SGII for Victorian SF?

Hello: I've been doing a little thinking. I wonder just who
simple/difficult
it would be to use SGII for a Victorian Sci-Fi background.  Personally I
think that a Colonial SGII would be a little simpiler to play, given the fact
that you can leave out a lot of the technology. (e.g. ECM, Sensors, etc.) Any
comments?

On Sat, 16 May 1998 03:09:43 -0600, "Mark A. Siefert."
<cthulhu@csd.uwm.edu> wrote:

> I've been doing a little thinking. I wonder just who simple/difficult

I agree, Mark, it could be relatively simple. Combat is pretty simple in this
case. The only tricky part will be the movement rules. You'll want to include
column, line, square, etc. formation rules into SG2. If you remember the movie
_Zulu_, while the British troops "fired at will" from behind barracades,
they also conducted line volley fire. While this isn't difficult from a combat
point of view, you'll have to include rules for moving men in formation.

Here are some suggestions:

- shift the target's morale die down when it takes fire from a volley
- troops "firing at will" fire by section/squad as per Stargrunt 2 rules
- troops firing volleys in line fire once as one big squad. So, if you
have an
entire company of four sections standing shoulder-to-shoulder as a line,
they can fire as one big section

Here are some examples of movement rates (you'll have to playtest these)
- line formation: 3"
- open/skirmish formation: 6" or up to 2d6" as a combat move
- column formation: 8"

> Hello:

I like this idea. (I enjoyed Space 1889, too.) One question: what about ground
scale and the use of close order formations that are appropriate to
the period? This might also be a factor is some low tech scenarios -
aliens or lost colony at the 19th century equivalent of technology.

Or maybe, on a man-to man skirmish level game, 'form square me lads !'
is less important than the difference in leadership, organization and morale
that's already present in the SG2 rule set. I mean how many men are we really
talking about, a few squads of Tommies, Frenchies or Belgies vs. Former
Bannerman Anhaat Kaamaaraam and a couple of mobs of his Red Hills Bandits.
Ground scale is flexible too. Although that certainly doesn't preclude command
and control bonuses for trained units in formation (extra activation(s), maybe
? Bonuses to impact or some sort of inherant support bonus for volley fire?)

I think that to truly cover an *ahem* EPIC scale Victorian battle, say Sikh
Khalsa vs. John Company you'd need to use something more akin to
D2, maybe with more variation for infantry types/ grades/ formations...

Just some Sunday mornin' ramblings....

Gene

> ----------

In message <35648e2e.1870440@smtp1.sympatico.ca> agoodall@sympatico.ca
> (Allan Goodall) writes:
<cthulhu@csd.uwm.edu>
> wrote:
Personally I
> >think that a Colonial SGII would be a little simpiler to play, given

Well, I hate to be the nay-sayer (*) but I don't think it would be
so simple.

There's an often encountered idea in wargaming (and role-playing)
that all you really need to do to turn a game for genre-X into a
game of genre-Y is to provide a different list of weapons, or even
turn it into a universal ruleset by providing the mother-of-all-
weapon-lists. I prefer to think that there is more to a game genre
than merely which weapons are being carried by the troops.

Consider Warhammer... what started as a cheerful dungeon skirmish game that
stepped up into a "mass" (ha ha) battle system then
warped into a sci-fi game with little alteration of fundamental
ideas. IIRC An assault rifle is barely more lethal that a bow. A silly, dumb
game.

[Now the design people are going to try peddling it to the
historical market. I can't wait... I want Warhammer Zulus Wars so
I can share half my points between super-hero Queen Victoria to
kick arse and the Archbishop of Cantabury to hold morale together. Bring it
on.]

OTOH hand I picked up on DirtSide because the game designer was savvy enough
not to go with all this trivial weapons shit and just
treated all hi-tech small-arms as effectively the same. The genre
assumptions were that all small arms were so good that the limiting factors
were all human. None of that Epic boltgun, lasgun, shuriken, this armour, that
armour crap.

Without some care being put into game scales and concepts a C19 StarGrunt
could be a really mediocre game... aren't there enough
of those already? SG2 is optimised around dirt-kissing SF soldiers
with hi-tech armour and assault rifles, where close-quaters
fighting is performed with bursts of fire and grenades and space wombles (of
sorts) can wade through gunfire (to a degree). I don't really think the basic
genre assumptions are really the same as, say, Space 1889.

[...bear with me here ...I haven't my SG2 rules to hand for
reference]

What would firepower, armour and impact mean in the 19th century? What is
firepower to man who intends to throw a spear at you? How do you rate a bow
and arrow? What are armour values in an era with
breast-plated heavy cavalry and Zulus with hide shields? What does
a horse consider to be a terror weapon? What does one throw in close combat
when using a sword and revolver, vice a bayonet? Is
the reaction of a bayonet or assegai-armed man "suppressed" with
overwhelming firepower going to be same if that firepower is a
single-shot rifle vice a machinegun from SG2?

If one wished to create a game where all the stats were inter-
compatible with SG2 for mix-and-match "tech levels" and wrote out
stats based on comparisons with SG2, then I fear that game would
be extremely poor for C19-only games, to put it mildly.

OTOH... one could use SG2 reasonably as is if your own SF
background justifies it. I recall in Gibson/Sterlings "Difference
Engine" a policeman is armed with a clockwork SMG (a "Cutts-
Maudsley Carbine" IIRC). One has total licence to manipulate history to
provide the spurs needed. F'rinstance the hand grenade
came into general issue after the trench-fighting of WW1... but
the Crimean War included plenty of trench-fighting with grenades
(and shotguns). Good luck finding figures of redcoats with assault
rifles... I guess "tanks" could be scratch-built. There are plenty
of C19 rockets to revise as AT-weapons.

In short, I think there is a fine game lurking in SG2 for C19 SF... but that a
great deal of thought and work would be needed in
rescaling and revising SG2 mechanisms to bring out the Victorian-
ness and suppress the hard-SF-ness.

Mark A. Siefert. <cthulhu@csd.uwm.edu> wrote
> Hello:

Personally I've been working on changing DS2, mainly so I can put in those
cool steam powered leviathans and stuff.

> At 23:21 31/05/98 +0100, you wrote:

Incidentally, Irregular Miniatures do an "Orc Tank" in 6mm which they clearly
chickened out of putting in their Crimean Miscellany range, as
it's the proposed British 1850s traction-engine based tank (like an
upturned pudding basin with scythes), rejected because it was "too barbaric".

Rob

Dear Rob,

The orc tank is one of the few things designed and crafted by my own fair
hands, and it was supposed to be based on Leonardo Da Vincis propsed tank.

Now we all know why I don't make many master figures, but cast lots of other
peoples!

Nic

Eureka Miniatures

> At 03:32 PM 6/1/98 +0000, you wrote:
Personally I
> think that a Colonial SGII would be a little simpiler to play, given

SNIPPAGE
> Incidentally, Irregular Miniatures do an "Orc Tank" in 6mm

> At 21:32 02/06/98 +1000, you wrote:

That's interesting- these are my hazy recollections of the illustrations
in
an old tank book i was given when I was wee- so you see that your orc
tank (which I rather like) is pretty suitable for the alternative Crimea! (my
own fights for my 6mm HOTT Dwarves, though!)

cheers Rob

a da Vinci machine, as far as I remember, 1500-ish

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