LOTR and testing my Tablet for miniatures.

well christmas was intersting and busy.

Back at the beginning of December I pulled out my old GW wor of the Ring collections and palyed a game with my friend dan.  This reminded me why  stopped playing the WOTR rules from GW. they are just to gimmicky and full of loopholes. plus magic can be game breaking. this to me is not at all what Lord of the rings was all about.

I mentioned I had a lot of 28mm LOTR to my friend Bevan, and he suggested trying mantic Games' Kings of War rules.  I have not pulled these figures out since a few months after War of the Ring was released. so we made a date (Dec 22nd) and i did some searching to see if anyone ahd done unofficial LOTR lists for kings of war. turns out only bad guys had been done.

 I took the liberty of trying my tablet out during the game for taking pics of miniatures. I have not done this before, but i do use it frequently at school in labs for taking pictures of waveforms, equipment setups, etc. and it works superbly for that.

Easterling/Khandish centre and left flanks

so we set about trying the game out. i did Saruman's Uruk-hai and Bevan ran the Easterlings & Khandish(just used Easterling stats for all), and we just used the chariots as Kataphracts that could shoot.

Khandish right flank

the game lasted maybe 1hour and 45 minutes, even with us constantly looking up rules.  the combat was bloody and fast.  I did not think the army lists were particularly well designed, and my pike crushed the opposing flank. 

Uruk-hai army

Still the rules flow fairly well.  one of the things I did not like was  melee rules. basically, the side that charges rolls it's dice, and the enemy just stands there and takes it until his turn. this just seems wrong. so one of the house rules for the next game was to make it so that once the chargers struck, if the unit receiving the charge passed it's morale test(remained steady) then it strikes back.

After the game I went about rebuilding the army lists from the ground up, cross referencing existing stats and special rules in Kings of War with what i know of my Lord of the rings Armies(Easterlings, Khandish, Elves, Rohan, and Uruk-hai).  then  on  December 30th we tried it again. this game was much less one-sided, although the Rohan Guard cavalry managed to make a quick break on the Easterling elf flank(wiping out a unit of Khandish cavalry in the process). I reacted with an Easterling pike unit flanking the guards, but a succession of terrible roles later and I had completely lost the flank, and my centre was locked in place  by a massive unit of Rohan foot troops.

finally we identified a few things we'd like the change.  we are going to migrate the system to a D10.  this will require some tweaking of Nerve numbers, but will allow for more differentiation in levels of armour(currently the system only uses 3+, 4+, and 5+). we are going to make heroes that are not combat worthy unto them selves. ie they are upgrades to units.  the last thing we are going to do is come up with a command & Control system. we haven't decided upon that yet, but it will likely end up being either a card driven system, or something more akin to War master.  either way Bevan and i enjoy more command friction in our rules, and we also enjoy tinkering.

I was also happy with how my tablet pics turned out. they aren't as good as a camera on a tripod, but they are still of respectable quality.