""No End in Sight". Example of how the game works." Topic
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Weasel | 14 Sep 2014 5:59 p.m. PST |
Somewhere in Afghanistan 1983. We're scouting out a village under Mujahideen control. I have 6 men in my squad, huddled along a wall on one side of a street, with the rest of the platoon further back, spread throughout the village. It's my turn and I activate my squad leader, roll 1D6 for his activation points. I get a 3, and I decide to move the RPK and two riflemen across the street. We're moving outside of sight of enemies and into cover, so each soldier takes a 3" move, crossing the street. I place a Stress marker on my squad leader to indicate he has been activated once. Now the game changes to the other side. The Mujahideen player activates the leader of a nearby group, rolling a 4. The leader activates four of their troops, sneaking forward through cover and placing them where they can look down the street. When activated, a soldier can both move as well as fire at a target, so they open up on my troops, firing at the group that haven't crossed the street yet. 4 irregular shooters with rifles gives him 4 points of fire power. This means 4 dice are rolled for shock, trying to score a 5 or 6 on each of the dice. Scoring 1,2,5,5, two of my men are pinned down. Pinned troopers: A pinned soldier can't take any actions. An activation point has to be spent to rally them. If enemies come too close to a pinned soldier, they may fall back. Of course, bullets tend to hurt people too though fire fights tend to inflict much fewer casualties than you might be used to in war games. With 4 fire power, the enemy gets to roll 2 dice to inflict hits, requiring a 6 to hit. The dice come up 3 and 6. Man down! Dicing to determine the effect of the hit, my man is wounded. Philosophy: In a fire fight, most gun fire is suppressive in nature. When you read about encounters taking place at range, extensive fire is exchanged but only a few casualties might occur, unless an assault takes place at close quarters. As such, the chance of scoring casualties (especially against troops in cover) are very low. Firing at troops in cover will cause several to be pinned and continued fire may push them back, but the normal gaming tactic of annihilating troops in cover by shooting at them long enough won't work. Morale: Any time a group is fired upon, they may be subject to a morale test. I took 2 pins and a casualty, for a total morale score of 3. Rolling 1D6 for morale, I roll a 2. Since the roll was equal or under the morale score, the group falls back a distance equal to the dice roll, in this case 2 inches. Morale affects troops within 2" of each other. My squad is split up into two groups with about 3" apart, so the group that already crossed the street stays where they are, while the other group retreats 2". The Mujahideen leader gets a point of Stress and play passes back to me. I review the situation and decide to activate my squad leader again. I can pick any leader at my disposal but I am worried that the squad will be over run if I don't push them into better positions. Rolling for activation, I have to deduct the Stress on the leader. He has one point from earlier, so I roll 1D6 minus 1 for a total of 4 points. I spend 2 points to recover the two soldiers that were pinned down and spend the other 2 to activate two of the soldiers that crossed the street. They're not in good positions to fire from where they are but there's a wrecked vehicle a bit further up the street. Rushing the open ground: Any time soldiers move in the open, while in sight of the enemy, things change. Instead of a slow, cautious advance, soldiers move by rushing a short distance, hoping to reach cover before enemy fire gets too close. To rush open ground, I nominate my destination, which is the wrecked vehicle slightly over 3" away. I roll 1D6 for each soldier rushing, scoring a 2 and a 5. Since a move of 5" is more than plenty, I place one guy in cover behind the vehicle. Luckily, this was the RPK gunner. However, a 2 is not enough to get there, so the assistant moves 2 inches before being pinned down in the open. The Afghans get to roll to see if they hit him, but fail to score a 6. ***** From there, the game continues but that should give you a decent snapshot into the movement and combat mechanics of the game. |
FatherLucant | 14 Sep 2014 8:35 p.m. PST |
Random move distances is something I'm not a huge fan of. There are so many factors that I can't control during a game, so when I lose the ability to at least put my guys where I think they should go, I get a bit grumpy. I'm curious as to why you feel the need to include it. If they were moving 3" the first round in a slow and cautious advance, why couldn't they move at least that when they know they are in a dangerous position? I hope I'm not coming off like a jerk btw, I'm still digging the other parts of the game from what I read. |
Weasel | 14 Sep 2014 8:56 p.m. PST |
Oh, not a jerk at all :) The reason it's there is that it's part of the reaction fire mechanic. The dice roll is how far the soldier gets, before the enemy gets accurate fire on him, causing him to hit the deck. Sometimes no one is paying attention and you can haul *** to get a good distance. Other times, the bullets are whistling by as soon as you stick your helmet out of cover. As with regular fire, the chance of reaction fire hitting anybody is very limited (1 in 6 unless you have a SAW or at least 4 enemies firing). This came from quite a few discussions here and elsewhere, where many people expressed that the odds of getting hit during a short sprint from one spot to another aren't that great.
