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Miniatures Adventure => Future Wars => Sci-Fi Small Skirmish Games => Topic started by: craigjwoodfield on July 17, 2021, 11:30:57 AM
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Played 4 games of Stargrave now, and I like everything about it. Except for the opposed d20 rolls. So much scope for wildly different results, particularly in shooting, and subsequent disproportionate outcomes.
I haven't played Frostgrave so don't know if it has the same issues, but the randomness and pure luck involved has tempered my enjoyment of an otherwise very neat game.
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Yep, a frequent problem for people with the Frostgrave / Stargrave engine.
Certainly in Frostgrave it was very much part of the game - but my group wasn’t a fan of it
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Whilst researching the *grave series of games this very topic kept cropping up. There are numerous threads about the d20 mechanic of the *grave series but my understanding of the issue is purely theoretical since I have yet to play any of the games.
We invested in Ghost Archipelago but I have not painted up everything we need for that yet. So I am interested in whether anyone has found a suitable solution for the swingy, random feeling of combat.
I thought 2d10 might be a solution but that has had mixed responses in previous threads.
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All of McCullough's skirmish games use the same core mechanic and this topic has been endless discussed since 1st ed Frostgrave. It's a matter of taste. I neither love nor hate it, but the perceived randomness is nowhere near as extreme as most people make it out to be, and it certainly isn't hard to predict.
If your Shoot equals their Fight you have a 45% chance to hit, and every point of difference shifts the odds by 5%. Makes modifiers far less impactful than (say) a d6 system would, and provides a little more granularity. The amount of damage you do isn't really all that random either, it just isn't sitting at 10.5+your bonuses like some people seems to think. Most low attack rolls will miss, while most high ones will hit, so the net effect is that your expected damage is probably somewhere around 14+Shoot+Dam bonuses, varying a bit based on respective bonuses. Even the weakest soldier (the guard dog) takes 18 damage to one-shot, so that's 15+(5 x attack+dam bomuses)% of the time, minus a bit because sometimes that net 18 will still miss the target as they roll high. More normal "support" soldiers need a net 22 result and actual combat types around 24-25, with the power armored guys needing 27.
Without advanced officer-grade stats it's extremely rare to one-shot even middling fighters although crits will manage it in almost all cases. You can roughly calculate the odds of dropping damaged models with another hit using the same process and subbing in the lower health total, of course. It's generally useful to think more about the odds of a shot stunning or wounding the target than dream about one-shot-one-kill fantasies, which is again pretty easy to get rough odds on. Stun needs a minimum target armor+4 damage, wound needs target armor+health-4 - and forget about it if you're shooting a robot.
Now, whether you actually want to do this kind of prob & stat exercise at the table is questionable, but the plain fact is that the numbers are there if you want them, and while allowing for how much the opposed rolls generating unlikely results is a bit trickier, it's also more trouble than its generally worth. Predicting outcomes within (say) 10% is plenty good enough for gaming until Vegas starts running big-money Frostgrave tourneys.
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For me I like the swing of the D20 system. We play for fun and since I tend to roll very hot and very cold so my games are usually up and down. Our games tend to tell a story and are always enjoyable. My two cents.
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The d20 mechanism does do a lot of swings but IMHO it is really good as it means your characters have to support each other, and there is no super killer combo at low to mid level.
We had a game of RoSD on Thursday evening.Mt Ranger carved his way through half a dozen cultists in one round, and then promptly failed his Will test for resisting a flash bang grenade (it was a scenario I wrote). The other Rangers having been KO'd managed to get up, so we went from utter disaster to victory in about 2 turns.
This made for much suspense and collaborative activity between 4 players.
I've played 2 opposed Stargrave games, the first I lost despite being a higher level, the second I won. We'd been doing the solo Dead Or Alive games as we were semi locked down and I only got my second jab Wednesday which hampered meet ups (outdoors in my mate's new gazebo).
It comes down to personal preference, but I find it better than the predictable grind of a d6 system, or even d10.
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Isn't it just the case that you only remember the instances where you roll 1s (or 20s)?
Presumably D6 games don't give so many memorable moments or you roll so many of them you don't notice?
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Some good comments there, but I will add that rather than focus on what is just required to hit, the probability of getting a wildly disproportionate outcome - 1 player rolling 1-4, the other rolling 17-20, for example, is quite high. It doesn't have to result in a kill to be influential, just a serious wound, and if it happens to the same player a couple of times, they could be in trouble no matter how good their strategy.
I don't think a d6 system is the solution, but I think d10 would have been a better design choice. I went with 2d6 in Ronin to avoid too much of this sort of thing. Ronin still has the chance of single shot kills, I might add.
But it's clearly a very successful game, and full credit to the author.
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Actually, I think the d20 system is very realistic. However I am biased since Runequest came out all those years ago :)
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Some good comments there, but I will add that rather than focus on what is just required to hit, the probability of getting a wildly disproportionate outcome - 1 player rolling 1-4, the other rolling 17-20, for example, is quite high. It doesn't have to result in a kill to be influential, just a serious wound, and if it happens to the same player a couple of times, they could be in trouble no matter how good their strategy.
Rolling exceptionally low has very little game effect whether it's on offense or defense. A miss is a miss regardless of how much you missed by, and a hit with a medium or low roll (and your opponent rolling even lower) inflicts little or no damage. It's the unusually high rolls that matter most, and those mostly on offense where the damage is significant. IME very few people remember when they roll high on defense compared to the number of (say) 17+ attacks they got in the course of a game.
