Monday, July 26, 2010

Chainmail Rules Oddity

I took my printed copy of Chainmail with me yesterday to read on the subway while going to my Korean lesson (yeah, probably should have studied a bit on the train, but didn't feel like risking having a nosy Korean person decide to teach me on the spot). I was really looking at the morale rules, both for immediately after melee and for reduction of forces.

The two systems are different, no surprise there. Gygax found two ways to resolve Morale because the first system wouldn't apply easily to the second, but both make sense within their intended purpose.

Anyway, the odditiy wasn't that you make a check of casualties dealt/survivors remaining after a melee round or a roll against troop class after a certain threshold of a force has been reduced.

The oddity was in the melee morale system. I forgot to bring my USB drive with the pdf with me to work so I can't quote it, but the rules say to take a factor of the difference in casualties taken times a die roll, minus the ratio of troops remaining, and compare to a set list. The greater the difference, the worse it is for the losing side.

But immediately after explaining that, there's an example where, for reasons I can't quite understand, the ratio of troops factor is doubled in the example. Did I miss something in the explanation, or is this a mistake in the text?

I should probably be asking this over at the OD&D Discussion boards, but I figured I'd just throw it up here on the blog.

Oh, and the Swiss/Landskneckte are seriously broken. Yeah, historically they ruled the battlefields of Europe in the early 16th century, but they've got just about every conceivable bonus Gygax and Perren could throw at them! I kinda wonder if it's because of Gygax's Swiss herritage...

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