"Do your melee/assault rules allow double elimination?" Topic

2nd attempt

Had this situation come up in a solo game I played recently: link

WW1 British Bombing squad assaults entrenched Germans and in the ensuing melee both are eliminated. It got me thinking, how many rules allow this outcome where both the attacker and defender are eliminated?

(Kind of like the old Ex result in the Avalon Hill CRT)

Of course a lot depends on the scale of game and the period, but how do people feel about this as a possible outcome?

I am ok with it in the above example, as I assume while the Germans were routed, the British squad in question was too exhausted or depleted to continue and was combat ineffective for the rest of the game. Fortunately, there was a rifle squad nearby to hold the position. I rather like this as it shows the importance of following up an assault with fresh troops to hold the position.

Thoughts?

The rules I usually play allow this on large scale. Skirmish rules, not so much

Chain of Command allows the possibility. With lots of SMGs on both sides, and a large attacking force charging a couple of LMGs from a distance, yes, it might happen.

I wrote skirmish rules for plastic Army Men figures, back in the late 1990's. I designed the rules to play fast, and Close Assault was both fast, and brutal. It is possible, with the right die rolls, for each side to be eliminated, but they need to be close in numbers of figures, to pull it off.

I designed my rules to be a "game", not a "simulation". In other words, I designed them to be fast, decisive, and fun. They were not designed to be historically accurate, or simulate reality. I did not worry about real world situations, nor physics, in Close Assault situations -- I just wanted it to be deadly, and hopefully, fast to resolve. Cheers!

It's one of those situations that might seem absurd on the face of it, but not so much when you think about what is actually represented by "elimination". I don't have a problem imagining that in the course of an attack one squad may actually be destroyed, while the other loses some men killed and the survivors are either too wounded to continue or have had their morale collapse and are of no further use.

I assume that in all situations some casualties represent kills, others wounds, and still others represent catastrophic morale loss.

Nice game report by the way.

In the rules I use, melees usually have winners and losers. There's always at least one man standing.
That doesn't mean he won't think he's done his bit when the next morale check comes up!

In TSATF, notoriously, figure fights figure. There's always at least one survivor on the winning side.
In Empire, someone always wins. Period.

But in Age of Reason, it is possible for both sides to roll high enough to eliminate each other. I've never seen it, but it can be done.

QILS, a skirmish level ruleset does not allow for this possibility. Path of Bones, a medium size engagement system does.

Global thermonuclear war allows four mutual elimination. The only winning move is not to play.

I've played the Nuclear War! game, with all of the supplements. It's all fun and games, until the first nuke is detonated…

I've played games of that where everyone was destroyed. It was fun, actually. Cheers!

As Winston suggests, a lot depends upon what "elimination" is intended to represent. I could visualize a scenario in which one squad close assaults another, but both suffer so heavily that the exhausted survivors of both sides cease combat in order to recover their wits and tend to wounded comrades.

I'm not arguing that such an outcome would necessarily be common, only that is (IMO) possible.

B

Given the way my players were using grenades as melee weapons over the weekend, it was certainly a possibility. Of course, the characters doing that were (most of them) wearing powered armor, so they had a good chance of surviving.

I was also allowing attacks to happen simultaneously if (1) both characters had the same initiative rolls and then (2) their roll-off against each other was a tie. I think that Mongoose Traveller actually doesn't do a roll-off but gives tied initiative rolls to the higher dexterity. I'll have to bone up on, and chart out, Mongoose combat for the next game.

Thanks for the input (and compliments)

Always going to keep a reserve in the assault now to consolidate my gains. Next time I am doing a scenario with the Germans attacking a section of trench based on TFL's "Gentlemen at Loos" scenario.

For some periods, I play The Sword and the Flame (or a variant), so Winston's remarks apply. For others, I play rules based on Totten's Strategos. There, melees are decided quickly, and only rarely is one side eliminated, and never both.

Yes.
I've never seen this happen, but in theory yes.

In SG2 close combat rolls off figure vs figure and the one that loses is removed.
Combat continues ( in the same bound ) until one side or the other wins.
The assumption being that most shooting has pauses and whatnot whilst close combat is all-out kill or be killed until you win or lose.

One section of 8 close assaults a defender section of 8.
Each player rolls 4 wins each.
Both sections are halved to 4 men ( probably combat ineffective ).
Neither wins close combat so repeat.
Each player rolls 2 wins.
They are down to 2 men left in each section.
Neither wins.
They roll again and each rolls 1 win.
They are down to 1 man each.
They roll again.
One section of one man is left.
He is now a combat ineffective section.
Rather a pyrrhic victory and he'll almost certainly fail his morale tests.

He can be incorporated into another section if one is to hand and he can be rallied.

The reason I've never seen this is because players quickly realise close combat is all or nothing.
You want to at least suppress a defender completely and preferably inflict casualties to stack those odds in your favour.

We can get results that render elements combat ineffective. Most "damage" to both sides ocours when they are in a tough fight. However dead does not really figure directly, our system covers fear, fire, fatigue and Ammo. I you have had a tough fight you will be low on ammo, fatigued and stressed so not really effective for further fighting today, and of course you may have some casualties.

In the rules I'm currently working on, yes. Both parties are assumed to have gotten shots of at about the same time and incapacitated each other.

Our rules are attrition based. So if castings are lost, they can be lost by both sides. There is none of this winning three or four times in a row and never losing a single casting.