i.e. I forgot some interesting stuff.
Doors
The board itself was always intended for Space Hulk (best game ever created) which means of course it has lots of doors built in or at least into the rooms anyway - corridor doors are a tedious design problem to describe another time.
As a baseline I worked with the idea that doors could open or close for 1 point of Movement, i.e. your basic action point conversion. That's obviously clumsy bookkeeping and even the minor mental arithmetic is a cost so there has to be a balancing game benefit as there is in Space Hulk where LoS is a critical balancing mechanic. So it turned into automatically opening and closing for anyone standing in an adjacent space. But I kept thinking about the cost/benefit. Even free doors have a cost of physically needing to move the thing, but moreover this game was built for aggression and blocking LoS is inherently defensive. It seemed like there wasn't a good reason to have doors at all, so sacred cows got killed - no doors.
Slightly annoying to have spent the time painting them really.
Teleports
Honestly this was very much a top-down design. Can't play a Doom game or any FPS without teleport effects.
Didn't change one whit from the obvious - player goes in, player comes out. Some subtle things though - shooting through teleports just raises too many problems related to angles and visibility and what-not, and I can't recall an FPS where that happened so it's easy just to say no. As physical pieces a teleport piece takes up a space, not the edge of a space, so it can't be occupied, which means it needs a point of move to enter and exit. That sometimes costs a player a point of movement. Could leave them in limbo between actions but that's more powerful than intended.
Finally, in FPS's teleports tend to be paired and are often one-way only. While that's interesting in all kinds of level-design ways, I valued the ability of teleport's to basically fold the map like cluedo more and it broke the Simple and Fast rules to try and pair them in any way. So they were just anywhere to anywhere.
Armour
FPS's have approached armour in a variety of ways. The simple old-school version was it was effectively just extra health. That mutated into something of a damage reduction modifier, but again depleted and functioning much like extra health but with more maths involved. Games like Halo (I think it was first to this?) made it more of a resource in it's own right which created a pacing limitation on a player (not inherently a bad thing).
Extra health was problematic for a game built on life = hand size. I could have buffed a player's hand with non-action armour cards to be discarded on damage first, which works but just felt bland (and would require a lot more cards printing than I wanted).
Regenerating shields a la Halo seemed too powerful and identified to me the tension between defensive cosntructs vs a game which wanted players to die as frequently as possible. Needing armour to exist in the game because I wanted some defensive mechanics and because it does exist in FPS's I went with the damage modifier but I knew going into Salute it was a compromise and not what I needed it to be.
Range
Cost/benefit wise counting spaces (or measuring in most wargames) is another annoying and jarring event, which is somewhat counter-reality in most scenarios - real world weapons generally having much longer effective ranges than depicted in wargame rules. But the benefit is a huge amount of variety/colour and the strategic decisions it creates. Games with infinite ranges tend to be dominated by firearms and need for scenery (though this is not inherently a bad thing by any means).
So that's what I went with here as well, a base range of 10 for almost everything with a few weapons (e.g. shotgun) having a reduced range.
Things That Didn't Make It
I spent quite a bit of time just brainstorming anything connected to the FPS experience and most of it made it in, but there's some stuff that I just couldn't make work... or didn't want to.
An example of the former was rocket-jumping. A pretty unique feature of FPS's since Quake introduced true 3D it doesn't work for me for much the same reason it didn't for Doom - despite the existence of a third dimension I can't really exploit a z-axis of movement as very few 28mm miniatures can jump. They can't arc through the air, and I can't really place ledges and floating things that rocket jumping was invented to reach. Ok partially invented for; but speeding up movement slightly was also fairly marginal.
An example of the latter was tea-bagging.
Definitely (unfortunately) characteristic of FPS's, I hovered on this for a while. Mechanically this would be some sort of post-kill action that diminished the victim i.e. the flavour is it tilted them. For example respawn with one fewer card, something like that. No, the problem here is clearly not could but should.
Part of me felt like if it's part of the FPS experience then it needs to be part of the 3PS experience, and part of me felt like making moral censorship judgements was a slippery slope in a game built on killing each other. But then I considered: a). it's always been a stupid homophobic thing b). I don't think parent + kid punter's would take kindly to it, and c). as an action the intent is to insult.
So in the end that was simple. It's 2019, it's not OK, and it's my damn game so I left it out.
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