"What is the best "critical hit" cascade you have had?" Topic

"Best" as in "most fun". Or however you want to define it! Hey, it's YOUR memories!

We were playing a GASLIGHT game, in the usual place. Somewhere in Canada, where the stubborn Canadians were objecting to the Americans attempt at acquiring valuable phinnertite mines through eminent domain.

7th VA Cav and I were both using Star Wars AT-AT walkers, but in different scales.
Mine was the one about 8" tall. I decided to make him a Spar Torpedo lancer. OK, OK. Add a Gatling gun for self defence, but he is a LANCER! So, I got a bunch of brass rod and tubing and made a telescoping torpdo lance. Visits to jewelry and hardware counters gave me the swivel mounts and torpedo warhead.
Roger had the much larger Action Figure model, which he loaded down with cannon.

So, the battle came. After a few fails of START and SUSTAIN, I finally got up some steam and charged. Before the game, we agreed that both the driver AND the spar torpedo man had to pass their SHOOT rolls. This made for a LOT of crew shifting to get the right guys in place. Ths skill and training paid off, and the torpedo blew out the front right knee of the giant AT-AT walker. In a cascade of critical hits (and die rolls), it collapsed. Guess where. Yup, right on top of MY AT-AT walker. David slew Goliath, but Goliath fell on top of David.
Maybe I should have used the spar torpedo as a steam staff sling instead of a lance, but then I would not have had a Prussian FPW lancer figure peering out the turret. (Foreign "advisors" have had a field day advising both the Yanks and Canucks.)

I much prefer this result to spending 10 minutes blowing up the paint locker, or ruining the Admiral's lounge.

Playing GW's old Space Fleet with my wife years ago.

She zoomed her little Cobra DD:

up on my Dominator BB:

She fired her 1d6 Popgun "6". Penetrates shields automatically for a free critical hit. Rolls critical 1d6 "6" for a Reactor hit. Rolls 1d6 for the amount of damage caused by the reactor hit "6".

"Boom".

LOl I am still tickled by it!

Ask Rimmer about his Risk game…

Only Warlock I had the same thing happen in a BFG game, although it was cruiser doing it on a cruiser. 6->6->6->double 6 Boom!

D&D Home rules.
Need to hit the monster: 5%
Only way to hope for enough damage was a "critical hit": 5%
Only way to kill it was maximum damage: 6

0.05 * 0.05 * 0.16 = 0.0004. or 0.04% Kill

OR
Only way to miss the unsuspecting sentry with both shots is to roll 100 with both shots.

0.01 * 0.01 = 0.0001 or 0.01%

Sort of the reverse, actually, in an early Traveller game. My comrades and I were making a, uhm, "high velocity strategic withdrawal" from a certain planet where local law enforcement had come up with a clearly egregious and exaggerated discrepancy claim against our import/export business (very Firefly in nature), and the planetary orbital patrol was firing on our innocent yet surprisingly well-armed merchant craft. Hit after hit after hit pummelled us, yet never once did those lousy copper… that is, unfortunately misinformed yet zealous law enforcement agents… never once did they hit a critical system— they just kept whacking our (empty) cargo hold. We reached jump distance shot full of more holes than the fishnet stockings of a Mos Eisley dancing girl, but with our ship's systems completely intact. Too bad the hold repairs ate up the profits from the job…

In battletech we had a home rule where mechs receiving enough damage to the engine caused the engine to blow sometimes. This was basically a small nuclear exlposion.

The mechs with the extra light engines were particularly vulnerable if I remember correctly. The explosion was in proportion to the size of the mech.

I don't remember the types of the mechs but each side had about a dozen in lances of four with roughly one small one, two mediums and a big one per lance and each lance being run by one player.

There was a hill line that allowed their center and right lances to converge on our left lance. And we had a tough time getting over the hill in force.

Ben was getting whacked over there on the left but he managed to get a critical hit with his gauss rifle on the center lances big mech, it caused the engine to explode after a few die rolls and the ensuing explosion took out the light mech in that lance, damaged the other two medium mechs in that lance and ripped an arm off of the other heavy mech in the other lance.

Most of the damage was to the rear of the two medium mechs and our center lance managed to get down to them soon after to take advantage of that.

We would have gotten our pants beat off of us if it weren't for that crit.

Another good one was in a game of D&D. Our party was fighting some demon and it turned people into ghouls or some such thing. The demon had left a bunch of ghouls to get us and we took forever getting through them because we kept failing our saves vs. paralysis and even though they were only doing 1-2 pts of damage we were seriously in danger of all dying in this minor encounter.

