's power is extra range or compensating for distance penalties, not bonus dice.

I'm thinking of ways to build creatures, without getting into a hard to balance point-buy system. My current thought is to have seven columns - five of abilities, two of disabilities. The tougher you want the creature, the more columns you add (taking only one ability from each). Add some numbers across the top and bottom, and you can randomly generate creatures. A separate table can list if its abomination, aberration, etc, and possible SDI/NP.

This also indicates I need to take my writing in a new direction.

Its high time I write more action scenes and combat stories to remind people of this world building aspect, rather than interviews and one-sided conversations. The prevalence of coil guns was pointed out very early on - the third entry ever posted: A few months later it was followed by , which covered vehicle mounted types. It shouldn't be so surprising that new readers haven't/won't gone back that far in the archives.

Knee-capping is more of a "I don't have to outrun the reanimates, I just have to outrun you" option. Knocking a hole in a town's wall or slashing tires can be a far easier way to deal with problem people than trying to face down a bloke with an auto-shotgun. Once again, stories in less calm conditions would help make this apparent.

I think the world books will not be simply split into "Cold Hard Truth" and "Undead Fairy Tails". but will be more guided in focus (Antagonist Archive, Alien Radio, Wandering the Zone) prefaced with a retrospective written in character by Hobbes/Kurtz/KC/Diego, and then split into interviews, recordings, and old encyclopedia entries. Kind of the "Time Life Books: Our history 2050-2060" approach.

Initiative will be only once a fight, its maneuvers that let you alter that if you had a really low roll at the start. Deadening used for a Quick boost of course helps the initial placement, and I might add in it can be spent to at least temporarily go sooner in combat. Making an official cheat-sheet should be a priority as well.

Its kind of amazing to thing I'm a month away from the two-year anniversary of starting the blog.