All my homebrew rules start out as justifications for my scratchbuilding habit. I get most of my satisfaction by building terrain and miniatures from nothing, but inevitably my girlfriend asks "but what do you use them for?" So, like everyone else with a blog, I'm constantly producing my own game rules.
My spaceship game Greater Space Battles surprised me with how much fun it turned out to be, and I thought to replicate that in other genres. So far lightning hasn't struck twice; ideas that seem great on paper fall apart on the game table. In particular I just can't seem to nail down a fun and simple micro-armor game to go with my new scratchbuilds. Well, I've decided to start with a published game known for being simple, fun, and solo-friendly.
Ganesha Game's Song of Blades and Heroes is a super-cool little miniatures game with a neat little activation mechanic that forms the basis of a number of derivative rulesets. The author maintains a constant presence on the game's Yahoo group, patiently answering questions and providing updates. One update I'm interested in is the 6mm spin-off of SoB&H that he's currently writing. Unfortunately it won't be out for some time, and I want my tanks fighting now... so I'm trying to figure out how to adapt Song of Blades and Heroes for tank v. tank combat.
It turns out I'm not alone, in fact check out these cool 6mm forces on Space Cow Smith's blog, which he pitted against old Battletech 'mechs using the SoB&H rules.
One thing about Song of Blades and Heroes is the combat is very simple, just an opposed die roll with modifiers. While great for modelling two swordsmen dueling, to me this just isn't the right flavor for hi-tech vehicular combat with large energy and ballistic weapons. I'm trying to come up with modified shooting rules for SoB&H, but so far am a bit stuck. So I'm reaching out to the gaming blogging community since I know this ruleset is popular with solo gamers.
Who else out there is using Song of Blades and Heroes to game sci-fi micro-armor combat? How are you doing it?
Get hold of a playtest copy of Song of Void and Stars, which is an in-development version of SBH for spaceship combat. There may be ideas in there you could poach.
ReplyDeleteCommercially, Flying Lead is SBH for 'modern' gun combat, and may have ideas you can use.
Thanks Kaptain. I was anticipating people would point me to Flying Lead, and really it's pretty dang cheap so I think I'll grab a copy. That being said, I'm more fond of systems that work a lot of the nuances into the dice themselves, like Silent Death.
DeleteMaybe you can get some ideas from Mighty Monsters. It includes simple rules for using stands of infantry, tanks etc. with the monsters and suggests creating large mecha as artificial monsters. Besides that, Drums and Shakos Large Battles might have some useful ideas for micro-scale with SBH but I don't have that book, so I'm not sure how much of it could be adapted to sci-fi.
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