Rules of the Road

Posted On March 31, 2012

Now that we’re finally getting some lead on the table, it’s time to decide on a ruleset.  I’ve been pumping the good guys over at the Lead Adventure Forums for advice and they’ve pointed me to a lot of nice little free rulesets available on the web.  But I’m having the same problem as everyone else – no miniature wargame ruleset gives me everything I need.  One is incomplete, one works great for solo play but not for play with a GM, one works great for multi-player but sucks for GM play, there’s always something missing.

So why not go back to some seriously old school dungeon crawl rules?  I’m talking the original dungeon crawl rules for use with miniatures here.  Something old fashioned like Chainmail (see left).  These are the rules that evolved to become Dungeons and Dragons, after all.

But heck, why stop there?  Might as well go straight to D&D so I can use the wizards and everything.  But the OSR rules really were incomplete, so I might as well skip ahead and use the cleaned up and much more accessible Moldvay version.  But now we’re drifting further away from miniatures, so you might as well go all the way up to AD&D, right?  That’s the set that I have the most experience with, after all.

Oh but the organization of those rules – second edition would be so much easier to relearn, but now we’re basically completely out of miniatures altogether.  That’s no good.  I didn’t drop all this money not use the little suckers.  That means moving up to 3rd edition which was designed to be easy to use with miniatures.  But oh, then I’ll spend more time statting than painting, and they tell me that you can stat so much easier with 4th edition…

I’ve gone through 30 years of gaming evolution over the last week without opening up a book.  The key to this whole thing is that I’m building a game I can play with my son and his friends – a complex game that isn’t too complicated.  So what I really need to do is find the middle ground between story games and miniature games.  And every dollar spent on books is a dollar less on miniatures.  At the same time, every hour spent building encounters in an hour less spent painting.

Right now I’ve got two complete systems, third edition and the Rules Cyclopedia.  In that case there’s really no comparison.  The Rules Cyclopedia has everything I need.  And if I can’t fudge the adventures into miniature heavy ones then I might as well turn in my 20-sided die right now.

But that won’t stop me from trolling the net for more of those fun little free sets…