Ironwood Omnimedia

As I write this I am reliving this weekends play session. In this session a really exciting firefight emerged. Myself, and one of the testers, Liz, were the two gunmen in the player’s side of the encounter. We faced off against four mercenaries we had trapped in a cement bunker type of building. We were lucky in that there was only one way in or out (though we weren’t sure of that). The unlucky part is that we couldn’t get much of a foothold inside. The mercenaries had some hostages to boot. We didn’t think they would kill them, but again, we weren’t sure.

So getting in was high priority. This is the point where I felt that all of work on developing the rules was going to either show fruit, or turn out to be a big mess. You see, I expect that some players would run in guns blazing. In an RPG you would almost think such a tactic would work. Its dramatic and fun. However, this was the type of play I was most afraid of. It boils the combat down to a high initiative, bigger badder gun type of play. This means, you stat your character high enough and you will win, no matter how badly your actions stack the odds against you. Thankfully this didn’t happen.

When developing the rules for combat for all of E-RPG we wanted a strategic feel to the actions. We didn’t want it to be simply a matter of bigger, better weapons and stats. This had to be a game where player choice makes or breaks the combat, and your stats and weapons only accentuate what you do. The heart of the RPG is playing the role of a character, not the playing up the stats of a character. In Fantasy, your stats play a huge part in how your weapon performs, however, your actions dictate the actual performance level. If you don’t understand how combat works, it doesn’t matter how big and bad you are, you will die fast if your not careful. I was afraid that guns would destroy all of this, despite my best designs for it not to.

So I was real careful. As I have said before, Willie was a soldier. He has seen combat and done things in the service our country that most of us only see in movies and news footage. So to understand that gun control in  combat had to be done correctly meant going to people who had actual experience doing this. Not only did I get his point of view, but I got the point of view of a myriad of sources. I put together everything that collaberated itself and took a look at what made gun combat actual combat rather than a bunch of people simply hurling bullets at eachother.

One thing that was abundantly clear was position. This is a mutli-facetted word when discussing gun combat. Position of your body, position of your base of fire, and position of your enemy/target are all important. So we broke things down.

Positioning of your body basically means how you hold your gun. Are you standing up, down on one knee, down on one knee with the weapon position on a stable object (like a wall or even the edge of a trench or hole), are you prone, are you prone with support. Also, this means how much is exposed. Are you fully exposed, allowing for greater maneuvering of your weapon but increasing your profile as a target, or do you minimize both? This sounds complicated, but actually ballanced out very well, and very smoothly. In the encounter I basically set myself against a wall on one knee, exposing only enough to keep a 90 degree arc firing into on room. Liz set herself along the wall oposit the door opening in the same way. She was able to cover the other side of the room with a mirror image of my arc. My gun was supported only by my knee. This meant I was a small target, but also had a good support of my rifle. This gave me bonuses to hit (small, but measurable) while adding to the target level to hit me. It was a simple “I got to the right side of the door, on one knee and I position myself to see this much of the room” statement. Something we all do in games is describe the action. This description was all the GM needed. It amounted to basically (and I am guessing by my own knowledge of the rules) that I had an extra +3 to fire, and the target level to hit me was 20-3(my size cause I was on one knee versus the standard 5) + 3 for the wall meant that to hit me the attack had to roll a 20 or higher. Needless to say, most of their shots missed. I say most because I was hit, and we’ll come to that soon.

Next we discuss position of my base of fire. In this scenerio I had very little manuevering I could do. But I could more or less control my side of the room. If the room had been a courtyard I would have kept a base of fire to control my field of view. This would have given Liz a chance to move into a position where our enemies were not so well covered. If anyone popped their heads up I would take a shot. She moves through cover, sometimes exposing hereself (but she is moving so that makes her harder to hit). She gets to a flank and we take them out with here ability to fire on a lower target level than I could from my location. This also plays into the position of the targets.

Now, we had messed up. We thought we had an enemy we captured on patrol securely bound and out of the way. We didn’t kill him so we could pump info later. We weren’t so good at securing him as I thought. He snuck up on Liz and knocked her cold. I turned and burried 3 quick rounds at him and he fell dead. Liz was alive, but taking a deep nap. The problem was my control had now slipped. Not only was Liz not able to control her side, but I attacked her attack, freeing my side of the room for a moment. THis allowed them to get a better position on me and I took one in the shoulder. It wasn’t bad, but it was bad enough. I slipped behind cover a bit more and hoped some help would arrive quickly. The other players were already on their way. All thoughts of rushing the room had fled from my mind. One more decent shot would take me down and open up a few wounds. I would probably have bled to death long before help would arrive. Worse, I would have only killed one, maybe. If I was lucky 2. Now, I am hoping the opposite wouldn’t happen and that my enemies wouldn’t rush me.

There is some tuning stil to do I think. Mostly to help the GM run te show. But overal, this was the combat I wanted gun play to be. It is about controlling the fight. Move and fire from secure positions, hold positions, flank, etc. Not big flashy run and kill em all moves here. What was really great was the tension of it all. In our minds the clock was ticking. They would escape out of some unknown back door with the hostages, or they would rush me when Liz was down. I was generally concerned that my character was about to loose his first gun fight in the campaign. I’m not going to go into detail on how we got through this. Needless to say, backup arrived. I ended the session with 3 kills and Liz had 2. At the height of the battle I took out 2 in a pitched bid for entry. I took another round by the way. If it weren’t for some help from a PC with medical training I would have bled to unconsciousness after the second round which gave me 2 wounds and left me with 1 point left to hold onto life with. But we came through in the end, and I, personally, have ahealthy respect for the business of controlling a firefight.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 18th, 2007 at 7:13 pm and is filed under Developer Blog, Modern Sagas Development Log. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.