Campaign

The starting positions of the first contestants.

This month saw my #1 son and I start an on-going campaign for gladiatorial combat.
We each "diced-up" the stats for five gladiators that ranged from volunteer Senators to criminals condemned to the arena.  Once their stats were known we allocated them to generic  roles of a 'light', two "mediums", a "heavy" and a "retiarius". - after they had fought once ib their 'generic' mode they could specialize into a specific  role after they had fought once in the arena.

Maneuverings leads to some interesting situations.

I had hoped for at least four participants but the two of us went ahead anyway. In my campaign, the number of ludi (read players) determines the prize money to be paid out to winning gladiators in addition to the fees paid for gladiators attending. As there were only the two of us he winning gladiators were paid 125 sesterces and another 200 sesterces were paid to the ludi for each participating gladiator, Has we had more players the fees would have been the same but the prize money increases up to a maximum of 1000 sesterces per winning gladiator.

The inevitable conclusion.

 The campaign is all about cash, with each player trying to accumulate the most cash .
To avoid the obvious problem of those winning combats accumulating so much wealth that they can outbid others at the auctions for new gladiators I've set the limit of how much cash can be held by each player's ludus at 2000s) and anything in excess of the 2000 that is gained goes into an untouchable  'deposit' account. This latter account is the milestone by which we determine 'winning' the campaign.
The rules do allow for the individual gladiators to accumulate "experience" (i.e. Experience points or XP) so that they can slowly get better statistics.

The start positions of the second bout

The stats that are used are Training, Strength, Agility, Constitution and Wounds. The number of combat factors (the points we use for attacks) is calculated from the addition of the training, strength and agility factors. Training factors range from 7 to 13 with an average of 9; Strength from -3 (yes it's a minus) to 5, average of 1; Agility from -3 to 4, av. 0; Constitution 1 to6, av.3; Wounds 8 to 15, av. 10.

And another one bites the dust...erm sand

One of the 'newer' ideas was to add in social origins to character generation, (as mentioned above), which not only gives a little more 'colour' and background to our gladiators, but also allows adds minor adjustments to a few of the stats. For example a gladiator that was a soldier has a training adjustment of +2, whilst a criminal has a -1 adjustment to his constitution stat.
There is also a "Prestige" (popularity) statistic that we have adopted, that gives a bonus in both combat factors and when appealing for a missus.


So that's it for this time, my campaign is off and running and in case you're wondering, I did win two very closely fought fights, the first by manoeuvre and the second by very good dice rolling !