"another star grunt discussion" Topic

After a few recent messages here about star grunt I did a bit of search to see what else is on the net.

Firstly, for those who may not have seen it. Have a look at this video.

YouTube link

What I found was that a common criticism is the amount of dice rolling, particulary the opposed roll for impact vs armour after shooting. SO I wondered of there was an alternative that stuck within the rules.

Having already converted the multiple die rolls for close combat to a squad based system that mirrors shooting, I came up with the following and offer it for consideration:

Use the same mechanism for calculating 'wounds' as is done for 'hits'. That is, roll a number of dice equel to the number of hits, of the type matching the weapon impact, and divide the total by the armour die type to get wounds. Eg if you work out you got 3 hits with a d6 impact weapon, roll 3d6, total them and divide this by the target armour die type to calculate the number of wounds.

This seems to be a good compromise between the standard rules and the 'quick and dirty' alternative suggested on page 36-7. I would be very interested to hear from anyone who tries it out. masont at bigpond dot com

I have not explored the effects on shooting vehicles, but I imagine it would still work, or you could just use the rules as written

The numbers work out fairly close – this alternate method will result in more wounds, but less instant kills.

Because there is no option to roll double the armour score you don't get instant kills that way, but there is a slight chance for particularly lethal weapons to roll more wounds than hits in which case they would have to double up and cause instant kills. See right at the end of this email for an explanation.

What follows now is the text from an email I sent to a friend explaining how it works. I include it in case there are some readers here unfamiliar with SG2 who won't get the gist of the above simple explanation.

what I will do is try to explain it all more simply (less maths – and understand me, it took me ages and lots of computer programming today to actually do all the maths)

The existing rules for shooting (and close combat to a degree) work as follows. I stress, these are what was published over 20 years ago and people seem to be happy using them.

weapons have a firepower value and an impact value. troops have a 'quality' and an armour value. Lets say rifles have fp of 1, impact d6 and our troops are all regular (d8) with d6 armour.

So, to shoot:

1. determine the range in increments based on shooter troop quality (8 inches). 0-8 is increment 1, 8-16 increment 2 etc up to increment 5 at 40 inches. This coresponds to a range die that the target rolls to set the difficulty of the shot: increment 1 = d4, increment 2 = d6 etc.

The range die might shift up or down depending on concealment and other effects.

2. the firer works out firepower dice. A unit of 10 men armed with rifles has a total firepower of 10x1 = d10. To this they add their quality die (d8). In some squads one rifleman might be replaced with a lmg or similar, so you drop a rifle (fp goes to 9 which rounds down to d8) but add a support die of let's say d8. So we end up with 3 dice: quality (d8), small arms (d8) and support wpn (d8).

3. Make an oppsed roll: firer vs target's range die. If no firer's dice beat the range die, the shot missed – no effect. If only 1 die beat the range die it causes suppression but no other effect. If 2 or more beat the range die, you get the chance of hits.

Up to this point it is pretty straight forward and pretty quick. The whole die shifting thing is a bit comfusing to read, but very quick once you get it in your head.

4. To calculate the number of hits you add the dice together. That is, the shooting dice that were just rolled to beat the range die all get added together. So if you rolled a 3, 6 and 8 the total is 17, The idea is simply the more effective the firewpower (higher die rolls) the more chance of a hit. This total is divided by the range die TYPE, which reflects the effect of range on shooting. The idea is that the one roll is used to determine primary effect – miss, suppression, hits, and then calculate hits in one go. So if the total was 17, you get 2 hits (17/range die 8) plus an optional remainder of 1 which can be converted to a third hit by rolling a 1 on another d8.

again, it sounds compliated, but that bit is quite quick.

