MEK OP Game Night: Playtesting

Advancing the Green Pass campaign clock by another month resulted in no random incursions by enemy armies, so the session broke out into two groups: a 40K group with most of the experienced players, and a "Medieval Aegis" playtest with some new players. I was in the playtest group.

Medieval Aegis is a tactical man-to-man combat system created by Richard "Vox" Scott, using a hex map and lots of dice. We each created characters using a simple point-buy system that Vox made up on the spot, for a four-way battle. Because movement is slow in this system, the free-for-all pretty quickly devolved into two battles on each end of the map.

Some comments about the system:

• This is a very dice-heavy system. An average attack involves rolling to attack, rolling for damage, and then counter-rolling for damage-soak. Each of the latter two rolls can involve a half-dozen different dice. Higher quality armor/weapons use better dice, so a standard mathematical operation might look like "Attacker rolls 3d10 + 2d12 + 5, then defender subtracts 5d8 + 2, and applies the difference as lost health."
• Crits and fumbles are quite common in this system (generally on a 1 or a 6, rolling something like 1d6), and tend to influence the flow of combat in unpredictable ways. As an obvious example, the first round of engagement between me and Vox involved both of our archers making failed attacks and dropping our bows for the following round.
• Depending on character build choices, it's not difficult to create a stalemate situation where both sides have lots of armor and only weak weapons that can't inflict damage through it. This creates situations where each side pickets the other, hoping for a crit.
• There's no magic in this world, which removes some of the rock-paper-scissors dynamic of fantasy combat. Nothing beats high-end armor, which stops arrows just as well as swords.
• The point-buy method for leveling up used fairly solid principles of diminishing returns to make it unappealing to dump too many points into one character.
• Archers seem very good, given how many steps it takes to make contact with enemies. I suspect a force of long-range mobile archers with minimal armor would be the quickest way to win. That being said, moderately armored archers can beat unarmored ones, so there's still a difficult optimization to be performed around finding how much armor an archer needs.
• Some rules (like horseback riding) seem minimally implemented, and will probably require more explanation.
• There's no element of dodging attacks at all, aside from a single specialized skill. In particular, wearing lighter armor or having higher agility/dexterity has no benefit in terms of reducing a foe's attack probabilities.

Overall the rules are short, at about 10 pages. Despite being a medieval game, the style of play actually reminded me more of an age-of-sail wargame, with lots of slow maneuvering at range using turn-radius restrictions and a limited firing arc. I like that style of play in warship (and for sci-fi games, starship) battles and maybe it has some logic for heavy knights, but it feels thematically odd to use it for light skirmishers in leather jerkins. I feel like it would be improved by doubling all movement rates to help melee combatants get through the gantlet of arrow fire and create a sense of flow. Even in the current incarnation, though, I would be willing to play again.