"Sol'una Tactical Rules: Dice, flips and phases" Topic

As part of design and exposure ^_^;;; , I am providing a link to a non-fancy PDF of the Sol'una miniature rules. The link is PDF link .

The system has what I hope is something unique in it and bits of the familiar to those of phase based turns (ala Star Fleet Battles and Car Wars) and resource management (Anima Tactics, Warmachine/Hordes).

The core difference is how dice are used IMHO. Instead of rolling 10 x BS4 or 10 resolutions of 2D6+7 for example, 10 dice are rolled, grouped by pip facing (1-6), and then some can be flipped (according to a whole bunch of modifiers) to make a group larger, and the size of that group is then the final result for the test.

The rules also try to cater for tabletop and gridboards. Gridboards (smaller playing area usually) are certainly harder to work with when having to consider large sized bases and templates/AOEs etc.

The LoS rules on a gridboard use corner-to-corner lines and n of them being a particular level of obstruction.

A sizable arsenal entries of weapon attributes and items along side your own made up model and weapon stats make the rules usable.

The standard mission is still being worked on.

Have a gander.

These sound really interesting. If you have time…would you mind staging a minor game and showing more detailed examples of the actions (and flips) in detail?

Sort of a variant on the "dice pools" method, then. I've always wanted to do something with dice pools, but never found a good application for it.

Lets take the simplest use of Pools and Flips: unopposed and opposed tests, without a lot of modifiers.

A game of Cards! (on the Galaxy Express 999. now that's space opera).

Maetel is playing Solitaire. Captain Harlock and Queen Emeraldas are playing a high stakes game for possession of some technical readouts.

(for atmosphere. GE 999 and all its characters and stuff (c) who ever does have (c) !!)

Firstly Maetel (Mind 7 AP 4 RP 3). Her test will be unopposed so the test wil be based against a Target Number (TN). A skilled player, Matael has the arsenal item of Card Shark 2 (who would have known it!). She likes to challenge herself on the long journey through the Sea of Stars and has set the difficulty of the deck shuffle to TN 6. In order to succeed in the test she must have a final group of dice of the same PIP face of 6 or more.

Maetel has Mind 7, which gives her 7 dice for the test (7/0). She has RP 3 to either use to increase dice or gain flips. She decides to take 1 dice and 2 flips (8/2). The traveller also has Card Shard 2 that acts as additional RP when playing Cards. One each are turned into dice and flips (9/3).

Rolling the 9 dice and sorting into groups gives:

1: 2
2: 2
3: 1
4: 2
5: 0
6: 2

A wide spread and the largest group of PIP faces is 2 (in fact 4 groups are on 2). Now we come to flips. Maetel must make the largest group she can with 5 flips. A die can only be flipped once, and on an adjacent side (e.g. no 1 to 6 or vice versa, but 6 and 4 is allowed). The lone 3 is flipped to 6. Any of 2 the 2 or 4 face group dice can flipped to 6 but not the dice in the 1 face group. 2 more are flipped to 6. The group size is now 5.

Unfortunately in this game Maetel did not win the game. She only scored 5 and needed to reach TN 6.

Onto the game between Captain Harlock and Queen Emeraldas. This game is an opposed test because there are two or more parties that are involved and can manipulated each others roll and flips. The party that gets the largest face group wins the game. Harlock has been drinking a bit too heavily earlier on…

Captain Harlock (Mind 6 AP 3 RP 3) Lucky 1 spends the obligatory 1 AP to be involved in the game as an Interaction Action. He will roll a base 6 dice, and then use all of his RP to remove 1 dice and 2 flips from Queen Emeraldas because he knows that she is a canny player. He uses his Lucky 1 to counter act the minor level of inebriation that would ahve otherwise posted a negative flip penalty.

Queen Emeraldas (Mind 6 AP 3 RP 3), seeing that Harlock is a little tipsy, decides to go for broke and puts everything on her success. She will roll 6 dice and puts all 3 RP into additional dice for a total of 9 dice.

Both parties reveal their choices, which are modified by the other party's choice.

Captain Harlock: 6/0, gets 2,2,3,4,6,6. Largest group is 2.
Queen Emeraldas: 9/0, -1/-2 (Harlocks infuence) to 8/-2, gets 1,1,2,4,4,4,5,5. Largest group is 3.

Emeraldas would have won the game, but her flips are in the negative. That means Harlock('s player) makes the flips instead. 2 4s change to a 6 and and a 2, reducing the largest group to 2 (1,1,2,2,4,5,5,6).

The game is a draw! Harlock smile wryly and Emeraldas holds out her hand. Its her turn to shuffle the deck.

The downside seems to be that you're spending a lot of time and effort playing with the dice. Different people take different levels of satisfaction from that, obviously, but for me, I've always found it distracting to break from the game narrative in order to talk and think so much about the dice.

Thanks Aksakal!

The dice work is all part of the narrative (to the player group I have anyway :) ) – finding the best way to use the groups and flips to maximise the roll. No matter what harlock did he could only get a draw, or make himself lose (hes that kind of guy he might do that for emeraldas or some young lad out on his first boys own space adventure).

the main balance issues people are having is mixing high and low Mind models. The high Mind will have lots of activations which is leaving the movement rules in a flux.

the first type was move only 1 cell per activation max, up to the speed limit over the sequence. this felt very slow as models hardly moved and fired at each other a lot.

that changed to being able to move full speed each movement activation – leading to high Mind models zipping around or being stuck behind slower guys.

i've reverted to a combination of 1 and 2. can't move more than speed in a sequence, but can move as far as wanted up to that per movement activation. this may change the speed value upwards to give more 'motion', let lower Mind be more involved, and bring in fire and movement activations.

another good change that was brought was the proportional damage grids (easy to draw in MS Word) to be non-proportional. it was found that wounded models slowed down too much and fell out of the game. the change is easy, and interesting, by shifting cell sizes, e.g. not loosing the 1st speed point until 1/2 health is gone. this way profiles can be really customisable and used to represent races etc.