Publishing questions:

Is Nordic Weasel affected by the various OGL talk going on?

No.

What do you think of AI for game design?

At the moment, I think AI can be handy for making some quick drawings. You don't really get the benefits of an actual artist like revisions and you know, actually understanding what you are asking for, but some of the results can be quite fun. Rogue Hammer features a few pieces of AI art and some of them are quite cool.

For rules writing and design, I would say it is not useful currently. It mostly produces the equivalent of that guy in your gaming group who has never read the game you are talking about, but has strong opinions about it regardless.

Will we get more nice looking revamps of old titles?

I would like to for sure, but I am trying to not announce plans until I know they are for sure. 

Five Parsecs questions:

Expansion 2: Expanded mission extraction. Leaving the table in 3 turns is going to be really difficult on a 36x36" table.

Yeah, you should probably increase that to 4 turns on the larger table. 

Expansion 2: Non Minis rules. What happens if there is only 1 enemy left?

If there are less than 3 enemies left and you still have 3+ crew you should still generate 3 firefights. In any "excess" firefights you will fire but they will not. This is not clear in the rules. 

Rogue Hammer questions:

Transported units taking damage seems to be broken.

This will be fixed in 1.04. Transported infantry take 1 damage each time an attack penetrates the vehicles armor, 2 damage if it is wrecked. 

Is there a less open-ended option for measuring between units?

The text box on p.9 suggests using the squad leader figure to measure if you want a fixed point. Of course people using Epic troop stands or similar can just measure normally in any event. 

I have occasionally shared various tips on game design here and I figured going forward they will have a specific title: Upgrade your design. That sounds very practical right? 

I think a common flaw of game design is including too much stuff. I don't mean content (though there is such a thing as too sprawling a book) I mean the little stuff: Modifiers, special cases, sub-cases, exceptions and so forth. 

Now this is not always a bad thing: Sometimes you do want to capture a special case to avoid silly situations. After all we expect a tank to act differently than a foot soldier and a particular rule may require a carve out to ensure that is the case. Other times you just want the game to be a bit more detail oriented overall.

Small details can be a trap however because they carry two risks:

The first is the obvious question of weight in handling the game. Players will quickly memorize 3-5 typical modifier situations or sub-cases that are logical but a list of 20 gets difficult unless you scan the list each time. And if players realize they forgot one, they will be hesitant going forward because now they feel like they may have screwed up multiple times. 

When evaluating weight it is useful to look at the overall impact on the grand scale of things. A sub-case that adds a +/- 1 on a D20 roll is probably not worth considering. Odds are you could go through an entire game without ever having a roll where that modifier makes a difference to a single roll, let alone the aggregate outcome. 

Take a look at your game mechanic and evaluate how many individual pieces do I need to keep in my head as a player? For a typical ranged attack I probably need to know the shooter, the weapon and if you are in cover. Do I need to check the range precisely or is it okay if I can eye ball that I'm definitely within range? How many conditions apply to the hit roll? Does the number of shots I get vary? Does it matter if I moved? Are there influences that carry over from previous turns or other actions?

As you can see each of these is individually very small and usually binary questions (did the target evade last turn yes/no?) but they can add up pretty fast.

There is not a golden formula for this, but try to take the shooting mechanic in your game and count out how many "things" influence the attack roll. If any of them require remembering something that is not immediately clear from the position of the miniatures (such as whether a figure moved or what actions the target unit took last) count it as 1 extra thing. If any of them require decisions on the players end (such as aiming at particular parts of a target) count it as 1 extra thing.

How many did you end up with? 10? 20? 30+? 

Now take a long, hard look at the those cases, decisions and sub-cases and ask which of these are integral to the mechanic and which are not. 

For example the skill rating of the shooter is integral because that might be our basic hit modifier or target number. A penalty for moving and firing is not integral as the mechanic works without it. 

For any items that are not integral, start asking yourself if they are worth keeping especially if they rarely apply or if they often cancel out another modifier. They may be but interrogate each in turn to make sure they are. A lot of small hit modifiers or "happens on a natural roll of x" conditions have a high chance of being something you can ditch without ever affecting the flow of the game, particularly with a big die type. 

Once you have identified a couple of targets for deletion, try playing through a couple of quick firefights without them. Did you even notice their absence? Did the lack of it affect the tactics that seemed useful? That will inform your choice. 

An added danger is that by applying a rule for something you may end up overemphasizing it. Let us say you are writing an ultra realistic fire fight skirmish game and you set up a rule that guns jam on a natural D20 roll of a 1. Guns jam in real life so it is realistic right?

Well, maybe. Statistics are hard to come by but some time ago I read that some model of modern military rifle had a failure rate of around 1-2% in typical conditions with limited maintenance. Lets just assume this is accurate. 

By assigning the malfunction rate to a 1 in 20 chance, we have raised the chances to 5% meaning that our shooter in the game is many times more likely to jam their weapon than the actual rate should be. 

This is a simple example and compound probabilities get hairy but I hope it goes to show what I mean: By assigning a mechanic you emphasize the chance of a particular action or event occurring even if it is statistically not very likely. For most games not having a jam mechanic at all is probably closer to the statistical reality than assigning a 5% chance per attack.

