TABLETOP DEBRIS

[quoted original message omitted]

[quoted original message omitted]

THIS actually does not refer to tbleto battlefield debris, but those damned
chits that SG II (and others) uses to track troops.

i can live with them, but a number of folks that i know, do not like
the use of chits, clipboard w/ tracking rosters (ala WRG and other rules
of OLDE), etc.

this may sound odd coming from the same folks wh like to keep up with unit
histories and individual trooper histories, but it is a fact of life none the
less.

but the argument goes that this stuff takes away from the prettyness of the
game.

any suggestions?

DAWGFACE47@webtv.net schrieb:
> i can live with them, but a number of folks that i

Getting rid of the clipboard may be difficult in Stargrunt, as there is a fair
amount of info to remember and track.

As to the chits:

A number of them can be moved to the notepad and noted there (e.g.wounds,
activation chit, confidence level etc.)

The other option is to camouflage them. Confidence level and leadership could
be painted on the officer's bases. Suppression markers could be smoke balls
simulating weapon hits. In position could be marked by replacing one figure
with a prone miniature. Dummy unit counters could be heaps of camouflage
netting. Etc.

Greetings

From:  DAWGFACE47@webtv.net
> THIS actually does not refer to tbleto battlefield debris, but those

Make up squad cards and keep them off table. I think this is more
realistic anyway--your opponent should have no way of knowing that Squad
1 is a Vet-1/Confident but Squad 2 is a Green-2/Shaken.
 You can put 2-3 squads on a 3x5 card (depending on how many different
weapons and bits of shiny kit they're carrying, and how small you can
write/read).  Half a dozen cards should be sufficient for a couple of
infantry platoons plus their vehicles, artillery, and air support--a
medium large game.

KarlHeinz said:
> The other option is to camouflage them. Confidence level and leadership

confidence level changes, though.  You could use fine-point dry-erase
markers on the underside of the officer's base, perhaps? A bit difficult if
you're using 6mm figs, of course.

> Suppression markers could be smoke balls simulating weapon hits.
good

> In position could be marked by replacing one figure with a prone
I put aquarium gravel in front of a couple of the figures

> Dummy unit counters could be heaps of camouflage netting. Etc.

"There's a bit of grass." "Oh? Why's it on a base, then?"

KH.Ranitzsch scripsit:
> The other option is to camouflage them.

I always keep a bunch of small irreular felt bits with flock glued on them
handy for this. Especially for the hidden units.

____

laserlight@quixnet.net schrieb:
> >Dummy unit counters could be heaps of camouflage

All my bits of grass are on bases ;-)

You use them just like hidden unit/dummy markers. Some represent real
squads others just a bit of stuff that looks like a hidden unit. Mark them on
the underside according to what they really are.

Greetings

> Dummy unit counters could be heaps of camouflage

All my bits of grass are on bases ;-)

That was a quote from GZG ECC V, Tomb (GM) and the ESU commandder (David
Raynes?). The "bit of grass" was my OU sniper in ghillie. I don't remember
that he successfully shot anyone, but he did call down an ortillery
strike...so you need to watch out for those bits of grass.

On Tue, 11 Jun 2002 10:19:21 -0400, "laserlight@quixnet.net"
> <laserlight@quixnet.net> wrote:

> Make up squad cards and keep them off table.

I do this for convention games, as it makes things easier for new players. I
have been known to laminate them, too.

DAWG has made things difficult (that is, interesting!) by wanting to get rid
of the chits _and_ the record sheets. I have to agree with him, though.
I usually hate games with record sheets (not sure why, though I put up with it
for naval/spaceship games). The chits do look ugly.

_Fire and Fury_ handles unit markers by making them actual mounted and
painted figures. An artillery battery out of ammo, for instance, is marked
with an ammunition chest. This sort of option might be possible for SG2. Let's
look at the common markers.

QUALITY CHIT This is the most vital, as it has the leadership rating and the
quality rating. I have placed coloured circles on the bottom of figures with
the leadership number printed on them. These circles are not very expensive
(found in office stores). A box will last quite a few games. This gives you
the colour coding and the number (cross out the number and write a new one
when the squad gets a new leader).

Another option is painting the leader's base (or part of it) the colour of the
squad's quality.

If you mount figures on a base, you can do some neat things with folliage. You
can get lichen in yellow, green, blue (yes, blue!), and red. Brown lichen
doubles as orange (and I think I have some orangey lichen). Gluing a small
"bush" to the leader's base gives the quality of the unit. Denoting the
leadership value is a little tougher. Putting the bush in a specific place
could indicate a 1, 2, or 3 (right up front is a 1, back left is a 2, back
right is a 3, for instance). There you have the quality and leadership value
of the unit masked in such a way that it doesn't require you to pick up the
figure _and_ it doesn't hurt aesthetics.

