Phi230 fucked around with this message at 15:58 on Apr 9, 2017

Welcome to my own personal descent into hell.




Movement. Easy right? Hell to the no, this is Phoenix Command baby.

As I've stated before, Phoenix Command is a system which relies on 2-yards-per-hex maps with a time scale of 2-second phases which are divided 4-half-second impulses.

In order to understand movement and combat, we must first understand stances. As graciously provided to me by a wise monk who descended from Grog Mountain, here are some play aids describing stances:







These are fantastic, and describe the modifiers to size, shooting, and movement that stances add. Standing you move at your fastest, but you are a bigger target and don't shoot as accurately as you could. Kneeling is a middle ground, with a moderate size, moderate accuracy boost, and moderate penalty to movement. Prone movement is as slow as it gets, but you are a small target and shoot quite well.

At a standing stance, here is what movement looks like:



And here is the relationship in action costs/movement penalties/ALM bonuses between all three stances:



For movement, it is important to know your Field of Fire and Field of View; in short, your Facing

Field of Fire: describes a 60 degree cone where you are facing, whereas;

Field of View: is a 180 degree arc in front of your character.

It costs 1 action to change your facing, however, when moving you get 1 free facing change per movement.

It costs 2 action points to actually assume an aiming stance. Otherwise, you are hip firing. This affects field of fire and field of view.



FoV and FoF, the ranges of the actual lines are not to scale, just to show the arcs themselves:



Where Blue is Field of View and Red is Field of Fire.

Additionally, there are rules for moving your head but not your body ala head on a swivel rules; where glancing once costs 1 CA (combat action) and increases your FoV to 240 degrees, a 2 CA glance expands your FoV to 300 degrees, while a 3 CA glance extends the FoV to a full 360 degrees. Each CA cost is not actually one CA spent, but rather a decrease in your total CA. So if you had a 5 CA character on full alert at 360 degrees, he can only has 2 CA until he stops being so alert.



Finally, there is the Brace Stance which is special and somewhat limited in use:




There is also ducking, which is a single action (at no cost) which simulates diving to the ground or behind cover, which gives a penalty to the enemy shooting at you. You are also penalized in that you can't shoot as quickly. To picture this, imagine any John Woo movie. I guarantee at least once one of our mercs is gonna fire his guns while flying through the air and going "aaaah." This about wraps up movement, there's a lot of things you can do but they all involve...moving. Onto the next step.



Combat is so extensively detailed it will be an impossible and time consuming effort to cover absolutely every rule, nuance, and minutia that the rules provide. Combat also involves about half a million tables, which I will omit for brevity's sake. But I will try my hardest to give the broad strokes.

Skills and variables relevant to combat are: SAL (shooter's skill), Time spent Aiming (Aim Time Mod), Stance, Brace, Aiming or Hip Fire, Range, Weapon Accuracy

The sequence of combat usually goes like this:

AIM/FIRE>ODDS OF HITTING>HIT LOCATION>APPLY DAMAGE; Rarely there will be a time of flight between firing and hitting as necessary, IE two people shoot eachother at the same time and need to find who got shot first.

All shots cost 1 action, and that includes aiming for one action, and this is referred to as a snap shot. All Aim Time Modifiers for weapons include shooting. So if you wanna spend 6 actions aiming, that includes shooting, so you don't have to spend 7 CA's. Additionally, you need line of sight to shoot the enemy. Except when you don't.

Shots, unless they are fully automatic, which will be a bullet point further down this post, are only limited by CA. A semi-automatic weapon can be fired 2 times per impulse, if you have the CA. However they will be extremely inaccurate unless you've got some very situational good modifiers going on like being prone and braced, and assuming a firing stance. At that point you may as well just aim. This of course is limited by the RoF of a weapon which usually is limited to bolt action weapons. Automatic weapons (with a * or **) don't need actions to be spent to chamber a round. So while the M16A2 has a RoF of 7, that actually refers to how many rounds can be fired per half second burst when doing automatic fire; whereas the RoF on the M24 sniper-rifle is 3, which means it costs 3 CA to bolt the rifle.

