u/Unicide

I'm planning a trip to Split in November. I don't feel utterly clueless about what I'm getting myself into, as I've visited the country before (and really enjoyed it). However, that trip was in the summertime, and I want to gauge how different (and difficult) it'll be in the winter.

I'm not really concerned about Split itself - cities run year-round. But I am also wanting to squeeze in a couple nights in and around Hvar, which I think is much more of a tourist zone. There is lodging available there (allegedly), but will I get off the catamaran to find all the restaurants closed two months ago? Any chance of coffee bars being open?

What about some of the more touristy things in the surrounding countryside? I'm looking forward to visiting some of the old forts and archeological sites in the hills and up the train line; do any of those close outside of high season? What about the bars and restaurants around them (you may be able to sense a theme here)?

Finally, SHOULD I expect any issues in Split itself? I don't know how to speak Croatian, and I could see places that would usually be surge-staffed in the summer now only expecting locals and be running with fewer employees that might not be able to cater to my monolingual ass. I can adjust to that, but it'd be important to know.

And of course anything else I should know - is there a secret week-long holiday everyone takes in the back half of November? etc.

Thanks in advance!

I previously ran a Forbidden Lands game where muzzleloading guns were a factor, which made finding cover in fights a much larger priority.

In Forbidden Lands, the battlemap consists of zones, which are roughly-defined patches of land about 25 yards across (but bigger if the terrain is open, smaller if the terrain is rougher, and of variable size if there's defined features like a building). This makes combat very flexible and fast to run, but it also means the map isn't defined down to the grid square, so it's hard to answer a question like "am I behind something sturdy or not when I get shot at?" without relying purely on fiat and whim.

I ruled, more or less off the cuff, that you could take a Move action (which usually takes you from one zone to another) to find cover in a zone. In this implementation I ignored how many successes you got (I think) and just said you got behind something appropriate for the zone - a thick tree if you're in a copse of trees, a big pillar in a ruined temple, etc - and set armor and cover values appropriately based on example object and material values given in the book.

I also gave some small buffs or debuffs based on whether the zone was wide-open (like a road or a field), rough and heavily broken up (like a forest or a rock field), or somewhere in between - it being easier to find a place to hide in rough terrain, obviously.

This worked pretty well! However, the way I balanced guns in that game made it likely you'd have a few rounds of exchanging gunfire before closing in for melee combat. I'm now looking at running a nautical-themed game in Tales of the Old West, where repeating firearms are the norm; I think guns will be much more the focus of combat and more powerful. I think I need to develop a better system to answer "can I get to cover? how strong is the cover? how many places could an enemy get to cover in this area? how can I get around the enemy's cover"

Here's what I have right now:

• Take a Move action to find cover in a zone. This doesn't just represent finding something to get behind; it also represents finding something that's between you and your enemy, finding a way to get to it without exposing yourself too much, etc.
• On a success, you find Partial (-2 to enemy shooting) cover that provides 2 armor dice.
• Any additional successes can be spent to increase the armor dice the cover provides; one (or two?) additional success can upgrade the cover to Good (-4 to enemy shooting).
• If you want to improve your cover, you need to make another Move roll, abandoning the cover you found and finding another.
• If an ally has found a piece of cover, you can try to join them with a Move roll; any successes lets you join them. A piece of cover can support one additional person per 2 armor dice.
• CRAMPED and ROUGH zones give you +2 to the Move roll, OPEN zones give you -2. Armor dice cap out at X for natural environments, X+2 for built-up environments, X+4 for mostly-metal environments (like the interior of a ship).

This is an alright system - but I think I can do better. To be clear I'm not looking for input on tuning specific values like how many successes give you how many armor dice etc.

What I think is missing is a good way to implement maneuvering and flanking. I'm especially interested in a way to make this cooperative. Something like this:

• Flanking: Make a Move roll against (your opponent's cover value? their armor dice?). Every success you have over them degrades their (armor? cover?) by 2?.
• Pinning: Your allies can try to keep your enemy's head down by shooting at them if they make an attack some time in the round before your flank attempt. A successful attack gives you +1 success on your Flank, per success on their attack; you also roll one additional die for every bullet they fire (some guns can fire several times per attack), regardless of them missing or not.

This still feels underdeveloped to me. Specifically I think it doesn't make the attacking player make enough interesting choices or balance risk sufficiently; I toyed with the idea of giving an in-cover player reactive 'overwatch' (use their action out of turn to attack someone trying to flank them), but that seems a bit TOO risky.

So my questions are:

1. Have you ever ran a game with a similar zone based system? How did you handle cover?
2. Do you know of any systems that have decent rules for this?
3. What do you think is missing from this implementation?