STRIKING MECHANICS

My brother and I loved all things medieval and fantasy. By my brother's urging, I read Lord of the Rings at 14, and then the Hobbit, shortly after. But reading wasn't enough, so we had to go a step further. We invented a game that we called "Swingball." In Swingball, you'd take one sock in a pair of tube socks, and roll it into a ball. You then push the balled-up sock as deep into the other sock as possible, and grab the other end of the sock at the top. This created, in effect, a SOFT morningstar/flail, which we later found not to be all that soft after all.

So anyway, we'd stand across from each other, and whack each other with these "swingballs," simulating medieval combat with morningstars. And we'd do it for hours. And hours. And days, and weeks. We later went on to fashion cardboard shields, which *did* do some good. However, we found that "soft" swingballs could quickly chew chunks out of a cardboard shield with little more than a few whacks.

But I digress...

The point is that in the simplest form, one combatent would strike, and the other would either dodge or counterattack. If the blow was coming your way, you could get a pretty good idea of whether or not it would hit, before you got your chance to strike back. Try it--you'll see for yourself!

Any, this first-hand experience led to the fundamental game mechanics of DCG striking and dodging. One character must roll his DX or less to hit. The opponent can view the hit roll before deciding whether to dodge or to counterattack.

In all, a simple mechanic, but based in the real-life experience of the soft, yet painful "Swing Ball!"

GRAPPLING MECHANICS

My observation over the years has been that grappling (wrestling & BJJ) is fundamentally a ST endeavor. In contrast to weapons fighting, where your ability to hit me is a DX issue, once we're holding onto each other, ST becomes much more important. You can test this at home. Take turns shooting at each other with a paintball gun. DX. Now, grab onto a foe much stronger that you, and you'll see what I mean.

When we updated the DCG grappling rules, we felt that the outcome should be deteremined by ST and not DX. So, at a rather fit version of 61, assume I still have a ST of 11. However, my bigger, stronger, younger, and more athletic opponent has a ST14. Without any training, he's going to kick my ass.

Fortunately, with my wrestling training, and 14 years of BJJ under my belt, let's say I'm a +4 grappling. So that even with ST=11, with the Grappling +4, I'm at an effective ST15 while grappling. So in this case, I still have an advantage on the bigger, stronger, younger, and more athletic ST14 opponent.

So this was the rationale behind the DCG implementation of grappling rules. If you have questions, take a friend/foe to the mat, and see what you think.

SHOOTING MECHANICS

As SEALs, we outperformed all other military units. And then as now, the US military is the most powerful military of the entire world. A large part of our performance was attitude (never quit), a lot of it was the extensive conditioning that we as SEALs took part in. However, what doesn't really get addressed is MONEY. At SEAL Team FOUR, we would do a periodic shooting cycle, which lasted a couple weeks. In the course of 14 days, every SEAL operator would go through 600-1000 round every day. At the end of the shooting cycle, a SEAL would have fired 8,400 rounds-14,000 rounds. And then a while later, we would repeat this cycle.

At the time, a lot would be made of our shooting skill. There was a mythos that SEAL=excellent shooter. My contention is this. We were better shooters not because we were SEALs, but rather, we we had more money. We had money to rent out the best kill houses. We had money to get more ammo.

And at the end of the day, if a SEAL goes through 10's of thousands of rounds in a year, and a Marine (much larger force to support, and much less funding per grunt), only gets a fraction of that, then the SEAL is a better shooter. Reverse the financial equation, and the Marine is a better shooter.

Much of our shooting was in preparation for Close-Quarter Battle (CQB--that's what it used to be called). So we would be firing across a room.

From a gaming perspective, my living room/kitchin is about 10 yards across. If a hexagon is 1 yard across, that's about 10 hexes. If a hexagon is 4' across, and 10 yards = 30', then my living room is 7-8 hexes across. Take your pick. Our boards at the largest are 17 hexes long, though the boards are usually chopped into smaller rooms which are much smaller.

At 17 hexes, a board is 17-22 yards in length. When I go to a shooting range, my shot pattern at 25 yards is much like my shot pattern at 10 yards. Or even at 5 yards*. In an effort to simplify the DCG basic rules, we elected to streamline game mechanics at the expense of a (negligible) loss of accuracy in range. I encourage you to go to the range and decide for yourself.

* What made shooting difficult was when the target was moving laterally. I was involved in an exercise once using paintballs, where I was opposing forces (OPFOR). I was about 15' from the door, and as the first shooter entered the door. I fired a couple paintballs at him. His movement was lateral, and he was running sideways along the wall. Though I was sure I hit him, after we did our debriefing, it turned out that I had missed. That was quite shocking to me, as I was a reasonably good shot.