-ROCKETMAN III- Concluding thoughts.

RM3 was designed with two thoughts in mind. The first was to accomidate my friends desire to have a game based around Bolsheviks, and the second was to trial run our home grown skirmish rules' with heavier weapons than one might normally expect in a pulp literature based campaign. (Its highly annoying that Tarantino stole the phrase pulp fiction). The latter has led to a revamping of the rules to address many of the flaws the games exposed, and hopefully these new rules, which span from the Boer war to circa 1939, will give us more flexibility and ease of flow in subsequent games.

I was quite pleased with RM3, even though I'd been horribly distracted by EVE in the middle of my preperations and many of the models I'd intended to build, never got built. I was lucky to have painted the bulk of my figures prior to discovering EVE or else the games would have been played with unpainted figures, and thats always aesthetically displeasing. I'm hoping the next RM campaign will not suffer my EVE addiction!

The other three players appeared to have a good time and were more at ease with the genre now. Certain characters have begun to take on a life of their own (Mitchell and George in particular) and I may have to include them both in the next campaign to capitalize on this. Originally I was not going to do this, but looking back at Mitchell's popularity, I think I have to.

When I planned the games, Tracey (player 2) seemed to be the least likely player to succeed. This may have been my own sexist assumption or it may have been something less simple, but for what ever reason I assumed this, I quickly found myself mistaken. I'd seen Oleg (player 3) and Palle (player 1) as being the more dangerous players, and I made Palle slightly weaker to compensate. Usually I strive for a neutral balance, but given the interests of the players, I made assumptions which reality didn't bear. Tracey was by far and away the most effective player, using her superiority in numbers to full effect and giving Oleg and I a hard time in all but the first game.
For my own part, I think I did fairly well. I'd given myself pretty weak forces and they dropped like flies as a consequence. I enjoyed using the light tank in chapters 3 and 4, even though it proved horribly ineffective. I failed to develop my officer, Olga as a character, mostly because I hadn't really given her much thought. She was a 'Chinese Helga clone', and as such had no 'personality' at all. Her only skill was hand to hand, and that never got used until the last five minutes of the last game where she took on Mitchell and got decked. Game Over.

I've already begun RM4 and I have the whole scenario worked out. All I have to do now is prepare the models and write up the stats and if the wind holds fair, we may play thenext campain before christmas...