The Russian cruiser Oleg beginning to have a bad day….
I have been fortunate in that so far the testing of the rules for my new book has been conducted using real players. This makes for a pleasant change as when I was writing the Portable Ironclads Wargame nearly all the testing was conducted on a solo basis. There is no doubt that having real players attempting to break one’s rules really helps to focus the mind!
Having said that, the last battle I fought was a solo effort and was played with a specific aim in mind that would probably not have happened using live participants!
It threw up one key issue which was easily fixed. You may recall that I had a procedure in place for determining the location of any damage points inflicted. Basically for each hit a D6 was rolled to locate where the damage was inflicted. I must admit to being a fan of such a system although I prefer to keep it limited to hull/superstructure and weapons rather than everything including the ship’s cat or the wardroom drinks cabinet. The system worked but it did mean another round dice rolling and it felt very much as though it unbalanced the flow of action. It needed changing or something.
I opted for the ‘something’ option and have dispensed with it entirely - or have I? Hit location adds to the feel of a set of naval rules and such an honourable process cannot be easily discarded - so I have not. The system I am now using is determined by the number of hits scored - essentially, the more hits scored the greater the ‘spread’ of damage. This is not new, and anyone that has played Wooden Ships and Iron Men, Air Force and many other games besides will recognise the similarity. This approach works well for ‘normal’ hits so the exciting and exotic damage is reserved for the Critical Hits table. This was the other thing that caused me a few issues - Critical Hits, ore more specifically, what triggers them. I have changed this ever so slightly based on the new damage/hit location system. In a nutshell, flotation point damage is the key - not guns etc and before anyone says ‘what about magazine hits etc?’ These are included in the Critical Hits section so fear not, if you want to see an exploding battle cruiser the potential is still there!
With these various ‘soupcon’ changes the biggest single advantage though, is that for firing guns only a single round of dice rolls per calibre firing is required. This balances out the process immeasurably and adds to the flow of the action.
I feel far happier having done this!
4 comments:
David -
This can be a vexed issue: the extent to which one adds detail to received damage. One reads of accounts in which an incoming 11-inch shell struck the forward secondary gun, killing and wounding half the crew, before penetrating the map room, passing through and exploding in the petty officers' mess. One feels the need for details, not quite so gratuitous, perhaps, but something that makes the ships 'human' somehow (I'm not sure quite what I'm expressing, here, something I think that draws one into the narrative).
For my own purposes, I find Bob's PNW card directed system, sufficient, but have added one or two little tweaks. One is that an upper hull hit just below a main (centre line) gun turret (a 6 or an 8, say) has a chance of doing nasty things to the magazine thereabouts. So, if the card drawn happens to be a spade, then the magazine is compromised. Roll a D6. A '6' = Boom. Otherwise, (roll of 1-5) the magazine is flooded betimes. The gun turret may shoot once more - the assumption being that itself is not damaged, and has the ammo available in the turret (the guns are loaded, say) - and after that fall silent.
Vessels that were notoriously given to mishaps of the fulminate kind - British battlecruisers, and French ships seem to fall victim to explosions of indeterminate causes - might fail to flood the magazines betimes on a '5' as well as a '6'.
It's one of those battle incidents that one doesn't really want happening all over the place, but which has to be a possibility of something more than negligible likelihood. In my battles, I haven't seen a magazine explosion yet, but a couple of times a main gun turret has been rendered inoperable by the magazine having to be flooded. It all adds to the tension!
Cheers,
Ion
Always useful to run a solo play test game...great stuff!
Hi Ion,
In my experience the whole critical hit thing tends to be either too much or too little. If I am honest I would err on the side of too little as the outcome is the key thing rather than the minutiae of how it arrived. Within the context of the rules I am loathe to go into too much detail as it would impact on the flow of the action.
You are right about the tension and that is something I shall look at again.
Many thanks for your thoughts on this - every little helps!
All the best,
DC
Hi Jim,
It was a lot of fun for sure and as you rightly say - always useful!
All the best,
DC
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