Well, it's been a while...
Apparently, I never got around to posting my thoughts on prepping for Adepticon, which is fine since Adepticon has now come and gone. Did I run my event? Indeed I did! Was it successful? In my completely biased opinion, yes it was.
The information packet for Firestorm Planetfall: Renaissance at the Renaissance can be found here, and it has some aspects that I am fairly proud of. I talked to a few representatives from WarCradle, who now own the intellectual property for Firestorm, Dystopian Wars, and a few other formerly Spartan Games assets, so maybe some of my ideas will make it into the rules when Firestorm rises from the ashes in a year or so. The main rules change, which was very well received, is the "non-rolling start" described on page 2 with a record sheet on page 7 of the tournament pack. Basically, instead of rolling opposed initiative six freaking times at the start of each game, you do it once. The winner of that roll gets to choose one of the six things that need to be decided (first activation, first recon move, etc.), then the other player chooses one, going back and forth until all choices are made. Instead of being completely at the mercy of the dice, you get to decide which "firsts" are the most important to you, or possibly which ones you think are the most important to your opponent. The less drastic change I made was writing rules for forests and woods that actually make sense, because the ones in the official game are pretty bad. In my version, a wooded area doesn't block line of sight to anything, is area terrain rather than occupiable like buildings, and grants a single die of cover save to all light units, not just infantry. Also, armoured units, and light non-infantry can not move Flat Out through the forests. Admittedly, this was largely designed to give the light, non-infantry units some extra protection because in most games of Planetfall I have played they don't live long at all.
The mission structure, I freely admit, borrowed heavily from the previous events run by Josh Linde of The Waygate, but that which isn't broke doesn't need to be fixed! I used the primary, secondary, tertiary method of scoring from his events, basically without modification, because it works well for tournaments. I made the primary objectives worth more points than the secondary and tertiary combined (objectives were worth 6, 3, and 2 points), which might have made the game a bit one-dimensional, but it did keep most players focused on the primary mission. The mixture the objective and terrain configuration seemed to work well (again, the full tournament pack is linked above), and led to some variety. One of the objectives was always to have the lower Zero Hour Tracker, but that was never the primary.
Mission 1 was a straight up "kill everything" scenario, and didn't even have claimable objectives on the table. At least one player enjoyed the change of just killing things rather than purely fighting for markers on the table. The primary objective, "That Looks Expensive," was to kill the opponent's highest point unit, while the secondary was to keep your own core command unit alive. I had hoped this wouldn't happen, but one unfortunate contender's most expensive unit was also his core command one, which made his opponent's target priority very easy! While I allowed fleeing the field as a way of achieving the "You OK, Boss?" objective, I don't think anybody tried it. It's more fun to kill things than to flee.
Mission 2 was a fairly typical "near, center, and far" objectives, with the added complication of trying to remove the opponent's scoring units from the table. This is also where the new terrain rules came into play as all three objectives were inside forest markers, leading to some challenge in wiping out the scoring units when they can actually claim a cover save.
Mission 3 went back to Planetfall's roots with a diagonal deployment and 5 objectives. The central one was considered primary for both players, and as planned became the sight of several impressive bloodbaths! The rest of the objectives were standard Planetfall: two secondaries in neutral territory, and one in each deployment zone that is primary for the far force and tertiary for the far one.
Overall, I was quite happy with the results. All six players seemed to have a good time and there were no tie scores that had to be settled by Zero Hour Tracker tiebreakers. The convention provided medals and prize support, and my home-brewed database kept the statistics and did the scoring arithmetic exactly as I had hoped it would. One of the things my database allowed me to do, which I hadn't seen before in events like this, is record the Zero Hour Tracker difference rather than just totals. While far from impossible to calculate, it's actually more difficult than expected, which is why Josh and most other tournament organizers I have seen only calculated totals. In my opinion, the differential is a far more important stat than the total since that's how the winner of a standard game is calculated.
Will I do it again next year? Honestly, I don't know. Unless Warcradle gets the relaunch of the Firestorm universe going sooner than I think they will be able to, there won't be many players left for the game. Maybe it falls to me to keep the game on life support until then, but that's kind of a thankless job and I don't know if I'm up for it. We shall see when next year's Adepticon gets a little closer.