5. converting hits to wounds. This is where the complaints seem to occur. The rules as written have two components each requiring more dice to be rolled.

to convert a 'hit' to a wound, you make an opposed roll with the firer rolling an impact die for the weapon and the defender rolling an armour die. In the example above, I said the rifles had an impact of d6 and the target had armour of d6. So for each hit, roll 2 dice. If the impact die beats the armour die you get a wound. If it doubles the armour die, you get a kill (a wound can be CASEVACed or maybe even healed – esp for power armour).

very simple to explain, but it takes time. If you got 4 hits then that is four times you have to roll to wound. This is what people seem to feel is slow.

6. who is wounded. The published rules then also have you randomly allocate wounds to see if the squad leader or the lmg gunner etc is wounded. I usually bypass this and take the hits on riflemen, but you could certainly do a one-off random roll to check for the leader as that does have a significant effect on morale.

So that is how it currently works. What I am exploring is the feasibility of replacing step 5, the multiple 'to wound' rolls with a single roll much like the 'to hit' calculation.

alternate 5.

For each 'hit' the firer gets one impact die of the type matching the weapon (d6 in my example) and they are all rolled together. They are totalled up and divided by the armour die type in exactly the same way the firepower dice were divided by the range die type. So if you rolled a 2, 3 and 6 you get a total of 11. Divided by 6 (armour die) gives you 1 wound with a remainder of 5 which can be converted to a second wound if you roll 1-5 on a d6. (I sometimes ignore these fractional rolls – they are an option).

So, what I am exploring is the relative effcetiveness (lethality) of the two options.

For comparison, a d6 will beat another d6 about 41% of the time. (note it has to beat it, not just equel it). So if you got 3 hits and rolled your d6 vs d6 3 times, you would expect to get on average about 1.2 wounds – that is most of the time you would get one wound, about one in 5 times you would get 2 and occasionally you would get three or zero.

If we try the alternate way and roll the 3 dice together for an average result of 10.5 and divide this by 6, you get 1 remainder 5.5 or almost 2. So the second option is slightly more lethal in that simple comparison.

What I did today was do some slighty more complex maths to see how this works in practice and if it is always more lethal. Which it seems to be. Not extremely so, but it is always more lethal.

However, what also occured to me on the way home is the effect of instant kill.

If you cast you mind/ eye back up the page (step 5) you will note that with the opposed roll to wound, you could get an instant kill by doubling the armour die result. On the face of it, the new method loses this effect. However, it could be considered that that is what is accounted for by the additional lethality.

What I discovered when I did the maths (and it is obvious in hindsight) is that at the extreme ends of the examples you get weird results. For example, suppose you have a weapon that has low firepower so will get few hits, but really high impact – say d12 – against low armoured troops. If you managed to get 3 hits, that would be 3d12 which 'could' roll a total of 36. Divide this by 4 and you get NINE!!! wounds but there were only 3 actual hits.

It seems to me, this is where the double hit can come into effect. The rula can simply be that no more than 3 (or however many hits there were) models can be affected and so over-kills have to be applied twice, hence the 9 wounds become 3 instant kills (and then some).

Now the odds of that are quite low, but that is where the 3.75 came from in my original email. It works out that the expected outcome of rolling 3d12 against an armour of 4 is around 3.75. That is you are quite likely to get 4 wounds from the 3 hits. Initially that didn't seem ok, but then it occured to me you could just double up the hits and make one an instant kill.

I would probably allow the defender to decide whether to double up wounds or not. That is, say you got 3 hits which became 3 wounds. you could take a wound on 3 different models, or take one wound and an instant kill.

Of course you could just apply the wounds randomly and then also randomly apply any extras too.

That I like thanks :)

Cheers Matt

Ugh, that video really isn't a great introduction to Stargrunt (though I guess it is the "best we've got," vis-a-vis YouTube). The guy is very enthusiastic and he does explain a small bit of the game, but most of the nearly half-hour video is spent chanting superlative and repetitive phrases like "yeah, it's absolutely great" or "yeah, it's super realistic." I would love a 10-15 minute video that tackles 80% of the game's rules clearly and concisely, a la Tom Vassel's boardgame reviews on the Dice Tower.

