Ish

I think what you aren't quite picking up on, in general, is that "let's play a game" can mean very different things to different people. You seem to come from the "Game means an activity described by a set of rules, often competitive or having an explicit goal" definition and without knowing it are becoming frustrated with people who are operating on the mindset that "Game means a playful activity, amusement, or pastime." You're playing poker, they're playing go fish. Neither of these points of view are wrong, but they can cause friction between players who don't quite get where the other person is coming from.

John Kreese is the villain in The Karate Kid, y'know, the "There is no mercy in this dojo!" guy?

Which is a noble intention… But how are you executing it? On a scale from John Kreese to Mr. Miyagi?

That’s where the thing about being magnanimous in victory comes in. There’s a wide spectrum of approaches between giving someone friendly advice on how to improve their gameplay and making mockery of them and saying “Get good, newbie.” There’s such a thing as “being a sore winner.”

Be fair, be nice, play by the rules, be generous with your opponent, be gracious when you lose, and be magnanimous in victory. “Games give you a chance to excel, and if you're playing in good company you don't even mind if you lose because you had the enjoyment of the company during the course of the game.” – Gary Gygax

I mean, at the end of the day, we’re all a bunch of geeks, nerds, dorks, and neo-maxi zoom dweebies gathering in a musty attic to play pretend with toy soldiers. We should all expect a certain lack of people skills and social awkwardness from our fellows. Some nerds roll CHA 18, but a lot of us are stuck with CHA 8… on a good day. But there’s a big difference between being “socially awkward but friendly” versus “socially awkward and an asshole.” The vast majority of people in Ordo are friendly the vast majority of the time. That’s the essence of the Ordo spirit, if you ask me.

To me, the issue is almost never a question of rules, units, special abilities, or whatever. It’s almost always a question of the attitudes of the players. If someone plays with a sense of good sportsmanship, friendliness, and fair play then it doesn’t matter if the list they are using is the latest and greatest tournament winning curbstomp bomb or a suboptimal pile of poo. Contrariwise, if someone plays with a bad attitude, poor sportsmanship, or cheats… Well, it could be a list whose fluffiness is as pure as the driven snow. We don’t play against models or lists. We play with people.

Combat and Shooting are both resolved using more or less the same system. In mêlée, each player calculates their Target Number (the number they must meet or exceed to score hits) by subtracting their Fight stat from their opponent’s Defence stat, with various modifications (attacking into a flank or rear is a –1 bonus, charging into a unit behind a defensive wall is a +1 penalty, etc.). Shooting has you calculate the Target Number by subtracting their Shoot stat from their opponent’s Defence stat, with various modifications. It might not seem like much on paper, but it means that a difference of a single pip of Fight/Shoot/Defense has a big impact. Almost all Dwarf units have a Defence stat of 10 or 11; whereas the typical infantry soldier will usually only have Fight stat of 1 or 2… and most archery units have a Shoot stat of 1 or 2. This makes Dwarven infantrymen really damn hard to hurt in a straightforward fight and shooting is unlikely to do much against them either. Tao was knocking down one or two dwarves with every attack. Units that take any casualties have to take a Morale test; rolling two dice and trying to roll over the value of the unit’s Activation stat. Various modifiers apply. Dwarves have Activation 4 on every unit (except the Dwarven Militia, who as “untrained” troops have a mere 5). Which means that they’re going to pass most straight Morale checks. Tao made sure that he did everything he could to stack the odds in his favor. He’d shoot at my units and knock off a guy or two, then he’d engage in mêlée with one of his units and knock off a guy or two, then he’d hit me with a second unit attacking into a flank and knock off another guy or two. This slow grinding ensured that he was imposing more penalties to my Morale checks than I had bonuses… and eventually the dice rolls went against me and my lads hoofed it. One game is hardly a scientific sample size, but it did reinforce the impression I got from the books: you don’t defeat dwarves by killing them, you gotta break them in the Morale test.

I had a great time! I lost, but it was due a combination of my making mistakes, Tao capitalizing on those mistakes, and a couple key die rolls that broke in his favor. At no point did I really feel like either one of us had some sort of inherent superior advantage over the other due to having a better army list, better units, or whatever. I maneuvered poorly and Tao took advantage of that… But even still, during every turn but the last I felt like I was still “in the fight” and could have clawed my way out of the hole I’d dug myself into, if only a couple of combats and/or morale checks had gone my way. Overall, the rules are very elegant. They’re simple, yet have a lot of nuances that are subtle rather than fiddly. The use of ten-sided dice opens up a lot of design space that other wargames’ use of D6’s lack. Likewise, making the target numbers vary instead of just adding more and more and more dice to a roll keeps things very fast moving in play. Combat between a full block of 20 Dwarf Spearmen against 19 Goblin Soldiers led by a Goblin Hero involved both of us quickly calculating our target number and then I rolled four dice whilst Tao rolled three dice of one color and a fourth die of a different color, with us each having an option to re-rolling one die due to a special rule. In something like WHFB or KoW, we’d both have been rolling buckets of dice to hit, picking out the misses, then making another roll to wound, picking out the failures, and then rolling to save. There is a wee bit of learning curve, of course. In our, we had to stop a couple of times to look up exactly how Special Ability X interacted with Special Ability Y, how to handle a specific maneuver when in rough terrain, and that sort of thing. But that’s a normal part of learning any game and a pdf copy of the rulebook (and a hard copy quick reference sheet) made finding that information pretty easy. No doubt, with more games under our belts, this will happen less and less. Compared to other mass combat games (e.g., WHFB, KoW, T9A), I’d say Oathmark is a hell of a lot easier to play, but without losing any of the strategic and tactical depth of those games.

