I wrote a short story called Two Friends in an attempt to kickstart my brain into writing more for the Shayakand setting. At the time, my goal was to generate generic PDFs for Southeastern Asian flavor that a Savage World GM could drop into their game. The idea was that after writing six of these smaller PDFs, the entirety of them could come together for a Shayakand Sourcebook.

The races were created with no big issue, but I was unable to finish the others. So, in March I started writing back here. Work began again on a 2e clone.

Most of this year has been the evolution of this game, now called Andras. Along the way, it has evolved from a clone to a 2e inspired game. Since my early groups all played an amalgam of B/X,BECMI,AD&D and 2E, that only makes sense. I never played D&D with just one player’s handbook. Heck, I didn’t play Marvel with just one, either.

Outside of that, I have discovered a lot of fans of the football game called Statis-Pro Football. This Avalon Hill game was one of my favorites back in the 80s. I loved playing it and I still do. I have all the cards I can find that were created by Lee Harris. I also have the formulas used in the 6th edition of the game.

This year I have two writing goals:

• Finish Andras.
• Make Statis-Pro Football Cards

When it comes to Andras, the finished project will be like the Introductory Box post. In other words, it will have a separate guides to help people to just sit down and play. Considering that another goal is a multitude of options for the player, that could be a very tall order.

When it comes to Statis-Pro Football, I plan on making 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011 cards. I also plan on making a separate set of cards that are modified in a way to eliminate the dreaded rest rules. If I get a chance, I’ll try to make some historic teams, UFL teams and others.

I only have one gaming goal this year. I want to have a regular Google+ game.

I wish everyone a happy 2012. I hope you have a great time gaming!

Sometime later, I hope to upload my modified formulas and rules.

They were looking for Statis-Pro Football information.

So, I am going to finish uploading the cards and put up my re-design of the cards. This will include the USFL and a fictional league with made-up players.

The people want Statis-Pro, the people will get Statis-Pro.

I love Statis-Pro. Despite issues around gaming the system, I really enjoy the individual stats, the ability to have fantasy leagues with it, and that the knowledge to create teams is available from multiple places. In fact, many visiting my site looking for the cards created by Lee Harris.

The good news is that Lee Harris is working on his website. He aims to repost everything from the old Bomber’sGolf site. I can’t wait until he’s back.

I also enjoy Second Season. This game was designed for solo play, so it play better alone. Even better, the Football America set features an entirely fictional league. Now when I’m playing football, I’m not concerned with emulating reality, I’m only concerned with football. Like I did with Electric Football, I sketch out articles with a commentator’s description of the game. Had I the time, I would do magazines like I did when I was a kid. My cousin has about 20 seasons of storyline he and I wrote.

Also going for Second Season is that I purchased the rules to create teams. Unlike Statis-Pro, team making for Second Season is more of an art. There are also lots of fiddly bits and making up sub-systems happens. For example, a running back’s rating may have a note that says “Rating is AA for the first five plays”. Something about this kind of fiddling evokes the First Edition DMG.

Yeah, I know. Don’t cross the streams.

I also enjoy playing Paydirt. The wonderful things about Paydirt is the incredible compactness. The team fits on one page. Using dice, you look up results on various charts and record the result. It plays quickly and does a great job emulating the ups and down of a game. I only wish that I knew how to create teams for it.

Speaking of the formula, Matt Floray passed away earlier this week. I only knew him from reading the Paydirt Yahoo group. Condolences to Matt’s family and friends. He will certainly be missed.

Matt had the formulas used by Dr. Nicely to make charts. Occasionally, he made charts. Otherwise, charts are available from two or three folks that developed their own formulas. Sure you don’t have individual players with as big a role, but the elegance of the design compared to Statis-Pro is beautiful. If I ever got the formula, I would develop the ability to do Fanatasy Football with Paydirt. The system is that good.

Anyway, I am still working on my Football sim based on Statis-Pro. I hope to address certain issues that I personally find annoying, but YMMV. I do not like the gaming of the system by using certain players that had a minor role in a team’s play.

For example, if a running back managed a breakaway for 30 yards once in a season, but averaged 2 yards a carry for his remaining carries, his card comes out like an All-Pro player. The card would make it seem that he can get 5-6 yards every time he touches the ball despite the reality of his actual play. To mitigate this, Statis-Pro invokes a rest rule that says that this player can only play in the game for a certain length of time. This creates all kinds of strange play calls. If you have a guy that is almost guaranteed a 10 yard run or a 20 yard reception, but can only play once a quarter, when does he play? That’s right, he comes in the game at critical moments. This is backwards!

I hope to use a different statistical method to shave off these odd cards. The cards for these players will still be made, but there should be no need for a rest rule as the player’s contribution to the team will not be artificially inflated. He will still be able to get the big gain, because he got it in real life. However, he won’t be able to get larger gains on average than he did in real play.

I recently got about 8 seasons of play-by-play data. When I get done with my analysis, I hope to have a system to make teams that’s as straightforward as the current system to make Statis-Pro teams. Here’s to hoping! I may find out that I crunch all the numbers just to recreate the original system developed by Avalon Hill.

