Mutants and Death Ray Guns!

A selection of mutants

So far this year, the game I've played most is Mutants and Death Ray Guns, the post-apocalyptic sci-fi skirmish ruleset from Ganesha Games. Work, travel, holidays and the Six Nations have conspired to deny me time for preparing RPG adventures, so I've been running MDRG games for my son and his friends (and one of their fathers) most weeks.

I've had the rules for three or four years, and we've played them fairly often over that time, but usually simply as a sci-fi take on Song of Blades and Heroes, the marvellous fantasy skirmish game that provides the 'engine'. So, we typically just stat up some characters, keep the page with modifiers for high-tech weapons open and then play SBH. 

The field of battle

In our recent sessions, though, we've been paying much more attention to the differences between MDRG and SBH. And the game was much the better for it. That shouldn't be a surprise, of course, but I think many of us are guilty of carrying assumptions from one ruleset into similar but subtly different games.

So what have we been doing differently? Well, for starters, we've been using the profiles for each species in the book: Q3, C2 for humans (the default in SBH tends to be Q3, C3) and Q4, C3 for mutants. We then gave each side the appropriate leader and champion updates. That meant that Captain Zero, a human leader, is Q2, C2 - very easy to activate, but not especially formidable in combat, even when decked out in power armour (+2 C) and equipped with a jetpack (the Flying trait) and a sub-machine gun (+2 C).

Captain Zero

We've also paid much more attention to the differences between weapons. It was only fairly recently that I noticed that the titular death-ray guns don't just add 2 to combat rolls, but are also Lethal (killing on a 'win' rather than a 'doubling': something that should have been obvious!). So we've been making sure that was observed. And we've also been using multiple-shot rule for most high-tech weapons - a big departure from SBH - and the slower rate of fire for primitive weapons like bows and crossbows (which need an action to be reloaded in MDRG).

All of our SBH and MDRG games involve wandering monsters, which add a bit of extra spice. Before the game, I line up six beasties in order of power, with stats assigned to each. At the end of each turn, someone rolls a d6; a six means that a wandering monster (d6 roll for which) appears at a random table edge. This adds a lot of unpredictability to the game: players have to watch their backs.

Our most recent game put a twist on this. The game centred around cargo from a downed aircraft that had broken up over an alien hive. The players' squads had to retrieve some of this while avoiding or fighting off angry, bug-like aliens that emerged from several 'spawning points'. A d6 was rolled for each of these at the end of a turn; only a 1 failed to produce aliens, with other numbers spawning various types of bug.

Bugs

This lead to a set-up in which the table was often swarming with agitated aliens, meaning that the player goals often had to be subordinated to sheer survival. That forced temporary cooperation among the players, who were otherwise opposed to each other.

Bugs and their spawning points

I also recently played back-to-back games of GW's Kill Team and MDRG. I enjoyed KT (a game with an old friend is always fun), but I was struck by how slow the game is compared with the Ganesha rules. We used a small section of the table for KT and the whole table for MDRG, with two warbands a side for the latter game. But MDRG played out much more quickly. It also offers much more elegance in the combat system: shooting delivers five possible results from one opposed dice roll, whereas in KT, it's three possible results from four or five dice rolls. In close combat, MDRG gives a spread of nine possible results from the single opposed roll; in KT, it's three results from four rolls - and the process is repeated if the defender survives.

That got me thinking about how MDRG and SBH combat is generally much more enjoyable and dynamic than most RPG systems. And that in turn prompted me to dig out the Tales of Blades and Heroes RPG rules from Ganesha. I'm planning a hybrid skirmish/RPG run-out with those this weekend.