Denied and Disappointed!

Well, due to a last minute cancellation by critical personnel, my game convention weekend ended before it began.

Circumstances being what they were for the planned trip, when our host received word that a business partner could not make the trip, myself and Brent (who were going to run five or six games between us) were left without any transportation to and from the convention from our lodgings. This left us in a serious bind and we had no time to establish alternative transportation.

So, Murphy strikes again, just as he always does, causing me to go yet another year without attending a game convention. My RL situation being what it is, even if I came into a lot of cash next year, that still does not mean I would be free to go.

Instead, I got roped into fixing a roof (since I was now available to help) and am spending the entire weekend in 100+ degree heat helping out a friend of my father's. We will be finished with it by Monday afternoon, so yes my Labor Day weekend is completely shot. I am even too exhausted to work on the ACW rules that I have been tinkering with.

Stating that I am disappointed is something of an understatement, but such is my lot in life.

Hope the rest of you have a better weekend than I.

Defcon 2

Pacificon, the premier wargame convention in the Western U.S., is this weekend. As Fortuna would have it, I am going to be attending as a gm, running an old west game that several of us in the club have contributed in the making of.

Due to Alex's unanticipated generosity, I have a ride, a room, and a gm pass for the entire event weekend. We've been working on the rules for about two months now, between RL events, but with tonight's final playtest, I think we have a winner.

I don't know what the plan is for these rules, long term, but if the consensus is that they will be made freely available, I will post them here.

I plan on taking my rather poor quality digital camera with me, so some pics will happen. My intent is to get in as much viewing as I can between the sessions I am running. My last game convention, apart from Games Day Baltimore in 2002, was Historicon 2001, so I am long overdue for such an adventure.

Canister and Grape: 50k celebration and prize draw

Canister and Grape is celebrating 50,000 hits and giving a prize draw. Check out the site and join in on the merriment.

The site has free stuff for gamers, which are a collection of files which may be useful to pushers of lead/pewter/plastic.

They also play The Sword and the Flame, which covers a period I have become more and more interested in, mainly due to Robert Cordery at Wargaming Miscellany, but these chaps provide further inspiration.

So, give 'em a gander, post a comment, and good luck!

Quick Update

It has been a particularly stressful couple of weeks, between job hunting, computer problems, and other RL issues that never seem to get resolved. Friday will be a huge day, either adding to my stress level or reducing it somewhat, depending on the outcome of certain events. We'll see...

I have been spending what little time I could on refining the ACW rules I have been working on., especially as I did end up having a few holes in them which need to be dealt with. The holes are minor, but I wanted them taken care of before I post the first draft.

I have an old friend and club mate who has opened a game shop about 40 minutes away. I am planning on visiting the shop tomorrow evening, with some other friends, in support, but as I have no room in my budget, I won't be buying anything.

I have put in nearly 800 job applications since 2008 and so far, nothing in the way of a full-time job. I am still a substitute for two school districts, but the income barely maintains me in my present and undesireable position. However, I do have a promising prospect, depending on the outcome of some examinations I have to do extremely well on (as there are hundreds of applicants for the same position). If I get this job (fingers crossed, incense burning, prayers offered, etc.) the income may be sufficient to allow me to move into a 3 bedroom home. Which is almost back to where I was pre-divorce.

While not counting on such good fortune, it would sure be nice to have some measure of relief from stress. Meaning I will also be in a position to church out painted miniatures by the bucketload, build terrain, construct custom game tables, and get a camera that will be good for close up photos of miniatures.

In the interim between now and the results of my efforts being made known to me, I look at my boxes of collected, but unpainted and unassembled, miniatures and imagine...

On Morale/Experience Grades

I posted this earlier today, on TMP, and felt it was useful to re-post here, with appropriate edits. I would love to have detailed feedback from my readers about this very subject.

The more I research the subject of morale/experience, the more uncomfortable I feel towards using morale grades. As others have pointed out elsewhere, past heroism on the battlefield was not a guarantor of future behavior.

If we can agree on that point, then can we also not agree that determining a unit's "morale grade" weighted by past heroism has a built in flaw?

On the other hand, my own recent thoughts on a particular unit's experience causes me to consider a lesser number of grades instead of more.

For me, untrained is really more of a modifier to Green. I mean, just how many ACW regiments went into combat with zero training? I'd rather have "untrained" as a modifier, because roving bands of marauders in the West may have not received official training at all, but were very experienced at the skills they needed for certain types of actions, but were entirely unsuited for other types of actions.

Experienced and Veteran are very similar, are they not? Again. I'm more of a mind to have "veteran" status act as a modifier, based on scenario parameters, to experienced troops.

Crack troops… A way to describe a body of men who will generally do what you order them to do, and perhaps a bit more? Like holding the line for over five hours and taking over 60% casualties while doing so. Admittedly, some regiments deserve this label for actions on specific days, but not for extended periods of time. The Iron Brigade was a shadow of its former self by 2 July 1863, still very good men, but no longer as capable as they were on 1 July.

These thoughts cause me to consider troops as being either, Green, or Experienced, because there is a definitive line that determines which is which.

