The Battle for Wesnoth Forums

I don't know if this concept has been brought up before, but after getting into Warhammer recently, i've been thinking seriously about developing a tabletop Battle For Wesnoth miniature wargame in my spare time. Right now i'm more worried about rules and gameplay than i am about actually developing models.

Right now this is merely in the concept stage, just trying to imagine how it could work. As of right now, i'm imagining a single model game. meaning no units, but single units similar to Wesnoth. You start with a free lvl 2 leader of your choice, and may recruit up to the gold amount of lvl 0 - lvl 1 units. units could move 4 inches, 5 inches, 6, even 12 for bats and the like, just like in wesnoth. they could have the same amount of attacks they have in the game, stuff like that, but what i'm getting hung up on, and what i would love ideas for, is how to go about combat, and mainly, how to go about health and wounds.

feel free to throw anything out there. this thread is merely for conjecture, so throw out your best ideas

dashzed wrote:I don't know if this concept has been brought up before…

I don't think it has… we did have a few boardgames suggestions here and here, but I believe that's about it…

TBH, a minis wargame wouldn't be too hard at all. You just use d10s, a hex board, and substitute a d10 roll for any case where a percentage chance appears in the game. The rules would translate reasonably well.

Finding minis and getting good maps would be the challenge...

Yeah, Wesnoth is already practically a tabletop game. The only things that might prove problematic are things that change damage by a percentage, like resistances and ToD, since those actually require calculations. You could probably rephrase them to make it just adding/subtracting, though. Make the ToD bonus something like +1 per 3 base damage, and similar for resistances, for example. Or if you want to be super-simple just make it a flat -1/-2/-3 per strike for low/medium/high resistance or something like that.

TSI is right about d10s.
hex making is not too hard, Settlers of Catan has nice card hexes, which are very similar to what you are looking for (a little big though)
Resistances would be best done with a final modifier (Imho)
say unit x has 50% resistance, that means that for every 10 damage caused you take off 5 damage.
roll for damage for a unit (say 5-4) you get 3 hits.
take off 5 damage from the first 10, then another 5 from the remaining 5 (5-5=0, but minimum damage from a level of damage is 1) giving 6 damage (5 from first '10 level', 1 from second '10 level'

not perfect, but easily calcuable and very simple.

Atz wrote:Yeah, Wesnoth is already practically a tabletop game. The only things that might prove problematic are things that change damage by a percentage, like resistances and ToD, since those actually require calculations. You could probably rephrase them to make it just adding/subtracting, though. Make the ToD bonus something like +1 per 3 base damage, and similar for resistances, for example. Or if you want to be super-simple just make it a flat -1/-2/-3 per strike for low/medium/high resistance or something like that.

All of the damage changes are basic multiplication. That said, if damage and hit points were both multiplied by ten it might be easier for the less mathematically inclined to deal with resistances. However, that does remove the rounding involved which could potentially disrupt balance.

Also, keeping track of that many units, both xp and hp, would be a massive irritation. It would need some simplification to become a playable board game.

TheCripple wrote: All of the damage changes are basic multiplication. That said, if damage and hit points were both multiplied by ten it might be easier for the less mathematically inclined to deal with resistances. However, that does remove the rounding involved which could potentially disrupt balance.

But multiplications like leadership, damage resistance and TOD bonuses mean that you could have a fair calculation to do. The computer does it for you in the game, but on the tabletop you want to streamline as much as possible

Any damage modifier like resistance, TOD, or leadership should be made into a flat modifier that either applies to each strike, or to the overall damage done to simplify calculation…

Not really trying to shamelessly plug my tabletop game, but in the advanced version of my game, I planned on changing the various resistance percentages into flat +/-0 to +/-3 modifiers that would apply on the overall damage done by a unit. Just to give you an idea of how it would work, here's a passage from my conversion guide;

Conversion Guide wrote:So for example, if a Loyalist Spearman was to attack a Rebel Elvish Scout and hit twice, he would inflict 5 points of damage (2 x 2 for both of his spear attacks +1 for the Elvish Scout's weakness to Edg.). This would leave the Elvish Scout at only 1 HP (if we consider that he was at full HP before the attack), ouch!

I also Highly suggest you check out Elric's game for a good idea of how to handle alignment and TOD bonuses (I was actually thinking of shamelessly stealing his idea for my own version of the game… )

TheCripple wrote:All of the damage changes are basic multiplication. That said, if damage and hit points were both multiplied by ten it might be easier for the less mathematically inclined to deal with resistances. However, that does remove the rounding involved which could potentially disrupt balance.

"Do double damage" is basic multiplication. "Do 1.25 x 1.25 x .7 damage" is not... though adding percentages instead of multiplying would make it much simpler. Still, having to constantly multiply by .85 and 1.45 and other annoying numbers would slow the game down substantially, and a lot of people have trouble with that sort of thing.

For tabletop games it's generally a rule of thumb that the only maths required should be addition, subtraction, and "Is the number on this dice higher than then number on my character sheet?" Some multiplication is acceptable, but only if the numbers are really low integers (like 2x or 3x) since in that case you can do it as addition anyway.

Most people (and presumably everybody playing this) have calculators and computers (or, if the point of this is to be able to play BfW without a computer, cell phones) to do their multiplication for them.

8680 wrote: Most people (and presumably everybody playing this) have calculators and computers (or, if the point of this is to be able to play BfW without a computer, cell phones) to do their multiplication for them.

Having been a tabletop gamer for a while, I know that if you need to bring a calculator to a game, it's usually a very bad sign…

I always use my computer, even for addition, so I guess there's something very wrong with me....

Atz wrote:

TheCripple wrote:All of the damage changes are basic multiplication. That said, if damage and hit points were both multiplied by ten it might be easier for the less mathematically inclined to deal with resistances. However, that does remove the rounding involved which could potentially disrupt balance.

"Do double damage" is basic multiplication. "Do 1.25 x 1.25 x .7 damage" is not... though adding percentages instead of multiplying would make it much simpler. Still, having to constantly multiply by .85 and 1.45 and other annoying numbers would slow the game down substantially, and a lot of people have trouble with that sort of thing.

Hence the suggestion to multiply health and all damage by 10. That just means that you strip off the 0, multiply the remaining number by 7, then multiply by 1.25 twice. Seems basic enough to me.

TheCripple wrote:

Atz wrote: "Do double damage" is basic multiplication. "Do 1.25 x 1.25 x .7 damage" is not... though adding percentages instead of multiplying would make it much simpler. Still, having to constantly multiply by .85 and 1.45 and other annoying numbers would slow the game down substantially, and a lot of people have trouble with that sort of thing.

Hence the suggestion to multiply health and all damage by 10. That just means that you strip off the 0, multiply the remaining number by 7, then multiply by 1.25 twice. Seems basic enough to me.

That doesn't change the complexity of the calculation at all. You can already do it by multiplying by 7, then slapping a decimal point in front of the last digit. Or moving the decimal across one, in the case of non-integer values.