Gunther

Post a random fact about yourself.

I retired from the US Army 17 years ago and yes, I am an old man.

Post a random fact about yourself.

@ExitI think Maybee's title is fake news; a deception plan. Something just might be afoot.

Post a random fact about yourself.

My wife and I held my son back prior to Kindergarten due for maturity reasons. His birthday is in June. He is now on of the older students in his grade. There are actually a set of twins one day older than him.

Post a random fact about yourself.

I also went to a college that has the tallest academic library in the world and I won't even pretend like I didn't climb fourteen stories because it was less awful than taking the elevator.

@Chuuya

I don't know which university/college has the tallest elevator, but the University of Massachusetts at Amherst has a library that is 25 stories tall. I used to run the stairs, up and down for exercise, not because I was claustrophobic.

Spearhead in the Gap; A WWIII war game (1985)

As for FATE, I'm unfamiliar with it, but that's most dice or tabletop systems for me, at least the non-Warhammer ones. As for alternative ideas no matter the system, Napoleonic line warfare definitely appeals, albeit I'd be willing to do practically any wargame so long as you were running it.

@CaptainBritton

OK. So this is the idea I was running through my head. I will post a price list for Infantry, Cavalry and Artillery units from a European-esque setting from the early 19th century in a fictional world. You as the player will be given a total value of money to use to buy units. Obviously, it is a Napoleonic era flavor. The units will have inherent firepower and a constant movement rate. I would use Regimental sized units, with two or three battalion sized subordinate units. Each player (author) would control a Brigade sized element containing three or four infantry regiments, a cavalry regiment and one or two artillery batteries. Your units will then receive DRMs both + and - depending on what you choose as the player. There MUST be negatives in order to have positives. Positives will outnumber the negatives, but there has to be a weakness.

I want to use morale as a factor in the gameplay, where units that are fired upon will have to roll a morale check. If the unit passes, they stand and fight. If they fail, the run. If an adjacent unit (battalion) runs from a morale check, that unit will have to undergo a morale check too. This way, one whimpy battalion, could cause an entire Brigade to run from the battlefield. It is realistic. I've seen it happen in historical readings. But yes, Napoleonic or USCW would be good venues to play on, but it would be fictional. It is like a Roleplay Landain was in earlier this year: Battle of the Nations.

We can use the FATE Core system to resolve combats with this. I have a few hexagonal maps from other games that I could use for this or we could agree to use Google Maps. We would need to establish the footprint of a regiment and/or a brigade as well as a battery of artillery, just to know how much space is taken up by friendly and enemy units.

You know I have units already cretaed that I could use to play the bad guys. Maybe do this the way TJByrum did and have an NPC bad guy fignting against our player created units. @Landain could use his Friedrich Brigade of hte Halldorian Empire.

Spearhead in the Gap; A WWIII war game (1985)

Also, in PvP or force on force contests, the outcome is decided a bit differently. If CaptainBritton rolls a 14 (12 +2) and Landain rolls a 10 (no DRM), hte difference of the two rolls (14 - 10 = 4) which would give the outcome a Great rather than a Catastrophic -4 (4) which is below the average line.

Spearhead in the Gap; A WWIII war game (1985)

I was happy to see the Soviet Spiggot missiles were just as effective and tried to make as good use of those as I could.

@Landain

Yes, the TOW has a longer range, but both systems required a flat base roll of 8 to hit. It put the ATGMs on a similar footing.

Why didn’t American CAS show up? There were plenty of targets to shoot at.

@Landain

@CaptainBrittonCan you respond to this? Personally, I think he wanted to use them on a location where he didn’t know your tanks were located at and was unsure where to send them. Your units were moving and his subordinate were hitting your units. Since CAS is not part of the original game, I would have allowed for the pilot to seeing the units move and adjust their aim up to more than a few hexes away. Four hexes equals one kilometer. It would not have been too difficult an adjustment for the pilot to hit something that moved a kilometer away.

Did Gunther’s attempts at preserving the Fog of War hinder gameplay? He could have put the responses in the IC thread, maybe even in hiders. As long as CaptainBritton and I could read what was there and not allow it to influence our future actions or refrain from looking, it would be OK. But that takes some serious trust issues. Using the Private Messages (PMs) communicate was probably the best means of communication.

