Unobtainium Ships and Squishy Men:
At GZG ECC IX, I believe Mike Hudak is running Full Sail, which is his Full
Thrust on water variant if I recollect correctly. Don't know if Mike is still
list lurking or not. Maybe someone can pass on the request for a copy of his
rules mods.
Morale:
I find it interesting that people think Morale in SG2 or DS2 necessarily
implies troops fleeing in terror. I always assume that Morale was a composite
of fear, fatigue, accumulated loss, and professional judgement. That is to
say, sometimes a relatively pristine force will fail its morale check... I
assume this simply represents the commander making a situational appreciation
using factors available to him (which differ from those available to the
player) and his best decision is to retreat, pull back, etc. Sometimes
this results in momentary disarray until some re-org and rallying is
done.
I sort of viewed FT's Strike The Colours as the same. The Admiral (the player)
may wish a particular ship in his fleet to perservere in the attack. The
striking rules mean that captain has simply made an assessment based on what
he knows and his understanding of his duty and has elected to save his ship.
So, I don't see a big problem with having striking of
colours/withdrawing as part of the
game. This encapsulates some professional judgements. Now, I'd give an Admiral
a chance to rally a withdrawing ship (giving the withdrawing Captain a comm
and being very clear about his orders). But I think the idea missing from too
many of the games I see is that their are little imaginary people on these
vessels (or in the tanks or stomping around alien
worlds on the two-step Black Cadillacs). They might just have plans of
their own and a different situational assessment than their high command (the
player).
This would, in some sense, help to explain historical situations where modern
armchair analysts look back on something, draw conclusions that X general or Y
admiral made a poor
decision and withdrew when he was about to win/in a position of
advantage/not seriously
damaged. Sometimes a vessel or formation takes moderate damage, but it seems
like the best time to withdraw to that units commander. Sometimes he is wrong,
sometimes just short on data, sometimes he might know things that aren't
apparent to the armchair analyst. At any rate, there are enough cases of
people pulling out early to make me think rules that allow this (just as we
have Last Stand rules) help to make the ships and tanks and little lead
dudes behave a bit more like their real world counterparts - complete
with frailties, bad judgements, inconvenient timing, and sometimes with
outrageously tenacious morale.
TomB
> Thomas Barclay wrote:
Yup, that's correct. Mike's running "Full Sail:The Gathering" on Sunday, and
I'm running a variant of his mod for "Full Sail Frag" on Friday. I've got a
hard copy of his mods, and I think there's a word document out there with
them, but I'm not sure if he ever HTMLed them or not. (Mike was gracious
enough to let me borrow last year's Full Sail rules, I don't know if he's made
any changes since then.)
JGH
I'm still around...... :-) Swamped right now, but still around. (Then
again, isn't everyone?)
I have the rules, in word and pdf format. Who needs them?
Haven't gone over them to tweak them for this year yet, but should be doing
that in the next weekend or so. But the only change I have in mind right now
is Jon Davis' suggestion to increase the range of the cannon from 12 to 18
inches.
That, and I'll probably look at shadowing/ramming to see if I can have
it make more sense.
Heh... I like that.... a mod of a mod...... :-)
> -----Original Message-----
Id be intrested in a copy, long term interest just not many players around
here:(
borgoth@blueyonder.co.uk
Cheers
Ian
> I'm still around...... :-) Swamped right now, but still around.
(Then
> again, isn't everyone?)
Put a link somewhere so we can download
:)
[quoted original message omitted]
Greetings:
I'd be interested--either MSWord or Adobe Acrobat
format would do.
I was drol...I mean looking at the GHQ Nappy-era
miniatures yesterday. Nice!
Fred Kiesche (FPK3)
My books are water; those of great geniuses are wine. Everybody drinks water.
(Mark Twain, "Notebook")
Science, science fiction and more. See The Eternal Golden Braid.
(http://theeternalgoldenbraid.blogspot.com/)
Thomas Barclay schrieb:
> This would, in some sense, help to explain historical situations where
And not all bad decisions consisted neccessarily of running away. They
could be ill-judged attacks or random moves.
At the Dogger Bank, Admiral Beatty "saw a torpedo" and turned his Battle
Cruisers away from it, in effect giving up pursuit of the German force.
At Jutland, Scheer turned into the British fleet that was "crossing its T"
after he was well on the way to get away.
Greetings Karl Heinz
If you used a morale system like DS for the ships captain, in addition to
applying mission morale modifyiers you might apply morale modifyiers based on
the opponent.
e.g. if you are a FSE ship you might be more likely to surrender to a NAC ship
because they have good reputation for dealing with enemy combatants. A NAC
ship might be less inclined to surrender to an ESU ship because of rumours of
gulags and harsh treatment on prision colony planets.
Human ships might have great reluctance to surrender to Kra Vak because no one
has ever come back.
You might also get great reluctance to surrender between hated human
opponents, I can imagine reluctance to surrender in battles between islamic
and israeli forces.
> Hudak, Michael wrote:
*shrug* (8-)
I've actually got TWO mods of the mod -- one's a simplified version for
the Frag, and one's for a backup scenario if we need to run something
else at the con (if we get a lot of walk-ins on Saturday, for example.)
