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This is a follow up on a couple of threads, but as I am going to be long-winded, I didn’t want to hijack them.
Let me start with the caveat that I have only played FoF about 20 times (still need to check on rules) and only playtested these house rules once – so I am completely open to any feedback or critiques.
It was the elegance of the FoF armour rules that attracted me in the first play – simple and yet effective. And, of course, I needed to see how far I could push them.
The “first shot, first kill” complaint has not been my experience. Usually the hit results in some form of lesser damage – mobility, weapons, etc. I like the fact that the tie goes to the initiative player as it encourages mobility. In my game I had Leopard 2’s going against T62’s and the majority of shots were not kills.
Anyway, the rules can handle larger battles, but things do slow down, so I made the following adjustments which I hoped still caught the intention of the rules:
1. All distances and ranges are halved – could have used centimetres but I have a bunch of tape measures and none of them are metric (may be why they were cheap).
2. Not tracking individual casualties – when you can have a company of infantry of about 20 fireteams per side, it can be quite a hassle tracking KIA and WIA per fireteam base. What we did was an all-or-nothing first aid check. Serious wounds are counted the same as dead and a die is rolled based on the current and original unit strength to determine if the unit as a whole lives or dies. I worked out the math and do this survival roll and the first aid roll all as one d20 roll (FoF players should not be afraid of another die size).
3. Effective and maximum ranges – some weapons shooting 450 scale metres with no decrease in effectiveness just doesn`t seem right. We created an effective range which is 4 times the optimum range for the weapon. Effective range uses normal die rules. Beyond effective range, the die size goes down one, similar to an SMG firing beyond optimum. With this rule, an SMG cannot fire beyond effective range, and snipers and vehicles are not affected. I like the die change better than reducing the number of dice as it does not impact the defender’s dice. It is possible that the effective range should be longer.
4. Unit cohesion – vehicles and fireteams are grouped by platoon (HQ units being the exception) and must stay within a reasonable distance of others in their platoon. Haven`t really determined what is reasonable – using TQ for now. If a unit activates out of cohesion, it must first pass a TQ test.
5. Activation by platoon – actions and reactions are announced by platoon, as is the resolution of which platoon fires first. Although fire is announced by platoon, it is resolved by individual vehicles or fireteams against individual vehicles or fireteams. All targets must be announced before resolving any attacks and must be evenly distributed. This probably sounds more complicated than it is, so I`ll give an example.
The blue platoon has 4 tanks (A, B, C, D) that are not in LOS of 4 red tanks (1, 2, 3, 4). In FoF, tank A would announce that it will move into LOS and fire at tank 1. Tanks 1 to 4 would then have the option to react. This is then repeated for tanks B to D. D may have the best chance of survival as it goes last.
This might be the most realistic way of handling things, or the best if you only have 4 tanks, but is really slow is you have a dozen more.
We play that blue platoon announces that it will come into LOS and shoot at the red platoon. Red platoon says that it will react by trying to shoot first. After the reaction roll, the winning team announces what tanks are targeting what tanks (should be 1:1 in this case) and the firing is resolved. Then there is the return fire.
Intuitively, this seems to have faults, but in practise it seemed to work.
Open for comments.
Thnaks for taking the time to read
Mikey #2
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