ODDS OF HITTING

The odds of hitting are determined by table, of course. However, there is a whole table dedicated to modifiers to this as well! To determine the To Hit, you must determine your SA or Shot Accuracy which is the sum of your Aim Time Modifier and the Skill Accuracy Level. There are many factors that go into the odds of hitting, like how long you've spent aiming, the range to target, and the target size.

Target size refers to the, well, size of the target. A target can be looking from cover, so that only his head can be hit, shooting from cover, which exposes their upper body, and exposed which is basically in the open and can be hit anywhere.

Essentially this comes down to figuring out all possible modifiers, finding their sum, and rolling for some odds of hitting. Figuring out all the modifiers is the biggest part of the workload. If you roll the target number or less, you hit. Now comes the worst part.

Automatic Fire

To preface, all Automatic Fire gets a +1 to accuracy.

How many hexes are covered by the automatic fire is covered by the Arc of Fire, and is also determined by the weapon's stats, but first:

You must determine if you fired at the correct elevation. This is called the Burst Elevation. To determine the BE, you determine EAL (accuracy) normally as with any other shot, however you use a different Target Size table rather than the normal Target Size table. You simply sum all the modifiers to aim. You then use a table to determine the Burst Elevation Odds and roll like any other shot to hit. But unlike single shot firing, this is only to determine if your elevation of your bullets was correct. There are more steps.

If your elevation roll on the odds table was a success, that is to say, you shot where you wanted, you now need to determine the Arc of Fire. Automatic weapons have a minimum arc stat listed. Otherwise, you choose how many hexes you want to sweep. This affects bullet distribution, so you don't want to sweep long areas for no reason; especially if your Rate of Fire is low. Go hog wild spraying everything with a minigun though. The second and only real limitation on your Arc of Fire is your Field of Fire, which is always 60 degrees. So up close, you can't sweep that much, but the distance you are allowed to sweep increases as range increases.

All targets covered by the AoF may be hit, naturally. However Phoenix Command takes this a step beyond. All people 100 hexes toward the shooter, and 100 yards past the target are eligible. Meaning there is a 200 hex long cone of fire from the shooter of pain and danger.

To determine hits, you use a separate Automatic Fire Table. This allows chance for hits for one or more round per target in the arc.

The Sustained Automatic Burst value on the weapon makes the next Elevation Check harder.

Shotguns

Shotguns have their own system, separate from normal shooting. Shotguns even have their own stats. Shotguns have a Shotgun ALM rating which translates to how wide a spread the shotgun fires. Odds to hit are calculated normally, but you pick the higher number between the SALM and the Target Size Modifier to calculate the EAL. Same simple sum of all modifiers. If there is a hit, the shooter now looks up the Base Pellet Hit Chance of the shotgun. There are two ways numbers are classified here. If there is a number with an asterisk, IE, *11, that means that on a successful hit using the Odds alone, 11 pellets hit. However, BPHC's with single numbers with no asterisk are in a percentage, IE, 94. You must roll 00-99 and roll equal to or greater to hit with its pellet as if rolling to hit for a single shot. This is usually for long range shots.

Shotguns have a spread radius similar to automatic weapons.

If there are multiple pellet hits, you may either resolve all hits separately, or for simplicity's sake roll as if they all hit the same location and multiply the physical damage by the number of pellets. This is no fun, and I will be resolving all pellets separately.


• Automatic Shotguns: This uses the same rules as Automatic Weapons, with two key differences. Firstly, you use the larger of the SALM or Target Size like with a shotgun. Secondly, when you hit, you resolve number of pellet hits rather than just individual hits.
  
  HIT LOCATION
  
  The hit location is determined by table. There are 3 pages of tables. One page for getting shot from the front, one page for getting shot from the side, and one page getting shot from an oblique angle.
  
  Hit location is modified by Target Size.
  
  You simply roll a D100-1. Take into account how the target is situated, IE, in the Open/Looking Over Cover/Shooting From Cover. Depending on what you roll, you hit them anywhere in over like 40 locations.
  