So I figured: Reaction fire must do something differently then. From a tactical perspective, the reason you set troops to cover a given approach is to prevent the enemy from moving freely, particularly out of cover. So it seemed clear to me that the role of reaction fire in the game mechanics should essentially be a movement rule, not a combat rule. That's the reasoning :-)
Of course, nothing would break if you made it "1D6, minimum of 3" or ruled that a roll of 1 or 2 means the mover is pinned in their starting location.
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Ironwolf | 14 Sep 2014 11:22 p.m. PST |
Weasel – Nice and simple example of play. I have one question. If I understood correctly each player can only active one unit per turn. From your example I got the impression each player is limited on number of units they can activate. So if I was running a platoon of three squads. Each turn I have to select one squad to activate. In your example above, you moved 3 of your men. Yet the rest of the platoon was not able to take any action. I really like your philosophy and how you've made this into your rules. Thanky |
Weasel | 14 Sep 2014 11:55 p.m. PST |
Ironwolf – Think of it like an alternating activation game. So when its your turn, you pick one leader and try to activate him. If he passes, he acts and gets 1 stress. Then it's my turn. When its your turn again, you can activate the same guy again or activate another leader. The phase is over when every leader is exhausted from failing an activation roll. Then we check if either side has won, otherwise, stress is removed and we start another phase. So a "turn" is just your chance to make one leader do a thing. A phase is a number of turns where each leader did at least one thing and probably more. During a typical phase, a leader will tend to activate 2 or 3 times. Pushing a leader past 3 activations means that they can't remove all the stress when the phase ends, so it tends to be only for desperate measures.
Make more sense that way ? |
whoa Mohamed | 15 Sep 2014 3:01 a.m. PST |
Could one establish a base of fire with one leader ,Place another on overwatch while manuvering with the third,Because it sounds like you can only activate one unit per turn or an I go you go type of system…Mikey |
Weasel | 15 Sep 2014 8:10 a.m. PST |
Whoa – You can. The example just only had one unit on each side. Basically, you take turns picking and activating a leader. Leaders can activate multiple times in one "phase". The phase ends when every leader has failed an activation roll. Overwatch is automatic btw. Any movement in sight of the enemy is subject to reaction fire. An example of a phase might look like:
Squad 1 moves up. Enemy squad A moves. Squad 2 settle into a good overwatch position. Enemy squad A moves again Squad 3 move around the flank Enemy squad B moves. Squad 1 fires from their position. (second move) Enemy squad C moves. Squad 1 tries to activate a third time but fail. Now they can't be activated again this phase. And so on, until all the leaders have exhausted themselves. Then we check to see if either side has won yet, otherwise a new phase begins. |
whoa Mohamed | 15 Sep 2014 8:45 a.m. PST |
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Ironwolf | 16 Sep 2014 9:15 p.m. PST |
Weasel – yes I understand better now and I really like the stress put on a leader. Plus if they fail to activate then you are forced to active other units. I was originally worried if you could just keep activating one key unit. It could skew the game and make it not realistic. But its clear you have some good checks and balance built into the system. |
Weasel | 16 Sep 2014 11:21 p.m. PST |
Thanks! It adds a bit of a gambling aspect as well, which I am always in favour of. |
vtsaogames | 18 Sep 2014 1:50 p.m. PST |
Is this similar to 5 men in Normandy? |
Weasel | 18 Sep 2014 2:08 p.m. PST |
It has some connecting threads (shock and kill dice, though they work differently), limited control, campaign focus, no stats (though there are quality levels) and plays quickly and on a smaller table. The system is brand new though. |
Weasel | 19 Sep 2014 12:33 p.m. PST |
A lot of questions have come in, so I figured I'd answer some of the more common or interesting ones. General questions about the game: What scale of miniatures works best? Any scale can work as long as you can identify which figure is which. You need to be able to tell who has the SAW or RPG and who is the squad leader. The ranges and whatnot are roughly intended for 10-15mm but people tested the rules with 28mm and it worked fine. For the big figures, you might want to increase the base movement rate a little. How many figures do I need? The aim is platoon level gaming, so figure 3 squads of 8 or so miniatures each, plus a few vehicles supporting them if you like. We ran tests with a full platoon of 3 squads, 3 APC and a tank on each side and had no problems though pushing above that might get a little busy. You'll have a lot of leaders to keep track in particular. Smaller games