Pages

Saturday 21 August 2010

Back to the 'Frontier'!

Now that I have finished transcribing Joseph Morschauser's HOW TO PLAY WAR GAMES IN MINIATURE and have sent off the draft to the publisher, I have been able to return to developing Morschauser's 'Frontier' rules so that Units other than Artillery Units can fire at each other.

I had already sketched out some ideas on paper, and I am in the process of amending my copy of the 'Frontier' rules to incorporate the following:
  • 'Battle' has been replaced by the term 'Close Combat'
  • 'Firing' has been added to the Turn Sequence (It comes after 'Movement' and before 'Close Combat' [formerly 'Battle'].)
  • 'Firing' rules have been added (These are based on the existing 'Artillery' rules as I saw no reason to have two different systems for resolving fire combat in the same set of rules. This is very much in line with my desire to always keep things simple! The only major differences are that non-artillery fire is either 'hit' or 'miss' [it cannot land in the 'wrong' hex] and that units that are behind cover are regarded as being fired at 'indirectly'; this removes the need to include additional rules for the effect of cover or to have 'saving throws'.)
  • The firing range of Artillery has been increased
Once these draft rules are ready, I hope to try them out in a play-test.

4 comments:

  1. From one old gamer to another I really love seeing what you are doing to revive these old rules. I would be very interested to seeing a copy of your mods to the Frontier rules to to see how you handled infantry firing. Any way you can send me the rules?

    I am preparing a campaign using Scruby's old map of Mafrica and am using a set of When Empires Clash slightly modified to use on my hex board. I am hoping to star a blog of my own to keep track of it all.

    I ope to keep in touch with you about the Frontier rules!

    Rich Court
    rcourt929att.net

    ReplyDelete
  2. Rich,

    I think that Joseph Morschauser's work is largely unrecognised by almost the entire wargaming community in the UK, and a large part of that community in the US. I have made it my mission to change that situation. I might not achieve my aim ... but I will do my utmost to do so. As part of my efforts I am hoping to persuade John Curry to republish Morschauser's book but with some additional material he wrote for various periodicals.

    I will send you a copy of the version of the rules that I used for this play-test. I hope that you find them informative.

    I look forward to reading your blog when you start it. Could you let me know when you do?

    Good luck with your campaign,

    All the best,

    Bob

    ReplyDelete
  3. I was just wondering if you saw my last post with my corrected email address and blog address. If you did, sorry for the bother!

    I am looking forward to seeing the rules!

    Rich Court
    rcourt929@att.net

    ReplyDelete
  4. Richard,

    I sent my reply to the email address at the end of your first comment ... and assumed that for anti-spam reasons that the 'at' part of the email address should be '@' (i.e. I sent it to 'rcourt929@t.net' ... Oops! Sorry!).

    I will send a copy of the current version of the 'Frontier' wargame rules to you later today.

    All the best,

    Bob

    ReplyDelete

Thank you for leaving a comment. Please note that any comments that are spam or contain phishing messages or that come from Google Accounts that are 'Unknown' will be deleted.