What do you think? What have you cut from your game? What do you wish you had cut in hindsight? What did you cut that you realized you actually needed to keep?

Rogue Hammer v 1.03 has been made available to patrons. It adds 2 new orc walkers and a rules tweak for orc vehicles in general, a new "scout" unit for star knights and elves respectively, a mercenary robot unit (not really based on a specific unit but seems like it fits the vibe), 2 new unit upgrades and a few other touches and tweaks.

It will be generally available later after testing.

Five Men in Normandy v 1.05 has been uploaded to Wargame Vault and features minor rewordings throughout the book, as well as tweaks to a couple of skills and random events. There is probably no need to print the book out again, but you will want to download the new PDF to make sure you have the most up to date version.

I answer a lot of questions but they are scattered across different locations and often don't get noticed. So I am going to try to capture some and post them to the blog every so often.

A round up of various questions from the last weeks. Questions are paraphrased and edited from their original format on facebook, discord or email and are thus not verbatim. 

Publishing questions:

Will the Five Parsecs expansions be available in print?

Yes, once the third expansion is released, the plan is to do a print compendium with some cool bonus content.

Five Parsecs questions:

Expansion 2: The Duck Back dramatic combat rule does not say how far the character moves.

Their basic move. In testing this was 1D6" instead but I decided to cut the die roll out. You can do it either way if you prefer. 

Why don't new characters roll on the character creation tables?

Originally I liked the idea that new arrivals would be blank slates to be developed in the game, but people really enjoy the character creation tables. Until we can make an updated game revision I suggest doing the following:

New characters roll normally but ignore all results of starting Credits.

Five Leagues questions:

How does Defensive Tactics work when I have a Parry?

As intended, Defensive Tactics is meant to use the highest die score, however I don't think you would break anything by letting the player pick either die roll. 

Weasel Tech questions:

Does the PL-C Beam weapon roll two dice to hit or roll once and hit twice?

It rolls two separate attack dice against the first target.

Questions about me:

Is Nordic Weasel Games your main job?

Yes. 

As the question comes up occasionally it is worth noting that I play almost everything in 15mm and the game rules usually just assume that. There are a few exceptions such as Laserstorm which targeted 6mm but the baseline for me has always been 15.

It turns out that the weapon ranges and movement distances I like in 15mm also happen to match up pretty well with what is the norm in 28mm so there is rarely a need to modify distances to fit another scale. For example a 4-6" move feels pretty good in 15mm and thats about what figures tend to move in games written for the larger scales. 

The area where this can get a little awkward is when it comes to interacting with terrain. A 4" climb looks pretty casual for a 32mm space marine but is a pretty epic endeavor for a 6mm trooper! I tend to not worry too much about things like that, but if it is a worry you should probably tweak those specific distances (halving for 6mm works fine).

On that note if you do want to scale down the game (particularly for playing on a little table) I used to suggest swapping the inches for centimeters (so 6" becomes 6 cm.) but I think that can get too fiddly. Instead these days I would suggest just halving everything. A 6" move becomes 3" and a 24" weapon range becomes 12". Try it either way and see how you get on.

The latter is also useful if you want to play on floor tiles or a grid and count squares. Most grid surfaces don't give you very many squares across so 1"=1 square is often going to make things move too fast. 2" = 1 square requires a bit of rounding up or down but tends to work better in my experience. 

I am slowly working on a project regarding the history of science fiction miniatures gaming. As part of that I want to track down some experiences of people who were around at the time.

Things will be a little bit quiet as I am hard at work on the next big thing. Stay tuned. 

First and foremost, NWG has no exposure to the OGL of any sort. We do not use a single line of anyone's product identity or material anywhere. 

Even in the case of Renegade Scout it is rewritten from the ground up with all stats and terms renamed. Now, it is of course possible to earn a C&D for basically existing on the internet, in which case I'd have to play it safe, take it down and rework it. The conversion guidelines was removed from the 2e book to help insulate it a little bit more, out of worry. RS represents a tiny sliver of my income however so even this would not be a major problem.

I think some of the panic that is happening across forums and social media is probably going to turn out to be unwarranted, however:

*There are many forms of open license and this is a good time to evaluate carefully what license will benefit your game the most (and IF you want an open license at all).

*Tying your livelihood to IP you do not own always means that you live at the mercy of the rights holder. 

As far as what is right and wrong, I leave that to people who earn their living from making proclamations about such. I am going to see what lawyers say once the actual license is available. 

As discussed I am trying a bit of a phased process for Rogue Hammer with patrons getting the updates first and then after a bit of testing them out they get pushed into the Wargame Vault release.

Folks at the 10+ dollar level can find 1.02 which offers the following additions:

V 1.02

Version 1.04 fixes a few wordings in the vehicle chapter (no need to reprint) and adds a few items from patreon to the core rules:

The Multi-gun allows you to carry a combination weapon, Flex armor grants a new defensive option, campaign games can take advantage of cybernetic revival and a new scenario is included. 

https://www.wargamevault.com/product/398913/Shoot-People-in-Space