""Blood, Sweat, and Tears" wwii rules - who's played these???" Topic
11 Posts
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RetroBoom | 25 Jul 2016 9:32 a.m. PST |
Why don't people talk about these??? PDF link As many of you have seen, I've been pimpin' my Hail Of Fire set in another thread, going on about delayed combats and other things. This set already does pretty much everything I spent so much thought and energy trying to work out, and appears to have come out last decade! That said, HoF is more "casual" and "fast-play" and BS&T appears more sophisticated and thorough. While all the systems work differently, most of them seem to have conceptually come from and landed in very similar places. I've only looked at them so far but I assume people have been playing them over the years, so I'm curious why I haven't been hearing about them? If you've seen them before, let us know your thoughts. And if you haven't and want to see a really interesting different approach to rules, check them out! (and also check out HoF…) |
nazrat | 25 Jul 2016 10:46 a.m. PST |
I would say they don't talk about them because they've never heard of them. I skimmed through them and didn't find much to interest me, although they do seem well thought out. I'll stick with Fireball Forward for my company level actions. |
Extra Crispy | 25 Jul 2016 12:16 p.m. PST |
Nazrat has it. I am a complete rules junkie. I own over 500 sets of historical rules. So it takes a bit of hiding for me not to even have them on my list (which I didn't). So I just downloaded them and will give them a look. I assume people have been playing them over the years Why do you assume that? I mean, beyond the author and his group… |
RetroBoom | 25 Jul 2016 12:23 p.m. PST |
Very true, though someone knows about them because they were recommended in the most recent "which free rules" thread. Also, in searching for last hussars blog i saw some other responding to a post about the rules and asking questions. Regardless, its an interesting find, especially to me. |
Last Hussar | 26 Jul 2016 1:38 p.m. PST |
Um, They're mine! Very sorry the aren't complete- I found the Lardies 'Troops Weapons and Tactics', and then IABSM and stopped developing these. Somewhere I have the Armour rules- did loads of ruddy research so that the Pk matched history, but can't find the beggars. They never really got play tested enough to iron out the bits that didn't work. Recently I've been toying with revising them, but keep getting sidetracked. I want to change the way clustered targets work. Instead of that clumsy 'chaining', I'm looking at +?1 fire marker per stand within ?a base width. Half the total goes on the original target, the rest are spread evenly among the clustered bases, then take off cover modifiers. You have to declare the easiest target to hit as the main target, unless directed by a leader. Also want to rework the organisation bits. Looking at some groups, eg British Rifle (7 men) being a double base. +1 firepoint, needs 3 'kills' to remove it. The basis of the game is to remove control from the player and introduce uncertainty and fog of war. Most games players see they have a suppress result, then charge in- a luxury real platoon leaders don't have. Thus delaying the resolution until the underfire unit tries to do something adds uncertainty. Likewise we know that heavy fire has not really harmed a unit, so we order it forward. In reality men would get an order, and then may decide 'nope, not at this precise moment while I'm under fire'. The whole game idea came from this delayed fire resolution. I put them on my blog to share to get feedback/ideas etc, and the guy from Free wargames linked them- I don't object, but as I say, I never finished them! |
RetroBoom | 26 Jul 2016 2:39 p.m. PST |
LH, its very impressive work, let me be the first to say it in case no one has. It's good and bad that I hadn't seen these while working out my own. Simply laying out fire markers instead of rolling, and then rolling simple consistent target numbers depending on whether moving, shooting, or hunkering down is super elegant and sexy. I got there another way that works for my ecosystem, but the clean 4+, 5+, and 6+ at the beginning of each chapter comes off as super slick. We came to very similar places as far as unit cohesion and hit allocation as well. Cohesion resembles Crossfire in both sets, offering simplicity and flexibility at the same time. And I went basically in a direction you described, allocating to all valid targets within 6" of a chosen target, with a couple exceptions (one of my favorite things from Fivecore). It was all feeling pretty good but it was hodgepodge enough that its been hard to decide how solid it was all going to be. Seeing your work makes me much more confident that this is all the direction the set was fated to go. When you want to play a game that prioritizes these concepts, these are the ideas you land on. Anyway, my gaming time has been committed to play testing recently, but at some point I absolutely intend to get BS&T on the table to get a feel for it. If you ever get the chance, please take a look at HoF too, it's essentially beer & pretzels BS&T! I would be incredibly interested in your help. |
Last Hussar | 26 Jul 2016 2:52 p.m. PST |
I wish I knew where the armour rules were – I hope they weren't on a junked computer! I spent ages checking Pk's for various guns/armour thicknesses, then coming up with a simple dice system. It was the kind of system where the gun gets so many dice and a target value, ditto the armour, and the gun has to throw more successes to kill – there was no damage system. I believe this was also delayed resolution, but with a system for an immediate brew up – a tank going BOOM is obvious, otherwise until it acts (or doesn't) you can't necessarily tell. Play testing was my weak point – I didn't want friends to feel the wasted an evening on something that wasn't working. |
Last Hussar | 26 Jul 2016 3:01 p.m. PST |
The To Hit numbers are written to be easy to remember- the 4/5/6 is easy to work out if you cant remember (is it likely to be easier or harder to hit than another action) and 1/2-3/4-5/6 should be simple enough to hold in your head. A cm to the yard/meter means vertical and horizontal scales are close in 20mm/25mm, so you can get an idea of what the men are seeing (though perversely I will be using 10mm, so I have the reverse distortion to most games!) I think the to/from movement was inspired by Crossfire, I especially wanted to show the difference with the US 3 team system, as opposed to the British Bren shoots the rifles in |
Last Hussar | 28 Jul 2016 2:00 p.m. PST |
Cheesy boy you say they were recommended in the most recent "which free rules" thread Can I have a link to that – can't find it. |
RetroBoom | 28 Jul 2016 8:24 p.m. PST |
TMP link it's currently about 6 threads from the top on the wwii rules board. Recommended by Simo Hayha, not by name but in a short list of links. |
christot | 28 Jul 2016 11:27 p.m. PST |
Thanks for putting these up (and thanks for writing them, LH) very interesting. Fascinating how one reads other people's rules and discovers how they arrive quite independently at similar mechanisms and conclusions as one does oneself! Please find the armour rules! I have been fiddling about with the infantry aspects of my own rules and realised the reason I was doing this was because I was putting off writing the armour bits! |
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