First 4 groups

Here are the first four completed groups in More Escarmouche organisation. The figures are Renegade.

More Escarmouche, melee, draft

This is the first draft of the section on melee.

Fighting occurs when one of your groups attempts to move into a square that is already occupied (defended) by an enemy group. When you activated your group, you moved them to the edge of the target square and tested for Resolve. If they passed their resolve to push home the assault, the melee begins.

Fighting consists of rounds of duels between individuals.

Your opponent (the defender) spreads out his figures so they can be all seen. You can ask him to point out which of his figures is the leader, but he does not have to reveal anything else about them (such as who has sharpshooter skills or who has the ability to double as an artillerist, for example).

You (the attacker) now pair up each one of your figures with each one of the defending figures. Any of your figures may attack any of the defender’s, but you must attack every defending figure if possible. If you have more figures than the defender, you may assign your extra figures to any of the duels as you wish.

If the defender has unengaged figures left after you have finished assigning your figures, he may assign his excess however he wishes.

Duels are resolved one at a time. Combat is simultaneous; both you and your opponent draw cards for the same duel at the same time. You may resolve the duels in any order. To resolve each duel, do this:

1  Calculate any Advantages your figure has. This is how many additional cards you may draw from the top of the deck. Every figure may draw a minimum of one card. Your opponent also calculates how many additional cards he may draw for the defending figure by identifying any Advantages he has.

2  Draw and flip the cards onto the table and compare your attack with your opponent’s defense.

3  The winner is the figure who draws at least one card that beats all of his opponent’s drawn cards. If there is a tie, use the suit rank to trump and break the tie. The suit rank used in More Escarmouche is the same as that used in Bridge: Spades (highest), Hearts, Diamonds, Clubs (lowest).

If more than one card beats all of the opponent’s cards you may choose which is the ‘winning’ card.

4  The winning card determines the effect on the defeated figure:

Hearts: killed. Lay the figure face down on the table.

Diamonds: wounded. Lay the figure face up on the table, or mark him with a token.

Spades or Clubs: evicted. Move the figure out of the square. A defeated attacker withdraws to the sqaure he came from. A defeated defender may be moved to any square away from enemies. If there is no square available to retreat to because they are all occupied by enemies, the figure is killed.

5  Continue this process for every duel. If there are still attackers and defenders left in the square at the end of every duel, the figures may be paired up again for another round of duels.

Repeat steps 1 to 4 until either only your figures or your opponent’s remain in the square; the combat only ends when there are only attacker or defender figures left in the square

6  At the end of any round of combat (every duel has been resolved) either you or the defender (in that order) may break off combat and retreat all of the surviving figures out of the contested square.

Table: advantages

Mounted
Heavy cavalry
Charging (1st round only)
Pike armed (1st round only)
Defending class IV terrain (structures)
Opponent wounded
Cavalry attacking infantry that are in open formation

Special case: two or more figures against one

Every figure in the duel calculates Advantages and draws cards as usual.

The figure by himself (let’s say he is the defender) only has this one draw in order to defeat the multiple draws of the attackers.

Since all combat is simultaneous, it is possible that the defender defeats one of the attackers but is defeated by another. Both of these results apply.

Special case: civilians (artillery, baggage and camp followers) and animals

Civilians of all types do not fight. If their square is attacked they immediately drop or abandon whatever they have and flee to an adjacent square.

Capturing animals…

Groups, an explanation

More Escarmouche does not use the idea of ‘units’. A unit is an organisational construction that is inappropriate at this scale of simulation.

Instead, More Escarmouche uses the idea of a ‘group’. A group is every figure within a single square. These groups are temporary in that you may reform and change their composition during the course of play. They literally represent a bunch of people that for the purposes of the game we treat as a single entity for movement and shooting and so on.

It helps to have a ‘leader’ for a group for morale purposes, but this leader need not be the designated Colonel or anything like that (by leader here we mean a genuinely motivational character, and this may or may not conform to any formal ranking). You may identify leader figures at the start of the game, and you may replace or elect new leaders for a group when a vacancy comes up (if the current leader becomes a casualty, or if you spawn a new group out of an existing group).

Similarly, we are not concerned with ‘formations’. A dozen or so single men cannot meaningfully be desribed as having ranks and columns or anything along those lines. They can have a close or open order, indicating that they are either huddled together for protection or spaced out, but that’s as far as it goes.

At the beginning of the game you start with your figures divided into 6 +/- 2 groups. That is: you may not have less than 4 groups and may not have more than 8. These groups must be in either the first or second rows closest to you unless there are specific scenario setup conditions.

You may split a group into two smaller groups or join several together to make a larger single group as part of your turn. Groups can involuntarily fragment as a result of stragglers in a charge, being displaced by combat, or failing morale tests.

