Fantastic Frontiers: Reference Sheets

I've mostly completed working on the draft of the rules for my early-modern exploration game, Fantastic Frontiers. I'm now trying to test a few portions of the turn sequence for aspects that feel clumsy or illogical, which is something that can't always be predicted in advance of playtesting.

I've also been creating the first versions of the reference sheets that are needed during play. And hooo-boy, are there a lot of reference sheets in this game. At this point, I'm literally playing with about five different sheets that I actually need to modify (using pencil and eraser) and another stack of pages full of game tables to roll against. This is pretty far removed from "industry standard" in the design of modern boardgames, which emphasize playability based on virtually no pencil annotations beyond maybe adding up the score at the end. On the other hand, RPG players are pretty used to having a detailed character sheet, and I feel as though thematically what I'm trying to do owes more to the RPG world (especially Judges Guild's Wilderlands of High Fantasy, and newer imitations like John Stater's Hex Crawl Chronicles or Rob Conley's Blackmarsh). So by those standards, maybe the paperwork looks a little more tolerable.

First off, here's a look at the "character card" used for the party leader, the lieutenant, and any other companions in the leadership party; in effect, you can think of the leadership party as a two-person RPG party with a bunch of lower-level henchmen. These match up with the standard information used in an RPG (stats, gear, class, levels), and translate them into a condensed block at the bottom that matches up with the stats of the simpler units that make up your soldiers (and enemies). There's a large matrix table in the rules that converts from personal bonuses to wargame-style combat factors. For a historical scenario these could just be pre-generated, but there's something undeniably fun about rolling up a totally random crew of conquerors.

Statistics follow the d20 convention, so it's pretty easy to port them back and forth from any D&D-style RPG. From the standpoint of this game, only the bonus or penalty (a value running between -3 and +3) matters. Any character system that creates characters with seven tiered attributes, bell-curved toward the middle, should work. This is a compromise between very early character design, which topped off at +1 or maybe +2 at most, and modern systems, which often extend to bonuses of +5 or more.

Here's a version of the character sheet that adds some "fantasy" stats like magic points. I've divided spell points into five "schools", so that each caster type feels a little different. You can configure casters to specialize in different schools, although some classes are more efficient for certain builds. I also added back in the traditional six stats, although I'm having trouble figuring out how to make personal combat stats like "strength" or "dexterity" feel important in a game that revolves around leading troops of dozens of mercenaries. In effect, they'd be the dump stats of this game, just like (non-prime requisite) mental stats were the dump stats of RPGs. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, since they do provide some nice flavor, and your hired companions use a totally random "roll everything in straight order" system to resist the temptation to make your entire leadership party into a group of brilliant Napoleon-like midgets.

In addition to leaders, your expedition will (eventually) have a small to respectably-sized army of troops, various war machines, and the supplies needed to keep them in the field. All of these are recorded on the Expedition Control Sheet. Here's a multi-purpose version that could be adapted either for a historical or a fantasy campaign:

As you can see, there are about six different categories of investments you can make.

• Mercenaries are soldiers, and require both an initial hiring cost, and a maintenance fee. They need to eat, and (if they have projectile weapons) they need ammunition. The troop type names are taken from the 1975 edition of Chainmail. Not all of these would be equally useful in an exploration campaign. Militia are mostly there to represent the fighting capabilities of civilians who are forced to fight, and "armored foot" are probably too slow for anything but garrison duty. (Full suits of gothic plate did make an appearance in the new world, but mostly for the sake of diplomatic showmanship.) I'm suspecting that these preferences should emerge logically in the course of play, so that players will realize that light infantry are usually the better choice (just like Spain did in the 16th century).
• Irregulars help perform a variety of utility functions related to logistics. They fight as militia if they have no other choice, but usually they are an investment you need to protect.
• Specialists are essentially a late-game money-sink for fantasy games, for when you've cleaned out a dragon's lair and need something interesting to do with the vast wealth you've suddenly acquired. Incidentally, these are all the original specialists named in the 1975 edition of Underworld and Wilderness Adventures, in parallel with the Chainmail-based mercenary list above.
• Portage represents carrying capacity for the three basic transportation units: mules, horses, and human porters. Human porters are cheap to rent, but need to be paid a regular salary. Mules have a huge carrying capacity, but are more expensive. Horses are quite expensive, but can keep pace with scouting cavalry. They all get thrown together into a single formula, rather like in Source of the Nile.
• Boats can move up and down (and across) rivers. Porters can carry a canoe overland, for when you can't find a fordable hex or bridge. Riverboats are too large to carry, but can also move horses, artillery, and other heavy gear, making them small mobile fortresses and supply dumps that can save you a long trip home. It's intended to represent something like Lewis and Clark's keelboat - something that can carry a substantial amount of freight, dozens of men, and even mount a small cannon up front. It's pretty amazing to me that this thing could go upstream under nothing but oar power, but apparently it made pretty good time!
• Artillery are slow, use lots of ammunition, and provide AoE capacity against massed formations. For a historical campaign, you'd mostly want to use light field cannons like falconets. The slower bombardment guns could be used to reduce casualties when up against a fortified enemy city. For a fantasy campaign, I imagine that high-level wizards would mostly make them obsolete, being much a faster and lighter way to accomplish the same pyrotechnics. But cannons might still be useful to defend a fort that isn't sufficiently important to justify assigning a scarce archmage.
• Finally, you can list your objectives and treasures at the bottom, which come off of information cards which I still need to finish writing!

Note that everything can be assigned in two different ways: to the main body, or to the scouting group. In effect, the expedition is a two-piece bola that spins across the map, with the faster scouting group moving as a satellite around the slower main body to probe into unexplored hexes. I find this a little more interesting than the single-group movement used in other hexcrawl boardgames, since it makes it possible to encounter more realistically deadly threats from day 1, rather than artificially color-code the difficulty of game regions.

Finally, all of the information on the character cards and the control sheet get combined to calculate a bunch of "expedition attributes" that affect how you move and conduct your other operations on the map:




Many lines are split into three blocks, indicating three possible values, one for the scouting group, one for the main body, and one for when they meet up together in the same hex. You can see that many of the logistical elements use a common formula for their determination, based on the square root of the size of your expedition (or at least, the contributing members to that function), and any bonuses associated with the leaders who can contribute. The latter is supposed to represent the organization and bookkeeping associated with the actual work that's being done by your various recruits.

The standard dice throwing mechanic is that the value of a logistical attribute determines the number of dice you get to roll for a function. So if you have a recon score of 7, you get to roll 7d20, and any of them that are at or below the search index for that hex are successes. Or if you have a navigation value of 2, then you get to roll 2 dice and if either of them are good enough to prevent you from getting lost, you'll be able to avoid the penalties for getting lost.

The use of square-root dependence on party size is a good example of explicit implement of diminish returns. Diminishing returns cover over a multitude of poor game design sins. To a certain extent, it doesn't matter if hunters are "fairly priced" against scouts, if the marginal value of adding an additional hunter is rapidly falling off to zero. The exact pricing can shift the equilibrium a bit, but the optimal expedition composition is always going to be a mix of roles and functions, even with egregiously poor balance. (Which I'm nonetheless hoping to avoid!)