New Easier Way to Play THW Games

[Ed the Two Hour Wargames Guy]

Give it a look. Smoother and quicker.
 001 New Activation.pdf (115.89 KB)

[squidlord]

On first read there's a couple of things that jump out to me about this design:

Firstly, with no randomness in the Activation roll you're going to have to find some other mechanism of determining when reinforcements show up, other than a total on the Activation dice. It also removes a source of randomness that you could just key on for any other sort of random event that might happen during a given turn.

Secondly, it removes the possibility that on the next turn, the enemy might actually get to go first. This significantly changes decision-making and not in a positive way, as I see it. Sometimes the enemy just gets a jump on you somewhere.

I'm not sure that this change in mechanic delivers more than it takes away. I don't think that the Activation process is so complex in the original rules that simplifying that particular part is a huge gain. Specifying alternating moves is good to put into the architecture though I would probably do it with Reputation strata; that is, roll for Activation to determine who goes first, start with the lowest Reputation on the board and alternate moving within that Reputation, then start moving the units of the next highest Reputation, and so on, with the option of groups led by higher Reputation being able to move at a Lower reputation if they desire.

So if you had a Band with a leader of Rep 5 and a smaller group of Rep 4, and the enemy has three groups of Rep 3, no matter who rules the higher Activation, the Rep 3 would, by default, all move first unless either or both of your groups decided they wanted to move at Rep 3, at which point whoever won Activation would move their group 1st, and then back and forth. This has the advantage of giving you as a player more decisions about what you can do. If you like the position you staked out and you're comfortable letting the enemy advance into your fire, by all means… You have the higher Reputation so you have a higher degree of control of your engagement. If you want to get the jump on them, then you activate at a lower Rep and get in the mix with them.

It's a more complicated and inherently slower process because it does require making decisions but those decisions make the Activation flow more meaningful, which is usually a net good.