@Landain

Personally, I think this might have worked. I would not have wanted to read the hiders for Britton as it would ruin the perspective of the game for me.

Could it have been better if you (Gunther) used operational graphics rather than photographing the little cardboard chits? The hex identifiers did make it easier to identify locations of friendly and enemy units.

@Landain

I actually thought of using operational graphics and tried to that for CaptainBritton early in the game. But honestly, it was so much easier to use the cardboard chits. Chalk that up to laziness. I would prefer operational graphics.

I’m not sure what you are asking here. I knew how my unit was moving and it appeared the US units didn’t move at all. I think if a US unit had moved and Gunther stated it moved, that would have resolved any issues here.

@Landain

This question was more for Britton than for you.

This game was great for this scenario/war game. I loved it. I would love to do it again. Not sure I would be able to with work going on.

@Landain

Cool. I might do it with player created equipment. Maybe a different time period or not using vehicles; light infantry or even musket or sword based infantry.

The FATE system. I have seen that in use. I think it would be great for use I a wargame, if the players were using units, equipment and vehicles of their own creation, either based on real stuff or not. The Fate dice are kind of based more on events resulting in average ways and only rarely being very good or very bad. You would need to assign some good Die Roll Modifiers on player created junk rather than based on historical performance of this stuff.

@Landain

I actually calculated the percentages of the dice results as follows:

Outcome Occurences Percentage
-4 1 1.2%
-3 4 4.9%
-2 10 12.3%
-1 16 19.8%
0 19 23.4%
+1 16 19.8%
+2 10 12.3%
+3 4 4.9%
+4 1 1.2%

But the only problem for use on the forum, is it appears to be 4d3. Each die has three equally occur result and you use four of them. But 4d3 provides results of 4 - 12 which means you would have to use 4d3 - 8 which would give you -4 to +4. Or tip the scale up to 4 - 12 using 4d3 as follows:

Outcome Score
Legendary 8 (16)
Epic 7 (15)
Fantastic 6 (14)
Superb 5 (13)
Great 4 (12)
Good 3 (11)
Fair 2 (10)
Average 1 (9)
Mediocre 0 (8)
Poor -1 (7)
Terrible -2 (6)
Horrendous -3 (5)
Catastrophic -4 (4)

Using this chart, we allow DRMs up to +4 which would allow the extremely rare outcome of a roll of +4 + 4 = 8 or Legendary. A roll of 0 + 4 would still give a character (unit) a roll of 4 which is Great. By using 4d3, we could still use the results chart above, using the numbers in parenthesis. 4d3 would serve the same purpose, giving results of 4 - 16 with the allowance of DRMs up to +4.

Are you familiar with the FATE Core system, @CaptainBritton? I think this is a better system and wouldn’t need so much detail in maintaining the Fog of War. It could still be preserved as long as we identify what each word above means or translates into game/Roleplay terms.

Spearhead in the Gap; A WWIII war game (1985)

... it didn't matter very much as my Abrams and TOWs acted as a literal delete button for everything that showed itself anyways.

@CaptainBritton

Amen! Ain't that the truth.

As for the East German victory: While the First Battalion, 33rd Armored Regiment is now cut down to size, we effectively neutered the East German advance. Any breakthrough beyond that point would probably be hard pressed to push on to Frankfurt-am-Main any time soon. This battle's exact definition was a Pyrrhic victory. The quote attributed to Pyrrhus himself comes to mind: "Another such victory and I come back to Epirus alone."

@CaptainBritton

I couldn't have said any better myself. There is a footnote, I must state. The game, "Assault!" has no rules for Close Air Support (CAS) which I think it is sorely lacking. Although hte presence of US A-10s was invisible, the Soviet built SU-25 was heavily felt. I believe, the early American casualties were attributable to the Frogfoot's performance. The scoring rules would not have considered that. In which case, the two or four steps of American units lost to Soviet CAS would have handed the victory over to the Americans. The only thing that got past the Americans was a company(-) of T-80s. They would have eventually run out of fuel, run out of ammo and/or gotten taken out by a rear echelon force or friendly air attacks.

Thank you very much for your input. I appreciate this. Let's see what @Landain has to say. He hasn't been on in a while.

Current Mood in One Gif

Word association Game!

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