Rules tinkering, rambling, and game-space tinkering too. Also rambling...

 I experimented yesterday, all too briefly, with a "solo ECW" article from a volume of Wally Simon's essays. Unfortunately, it was a bit rambling; it reminds me distinctly of Donald Featherstone, in fact. Like Featherstone, Simon was a charming, friendly sort of writer, but also like Featherstone, he tended to ramble. The articles, while they are mostly about rules mechanisms and their modifications, are also  reminisces of who knows how many decades of play and camaraderie. Featherstone doesn't write much about his opponents, but in Simon's writing you can hear the banter across the table. And like Featherstone, the rules are often spread across a chapter, and missing important elements. 

I'm not saying he's a bad writer, but it's not always easy to follow the rulesets he writes. Mostly because he often focuses on specific elements, often of someone else's rulesets. Or an entire article will be on different methods of counting initiative (I'll come back to this one when I get around to my Picacho Peak game). Or a pleasant, but rules-lite recounting of crewing an X-class submarine made out of a batch of chairs in Paddy Griffith's living room, which reminds me of Jim Wallman's equally cramped Tank Duel. In that one, players sit or crouch together in the relative positions of a tank crew, and have to stay there while operating a tabletop tank. I intend to run it for my own group the moment the pandemic's over and I don't have to worry about infecting a bunch of gamers old enough to be my father. I think kids would get a real kick out of it too.

Like Simon and Featherstone, I ramble...

In this case the missing element was morale. The ruleset in question is for a relatively small game, with units represented by a single base. For my quick test run-through, I took two bases of pike, two of muskets, and one of cavalry a side, on a new 2x4 foot folding table I picked up to be able to isolate in the bedroom. I am considering further remote games, you see, and when one must wait for the players to send in their moves, leaving a table set with minis and terrain for days on end, one cannot leave the table vulnerable to pouncing cats.

This was all very well, except for the lighting. Something I hadn't realized about my play in the living room is that I have an overhead light there; I don't in the bedroom. This is not so bad, except that I want to be able to take pictures, or maybe even video (she said, envious of certain youtube channels. Seriously, check out the overhead camera in this guy's battle reports). And the lighting in the bedroom is poor, even in daylight with a window open - and I will be rarely playing in daytime as I'm a night owl.

Rambling again. Back to the playtest. So I ran through the rules. There are six elements to a turn, and more than a few interesting mechanisms in them:

- Active player tosses a D10. When cycle-upon-cycle throws add up to 15, the turn is over, and Victory Points are toted up.

- Active player moves both infantry and cavalry up to ten inches. No mention of terrain modifiers here, though the battle report is set among hills and manors.

- Non-active player fires, but draws a variable number of cards from a "fire deck" first, looking for pairs of Fire and Load cards - each pair allows a single unit to fire. There are also Misfire cards. I tossed a D12, but could have used, perhaps, three suits of cards (or two plus the Jokers). units with casualties roll for morale - losers retreat to a "Rally Zone." Interestingly, pike elements may also fire, on the assumption that they are typical regiments of the period with a 1:2 ratio of pikes to muskets, so the muskets are "concealed" among the pikes and actually fire with near the same chance of hitting as the musketeer elements.

- Active player chooses two units, which fire. (For some reason, he doesn't draw cards.) Confusion was attained by the fact this was also a battle report between the Active player, the Earl of Cratchett, and the non-Active player, Lord Flocke, and at this point the Earl is named as the non-Active player.

- Non-Active cavalry move ten inches. I like this, incidentally - it gives the non-active player another thing to do (something that Wally seems to approve in his other articles) at the same time that it enables the cavalry to move faster than infantry like it should. The entire turn cycle is intriguingly "semi-simultaneous."

- Melees are fought. Losing stands again retreat to the Rally Zone. At this point, all such units roll to see if they return to the field. This feels akin to the rallying mechanism in the Perrys' TravelBattle - losing units retreat to their baseline, then either fail to rally or are retrieved by a command figure. While Heavy and Light Cavalry are listed in the army writeups, as well as a unit armed with swords and bucklers, there is no comment on their impact in close combat - do cavalry roll higher, or get extra dice?

Now here's the problem. The morale-check mechanism for casualties from fire is not there.

And of course I didn't notice this until I needed to roll a morale check. This is, also of course, the reason I ran a hasty small game in the first place - to catch things like that. Or so I reassure myself.

The morale check mechanism for melees is there, but I'm not sure it would apply to the firing phase. Sides add up stands in combat and casualties inflicted (so one stand that inflicts one casualty on its opponent makes two) and multiply this number by a D10. Again akin to Featherstone, where survivors (not casualties) are multiplied by a D6, and the side with a lower number retreats.

In most rulesets, the side that takes casualties by fire rolls alone, against a set number. It didn't occur to me at the time to roll off between units in the same way as melee; at the time I think I felt the fired-on unit would be much likelier to lose (since the firer hasn't taken casualties yet), and this didn't seem realistic. In hindsight, though, I could see it, in part because the Active player gets to fire back, possibly with units that took casualties in the immediate-prior phase, thus enabling the opponent to roll higher. (Is this making any sense?)

See if you can figure out morale from fire-casualties from this!

An earlier article in the book, Encounter at Lennard Manor: Loss Threshold, describes a similar ruleset and melee-morale mechanic, but still does not describe how morale works when units are not in melee.

I may try again, using the same mechanic for firing-morale as for CC-morale. On a 2x4foot table with five bases a side, it goes quickly enough. There are the bones of an interesting and light system here, but as with Featherstone's, I'll have to build on them. Of course that's half the fun!