Sharp(ish) Katanas

I had Weirdy-Beardy and Big Pat over last night to inflict some fuzzy rule ideas on them.

The game was mostly straight up Sharp Practice with some modifications to shooting from the Tenka Fubu blog here. I also added in an Armour Save to shooting hits, but forgot to give teppos better armour penetration and forgot to use the Armour Saves in hand to hand. ho hum....

A Random Event: the hatamoto-gashira has a broken sandal and suffers a -1 to his movement dice.

Deployment Point and some Support Options

Cavalry on a flanking move from a Secondary Deployment Point

Weirdy-Beardy's sohei monks (center of picture) are out of the box after many years of silent meditation

Sohei with bows covering Weirdy-Beardy's Secondary Deployment Point

Heavy cavalry vs light cavalry. Ouch. Although the bushi with yumi (horse archer samurai) managed to take 4 of the bushi with yari (samurai with spears) with them,

Hatamoto clear archers out of woods

Fight to the death! Samurai Big Man and last sohei archer kill each other.

Remains of the Daimyo's cavalry wipe out a shattered group of sohei, dropping the Ikko-ikki Force Morale to 0.

Big Pat had fun because he won. His die rolling is notoriously bad, so he was happy for a change. Weirdy-Beardy started out badly and struggled to recover; his cards weren't coming up, his initial deployment off his DP was a traffic jam,  it seemed he couldn't roll any 5s or 6s to save his life. He did mangle Pat's ashigaru-yari, but at a heavy cost and it was too little too late.

So I should probably next go back to Seven Spears and see about importing the things I like from Sharp Practice; Deployment Points, moveable DPs, Support Options. I'm still internally debating whether the Command Cards in Sharp Practice are "better" or "worse" than the Fate Cards from Dux Britannarium/Seven Spears. I like the Random Events in SP, but how to reproduce that in Seven Spears? I would also like nobori (those big banners that an awful lot of man power was assigned to) to actually mean something for game play.