1. I've been looking at several internet sites boasting of "free rules sets"... reading lots of them, and downloading a few that appear to bear further investigation. Thus far, though, it's been very disappointing, Not too much originality on the net these days.
The sets seem to focus on "historical accuracy", and to ensure this, there's always lots of charts and tables and weapons lists, and so on.
And it appears that the authors, in their rush to get something on the screen, and see their names in lights, offer some of the lousiest grammar and spelling I've ever seen, coupled with an incessant misuse of the words "its" and "it's". One fella presented the reader with an "oppurtunity" to play his fast-moving game. I declined to take advantage of the 'oppurtunity'. And another author told me of the value that "dicipline" plays on the battlefield.
One item of interest concerns the color schemes chosen to present the rules. One site had black letters on a dark green background. Completely unreadable. A couple had yellow letters on a white background. Also unreadable. Who designs these sites?
Another thing of interest is that there's a huge number of skirmish rules... I'd say that about 30 percent of the listings concern single-figure skirmishes.
There are also quite a number of rules modifications, extending... or trying to extend... published rules into eras for which they weren't designed. And so you'll see variations on FIRE AND FURY, and AGE OF REASON, and DBM, and DBA and the like. This has always puzzled me... if a guy has an interest in a particular era, and he thinks he has the smarts to change an existing set of rules to fit, why doesn't he strike out on his own, and come up with his own original set?
I mention this because, of late, I've been witness to a couple of attempts to adopt FIRE AND FURY (IFF) to different eras. First, as I've written in the REVIEW, I participated in two really sad efforts to plunge FF into the British colonial era, and second, two equally-as-sad versions for the English Civil War. But take note that I am not an unbiased observer... I don't even think that FF applies to the ACW era, for which it was written.
Published-rules-authors focus on one era in particular and spend quite a bit of time play testing and play testing and play testing until they believe they have a saleable product, applicable to a given period. To my mind, there's only one set of rules on the market which the author (and his disciples) feels will fit every historical period, every era, without basic changes. That's PIQUET, where, essentially, the same rules set (sequence, charts, cards, morale, melee and firing procedures, etc.) applies regardless of the era. It's "one size fits all". My own experience with the PIQUET rules is that "one size fits nothing".
2. A friend of mine, Don Bailey, is due to visit me in the near future. He sent an e-mail message, saying that he wanted to demonstrate his revamped science-fiction rules (he had shown them to me a couple of years ago) , called BLAST'EM!. My return message stated that, coincidentally, my own science-fiction rules were titled BLAST THEM!. After thinking it over, however, I've decided, out of deference to Don, to change my rules set's name to BLAST THAT!
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© Copyright 2001 Wally Simon
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