When we got to the demon itself my Paladin managed a critical hit in the 2nd round of combat that basically eviscerated the damned thing and then we put it down in the 3rd turn easily enough. I think the combat with the ghouls lasted something like 15 turns.

Right after that we fought a dragon and were using Wild Magic, Nahal's reckless dweomer was cast turning the dragon ethereal right after it squished my Paladin and was about to breath on the rest of the party.

It couldn't do anything like that but we were able to zap it with a lightning rod we had a few times. It flew away and hid in a lake where we chased it and managed to kill it with another zap of the lightning rod.

Not exactly a critical hit on that last story but a pretty amazing roll anyway.

28mm sci-fi home rules on a 6' x 8' table.

Turn 1, first action of the defender's player turn. My son, Henry, happened to deploy a hidden AT team in LOS of a tank approaching from the far end of the table. The team is armed with a sci-fi version of the Javelin…

The guy controlling the target tank is a former M1 tank platoon commander.

Henry rolls to hit using top attack mode…locked and on target!

Opponent fails point defense system roll. Doh!

Shot penetrates the top armor! Woohoo!

Critical hit roll…EXPLOSION, target destroyed!

Fortunately the attackers had another tank and some IFVs and the opponent was a good sport. He said, "Yeah, that **** happens on the battlefield."

To this day Henry remembers that shot.

*****

My older son once fired his sci-fi ATRL at a lone NCO at extreme range. This being sci-fi he had two modes to chose from…blast or AP. He chose AP even though blast would give a far better chance to hit. The lone NCO figure was controlled by another dad.

Despite the odds my son, Edward, managed to hit the NCO. Of course, nothing was left.

Asked why he chose AP mode he replied, "It would make for a better story".

Playing the original Adeptus Titanicus. My opponent rolled up and opened fire with a Plasma cannon on Sustain (in which you keep rolling hits again until a miss is rolled). Two dozen hits *in a row* later, my mighty Warlock Titan was not even a slag heap. Four void shields and the maximum of seven internals could not withstand twice that many hits from the opening gun.

Unloaded small arms burst on enemy target at close range.
20D6, needed 3+ to hit.
Missed with every damned shot.
He fires back, 1D6 needing a 6 and got me….

D&D game – Very FIRST combat, very FIRST roll of the entire campaign the wife roles a 1 to hit. We were using crit hit and fumble charts. She rolls a result of hit friend, the GM being nice says roll to hit (figuring she would miss), nope a natural 20. Off to the crit hit chart – 00 – off goes the head.

The GM was a nice guy and let us fix it (duct tape does wonders right?), since it was the very first fight.

Dan and I had been painting up pulp action figures for a while, and decided to put on a game using Legends of the Old West, with house rules made up on the fly for anything new (like Tommy guns). My Chinese Tong were busy loading up a truck with archaeological treasures when a group of rocketmen flew in, in close formation. Oh, they looked pretty, so naturally Wun Hung Lo pointed his chopper into the sky and let loose – shooting at long range at a moving target, he got lucky and picked off the lead rocketman. But what was the effect of the hit? Arbitrary ruling was 1-4, hit the man, 5-6 the rocket pack. He hit the pack. Effect? 1-2 no effect, 3-5 engine stops, 6 big explosion. Naturally, he got the explosion. What next? Anyone within 2" check for shrapnel. In the end, Wun Hung Lo's burst from his SMG took out the lead rocketman, and the resulting explosion took out two more fliers, and the remaining two fliers failed morale and flew to safety. Dan was a bit grumpy after that, for some reason…

ASL – ad a game that lasted half a turn when a single mg got rate over and over. Ended up killing the entire enemy force with a single mg in that first fire phase. Had the reverse happen to me once.

Epic 40K. My Eldar opponent had two Scorpion heavy gravs and a Cobra heavy grav. My Warlord titan fired it's volcano cannon and hit the first Scorpion grav which promptly blew up due to some 6's on the dice. Resulting explosion caught the second Scorpion in the blast radius and caused him to go BOOM due to more 6's on the dice. That explosion caught the Cobra in it's blast radius but only caused one damage point. Can't win 'em all I guess.:)

Johnny Reb game, We had two reb cavarly regiments holding a crossroads, waiting for reinforcements to show up. At the far end of the table (about 3-4 feet away) all of the Union infantry in the world starts showing up. marching down the road in column towards us.