could be done easy enough. Take a US infantry squad, treat each 4 man team as its own squad with its own leader and put them up against 15 or so insurgents and you could have a nice little skirmish. What size of playing space do I need? Not terribly big. 2x2 or 3x3 feet will work fine. Troops should be deployed one or two moves before contact, rather than setting up far from the enemy like you usually do. No End In Sight is about the actual fire fight. The entire table is maybe 100-200 yards across. Supplements, expansions, scifi, bunnies, I want it all! Multiple people asked for a hard scifi version almost immediately upon seeing the rules, so I am obliging that. I'll ask for testers once we get closer to having a workable product but it'll be pretty exciting. It's still several months away but nothing prevents you from playing some near-future games right now. Other than that, you guys will have to tell me what you want. WW2 isn't out of the question and there may very likely be a WW1 variant in the not too distant future. If people want big, long lists of vehicle data, you'll have to send me some booze. Rules questions: ehicles seem very fragile. They are. This is intentional. On a 3x3 foot table, you are essentially at point blank for vehicles. Even a T55 presents a threat at that range. If it still bothers you, bear in mind that we are playing for effect. A "hit" with an anti-tank weapon means you hit the target and inflicted some type of result on them. Missed shots may have scratched the armour with no effect (this is why RPG have a hard time hitting in the game). Why don't insurgents take stress from casualties? I wanted insurgents and regular troops to feel different. In many cases, it seems insurgent forces are less likely to cease combat to tend to wounded than trained soldiers are. My research indicates that taking multiple wounded will often slow or stop a squad from operating effectively and I wanted the rules to reflect that, so stress builds quickly.
Insurgents are more likely to leave the wounded to be recovered after the fact. However, to reflect their brittle nature, they have to make a "casualty check" to see if any of them bail when they take losses. This means insurgent units can often start big, but if they get hit hard, they will tend to melt away. I can't hit a **** thing! Ranged fire won't inflict a lot of casualties. You have to either get in assault range, severely outgun the enemy or drive them off through suppression. This mirrors accounts of fire fights in modern warzones. A platoon can go through a brutal fire fight, get kicked in the teeth and fall back and only have taken 3 or 4 actual casualties. |
RetroBoom | 30 Sep 2014 11:05 p.m. PST |
Weasel, this sounds like really interesting work! I love the concept of pinning being resolved in the movement mechanisms. And the activation/stress/turn sequence system sounds fantastic as well. I wish I had some single based figures to play with. Keep it up! :D -B |
Weasel | 02 Oct 2014 9:12 a.m. PST |
Thanks! There'll be either WW2 or Scifi coming up next, on the same mechanics, mostly driven by what people want to see. |
RetroBoom | 02 Oct 2014 12:36 p.m. PST |
Weasel, your rules have been on my mind ever since I read this. I have a question. While I love the elegance of your innovative pinning rules, I've hit a wall where they no longer make sense to me and I wanted to get your justification. To my logic, being pinned is the state of choosing safety over maneuver, and thereby becoming pinned in the open doesn't make sense to me. I would think that there would be 3 possible states when attempting a dash to new cover; arriving there, reoccupying the cover you had, or getting hit. My imagination can't come up with a reason why being shot at would cause a soldier to stop moving once hes outside of cover, he would choose which ever was safest/closest and get there as quickly as humanly possible, the only thing stopping him being a bullet in his person. What are your thoughts on this thinking? Thanks!!! |
Weasel | 02 Oct 2014 2:41 p.m. PST |
Its a tiny bit "movie-logic" (only a tiny bit though, I promise! :) ) There's a few ways to look at it: A: Essentially the pin represents that the soldier thought he could make it or that there were less guys able to fire at him than there really are. As he gets up and runs a few yards, accurate heavy fire start coming in and its hit the dirt on your own or with AK holes in your flak jacket. B: In some cases, it may simply represent a "bad run". The trooper stumbles as he gets up, slips on a rock, impeded by his kit etc and gets in a situation where he must go flat on the ground since he wont be able to make it before the enemy gets their bearings. If you make the roll, then he gets a good start and is across the open gap before the enemy has a chance to fire more than one or two shots in his rough direction. You could introduce an option to "push through" and run hte rest of the distance but at a higher risk of getting hit but I decided against it, on game balance reasons.
