Planet 28 Skirmish: Testing Some Shooting

 Hi!

I managed to play out a bit of a game of Planet 28 last night to playtest some mods I've been pondering and it resulted in a really great little skirmish!

Martinez and Dmitry 

Nameless Security Drones 

The game was set in an abandoned settlement somewhere on the frontier and as I was playtesting some mods to the rules, I just went for a straight up fight with the two mercenaries entering from the left and the security troopers coming in from the right and attempting to kill one another.

I'm using Planet 28 but with the D100 mod so instead of characters stats being single digit, they are double digit as I love the extra little bit of crunch it gives.

The modified rules revolve around ranged combat at present with the introduction of critical hits and jams. Every ranged weapon has a 10% chance of rolling a critical which causes maximum damage minus the targets armour save and a 1% chance of doing a kill shot which does the same as a critical but means no save from the target at all.

Jams occur when you roll a double on your D100 dice and require you to spend an action to unjam the weapon. A missed shot jams as normal but a successful hit roll does mean the shot hits but you've run out of ammo. I'm pondering adding the Necromunda option of taking reloads for your guns as it feels more characterful for small games like this where running out of ammo at a critical moment can be truly unfortunate for the character.

The other rule I'm trying out is the Aimed Shot action which means you get an extra D8% chance of striking the target but at the cost of taking an action to do so. The bonus is that a successful hit gives you D4 extra damage. In game, this worked out really well as it resulted in some impressive shots from the lowly security troopers who managed to hit and damage my characters who were taking cover.

Finally I've also fiddled with the wounded effects so once a character gets down to 50% damage, they loose 10% to all their stats automatically as usual but once they get to 75% damage, they loose 50% to their stats. This represents a character who is badly shot up really not being much use in a fight and encourages you to play a bit more carefully. 

The game itself was great fun as always and saw my adventurers get themselves caught in a bit of a crossfire of laspistol fire taking a number of small hits before Martinez forced one security trooper to flee with some impressive shooting. 

Dmitry took quite a few hits that even being in cover and wearing medium armour didn't entirely stop and suffered from multiple jams with his SMG and eventually tried to climb onto the cargo stack to shoot at his tormentor and managed to fluff his agility roll and fell over resulting in much hilarity.

Despite this, he did eventually manage to wound and pin down the remaining guard long enough to cover Martinez who made a rush towards him. Surprisingly, the guard held his nerve and with his last shot managed to catch Martinez a glancing blow as he emerged into the corridor but his gun then jammed and Martinez cut him down with his big knife.

As always, Planet 28 is great fun to play, especially for super small skirmishes on terrain covered tables and I liked the way the mods I trialed worked as it resulted in quite a few cinematic moments and I plan on continuing to tinker with the rules to see what I can come up with to further improve the gaming experience!

With the kickstarter for 2nd edition coming into its last few days, I'm eagerly awaiting the new rules so I can delve into the game further and plan on continuing to bodge, tinker and pootle around with them as I go.

I'm also trying to get my Tiny Troops Junkers some opponents in the form of Syntha AI's but as I'm at work until Thursday and off to Liverpool over the weekend, I suspect I won't have much chance to work on them until next week now but until then, All the best!