Squares, an explanation

More Escarmouche is played on a board measuring 4′ by 4′ which is divided into a squared grid of 8 by 8 – just like an oversized chess board.

Figures do not measure distance when they move, nor do you measure range with a tape measure when shooting. Instead, figures move from square to square, and you count the number of squares from the shoorter to target to calculate range.

Terrain can be placed in a square and the terrain is assumed to occupy all of that square, right up to the edge.

Now it is vitally important to understand that the square and the terrain that it contains is an abstraction. The men we are modelling are not moving from a 60′x60′ square region into another similar region any more than men are moving from hex to hex if we were to divide the board that way. Any more, indeed, than it makes sense for us to measure up to the ‘edge’ of a hill on an open layout game table.

We divide the board into this 8×8 grid for familierity (just like chess), to regularise movement and range determination (there can be no measurement ‘generousity’), and to simplify the definition of a ‘unit’ or maneouvre element (everything in a square comprises a single object and can be moved as a single action, period).

Squares were chosen over hexes to give a simpler, classical feel. The problem of movement where a path cannot be as direct with squares as it can be hexes is overcome: firstly by allowing cavalry to count every third movement step as being diagonal (just like a regular knight in Chess), and secondly by allowing all figures to attack diagonally (like pawns in chess) as well as orthogonally. Incidentally, the ‘two steps orthogonally and one step diagonally’ method gives a lineer distance that is very close to the distance covered if we were using hexes.

v2 More Escarmouche

Time to start a new version.

There are a number of problems with the current approach. The main being that the number of figures on the board makes the card identifier idea ponderous. I like it, but for the number of models it really cannot be supported.

So let’s go back to first principles. The objectives of the system:

1) To support squad level action in the pike and shot period. That is: groups of figures ranging from singles to mobs of ten or twelve, in a 1:1 man to model scale, with a total force of between 20 to 40 per side, with a total number of maneourvre elements per side being 6 +/- 2 (between 4 and 8 maneouvre elements, or groups). These are not scaled down regiments. They are bunches of individuals.

2) The board is a 4′ x 4′ square, divided into an 8×8 grid to simplify movement and range calculations.

3) normal expectations of the period must be evident. For example: muskets are slow to load, pikeman have advantages when defending against cavalry, infantry caught in the open by cavalry are in trouble, and so on.

4) Only one novel game mechanism. The rest of the rules must conform to player’s expectations and experiences.

5) Prefer normal dice – but don’t sweat it on this point.

6) Avoid designing an entire pack of ‘event’ cards, or making the system driven by a specific set of designer cards.

2nd draft factors table for More Escarmouche

A new draft. If we move the individual shooting factors up to be 3, 4, or 5 instead of 1, 2, or 3 we get a table like this. Now, with the addition of the roll of four FUDGE dice we get a much more palatable result range. It does involve potentially counting up lots of numbers, but these numbers will only ever be 3, 4, or 5. And having said that, while you might have 15 musketeers crammed into one square, it is more likely that you will only ever have five or six.

Click this link to see the new table: more-escarmouche-firing-factors-2.pdf

More Escarmouche design issue

How to achieve a mass fire effect, but still have hits against individuals. This is the problem of tactical, but not so personal that they are really role-playing, miniatures games.

The goal is to allow the volley, because ten men could actually get together and do that. But at the same time we want to allow sharp shooters. Just because the matchlock had a low rate of fire and short range, there is no reason why some men would not have chosen to master the weapon and get the most out of it. Most would not, of course, but at the individual level it is only reasonable that we make provision for the individual shot.

It’s easy enough to have one man shoot at one man. It’s easy enough to have a mass of men shoot at a mass of men when at the end you are removing abstract homogenous casualty figures. But if you have a mass fire effect, say from a volley of muskets, when every shooter is a known individual shooting at a group of targets who are also known individuals, the problem of hit allocation rears its head.

Guerra Floridas apportions the hits according to the target ranks – an automatic assumption that cannon-fodder get it first.

Avalon Hill’s Up Front applies a base number for the volley, and then adds a random modifier and inflicts this on every target figure. But in this case they are modelling potentially high rates of fire.

But then again, to talk of rate of fire is to talk about time. And what is the time scale for More Escarmouche? Certainly a personal scale, measured in minutes. But is it so short that we are addressing individual discharges of matchlock muskets, as we are in Escarmouche?

These thoughts have been chasing themselves in my head over the last 48 hours. The main cause is my natural revulsion at the idea of a table. The idea of table implies a slowing down of the action. Tables have gone right out of fashion. The second is the fear that the dice economy will either level out differences so greatly that any talk of individual differences in the characters is simply window dressing. Or worse, that individual differences become so strong that the dice roll is irrelevant: “Sgt Cleft never misses”. Or, even worse still, that the whole thing becomes too luck driven.

These are normal considerations, and they only really come out at play test time.