Combat Maneuvers

Every man-to-man combat system begins with the assumption that both sides will take turns bipping one another with swords or lasers or whatever. The moment you allow for more complicated forms of interaction, things can get amazingly complicated in a hurry.

Our current campaign under the ACKS system uses a double-test for any special combat maneuver:

• make a normal attack with a -4 penalty, then
• give the target a saving throw vs paralysis

Effectively this makes success depend on three things: (1) attacker level, (2) defender armor class, and (3) defender level. (There's also a loose admonition to apply suitable penalties for size differential, but those are left to judge's discretion.)

The most controversial feature here is armor class. The system designer (Alex Macris) is pretty adamant about the innovation of a "touch AC" in D&D (or a CMD in Pathfinder) going to far in terms of negating the value of gear. The concept here is that being armored doesn't just block attacks, it also frees you up to defend in a totally different and far more confident way. A knight doesn't need to focus on anything except holding a sword and using it to beat someone else on the head. A light fencer needs to focus on survival-footwork first, and so is much more vulnerable to trickery. For example, he's going to constantly be using his sword to parry, which is going to make it easier to sunder that sword.

From a gamist perspective, there's another argument at stake here: "tanks" should be hard to control. If a heavily armored fighter steps forward, you don't want there to be a single right answer for how to neutralize him every encounter. "Trip him and make him fall down" is funny the first time, but if it happens every battle and becomes such an obvious tactic as to be mandatory, then it's negating the whole concept of having armor class as a numerical proxy for defense ability. The best tactic is then always to grapple the tank, then run past to murder everyone else. So special maneuvers shouldn't, in general, be able to disregard armor class, since that would negate the value (and fun) of stomping around the battlefield as an impregnably armored behemoth.

The bottom line is that I've decided it's probably best to keep using armor class as the defending stat for special maneuvers, rather than try to introduce an independent combat maneuver defense. For things like "sunder weapon" or "disarm", I think the best approach might be to define an alternate minimum armor class equal to level + strength-bonus, so that hulking shirtless barbarians can still hold onto their giant axes. High AC defenders could still use armor class, but low AC strikers could replace that with their raw force and tenacity.

WiF Optional Rules

With ambitions for a summer WW2 campaign using the World in Flames Deluxe set, I've been pondering the use of a few optional rules beyond the ones included in the RAW. In particular, I'd like to make production less random; currently it just involves drawing counters blindly from the available force pool, which can result in oddities like the British accidentally building an Australian infantry just as the Germans are massing an invasion fleet! It's also difficult to draw units randomly when using magnetized counters, which make it impossible to use the old "shake 'em all up in your hands and draw" method.

The first rule is from our old days at the Calvin Historical Simulations Club:

What's in this stack?!?

• Fog of War: The units in each stack of the board are normally concealed, except during combat by any units that cover them. Any other player may request to see only the top land unit, the top naval unit, the top air unit, and any stationary assets like fortifications or factories.

The advantage of this rule is that is prevents excessively time-consuming calculation of pre-combat odds, and represents a realistic level of operational intelligence.

The second rule, which I'm proposing for the first time, is intended to reduce production randomness:

• Production Specialization: Sort units into force pools (and sub-pools) as usual. Any pool that contains only units that have no year-dates on the reverse side must build randomly, as usual. For any other pool, do the following.
• If the pool contains units from only one year, the unit(s) to be built may be selected non-randomly by the builder.
• If the pool contains units from more than one year, and a single unit from the pool is built, it may be selected non-randomly by the builder, but may not be from the most recent year.
• If the pool contains units from more than one year, and multiple units from the pool are being built, then the first unit must be selected non-randomly from the earliest year available, but all subsequent units may be selected non-randomly from any year.

That's a little more complicated to explain than the current rule, but it should be faster to apply it in practice. It avoids the horrendous ordeal of constantly having to sort out force pools at the end of each turn, or else buying a stack of extra game trays to keep them sorted. The logic behind this is that, if you are building just one bomber wing a turn, your Ministry of War Production isn't going to be nearly as proficient at designing good planes as it would be if it were cranking out a dozen bomber wings.

There are a few weird side effects from this rule, like the fact that small powers like the Chinese will have to wait an extra year to build most of their top-end units. On the other hand, they'll get to avoid the indignity of having to build some completely obsolete junk, which helps to balance it out.