motivation

[Peterloo]

Hi
Me and mark still play PBI , but not as you know it, as we play in campaigns. but a few ideas we have played that seem to work might be useful in the next version of PBI (still my favourite game - though men who would be king is a close second)
anyhoo

Motivation and  the problem of crappy dice. - boy do I know about them!
so
you have 3 motivations normally for a platoon commander, thats 1 dice per motivation, so we roll all the three dice for the first motivation, pick the best. 2 dice for the second, 1 for the third. - it doesn't guarantee success but  you can either try the hardest first for a fair chance or your most important activation first and get a very good chance of success. 

We played allot of early war 1939-40 stuff even early 41 where men were men and radios were rare and guns were useless. An early war supplement would be good with specific rules for no-radios, one man turrets(which you have), and a penetration table of early guns as they did fail to stay the same over the 500yds unlike the later guns.

The other thing we found which helped was we limited firing in the other persons turn to once per square. so you can do opportunity/return fire once only (we did need a marker to show if they had fired) we also diced for opportunity/return for each base in a square so not the whole and not always the mg fired, but that was an added complication. which you soon got used to but needed a bit more record keeping, by placing the have fired marker by that fires that have.

a few other simple things, we came up with a table that randomly places the objectives and the terrain - well its done on dice with a degree of your interaction

a rule for tanks going hull down, - simply if your on a hill at the base you can claim hull down and count cover. but you cannot use a hull mounted weapon or mg - so stugs and hull guns cannot fire hull down. - hills in pbi are a bit useless, foot should be able to claim at least partial cover if on the back edge of a hill as they can use the crest as cover. (I cannot remember if thats already in the rules?)

we allow mortars to be directed by its platoon commander if in an adjacent square. And for early war only the company commander or a foo can bring down off board artillery.

and we use cards to decide on which unit is to be activated, it turns it from a you go I go game to a we go game. (becoming a very in vogue method in other games)

we played around with other things like sections have to stay in the same square, that worked but threw up a few complications, mostly because of early war where sections could be very large. (like 5 bases in a polish section!)

we allowed tanks to do return fire on a 5,6 as it stopped those stupid pop out shots without risk. and we made reversing more expensive for the same reason. (but under the fire once only in other persons turn - you do return fire you cannot do opportunity)

The End game. On 21 the game doesn't end. but each player in his turn can declare to end it, then both dice highest dice wins, so the other player can possibly delay the ending or end the game. so if you just about to take an objective and 21 comes up you still have a chance. And the other player has a chance to keep it going to take it back !

cannot think of anything else. - possibly a points system based on availability and period but that would be whole different ball game to produce.

[pbeccas (Paul)]

Some great ideas there.