  If the location hit is wearing armor, you then need to compare your weapon's penetration value to the Protection Factor of the Armor. The bullet can then glance or overpenetrate. This will be discussed more in depth in the damage section, below.
  
  You may "call shots" and resolve normally using a special modifier, and then resolve hit location specific to that body part. IE, you call your shot to the head. You manage a hit, now you roll to see what part of the head you hit: grazing shot, forehead, eyes, mouth etc...
  
  
  RESOLVING DAMAGE
  
  Shooting a person does damage. Shooting a person with armor may or may not do damage, except when it always does damage. There are several key concepts behind damage.
  
  Physical Damage and Knockout:
  
  
• Physical Damage (PD) is the amount of damage one has sustained, or how much damage a would inflicts. Higher numbers mean a more severe wound, while lower numbers mean a more minor wound. In the tables there are several symbols that modify PD. H is for denoting hundreds of damage, K for thousands, T for tens of thousands, X for hundreds of thousands, and M for millions.
  
  Note, that the way it works out is that anything over around 700 damage is fatal within minutes.
  
  
• Knockout: When a person is damaged in any way, they must immediately do a Knockout Check. Basically they roll a 00-99 based on the amount of damage they took on a table, and if they fail they are incapacitated. You then roll on another table to find out for how long. If they succeed they stay in the fight. Knockout represents shock, fear, or actual loss of consciousness that comes with being shot. Whenever you make a knockout roll, you roll against the TOTAL of your PD. So if you get shot and succeed, it is harder to succeed on successive gunshot wounds.
  
  Using the "Hero" Rules, whenever we are charging the enemy or rushing to the aid of another comrade and we are wounded and succeed a knockout save with a value of 98 or 99, we enter HERO MODE. This allows a person to ignore all previous damage on knockout rolls, meaning any new damage is rolled against on its own rather than the sum total of PD.
  
  Armor
  
  Before delving into the medical system and actual damage, lets go over armor.
  
  Any given piece of armor has stats that give two ratings: a Protection Factor and Blunt Trauma Protection Factor.
  
  Additionally, any given piece of armor has an Effective Armor PF, which represents angled armor or ablation or what have you that increases an armor's capabilities beyond pure thickness.
  
  To find EPF, you cross-index its PF with a 0-9 dice roll on a table.
  
  Penetrating Armor
  
  
• Effective Penetration: to find an impact's EPEN value, you must take its PEN value and subtract the EPF. Now two things can happen:
  
  1. No penetration. If EPEN is equal to, or less than 0, the round does not penetrate. HOWEVER, this does not mean 0 damage. We must now calculate the blunt force trauma caused by the bullet. This is done by cross referencing the weapon's PEN value with the hit location and Blunt Trauma Protection Factor of the armor. The table then spits out a damage value that represents bruising done by the bullet's physical impact.
  
  2. Partial Penetration or Low Velocity Penetration occurs when the EPEN is greater than 0, but less than the EPF. This represents bullet impacting at a severely reduced rate of speed which makes it much less lethal. This makes all armor absolutely worth its weight, as even armor with low PF can save your life and limb by substantially slowing a round's impact, and thus, lowering its PD into non-lethal levels.
  
  3. Penetration: A penetration occurs when the EPEN is greater than the EPF. This means the bullet punches through the armor without any significant impact on its lethality. As with all things, to resolve damage, you use tables.
  
  Disabling Injuries and Shock
  
  A wound may also disable a person's limb. If you survive the wound, and succeed in your knockout roll, you may continue combat but without the use of that limb. This is supposed to represent the effect that broken limbs and pain etc... have that go in the way of making limbs unusable. A disabled limb cannot be used until the damage is fully healed.
  
  Shock
  
  When a disabling wound is sustained, there is a new value introduced into the mix for resolving Knockout. This is shock PD. Shock PD has its own table, (we are at around 25 tables used now), and does NOT count toward actual wounding of a character. It is ONLY used when a person is making a knockout roll immediately after sustaining a disabling injury, and is meant to simulate the shocking effects of broken and shattered bones and other horrible things that does to a person's mental state.
  
  

Phi230 fucked around with this message at 15:09 on Apr 10, 2017