Front Matter

“Being in the Main a Game of the Life and Times of a Gentleman Adventurer and his Several Companions”

More Gladiators

Mon Jul 27 21:05:57 +0100 2009

So, another weekend in London, chez Nick. After a longish Gin Lane game on Saturday, the GMing of which I was rather under-pleased with due mainly to my (persistant) inability to have Names ready, on the Sunday we turned our attentions to playtesting Nick’s current take on a gladiatorial combat game.

After the pain of Gladiator Wars, referred to previously, he’s put together his own rules with the aim of making them GM-free eventually, so he can play too. At present they’re still in play-test with Nick GMing, explaining and note-taking on the fly.

How did it go? We had a three corner’d fight, Malcolm, t’other Pete and me. Two armoured gladiators and a net’n’trident lightweight. Malcolm’s heavy was helmed, cloth on his lower parts, a big shield and a longsword: a murmillo perhaps? Pete’s man was the retiarius with the net. I had a hoplomachus with spear, long knife and buckler together with arm and leg armour. Though the character design system is more flexible I think we’d all made our characters match the standard gladiator figures we’d chosen.

System is d10-based for everything: initiative for turn order, movement (move d10 hexes, but limited by encumbrance from kit), attack and defence, hit locations, etc. Each gladiator’s turn has two action phases so they can move and attack, attack and move, or do one or other twice.

The result seemed to be an entertaining swings-and-roundabouts game. I enjoyed it but then I — or rather The Terminator to boast his professional name — won with a spectacular and crowd-pleasing disembowling1. Nick promised that he’d have some sort of experience / reputation system later to add to the campaign side of the game, but for now I just have to carve a notch on the side of my notepad or some such.

I didn’t spot any particular problems that weren’t to be expected on a system’s second or third live test. They were procedural — the order of certain events and intention declarations would need careful spelling-out in a GM-less game.

I look forward to another bout, you’ll be unsurprised to hear. Doubless Pete and Malcolm look forward to their revenge.

1 Eew, now I come to think about it …

Non-Standard

Thanks to Gavin for pointing out:

“using IE8, your breadcrumbs appear to be bisected by the second horizontal rule” … “don’t see the same issue in Firefox, Opera, Chrome or Safari so your CSS is probably non-standard ;-)”

Yes indeed. I was lobotomising my CSS for the previous (broken as designed) standard versions of IE. Or rather the IE fixes in the CSS framework, Blueprint 0.8, that Webby currently uses predated IE8 and its “standards mode, no really, we mean it this time”.

While I have updated to Blueprint 0.9 anyway, to give IE8 its due all I’ve really done to fix the problem is exclude it from the standard IE lobotomy so it uses the same layout as, ah, legitimate browsers.

Gladiators and Skull Systems

Sun Jun 14 20:09:50 +0100 2009

So that was a couple of nights in London with Nick. After the grappa mists cleared on Saturday we took a bit of a look at stuff in Gin Lane – see the December ’35 hair-splitting on the matter of Heads.

We than moved on to a simple playtest of Gladiator Wars, a rather iffy set of rules for, well, gladiatorial combat.

What Nick is looking for is a light weight but absorbing campaign for those Sunday afternoons when people start to slope off after a con, or other short game slots.

The main problem is that the GW rules seem to be a manifestation of a generic set which have been tweaked and search’n’replaced slightly to provide Gladiator Wars, Samurai Wars etc. Unfortunately they haven’t been edited very well; perhaps not even proofread. Apart from one paragraph being inserted into the middle of another; confusing layout; font incompatibilities (“_” appearing instead of ½) – we quckly ran into queries about the combat outcomes and a the two deadly phrases for rules sets: “What does that mean?” and “Can you find any reference to that?”. This was not helped by the repeated common sections of rules for each of four or five levels of game, from beginner gladiators to top level champlion and Chariots. Or were there subtle and unflagged changes and inconsistencies… yes!

The appeal of the rules was their initial apparant simplicity, using what’s called the Quality Dice system to represent gladiator stats – a poor stat is rolled on a d6, a good one on d12. I’m sure you can see the opportunity for steps in between. Trouble is, having fiddled about with such systems myself in the past, both home grown and S John Ross’s Risus which I used for the old Pyrates game for a while, I reckon that as soon as you put a result table into the system you lose the point of silly simple dice systems. GW has tables. Not many, but…

Still, despite having written off Gladiator Wars except perhaps as a mine for ideas about tricks and tactics Nick’s still enthusiastic about Gladiators even if he has to write the rules himself — watch this (arena) space.

On rules, we also had a chat about some ideas I have for changes to Gin Lane’s. We differed in opinions as to what is a (potential) problem and whether my proposed fixes would do what I want. Always good to have (highly) critical input before implementing rules. I shall contemplate further.

Try Again

Sun Jun 07 14:27:21 +0100 2009

A hiccup at Demon provided the impetus to finally get serious about transferring Gin Lane here. Though one or two finer touches of layout and navigation are missing still I think it is all readable now. Let me know if there’s anything missing, unreadable or oddly laid out – I’ve only tested this on Firefox so I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if older versions of IE have ‘issues’.

Opening

Tue May 05 22:27:21 +0100 2009

On the basis that the only way to get a show on the road is to get the show on the road, these are the new louisxiv pages. I may move much of the FRP stuff here from the old louisxiv.demon, but that depends on the supply of Round Tuits.

I can pretty much guarantee that the appearance and layout will change as I play about with the site building engine, Webby and the page CSS. It’s a hobby of sorts.

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