Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Some Thoughts on My Rules --

Over the past few months I have been particularly enjoying Ross Macfarlane's discussion of rules on his "Battle Game of the Month" blog. He, along with Bob Cordery's "Wargaming Miscellany" blog, have had me thinking about my "Tricorne Wars" rules.

When I first wrote them one of my goals was to replicate the steadfastness of line infantry and the slow wearing down of their resolve . . . and I feel that in a way I succeeded in doing so.

The problem is that that also tended to slow up games. Units took hits and then rallied in place too often. Ross and Bob have me re-thinking that approach. I need to keep in mind the fact that I'm writing "game rules" not "copying history".

While I'm not quite sure just how I want to deal with this, I do know that I want to. Mind you there are lots of parts of my rules that I really like . . . but they do need some work in light of my recent convictions.

Finally, if you have not yet read Ross Macfarlane's most recent reworking of his "Hearts of Tin" rules, I certainly suggest that you give them a read. They were primarily written for the 19th century but will flex a bit on either end of that.

-- Jeff

2 comments:

Prince Lupus said...

Thanks for the link Jeff. I too have been tinkering with my Charge based rules which, in my opinion, are too fast in wearing down a unit. I would also like a morale check or two.

Ross Mac rmacfa@gmail.com said...

The tricky thing to me is that history includes both examples of firefights that were over quickly with one side routed and others that dragged on. I'm still struggling to get that balance right.

You can do that with morale tests + shooting but the beauty of a system like Charge! is that it rolls it all together into 1 set of die rolls. You just look at the end result, not how you got there. I've seen very few rules that so easily allow the Guards confrontation at Fontenoy or Quebec to come off as they did.