Demoing SG2 (was Re: An apology for the unwashed)

At 01:14 PM 1/25/2000 -0500, John Crimmins wrote:
[snip]
>>My experience with the other games has involved reading part of the
book,
>>scanning to the next part, reading some more, scanning some more,
getting
>>lost on previous points, getting bored, then just dropping the whole
thing.
>
>I hate to say it, but we've had the same experience.  That's why we
ended
>up turning to ShockForce for SF skirmish, and why I'm going to be
adapting
>it to a microarmor game at some point in the near future.  It plays
very
>quickly, very easily, and after the first game you don't need to
reference
>the rulebook at all.
>
>With SGII, we kept having to stop play to look something up in the
>rulebook.  It just slowed things down too much for us to really enjoy
it.

Well, the same could be said (constantly looking up rules) about Clan
War,
yet it doesn't stop our local group from playing it every week. :-)

I've found the StarGrunt rules fairly easy to understand - once I get
past
the jargon that Jon used.  Now, I will be playing my first SG2 game next
week against one of my regular Clan War opponents, but I don't foresee
any
difficulties in teaching him while I'm learning it myself - after a few
reads I have a fairly good grasp of the game mechanics, and can
translate
the SG2 jargon into terms used by other games that we've played.

* Movement?  Similar to Heavy Gear infantry squads in Skirmish scale.

* Actions/Activation?  Heavy Gear again, with a squad getting 2 actions,
like the old 1st edition HG skirmishing rules.

* Fire combat?	Costs an action to fire, like the old 1st edition Heavy
Gear skirmish rules.  Defender rolls range die for the "target number"
(Clan War).  Attacker rolls higher than TN to suppress or hit.	Attacker
rolls any hits to wound (impact die), defender rolls "armor save" (armor
die) - similar to WH40K in mechanics. 

* Confidence checks?  Call them Morale tests (Clan War).

* Reaction tests?  Call them Leadership tests (Clan War, Heavy Gear).

* Transfering Actions?	Very similar to Heavy Gear Command Points,
except
you pass activations out instead of single actions.

For this basic demo game, I only need to worry about these 6 items,
along
with the RALLY rules.  No vehicles, so I ignore all of the Point Impact
rules.	No CaseVac, so we'll have to carry our wounded out.  Since all
of
my Clan War opponents are also WH/WH40K players (which I'm not), we'll
use
Imperial Guards for the grunts and Space Marines for the Power Armor. 
No
new figures for them to buy <g>.

Here's my TOE for this demo:

(2x) Infantry Squad
-------------------
REGULAR Quality (d8)
Level 2 Unit Commander
(5x) Guards with Lasguns (Firepower 2, Impact d8) 
     in battledress (Armor d4)
(1x) Guard with Assault Cannon (Firepower d10, Impact d10)
     in battledress (Armor d4)
(1x) Commander with Lasguns (Firepower 2, Impact d8) 
     in battledress (Armor d4)

(1x) Power Armor Squad
----------------------
"Medium" movement (8")
VETERAN Quality (d10)
Level 2 Platoon Commander
(4x) Space Marines with Bolters (Firepower 2, Impact d10) 
     in light PA (Armor d10)
(1x) Space Marine Commander with Bolters (Firepower 2, Impact d10) 
     in light PA (Armor d10)

All troops start out with MEDIUM Mission Motivation, TIRED, and STEADY
confidence.

It should go fairly smoothly, since most of the rule concepts can be
correlated almost directly to other rules that we've played before.
Constantly looking up rules is something that Clan War gets you *very*
used
to (unfortunately, and we all can hardly wait for the Daimyo Edition to
be
released), so I don't see that as a big hurdle either.

One thing that I will be doing to speed the learning process is to make
a
few squad "Force cards" that have all of the ranges, die shifts, and
leadership rolls in tabular format all written out.  This will allow
most
of the combat mechanics to be easily done, without a lot of the mental
gymnastics and page flipping normally required to look up all of the
proper
die types.

============================================================
Mark "Hauptmann" Shurtleff
 email: hauptman@sfcmd.com
 StarFighter Command Homepage: http://www.sfcmd.com/
============================================================