ASL -- Just begging for a Cease & Desist

Hasbro have not given permission for erules. MMPs hands are tied.

Hasbro worry a lot about illegal dissemination of the erules ultimately leading to a loss on their full rulebooks and, to a certain extent, I get their view. ASL is not a boxed game where the components are the expensive bit, it is primarily the rulebook which is required at entry level and already is priced below production costs. Losing this as a source of income would undoubtedly be bad business practice.

ThirstyMan wrote: Hasbro have not given permission for erules. MMPs hands are tied.

Hasbro worry a lot about illegal dissemination of the erules ultimately leading to a loss on their full rulebooks and, to a certain extent, I get their view. ASL is not a boxed game where the components are the expensive bit, it is primarily the rulebook which is required at entry level and already is priced below production costs. Losing this as a source of income would undoubtedly be bad business practice.

The ASL modules have an MSRP of 60-80 dollars.

If the rule book ($80) is being sold for less than the production price, it is not a revenue stream.

I am not trying to be a rules lawyer--help me understand where MMP is making their money. I respect their right to sell their IP for whatever they want. I would still torrent a copy of the rules for the same reason that I slow down when driving by freeway accidents.

By freeway accidents, I mean something terrifying, in this case, terrifying because of its complexity and ability to make me whimper in fear. Something that demonstrates that the safe, calm little world you've created (be it driving, or gaming) can be instantly disrupted by forces beyond the grasp of a single human mind.

You could try torrenting the rules, there actually aren't any out there. There's an unsearchable pdf scan from Brazil which is useless. You aren't going to find anything better. Private deals with ASLers who have developed their own erules will net you more.

MMP make money off ASLSK and the modules. I would guess ASLASK is better stream for them, at the moment. The full RB is a necessity for all of the full modules and you would never buy the RB without at least one other module or you won't have the counters or boards. To price the necessary RB any higher would block access to all further modules.

In this sense, the RB is a revenue stream that cannot have a serious price increase due to shutting potential players off from the actual modules which are profitable. Allowing access to a free RB doesn't seem to be a great idea when you can recoup at least some of the production costs of the rule book by charging whatever for it. Pricing has to be such that it wouldn't immediately shut out potential players. It doesn't shut potential players out. The RB is full of examples of play, charts and tables as well as an entire chapter on teaching the basics with a full walkthrough. I think it's good value especially compared to the bollocks sold on kickstarter for the same price.

Yes, it's complex but not unmanageably so. I friggin' learned it with no ones help and I am dumb.

From what I've seen at the con players review the rules for their particular scenario ahead of time, and it's usually a pretty short review. You don't need to know the rules for Panzer IVs if they aren't in play. So much of the rules don't apply for a particular session. Complexity isn't as bad as it sounds.

S.

Just finished my first turn (provided Andy doesn't make me back up and correct something) and I'll tell you what, I have experience with similar games and I couldn't have learned and played correctly without help. There's no introductory material, no fundamental concepts presented for each stage. Someone coming to it as a first wargame, which I'll grant you is unlikely, would be in a very bad place.

With mentoring and correction I've been able to work my way through, but two newbies coming to the game would absolutely have to depend on the Internet and the answers of a seasoned player to get the game working correctly.

I took the time to reread sections of the Valor & Victory rulebook, a game in the exact same space as ASLSK, and it is simply magnificent in comparison. It understands that it is written for an introductory audience and lays the groundwork to get a player acclimated to the large-scale concepts of the game prior to plunging them into the details. At 16 pages it's actually shorter, as it uses a much larger font and covers a broader amount of material (guns and vehicles are included in V&V's core rule set, essentially equivalent to ASLSK 1, 2 and 3.)

Second turn should go much more smoothly. I would be hard-pressed for it to go worse, especially when I rolled a natural 12 with my first attack.

S.

Here is a link to my dropboxed version of one guy's attempt at revising Squad Leader.

I'm not arguing that SL is superior, I just wanted to show an example of someone attempting a complex rules rewrite.

www.dropbox.com/sh/jpclsaa5830ffvv/AAC9P...xg_JZmcteJxt8ua?dl=0

This will probably go down in a day or two.

I have a friend who is notoriously bad at explaining games. He also has mountains of ASL in his basement.

The thought of revising ASL or making it friendlier reminds me of a book from the Danny Dunn series where Danny decides he is going to program the professor's huge computer to do his homework. By the time he's done (npi), he's had to do so much background reading that he ended up doing more work.

[Note: I am tired to the point where I might as well be drunk right now, or what I imagine being drunk is like]

I don't think anyone is trying to defend the ASL rule set, as such, and be careful not to compare trivial issues like rule sets with serious social issues, it doesn't sit well.

