Legends Of The Old West question...

[Johnno]

I have ALL 4 books but haven't located an answer so I thought I would ask the collective...

The books have all the stats for individual gangs or "massed" armies (ALAMO expansion).

I'm looking at running a multiplayer game, with individual gangs fighting against each other but also a larger threat (State Militia has come to town, looking to take over etc). Essentially the gangs can either destroy each other (and lose) or unite towards the common enemy (still might lose though )

I'm trying to keep the game balanced and LOTOW has poinit systems so that's fine but my questions are:

Has anyone tried this? Does it work?

Or would I be better suited to divide the militia into multiple gangs as well? It might balance better and I suppose only I (as the GM) would know the difference.

[dinohunterpoa]

Johnno, it sounds like a nice idea for a very fun game! And yes, LOTOW can make it work, because the points system lets you build balanced gangs. Its turn sequence is also well suited for multiplayer games, but it can be upgraded IMHO with a idea shameless stolen from Pulp Alley, where the initiative goes to the player that controls/achieves certain objectives of the tabletop - try it! 

[katie]

We've played LoTOW as ACW with quite large forces; I went with making them just "posses" as per the core rules and three players a side rather than try to integrate Alamo units. It's possible to run 12+ figure posses if you're careful with the stats (lots of basic soldiers with all the same stats and all the same weapons who can then roll shooting in groups) -- it's the lookups and handling individual rules that take the time.

You might want to tinker with the morale rules as well; there's a bit of tendency for the tail end of the game to get messy with figures repeatedly routing/rallying. We added some house rules about flags and retreats to try and make breaking units a bit more decisive.

Available at http://www.fysh.org/~katie/wargames/downloads/lotme-morale.pdf

Some quick-reference playsheets can make it nice and fast moving for a multiplayer setup.

But it's quite fun! We had good games and I might suddenly decide to do more now..

[dinohunterpoa]

katie, great insights as well, and thank you very much for the Improved Morale Rules - they look very nice indeed! 

[Johnno]

Thanks for the replies.

Like the improved morale rules Katie.

12+ soldiers would imply an increased $ value to recruit and arm them though?

[katie]

Oh yes; some of the posses are more than $200. I aimed for balancing the sides (in terms of costs) and getting "interesting" mixes of units including low quality ones, snipers, zouaves and so on -- it makes sense to have larger batches of recruits than sharpshooters so the costs actually range from $50 - $400.