Gluing plastics

Meet Rogue.
Rogue is 'helpful'.
Rogue is also a certifiable headcase.

I've embarked on a massive bout of batch-assembly of plastic figures - specifically, six boxes of 28mm Wargames Factory Persian cavalry to stand in for Parthian horse archers. (That distant rumbling sound you can hear? Yes, that's a deadline approaching. For once, it's a whole two weeks further off than my usual!)

As it's <deleted> perishing out in the workshop, I've temporarily appropriated the dining room, which is great for being warm, but needs the door shut in order to both keep the smell of glue and paint out of the kitchen, and keep the cats from 'helping'.

On the left, EMA Plastic Weld.
On the right, Humbrol Precision.

This is the first batch job I've done in a while (since the El Cid army, I guess), and it's I think a slightly different plastic (Wargames Factory) to the one Conquest Games and Fireforge (and I assume, therefore, Renedra) use. Interestingly, this seems to mean I need to change glues.

Normally, I use Humbrol Precision, which comes in a nice yellow plastic bottle with a metal needle applicator. On the upside, it's very easy to apply precisely where you want it, and for the Renedra plastics it seems to just work. The downside is I /believe/ its base ingredient is methyl ethyl ketone, and in a closed enviromment like the dining room the fumes are enough I can only work on about a dozen figures before needing to take a break. Also, it doesn't appear to stick the WF plastics as well: this is fine for the horses, which have some pin/socket locator thingies to hold them, but is tricky when you're trying to attach arms,  heads and things like quivers that rely on the joint to hold them against the weight of the piece.

You may have seen me mention EMA Plastic Weld before - it's a different glue in that it comes in a bottle, and is applied with a brush. For some reason, it seems to work much better on the WF plastics than the Renedra-manufactured ones, providing an almost instant bond (10 seconds of holding the joint rather than a minute+). The Hunbrol is a bit slower to bond even on the Renedra/Warlord/Fireforge/Conquest plastics, but the ease of use tradeoff means I tend to use the Humbrol for those.

The Plastic Weld fumes also aren't quite as noxious in terms of light-headedness, but it is dichloromethane, which is supposed to be slightly worse for you (category 3 rather than 2 safety risk) with prolonged exposure. You also can't apply it quite as precisely, as it needs a brush. Its other downside is that it's very easy to knock over if you're a klutz like me! The short fix? Superglue (using the new Army Painter superglue I picked up at Hammerhead (thanks, guys from Warlord!), which is just awesome in terms of speed of bond) a beermat to the bottom of the bottle.

Kickstarter Watch - Beyond the Gates of Antares

Wow. Ok.

That's quite a biggie. And I quote:

After much consideration we have decided to withdraw our project from Kickstarter.

We’d like to thank you all for believing in us and backing us, GoA will still become a reality but through different means.

We will take the next month to reassess our plans, during this time you will still see us on the forums and we will continue to post updates to our website.

I have to say, a couple of folks at the club had commented they thought it was going to wind up not meeting its goal, and I was... unsure. I've seen things pull 60% of their funding in the last few days, but those have generally been much lower targets. I wonder... is £300,000 a bit of an bold target for a Kickstarter - it doesn't, somehow, feel like what KS was intended for. It also... I dunno, it kind of felt generally 'meh'. Sure it raised £100K, but I never really picked up any excitement about it.

Having said that? I was tempted, though I really don't need another ruleset: I hadn't actually started delving into the setting yet. Part of that's because I'm toying with writing a setting for the Lardies' Quadrant 13 rules!

It will be interesting to see both what happens to BtGoA now AND, more interestingly, what backlash there is.

A new era for Miniature Wargames

Miniature Wargames has been a magazine I've picked up on a 'when I see it in the shops' basis. As I have digital subscriptions to both Battlegames and WSS, I've sort of toyed with adding it to the list, and decided that on the whole, two's kind of enough. Or maybe not.

Atlantic Publishing (who publish both Miniature Wargames and Battlegames) have very kindly taken the dilemma out of my hands, by asking Henry Hyde, editor of the latter and one-half of my favourite podcasting team, to take the editorial reins at MW. This means that Battlegames as a brand will cease to exist (except for specials and their Combat Stress appeal) but (according to Henry) his brief is to add a healthy dose of the Battlegames 'Spirit of Wargaming' to the MW editorial mix (as well as a good few more pages).