Part of the problem is that ASL, as a rule set, is designed to cover European fighting, and Pacific fighting using the same core ideas as well as vehicles and tries to put in a LOT of detail. No one is saying ASL is better than Combat Commander or even V&V. They deal with different things. Yes, you can simplify tactical combat and yes, Combat Commander does tell a decent narrative but, to be frank, it has no where near as many active gamers as ASL.

Why don't you see CC conventions? Because it isn't as expansive as ASL and does not cover all tactical situations. If you want to play tactical games then ASL is the go to rule set, eventually. ASL appeals to the same gamers that enjoy 'monster' games, that is, many interlocking parts and a huge variety of tactical approaches. VASL gave ASL a huge shot in the arm and introduced way more gamers to the topic.

As I have said before Squad Leader is incomplete and hence can't really be compared, considering that ASL was developed precisely because SL was incomplete.

I enjoy big monster games, I loved Europa and OCS and ASL is equivalently satisfying to me. For casual gamers, ASL is totally unsuitable and CC or V&V should be your tactical system or Conflict of Heroes, even Memoir 44 (which I despise). It's not as if you don't know what you're getting into with ASL.

I repeat, I learned it from one big rule book, by myself and really didn't have that much of a problem, maybe it's my experience with the big rule sets of monster games, I don't know. I, and many of my friends, have mountains of ASL stuff and they are played. I don't consider myself bad at explaining games but that would be for others to judge.

I keep forgetting you're in my timezone, and able to quickly call me on my crap. I removed the offensive comparison to serious social issues. I suppose one could argue that war itself is a pretty serious social issue.

I would say that you are, in fact, defending the complexity of the ASL ruleset, but that your defense makes sense, and makes me want to learn the game at some point.

I also highlighted part of my original message where I said that I wasn't trying to defend Squad Leader, just show someone trying to revise a ruleset.

Reading the intro to those linked rules, you quickly realize that it's a complicated process. Any attempt to make the ASL starter kit rules more accessible might be more work than it is worth.

I'm just repeating myself a this point, so I guess I'll take a breather from the thread.

Note that I'm not complaining about the rule set, I'm complaining about its exposition in the Starter Kit. With one pass under my belt I can see that the rules are pretty straightforward, the rule book is simply incomplete.

Valor & Victory's rule book is better organized, more thorough, and understands that its intended audience needs summary sentences that describe the overall concept to follow. I went over some of this in my article years back ( fortressat.com/analysis-toc/2482-knowledge-transfer , Rule 4) and nothing has changed. Frankly I wish I had had this rule book as a second negative example of the concept, because I gave the impression I was beating up on High Frontier with the overall article when that wasn't my goal.

For one of my issues last night I consulted the big ASL rule book which cleared up my understanding with one sentence that, though complicated, was clearly written. Returning to the Starter Kit rules I could reread the associated section and magically understand it now that the context provided by the larger rule set was already established. The Starter Kit rule wasn't wrong, it just wasn't well written for newbies, its intended audience. It was too brief.

My guess is that there aren't a lot of people coming to ASL without a mentor, and the Internet can always serve that role if they are because ASL players are about as helpful as you're going to find in the gaming world. I'm impressed with the community whenever I interact with it. So there may not be a lot of incentive to have someone revise the rules to make them more approachable.* These days the rule book can be all lawyerville, because the introductory material will be provided elsewhere with little trouble to the new player. The publisher can depend on experienced players to provide that portion of their explanation, free of charge.

S.


* My guess is that this is not the case, that the writers had experience with the game and did not sufficiently test the rule book with brand new players. It looks more like a case of someone pressing their own knowledge onto their audience. I could be wrong.

I'm not sure I quite get the appeal of stuff like ASL/SL, at least as an outsider who's only skimmed the rulebooks and read up on it a bit. Just a painful level of detail that still ends up with some cheesy "gamey" tactics (or is that not true any more, I read a lot of articles about this whole move, shoot and then move back round a corner gaminess etc). And what are you trying to achieve with that level of detail. Honestly, I feel like once you get to that amount of simulated detail, I'd much rather just read a historical book account of the conflict, because throwing dice and pretending it somehow tells a "what if" experience feels a bit daft if you're modelling everythging in such fine detail. I can believe the game has a lot of old timers, hard core guys lifestyle gamers, but I'd be more surprised if new gamers flock to that kind of game rather than more streamlined "modern" titles that focus more on the abstract and narrative with some level of historical accurary (this gun or unit is better than that one). But I have no idea if thats the case.

I don't think there are a lot of new gamers flocking to it, just a steady stream of players that enjoy complexity and freedom of action. ASL is one of the games where you can really set your own agenda with a wide array of options, a concept that I'm proving by getting veteran soldiers mercilessly killed via incompetent command decisions.

Most modern games are very channeled, very controlled in comparison. They provide a more reliable result, but you don't get the same level of freedom of action. I doubt I'll be playing full-blown ASL ever, but I can appreciate having a wide open field of options in front of me.

