Getting Started With The Silver Bayonet

[muggins]

I wrote up this getting started guide for The Silver Bayonet - it's intended to be an evergreen article that helps players get into the game and bridge the gap from other systems or even start fresh from nothing. Check it out! Please let me know if you think I missed anything.


https://www.goonhammer.com/goonhammer-historicals-getting-started-with-the-silver-bayonet/

[BeneathALeadMountain]

That looks great Muggins. Exactly what blogs/the net needs more of for people teetering on the precipice of (the lifelong medical condition commonly called) wargaming. I hope it inspires more people to pick up some minis and give the lesser (ie not just big mainstream corpo run) games a go.

Andrew
BeneathALeadMountain

[muggins]

That looks great Muggins. Exactly what blogs/the net needs more of for people teetering on the precipice of (the lifelong medical condition commonly called) wargaming. I hope it inspires more people to pick up some minis and give the lesser (ie not just big mainstream corpo run) games a go.

Andrew
BeneathALeadMountain

Thanks!! That is exactly what we're trying to do at Goonhammer Historicals.

[Hitman]

Great review and article. Thanks for taking the time to do this. I have been collecting, painting and even played 1 game with a friend. We both enjoyed the game immensely. I have focussed on the Pennisular War so have completed figures representing every type of figure possible for British, French, Spanish and a Portuguese group set similarly to the Spanish figure types. Looking forward to painting my 4 Canadian groups shortly.
Regards,
Hitman
😎

[aircav]

 Great stuff 

[Aethelflaeda was framed]

good review. 

I really really love the North Star figs and have bought most of the Silver Bayonet figures—I just don’t use them for Silver Bayonet.  I just can’t bring myself to pay for yet another set of rules which don’t really bring anything terribly novel to the table except for the genre. (I just use Song of Blades and Heroes, Fistful of Lead, or even old D&D rules, which all have musket rules.) If the book spent more time delving into the plot and setting with RPG level individual NPCs and recurring nemesis, i could more easily justify the investment.  As it stands now it’s an expensive tome with the same old beer and pretzel skirmish game with little different in it other than flintlocks and monsters.  I have hopes for the settings books but so far haven’t looked at them enough to know how rich or immersive the campaigns are.  I definitely want more RPG like plot-driven campaigns.  right now it’s looking fairly bare boned.

The game itself is okay but the SB rules bug me with a bit of unnecessary mechanic in the form of skill/power dice.  it looks like you should be able to make a tactical decision based on differences of the dice but the reality is that the odds of a result are exactly the same and the die irrelevant.  The effect as far as I can tell could just as easily labeled one die as always being the “effect” die.  The mental effort of figuring which particular die to use for the effect (and remembering which color you declared was the power or skill die), although small, is just wasted energy.

[muggins]

To be honest I don't agree much with what you said, other than having the npcs and campaign fleshed out more. Older systems definitely don't include resource mechanics, fatigue, and alternating activations nearly as much. The combat in TSB is strategic and interesting - not just move and attack.

Power vs Skill die is mostly important for when you choose to use fate dice. It's not a game defining mechanic, but it's there.

[Aethelflaeda was framed]

To be honest I don't agree much with what you said, other than having the npcs and campaign fleshed out more. Older systems definitely don't include resource mechanics, fatigue, and alternating activations nearly as much. The combat in TSB is strategic and interesting - not just move and attack.

Power vs Skill die is mostly important for when you choose to use fate dice. It's not a game defining mechanic, but it's there.

Both Ffol and SoBH both use variable alternating activations, fatigue is worked into FFoL as shock results, appearing as well as a to hit modifier from hits in SoBH,  there are resource mechanics from using hero points for rerolls and how to allocate cards in FFoL, many of which force you to think about speed of activation versus a plus from the slower card and there are reroll attributes as well .  Variable warband purchase is there in both, and Tales of Blades and Heroes (the RPG version of Song) has a full fledged experience system.  I haven’t seen anything in TSB that is much more innovative than what has appeared earlier.

I think if you haven’t got either of the rules I mentioned (or some other skirmish game to adapt from ) or are not adroit at home brewing adaptations, TSB is a decent, fairly complete game system to buy into…but it is rather expensive for what you get.  The chrome comes from the figs, not so much from the game mechanics itself.

[Aethelflaeda was framed]

I did just find out (as of today at least) that the rulebook is now available as a cheaper downloadable pdf which removes a lot of my objections. 

[muggins]

Both Ffol and SoBH both use variable alternating activations, fatigue is worked into FFoL as shock results, appearing as well as a to hit modifier from hits in SoBH,  there are resource mechanics from using hero points for rerolls and how to allocate cards in FFoL, many of which force you to think about speed of activation versus a plus from the slower card and there are reroll attributes as well .  Variable warband purchase is there in both, and Tales of Blades and Heroes (the RPG version of Song) has a full fledged experience system.  I haven’t seen anything in TSB that is much more innovative than what has appeared earlier.

I think if you haven’t got either of the rules I mentioned (or some other skirmish game to adapt from ) or are not adroit at home brewing adaptations, TSB is a decent, fairly complete game system to buy into…but it is rather expensive for what you get.  The chrome comes from the figs, not so much from the game mechanics itself.

I've played FFoL - I think it's neat but not as in-depth for my liking - like it wouldn't have soldier classes, and i don't recall a campaign system. I haven't played Song of Blades and Heroes and wouldn't be likely to take an RPG to a table as a wargame as I haven't had good results trying that before. The hardcover TSB book on amazon.com is $35 which is fairly cheap as far as rulebooks go.

[Aethelflaeda was framed]

SoBH isn’t an RPG game, although “Tales of Blades and Heroes” is the expansion of  the system to a traditional RPG.  FFOL doesn’t really set out to play campaigns but the attribute system would make it very easy to create “classes” of different styles soldiers and allow for additional attributes based on experience, but it does take a bit of prepping. The Horror and Napoleonic expansions add everything you would need.  it’s not really any different than building a band in TSB.  If one already has them it does seem that spending more on TSB might be rather redundant, except maybe for the “shiny and new” gratification.  If the settings volumes, were a little more dense with story and plotted campaigns with NPC personalities as a recurring nemesis, i would go whole hog on those, as that is where there is a real void.

The price of a hard bound book with lots of art is something i would in general rather not spend on no matter how they compare to other comparable  rule books.  Far better to save the difference from buying  the cheaper pdf for buying another set of figures.  you get a search function as well.

[Mister Rab]

I wrote up this getting started guide for The Silver Bayonet

Thank for writing that - it was what pushed me over the line into ordering the rules, digging out my long-neglected paints and hobby bits, and now I'm back in that happy place of having super glue patches on my fingers and the smell of drying spray-primer filling my spare room!