That option looks fine to my eye and in some ways it is easier to teach (since the mechanics are the same as with shooting). In some ways, however, this begs the question (or at least makes the question already present in the original game more obvious): why even have two sets of dice rolls—one for shooting, and one for damaging? That seems to me a Games Workshop innovation, where the game distinguishes between a "roll to hit" and a "roll to wound" in order to either 1) model weapons that are likely to hit but unlikely to wound (or vice versa) or 2) create an extra hurdle to pair down the incoming damage from an attack. With Games Workshop games, this always follows a familiar formula: you roll a bucket of dice (each representing a potential casualty), and the number of dice that make it through to cause actual damage is hemmed down by several stages of rolling. After the final count is determined, each successful die accounts for a single casualty.

Obviously, the mechanic in SGII is different, but the effect is the same. If you are going to winnow down the number of hits, why not accomplish that in a single roll of the dice?

Perhaps part of the answer, at least in so far as it was conceived originally by Tuffley, was the need to distinguish between regular infantry and power-armoured troops (and then, along the way, everything in between). This is not to say that there is no other way to account for this, of course. For example, you could stop at Stage 2 (your "step 4") in the infantry fire procedure and count all hits as potential casualties and then roll the soldier's armour die later when stabilising wounded (page 39) during a reorganize action (page 17), instead of using the standard D6 to stabilize wounded.

Achtung Minen, a good question.

For me the 2 steps (roll to hit, roll to wound) do matter because it does allow for ways to model different types of weapons and effects. And rolling twice is a simple way to achieve that (which pre-dates GW, but they are certainly the ones who have popularised hit-wound-save).

In particular because I play a lot of games with aliens that ability to have them work slightly differently and not just rubber suited humans is important. Although there are also changes to morale/ reactions that make aliens a bit different too.

I have never really found the system cumbersome to use or teach (written explanations sound complicated) but it does seem to be a common complaint on the few fora that mention SG.

Fair enough, and I think that is the mechanic which ultimately makes SGII "sci-fi"—that it distinguishes between different kinds of weapon and armour effects (and I have no doubt that the lost supplement on alien races would have continued this to include claws and so forth).

why even have two sets of dice rolls—one for shooting, and one for damaging? That seems to me a Games Workshop innovation, where the game distinguishes between a "roll to hit" and a "roll to wound"

The "roll to hit, roll to save/wound" mechanic has been around since the 60s. Featherstone used it extensively in his rules.

why even have two sets of dice rolls—one for shooting, and one for damaging?

Because it gives the player on the target side the feeling of having some say in or control over the process.

Two roll systems seem to be the most popular on the market and it might be worth remembering that scifi games have actually reduced the rolls from the 3-4 in games like Warhammer 40K and Laserburn ;)

+1 Lion in the Stars. It's usually better gameplay if a player always feels involved in the game, even if it's not his turn. GW actually reduced the 3 rolls from Warhammer to 2 in The Lord of the Rings, but made the to hit roll opposed so that both players were still involved.

I think it's worth pointing out that Tuffley himself included a 'quick-and-dirty' method in SGII. It's on pages 36-37. Quick summary: roll quality, firepower, and support as normal, and in the case of a major success, divide the total by the target's Armor Die Type rather than Range to determine the number of casualties taken. Shift up Armor die once for soft cover and twice for hard cover.

It does ignore the Impact value of the small arms, which your method does not, but if I were trying to make SGII go faster, I would rather eliminate an entire roll ala Tuffley, rather than having a different kind of second roll. I have never found that dicing off Impact vs Armor for each potential casualty takes that long, as in my experience, most fire combat only results in 1-3 potential casualties, unless you can catch someone in the open and really maul them.

I imagine if you ran a full company on each side, it'd be a bear but in a platoon level game, usually only a few shots are taken each turn.