Some of our pro-Tiger CD players are a bit disturbed by the ease with which many heavily armored vehicles can be knocked out-- damaged, disabled, or KO'ed-by "mediocre" guns such as the 75mm. It boils down to a concern over the penetration curve-it's flat. A firing gun's penetration is equally likely to fall anywhere along the range of the curve from minimum penetration (base penetration +1) to maximum penetration (base penetration + 10). We realize that many damaged and disabled results are trivial-broken tracks, scared crews, dinged guns, etc., and that is what many of the high penetrations results actually represent, but the results still feel a bit extreme to many of our players. We've worked out a house rule to rectify this situation. Instead of rolling a D 10 for direct fire penetration, we instead cast two six sided die and subtract two from the total, (2D6-2), so that the possible range of numbers runs from 10 (12-2) down to 0 (22). This gives us a penetration result that: (a) adheres roughly to a bell shaped curve (its weighted just a bit at the low end) (b) averages out to about a half a point less penetration than the original ten sided die roll. The overall effect is to somewhat minimize the extreme penetration rolls (more of the penetration results fall toward the middle of the range) and to slightly decrease the effectiveness of the firing gun as there is now a 1/36 chance that the base penetration will be the only penetration allowed to the gun. A Sherman can still bang up a Tiger frontally using this methodit's just not likely to do it so thoroughly or so far away as was possible before. Our group has used this method off and on for the last year with good results. Oh, for those who are leery of additional dice rolling. After taking a few shots with a 2D6-2, the procedure becomes almost automatic. Back to Table of Contents -- Command Post Newsletter #5 To Command Post Quarterly List of Issues To MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1991 by Greg Novak. This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com