What do I think? Personally, I can't wait. Battlegames has always been my favourite mag of the Big Four (before you ask, Wargames Illustrated (aka the Battlefront House Mag) runs a distant fourth), and I've always liked the fact that as a magazine it makes me think at least as often as it makes me go 'oo, lookit da shiny figurez!'.

So... congratulations to Henry, who is an all around nice bloke, polymath and Renaissance Man! I'm hoping and assuming the remains of my digital subscription will transfer, and I'm only left to decide whether I want paper or digital for the new mag. Tough one.

Another set of eBay listings

I've just listed another bunch of stuff on eBay. For anyone whose interested, it includes a fair quantity of assorted late 80s/early 90s fantasy stuff, both Citadel./GW and other, a couple of early-era Tyranid/Genestealer metals, and a bunch of 15mm Minifig Napoleonics and a bulk lot of some unknown make 15mm fantasy stuff.

Slide show for the latter (and despite the title I know they're NOT Minifigs!) is below.

Probability for wargamers 9 - d20 vs 3d6

While driving in this morning, I was listening to the latest View From The Veranda podcast with Neil Shuck and Henry Hyde (yes, yes, pedants - by which I mean they were on the podcast, not in the car - not that it wouldn't enliven my commute!). One of the topics that came up was the Beyond The Gates Of Antares Kickstarter, and the fact that it uses d10, not d6, from which the discussing drifted (as VFTV often does) into designers' choice of dice for such things as Phil Hendry's Augustus to Aurelian.

Somewhere about then it started to click that this series of posts is as much, if not more, about understanding probabilities for game design as to allow you the wargamer to understand (and, heaven forbid, mini-max) the odds. And I got to thinking afresh about the issue I mentioned in my Principles of War battle report the other day, namely the d20 morale roll.

Essentially (and I may have this slightly wrong since I'm working from memory, but the core concept is about right), in PoW units have a strength, which is typically a number around 10-12. Combat casualties reduce this strength, and a morale test is basically taken by rolling strength + modifiers vs a d20, as follows:

Roll	Effect
1	always succeed
<= Str	succeed
<= 2 x Str	shaken
<= 3 x Str	retire shaken
> 3 x Str	rout
20	always fail, one row worse than what the roll would be otherwise

My issue with this is that because it's on a d20, it's more prone to extreme results compared to a 3d6 roll. Go back and read up on the odds with 3d6, and then let me demonstrate with a graph.

The chart represents the odds (up the side) of rolling greater than or equal to a target number (along the bottom) on both 3d6 (the green curve) and d20 (the blue line). Key things to note: 

• the 50% point is the same for both rolls;
• the 3d6 is a fairly smooth curve that makes the extremes harder.

Take a look at the graph a different way, and you'll see the latter more clearly.

For the stats and math heads amongst you, the green curve (the 3d6) is what's called a normal distribution, Gaussian distribution or bell curve. For games designers, it has the useful feature that extremes are rarer, compared to a linear distribution (the blue curve for the d20). Note that the lines cross at about 6 and 15.  Particularly, note there's a 1 in 20 chance, or 5% of an automatic fail, which seems to me to be a bit vicious on a strong unit.

So, what would happen if we swapped the morale roll for PoW to be 3d6, rather than d20, and for the sake of completeness made 3 an automatic pass and 18 an automatic fail?

Well. The key thing is that auto pass and auto fail become much harder - 0.45% rather than 5%. I think this might be a bit too hard. So - what if we make that 3 and 4 always pass, 17 and 18 always fail. The odds are then a hair under 2% (4 chances in 216) of automatic failure, which feels about right as a compromise, and if we were feeling vicious we could make an 18 two column shifts from the actual result.

The other thing that happens (and I'll leave you to work out the numbers if you're interested) is that weaker units become a bit more likely to be shaken, and stronger ones less so. For example, if you look at the first graph, a unit of strength 5 is more likely to roll over 5 on 3d6 than d20. Interestingly, it's less likely to roll more than 10 (and thus retire) and considerably less likely to roll more than 15 and rout. It does make it a bit harder to rout units, in other words. 

