Miniatures Combat

This is a fantasy/medieval skirmish combat system that is intended to work for narrative style games where there are heroes fighting anything from rank and file minions to Cave Trolls and also where the dramatic action follows some characters more than others. Time is not spread evenly across the tabletop. If Aragorn is running to try to rescue the Hobbits, the heroic character will keep trying to activate Aragorn while the villainous player will keep trying to activate the Orcs fighting Boromir. As part of this, when groups of characters are activated, that is when they get attacked. You cannot be damaged, for example, until the story is talking about you so by activating a group of characters, the player chooses to risk their safety.

Characters are assigned numbers of general dice (3 for good fighters, 2 for average, 1 for minions) and also get bonus dice for certain things (shield gives 2 bonus defence dice, horse gives 2 bonus movement dice) and this also marks their toughness. These are not hit points. A good fighter, for example, must take 3 hits all at once to be killed. It may be that the system will allow for things such as monsters to have 4 or 5 dice/toughness without breaking the system.

A key aspect though is that although the heroes are tough, near misses will also tally against them in the form of story points so though the hero has been successfully holding off Orcs all day long, they are building a small pool of story points and they can elect to spend them, and if lucky, suddenly get some chance to dramatically affect the hero or his allies.

– Miniatures Combat

Designer: Malcolm McCallum
Status: In Print
Contents: Available online (webpage)

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