Not knowing what else to do I remount my cavalry regiment and looking at my fellow reb say, See you later. I charge down the road and after much rolling of dice I end up scattering every Union infantry regiment off of the road in disorder.

My regiment, now also in disorder, is now sitting at the far end of the table, where the Yankees came in. Somehow I am able to make it back to the crossroads without having lost a man.

It was awesome.

I played a game of WRG 7th years ago where I force marched my Irreg A foot with 2hand swords to a hill in the middle of the table only to find that my opponent had also force marched a cohort of Praetorian Legionnairs complete with eagle. They were right at the edge of the hill when I charged up. I rolled a +4 to max the chart and he followed up with a -2 and routed losing the eagle. By the time morale checks were done half the army was either shaken or routing and he conceded the game without even finishing the first turn.

I took out a Churchill with an 81mm mortar once, but I saw a guy take out 4 ammo trucks with a single shot once – each truck's explosion ignited the next truck in line. This was all playing ASL.

Like Pictors Studio, BattleTech first came to mind.

In the game, Mecha heads have 9 points of armor befroe they begin to take meaningful damage. There is a 1-in-36 chance on a given shot to hit the head. Two of the fun weapons in the game (Particle Projection Cannon and Autocannon-10) each inflict 10 points of damage. The 10th point of damage has a 40% of doing a critical. If it does a critical, there is a 1-in-6 chance it destroys the cockpit.

Not only does it disable the enemy and kill his pilot, but also the mecha is 90% intact and can be sold/repaired for a song.

Never gets old. In 20+ years of play, I've only done it a handful of times.

Anti-critical: Pirates of the Spanish Main, with the old rules where a Firepot (burning mast) spreads to another mast on a roll of 1-3, or gets extinguished on a roll of 6. My three-masted ship (USS Overton), which was the biggest ship I had left, got a Firepot on the mizzenmast, which quickly spread to the mainmast.

On the next turn, I rolled a 6 to put out the fire on the mizzenmast, then rolled again for the mainmast fire. The die was going to come up 1, but it slid off the raised gaming surface (painted cork tiles) onto the table, tumbled, and came up 6. All fires out, at 36:1 odds.

My ship ran home for quick repairs, then came out fighting and sank two enemy ships for the win. Read the whole battle report at link

A fair few from DnD, one very similar to Martin. The dwarf charged across the stream to attack the bandits. I gave him cover, by loosing some arrows, the very 1st was a fumble, hit friend, instant death, arrow straight through the heart. We agreed to restart after the dwarf character had ripped up his character sheet in frustration.
The best I ever got was 5 20s in a row from 3 bog-standard orcs causing 2 critical hits on turn one on the 7th level dwarf – one broken arm, broken ribs & concussion and out of the game for 6 months recovering – you should have heard the complaints from the dwarf player.
Fumbles have caused more hilarity than anything else. One of the worst was my ace pilot in Space Opera, flying in with the marine reinforcements, rolled the worse mishaps possible. The entire craft was flooded with radiation, the marines all died, and my pilot spent the remainder of the game dying of rad sickness. The party meanwhile had a re-enactment of "Aliens" when the dropship crash.

Very first WWII naval surface game I played, a hypothetical BB vs. BB night action involving the USN and IJN in early 1944.

I was given the West Virginia, and after staying in line ahead like a good captain, asked the "admiral" if I could take a ranging shot (no pre-measuring PLEASE!). He says sure, why not (humoring the youngster), so I measure out to extreme range for a full 16" broadside, and HIJMS Nagato (IIRC) is *just* within range.

I open up, with a 4% chance to hit. I rolled a 02 on percentiles. I then proceeded to a) hit with four shells; b) hit his turret; c) *penetrate* his turret; and d) get a critical hit by rolling a 03 on a 5% chance that blew his ship in half…all on the first turn.

The admiral's response was, "Signal WeeVee 'Splice The Main Brace'".

Not exactly a critical hit, but in the spirit.

Empire game with the Spanish assaulting a crack French division. I'd labored all game to wear him down without breaking myself and now had committed my final reserve, the Spanish guards, alongside a division that had been fighting.

I've got him, the French are beaten. All I have to do is finish him off and I can claim that rarest of things, a pure Spanish victory.

