The Container - super heroes battle report

I will run through the rules as they are used .  I might have to break this into two parts as it ended up being quite long even though in the end I ran out of time.  There were a few rules that I forgot and I will mention these in passing - still don't know my own rules yet!
So here goes!
A villain group has broken into a storage facility in order to steal a container that will aid their nefarious plans! However, things start to go wrong when they discover just how heavy the box is.  It takes two of them to move it and then only slowly - if only they had a criminal mastermind in the group they might of thought to bring a truck!  Things go from bad to worse when a group of Heroes turn up to stop them.

special rules;
the container needs two figures in contact and it can only move 2" per turn activating of the slowest of the two figures.
villains win if they get the container off the board or knock out all heroes
heroes win if they knock out 2 villains as they will be unable to carry the container.

Villains

the villainous group comprise of Rhino, Titania and Speed demon.  Here are their boards.

 Titania is a straight forward brick, Rhino a more complicated brick and speed demon a speedster.
Here are the Heroes.

Here are their boards

Captain America,  a leader with a few abilities, Cable, energy blast and marksman, and Arachne, a web spinner.  none as strong in hand to hand as the villains but with more tricks at their disposal.

Turn 1
Each group rolls 1D8 for each figure in their group and allocate these to the figures.  This is the initiative order and goes from highest to lowest.
Villains rolled well giving Rhino 8, titania 7 and speed demon 6
heroes rolled lower, Captain america 6, cable and Arachne 5.  One of captain america's abilities is combat reflexes and this means that he is more aware of the ebb and flow of battle. He can alter his initiative die value by +/- 1, meaning he can alter slightly where he goes in the initiative order.  In this case he alters his 6 down to 5 as there are advantages to hitting the same target in the same initiative, so although all the villains get to go first, the heroes all get to move at the same time for better teamwork.
Rhino moves straight towards the heroes at full speed of 10", hoping to engage them and buy time for the box to be moved. Titania and speed demon move the box forward.
Captain america mover forward but is out of range for his attacks, Arachne moves along the base edge to try and block the escape route.  cable move forward and is in range of rhino with his gun and so fires.

(sorry about the shine on the table will sort it for next time)  Cable fires 5D6 auto2, which means that he  fires twice and rolls 5D6 each time.  Looking for 4+ he scores 4 hits.  he is a marks man so can add 1 pip to any die so turns a 4 into 5.  Rhinos armour is not so good against energy weapons so he can alter any 2 D by 1 pip each making the 4 into a 3 and so a miss but can do nothing about the others so 3 hits (his stun track goes down by 3) and 3" knockback (5&6 cause 1"knockback each). As his first shot did damage, his second shot gets an additional die and so rolls 6D6. this additional die is accumulative and represents over powering of defenses, it can get very significant if a target takes multiple damaging hits in a single initiative.
in his second attack he scores 3 more hits and more knock back.  A good start for Cable!

turn 2
initiative -   villains Rhino 8, titania and speed demon 4
heroes arachne 8, cable 3 and Capt America 2 which he turns into a 3 to act on same initiative as Cable.
Although both Rhino and Arachne have initiative of 8, Rhino has a better speed value and so goes first (if they had been the same then die roll off)  He charges forward but due to knock back in previous round is still out of range!.  Arachne continues to move along the base edge. speed demon and Titania move chest.
Cable fires for 3 hits that rhino's armour turns into turns into 2, but second hit is more effective with his extra die and causes 3 hits overall.  Rhino's stun track is empty and he falls to the floor, dazed!  On seeing this Capt America tries to tack advantage and puts his all into his attack and 'pushes'it.  (some characters have attacks/abilities that they can squeeze a little more out of if they try - these are called push attacks.  captain america has a special trick shot that hits back arc for an additional 2D useable 3times per game)
With his extra 2 D for pushing and 2 more for 2 damaging attacks this initiative, Capt's normal 5D6 has turned into 9D6!!!

he roll poorly and only get 1x 6 (when a figure is stunned extra hits count for nothing except that 6's cause an automatic body damage instead- i also forgot that rhinos armour should have stopped all of these hits as armour works even when stunned) so rhino took a body damage and this was marked on his track)

end of turn - rhino stands up and turns 1 body into a full stun track.  he might be out for revenge this go!

turn 3
poor initiative for the villains

Capt turns his 5 into a 6
cable fires at rhino again for 3 hits, then 3 more, capt then attacks him with 5D6 + 2D for damage done already this initiative.  He gets 2 hits but rhinos armour is much better against physical attacks and ( it is -3D vrs phy so he can remove 3 hits) so none get through.
Rhino charges capt America.  Hooray for the bad guys!!!

