A thread of 4 messages, 31 October 1991 to 6 November 1991, in the order they were sent.
I just started roughing out a system for Traveller medium scale combat using a variant of the GDW First Battle tactical boardgame rules. Obviously, this would not be publishable without GDW's permission. Is there anybody out there familiar with the games? Do you you think that such a thing would fulfill a need in Traveller? Command Decision for Traveller would be almost as good--and might be part of Space Viking? When? Hmmm....more if anyone is interested. Rob
miniatures games for the past two years. It is easy to do just convert pick a number for the hex size and convert ranges and movement by that. The rules are simple and fast to learn. We used these last January and predicted that outcome of Desert Storm (with the exception of percent of U.S. casualties i.e. in the games there were some). I think they would be an excellent for use in Traveller. As for publication you could always try it as a article in Challenge. Command Decision should be easier to port (since you have a Panther to start from), but I would suggest you wait until the revised edition comes out later this year since there will be a number of rules revisions. (The basic system will be the same, but after playing these for 10 years we have found a number of better ways to do things). In fact I just spent the weekend in Bloomington as part of the rules revision committe playtesting and debating all the changes. The next project appears to be the pre-20th century command decision (wierd as it sounds it works, in fact it works better than I expected). As for Star Viking, I think it is waiting on the Command Decision updates as well, but I would expect to see it about next Gen Con/Origins at the latest. Frank has decided to go to 1/285th scale as the main focus for the game rather than the larger scale he first envisioned. The Star Viking rules should be very portable into Traveller because of the common technological basis. Non Cuniculus Est, Tom Harris
OK, I give up. Forgive my ignorance but what is Command Decision? Also, although this may be the same answer, is there a miniatures rules system for handling small unit combat in Twilight 2000? Thanks for any answers. Greg - ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Greg Givler | Q-Link: GregGivler Analyst - Systems Evaluation Group | CompuServe: Greg Givler 76702,647 Commodore Product Assurance | GEnie: [email removed]ivler [phone removed] | The NET: [email removed] - ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "By the way, don't eat the figs." - Livia to Tiberius after the death of Augustus - I, Claudius PBS ===============================================================================
Fyi: Command Decision is GDW's WWII platoon level miniatures rules set
(i.e. every stand is about a platoon/battery). There are two "sister"
games Combined Arms (Modern Warfare) and Over the Top (WWI). There will
soon be a third "sister" for pre 20th century. Command Decision is
currently undergoing a rewrite based on improvements developed over the
past 8 or so years and to fold in the Combined Arms rules.
For small actions in Twilight 2000 my suggestion is to use the RPG
rules as minitures rules unless you are trying to run a battle that
doesn't have anything to do with your campaign (non-PC types will probably
complain about the amount of paperwork). For larger actions I recommend
converting the last battles rules to miniature, but using the RPG rules
for PCs (the biggest failure of the Last Battles board game is that there
are no ammo rules and no conversion rules to go back and forth from the
RPG). This is what I'm using right now to run convention games. For the
third issue of the Eternal Soldier newletter there will be an article on
converting Command Decision II to skirmish and then going back and forth to
Twilight 2000. For very large battles (say the size of Kalisz) I
recommend the use of Combined Arms (i.e. Command Decision II).
Non Cuniculus Est,
Tom Harris