Njetponimai City, the converging point of all outlaws, desperadoes and scum of the earth has been spied by a low-flying vulture.
Rumor has it that no less than three outlaw gangs have recently
entered Njetponimai City in search of the legendary cattle baron
Gilliam H. Wates III Jr's stash of brandind irons, which was
recently stolen by the notorious outlaw Ricky Stallman. Normally a
trunk full of rusty sticks would be of little interest to most
outlaws, but Wates insisted on stamping his personal irons out of
solid gold.
One or more of the groups might be actually employed by Mr. Wates himself, but that's something he would deny if asked. The others are self-employed -- even ties to the mysterious Open Safe movement have been hinted at.
The local inhabitants of Njetponimai City have seen this kind of thing often enough, and being sensible fellows, have locked their doors and boarded their windows. The main street is barren and empty, even the tumbleweed has chosen discretion over valor.
It is high noon...
It turns out the rumors were wrong, and only two gangs showed up: The
Diamond gang and the Club gang. No one is quite sure how the gangs
came by their names, but Wyatt Burpe's Diamond gang has long harbored
a grudge against The Kid's Club gang. Kid being wounded and with a
host of relatively new recruits, does the Diamond gang have their chance
now?
| Diamond gang | Club gang |
|---|---|
| Wyatt Burpe | The Kid |
| Doc Gray | John Dough |
| Mr. Red | Frank Ernest |
| Mr. Black | Bob Jones |
| Mr. White | Joe Smith |
Diamong gang has decided to concentrate towards the northern part
of the city while Club gang is more spread out. The weasely Diamond
gangers do not trust their superior skills, but try to avoid the superior
range of Club gang's rifles.
Mr. Red opens the action by dashing into the yard of the house at the end of main street. Soon Doc Gray joins him and starts advancing on Club gang members. Elsewhere, John Dough and Joe Smith decide to dash across the street but are beset by lousy movement rolls.
Bob Jones runs out of rifle ammo in the ensuing firefight, and
decides to move up closer to stand something of a chance hitting
with a pistol. The Kid follows him for similar reasons. Bad move!
The Doc manages to plug Bob and Mr. White flanks The Kid taking
him out. Doc, Mr. White and Wyatt, who finally gets to do something,
converge on poor Frank.
Meanwhile, John manages to plug Mr. Black in the belly, but the
hardy Pinkerton man refuses to go down. John manages to break his
rifle in the process of trying to dislodge Mr. Black. Joe dashes closer
to Mr. Black and takes cover behind some crates, but isn't any luckier.
Soon John joins him to get in pistol range.
The end is nigh. Frank is badly wounded and forced to surrender, while John manages to break his gun. Diamong gangers run around looting guns from the fallen and finally Doc Gray steps up with a stolen rifle and plugs both Joe and John from across the street.
Five - nil for the Diamong gang, another testament to the inherent
balance of scenario games. Yes, balancing
games is so easy a retarded 8-year old could do it blindfolded,
who needs benchmarks? But I digress...
It all came back to me so clearly... namely the last game of Rules With No Name we played. Blazing away to no avail, broken guns, people hit but refusing to go down, people zooming about trying to collect guns from corpses and/or knocked out people... only the "run over the hill with move & fire to catch people without chance to respond" was missing, because I carefully crafted the terrain to avoid that.
I guess the root of the problem is that people are too hard to kill. Even though the Club gang lost by a mile, there was actually only one guy killed. The rest were either knocked out or wounded so badly we decided to call it quits.
This leads to people blazing away all the time, since a single hit most likely
does not cause anything major. I think there was a grand total of two deliberate shots
in the entire game.
Blazing away all the time leads to people running out of ammo (not so bad), but also to people breaking their guns a lot. I think at least a third of the characters busted their guns in the game.
Breaking your guns and running out of ammo leads to people coveting other people's guns, which leads to video game -like running around trying to pick up new weapons.
If I wanted to play Quake with miniatures, I'd be playing Frag.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.
Copyright 2003-2021 Mikko Kurki-Suonio
Sucks!
