When people play Close Encounters, one thing that gets comments is the close combat system. It’s fairly simple: each side totals up the bonuses they receive from participants, covering fire, and so on, and then they each roll a dice, add it to their total, and compare scores. The winner inflicts a casualty and forces any survivors to retreat.
This simplicity seems to be quite popular, and it speeds up the game. The most common alternative, where each figure involved makes its own die roll, would be an unwieldy mess in my opinion. That sort of thing might work well in games where there’s a strong focus on simulation, but for a fairly fast-paced game like Close Encounters it just wouldn’t be appropriate.
Instead, the close combat system relies on abstraction. I assume that the close combat will be a frantic melee with everyone in the tile taking part in it, doing their best both to strike and evade their opponents while everyone else does the same. Nobody is politely lining up to take turns here! That means we can consolidate the contributions of everyone involved into rough totals for Side A vs. Side B, and that abstraction of individual participation into a collective result is what makes the system work as well as it does.
There’s a similar concept behind the equipment cards I’m working on too. Each card is a one-use piece of equipment – a fragmentation grenade, a piece of armour, a magazine of a different ammunition type, etc. To use them, you choose the trooper who will be using it, play the card, and resolve the effects. Again, conceptually it’s pretty simple.
But how do we know that trooper is actually carrying that piece of equipment? After all, with five troopers in the squad, it would be quite a surprise if the one carrying the frag grenade just happened to be in a position to use it when you needed it. It would also be a bit of a surprise if a squad of troopers from a private military contractor only had a single frag grenade between them, so what’s going on there?
Well, you’ve probably guessed the answer – it doesn’t matter, because we’re abstracting it.We’re assuming that the troopers in the squad pass equipment back and forth, as they get the opportunity and as they see the situation changing. We’re also assuming that they all have a basic allocation of gear. What the use of an equipment card represents is not the use of a single piece of equipment: it’s the combination of a trooper both having the equipment and getting the opportunity to use it.
I like to think of this as being similar to the events in a movie: the camera follows one piece of action at a time. Troopers in other tiles might be wearing armour too, but this is the camera shot in which we see it save someone’s life. Perhaps several people are carrying magazines of Sabot Light Armour Piercing ammunition, but there’s only one or two scenes in which we see the effects of it.
And if you don’t like that idea, consider the alternative: keeping track of where each piece of equipment is individually. The increase in bookkeeping would turn it into a completely different game – one that, in my opinion, would be much less fun.
Carefully using abstractions, where they make sense, can streamline a game massively while not doing any damage to the concepts involved. It’s not a tool for every situation, of course. But, where it is, there’s not much else that will do.
Encounter Table Games 