Further thoughts on rules and another outing

Both 'Black Powder' family and 'Pike and Shotte' have a 'disordered' status.  This is the one aspect of the rules which seems to generate the most discussion.  Steve and I are familiar with the 'shaken' status in 1644 which is also generated by rolling a '6'.  However, the virtue of 1644 is that you only need to roll one dice, so the odds on obtaining a 'shaken' result remain constant at 1 in 6.  With BP and P & S you can roll 3 or even 4 dice, thus the odds on getting a 6 increase. So you can end up with the majority of your units disordered.

Steve and I have looked at this and he came up with the idea of extending the recovery roll from elite troops to all troops.  (In P & S at the beginning of your phase of movement, elite troops can roll to recover from disorder and thus, if successful, move normally.)  We used this in the large ECW game following the St Helens' show and it did help the game flow better.  The roll is modified by the quality of the troops; raw recover on a 6, trained on 5+ and elite on 4+.  A further modification would be to adjust the number of 6s required to inflict the disorder; 3 for an elite unit, 2 for trained and 1 for raw.  This total would be the sum of all the fire received by the unit during that firing phase.

Taking advantage of the good weather this weekend my wife and I visited Rufford Old Hall, which is run by the National Trust.  In the old Tudor period hall is a small collection of armour gathered by the Hesketh family in the 19th century.

As you can see the helmets come from a  variety of countries and periods.  Some of the attributions are suspect; this was said to be a dragoon breastplate from the Napoleonic period.

To close, a few more photos of Steve's Sudan collection used in the last game.