Melee is a somewhat different affair, since you're both at risk of taking damage during an exchange but you still compare the high roll to armor rather than each other's Fight rolls, which means your margin of victory on the opposed Fight test is meaningless - a 19 total hurts just as much against an 18 as it does against a 2 - and that does seem to bother some people a lot. And people absolutely remember the slightly less than 1 time in 20 that you get a tie in melee and both sides get hurt. But Stargrave de-emphasizes melee more than any of the other XXGrave games do.
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When considering the system the "swing" of the D20 is either a feature or a bug. I consider it a feature.
That being said, you can create mitigating house rules. For example, assign your Captain and First Mate each 1 Fate point. They can then spend those fate points to swap dice results on a D20 exchange. Once a swap is made, the Fate point is spent, and doesn't come back until next game.
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Wasn't the D20 system in Frostgrave 1st ed a conscious decision to hark back to the days of oldschool D&D etc?
I agree though that its not as swingy as people make out, but there is the perception that it is if you aren't used to it
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I like the fact that it is just one type of dice , rather than a whole hoard of polyhedrals. A lot easier for the old git to remember lol.
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I like the fact that it is just one type of dice , rather than a whole hoard of polyhedrals. A lot easier for the old git to remember lol.
Interesting. I have to confess that while I like Stargrave I'd still rather play Stargrunt/Full Metal Anorak any day of the week. The games are designed to do different things so it's a bit apples & oranges but I find I quite like all the polyhedrals in Tuffley's rules.
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I don't think a d6 system is the solution, but I think d10 would have been a better design choice. I went with 2d6 in Ronin to avoid too much of this sort of thing. Ronin still has the chance of single shot kills, I might add.
I was wondering if you could explore trading the 1D20 for either 2D10 or 3D6 to get a less linear distribution of results? I do not own any of the Grave series or played the game so this might be unpossible or completely screw the game up.
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interesting to hear that Rich, as one of the external playtesters (Page1) for SG2.
Played too much beta and when released pushed it up to company level (oh the insanity)to the max.
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interesting to hear that Rich, as one of the external playtesters (Page1) for SG2.
Played too much beta and when released pushed it up to company level (oh the insanity)to the max.
I prefer SG2 around the "reinforced platoon" level, but I've done company battles in years past. It is a bit much unless you've got multiple experienced players on each side. The fact that it also scales down into the "handful of fireteams and loners" level of FMA games is one of the reasons I like the rules so much.
Had great hopes for Tomorrow's War inheriting the SG2 mantle (certainly seemed to have Jon's approval) but that rulebook needed more editing and people seem to have largely forgotten about AAG's games these days.
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Check out this baby - dice probability calculator! https://www.omnicalculator.com/statistics/dice
According to this, if you had to score at least 5, 10, 15 or more, say, your chances would be -
For a single D20, 80%, 55%, 30%
For 2D10, 94%, 64%, 21%
For 3d6, 98%, 62.5%, 9%
From those, even without a funky graphic, you can see the 'bell curve' whereby the more dice you add, the more the odds stack in the middle range of numbers, minimising the chance of extreme scores, high or low. If you want more 'average' scores to crop up more often, you add more dice.
PS. Yes I am bored, reduced to extreme sloth by the heat.
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From those, even without a funky graphic, you can see the 'bell curve' whereby the more dice you add, the more the odds stack in the middle range of numbers, minimising the chance of extreme scores, high or low. If you want more 'average' scores to crop up more often, you add more dice.
Which is part of why various attempts to use multiple dice don't work out well in the XGrave games. The more you clump average results on your bell curve the more ties you'll get, and ties result in both fighters in a melee taking damage. That's less of a factor with shooting (which dominates in Stargrave) but still matters when brawls do happen.
Moreover, you shift the average damage toward the midpoint of your potential results, which is only 11+attack bonus-Armor. It takes forever to kill or even seriously wound anyone with that kind of damage output, making far more of your attacks have no real impact. Game would slow to a crawl and your ability to threaten to (say) drop a loot hauler as they run for the table edge would go down quite a lot.
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I always enjoyed the % rolls, made on 2D10 (or 2D20) with a designated 'tens' die and a 'units' die. The odds of making a roll were right there in front of you, with no fuss (although critical fumbles happened waaay too much - does the best swordsman in the world really drop their weapon or sever a limb one in every hundred times?)
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It is more an issue that a +1 means almost nothing, so why bother maneuvering to try and gain the advantage of a +1 (all the way to +3). Just roll and fish for Crits instead.
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Rolling and fishing for a crit rather than using fire and maneuver sounds like a problem that would bother me.
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It is more an issue that a +1 means almost nothing, so why bother maneuvering to try and gain the advantage of a +1 (all the way to +3). Just roll and fish for Crits instead.
Because a +1 means you have a 5% better chance to hit and do +1 damage when you do hit. That ain't hay, and you'll still have the same chance at a crit whether you move or hunker down, so why not maneuver if all you wanted to do is crit fish?
It sounds like what you're trying to say is that it's not worth taking the -1 for moving before you shoot if all it will do is avoid one of the -1 mods for intervening figures/terrain, and yeah, that's true - but there are other reasons to maneuver, mostly to position yourself in better cover, chase after loot or intercept a loot hauler, or set up for an advantageous melee in later turns. Stargrave also adds in grenades and flamethrowers, so there's a lot more AoE threat than the other games had and staying spaced out while still playing for loot is important too.
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For me I like the swing of the D20 system. We play for fun and since I tend to roll very hot and very cold so my games are usually up and down. Our games tend to tell a story and are always enjoyable. My two cents.
abso-bloody-lutely. Unpredictable narrative on a plate. Never ceases to amaze me how few people seem to want this as part of their games!