An idea for a simple RPG or Tabletop Skirmish game?

Yesterday, a couple of things happened that proved serendipitous. Flynn, my older boy, has been trying to get a game development group started within the local independent (mostly expat) artist scene, a group called Liquid Arts. Some of you may remember the GoFundMe he made that I promoted a while back. Well, that failed. And yesterday he refunded the few backers that he got. But he's got an idea to start the Liquid Arts game design group working on board games, and if he has some success there, try again with the computer game design ideas. 

I explained this, and the Liquid Arts group, to one of my friends, who was a backer. And it got me thinking about some of the simple board games my best friend and I designed back in elementary and middle school. One or two of the ideas we had may be worth re-developing. 

Also, my younger boy Steven has been playing a lot of the GBA version of GTA on our Super Console X emulator lately, but yesterday he wanted to play some Gauntlet II with me. Which we did. And while playing, he was wondering about more modern versions of Gauntlet. I told him that there were a couple of 3D games during the PS1/PS2 era, Gauntlet Legends (for PS1, which I had), and Gauntlet Dark Legacy (for PS2, which I never had). He got me to look them up and see if we could acquire them for emulation. 

Our box doesn't have (and apparently isn't a good enough processor to handle) PS2 emulation, but I found Gauntlet Legends, and also the arcade (MAME) version of Dark Legacy last night. 

Anyway, ideas converged, and I started thinking about whether the way Gauntlet rates character abilities might work as the basis for a fantasy RPG. I found this pretty quickly. And yeah, with a few tweaks, and the addition of some mechanics for outside combat activities, it could work. Or, it could be merged with something to make a tabletop skirmish type wargame. Something probably more simple than my ideas to use 4E just for tabletop skirmish games.

For a while now, I've been interested in what D&D would be like if Chainmail combat were used. But I've had too many irons in the gaming fire to start up a campaign using the Platemail 27th Edition rules or something of my own devising. 

My thinking, as I was laying in bed last night not falling asleep, and this morning in the shower, were to maybe merge Gauntlet style character ratings with Chainmail man-to-man/fantasy combat (and the Dungeon! board game) 2d6 style combat. Maybe throw in something like the Classic D&D Turn Undead table for a resolution mechanic for non-combat tasks if needed. 

Gauntlet ratings (taken from the original version) could be translated to: 

• Speed (how many spaces you can move per turn)
• Armor (how much damage is reduced by your armor)
• Attack Power (how easily you hit when you attack, melee)
• Attack Strength (how many hits you inflict on a successful melee attack) 
• Attack Speed (how many melee attacks you can make on your turn)
• Shot Power (how easily you hit when you attack, ranged)
• Shot Strength (how many hits you inflict on a successful ranged attack)
• Shot Speed (how many ranged attacks you can make on your turn)
• Magic Power (how easy it is to successfully cast a spell)
• Magic Strength (how powerful are the effects of the spells you cast)

The above Speed, Armor, and Strength ratings would all be set numbers. The Power ratings would be modifiers to 2d6 rolls. The Strength ratings might have a few levels with variation, such as:

• Lvl 1: 1 hit
• Lvl 2: 1-2 hits (roll d6, 1-4=1 hit, 5-6=2 hits)
• Lvl 3: 2 hits
• Lvl 4: 2-3 hits (roll d6, 1-4=2 hits, 5-6=3 hits)
• Lvl 5: 3 hits

For the Attack/Shot Speed, I'd probably look to AD&D attack progression:

• Lvl 1: 1 attack per round
  
• Lvl 2: 3/2 attacks per round
  
• Lvl 3: 2 attacks per round
  
• Lvl 4: 5/2 attacks per round
  
• Lvl 5: 3 attacks per round
  

Of course, one thing to consider would be that Gauntlet characters have hundreds or thousands of hit points, and can kill hundreds or thousands of opponents on each level (and with emulation, adding a "quarter" for more health is as easy as pushing the Select button on the game pad). Monsters do large numbers of hits compared to PCs, and armor reduces that damage. That's something that would need to be changed. If this were an RPG, it would probably be more difficult to scale it correctly. But for a tabletop skirmish game, it might work out alright. 

A variation of this system may also work for one of those old games from my youth that I mentioned above. The game was probably the best (and most complex) game that Todd and I made as kids. We made a map of our home town. Since the home town is tiny, it was a fairly accurate map, as we had every actual house, store, and church on it, minus a few people's sheds and whatnot. The game was an alien invasion game. We over-complicated it by having just about every type of alien from UFO lore that we could think of, plus a few from sci-fi movies (little green men, Men-in-Black, Grays, Critters, robots, etc.). In the original, the aliens had the goal of planting bombs in buildings, while the heroes (us) had to raid buildings for tools/supplies/weapons (all on cards) to fight off the aliens and prevent the bombings. 

It was a tough game, as we made way too many aliens, and we played them ruthlessly. 

I was thinking as well that this might be an idea to revive. Instead of bombing the town, though, maybe it would be an abduction game. And it could be played either cooperatively (like our original game) or competitively, with one or more players as the Heroes and one or more players as the Aliens. 

Again, I'm wondering if a 2d6 style mechanic like my Gauntlet idea above might be fun for this. Originally, I think we had just a regular d6 mechanic. It's been a LONG time, and Todd had our only copy of the game.

So, it looks like this year I may be experimenting with some table top board/tactical game designs in addition to RPG stuff.