I never got the play or do the games the way I wanted. I had a good team and ruined it by mismanagement. Ugh.

One of the innovations that have include a draft and salary cap. I say that because their cards are slightly different (extra information, different player rating system), but they are quite good.

If they are still playing in a couple years, I might try again. Either way, since my site comes up so much in regards to Statis-Pro, I felt like I should point folks to people that still play Statis-Pro Football on a regular basis.

When I redesigned the process, I wanted to use a minimum of stats, mainly due to the fact that many detailed stats were just not available for earlier seasons. One way of doing this was to make a rough guess at the standard deviation to understand how often a person gained a certain amount of yards. Doing this would differeniate a player that averaged 4 yards a carry, but ran for 1300 yards versus a player that averaged 5 yards a carry, but ran for 1100 yards. The former would have smaller numbers due to average, but more of them would be above average. The latter would have larger numbers up front, but smaller numbers at the end.

This is better explained visually, especially folks that have not played the game for years. Let’s take one of these rating 4 backs, DJ Dozier:

On the original card, he had better normal and short gain numbers than Barry Sanders and Emmitt Smith, the two leading rushers that season. Because of the relative rarity of a breakaway run, DJ Dozier would be a very desirable card if it weren’t for the pesky rating of 4 under his name. With the new version of the card, he can play all he wants, but he is now much less valuable. He can still breakaway for 20+ yard gain (He had two that year), but otherwise he will not dominate anyone’s offense.

Speaking of Detroit, let’s look at Barry Sanders that year:

Okay, I know. The short gain rushing yardage is much less and the pass yards are more spread out. One reason for this is an average 4.5 yards per carry that year. Another reason is that he didn’t play in game 1 that year. The main contributing reason is that Barry didn’t have but seven running attempts of 20 yards or more. Most games, he longest rush was 14 or 16 yards. I could be wrong, but I feel like the new card better reflects this. Let’s compare to Emmitt Smith’s cards:

Wait a minute, didn’t Emmitt take the rushing title that year? Why does he have a worse New card than Barry Sanders? The main reason is that he had a lower yards per carry, 4.3. After considering his 75 yard run, he really didn’t have any other huge runs that year. (I need to confirm this, I don’t have the stats for him in front of me right now.) Despite catching more passes, his average per reception was more than two yards lower than Sanders. The ultimate reason that Emmit’s card is not as valuable as Barry’s is that Barry had more yards from scrimmage that year at a higher averages than Emmitt.

You know, of course, that this system make Thurman Thomas’ card the most valuable RB card in 1991. He led the league in yards from scrimmage.

Next time I talk about Stais-Pro, it will be time for QBs and WRs.

A couple years ago, I tried to play in Statis-Pro leagues, but quickly discovered that I could not afford the time to play. Somehow in my nostalgia, I didn’t remember games taking 3 hours to play. I later discovered that I enjoy playing this game casually by severely  limiting substitutions, but that’s fodder for another post.

One site I enjoyed was Lee Harris’ site. He published formulas for making the cards as well as several sets. Unfortunately, I couldn’t provide any funds for the site to keep going, so it is now gone. Going to archive.org, I managed to find everything by searching through the many snapshots. For example, the formulas page isn’t in the most recent snapshot, but is in snapshots that are from the previous year. Since the last update was 2003, I don’t feel like anything was lost.

I began thinking about Statis-Pro because I get at least two hits everyday from folks looking for Statis-Pro Football stuff. My previous post about streamlining the system gets traffic, but I’m certain it produces a fair share of cursing as well because I haven’t finished it. Believe it or not, I got out the spreadsheets to generate my variation of the cards and began to fiddle with it again. Who knows where this may lead…

Having said all that I have added a page for Statis-Pro Downloads that have the Lee Harris cards as well as links to the UK League which also make their own cards with some rules variations. I feel like the two folks that end up here should at least get something for their trouble.

If Lee or other members of the Football Sim community feel that my hosting these files is somehow a bad thing, I’ll take them down. I’m not trying to steal or infringe on anyone, I just want to promote a game that I still enjoy playing. Considering that these files are all available from archive.org, I don’t see why this would be a big deal.

Rock on football sim folks! (I own five different sims.) Given the nature of negotiations within the NFL, it looks like sim action may be the only real NFL action for this upcoming season.

I say all this because I was blissfully unaware of the Solitaire Print and Play Contest. I discovered this entry about the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae. It looks very interesting and I hope to print it out and play it.

The second thing I found was this post about tweaking the Vancian magic system. Dragon Age is on my short list of games I really want to play and not necessarily GM. I know that this is a first draft attempting to put D&D magic into Dragon Age, but it has got me to thinking about the reverse — making a magic system that is AGE-ish into one of the many forms of D&D.

Start with a Mana point system, maybe INT bonus plus 1d6 to start. Gain 1d6 per level. Can a new spell every other level. Generate a spell list like the one from OpenQuest. Yeah, this could work…

I learned to play chess seriously at about the same time I purchased the original Red Box. It wasn’t too much later, that I had the B/X books (though not totally eschewing the box). When I thought about D&D and chess, I always had the same question:

What if I used different pieces?

