A bit of shilling today: Five reasons you might be interested in the FiveCore game or one of the off-shoots (Five Men in Normandy, Five Parsecs, the upcoming Union in Despair (which probably should have been "Five anarchists in New York").
And in the interest of fairness, five reasons why you might not be.
1:
Morale and Damage is one, combined roll.
Instead of rolling to hit, figuring out the damage, then making a morale check, you roll two dice of different colours, and by checking if either was a 1 or a 6, you know if the guy went down (and how bad), if he flinched or if he's legging it.
No tables or fuss.
2:
Character driven
All FiveCore games are character driven. Whether it's the basic skill system or the full-blown character creation tables in Five Men and Five Parsecs, each figure is potentially a unique individual with motivations and goals of their own.
To give an example, in Five Men in Normandy, your squads morale goes up and down based on certain personality types. Patriots may increase morale while too many ambitious career men may cause problems.
3:
No Stats
No stat-lines for your men. Anything that differs from "I am a soldier" is represented by a skill which marks the exception to the rule.
This also means that veteran troops are unique because they will have several skills that show how they have adapted to combat and in what manner.
4:
Cheap and quick
A typical game lasts an hour to hour and a half and getting a game-worthy force is extremely cheap. Since you need a squad or so at most, even in 28mm, you're looking at 15 dollars or so. 15mm gamers can get in with two packs of 15mm infantry, 8 dollars or so in most cases.
5:
No modifiers
Outside of close combat, no dice modifiers are used when firing and handling morale. Roll the die and what you see is what happened.
Now, five reasons all this greatness may not work for you and hence you shouldn't send me tons of money:
1:
Not comfy for platoon level battles.
While it can be done and there's various suggestions for it, a full platoon level battle is going to be a bit tough. The turns get very chaotic and you need some quirky rules to make the turn sequence really work well.
For this scale, until I finish "Berlin is not in sight", go buy Nuts or Chain of Command.
2:
Tank battles
FiveCore is an infantry game. The Heavy Metal supplement covers vehicles but mainly for recon vehicles, light tanks and suchlikes. I happen to think the vehicle rules are pretty clever, but they won't be that satisfactory for people who want platoons of T34 taking on Panthers.
3:
No Stats
No stats can be a bonus but it can also be a downer. If you prefer troops to be pretty interchangeable so you don't have to keep track of who is who, you may find yourself confined by "A soldier is a soldier" as a principle.
4:
Long, in-depth games
I play ASL, so I know the joys of a deep, complex game. There's a certain, narrative experience that quick and simple games don't always provide. The downside is complexity and play time. If you like games like Face of Battle or ASL, this might not fit your desires at all.
5:
The D6
SOme people prefer D10's or other dice with a wider range of outcomes (where are all the D8 and D12 games?) and more amenable to modification.
FiveCore sticks with a standard D6 on the gaming table though we do use percentiles in campaigns and when setting up missions.
If this has triggered your imagination, go give me lots of coffee and beer through link
Ask if you have questions and as a follow up, I'd love to see more of the writers that hang out on TMP do something similar.
makes models of models of models...