This means having to have a whole lot of leader figures, though, which might
be time and cost ineffective. The coloured dot on the bottom of the leader
should suffice.

CONFIDENCE CHIT A lot of players don't bother putting down a chit if a unit is
confident. That helps. What do you do for Steady, Shaken, Broken, or Routed?
Again, this assumes you don't want to use a roster card.

Most figure manufacturers have different poses on the figures. Using a
figure's pose to mean something can help in this regard. Standing shooting is
steady, crouched shooting is shaken, prone is broken, running is routed, or
something like that. You can designate a figure (other than the support
weapons and the leader) to indicate this. The problem then comes when that
figure is wounded or killed you can't easily mark the status of the squad.

If you want, you can use the leader figure to indicate this (along with the
idea above), but this means you'd have to have a large number of leader
figures(!) just to indicate everything properly.

Another option is the coloured circle idea. If you are already noting stuff on
the bottom of the figure, put a big enough circle, or a second circle (I
suggest white) to indicate the morale of the troops. You'd have to write on
this circle as you play, but that's no big deal. All your book keeping is done
on the base of the leader figure.

Yet another option is the _Fire and Fury_ idea: use markers that are
figures. Say you are using GZG figures, like I do. I have NSL and Japanese.
Pick a third nationality and use these to make up markers. Paint them a drab
colour or a really bright colour, but paint the whole figure the one colour
(you may want to paint skin tones). Use the above ideas for posing to indicate
the status of the troops. Put one of these figures down with your squad to
indicate their status. Since both sides have such a figure, and the figure is
painted in a colour different from both your forces, it shouldn't cause
confusion as a member of the squad.

You might also want to consider your marker figure being a different scale,
such as 15mm if you play with 25mm. I don't know, though, if the aesthetics of
this are worthwhile.

SUPPRESSION The easiest way to handle suppression is some cotton. Of course, I
use white cotton for smoke so this causes some issues. Using a different
coloured cotton (one painted black, or brown) would do.

Another way is to use a marker figure. Not sure what you'd use for
suppression. A prone figure I'd use for IP. A better marker would be a figure
lying down with his hands over his head.

You can buy small shell craters. You can even make your own. If you get a
washer and mount one shell crater on it, you have a suppression marker! You
can also put two or three craters to represent two and three suppression
markers. A bunch of these beside the figure would look better than a
suppression marker.

IN POSITION The simplest way is to get some twigs and lay them in front of the
figures, indicating a little bit of ground cover. It looks like they found
logs and are ducking behind them. Someone mentioned a prone figure used as a
marker, that would also work.

CASUALTIES Dead figures are easy: Jon already makes a set of body bag figures.
You'd need a lot of them, though. Wounded figures aren't as easy. Tipping them
over works, but some folks have an aversion to tipping over their figures. You
could always paint up some figures with some suitable red paint splashed about
to indicate blood.

DUMMY MARKERS The easiest way to do these is similar to something else I've
mentioned. Buy a third nationality of figures (I use NSL and Japanese, so I'd
get something like NAC). Pick a figure crouching. Mount it on a washer or
something, paint
it up in a neutral-ish colour (such as all green, except for skin tones)
and glue a lichen bush in front of it. Stick one of those circular stickers on
the bottom. Write either "dummy" or a letter on the circle (or, for that
matter,
just put a circle with a letter on the non-dummy markers, and leave the
dummy markers without a circle).

You can place these around the battlefield as normal. It will look like guys
hiding, ready to fire. It's not until you flip them over (ala the actual dummy
markers) that you will be able to tell if the figure is real or a dummy.

Mix and match any of the above as you see fit. I like the idea of the coloured
circles under the squad leader. That gets rid of most of the markers. I can
live with suppression markers and casualty markers. I really like the idea of
the dummy markers (I just came up with it on the fly). I might do
that...!

> QUALITY CHIT

Some means of temporarily affixing the lichen so that you could one, two, or
three very small bushes would work as well as allowing you to change an
officer's quality from game to game.

It might be feasible to mount the bush(s) on a small bit of tape or
metal/magnetic strip with a bit of an overhang. The overhang would
actually go under the officer's base with the bush then seemingly attached to
the edge of the base.

Or just place the clumps on the table and move them around with the officer.
Just make sure everyone remembers to take their status with them.

> CONFIDENCE CHIT

Discarded bits of gear would be good for this. Confident squads would have no
gear laying about loose and each step down would garner on bit.

Generally I'm a big fan of using figure markers but where each figure = one
combatant though figure markers (other than actual casualties) don't really
appeal.

Little stones or pebbles could be used for confidence. Although in this case
perhaps a confident squad should have more stones and lose them as they lose
confidence.

