Reply To: Scale and Abstraction in Gaming

[evilstu 15298xp 1]

Thanks all for the genuinely insightful feedback comments. Have been thinking it through and as a bit of a workaround solution for ‘true line of sight’ skirmish level games I think I might just apply a house rule where effective weapon ranges are doubled if a miniature did not move in the current round, or perhaps tripled if they did not move in the current or previous round and are carrying a weapon with an appropriately long/rifled barrel (ie perhaps not machine pistols or similar weapons).

My reasoning is that if you have a miniature rushing about the place for whatever arbitrary slice of time a game turn happens to be then the grouping of the shots they are discharging is likely to be spread over a wider, disparate area, resulting in a reduced chance to land a hit capable of incapacitating an enemy model. If the model/figure has not been moving and has instead had greater time to steady themselves and aim then the grouping of shots discharged should be much tighter, with the reduced spread effectively increasing the range between the shooter and target where an incapacitating hit is likely to land. Or at least that is how my current line of thought is rationalising it. This should effectively mean that steadied weapons would have a range of the entire game board with line of sight being the only restriction, whereas close support weapons (small arms, grenades etc) would be at somewhat of a disadvantage until a close assault occurred.

For massed unit or rank and file games where a miniature represents 10 or 20 troops I don’t think any sort of change is needed, especially as at that point all they are are markers that somewhere in that general vicinity there is a unit of approximately that size facing in a particular direction.

Thanks again everyone for your thoughts on this!