S.

each to their own commander, each to their own!

ldsdbomber wrote: I'm not sure I quite get the appeal of stuff like ASL/SL, at least as an outsider who's only skimmed the rulebooks and read up on it a bit. Just a painful level of detail that still ends up with some cheesy "gamey" tactics (or is that not true any more, I read a lot of articles about this whole move, shoot and then move back round a corner gaminess etc). And what are you trying to achieve with that level of detail. Honestly, I feel like once you get to that amount of simulated detail, I'd much rather just read a historical book account of the conflict, because throwing dice and pretending it somehow tells a "what if" experience feels a bit daft if you're modelling everythging in such fine detail. I can believe the game has a lot of old timers, hard core guys lifestyle gamers, but I'd be more surprised if new gamers flock to that kind of game rather than more streamlined "modern" titles that focus more on the abstract and narrative with some level of historical accurary (this gun or unit is better than that one). But I have no idea if thats the case.

boardgamegeek.com/thread/998996/tactical-wargamer-what-asl-isnt

These omissions and distortions aren't necessarily a big deal; ask anyone who has ever played ASL what he thought about the experience, and if he was brave enough to make it through the 300 page rulebook and the steep learning curve (and you never, ever really stop learning the rules), he'll tell you about the quirky game play, how fickle the dice are, and how things start to happen on the board that almost seem patterned or 'real' somehow - a squad standing firm by passing multiple morale checks, a leader becoming killed at a crucial moment, an AFV knocking out several others at an opportune time. An ASL game rarely fails to provide entertaining narratives, which provide nourishment to the imagination and have contributed to its longevity and reputation as, despite the gargantuan costs in time and money associated with learning it, fun above all.

Oh I dont doubt it, but all those things I hear (and have experienced) with, say, a game of Combat Commander, which can be learned at the table during a single session and demo game. But a beast like ASL is obviously more of a long term lifestyle game investment, its not something you pop out for the hell of it.

thanks for the link to that thread, I'm going through it now, unsurprisingly involving quite a bit of handbag waving.

For me, I'm still not convinced that the huge rules overhead is giving you an equal amount of upgrade in terms of narrative and experience when compared to something like

Combat Commander
Up Front
Ghost Panzer

CC is very "WW2 movie story" driven, GP seems to be trying to get a tactical game that rewards actual military tactics (suppress and assault), and UF for me is the perfect distillation of an abstracted infantry collision with fog of war. If I could find someone who would commit to playing regularly and teach me how to really get the most out of it, I'd probably go for UF

I think Combat Commander would be improved if you could draw extra cards in the beginning and discard down to your hand size, with that reducing with each time track advance until you are only drawing to your hand size limit later with a presumably degraded deck. That would provide some kind of solution to the flat chaos criticism that Sean McCarthy made where command and control is worse at the start rather than the other way round. So lets say your hand size is 6, you might start off drawing 9 cards and discarding to 6 before each turn, then only 8, then only 7, then draw just to 6. I suppose that could be gamed by chucking back the better cards and turtling early on while you're not so close into the enemy and waiting for your tuned deck to turn up at the end when you'd actually expect command and control to go to shit.

Fog of War has always been one of my bugbears, which is why I really like the abstracted way UF works. I also love the "opponent chit pull" system of Tank on Tank and would like to see a lot more of it

CC is like a rail driven video game. It's OK but it does not have the depth of ASL. I like it and have all the expansions but it is not, in any way, comparable to ASL.

To have a full opinion on this, you need to have played ASL and CC. To not play ASL and then pontificate on it, is like being teetotal and telling people how bad/good being drunk is.

UF, I don't want abstracted military tactics in a card game (I do have this though and enjoy it, in its own right)

Ghost Panzer? This looks like some rules from ASL distilled into a simpler tactical game but (amongst other things) no smoke grenades (even though these are essential to understanding military tactics), no prisoners, no multi level buildings, limited concealment effects only, no broken units that need to get to command to rally, no final protective fire and that is just the infantry sections. Where are bypassing buildings (going around them instead of through them)? An essential tactic for overwatch. Where is dashing through open ground? What about double time, causing exhaustion but allowing greater movement? It has taken the easy bits from ASL and presented it as a full military tactical experience game. Not true. Again, it is a casual gamers tactical game which is fine.

BTW ridiculous rout rules that state you are forced to rout if you are in LOS of an enemy or adjacent and fail a morale check, compare this with ASL: only broken units rout they do not take a morale check, they run. They break, not because of an arbitrary morale check because they are next to the enemy, but because they have been under fire and panicked.

Fog of War is covered in ASL with concealment rules and hidden pieces rules allowing for true surprise within a game context.

TL:DR Lee, you are a dick