Lead Adventure Forum
Miniatures Adventure => Age of Myths, Gods and Empires => Topic started by: since1968 on March 18, 2019, 10:19:14 AM
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I ran a game of Sons of Mars at Cold Wars 2019 for six first time gladiators, including one participant who was playing her first wargame ever! The session was a hit and we had to turn folks away. The game took a thrilling swing when a Sagittarius nocked his last arrow and shot a Provocator dead from across the arena.
Yep, that's a Playmobil arena inspired by several posts on this forum, populated mostly with Crusader miniatures.
Sons of Mars pros and cons:
Pros
- Easy to learn, easy to teach.
- Quick play. Each player spent 30 minutes building his or her own gladiator and then fought for 2 hours. Allowing the players to build their own gave them a sense of ownership and gave us a chance to do a deep dive on the rules without me having to drone on for 30 minutes.
- Gladiators have different fighting styles and the rules capture them effectively. A Crupellarius feels and fights differently than a Secutor.
- "Play to the crowd" and "Intimidate" encourage players to ham it up. This makes it a great game for folks who don't know each other.
- Gladiator types are well balanced. Everyone had something to contribute.
- The game rewards tactical play. Although the dice can take a funny swing, over the course of eight turns the better players came out ahead.
Cons
- The Rules could use an editor. There are grammatical errors throughout.
- The Rules could use more play testing. For example, a mounted gladiator who charges gains the "knockdown" skill. But knockdown uses the sustained stat, not the charge stat. Which is it?
None of the cons was fatal for a fun night of play. I highly recommend this game, and plan to run it again this summer at Historicon.
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Thanks for this, I have a few gladiator rules but I'm not sure any has really rocked my boat. I'll have to look these up.
And great looking game!
Chris
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The Rules could use an editor.
How so? That's already on page 2, in the paragraph titled "The Role of Editor". It says that it's...you!
Thank you, I'm here all week. lol
Ahem...
...the silence is getting awkward, isn't it?
So, I also bought a copy of SoM a while ago after several years of on-and-off attempts of finding a playable set of gladiator rules. I tried a few. Some were abandoned already after initial browsing, others were tested with friends. Unfortunately, none of those really managed to catch on. Some had far too much bookkeeping and constant referencing of D20 tables. Others were so simplistic or random that you could basically just roll single D6s and see who scored higher. Some were OK but they were too much about ludus management. I'd still like to move actual fighter miniatures on the arena, not just do bookkeeping.
Of course, gladiator combat (especially the most common 1-on-1 type) is fundamentally a difficult genre. On the actual tabletop level, how many different positions can you have between two miniatures on a flat, near-empty arena? Or if the combat happens mainly between stats on a sheet, why even bother with the miniatures?
Anyway, even though I haven't managed to play SoM that much yet, I must say that it looks very promising. As you said, the fighting styles feel noticeably different and plausible enough. The crowd aspect brings in a "third player", hence reducing the feeling of (literally) one-dimensional gameplay where you're essentially just moving forward or backward. The amount of stats and mechanics seems to be roughly within the sweet spot, where playing is meaningful yet not overwhelmingly complex. The number of different gladiator abilities may look daunting first, almost like special rule hell, but they're actually all quite basic and never any massive game changers (unlike in some games where you have to memorise dozens or even hundreds of special rules by heart to stand any chance).
The rules for ludus management and campaigns are in there, but they're by no means mandatory in the beginning. You can definitely play a single match or five to grasp the main rules first, and even have totally satisfying action there. If that starts to feel repetitive, maybe it means that it's time to expand to full events and campaigns.
Yeah, the book could indeed use better text and photo editing, but at least the print is clear and comprehensible enough. The initial chapters could have benefitted from showing example stats and explaining their general meaning earlier, I mean:
- Strength / Agility / Charisma: boosts to single-die skill rolls
- Charge / Sustained / Counter Attack / Defensive: dice counts for different combat rolls
- Movement: well, movement, inches
- Vitality: hit points
- Armor: boost to single-die armor save rolls
Now the very early "Actions" paragraphs jump directly to "-- resolve the combat with their Sustained rating --" etc. and continue for a good while like that without explaining at all what that "Sustained rating" might be and how it works. The stats are really explained for the first time on page 17! If you don't start from there, you end up piecing the same thing together from 16 pages of vague hints.
OK, I'll stop now because I don't really know anything about this game yet. :) I should play more. There are gladiators on my painting table so I'm working on it.
And yep, the Playmobil arena is simply epic, considering that it's essentially an ugly piece of "toy plastic". I advertised it to a friend, including the tip that our country's Playmobil online store also sells separate pieces to make it even more epic. Ultimately he bought it (with extras too) but I didn't, because he just moved to a huge apartment and I didn't. lol A real bargain, though, if you only can fit it in somewhere. Usually that money would buy you a single 28mm resin house or something. Here you get a 90 cm arena, which doesn't look shabby at all when you paint it.
Finally, I'd like to hear more from people who have really managed to play this. I ended up buying it half-blindly, because online reviews were few and far between. Surely we could provide more information here on LAF? Many thanks for your effort with both running the game and reporting it in here. :)