Draw, Don't Roll: It All Started With That Damn Walker
By PATM Community Member Peter
So from the outset, I'd like to have it on record that it's Smiddy's fault.
For a while now I've had an idea for a wargame rattling around in my head. It all started when Smiddy posted a model of a weird wild west walker he'd made on the PATM Discord.
It got me thinking about how a Weird Wild West game might work if I made it properly thematic. I had two ideas.
The first, which was discounted for fairly obvious reasons, was to load a single bullet into a six-shooter, spin the barrel like in the movies and keep pulling the trigger until it fires. How many pulls of the trigger you make is your "roll".
While highly thematic, it was also highly unlikely to take off instead of a D6, on account of the potential death and certain localised destruction.
So instead I decided the second thing that seemed to hit the mark when it came to the theme was poker, and therefore playing cards. As such, it seemed much safer, and here in the UK, considerably less likely to result in wargamers on the front pages of the tabloids with headlines like:
"EXCLUSIVE! BAD ROLL KILLS MUCH-LOVED FAMILY CAT"
and
"WARGAMING: SHOULD IT BE BANNED?"
So now I had my initial idea: a Wild West game using cards instead of dice. Not the most original idea, granted, but still, let's see where it goes.
I knew from the outset that cards would be used to resolve all actions. No dice at all, and aces are high.
After a few experiments with stats over a few days, and what I will grandly call "play sessions" but was really me drawing cards whenever I got a few minutes and jotting the results down on scrap paper to see how it worked, I settled on needing four, yes, a whole four, stats. No minimalist stat lines here.
They would be:
● Movement (M)
● Shoot (Sh)
● Fight (F)
● Resilience (R)
Movement is how far you can move, which I know will come as a shocking revelation. Shoot is how good you are at shooting, Fight is how good you are at fighting with your hands, and Resilience is how tough you are.
Everything else would depend on equipment.
The higher the stat, the more cards you draw when taking an action. Need a 7+ to hit with a gun and have a Shoot of 3? Draw three cards. If one of them is a 7 or above, it's a success.
A better stat means more consistency, as the bell curve skews.
After a while of testing movement, I also realised the cards were my friend here as well. One day I forgot to take my tape measure to work with me, so I started measuring in short and long card lengths.
It stuck.
Movement became either a slow short-card length or a fast long-card length. Even weapon ranges became card-length based.
Next was weapons.
Each weapon had three stats:
● Range (Ra): The maximum distance the weapon can shoot, measured in long card lengths (L).
● To Hit: The target number your card draw must equal or exceed to hit the target.
● Damage (Dam): The base damage value of the weapon before modifiers.
But damage implies some sort of damage resolution, and I tried a fixed value. It worked, but it didn't feel right. I wanted some randomness, so instead there was another card draw, this time with the following modifiers:
● 2-7: +0 to weapon base damage
● 8-10: +1 to weapon base damage
● J/Q/K: +2 to weapon base damage
● Ace: +3 to weapon base damage
So a weapon with a base damage of 2 could do anything from 2 to 5 damage depending on the card drawn. Anything from a flesh wound to a headshot, potentially.
I tested this with Resilience scores from 2 to 8, using a gun that did 2 damage. A successful hit took a model out of play.
Simple and brutal.
So I had gone from a photo of a weird Wild West walker to the very basic bones of a game.
It wasn't weird yet, but before you add the weird, you need to make sure the bones work correctly.
I spent a while playing with this before I expanded it further and started to add in the weird.
And then, thanks to another PATM guest, my direction of travel changed again.
But as any good western will imply, that's a story for another, much later, day.