Godlike Questions. Re: Combat.

[kkortekaas]

I recently came upon Godlike, and fell in love with the premise and as such picked up the core book. It's everything I hoped for and then some, but after reading it I do have some questions.

I've got a game coming up on Friday, and I plan on running either "Glazier" or "One Minute to Midnight", I figured that I would use the 13 soldiers from "One Minute.." and use the Aces High adventure seed to manifest powers in the PC's through the adventure. I do have a couple questions though.

My groups RPG experience mainly stems from D&D 3.5 (and various offshoots, Iron Heroes, Stargate, Dragonstar, D20 Modern) and as I'm sure you are aware, rely heavily on mini's for combat. I don't see it spelled out anywhere in the Core Rulebook (forgive me if I've just missed it) but Godlike dosen't seem to rely on this mechanic.

How do I pull off the encounters? Do I draw rough sketchs on a board not to scale and let them point out how they carry out whatever they plan? What other methods have people used successfully? Anything I should avoid? I'm basically looking for tips / tricks / ways to pull off combat effectively with a group who has never done combat without minis.

Thanks a bunch.
kkortekaas

[Shane Ivey]

Welcome aboard! It's easy to run with or without miniatures. If you don't have any miniatures, just sketch things out on scratch paper like a coach planning a football play, but rely as much as you can on visual descriptions.

The exact distances aren't usually all that important, so you can generally abstract movement issues down to "width minus five rounds" to run a long way under fire, or "if you make a Dodge roll with better width than the attackers you get across the street and under cover in time."

For weapon range, the only REAL question is "am I close enough to get a bonus, or far enough to get a penalty?" That leaves a lot of wiggle room.And you can abstract range issues to things like "short range for a rifle but long range for a pistol," "close combat" (i.e., close range for firearms, within melee distance), "short range" (effective range for firearms, and grenades, requires a round to move up for melee), that kind of thing.

The key is to keep the descriptions and action moving, keep things hectic and chaotic and suspenseful, and don't get bogged down in math.

One other thing you may want to bear in mind: Godlike can be a lot less forgiving than D20 games. You don't have a buffer of hit points to warn you when you're in danger of death; it's pretty much a matter of "has my limb been shot off or hasn't it?" As a GM, I recommend using the Suppressing Fire rules by default for NPCs; they tend to result in forcing players to keep their heads down without every successful hit taking a PC out of the game. (And if the NPCs are a bunch of riflemen without a machine gun, for their suppressing fire dice pool just use 2d for the first shooter plus 1d per additional attacker.)

You might also let player characters "buy off" injuries by spending Base Will; say, burn a point of Base Will to reduce the width of an attack by 1. That's still a steep price to pay, since Base Will doesn't come back on its own like Willpower, but most of the time a player will be glad to pay it and then will be a lot more careful before charging into the open next time.

I hope you have a great time with the game.

[kkortekaas]

Where can I find base speed information? (for players) as I tihnk I might use some wet erase markers on a battlemat

[Gustav]

Always nice to see new followers here on the forum.

Here is how I do it. For combat I use rough sketches and a lot of fudging even though I have had ideas to use 15 mm minis. One problem I believe with miniatures is the feel for scale and distances. A mere 100 meters distance would need a fairly large free space on the table if you want a "map" in the same scale, and sometimes combat occurs on much longer distances. Of course you can use a different scale on the map but I feel that different scales on map/miniatures can be somewhat confusing for the players in a hectic combat. I sometimes use miniatures to illustrate how a specific vehicle/type of vehicle looks like though.

[Gustav]

For your second question (didn't scroll that far down at first) The base speed is 10 yrds plus twice your body . IIRC it's written quite early in the rule book probably under the desription of your body stat.

[Mike Montesa]

I have used minis (Axis & Allies and Flames of War) but I only use them to show relative positions. I fudge and eyeball things like range and movement. In fact I don't really worry about range at all unless it's patently obvious the range is long or extreme.

Instead of thinking in terms of how far you can go per round, I think about how long it will take you to go from A to B. When the troops in my campaign were slogging their way up Omaha, I used the ORE system of timing. The PC made a Body+Athletics roll, subtract the width from 5, and that was how many turns it took to get there (and of course, how many turns they spent under fire).

I use sketch maps on a piece of paper, and usually draw one of the immediate area, and one of the operational area.

I've found it's not really worth trying to exactly regulate movement and such like you do in games that make a point of doing so. I go fast, I don't sweat the details that don't matter.