As promised (threatened?), here’s you chance to snag the I put together to run a Mini Six/Open D6 World War II game. They’re what you might call “barebones” if you’re feeling charitable. But if you know the system reasonably well they should make for a decent foundation for your own efforts towards such a game.
Download the November Company Notes (8802 downloads )
November Company, in my conception, is pretty much the A-Team combined with the actual early Army Rangers. The soldiers assigned to November Company are the type of guys who don’t make good soldiers, but who have skills and personalities that lend themselves to, shall we say, different uses in a theater of war.
Anyway, download ’em and do with them as you please. In addition to the very basics of character creation, you’ll find a small selection of US weapons of the period, a 1/2 page character sheet, and a sheet with vehicle information on the trusty “Rat Patrol” style jeep.
As always, I must admit that I am most decidedly not a WWII scholar – in fact, I’m little more than a tourist in the era. The material that comprises the period flavor of these notes is essentially what I was able to glean from Wikipedia, without any concern for accuracy beyond the bare minimum needs for maintaining a reasonable degree of Hollywood verisimilitude for a bunch of players who know even less about the period than I do.
That’s the long way of saying that if you see something that makes you draw your breath sharply through your teeth, blame a lifetime’s viewing of cheesy WWII representations, offer a gentle correction, and move on to something more important 🙂
I can think of only one or two of my players who would get into this, but I’m gonna snag it anyway and thank you very much.
You’re quite welcome, Doc! And you know, I didn’t figure my dudes were going to get into it as much as they did. But they did. I think the fact that we all grew up watching the Rat Patrol and similar stuff means this genre is in our blood, even if we don’t tend to focus on it. Give ’em a chance and they might just surprise you. Just be sure to keep the action going* and avoid too much “chain of command” stuff – that’s what I think bogs down military games.
* Yeah, like you of all people needs to be told that 🙂
Hey, this is flavorful stuff V.P. Where’d you get the old manual typewriter font?
How ‘durable’ were these d6 characters during actual play? Is the system gritty a la BRP or GURPS, or more mid-level, like say the HERO system?
Thanks, G-Man! I snagged the font off of DaFont.com. They have a nice selection of typewriter fonts. This one is Olivetti Type 2. I made the character sheets & such using this font because I was trying to reinforce the genre as much as I could, since my players (as noted) aren’t really any more WWII focused than I am. I also had a bunch of Andrews Sisters and Glenn Miller and such playing in the background over some kinda tinny speakers just to further the mood. Whatever it takes, baby!
These guys were pretty tough, though it was much more the “not getting hit” than it was the “ha! I eat .50 bullets for breakfast, Frtiz, so your Schmeisser rounds mean nothing to me!” sort of tough. It’s not listed in the PDF, but I had everyone make Might/Stamina rolls every time they were hit with gunshots (target number = damage taken) to avoid going into shock. For the NPCs and mook-types, failure meant they were out of the fight for good. For the PCs, it just cost them 1d3 rounds of action. Got to keep the heroes in the game long enough to see if they make it, after all!
Speaking of keeping the players alive, I upped the Body Points a tad by having BP = 20 + Might X4 (as opposed to X3, as listed in the Mini Six rules). It didn’t make a huge difference, but it was something.
In general, I’d put Mini Six as less lethal than BRP but moreso than HERO. But you could pretty easily make it extra gritty or way less gritty depending on your needs.
Nice and simple, just enough to set the tone for a game. I’ve been wondering about Mini Six, this looks like something that would be fun to try out. Perfect for a bizarre WWII story a la Kelly’s Heroes or Inglorious Basterds.
Glad you dig it, GMonk! Those are precisely the kinds of things I had in mind when I decided I wanted to pursue this particular genre. And Mini Six is downright awesome – so don’t hesitate to give it a shot. You’ll find some good stuff in the freely available Open D6 stuff as well – especially D6 Adventure. Rock on!
My dad was a B-17 navigator during the big WWII (I’m not *that* old–he had about twenty years on my mom), and I can tell you your music selection is definitely spot on. He’d want Benny Goodman on that list, too!
I like your ‘shock’ mechanic. Getting hit by rounds has a psychological effect that players blithely ignore unless there’s some kind of rule emulating it.
I think the ‘dodge’ mechanism in d6 is more forgiving than either BRP or GRPS, but I suppose that would depend on whether you use the quickie static value or the active.
Props to your pops! And there was definitely plenty of Benny Goodman in the mix. Along with Kay Kyser, Tommy Dorsey, and other good stuff. It definitely seemed to help with the immersion.
Yeah, I made up the shock mechanic in part to keep some grit in the game even though I was gunning for folks to survive as much/long as possible. It worked well enough.
The “dodge” mechanic is pretty smooth – especially the Mini Six “static dodge.” Much more HERO like. And it gets modified pretty seriously by range, making it much more likely that the players just won’t get hit. At least not by mooks.
Part of why I went with Mini Six over BRP for this particular game was the speed of character creation. This Thanksgiving group really only gets together this one time every year due to folks living in different cities and such. So something that wouldn’t take up much of our limited time (or require a bunch of internet-based hand-holding for the weeks leading up to the game) was needed. Add to that the ability to replace characters easily if they died or got knocked out and you’ve got why I went the route I did. I think Mini Six/Open D6 is just about perfect for pickup gaming and the like. It’s not *so* rules light that it fails to resonate with the game-y types.
Sounds like this would be cool fun.
One minor correction (for complete historical accuracy): The M1 Carbine used a 15 round magazine in WWII.
Also, you might want to add the Tommy Gun to the list as it was heavily used in WWII and, to me, it is cooler looking than the Grease Gun.
Thanks, Narmer. And thanks also for the corrections. I started out with the Tommy Gun (which does indeed look cooler) but I opted to go with the greasegun because (of all things) the army men I had to use as minis for the game were carrying greaseguns. And while it might not be 100% accurate, for game purposes I think one could pretty easily sub out the Thompson and the greasegun as desired. Still, adding it in would be good. And correcting the round info on the M1 carbine is definitely something I’ll want to fix.
Rock on, amigo!