So, at the WARGS meeting last night I played through another game. This revision had some major changes to how combat works and that had thrown off the GM's Fuel accumulation. Which made the last scene too easy and somewhat anticlimactic. However a quick discussion with the players led to an obvious solution that should hit things about right. They used the second marine squad, including WE3 tribute characters - uplifted combat trained cat and dog - which went well.
I have also worked out how to manage 'one big alien' style creatures in, with basically no change to the creature combat rules.
Those two changes need to go into the next revision and a bit of explanation and clarification, then I'll be ready to open up a public playtest.
I also now have a good logo for Generic Games (thanks Daniel Steadman) and some great art coming along (thanks Daniel Gorringe). It all seems to be coming together for this one.
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It was a blast of a game. I think the anti-climactic thing was solely due to the lack of fuel you had at that stage of the game - the only thing that it needed to be more climactic was more aliens.
I've been puzzling over the 'facts' thing, too. It took our group a while to get into the habit of targetting facts to add. Additionally, some facts seem much more or less useful in combat than others - which is necessary given some of them are so character-specific - but it did mean most of the stunts homed in on one or two recurring facts over and over again. Again, not a problem per se, but something to be aware of when writing new mission templates or giving guidance for GMs to write their own mission templates.
(BTW, the lieutenant's plan which he never got to voice was to escape by putting the broken ship into a stoppered volcano and then making the volcano explode, using the explosion to achieve escape velocity. Hee.)
Thanks for the comments. I'll just address the stuff about facts. Your puzzlement is probably because they're doing more than one thing.
They're there firstly to allow the zero-preparation gaming idea to work. That means they need to allow for variations on the basic structure without being too open so that the game is just 'make everything up'.
The second reason is to give you some way of generating banter and cool stuff between the marines - that's why there are a lot dealing just with this.
Using the facts to get a combat bonus is the last thing on the list. It's more there as a way to encourage them to be set in general.
One change I am planning is to emphasize the combat bonus on the marine player rules sheet, jsut so there's no confusion about this aspect of things.
Also, I'm going to go back to my original rule that you can only ever get +1 per roll from using facts. Allowing multiple facts in the stunts seemed to detract from the stunts if anything. This also returns the combat bonus from facts back to the 'nice if you can work it in' level it's supposed to be at instead of a place to mine for extra points.
We also had a small issue with when to narrate stunts. It should be *after* the roll but there seemed to be a tendency in this session to do it beforehand. This is a problem because players try to narrate the whole attack before knowing how effective it is. I'll be making this explicit too, and maybe saying that Fuel is the only bonus you are allowed to add after the roll - so you have to commit to using extras, specialty and fact (or not) before rolling, get your total, perhaps top it up with Fuel and only then do you narrate your actual stunts.
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