On a fluke dice roll I fail a gun battery morale test and pass the final initiative in the hour. No worries, the next hour he is hosed. But… in Empire you have to take a maneuver element determiniation check if you have suffered enough losses. So the guy next to me rolls for the division he commands. And they rout. The division behind me, seeing this also routs on a less than 5% chance. My guards are higher morale so don't have to check, but now I have an average sized brigade against a big division.

I still look back upon it as one of my most satisfying games ever. And this was the same battle where my DUB Spanish cavalry refused to charge exhausted Cuirassiers from behind. I guess they thought it unsporting.

Many years ago, I played a Nappies game where my Hussars charged my opponent's infantry anchoring his flank in some woods. I was very new to Napoleonics at the time.

Anyway, my opponent snickered a lot, joked to his friends, etc… Not very sporting, I thought, so I was immensely satisfied when my Hussars were routed…ending even with his line; whereupon they promptly rallied, turned to face his line's flank, and promptly chewed through three or four units in quick succession, destroying his command.

Smoke on the water. In the space two turns CSS Stonewall sliced through USS Niagara and then USS Sacramento. Not rammed-sliced through.

I was solo-playtesting Red Chicken Rising (space battle), with two small squadrons each led by a heavy cruiser. The Red heavy fired on its Blue counterpart, hit it, penetrated shields, scored a critical, got a bridge hit, and rolled max for casualties… which happened to be the flagship's entire crew. One heavy cruiser gone, from one hit. Improbable.

A few days later, I tried another solo playtest, and the exact same thing happened again – the Blue heavy cruiser was taken out by a single hit to the bridge. I don't remember the exact odds of this happening, but I remember they were up in five digits. Now that was inconceivable!

Playing a WW2 naval game in the Pacific. One of my Fletchers, mauled in an action with some Japanese destroyers, comes out of a fog bank almost in spitting distance of Yamato. The rules allowed gunfire before torpedo launches. Gunnery is simultaneous. I shoot, he shoots. My Fletcher is blown out of the water. My paltry single 5" hits aft. It starts a minor fire, but that's hardly a problem, is it? Unless of course the Japanese player consistently fails to make ANY damage control rolls, but DOES make regular "fire escalates" rolls which, after 12 hours of "real" time, has the fire reach the aft 18" magazines which detonate, sinking the ship :)

We were trying out a game of Alzo Zero. The German was defending and I was trying a flanking move with my Americans The Germans were well-positioned to receive my attack. I started to fire at the Germans with my mortar and one of the shells misses, scatters and lands in the middle of a squad of Germans wiping it out. The German player moves another squad to reinforce that position and finds himself right in the sights of a .30 cal, his squad took heavy damage and was pinned. I target the german tripod mounted MG with my mortar, and miss again, it scatters and lands in the middle of the enemy squad, killing the rest of the squad and some of the few who survived the first mortar shell. By the next turn my two squads of US infantry burst forward, pinning down the German MG and causing some casualties to the rest of the last German squad which promptly surrendered.

We were trying out some naval rules. I had the Yamato and my opponent had one of the Nelsons with some extra support. First turn my opponent hits, critical, takes out my fire control. I spent the rest of the game shooting blind, hitting nothing.

I played Battletech weekly for about 8 years, enough so that weird stuff happens regularly. Best one:

Running an assault Mech, defending behind a wall. In the initial, long range assault from a Clan star, got hit for just enough damage to force a skill check to remain standing. The final hit was a small hit to the head (1:6 chance, old-school rules), knocking the pilot unconscious (1:36 chance), the damage from the resulting fall breaching the armor (1:36 chance), taking 2 criticals (1:6 chance) and destroying the gyro (under 1:6 chance). Sure the mechwarrior wakes up from his daze next turn, but it now permanently on the ground, behind the wall and out of the game – the early, freakish loss of firepower pretty much dooming the defending units.

In a F&IW game using The Sword in the Forest variant of TSATF, one player fired his cannon at a unit of French infantry. He got five hits so as game master I draw 5 hit cards – a deuce and four aces! Each ace hits a leader in the arc of fire – the senior leader (the enemy player's figure), the French unit leader, the French unit sergeant, and the senior Indian leader (who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time). That French player's forces never recovered from those leader hits.

Jim

Falklands Conflict.

An Argentine Skyhawk pilot goes nose-to-nose with an all-aspect, Aim-9 carrying Sea Harrier, and despite the GM's strong recommendations to evade, due to the poor probability of survival, if he decides to continue on as planned, he decides to make make a guns attack on the British aircraft.

The Skyhawk is hit, and damaged by the Sidewinder missile, but the aircraft is still flyable.