For D&D, that became new classes. I hacked the 1e PHB for classes in our game. I scoured every issue of Dragon for new classes. Most ended up as NPCs, but I never got tired of trying to create my own. At the time, I didn’t own Dragon #10 with the class generator, so most of my effort were either amalgam classes (part psionic,part illusionist) or specialists (magic-users that focused on one or two ‘schools’ of magic). It wasn’t until I owned a lot more D&D books, old and new, that different ideas began to take shape. For example, somewhere in my gaming history, an NPC appeared that was part of a class that could use powerful magicks, but only target itself. (Pathfinder calls this class an alchemist.)  By studying the roots of the game (LBB and supplements) as well as ideas from others (BBS, Dragon magazines, etc.) new possibilities emerged.

The same held true with chess. At first, my pieces were combinations or substitutions. I had pawns that could move as kings (but still attack as pawns) and a paladin, a combination of knight and bishop. It wasn’t until I discovered the history of chess and its cousins that new possibilities emerged.

My father bought me a game called Chinese Chess when I was 12. I was immediately fascinated by the fact that the board was different. Ranks and files had little to do with how some pieces moved. The names were all very different and their movements were strange to me. I immediately started putting them on my regular chess board and vice versa. (With only rare opportunities to actually play against others with any of my variants, I had a lot of time.)

Later I discovered chess’ Indic roots and found a game with lots of pieces and different promotion rules. Lastly, I found chessvariants.org. I’ve been a fan ever since.

I own four person chess and Omega Chess. I secretly want to build a home fabricator to build my own fairy chess pieces. A man can dream.

All of this leads up to a chess variant that I had originally developed for one of my RPG projects. I wanted to have a game within a game that allowed for characters to have a longer interaction with an NPC. I had hooks that were dependent upon at least one character sitting down in the public square to play that world’s version of chess. I had another idea to create an encounter which is a variation of the living chess set, except, of course, that it would be my variant set. Later on, I plan on using at least one game of chess to develop a short story.

The Game

The board is an expansion of a board I saw somewhere on chessvariants, but I cannot find it again to link to it. If you find it, please let me know. I made the board wider and longer. I also changed the color scheme to two colors instead of four.

Here is the complete board with setup:

The pieces are marked by how many spaces they can move. All pieces can move in any direction except the pieces with the number 1. They may cannot move backward (though sideways is allowed).

The J piece can jump to the next pentagon of the same color. There are no J pieces on a white pentagon.

The R piece, the Raj, is the King piece. It can move one in any direction, including ‘diagonally’.

For reasons of storyline, there is no ‘check’. If you do not know that your opponents next move will take your Raj, then pay attention next time. There is, however, a ‘checkmets’ of sorts. If you place an opponent in a checkmate position, you may say “Bandakha-roh!” after your turn.

If anyone is interested, I have SVGs of the board. I will say, though, that I am a poor artist and the board has ‘rough edges’ in some spots.

Who goes first? That is determined by consent of the players. Sometimes the negotiations to start playing can take longer than the game itself. (This element was inspired by the rough draft of the aforementioned short story.)

One day, while setting up a game, he began to play with a 10 games in 1 set that I got for Christmas one year. Turning the board to the checker/chess board, he takes the checkers pieces and four meeples and begins to place them on the board. (I say meeples because they weren’t chess pawns, they were four differently-colored pawn shaped pieces.)

At first, I do not pay a lot of attention as I am trying to setup the other board game. But after a few minutes I stop and notice that he is working at making up his own game.

A father can be so proud.

When we were done working together on the rules, he was quite happy with it. I will say that my part in it was quite small. I only added one rule, otherwise, I am simply clarifying the rules he made up and putting them together in some kind of order.

Slide n Stack

Required materials: Full set of checkers, checkerboard, 4 pawns – (ideally, 2 each that match the color of the checkers.) And something that can fit on a stack of checkers to mark “kings”. (Recommend odd colored checkers or double pawns or pennies)

At the start of play, arrange checkers on the last 2 rows of the checkerboard. Off the board behind the last row, place the remaining checkers and two pawns.

The rules are the same as checkers with a few additions:

When it is your turn, you may move a checker and stack it on a checker(or stack of checkers) one square away. You may also ‘stack’ a pawn on a checker (or stack of checkers) that is one square away. No move is permitted that allows a stack to be larger than 3 checkers + 1 pawn. Two pawns may not exist on a checker or stack of checkers.

Stacks of checkers move a number of squares equal to the number of checkers in their stack. A stack can only move in one direction.

Stacks of checkers with a pawn may move a number of squares equal to the number of checkers in their stack, but may move in any forward direction. For example, a stack of 2 checkers and a pawn may move diagonally right and then diagonally left on its turn.

Stacks cannot move and jump in the same turn.

Checkers added to a stack that promotes to a ‘king’ do not gain extra movement. They only gain the ability to move in any direction.

Kings with pawns on the stack can move in any direction, but they cannot move back into the square where they started.

Try it and see what you think.