Rhino was determined to make it count.  His base attack is 6D but if he charges in a straight line for at least half his move then he gets a +3D charging bonus and the attack with his horn becomes amour piercing (AP). Just for good measure he pushed his attack for another 3D (he can do this 3x each game) making a total of 12D! above is the results- 6 hits and all count as capts shield is useless against AP attacks.  These hits were marked on his stun track and he was moved 5" knockback.  Way to go rhino!

Arachne is the last to move.  Gets into intercept position and the finds she's still in range to web rhino which she does.

She has a 6D entangle attack. still looking for 4+'s, she get 2 successes which means some of the web suck.  Wont hold him for long but it will slow him down as to activate he now has to use his action to break the entangle rather than attack. Incoming attacks will also damage the web so he could just wait for someone to attack him first.

going to end the post there as its getting quite long. pt 2 to follow!!!

my 'work in progress' supers rules

in this post I will start to lay out some of the ideas behind the rules.  I suppose the best place to start is to explain my motivation to design my own rules when there are several sets of perfectly good ones available.  In the dim and distant past that was my late teenage years, we occasionally punctuated our mainstay dungeons and dragon campaigns with mini campaigns of many flavours - runequest, traveller and, for me the most memorable, Champions!!  We had many a happy session beating all manner of supervillains, throwing cars at each other and knocking characters through walls.  As you can see it was only the fights that have stuck in my mind all this time.
     I still have a copy of the rules but a much later version and had considers using them to recreate the battles of my youth. However, there were two issues with this;
1) the character generation rules are complex
2) there is a lot of character bookkeeping thereby limiting the number of characters you can easily run.
I also had a few of the marvel herocliks and I saw a painting thread on the Lead Adventurers Forum (many in fact but sunday hero being the most influential with his excellent painting!) so decided to try and repaint some of mine.

Being reasonable pleased with the result my wargamer's obsessive nature kicked in and I ordered a few more from Troll and Toad in the US.  As I was only interested in the figure not the base I could get the cheapest option on each character as some have multiple versions and prices vary depending on rarity and value for points within the game neither of which was an issue to me.  

After buying and painting my new figures I realised that I had not thought things through properly and now I had 2 of the fantastic 4, a couple of Avengers, Magneto but not many mutant brotherhood to give him a hand.  Luckily Santa rectified that for me so now I have enough major and minor heroes and villains to play the game that I was planning on developing.

And so finally on to the start of the game.  If I do ever manage to get them finished I will make them freely available to anyone silly enough to want a look. However, that day is a long way off......

Each hero/villain has a board that track health and lists abilities.  one is below - please excuse the roughness of it as it is still work in progress as the post title suggests.

This is the board for Titania and here is the figure.

As can be seen from the picture, the board is divided into several sections;

• health, comprising body and stun
• movement, comprising speed and movement
• combat, comprising offensive powers/abilities
• defense, comprising defensive powers and abilities
• other, comprising all powers that don't fit in the other boxes.

Stun is the amount of damage a character can take before they fall to the ground, body is the damage a character can take before the are out of the fight.  1 body is equivalent to a full track of stun.

Movement is the number of units (inches/squares/hexes) that a character can move when activated. Speed is a measure of how quick their reflexes are.

Offensive and defensive powers and abilities are pretty self explanatory, and other is everything they can do that is not yet covered.  Some powers are obvious where they go, others are more open to debate but as long as they are there I am not too bothered if they seem a little odd in their placement... it seemed to make sense when I did that card. 

Titania is a pretty straight forward - she has pretty good body and stamina values, a good attack and defenses based on her tough body.  She is commonly known as a brick.  Other characters have much more complicated boards giving the character more options to chose from.  As an example, here's Captain America's

I think I will finish here for this post.  Next time I will start the battle report as it will be easier to show how the fledgling rules work in practice.