At long last, I finally got to play a game of Oathmark. I lost, due to a combination of a poorly made decision to push forward too fast, a failure to properly estimate how wide a gap in the terrain was, and some really bad luck during crucial dice rolls… But, hey, that’s what this hobby is all about! @Tao Tsê-Mung’s unsavory band of goblins, ogres, and skeletons has struck against my noble dwarven kingdom. We will be revenged!

Does the curse of vampirism confer the ability to play Toccata and Fugue in D minor or do vampires only bite experienced organists?

Amazon has the core rulebook on sale right now, 20% for Prime members with free delivery. But I’ve also seen it on the shelf at Guardian Games (it was over in the RPG section, for whatever reason) if you prefer to buy local.

No worries, it’s been a weird year and a half for everyone.

I’m definitely planning to use Legendary Heroes (from Oathbreakers) and Legendary Units (from Battlesworn) for my Dwarven kingdom; I’m not too keen on chariots or the various animated stone units… Just don’t see how they’d fit in with the rest of my forces. On the other hand, they all seem like really fun modeling projects, so no doubt I’ll add them eventually.

Now that my dwarves are home, I’ll be there for some Oathmark-ing.

Works for me.

My beardy boys have finally made it home! A couple of bent spears and bows, a few shields have fallen off, and other such minor nuisances… But other than that, they were well packaged and unscathed.

Well, as I said previously, Oathmark does put a hard cap of four units of any given type in an army. So, you’ve got an over abundance of Spearmen… Although given that four units of twenty-strong Human Spearmen comes out to 1,520 Points, it’s unlikely you’ll see much more than that on the field anyway. (Maybe one day we can do a massive Battle of Unnumbered Tears epic and you’ll get to use all 3,800 points of them!) Cavalry are meant to be on 25 x 50 mm bases in units of up to ten; Human Cavalry are 45 points per, Human Heavy Cavalry are 50 points per… You’ll have to decide for yourself which they should be. But it looks like you could field up to four units of them pretty easily. Looks like you can also easily field a good number of Champions, Captains, Princes, and probably a King. I’d want to add a Wizard or two to the army, but I gotta assume you’ve got a few D&D figs kicking around the basement/attic somewhere… or you can grab a Reaper Miniatures blister pack for a tenner. You might also want to add some more fantastical critters to your collect, like Ogres, Trolls, or whatever… But YMMV.

For Oathmark the most important thing is that the footprint of the unit as a whole is correct. Standard infantry are meant to be on 25 x 25 mm bases, up to four ranks deep and in five files. So a twenty man unit is 125 x 100 mm. The rules also state that the unit’s officer model be placed in the center of the front rank, since things like line of sight are drawn from him. If you make some 125 x 100 mm movement trays that hold your figures (in a three wide and two deep formation) and have a clearly marked 25 mm wide bit on the front to mark where the officer “should” be and use some sort of die or token to count the wounds of the “missing” models then it should work just fine. Getting attacked in the flanks will require a bit of mental gymnastics from everybody, but nothing too daunting. A Romano-British aesthetic for your models is perfect. The official artwork and licensed models all has a psedo-historical 9th to 11th Century vibe. Sort of Lord of the Rings meets Bayuex Tapestry. So your figures will probably be a bit “old fashioned” compared to the standard artwork, but also have a more uniform appearance… Which in my mind suggests a kingdom that values professionalism and martial tradition in their soldiers, instead of gathering their fighting men through feudal obligation and hastily raised militias. But this is all one nerd’s opinion. C’mon over to our ongoing Oathmark discussion thread, get the opinions of all the other nerds.

And I ran, I ran so far away… I couldn’t get away.

It will vary, of course, depending on which units you chose. If you lean hard on elite models (Human Heavy Cavalry are 50 pts per model) then you’ll end up with a much smaller force than if you go big on cheap chaff units (Goblin Slaves are a mere 6 pts each). Most of the basic infantry troop types are somewhere between 10 to 20 Points. Champions are usually somewhere in vicinity of 50 to 80 Points; Generals and Kings in the low hundreds… So, I’d say that on average, you are probably looking at 60 - 80 models for a 1,000 Point army. For example, I have a collection of Anglo-Saxons for Saga: Age of Vikings that I’m also going to be using as a small army in Oathmark: Human Captain 133 Human Spearmen (18 x 13 pts) 234 w/ Human Champion 51 Human Spearmen (19 x 13 pts) 247 w/ Human Champion 51 Human Archers (10 x 12 pts) 120 Human Archers (10 x 12 pts) 120 956 Points Total Not the fanciest of lists, but pretty representative of what you’d expect at that point level. I’d be happy to brainstorm kingdom and army ideas with you.

“Artillery adds dignity, to what would otherwise be an ugly brawl.” – Frederick the Great My plan for August is to build and paint two Catapults and one Trebuchet, along with their crews, to represent light and heavy artillery units for my Oathmark army. Perfidious Elves, dishonorable Men, and filthy Goblinkin: prepare to have the snot dignified out of you!

The Gorkamorka war bike was the same one from WH40k that came out in ‘96 or ‘97, if memory serves, during WH40k Second Edition. It’s just big enough to fill up one of the 25 x 50 mm cavalry bases of the era (if you ignore the big shootas that stick out to either side).