@seancb:
And maybe, just maybe, if a player needed a little help from a higher power to hold off an invasion or attack or reinforcement, a storm may just be the answer!!!
It could, of course, also work in the opposite direction: a player who’s already in trouble could have the final nails driven into his coffin by a bad weather dice roll, which at best would probably generate a lot of cursing on his part and at worst might lead him to pledge that he’ll never use the weather house rule again. Particularly if the weather house rule revolves around huge storm-of-the-century meteorological events that produce severe damage over large parts of the game map.
If the proposed system is indeed based on the concept that there’s only a 1-in-36 chance of a weather event happening (and I must admit that this element escaped me, given the rather lengthy and – to me at least – complex formulation of the house rule), then my suggestion would be to speed up and simplify the application of the rule as follows:
- Step 1: At the beginning of a round, a 2-dice roll takes place to determine if a weather event will affect the round. If the outcome is a double 6 (for which there is 1 chance out of 36), then a weather event will occur and the players then procede to Step 2. For any other outcome (for which there are 35 chances out of 36), then no weather effect will occur and the players continue to play normally.
COMMENT: The point of Step 1 is to reduce the work involved (in both reading and applying the rule) to an absolute minimum by eliminating from it everything except the 1-in-36-chance that a weather event will occur. After all, if the chances of such an event are almost zero, then why should the players need to concern themselves in Step 1 with any other details about the weather house rule? [The only other element I’d add to Step 1 would be a simple system to determine who rolls the weather dice. Suggestion: use two distinctly-coloured weather dice and initially give them to the player who plays first in the turn order; he gets to make the weather roll for the first round; once that’s done, he gives the weather dice to the second player in the turn order, who will make the weather roll for the second round, and so forth.]
- Step 2 (used only if Step 1 has produced a double 6): Use a simple table-and-dice-roll combination to determine what kind of weather event has had what kind of effect on what players in which location. The result is then applied. No other steps are involved.
COMMENT: I deliberately provided no details in Step 2, in order to keep it purely conceptual. My general suggestion for the table, however, would be to follow three principles:
a) The effects of bad weather should almost always be minimal, or to put it another way, “annoying but minor.” There should be almost no chance of bad weather producing an effect so severe that it will have major effects (good or bad) on a player’s situation.
b) Bad weather should usually have a negative effect on both sides if it occurs in an area where both sides are present. As I said previously, bad weather tends to make everyone miserable in a combat zone, regardless of which side they’re on. Admittedly, there were some situations in WWII in which bad weather favoured one side in a zone of operations, but when this happened it was partly because of additional factors that were non-meteorological in nature (for instance, because the Germans were convinced that Barbarossa would be completed before any winter clothing for the troops would be needed).
c) The results of bad weather should be quick and easy to apply, ideally in a single step. For example: at sea, the effects of bad weather would be easier to apply if they simply involved a small number of immediate ship sinkings (meaning they’d be applied at once, and then they’d be done with) than if they involved combat modifiers that would affect every round of combat (in which case they’d be a protracted headache).
