Re: (TFT) Back.. with a lil wargaming buddy.

[Daniel Tulloh <daniel@jaws.greatwhite.com>]

On Fri, 17 Jul 1998, The Hussar of Conflans wrote:

> Hi guys, I've been incommunicado for a while, celebrating the birth of 
> our son, Garrett.  

Congrats!  :)

> While spending all too much time in the neonatal intensive care unit 
> recently, I started to work on what I hope is an amusing variant for 
> Melee-- but I want to make sure it hasn't been done before.  Has anyone 
> ever done a Gladiatorial Games (as in Ancient Rome) version of Melee?  I 
> seem to recall mention of "Marx Plastic Gladiators" in Vindicator once, 
> can anyone out there expound upon that?

AH has done a gladitorial game, but I dont know how playable it is.
Its almost certainly not in as friendly a format as Melee.
 
> I've been working on my own game of gladiator fighting ...
     >snip<
> The big challenge now is how to implement the gladiator's "piece armor" 
> coverage.  Melee/Wizard's armor rules represent a large body area being 
> covered by a single material for armor; this is in keeping with most 
> FRPGs and late Medieval European tradition.  The Roman Gladiator, 
> however, wore very little (well, most of them).  Sometimes, a gladiator 
> would wear heavy armor on one leg, and leave the other bare.  Sometimes, 
> he would wear a helmet (which doesn't help in the Melee rules at all), 
> sometimes not.  Sometimes he'd have a huge rectangular army style 
> shield, sometimes just a round buckler, sometimes nothing at all.  I've 
> adopted a "build your armor coverage" approach, rather than adopting the 
> tactic of specific armor coverage for specific body parts.  
> Specifically, I assign a point and a DX penalty value to various armor 
> "pieces" that are added to the gladiator's basic load (which is almost 
> universally a broad leather belt with some leather straps on the arms 
> and legs for minimal coverage.  all else was variable).  The armor 
> pieces approach adds to the armor value (sometimes by a matter of a .5 
> pts./piece to keep this idea compatible with the Melee basic rules).   
> It seems to work well, though I find that some classes of gladiator 
> (specifically, the Myrmillons and late Thracians) are somewhat 
> overburdened, as well as the Retiarus, who has to pay a Melee rule 
> penalty for wielding a net and trident simultaneoulsly. 
> 
> Any thoughts on the armor idea?
> 

Hmmm. well, if you arent going to go with the specific armor,
specific coverage approach - then you sort of have to go with
the "stops .5/piece" approach you mentioned earlier.

You might want to add a similiar DX reduction for each piece
too.  You could even get "fancy" and give different armor
added/dex reduction values for equipment of different types,
ie:  leather may have .5 armor added, .1 dex reduction, 
chain may give another value, plate still another.

Dan


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