Monday, 25 May, 11 AM EDT
Brian Trotter ran a teaching game of Romance of the Seven Realms for two of our British regulars for Traveller. After some grumbling about the laws of physics changing, they eventually got into it, and Brian started escalating the skill with which he flew the Cockatrices. Paul Holden won the friendly competition with Elliott Goddard, with 7 Cockatrice kills to 4.
Thursday, 28 May, 1:00 PM EDT
Traveller Scenario Playtesting
I put together a scenario rather hastily. It turned out to be a one-sided cakewalk, and about as interesting as watching paper mildew. I was somewhat relieved when only 3 of our usual eight Traveller players could make it after seeing the scenario go 'splut'.
The Madrid is still hitting an odd hole in point costs, and seems to be under-priced. Something to check when we migrate to the new spreadsheet. (Some of this is the problem with Meson guns in general ignoring defenses.)
Midway through Ethan and Dave playing their Traveller game, one of my scheduled students for the Oh God It's Early teaching game next Tuesday said she couldn't make it then, but could play now. So, in spite of limitations on her hardware (an iPad) we did most of three turns of the Romance of the Seven Realms teaching game. It wasn't until she needed to mark damage on her SSD that it became truly unusable without a mouse.
Mike Zebrowski muttered dire imprecations about not listening to minimum hardware requirements. Sheila Suitts would very much like to do this again, and was impressed with the 3D movement and orientation system after playing Wings of War.
Thursday, 28 May, 7:30 PM EDT
This was the delayed RocketPunk alpha test; Brian Trotter and JD Aldrey played, with Brian taking the American Running Dog Imperialists and JD playing the Heroes of the Proletariat Revolution.
The scenario was about 550 points per side, with one map edge impassable. The results were…well. This is why we playtest. I sent a lot of feedback notes to the product author from this, so that things could be fixed in time for Friday's formalized scenario run.
Friday, 29 May, 5:30 PM EDT
We had enough players (with Will Minsinger, Tau Deichmann, Phil Purl and JD Aldrey) to run two instances of a smaller scenario. Will Minsinger's scenario idea, while interesting, would've required more development work to make workable than I had time to do prior to game start, so I did a variation on the previous night's encounter, only at 400 points, and using different ships.
In Tau and Will's game, Will misread his user interface (he didn't check to see if the AVID was aligned with the map direction he was looking at)…and two turns of thrust in the wrong direction later, they had a single high speed pass, followed by seven turns of trying to get back on the same map sheet as one another, while Will ran through his fuel -- Tau was the winner of the scenario, though we didn't get a lot of useful information about the ships or weapons.
We got more useful information out of the second instance, where JD and Phil tangled through several weaving engagements.
Things that worked:
High component armor plus "Fragile" ships -- these ships are very swingy in how survivable they are. Perhaps too swingy.
X-Ray Blasters: These were definite favorites.
Things that didn't work:
Nuclear missiles.
Accuracy of Russian weapons.
All three games reveal that the Russians are too far behind the curve on actually *hitting* things to make for a fun game; it's not as hopeless as Peeps versus Manties in SITS (where that's the meta of the Honor Harrington universe, and can't really be changed without offending the true fans), but in both runs where shots were fired in anger, the Russians were particularly grumpy at not being able to hit Americans enough to actually hurt them.
And the nukes are definitely disappointing. Will and I will take another pass through the ship design spreadsheets when I get the new version done and see if we can fix the problem.
Sunday, 31 May, 12:00 PM EDT
The Axanar game.
I'll be honest, it was a bit demoralizing to have four playtests in a row all be duds. It was nice to see that the first Sunday game was fairly routine!
Read the Axanar report.