It is one of those things where you probably need to look at the effect rather than the minutia though (and I hope this doesn't come across as snide).
Essentially, if the cover is 5 or 6 inches away, odds are its too far to get to. Your men will take too heavy fire and be stuck. You can try it, because you never know. 3-4 inches is more doable but does have a risk and 2 inches is mostly guaranteed, barring bad luck. Does it make more sense that way?
Cheers! Ivan |
Zelekendel | 17 Nov 2014 9:49 p.m. PST |
What about leaderless squads, or insurgent mobs of 6-10 figures? How are you supposed to handle them in this system – let's say you can't split them up at whim. |
Weasel | 17 Nov 2014 10:24 p.m. PST |
Cheers Zelekendel. A squad is never leaderless in /game/ terms even though it may be in an organizational sense. In such cases, nominate a figure as the impromptu leader: Essentially this is whichever is the most charismatic, experienced or initiative-taking guy in the group. Actually I'd be really tempted to randomize who that is, at the end of each phase. For big mobs of lousy troops, one of a few things will happen:
Their natural leader (see above) will be hard-pressed to direct that many men in any efficient manner. This means they won't be able to effective coordinate an attack well but will do okay on the defence. That seems reasonable to me. Trying to direct a mob of 10 guys while a bunch of US marines are firing on you is not for the faint of heart. In essence, the game mechanics mean that two teams of 4 will operate more effectively than one team of 8. (which probably makes sense) To alleviate this, often a bigger boss needs to get involved. Insurgents may not have a formal platoon commander but will likely have a "boss" operating in the same role. He'll be pretty busy running back and forth, hustling the grunts into battle. Alternatively, there's a Human Wave rule more or less explicitly for those situations: This gives you a bonus to activations but is limited to herding the men towards the enemy and hoping for the best. If neither of those options are appealing, our insurgent leader will have to lead aggressively with a portion of the men and leave the rest behind where they could be brought up as reinforcements later. This is problematic because the insurgents are probably outgunned but it does let them create multiple waves of attackers. In conclusion, larger units with very little leadership will have a very hard time against a smaller, better-led opposition unless they take steps to remedy those problems.