That's all for now, readers.
The information packet for Firestorm Planetfall: Renaissance at the Renaissance can be found here, and it has some aspects that I am fairly proud of. I talked to a few representatives from WarCradle, who now own the intellectual property for Firestorm, Dystopian Wars, and a few other formerly Spartan Games assets, so maybe some of my ideas will make it into the rules when Firestorm rises from the ashes in a year or so. The main rules change, which was very well received, is the "non-rolling start" described on page 2 with a record sheet on page 7 of the tournament pack. Basically, instead of rolling opposed initiative six freaking times at the start of each game, you do it once. The winner of that roll gets to choose one of the six things that need to be decided (first activation, first recon move, etc.), then the other player chooses one, going back and forth until all choices are made. Instead of being completely at the mercy of the dice, you get to decide which "firsts" are the most important to you, or possibly which ones you think are the most important to your opponent. The less drastic change I made was writing rules for forests and woods that actually make sense, because the ones in the official game are pretty bad. In my version, a wooded area doesn't block line of sight to anything, is area terrain rather than occupiable like buildings, and grants a single die of cover save to all light units, not just infantry. Also, armoured units, and light non-infantry can not move Flat Out through the forests. Admittedly, this was largely designed to give the light, non-infantry units some extra protection because in most games of Planetfall I have played they don't live long at all.
The mission structure, I freely admit, borrowed heavily from the previous events run by Josh Linde of The Waygate, but that which isn't broke doesn't need to be fixed! I used the primary, secondary, tertiary method of scoring from his events, basically without modification, because it works well for tournaments. I made the primary objectives worth more points than the secondary and tertiary combined (objectives were worth 6, 3, and 2 points), which might have made the game a bit one-dimensional, but it did keep most players focused on the primary mission. The mixture the objective and terrain configuration seemed to work well (again, the full tournament pack is linked above), and led to some variety. One of the objectives was always to have the lower Zero Hour Tracker, but that was never the primary.
Mission 1 was a straight up "kill everything" scenario, and didn't even have claimable objectives on the table. At least one player enjoyed the change of just killing things rather than purely fighting for markers on the table. The primary objective, "That Looks Expensive," was to kill the opponent's highest point unit, while the secondary was to keep your own core command unit alive. I had hoped this wouldn't happen, but one unfortunate contender's most expensive unit was also his core command one, which made his opponent's target priority very easy! While I allowed fleeing the field as a way of achieving the "You OK, Boss?" objective, I don't think anybody tried it. It's more fun to kill things than to flee.
Mission 2 was a fairly typical "near, center, and far" objectives, with the added complication of trying to remove the opponent's scoring units from the table. This is also where the new terrain rules came into play as all three objectives were inside forest markers, leading to some challenge in wiping out the scoring units when they can actually claim a cover save.
Mission 3 went back to Planetfall's roots with a diagonal deployment and 5 objectives. The central one was considered primary for both players, and as planned became the sight of several impressive bloodbaths! The rest of the objectives were standard Planetfall: two secondaries in neutral territory, and one in each deployment zone that is primary for the far force and tertiary for the far one.
Overall, I was quite happy with the results. All six players seemed to have a good time and there were no tie scores that had to be settled by Zero Hour Tracker tiebreakers. The convention provided medals and prize support, and my home-brewed database kept the statistics and did the scoring arithmetic exactly as I had hoped it would. One of the things my database allowed me to do, which I hadn't seen before in events like this, is record the Zero Hour Tracker difference rather than just totals. While far from impossible to calculate, it's actually more difficult than expected, which is why Josh and most other tournament organizers I have seen only calculated totals. In my opinion, the differential is a far more important stat than the total since that's how the winner of a standard game is calculated.
Will I do it again next year? Honestly, I don't know. Unless Warcradle gets the relaunch of the Firestorm universe going sooner than I think they will be able to, there won't be many players left for the game. Maybe it falls to me to keep the game on life support until then, but that's kind of a thankless job and I don't know if I'm up for it. We shall see when next year's Adepticon gets a little closer.
That's all for now, readers.
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