Gaming in Pearland

What happens when…

Things have gone a little crazy in game design land since I last posted.  My straightfoward plan to make a game so that I could play with my tanks has turned into a rather massive under taking.  To provide some history,you would need to jump back to May of 2004 and look at my post about Skirmished!, a new fantasy miniatures game I was writing.  This post gives just a brief description and asks for some play testers.  I ended up with 3, and the game needed so much work It sort of fell of my radar.

As I was working on this WWII miniatures game though, and as I was looking for the right mechanic for combat resolution, I thought back to Skirmished!.  I pulled up the old rule set, and gave it a quick glance.  It struck me that if I adopted the initiative method I am planning to use in this game, similar to what I described in my last post on this topic, to work in Skirmished! that the old game just might work.  It was also obvious that the same dice mechanic for combat resolution could be modified to provide a fairly fast way to resolve the tank battles.

So now I have this miniature miniatures game system.  Basically a single set of task/combat resolution rules, and then specific setting rules.  The original Skirmished! game used what I called, at the time, a river of dice mechanic.  Today, having played more games and read more about them, I would call it a dice pool mechanic.  I see this referred to more when describing roleplaying games, but it fits many miniatures games as well.  Typically, in a roleplaying game at least, a dice pool mechanic has you rolling a number of dice equal to some stat and comparing the results of those dice (or their sums) to a target number.  These rules work in a similar fashion.  You will roll a number of dice based on the tanks characteristics.  Your opponent will roll a number of dice based on his ability to defend the fired upon tank.  Instead to trying to reach a predefined target number, you will compare yours and your opponents rolls.

For example, lets say I get 6 dice on attack, and my opponent is rolling 4 defense dice.  We each roll our dice.  I roll 6, 4, 4, 3, 1, 1 and my opponent rolls 6, 5, 3, 2.  First thing the attacker will do is determine if the majority of dice rolled are one’s.  If they are a critical miss has occured.  In this case, the two one’s are simply discarded.  Next players will line up their dice so that each players highest dice is next to each other, and that continues down the line.  In this case, my six lines up with his, my four to his five, my next four to his three, my three to his two.  With each pair of dice, I am trying to get a higher result than my opponent.  The first pair of dice, the sixes, tie and are discarded.  In the second case my opponents dice is higher than mine, not good for me.  Finally with the next two dice my results are higher.  My opponent takes the four and three dice that were higher, and these count as hits.  The rest of the dice are discarded as misses.  Those two hit dice are then subjected to two more rolls to determine armor penetration and damage.

Anyway, the game(s) are coming along well.  I actually am very nearly finished with the re-write of Skirmished! and plan to begin playtesting at home in the next couple weeks.  I think the tank game is about 2 months away from something I can playtest.  I do have two questions for anyone reading this:

1. Do you know of any resources, first hand accounts preferably, that descibe what happens to a WWII tank and its crew when it is hit by enemy fire?  I would love to find some good stories to try and lend some realism to the damage in the game.
2. Have you ever played a miniatures game with a mechanic like I described above?  Any thoughts on it from this quick over view?