The SHAR is damaged in the attack, and needs to roll on the additional damage table. He does, and gets the Golden BB, since the gunfire hits the cockpit of the British fighter, killing its pilot instantly.

The Argentine pilot manages to limp his aircraft home, and to land safely, and is treated to a hero's welcome. There is much rejoicing in the streets of Argentina that night.

One of the few positive successes in an otherwise dismal campaign to take over the islands.

I'll never forget this one. I was running D6 Star Wars RPG. First sessions of the campaign, and the pilotm who has 5d6 in piloting & navigation rolls 5 1s on his hyperspace navigation roll! They come out of hyperspace on a collision course with an asteroid or some such. I ask him to make a piloting roll…and he rolls 5 1s! By all rights the ship should have slammed into the space rock killing all of the players. I just didn't have it in me to restart the campaign so I had the ship glance the rock and be badly damaged.

Playing a Napoleonics game in the late 70s. I was the Russian commander on the right flank. All my infantry had run away or trying to rally behind a battery of heavy guns. In desperation I throw a lone Cossack unit against the French flank.

The French forms square with ease while laughing at the thought of a Cossack attacking line infantry in square. I need to roll snake eyes for the Cossacks to even attempt a charge. Passes the charge roll and moves into contact. Now I need to roll a 12 to break the square. 12 comes up on the roll and the Cossacks have broken the square.

Now the impossable happens. The Cossacks have a breakthrough/pursuit move. They run into another French square and thanks to impossible rolls breaks another square. Another breakthrough move and they run into another square. Impossible rolls again and another French square breaks. The leading French brigade breaks and runs away after losing 3 battalions.

The exhausted Cossacks are left alone on the field watching a French brigade running away. While the next brigade quickly forms square in fear of these light horsemen, making a nice target for the heavy field guns. Flank is saved. Russians reinforcements arrive now thanks to the time gained by the cossacks.

I have never rolled that good again. I usually am the one that rolls the 1 when anything but a one is what is needed.

I talked a friend who was unfamiliar with medievals into playing as my sub-commander in a tournament game.
First turn I approached a wood with a unit of light cavalry. Out jumps an ambush by some low quality foot troops.
While light cav can always run from a fight in this case I had to test for the surprise. I rolled the mill around in disorder result which prevented me from running away immediately.
My light cav then routed in the resulting combat causing a cascade of morale failures that broke my army. Game over first turn.
Believe it or not my friend did turn into an entusiastic medieval gamer.

back in the 1980s,I used to run a Hydran palladin warship in SFB tournaments. With the gatling phasers in an overrun situation, the battle was over in a hurry. This happened several times.

I umpired a Napoleonic game of Bailen using Le Feu Sacre.

The experienced French player was dissecting the Spanish army. An E-class volunteer infantry unit managed to get on the flank of a French division. The French were in a checkerboard of attack columns, too closely packed as it turned out.

The volunteers charged one battalion in the flank, got a high roll and routed it. This battalion stampeded into another and routed it. The panic cascaded until 4 French battalions were in flight. Unfortunately for the volunteers, a fifth French unit escaped and formed line. The volunteers were repulsed after a nasty close range firefight. They fell back right in front of a just-unlimbered French artillery battery that blasted them with canister. Those who survived ran for the hills.

The Spanish were roundly whipped in the game but the memory of the death charge of the volunteers has always stayed with me.

WarHammer 40K

We had an Apoc battle with 7000 points of Chaos versus 7000 points of Guard – the Chaos included a WarHound Titan. The Chaos player advanced full-tilt and shredded my forward infantry positions. My Shadowsword fired its volanco cannon at long range – and scored a critical hit that led to a series of cascading explosions that blew up the WarHound – as well as the centre of the Chaos line.

The Chaos player, true to form, continued to press the advance, but losing the WarHound meant that my Guard tanks could devote their attention to his infantry – a painful thing for the Chaos forces

Not cascading crits, but in an old AF-Dauntless game
I was running 8 torpedo carrying Stringbags in search
of Bismarck.

She was defended by a pair of Fw-190's, each with an ace
pilot.

One of them was wise, came in and nicked at the rear-most
Stringbag. The other bore in, confronted with the rear
guns of the 'Bags.

I needed '1' to hit, and then had to concentrate all the
damage in a single area to knock him down.