Otherwise, I might run it for GZG-ECC X.
The full version has three types of cannons, with 3 six inch range bands, and
changed some stuff so when all your damage is gone there's a chance your ship
will be adrift, sink or will catch fire and go boom. I also have some other
things I'm playing with, but I'm not convinced the extra complexity is worth
it e.g. tracking wind direction and have that affect thrust (whether you're
running, reaching, beating, in irons), and declaring whether you're firing at
the hull or firing at the rigging. (The declaration isn't the problem, the
thing is you have to change the way thrust damage is handled to make rigging
fire work.)
There are also a bunch of changes to the SSDs, simply because of the new types
of ships WizKids has put out this past year.
I think all of this may be a sign I've been reading too many books on the
age of Fighting Sail. (8-)
JGH
> -----Original Message-----
A basic nod towards wind direction would be useful (ie: sailing directly into
the wind is a *bad thing*), but something simple for whatever movement
adjustments would be enough.
I've been playing a bit of "Wooden ships & Iron Men" online atm, so am getting
to really had having to sail into the wind.
Brendan 'Neath Southern Skies
> -----Original Message-----
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Jerry said:
> some other things I'm playing with, but I'm not convinced the extra
That's rather a key factor in Age of Sail tactics.
> and declaring whether you're firing at the hull or firing at the
Instead of MD being one system, have it be 3 or 4--one icon per mast.
> I think all of this may be a sign I've been reading too many books
You might want to get Mark Campbell's game Close Action, about US$ 40
or so from Clash of Arms Games--similar to the old Avalon Hill title
Wooden Ships & Iron Men. I've met Mark and played in a couple of
games he's run (including a 60-player Trafalgar last October), and
he's a fanatic for historical accuracy. There is also an advanced movement
system using 12 directions rather than 6, i.e. you can move along hex spines
as well. That's somewhat more complex, but IMHO it's worthwhile. The key
thing, though, is to try to have one ship per player, and severely restrict
signals. I'm reading about the Bailli du Suffren, generally considered
France's greatest (or second greatest) admiral, and it's amazing how often the
battle plans of both sides foundered because the commanders simply could not
communicate adequately with their captains.
> Laserlight wrote:
It is, but, it's a question of how complex you want to get versus playbility.
I've always tended to err on the side of playability when given a choice. For
example, one set of the rules I worked up involved a thrust and max speed
modifier for every point of the FT clock, based on some sailing guides I found
online. Much more realistic, especially when you're dealing with tacking
versus wearing, but, does
it really make it... fun? (8-) (Especially when your focus isn't
on the operation of a single ship, but on a whole fleet of 15 of the line
bearing down on your enemy.)
The current version splits the clock up into 4 different 'zones' -
in irons, beating, broad reach, and beam reach / running, which I
think will add enough flavour and tactical complexity without slowing things
down too much.
> and declaring whether you're firing at the hull or firing at the
*nod* Yeah, that's what a lot of people have come up with, independently,
and together. However, it's the various ways to model rigging fire --
does it force a threshold check at a penalty? Do you keep a separate damage
track for masts, and so you have TWO sets of damage tracks? How do you reflect
that fact that some ships were just better sailers than others e.g. an
American 44 heavy frigate should be able to outsail a British 74, all other
things being equal? etc. etc.
I'm tending to favour the 'one icon' per mast rule, but, having each mast
represent a different proportion of the total amount of thrust, so, losing a
mast on a single mast merchie is a heck of a lot worse than losing a mast on
something like Victory which had thousands of square yards of canvas.
Oh, and that's the other thing too -- battle sail versus full sail.
(8-)
> You might want to get Mark Campbell's game Close Action, about US$ 40
Hmmm. I've looked at buying that, there's a copy here in the FLGS (at least,
there was, your comment makes me interested in seeing if it's still around.)
My latest fighting sail reference is the one provided by GMT's "Flying
Colours." Haven't played it, but, it looks tight, and certainly provides the
framework to fight a fleet action (which
is what I look for in games in general -- I'm very much an
operations level gamer, when I get a chance to game these days.)
> The key thing, though, is to try to have one ship per player, and
Exactly, which is what made Nelson's battleplan work, the idea of making sure
every captain knew beforehand what to do in various situations.
However, I'm still thinking of larger scale actions, within the FT philosophy
of 'fun and fast.' So, there's definitely going to be an abstraction to
detail, and, in the interests of 'fun and fast', my mods won't have any real
sort of command and control framework.
For a Frag based sail game, C2 is pretty much irrelevant anyway as each person
is only fighting their own ship.
JGH
> The current version splits the clock up into 'zones'
Sounds reasonable
> Do you keep a separate damage track
That's the simplest, I think
> do you reflect that fact that some ships were just better
Higher speed, better turning number. Ideally you'd also want each ship to have
her own arrangement of the zones you
mentioned--eg the frigate might be faster but the 74 more
weatherly. That would depend on the wind speed and sea
state, though, so might get just a tad complex. :-\
> For a Frag based sail game, C2 is pretty much irrelevant
Heh. My first order of business in that sort of game is to make alliances.