Steam Transformers via GASLIGHT

Easter brought the expected excesses of round chocolate goodness entering the Bowman household... along with other gifts including a Transformers game for No.1 son, on his Nintendo...

Well after having his fill of electronic fun, he asked if we could play Transformers, with his toy robots and the GASLIGHT rules.

I had told him many months ago when I was ordering this rules set just what sort of things we might be able to do with it, and I figured giant robots should work just fine...

The only thing with GASLIGHT (if you don't already know) is that whilst it can handle a lot of 'periods' and items, for the most part you have to make up all the stats for vehicles, weapons, personnel etc yourself before the game. Whilst a little lengthy it is fairly easy to do from the charts provided.
So we set to, rolling away...

I was the bad guys, predictably, so picked 6 small robots of varying origin. These were rated as Veterans for Shoot & Scuffle rolls.
After this they got rolls for speed , save , spin and weapons from the various charts. The only thing I couldn't find were 'vehicle melee weapons'. So I just made them 0 range and rolled for SRM (save roll modifier).

Chris rolled up three good guys, one each of Leader, Adventurer and Hero (based on the robots size), for their Shoot and Scuffle values, and then again rolled up various weapons and vehicle stats.

Here's a pic from mid point of game where we stopped for a break... as you can see we are clearly playing in a barren landscape devoid of cover... AKA the lounge floor ;-)

Battle for the lounge floor - the White Raptor charges Bumblebee!

The game proved rather fun I have to say, with Start up rolls, sustain rolls and frequent rolls to hit and their resulting save rolls and damage chart references.

The only issue we had was that vehicles in this game are clearly meant to have a crew, as most of the 'killing effects' upon the vehicles from the chart, were actually an effect of crews being killed. Since our robots were sentient and didn't have 'crews', after some thought we instead gave them 'virtual crews' in the form of 'life points' or 'hit points'... once they were gone, you were dead.

We enjoyed our little game, though Chris got a little tired of the requirement for Start up and Sustain (though I rather liked it). Obviously he was thinking dynamic futuristic robot aliens and I was thinking Steam engines... ;-)

Next time he wants to bring a certain "Optimus", with increased firepower and an 'always on button'...

Some other things that cropped up we weren't sure about:

If a robot failed its sustain roll, and was then charged by an attacker in the scuffle phase the attacker would get one automatic hit. This seemed logical to us?

Also once engaged in melee, neither combatant could be targeted in shooting, for fear of hitting your own guy! (possible exemption from this for the bad guys).

Having played about with the rules this way I'm keen to give them a go with 'proper' troops and steam vehicles...