Much goodness snipped below...

Another possibility is to return to older historical mountings and have flags
for each unit. If you have a standard or flag bearer you oculd interchange
flags as necessary. Perhaps even better would be to glue a small plastic bead
to the base of the leader and then use the hole as a standard mount for flags
glued to piano wire. Flags could then have troop quality and leadership number
painted on them.

Using pennants (i.e. Red three would be three small red triangular pennants on
a pole) could be another style of marking stands without having a large flag
in the way.

Beads might be another way to mark quality - a small post glued to the
base would be a place to attach an appropriately colored bead for
quality.  Multi-colored beads could be used to denote better leadership
- i.e. Green 2 would be a green and white bead.  My understanding is
that you can make beads from Fimo clay in various patterns, colors and sizes
(i.e. you can make beads that have a triangle or star in them) Thus you might
make solid green beads, beads with a white circle (level 2) and green with a
white triangle (level 3).

> -----Original Message-----

I intend to mount my models on metal bases and use disks of magnetic
sheet that I've punched out using a paper-punch as the markers.  (Geohex
sells metal bases of varyied sizes.)

The disks can be labeled and color-coded to replace the chits.  If you
buy a roll of the flexible magnetic sheets that has adhesive backing, you can
print out a sheet with colors and markings you want, put the magnetic material
on the back of it, then punch out your markers. That
will save the time/hassle of punching out the markers, then going back
and labeling the fiddly little things...

--Flak

> On Tue, 2002-06-11 at 01:32, K.H.Ranitzsch wrote:

On Tue, 11 Jun 2002 17:52:10 -0400, "Robert Minadeo"
<raminad@earthlink.net> wrote:

> Little stones or pebbles could be used for confidence. Although in this

Hey, that works. Though you'd have to move the stones around with the squad.
Perhaps a small base representing grass and stones in a small clearing
(i.e. a
"rallying point"). These would be very easy to make. In fact, make them big
enough and you could slip the leader figure onto it! Geez... this thread has
got to be one of the best ones in the last month for SG2. I've got all sorts
of neat ideas for doing away with chits!

> [quoted text omitted]

> Perhaps a small base representing grass and stones in a small clearing

OOH Good idea!

> Geez... this thread has

Ditto.

Regards,

> Perhaps a small base representing grass and stones in a small

Yes, this is excellent, and keep the ideas coming! I'd be the first to agree
that the chits are NOT a perfect solution for aesthetic reasons, BUT I still
think they are better than the alternatives in terms of ease of play; in our
defence, please note that we do mention in SG2 that we acknowledge that some
players will object to the visual
effects, and may prefer to use off-table status sheets to either write
the data or to put the chits on. If you are willing to go to the trouble of
making scenic pieces and extra figures to replace the chits, then that's
great, and the ideas that have
been put forward over the last couple of days are generally very good -
anyone mind if we nick some of them to put in FMA and other stuff? One other
idea, for those of you suggesting putting labels on the
undersides of figure bases to replace the activation markers - if you do
it before you punch out the counter sheets (hint: we sell spare counter
sheets!! <grin>) you can probably get the sheet colour xeroxed onto
self-adhesive stock, thus giving you coloured sticker versions of the
chits to put under your figures' bases. Get a few sheets done at once, and you
can then change the ratings of figures as you need for each game. Similarly,
you could put sticker versions of the lettered or dummy chits under little
terrain features as already discussed, to identify what they really represent.

All this aside, I STILL far prefer on-table status marking systems (be
they chits, figures, BB slugs, whatever) over writing status notes on record
sheets - the latter are FAR to easily overlooked in the heat of
battle.....
"Oh, drat, I forgot that that unit was down to Shaken already - ah well,
too late now...."    ;-)

[quoted original message omitted]

On Thu, 13 Jun 2002 19:08:40 +0100, Ground Zero Games <jon@gzg.com>
wrote:

> I'd be the first to agree that the chits are NOT a perfect solution for

It's hard to figure out how else to do it. If it were easy and obvious, DAWGIE
wouldn't have asked us for suggestions.

> If you are willing to go to the trouble of making scenic pieces and

Nope, you can use any of the ones I suggested.

I'm probably going to do the following:

- Leadership and Quality: sticker on the bottom of the figure.
- Confidence: small stand for the leader: 1 rock (or bush, not sure yet)
for steady, 2 for shaken, 3 for broken, 4 four routed. The figure gets more
"cover" as morale drops, and Confident doesn't require anything.
- Activation: small rock
- Suppression: not sure. Maybe some home made shell craters on a base.
Still have to think about this.
- Dummy: the "generic" hidden figure on a base.
- In Position: logs or twigs beside the figures
- Casualties: probably just do as I've been doing, which is knocking
over a figure if wounded, placing a white skull if incapacitated and placing a
black skull if dead.

