Many years ago, in the mid-seventies, I authored a series of articles on modern skirmish rules which were printed in WARGAMERS DIGEST. Alas!... no one ever offered me a couple of thousand to buy the rights to the rules... but the sunny side of the picture is that, since they're still mine, I can still play around with them, making changes, never irritating anyone because they'll have to fork over another 15 dollars for the 5th edition. In point of fact, I'm probably up to the 10th edition... the rules described in this article are the latest and greatest.
The key concept in the rules... let me call them Modern Skirmish Rules (MSR)... is that every man in the MSR encounter has three poses. He's either prone or kneeling or standing. As he moves and changes position from bound to bound, the appropriate figure is placed on the field.
Standing men move faster than kneeling men, prone men fire with more accuracy than standing men, and so on. Each pose has its own attributes.
My collection is composed of AIRFIX plastic figures. A box of eight 54mm figures, years and years ago, used to cost around 5 dollars... I have no idea of the current cost. Each box contained an assortment of prone, kneeling and erect figures.
One Saturday afternoon, Bob and Cleo Liebl arrived for a game, and I assigned them each three Fire Teams (FT). Each FT had three men in it, hence each side only had a total of 9 men. And each man had his own data sheet, tracking:
- (a) Combat Efficiency (CE). A man started with 100 CE... this was reduced as he was fired at, engaged in melee, etc. When he was down to zero, he was killed. Another means of knocking off a man occurred when the percentage dice were thrown for his injury, and they came out 'doubles', i.e., 44 or 66 or 33, etc... immediately 'doubles' showed up, he was a goner and off he went.
(b) Weapon. By looking at the particular man, one determined his weapon. Most of the men were armed with rifles, but there were a couple of submachine guns (SMG) around, and each side was assigned one light machine gun (LMG).
(c) Weapon Status. Each weapon had a specific number of rounds which could be fired. I gave out the following assignments per clip in the weapon:
- Rifle 10 round clip
SMG 25 round clip
LMG 50 round clip
A man could fire his entire clip at a target... each round that was fired increased his probability of hit (POH). And when he used up his first clip, he could insert a second clip. Every man had two clips... it was interesting to see that at the beginning of the combat, lots of rounds were fired, but as the battle wore on, the men fired fewer and fewer rounds, seeking to conserve ammunition.
I realize that a 10-round clip in a rifle, circa WW II, is about 5 rounds too much, but it makes for greater playability. The other numbers were selected with the same thought in mind.
(d) I also assigned each man a total of three grenades. In retrospect, this was one grenade too many... there were too many men tossing grenades around, and a lot of energy was devoted, not to fighting the battle, but to scuttling away from the incoming grenade.
In the town of Khril, there were four small houses. One of them was Khril Manor, which possessed a large flat roof, perfect for going prone, and blazing away. Khril Manor was worth 4 Victory Points, while the other three houses were worth 2 each. Khril Manor was, therefore, worth fighting over. So thought Cleo as she directed two of her Fire Teams (FT), six men, to dash up on the roof, and take position.
Khril Manor was closest to Cleo's side, giving her an initial advantage, and Bob had to be content in setting up an FT in an adjacent house belonging to Farmer Finn, some 24 inches away.
The sequence was fairly basic, and was governed by the draw of cards.
- (a) Each FT on a side had three cards in an Action Deck, giving that side 9 cards. I also added two 'no action' cards, which, when drawn, simply meant that none of the FT's were activated, so these were, in effect, 'null' cards . The total cards in each side's deck, therefore, were 11. When a side became active, it drew, at random, 2 cards from its Action Deck, and moved and fired the members of each team. If the 2 cards were for the same FT, the team could move and fire twice.
(b) When the active side finished with its 2 FT's, the non-active side then could react by selecting a FT to move or fire... the choice was independent of the Action Deck... no card was required to be drawn.
After (a) and (b) were finished, the phase was over, and the sides switched, and the previous non-active side became active. Note in (b), if Side X was non-active, then on the start of the next phase, he became active. This meant that, in effect, Side X got to move three of his FT's in a row... first, a 'freebee' selection from (b), and then 2 cards when he became active.
This 3-in-row-business seemed to work out quite well. Even with the 3-in-a-row, a side might not be able to call on a given FT when it was needed.
Whenever a FT card was drawn, all men in the men in the team were given two actions... on each action, a man could move 5 inches, or could fall prone, or could rise to his feet, or could insert a second clip in his weapon, and so on. The big no-no was that he couldn't fire twice, i.e., once on each action. He was only permitted to fire once on his card draw. I had made the probabilities-of-hit (POH) fairly high, and firing twice would make for a very short encounter... too much lead flying through the air.
Back to the Battle
Back to the battle. FT #2, which was sent to Finn's house by Bob, contained one rifleman, one man with a SMG, and a man with a LMG. The rifleman, named Fleet, took aim at one of Cleo's men perched on top of Khril Manor and fired away:
- (a) The basic POH for the rifle was 80 percent. The SMG POH was 60, and the LMG POH was 100.
(b) Now we deducted the Range Factor. The range was 24 inches, which for simplicity, was rounded down to 20. The adjusted POH for Rifleman Fleet was now 80-20, or 60.
