MECHANICS LAB: SNOWBALL SKIRMISHES

First let’s get the necessary admin out of the way:

Hobby Spend: £152.88

I’ve been buying up a lot of plastic figures from Oathmark, Frostgrave and Fireforge Games for a fantasy skirmish project.

Painted: £303.50

My aim for lent is £0 spent on hobby, but we’ll see how that goes. I haven’t fully taken stock of my paints, so I’ll allow myself a few pots if need be.

Anyway, onto some snowball fighting rules…

Man of Tin has done some great work in this regard, and a lot of my thoughts are stolen from him: https://tabletopscoutingwidegames.wordpress.com/2019/10/29/packing-sugar-at-freddy-street-gang-snowball-fight-scenario-write-up/

My own thoughts were to base things on my Deathshot rules for Black Powder battles in the Deathzap universe. My thinking being muskets have similarities to snowballs, short range, poor accuracy and the slow reload between each shot is comparable to the scrambling about to make another snowball.

This is all accounted for in the core mechanic of Deathshot – a figure can shoot when loaded and they must spend a full turn reloading between shots. The roll you require to hit a target is equal to the distance from shooter to target in cms and you roll a D100 to hit. A 10 or less always counts as a miss regardless of range. Unlike muskets a person can prepare a few snowballs and throw them in quick succession, so to model that if a figure reloads a few times in succession they could throw/shoot a few times before reloading. Additionally piles of snowballs can be made, so a retreating figure might move back to a prepared defensive position and be able to let loose. You can also lose the distinction between hard and soft cover for snowballs as cover from view is cover from fire when it comes to projectiles with basically no penetrative value. Additionally a hit with a snowball is just a hit – there are no light wounds or fatal wounds. So if a hit is achieved I’d allow a 6+ save for cover on a D10, or maybe if a target is in cover you will need to roll an even number to hit. Also due to the slow and telegraphed nature of a snowball throw it might be a good idea to allow for dodges. So Deathshot feels like a good candidate, however I’m not sure I want a snowball fighting simulation, but actually something which captures the feel of a snowball fight.

Another consideration is when a figure is pretend killed what happens? In an organised game a figure might be eliminated and be out of the game for good or have to return to a base to ‘respawn’ before they can continue in the action. If you were to play out a disorganised game a figure would continue fighting until overwhelmed by hits and demoralised at which point they would retreat to safety. I’m finding the second disorganised option more interesting at this point, however I think it will have problems in play and potentially make the game far too long, to counteract that a scenario like capture the flag or take and may be necessary. Another option is to have a force wide morale level, so when a figure is hit their side loses a number of morale points (D6?), and when a side is reduced to 0 they lose. This stops a game dragging on for too long. A fun option there is to use a Snakes and Ladders board with both sides starting at 100 and going down to 0, I remember seeing that idea on a forum a long time ago for tracking morale in wargames.

I think like everything simplicity is key, if I can model several of the aspects of snowball fighting in a single simple mechanic then I’ll go for it. The best simple system I’ve ever come up with is The Simple Toy Soldier Game.

The core mechanic of The Simple Toy Soldier Game is individual figure activations and when a figure activates rolling for action points (usually on a single D6). Action points can be spent on moving, shooting and cancelling hits on that figure caused by the enemy. In the normal game a hit not cancelled either causes a saving throw or the figure is immediately killed, but in a snowball setting an uncancelled hit could result in a figure retreating to their home base say 3″ per hit.

A simple idea I have had involves a custom range ruler:

One side is marked in 6cm increments, the other in 4cm increments. The 6cm side is for a target in the open, the other is for a target in cover, simple. I’d then probably focus more on command and control to make the game more interesting, lots to think about.

Anyway, all the snow ballers are that grenade carrying guy be used a lot in Deathzap with just a block paint conversion with a nice gloss varnish to get that toy feel.

I’ve got two groups of ten, the blue scarves and the red scarves:

As a side note you might notice the farmhouse and bridge are painted wooden toy blocks, it’s a really good way to make modular oldschool wargames terrain, I really need to make more!