Rolled 15 '1's in a row…8 hits, and 7 damage in the
right wing – the last 1 I didn't need…

Colonial Battlefleet my opponent had heany missile armament while I was packing beams and fusion torpedoes, one of my 2 battleships was almost out and he had barely been scratched. The range closed to within 8 hexes and he unloaded his last salvo of missiles to hammer my ships, they would run in after my firing, except that after knocking down his shields I managed a single penetrating hit, double 10's later his reactor went up and the blast took out all the missile that were about to give me a bad day and crippled his battlecruiser to boot, his last battleship decided that with empty mags it was time to leave.

Robert

ACW: The very first game, the first turn, the freshly painted ironclad Virginia gets on a sandbar and grounds. It gets hit by one salvo, gets a fire and all turns after that cannot come loose, cannot extinguish the fire and burns to a crisp.

WW1 Naval: The British Queen Mary enters the table, gets hit at extreme range. Critical hit on tower, munitions blow up, sunk. At that precise moment a friend comes in and gives me a second hand book he found for me about the battle of Jutland. I open the book at random. On the page is a photograph of the real Queen Mary blowing up with a turret critical hit. History really repeats itself it seems.

Not a critical hit, but fumbles.

Runequest: fighting some horrible big scary monster with loads of combat dice. It rolled an attack fumble and bit its own head off. We just fell about.

Funny Little Wars: I engaged some enemy infantry with one of my 4.7s, the matchstick bounced off a terrain feature straight into the air and with a feeling of utter inevitability, hit our one and only aircraft which was hovering over the battlefield and shot it down.

A DH/C7B game between Germans and Russians.

The German player was confident/cocky. He deployed several squads of SS supported by a King Tiger for the first time, won initiative and trundled down the road toward an objective.

The Russian player brought a JS2 out from behind a house and popped his only available shot at the front armor. Sort of a symbolic gesture in an effort to slow him down.

Well, the Russian player managed to roll the one-in-ten perfect hit location (turret ring, IIRC) combined with a one-in-ten perfect damage, for a catastrophic kill.

You should have seen the German player's face. We laughed about it for days after.

While technically not a critical hit, years ago I played the Squad Leader scenario from Cross of Iron that pitted two King Tigers against three IS-2s. My German opponent broke the main guns on both his Tiger IIs when he tried to shoot, leaving them toothless. We joked that they must have been sabotaged in the factory.

11 battalions of Russian Militia with 30guns giving Eugenes' Corps of infantry a bloody nose in an Empire game of Borodino.

The game designer used map moves when we were not in contact and included the northern ford. I had the Russian Northern flank as Barclay de Toley.

The map moves allowed me to push the historical Cossack gaggel, a regular Cavalry Corps plus two infantry Corps I high-jacked from their defensive position across the ford along with 20 battalions of the Moscow militia who were just sitting on the post road. I topped all that off withh an additional 40 guns from the reserve.

The fellow playing Gouchy didn't move support Eugenes' Corps of infantry and was really surprised when he heard the fuss start up north east of his position. When he finally got there he had to wade through 2 Divisions of slowly retreating French Infantry closely followed by lots and lots of of Russian Militia moving forward in Square.

To me that looked pretty weird, but he just kept coming only to find that the militia were escorting the guns forward. The following Corps had 1 division in line to support the Militia and when the Militia halted the charging Divisions of Dragoons it was pretty much over for the French Cavalry as the Garde Cossacks charged home from the flank.

The rest of the battle was really boring as I couldn't make head way south as the French repositioned.

In my first game group, we had one player who ALWAYS got killed. In one game, he was the German company CO, in a foxhole on a ridge. His good friend was commanding a Sherman coming up said hill. German attempts to kill TC – no go. TC shoots back with .50 cal. MG, 1% chance to hit. 1 hit. Roll for hit location – if it's covered by the foxhole, no hit. Betwixt the eyes.

Another time, it's modern naval. ONE Soviet missile gets through the US ECM/missiles/guns/etc. It's a dud that passes through the CIC of a cruiser and kills the captain.

Guess who the captain was. Yep.

The player was later an Army officer. As his last posting as a Lt Col, he got the Pentagon. He was at a morning meeting when the plane hit almost on his office on 9-11. He was decorated for his work to rescue survivors.

I have a rule in my house sailing naval rules where, should you get the world's lousiest die rolls in succession, you can end up dismasted in the attempt to tack across the wind. Even that miniscule chance leads players to wear ship unless they have a good ship or good crew.

In all honesty, it's probably more historical than everybody tacking all the time.