Friday, April 20, 2012

More Thoughts on FUBAR

Last night, using the same setup and scenario found in my post for USR, I played a proper game of FUBAR with 3 single figure units per side. The rebels were ranked as Green, while the Riflethings were rated as Seasoned. Unfortunately, my camera batteries are dead and I didn't think to grab my cell phone, so not even poor quality pics.

Game play was quick. All of the points I made about FUBAR before apply - although I ran up against some of the limitations imposed by the 1 page medium that had not occurred in my original tests.

For one, I couldn't find anything in the rules about two figures attacking one in close combat.

I decided to allow the defender to defend against both - but they could only attack one of them. So if I rolled and the defender won both, only one attacker would be removed.

The rules also indicate that Suppressed figures can fight in hand to hand after the results of non-Suppressed combatants have been resolved. I found this puzzling in play, but now that I think it over, I take that to mean that if figure A attacks Figure B and Figure B is suppressed, Figure A gets an unopposed attack. If A hits and B's armor does not absorb the hit, that's that. If A does not score any damage and B still stands, B will get to attack A only after all other melee combats are finished (say between C & D and E & F, all of whom are not suppressed).

Finally, no or lightly armored Green characters will very rarely survive a hit (after any armor saves) when using my save vs. Suppress value option discussed in my previous FUBAR post.

That was fine during my test situations and would be fine in a one-off game, but for a go-to set of rules for some kind of linked-scenario campaign, this wouldn't work for me. So, using the Save to Suppress option works, but it depends on the kind of game you want.

An alternative is to allow a character to take the suppress result automatically for a single unabsorbed hit, but if there are multiple fire dice that result in unabsorbed hits in a single round of combat- say from an SMG - then it's a casualty. For Green characters, they'll almost never activate again anyway with the -1 penalty (they'll have to roll a 6 to activate) , thus they are effectively eliminated from the game by one hit, but at least there is a small chance they might rejoin the fight or be available for the next scenario.

I played a second game with 2 squads of 3 per side, set in WWII. This squad based game played very differently - FUBAR is definitely more of a multiple squads per side game. But, I found the rules to be a touch unclear in other ways when played like this: Do all figures in unit fire or only those with LOS? Can figures do different things (1/2 charges to Melee, 1/2 fires at enemy in cover nearby - still maintaining proper distance for squad cohesion)?

For the latter, I'm inclined to allow it. I'm thinking the answer to first question is only those with LOS and only those in LOS can be hit suppressed or killed. But it could be more abstract and as long as 1/2 have LOS they all have it, otherwise none do and hits could be distributed across the unit regardless of position on the table.

No comments:

Post a Comment