IFT: ASL Infantry Fire Table
My Two Cents Worth

Die Roll Table DR #/36 Pct 2 1 5.4       3 2 11.0             4 3 16.6                 5 4 22.2                       6 5 27.6                             7 6 33.2                                   8 5 27.6                             9 4 22.2                       10 3 16.6                 11 2 11.0             12 1 5.4

ASL uses two six-sided dice for most of its randomization. This does not provide results in a straight line, but is instead a classic bell-shaped curve as shown to the left. It is the very nature of this curve that leads to the anomalies in the IFT.        There's nothing inherantly wrong in this, provided that game designer always remembers that the liklihood of an individual result -- a DR -- is not the same for all possible values.        A better table -- a table that provided smoother results over the DR possibilities -- would be one that scattered the rsults throughout the table, rather than clustering them at one end. However, this would conflict with the various terrain, leadership, etc., modifiers that are inherant to the ASL game system.

It's not just the IFT that suffers from anomalies introduced by using two six-sided dice, the effects of leadership also behave curiously (see the table at the right).

The Leadership Table depicts the percentage effect of a leader on an ASL unit's ability to pass a Morale Check. Notice that the effect of leadership goes down as the quality of unit goes up. While a case may be made that a higher quality unit, due to its superior training and capabilities would be less dependant on leadership

Leadership Table Morale   -3   -2   -1   0   +1 x-x-5   44.5   30.6   13.9   0.0   11.1 x-x-6   41.7   30.6   16.7   0.0   13.9 x-x-7   33.3   25.0   13.9   0.0   16.7 x-x-8   25.0   19.4   11.1   0.0   13.9

ability, it's harder to expalin the odd bubble that occurs in the -1 and +1 columns. This leadership effect will also be noticeable in ordinance to hit numbers, where the varying effct of leadership is an even greater anomaly, since unit morale has no bearing on the probability of hitting a target.        All in all, it would have been better if the designers had borrowed from AD&D crowd and applied percentile or 20-sided dice to the IFT. Using percentile dice would standardize the incremental effect of various modifiers in the game system without sacrificing the overall impact of the IFT.

Page Last Updated 04/30/99

This page has been visited times since April, 30, 1999.