Newstand Press

A drastic simplification of Strength, Carrying Capacity, Load, and Movement Speed has occurred. Carrying Capacity is now a simple ceiling on what you can lift, and Strength is by default double your Fortitude. The two are disconnected in most ways. This makes it far easier to figure how how much you can move around!

In place of the previous penalties for carrying more than your capacity, you can now Push Yourself to move a higher speed than your Load would allow, taking Exhaustion and Thirst! This also allows Exhaustion and Thirst to be expended for benefits in a more direct way, which has much better game feel.

All load-bearing equipment has been totally reworked. This includes a new light Haversack backpack, a good option for scouts and light troops. This item was imported from The Trench Raiders. Strength is never modified by equipment, so its much easier to track.

A new Take Aim Minor Action makes for better sniping and stronger ambushes, and lets precision fire take people out of trenches, but is basically worthless in pitched battle as Suppression adds directly to the difficulty. It also requires Vigilance rather than Proficiency.

I’ve sort of kluged together some previous versions of Suppressive Fire to create the best version. The suppression dealt is based on successes meeting or exceeding, while the hits inflicted are based on multiples of, with the damage as 1d6-1. This means that at close range ambush you can personally hit three or four guys, while at long range you’ll probably only hit one, but your other excess successes will still have impact.

Throw Grenade is now a special kind of action that can be taken as a minor or regular action, or both! This lets you shoot and throw grenades at close range, throw grenades while on the move, and throw two grenades per turn, all of which I feel more accurately represents the fairly cavalier manner grenades are often used.

Melee combat now works like Shock Checks; extra Successes negate Failure. This is in response to testing for the WW1 Trench Raider game and new information from experts. It preserves the indiscriminate lethal nature of melee combat in unskilled vs unskilled combatants and skills vs skilled combatants, but skilled melee fighters will competently dispatch unskilled ones.

Medium Range band is now 50-250, rather than 50-200.

Resting has been buffed to remove an Exhaustion every other Turn. This also makes a full night sleep 7 hours, which is as good as you can expect in a war zone.

A language clarification was made to Shock Checks so that excess Successes negate Failures instead of reducing Ongoing Damage overall.

Language clarification on Shock Checks taken from Ongoing Damage, which has the additional effect of preventing blood loss from crippling or blinding characters.

Description update for Forward Air Controller and Forward Observer, properly associating the Skills with Spot Target instead of Bombard.

Fixed mislabled Table Names on page 150.

A minor mechanical change to the Observe Action. Stealth Rating is now added as Failures instead of difficulty, so instead of just not seeing anything in the dark, you’ll see false things. This is much more interesting and dynamic.

The severity of Conceal FUBARs have been reduced to alerting targets within 100m instead of 500.

Narcotics adjustments. Uppers are now dangerously awesome, completely negating Exhaustion and Injury as well as making you Skilled at Shock Checks. The fact that all the exhaustion and injury comes back, as well as the overdosing, will more than balance it. Downers lost the Shock Check effect, but it has a more consistent effect.

A new Extended Magazine weapon mod has been added.

Complete overhaul of vehicle crew position capacity, making it much more restrictive.

The internal passenger slot in the T-54 has been eliminated, as I’ve seen inside one of those now and there’s just not room.

I'm back from PAX and I produced a new version based on feedback I got during the show and stuff that came up while talking with other designers, so this is another one of those Big Updates like 1.07 that drastically overhauls some fundamental elements of the game. Let's go through it.

- Movement rules changed quite a bit. There's a new, extended Move Speed Chart and new rules for terrain to modify move speed. Print out a copy of the chart, and movement will be much, much easier to calculate, especially movement over mixed terrain, and GMs can easily make terrain which is more or less difficult to move through.

- Likewise, total overhaul of terrain. Terrain is now less "terrain types" and more tags you can apply to areas or features that give interesting modifications, including making you easier or harder to hit, slowing or speeding you up, or obscuring areas.

- Prepared Position moves got totally overhauled. Now you only need to roll once and let the timer roll down to dig a position instead of rolling for every turn and every change you want to make.

- Overhauled anti-infantry obstacles, including a new action, Crush Wire.

- Some melee and weather balancing.

- Many sections rewritten for clarity, including information about Units, NPCs, Traps, distance and observation.

Also, in exciting news, Luke Crane of The Burning Wheel and his friends will be playing PATROL and sending me feedback! There may even be a recording of this game to come out of it. It might mean some hefty overhauls in light of this, but it will also mean that a Kickstarter for a proper print run and expansions is probably in the near future!

Thanks to the feedback of many of our players (Special thanks to Gareth Lazelle!) there's been a lot of revisions made to PATROL in preparation for a final print draft.

This version represents a tentative version of that final form, with many sweeping balance and gameplay changes in effect to make the game smoother, easier to understand, and more straightforward to play. A full changelog would be gigantic, but in short...

Completely rewritten attack actions. Precision and Suppressive Fire are finally balanced against each other; Precision Fire for accurate fire eliminating single targets, and Suppressive Fire for destroying squads at close range or keeping the enemy pinned down at range.

Total overhaul of the Bombardment rules. Spotting and shooting are now separate actions and the new bombardment dynamic allows for different fire orders to be made by spotters for different situations.

The entire Action section has been completely revised for clarity. The skills for each Action are incorporated into their profiles directly. Almost every Action has small changes for gamefeel, balance or clarity.

Greatly diversified weapon profiles! The choice between an assault rifle, an SMG and a shotgun is now more than just small dice values. Pistols have utility in melee!

2 new shell/bomb types, Dummy (which reduced scattering from the target) and Cluster (complete with dud shells left in the target area!)

Balance changes made to medical elements, including transfusions and stemming bleeding.

Rewrites to much of the basic rule section to increase clarity.

Reordering of pages for the emphasis of NPC rules.

Rewritten Shock Check rules prevent the "strong characters bleed more" paradox from before.

Observation actions, and a variety of other actions that were previously Regular Actions, are now Minor Actions.

Completely redone Roundel (Thanks again Gareth!) which is much more useful for your games.

Revised cover art!

Many examples rewritten to match new rules.

Proofs came back for the print version of Must Be Tuesday! There’s just a few little corrections to make, so it should be on sale by the end of the week, and with this sorted, the print versions of Patrol and Damage Control can start coming together!

PATROL, my first large game, is finally out!

This 204 page RPG contains everything you need for playing just about any imaginable Vietnam War campaign from a variety of perspectives. The game has rules for playing US Army, Marines, Navy, and special forces, a large variety of South Vietnamese forces, Australians, South Koreans, Thai troops, mercenaries, montegnards, Viet Cong and the NVA. The rules allow for multi-day missions, with scarcity and morale prompting interesting moral dilemmas and opportunities for infighting. There's 12 MOSes (classes) and a wide variety of interesting equipment and vehicles to play with. The rules are designed to handle the flow of time easily, with no distinct "combat" turns and simple logistics inspired by Torchbearer. It's fail forward while still being task oriented and it includes multiple mechanics for introducing complications during play. It's not just combat either; there's detailed rules for interacting with locals and a variety of psychological tools, including narcotics.