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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ledded" data-source="post: 1391831" data-attributes="member: 12744">Ah.  Very good books, and forgive me for even looking like I suggested you had not done your homework.  Though if you have not read Gavin's book, I would read it.  It was a very good prespective by a well respected "fighting general" during WWII, and gives some interesting perspective to the post-Berlin split cold war.  Well, unfortunately, it is close to impossible to do anything other than close unit encounters without doing something about scale or using a big tabletop.  We do the big tabletop with miniatures and it looks like a Warhammer game, but we only play RPG's and it's a ton of fun.  We have lots of buildings, terrain, rubble, and homemade tiles to put down for roads and such so it's a lot of fun. See the minaitures link in my sig for a few snapshots of a WWII encounter that includes several tanks, halftracks, etc.  The story hour link is the write-up from the campaign, though if you stop by I warn you it isnt straight WWII as my players decided (at the last minute) that they wanted to mix Superheros into WWII.  It's fun, but more of a gritty comic book feel than an actual realism campaign. Most of the time I have the encounters start somewhere where visibility/line of sight is somewhat limited, i.e. wooded or urban, so the extreme ranges are not so much of an issue; this is what I would suggest for you if you dont want to large scale everything.  Such as an ambush closely hedged in by woods;  you can describe battle sounds off to their left and right and imply that moving in that direction would be *bad* and try to get them to concentate on their area of the line.  The city-scapes are easy as you can set up a couple city blocks, and have a sniper take shots at them for several rounds with near impunity until they can get close enough to spot him or lay down effective fire.  Starting the action in a trench system with bunkers, an old manor house, etc limits the amount of area you have to deal with.  Also, you can be ambiguous about distance if you have to; I have set up the PC's and the Nazis in 2 different locations that are relatively far apart but were close together on the table, then fudged the intervening distance though gameplay until they get close enough or manage to destroy each other at long range. Think of it like a movie;  set up the "scene" in your mind limited by the perspective you have on it and let them work within that.  Otherwise it can get out of hand. As far as maps, I would do a "players map" that shows them what they know or need to know, and have a GM's map that has additional stuff you can reveal to them later.  This is essential if you play in a game where you dont use a ton of miniatures and terrain, as position/cover is very, very important to success in a WWII action game. I warn you about close WWII action though, if your players are D&D'ers who want to go toe-to-toe they will die.  Very.  Quickly. There are tons of automatic weapons, grenades, artillery, flamethrowers and all kinds of nasty badness they will face.  Heck, I had a SdKfz 251/1 mittlere Schützenpanzerwagen (Wurfrahmen 40) drop a barrage of 280mm rockets on them, and at 5th level it nearly killed several of the PC's (and killed over a dozen of the NPC's).  With my barrage/morale rules stolen from V for Victory, one of the guys spent a few round p*ssing his pants and running in circles before getting himself under control. But they have learned to live in fear of the Tiger tank, and to take some friggin' cover if they even think they hear artillery <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />   Yeah, we have a group of 5 guys and I tend to put a few low-level NPC's with the group for 'cinematic fodder', essential non-combat crew (loaders, ammunition carriers, etc) or for someone to take over if their guy gets completely whacked (hey, war is hell, tell your PC's to get used to it ;^) ) so a halftrack is more appropriate more often than not.  The NPC's dont take any crucial actions at all, and might as well not be there unless it's absolutely necessary to use them to avoid a TPK or something like that.   So far my players have had a lot of fun with this.</blockquote>

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