Make sense? |
Zelekendel | 18 Nov 2014 7:09 a.m. PST |
The game mechanics sounded appealing and I got the rules and the rules pack as they were on sale. I read the Human Wave rule, and that looks like the answer, although it's written in a sort of "spectacular situation" way, to me it seems like the default way to handle big units. As far as I understood it, it's 1 action to activate everyone in the unit within 2" coherency towards a single target. I'm very happy that's included as that changes the entire game to make more sense, as commanding everyone to do a certain thing together doesn't take more time than commanding one soldier to do something special. Now that I got your attention, I'll ask in more detail: as we know, the biggest and best resources of scenarios for this period are currently written for Force on Force. I would like your opinion on how to handle force compositions such as these: BRITISH FORCE COMPOSITION British forces are well-supplied and have high confidence (TQ D8 / Morale D10) 1x Infantry Section of two four-man fire teams (2x SA80s, 1x Minimi, 1xSA80 wUGL) 1x GPMG Weapons Team (1xGPMG, 1xSA80) 1xMedic TALIBAN FORCE COMPOSITION All Taliban forces are Locals. They have normal supply and have high confidence (TQ D6 Morale D8) 1 Leader (D10 Morale) 3 Groups of 8 (1xRPG, 1 RPK. 6XAKs) 1 Sniper Team (1 Dragunov, 1 AK) Insurgency level is 3 and a d6 roll must be made lower than 3 to bring forces on to the table. If successful, the Taliban player rolls 2d6 and consults the Reinforcement Table. REINFORCEMENTS TABLE 2 1d6 (AKs) + 1 (RPK) 3 1d3 (AKs) + 1 (RPG) 4 1d6 (AKs) & Roll Again 5 1d3 (AKs) + 1 (RPG) 6 1d6+2 (AKs) 7 1d6 (AKs) +Leader + 1 (RPK) 8 1d6+2 (AKs) 9 1d6 (AKs) & Roll Again 10 1d6 (AKs) + 1 (RPK) 11 1d6 (AKs) +Leader + 1 (RPG) 12 2d6 (AKs) Here's my guesses: the british sections have one proper leader each and one assistant as per the fire team rules (-1 to activation). The Weapons Team also has an assistant leader. The Taliban have one overall "platoon leader" that can command anyone. The 3 mobs of insurgents each have a random assistant leader each as does the sniper team. Another question is how would NEIS phases correlate with FoF turn limits in your experience? Many of the scenarios are written so that the time limits practically force you to run around aggressively in order to make it in time. |
Weasel | 18 Nov 2014 11:36 a.m. PST |
Your ideas on how translate the forces seem fine. I feel like I should have been more explicit with this, but yeah, western forces should have an assistent in the squad. On occasion, I play them as two completely independent units with their own leaders, but that's mainly for very small games. Believe it or not, I have not actually played FoF :-) Maybe someone else can pitch in with how they might translate ? A typical game is 2-3 phases so as a rule of thumb, start with the turn limit in FoF and cut it in half, but you'll need to test to get to a proper number. For reinforcements, victory condition checks etc, the end of the phase is where all that stuff belongs. For the reinforcing insurgent groups, I'd treat the ones without a leader as -1 to the activation rolls but let them be absorbed into an existing unit if they can deploy reasonably close to them. Does this help at all? |
Zelekendel | 18 Nov 2014 3:45 p.m. PST |
It does, although based on experience, halving the phases is unacceptable as often units have to travel all the way to the other side of the table (usually a 36" distance or something) and back, a total distance of 72", in 8 turns, with a 12" run action per turn with 2 turns to "spare". That's a typical FoF recovery mission. If you only did 4 phases of NEiS, the maximum you could run would be 4x3d6" per unit, which is probably enough to get you to the objective but not back! Besides, the insurgency stuff happens every turn and halving those has repercussions. If the game works so that 8 turns of NEiS would be too long, maybe some streamlining needs to be done, for example, each unit completing all its activations in one go (especially if you have say 7+ units per side). Of course, all this adaptation is unnecessary if there'll be a whole bunch of scenarios for NEiS but for the moment FoF scenarios are where it's at and am intending to play those. |
Weasel | 19 Nov 2014 9:39 a.m. PST |
Yeah, movement distances will be a concern since moving under fire is one of the biggest (intentional) challenges in NEIS. I'll check around and see if there's any other suggestions. I feel like I am not going to be giving the best advice, since I don't actually play FoF, just trying to guesstimate here :-) |
Zelekendel | 19 Nov 2014 12:12 p.m. PST |
Yes, I think it would make a lot of sense to check if someone's done playtests and giving some "unofficial guidelines". |
Dale Hurtt | 30 Dec 2014 2:40 p.m. PST |
This helped me quite a bit; glad I decided to search for threads before I played a game. The way I read the rules it appeared that you had to activate a soldier in order to have him recover from pinning, i.e. it took two points to recover from pinning, one for activation and one for recovery. If you do a future edition, consider changing the wording as recovery appears under "When a Figure is Activated" section, implying activation must occur first, and the "alternatively" statement sounds like recovery is mutually exclusive to firing and moving, not to activation (which includes firing and moving). Just a suggestion. I do like the concepts. |
Weasel | 30 Dec 2014 8:55 p.m. PST |
Dale – I'll clarify that. Thanks for catching it. There will be some tweaks in January, to fold in the "group move" option from No Stars and I'll put that on the list. |
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