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Posted by: Wounded Ronin Dec 26 2011, 02:29 AM

I just downloaded the Recon Deluxe Vietnam War RPG from drivethrurpg.com.

I'm very excited and reading it while listening to smooth Vietnam era pop music. If it's good I might write a review of it.

One thing that amuses me about the game is that there are only 3 attributes, Strength, Agility, and Alertness. It seems like it's not wanting you to make a character you really invest in, but instead wanting you to make a bunch so you can join in with a new character when your old one is killed.

Strength is defined as a value from 1-100 where your score is defined as half the weight you can military press over your head, and also as the number of pounds you can comfortably carry around all day. It gives me the idea of trying to run a campaign where you take your players to the gym and make them military press weights to try and create a statistical version of themselves for the game. Hilariously you know that some people would have a monster bench press or lat pull down, while not training a military press, so their stats would come out a lot crummier than they probably should. Or better yet, take them out on a hike with a backpack full of rocks while wearing a heart rate monitor to try and determine the exact number of pounds they can carry "all day" with "minimal effort".

When I read passages like this, though, I'm not sure it'd be worth the effort:

That makes no sense at all, considering that the military at the time designed the basic existence load for soldiers as a function derived from an average recruit weight of 150 pounds. I've gone and looked this up in actual Army documents from the late 60s. In other words the normal gear represented a considerable amount of weight and adding, say, an additional 50 pounds on top of that would represent a lot of encumberance and not a trivial amount of encumberance for an average individual.

Even if you went to a surplus store, and got an ALICE belt, backpack, and harness, and 2 Vietnam era mag pouches, and a 1 quart canteen full of water, and 180 rounds of 5.56 ammo and a bunch of 20 round mags, and an AR, and made your friend carry all this stuff around in the gym, I'm not sure that having all that crap hanging on his body would directly affect how much weight he'd be able to military press. He might run more slowly or sweat more while walking, but I can't see him suddenly not being able to press the same amount of weight that he normally does, unless you made him run 3 miles with all the gear first, LOL, and you made sure he was out of breath when pressing!

Of course, I'm not sure how you'd determine Agility or Alertness. Maybe Alertness could be determined by timing people in finding Waldo in a Where's Waldo book.

Man, I really hope the RPG is good enough for me to go and write a review of.

EDIT, a couple of hours later: Dammit, this game is ridiculous. There's so much crap in there that makes NO SENSE. Some aspects of the game are over-simplified to the point of being completely wrong or off-base, whereas other aspects are extremely over-articulated without contributing to any amount of realism. Maybe I can write an article panning it instead.

EDIT, even later: LOL, the military gear section is ridiculously overpriced for the mercenary campaign section. An ALICE suspender set, without the belt, is $120. I think I picked up exactly one of those for, like, $20 from a surplus store a few weeks ago.

The ALICE pack with metal frame is $350. WTF, look it up on amazon.com. It never costs that much.

Posted by: Wounded Ronin Jan 2 2012, 07:40 AM

At the end of the PDF, there are the original mini combat rules that eventually became the full fledged Recon RPG.

There are some things I like about it and some things that I dislike about it.

Penalties to hit your target with a rifle or MG max out for distance at 500 yards, which is obviously inappropriate. I don't have very much training with long range marksmanship and I've hit a man sized target pretty consistiently with an AR at 600 yards without great difficulty. I'd max penalties out at a kilometer or something like that.

A thrown knife does damage like a .45, which is hilarious.

The author thinks that 5.56 NATO does more damage than 7.62 NATO.

There's a d100 hit location table, but it's detailed to the point of being silly. "Finger" and "hand" are seperate items. If you roll a 1 or 2 you're hit in the brain and automatically die, but you can also be hit in the eye or jaw or throat and it doesn't say you automatically die, nor does it say anything about damage dealt. That'd be some trick, to be hit in the eye with a 7.62x39 round and take only a few points of damage! And while the table deals with certain organs seperately (i.e. eye versus brain versus finger) you just have "abdomen" and "chest" for your torso wounds. Why not put "lung", "heart", or "liver" as well? And why have hitpoints at all when we all know that if you were hit in a lot of the body parts on the table you'd be if not dead permanently handicapped and probably not viable as a player character in the continuing campaign? "Yeah, some communist shot me in the heart with a .357 magnum round he fired out of his Chinese knockoff revolver, but I got better, and now I'm participating in the big offensive. No biggie." It would make sense to do either hitpoints or hit locations but not both.