(c) Now we deduct or add various small modifiers. Fleet was taking aim while prone, +10. The target was prone, -10. The target was behind cover, -10. Fleet had a rested weapon, +5. and so on.
(d) Taking all the above into account, Fleet's modified POH was now 55 percent. But we still had to adjust for the number of rounds fired.
(e) Each round fired at the target contributed +3 to the above POH. Note that a SMG or LMG, by firing lots of rounds, say 10 rounds, increased the POH by 30 percent, a respectable figure. Here, Rifleman Fleet decided to fire only a singe round... his POH increased by 3, and his total POH was 58 percent.
During the game, with all the bullets flying through the air rather successfully, i.e., everyone seeming to hit their targets, I decided to reduce the basic POH for each weapon given in (a) above. An initial POH of 80 was too much for the rifle, and when next I play the rules, the rifle will be reduced to a mere 60.
When Fleet tossed his percentage dice to see if he hit, he was successful, and the dice were tossed a second time to determine the injury to the target figure. A low toss (below 33) knocked 30 points off the target's Combat Efficiency (CE), while a high toss (above 66) only knocked off 10 points. In the middle, the target lost 20 points. Note that the injury table contains only three possibilities... losses of 10, 20, or 30 points... you could put a hole in a man, but you couldn't kill him.
There were, however, two ways to instantaneously kill the target... first, to toss doubles on your hit dice, and second, to reduce his CE to zero. On the injury dice throw, the chance of tossing doubles (11, 22, 33, etc.) was 10 percent, which is not insignificant.
When Fleet aimed at the man on the roof and hit his target, he didn't toss doubles, but the poor targeted man lost 20 CE, hence his remaining CE was 100-20, or 80, and he took an immediate reaction test. I use the term "immediate" because firing was sequential... if Fleet's target, on his reaction test, fell down out of sight, then Fleet's buddy, who was to fire next, lost his opportunity to fire at the target.
At first, Cleo's dominated the field from their position atop Khril Manor, but the situation suddenly reversed when a blast from Bob's LMG gunner, Mohl, cleared the deck (allow me to mix my metaphors).
Mohl's weapon had 50 rounds in it, and he was permitted to "spray fire", i.e., to fire at more than one target, sweeping the entire roof line of Khril Manor. At the time he fired, there were five of Cleo's men peering out from the roof, and Mohl hit every one of them.
- (a) First, the basic POH of Mohl's LMG was 100... and I should mention that the next edition of the rules reduces this to an 80. The POH of 100 proved too horrific in its effect.
(b) Second, we measured the distance between the two target figures furthest apart, which turned out to be 8 inches. Mohl, therefore, had to sweep an area 8 inches long.
(c) Each inch in the swept region had to have at least 2 rounds fired at it, as Mohl traversed his weapon along the roofline. Which meant that, with an 8-inch-long target area, Mohl had to fire at least 16 rounds. Each of the five targeted men was defined to occupy an inch, and so with five men on the roof, 2 rounds would strike each of the targets (that's 10 of the rounds fired), while the remaining 6 rounds would be 'wasted'.
(d) Here, Mohl, instead of firing the minimum number, decided to double his rounds fired... he fired a total of 32 rounds at the roofline. Each of the five targets would receive 4 rounds (20 of the rounds fired), while the remaining 12 would be 'wasted'.
(e) We went through the firing procedures as described above (the basic POH of 100 minus the range factor plus a number of modifiers, etc.), and determined that, for each target, starting with the initial POH of 100, and counting the rounds fired at him, the POH of hitting him was 72 percent. Hindsight says this is way too high a POH... and that's why I stated above that the LMG POH will be reduced... indeed, all POH's will be drastically reduced.
(f) Bob threw dice for each of Mohl's five targets and hit 'em all. A complete success. And the success was magnified when, as a result of the mandated post-firing reaction test, every one of the target figures fell prone and was temporarily taken out of the fight.
This was the turning point in the battle for Khril Manor. After that set-back, Cleo's men never could get their act together.
When Bob's teams got within grenade range of Khril Manor, he resorted to tossing his bombs. A grenade was given a potential range of 15 inches... which was subsequently determined to be too long for the scale involved... although I must mention that even if I testified under oath, I would have absolutely no idea of the scale.
But here, just about every man on the roof launched a grenade as did Bob's oncoming attackers. In particular, one rifleman named Evans on Bob's FT # 3, never even fired a shot... he threw all three of his grenades, causing great consternation to the roof's occupants.
When a grenade was tossed, there was a correction for the desired distance thrown. The desired point of impact was designated, and modified by a dice throw. The grenade could land either on target or 5 inches too long, or 5 inches too short.
Having decided upon the point of impact, there was another dice throw to determine the radius of the blast area... either 2 inches or 4 inches or 6 inches. Every man in the area was diced for in terms of injury (10, or 20, or 30 CE points lost), and he then took a reaction test.
At the end of the battle we noted that Cleo's men, each starting with 100 CE, originally totaling 900 CE points for her nine men, had lost 480 points, or 53 percent of her total. In contrast, Bob's three teams, with their initial total of 900 points, had lost only 80 points... a significant victory... in fact, one might term it a "wipeout".
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© Copyright 1999 Wally Simon
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