I'm not convinced this is perfect by any means, as it seems to make routing a bit harder for units that probably should rout. But it does remove that nasty 5% chance of a perfectly sound full strength unit retiring shaken, which I think is a bit unrealistically excessive. Students of the Napoleonic era may disagree. Perhaps one approach to this would be to also change the table so that instead of the steps being at x2, x3, they're at +4, +8??

Thoughts?

Back from Hammerhead

...and in a comfy chair with a mug of tea and a laptop.

That staunch defender of freedom,
Corporal Andy Miller.

So now it can be revealed (for those of you who weren't there): the Tunnels of Terror. In short? It's 1953. Under the Nevada desert, the various atom bomb tests have caused certain creatures to mutate, and a series of tunnels beneath the sands lead to a cave in which a giant winged ant queen is about to hatch a large quantity of winged horrors which will spell doom to Las Vegas, Nevada, Truth, Justice and the American Way. Cue that mainstay of civilisation, the 508th Infantry Regiment of the US Army.

You'll find the poster we had stuck around Kelham Hall here. It seems that the Vegas Herald and Post is a bit slow to put two and two together regarding the various items on its front page :D

The Tunnels of Terror

Just to be different, though? Grahame built the tunnels by cutting them into 2" grey foamboard on four sides of a cube. It's basically held together by some cunning carpentry (courtesy of Andy M), and perches on a pair of tables with enough space between to allow someone to stand up.

Dan doing a stint as cube jockey.

You'll notice the holes at various points - these open into the centre, and figures can be dropped through (to be caught in foil trays taped to the back), and then moved to emerge from a different tunnel. This is necessary, as its the only way to get from the three sides that squads start from to the fourth side, which is where the queen winged ant is.

Figures were 54mm (ish) toy soldiers, and a collection of assorted giant ants, spiders and rats from various sources. There's a strip of velcro on each tunnel floor and matching on the bases of the GIs to stop them falling off (an issue we noticed in playtest).

We let this young lad wear Andy's
helmet: he so clearly had a ball.
(photo with permission of his dad)

Basically this needed about five people to run it - one for each squad, the 'cube jockey' inside, and someone (usually me, as it turned out) working the bits of the cube everyone else couldn't see/cover to answer questions, explain the scenario, etc.

Games typically took about half an hour, the rules fit on one sheet of A4. It's been our philosophy that keeping the games short and fun, and easy to pick up, is by far and away the best approach to keeping people's interest for a participation game.

Of course, it doesn't hurt if your game is a 4 foot grey cube visible from the far side of the hall, and causing people to variously double-take or come up and ask (in a slightly boggled way!) 'just... what? why?' or variants thereon :)

Huge kudos, as ever, to the folks from GCN/COGS for the show, to our game design team (Grahame and Chris), to AndyM for both the woodwork and looking the part (even if his accent slipped), to Carl and Rob for umpiring outside the cube and Dan and Adrian for cube jockeying. I got to do the latter for the final run of the day - it's quite odd: very quiet compared to the babble of the hall, but oddly disorienting. I got confused by a quarter turn for a few moments, despite the inside faces being marked. But it's great fun.

And finally.... I'll let this last photo speak for itself.

Space Marines: Update

It appears that common sense has prevailed, at least at Amazon. From MCA Hogarth:

Last night many of you alerted me to the reappearance of the e-book edition of Spots the Space Marine on Amazon. I hope you’ll join me in applauding Amazon’s decision to reinstate the book. Amazon and other major retailers have given me wonderful opportunities as an independent author, not just in e-books but in print and audiobooks. The stories I’ve sold to magazines launched my writing career but it’s the sales I make from these outlets that allow me to buy food for my family. 

I cannot say enough good things about the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who have been enthusiastic, supportive and productive. They pursued my case with passion and principle and are standing by should any more developments necessitate their aid. Many of you have asked if you can help me pay my legal costs; I would encourage you to donate to the EFF to help support their good work. 

At this point my defense is done unless legal action develops in response to the reinstatement of Spots. But this is one small battle in a long war, and we must continue to protect common terms by refusing to reshape our creations to placate over-zealous legal teams. If you’ve run afoul of this sort of behavior, you are not alone, and help is out there. My experience proves it.

Also. an amusing link that was unearthed on Facebook by Erwin Blonk (one of my regular readers), being a White Dwarf (back in the days when it wasn't just a GW house rag) editorial by Ian Livingstone on the subject of copyright.  

How times have changed.