However, what I really like is that there are lots of rules for support. Rules for calling in arty, rules for helicopter strafing, jet strafing, and even for miniguns (everybody in the area of affect of the strafing run dies, LOL, whereas if it were an M60 you might just get a few people hit in the area of effect). There's rules for how the scatter of your support fire would be affected by forward observers correcting artillery trajectory and things like that. That's the one thing that there often isn't good rules for in RPGs.

Somehow I feel like there are certain nice things in this rule set, that somehow with a bunch of revision a person could write a decent Vietnam War RPG rule set. The only problem is that there's a lot of stuff in there that I feel is crap, so it would probably end up being A LOT of work, and after all that work, how would you then convince people to play your heavily houseruled obscure Vietnam War RPG? I mean, it's hard enough to get people to play Shadowrun instead of D&D, let alone getting them to play heavily modified Recon...

Posted by: CanRay Jan 2 2012, 05:26 PM

Yeah, Palladium caliber rules have always been a little strange to me. Even before I was a gun nut.

Posted by: AppliedCheese Jan 2 2012, 06:04 PM

Re: Rangw for rifles

Yes, you CAN hit a man sized target at 600m, without too much effort, with an AR.

On an open range. With an E type that stands still and is waiting at the target berm you know its at. And is fully exposed. And isn't firing back. From a clean firing position on a known range, And your not carrying 50 pounds of stuff. And you've been thinking "ah, good, time to go to the range, ok, set that target up there" which you drove to, not humped 8 miles of jungle/deltya/grassland/mountain to. And doesn't have team mates.

Suffice to say, said conditions are not particularly common. Frankly, in any combat situation, I'd be surprised to see most riflemen fire accurately beyond 200m, and thats assuming relatively clean lines of fire. Certainly there is a plethora of data for 5-10 minute firefights at 200-300m with minimal bloodletting and the majority of casualties caused by the wall of lead and HE, not riflemen picking targets. Shooting point targets with an AR at 500m in the middle of a firefight would be pretty impressive. More so over irons. A kilometer just wouldn't happen (even with perfect human factors most ARs of the non match variety tend to lose their weapon accuracy beyond 550-600m)

Now, for machineguns on tripods you may have a point...

Posted by: CanRay Jan 2 2012, 06:19 PM

How many firing ranges are in the middle of a jungle where the targets are the natives and the soldiers are a bunch of cityboys or from a farm?

Posted by: Wounded Ronin Jan 4 2012, 01:49 AM

Everything you wrote makes sense, but one thing the game does that is a bit unusual in RPGs is slap big penalties on you for being under fire. That being said, if you're telling me that people can't hit their targets with aimed semi auto fire at 300 meters while not specifically being suppressed, I'd agree that hit probabilities should be lower than they are.

Posted by: Erik Baird Jan 7 2012, 05:58 PM

You might want to look up the Twilight:2000 2ed rules. It's not Vietnam specifically, but the rules were decent without too much silliness.

Posted by: Wounded Ronin Jan 8 2012, 06:19 PM

I've actually been toying with the idea of picking up Pheonix Command again and figuring out a way to Vietnam-ize it. I agree that Twilight is a lot of fun, though. I actually played the old Abandonware PC game (which was LOL because it was statistically highly unlikely to complete the game) and got a huge kick just out of the chargen, which was an adventure in and of itself. In my opinion if a game is going to require having lots of characters and there being a lot of character fatalities, a random generation system like that could be just the ticket to keep the game entertaining.

Maybe once starting with either Pheonix Command or Twilight, the only thing you'd need to Vietnam-ize it would be to review and pay special attention to suppression fire and support rules, and maybe add a Sanity loss mechanic, and you'd be good to go.