I finished up work for the year today and so was home when the kids got in from school. So my son and I played our first game of Rogue Stars. He's eight, but has been playing Song of Blades and Heroes since his sixth birthday and has also played Space Hulk, Mutants and Death Ray Guns, Dragon Rampant, Battlesworn, Of Gods and Mortals, Hordes of the Things and Rogue Planet a fair bit. He's used to trying out different rule systems, in other words.
I set up two fairly basic sides. We didn't bother with points. I got three
warp pirates (GW Eldar) in light power armour with needle rifles, plus a power-armoured human captain with a submachine gun and jump pack. My son had six aliens: two reptoids (one with Tough +3, the other Tough +2; both with Reptoid). The first had a molecular slug-thrower; the second had a laser pistol. Both had claws. Then there was an insectoid (GW Tyranid) with needle pistols, a mammal with laser pistol and force shield and another with a submachine gun and no armour. Finally, there was a yellow alien with a plasma pistol, kevlar jacket and sword.
None of the troops had any other traits, to keep things simple and help us to learn the game.
We rolled the hacking mission and set up a dense-terrain table with primitive huts, swamps, large alien structures and a primitive shrine made out of alien technology. The complication was explosives (we used Lego vehicles - abandoned alien artefacts - at my son's suggestion). The objective was a stone dais bearing an alien computer panel that had to be hacked.
I scrawled out some very quick and crude roster sheets - just landscape A4 divided into rough columns with space to put the counters. For the counters themselves, we used small bits of lego of suitable colours (white for stress, black for pin and red for wounds). This meant that you could easily see how many markers each character had.
So how did it play? Well, we had a blast. My son won; although one of my pirates got to the dais first, he was brought down soon after. When my power-armoured captain got to the dais, he was pinned down by hostile fire thereafter and was eventually put out of action by having his arm blown off. The hacking mission was only half accomplished at this point, and another pirate was lying gravely wounded nearby. He eventually failed a morale test and surrendered. The sole survivor fought on, helped by some good morale rolls, but his attempt to sneak round the back of an opponent was thwarted by a jammed gun.
Some thoughts on the game:
1. It's really not that complex. My son grasped it quickly, and I think that anyone who's played SoBH will too. The status markers (stress, pins, wounds) are easy and intuitive, and the modifiers really aren't much of a bother at all. Our game had lots of sustained firefights fought at the same range, so we didn't need to measure each time. So, for shooting, it was just a matter of adding up the pins and throwing in any adjustments for aimed shots and cover, etc. I think the easiest way to do this is to think of it the modifiers as just that - so you roll the dice and add your modifiers, rather than calculating a new target number before you roll. In calculating the modifier itself, I don't recall the maths getting any trickier than 7 minus 4 and the like.
2. The firefights are
fierce - much more so than in Mutants and Death Ray Guns, for example. We didn't have a single instance of melee combat in the game. The closest we got to it was a point-blank
coup de grâce at the end. But we did get a lot of very convincing suppression. The power-armoured pirate trying to hack the alien panel was clearly up against it, despite a bit of cover from the dais and his heavy protection. Most of the hits he took just led to a Pin marker, but those added up very quickly. So he had little chance to get a shot back at them - and that was just as it should have been. Meanwhile, the one completely unarmoured character was heavily wounded the first time he was shot at and killed soon after.
3. Because wounded characters have amassed lots of markers, you tend not to want to activate them carelessly: your chances of success are low, and the chances of reactions are high. So wounded models spend quite a lot of the time groaning and moaning - again, just as it should be - though they
might just manage a game-changing lucky shot at some crucial point.
4. Numbers help. My son's two-character advantage was handy, because he could hold some unactivated, unstressed characters in reserve and then bring them in fresh later in his turn. By the time they entered the turn, both his other models and all of mine tended to be heavily stressed from all the actions and reactions - so much so that I didn't want to take the initiative. I liked how that worked out - superior numbers
should be hard to handle.
5. The detail is very cinematic - jammed weapons at crucial moments, running out of ammo, surrendering and the like. The hit locations help here. On our rosters, I just drew a simple box man with the armour number in each location - like a simplified version of the one on a Runequest character sheet.
6. It's fast. We had three D20s between us; three each would have led to an even faster game, as we could have rolled our reactions and damage instantly (you roll damage on your own models). Rather than being laborious, the ranged-combat system seems to deliver far more shooting than most systems. The reaction system keeps both players constantly involved - this isn't a game where one player can take a break while the other takes his turn.
7. A lot of the system soon becomes intuitive. For example, I found that I seldom needed to consult the weapons table; the distinction between weapons is often more subtle than their combat modifiers - as with "scorching" weapons, which use the lowest armour score on the target's body. The main things I did have to look up were the effects of critical successes and failures. By the end, though, those were becoming intuitive too.
8. Because firepower is so fierce, tension is a big part of the game. Breaks across open terrain are perilous. And there's a great risk/reward trade-off in repeatedly attempting to get three successes for a particularly manoeuvre (inviting huge amounts of suppression fire as you do so ...).
29 December 2016, 08:56:45 PM