Beyond these, other circumstances or characteristics can be plugged in as modifiers to a base system founded upon the two grades I listed above. This, then reduces the need to generate tables to as extreme as those found in the Empire series (which was very extreme), while still giving more variance than what is used in DBA.

Lastly, I am also of the mind that a unit's relative experience increases its efficiency in damaging the enemy (like knowing to lower the aimpoint when shooting downhill), but does not mean indicate whether the unit will fight or flee when under extreme stress. I think the latter had more to do with trusting the leadership of the regiment and brigade as well as the typical circumstances of being flanked, unsupported, and outnumbered.

Here is an example what I call "morale creep."

Morale Grades:
Untrained
Raw
Green
Experienced
Veteran
Crack

To the experienced (see what I did there?) wargamer, these should be familiar. We can then agree that they may even appear to be acceptable within a set of rules.

Being a manner in which morale is tested for fight or flight purposes, each grade must be given a value at which it either passes or fails, in order to obtain either result above. Now then, which die type that is used for morale checks is very important, is it not? Using a d6 with this list means we've few options for unique values as with 6 grades and 6 sides, the Untrained troops will likely always fail, without some major positive modifiers, but then with those same modifiers, a Crack unit will almost always pass and that is not an optimal solution either.

Else, we can combine into groups of two, the morale grades, we we would then have three unique values, one per group, and have three values not utilized, giving options for variance based on modifiers.

Example:
Untrained/Raw 5+
Green/Experienced 4+
Veteran/Crack 3+

With the target number listed as being the number on a d6 for a pass, then without modifiers we have no guaranteed passes or failures by any single morale grade, right? Well, then why do we have more than three morale grades?

Do we also have modifiers that apply to some grades and not to others, meaning that perhaps a Crack unit gets a positive modifier, but a veteran regiment does not? What contrived list of modifiers would give us those kinds of distinctions?

Now, let us use a d10...

Untrained      10+
Raw               9+
Green            7+
Experienced  5+
Veteran         3+
Crack            1+

Whoa! We are back to the same problem as before, nearly always a guarantee of failure for one grade and nearly always a success for another. Okay, okay, yes, I made this up, but YOU plug in values that you think would work. Consider that if you only have 1 pip difference between them, then Experienced troops would be a mere 20% less steady than Crack troops? But that would mean that Crack troops are a full 50% better than Untrained troops, but that does not seem right either.

How about a d20? Apart from being a bit more difficult for those with poor eyesight to read, and the fact that it rolls about a bit more on the table, a d20 surely has enough sides?

Untrained  16+
Raw           14+
Green         12+
Experienced 10+
Veteran         8+
Crack           6+

Now, this appears to be a better option, right? Um, well, no. Converted to a d10, these would be:

Untrained  8+
Raw           7+
Green         6+
Experienced 5+
Veteran         4+
Crack           3+

Yes, using a d20 allows us to achieve a result falling in multiples of 5%, but is that not really just a trick that we play on our minds, when the end result is what we are looking for?

We could move up to a d30 or even a d100, but why? Not every gamer OWNS one or both; I don't. Sure, we could use two d10s for a d100 result, but then the grades would tend towards something I last saw in Empire...something I want to avoid.

Instead, I am looking at the below as a possibility, using a d6:
Green 5+
Experienced 3+

Modifiers to Roll:
-1 Untrained
+1 Veteran

This provides a 33% (rounded) difference between the two grades, but a raw difference of 83.4% difference between Green-Untrained (AKA Raw) and Experienced-Veteran (AKA Crack), without having to create overly large, complex, and detailed sets of tables.

Yes, we would of course be using modifiers, but modifiers tend to be more intuitive between rule sets than are morale grades.

For an ACW game, we could consider support, leadership, enemy in flank or rear, and cohesion/order. Anything else?

We would then determine whether or not these should be positive or negative modifiers. This means that support can be assumed as the norm, but a lack of support would be a negative modifier to the die roll OR that a lack of support is assumed and the presence of it adds a positive amount to the die roll.

In the example immediately above, I would have support as assumed as the norm and give a negative if the unit in question is not supported.

By the same token, I would say that leadership could be either a positive or negative modifier due to the quality (or lack thereof) of the leader(s) present. And that an enemy in flank or rear would give a negative modifier (We can all agree on that one, I am sure).

Therefore:
Unsupported: -1
Leader: +1/-1
Enemy on Flank or Rear: -1

We can quibble over the degree of modifier, but for my purposes here, these are sufficient.

With all of this in mind, we can then also state that a morale die result of "6" is always a pass and a "1" is always a fail, giving us the extremes that we want to keep, because things like that did occur (where a green unit did surprisingly well or a very experienced unit did a fairly poor job).

All of this is not meant as a criticism of any set of rules or arguments, but rather an explication of my evolving thought process after years of study and recent pondering.

I am not a statistician, by any means, so I am purposely avoiding the detailed arguments such would give. My point isn't the numbers so much as the unnecessary degrees of distinction that we give for what I am seeing as little or no gain.  Complexity is becoming more of a turn off for people, even die hards, and overly complex systems of morale tend to bog games down somewhat. In my view, complexity for its own sake does not make for a better gaming experience.

Please feel free to disagree. I would love to know your own thoughts.