The body bag figures you make are good for dead figures, but I find that in
most cases you don't need to mark dead figures.

I'm still thinking about casualties...

> All this aside, I STILL far prefer on-table status marking systems (be

If you're like me, you also find that space is a premium. You either have to
constantly turn around for the status sheets or you end up with them on the
table. I'm thinking, once I have something semi permanent, of having a dice
rolling table and a way of hanging the status records off the sides of the
table. This makes it hard to write on, so that means the best bet is to keep
all record keeping on the table.

From: Allan Goodall agoodall@att.net
> - Leadership and Quality: sticker on the bottom of the figure.
<etc>

If you have a separate base with no figure, you could use it as a status
marker. Put a sticker with QD/Ldr on the bottom.  Texture and flock the
top. Drop a smoke puff for "activated" *and* a twig for "IP" *and* a pebble
for "steady" (etc). That way you have a single marker which covers everything.

Maybe different colored rocks for vaious morale levels.

Why don't we just figure out how to adapt the "clicker" bases like on
Mageknight or Heroclix for GZG use?

Okay, yer right... nevermind.

--Flak

> On Fri, 2002-06-14 at 12:48, laserlight@quixnet.net wrote:
*and* a pebble for "steady" (etc). That way you have a single marker which
covers everything.
> Maybe different colored rocks for vaious morale levels.

> On Fri, 2002-06-14 at 12:27, Allan Goodall wrote:

> At 01:05 PM 6/14/2002 -0400, you wrote:

> Why don't we just figure out how to adapt the "clicker" bases like on

Well, even that doesn't quite do away with it, as you have to use markers
to show which figures have activated that turn / last turn...

On Fri, 14 Jun 2002 12:48:39 -0400, "laserlight@quixnet.net"
> <laserlight@quixnet.net> wrote:

> If you have a separate base with no figure, you could use it as a

Ah. A single "status stand". The only trick is that if you are going to drop
things into it, you're going to pop things into it, you're going to make it
hard to see what's written on the bottom.

What would the status stand need to denote: quality/leadership,
confidence, suppression, IP, activation. Let's assume, for a minute, that it
won't handle casualties.

Quality/leadership: small lichen shrubs the colour of the quality die.
Lichen comes, as I think I mentioned, in yellow, green, blue, red, and orange.
Confidence: small rocks of one colour. I have some in red that would work,
subtracting one as confidence drops. Suppresson: a bigger rock (not too big)
of a different colour. Perhaps white or black. Activation: a puff of smoke.
Or, if you have create some tiny "cartridge case" markers, place that on the
marker. IP: a twig works. Or, you can place one of the squad figures in the
status marker, if it's big enough.

I favour putting the quality/leadership on the bottom of the figure on a
sticker. It's easier than building all the different type of status bases
you'd need. It would also allow you to add lichen to the status marker base as
a method of showing suppression.

On 14 Jun 2002 13:07:37 -0400, Flak Magnet
> <flakmagnet@tabletop-battlezone.com> wrote:

> Actually, I kind of like the idea of the table being 4'x8'. If I hinge

I have three tables (from Ikea in Toronto) that, together, work out to pretty
much 4' by 8' (they seem weird sizes until you realize they are metric). I got
three sets of folding legs, each set identical, and put them on the table. The
tables sit the same height, and now I have three tables I can maneuver into
different configurations. Easier than trying to hinge one table.

On Fri, 14 Jun 2002 13:08:37 -0500, Allan Goodall <agoodall@att.net>
wrote:
> I favour putting the quality/leadership on the bottom of the figure on

Personally, even though a game that *looks* good is important to me, I can
live with the chits. But then, I'm a lazy bastard, and I don't think that the
chits really detract all that much from the appearance of the board.

However. If you *really* wanted to, you could add a small piece of wire to the
rear of unit leader's base. Nothing much, just half an inch long, sticking
straght up. And then
you could use small beads to denote the unit and leader quality -- 2 red
beads denote a level 2 leader and an elite unit. Visible, easy to change, but
not *too* ostentatious.

A second wire could be used to track confidence in a similar fashion, and you
indicate the other things (like In Position) with other colors of beads.

Allan Goodall replied to someone (Laserlight?):

> >If you have a separate base with no figure, you could use it as a

And, of course, some of your opponents are likely to say "what different

colours on the rocks? I see grey-brown, grey-brown, grey-brown and
grey-brown rocks/lichen/whatever..."

Later,

Oerjan said:
> And, of course, some of your opponents are likely to say "what

Some of us don't *have* local opponents so are in the unenviable position of
being able to do what we please <g>. It does, perhaps, call into question the
sanity of those of us who paint figures and build terrain for what turns out
to be a PBeM game...