To say that Star Frontiers does not or rather did not have rules for operating squads of soldiers is not completely true becuase in the module "Volturnus Planet of Mystery" sqauds of 10 each edestakai fan out during the storming of the pirate town. The rules for these squads were greatly abstracted; they simply accomplish their objectives off camera while the fights the PCs are involved in are worked out as per the AD rules.<br /><br />Previously I had worked on a squad level and possible mass battle level for Star frontiers in the Ground Hawks project that I titled Battle Dawn but I was still very dialled into wargaming and had a strong wargaming bias influencing me. <br />http://www.starfrontiers.us/node/3249<br /><br />Putraak bringing up Mercy Mission and possibly using Star Grunt rules to run some of the larger encounters naturally got me thinking. squad level rules for the RPG would be nice to handle things like Mercy Mission and even some of the combats in the Volturnus campaign. It could lead to some war campaigns for stuff like Laco's War.<br /><br />We should see about a community collaboration to develop a squad level rule adaption to the role playing game without perhaps so much of a wargaming bias. After all we all have all those counters and the 1/4 inch ruled maps so why not a set of adapted rules to treat the counters as individual squads, vehicle counters are still individual and vehicles are treated as a squad. Each squad or vehicle will have a stat card for like those that were published in the SFman for KHs ships a while back. <br /><br />I think that for stats we would possibly use the average RS of the squad members to react to things like the need to take cover when suddenly fired upon. IM would be determined by the leader of the squad, any morale issues would be rolled for against the leader's LDR stat. Possibly use a version of STA to determine the health of a squad but I was also thinking that the squad's character sheet might have check off boxes to mark members of the squad as casualties and out of the fight much like you would mark off expended ammo from a KHs stat block. Two or three wound states: lightly wounded, heavily wounded, unconscious and killed the more casualties a squad takes the harder it is for the leader to motivate it. movement should be straight forward to factor in as a stat.<br /><br />I'm leaning toward making LDR the most important stat- used for motivating the squad to do things and for firing 1/2 LDR score of its leader plus 10% of the squad's "level of quality" with squad levels going: 0 level is rabble/mob, level 1 is green, level 2 is trained, level 3 is veteran, and level 4 is elite<br /><br />Could modify that to be full LDR score plus 10% per squad level quality and every wounded squad member becomes a -5% penalty for motivation and firing and every knocked out member is -10%, thus fresh squads are very capable and chewed up squads are harder to do something with.<br /><br />special provisions might be added for squads lead by PCs or they can be treated like any other member of the squad for wounds and after the encounter if they have been knocked out there is a dice throw for their survival and or recovery. <br /><br />I'm thinking that combat can be run like KHs combat with a damage table that tells you 1, 2,3,4, etc wounded. give each member of the squad a RS check for the wound to be no worse than a lightly wounded ie the dice randomly determine that member number 3 is hit and he is already heavily wounded but he gets a RS check and with a pass the new wound is simply another light wound and it does not change his heavily wounded status. squad member 2 is also hit and he currently has no wounds so he does the RS save to simply be lightly wounded otherwise he's heavily wounded.<br /><br />a serious damage table result might also be test against leaders LDR or squad breaks and runs. If there is a PC leading the squad he does not have to run of course. If a leader goes down then the LDR score for the quality level of the squad is tested against to see if the squad breaks or if someone else in the squad takes over.<br /><br />So the stats that are important are LDR, RS, Movement, and IM and possibly there might be a rating for quality of equipment which might impact the saving throws to minimize wounds.<br /><br />I'm curious for feed back and imput. <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
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