Saturday, December 8, 2012

Munera Sine Missione

Jamie and I ran about eight games using Alan Saunders's gladiatorial combat rules last night at the school Christmas Fair.  We charged 50p a game and had about eight or nine different players (most of them under 12) over the course of about two hours.  Some of them played multiple times - Matthew finally won a bout at the fourth attempt!
Spartacus the Thracian

The rules worked well with a minimum of having to look things up as we went along.  We found the easiest gladiators for the kids to use were those with a big shield, light armour and an ordinary melee weapon - a straight 1d6 AP and a sword to hit with were easy to understand.

Verus the Provocator
Better armoured gladiators tended to do well because after a bit of running around, most of the kids settled down to just trade blows in a stand up fight.  Fatigue points were rarely and issue!

We raised a few quid for the PFA but I consider the job of these games to be more about giving the kids something interesting to do and perhaps showing them that there's more to wargaming than Warhammer.

A couple of questions for Alan:

1. If an entangled gladiator cuts his way out of lasso, does the Laquaearius lose his lasso for the remainder of the fight?
Cyrus the Laquaearius

2. If a defender makes his armour save does the attacker lose a fatigue point (as he does if the defender wins the initial die roll)?

1 comment:

Kaptain Kobold said...

Glad to see it all worked well and, yes, with inexperienced players the straight sword and shield gladiators will do best. Dodging and dancing with lighter fighters comes later.

The questions:

1. The lasso is like the net I think - on a 5 you cut free but they recover it but on a 6 it's lost. I'll check that when I have the rules to hand, though.

2. There's no fatigue for a hit that's saved, only from failing the initial, opposed, roll.