BW's Unknown History: Range & Cover

Range & Cover is a fun mechanic for playing out battles that feature lots of missile fire and taking ground. But its history goes back to a long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...*

Luke, a buddy, and I were returning to NYC from a visit to our friend in Washington, D.C. I was driving my father's borrowed truck that had a broken fuel gauge. My father had warned me about it, but being a dumb, I forgot.

I think we were doing 80 mph on I-95 in Delaware when the vehicle began to sputter and lose speed. I got over to the shoulder just as the car lost all momentum. Our buddy volunteered to go find some gas, leaving Luke and I to wait. (This was before cell phones!)

I'm not exactly sure how we got onto the topic, but being Star Wars devotees, it's sort of a natural place to go, I suppose. And being fond of creating game mechanics, we decided to figure out how to simulate space fighter combat.

Now at the time, we were deep in BW Classic where everything was measured in paces and in a 2D environment, including bow and other missile weapons. But applying specific measurements to the chaos of 3D combat was just not working out. That's when we dropped reality and went to abstraction, from measured areas to relative zones/ranges. Fighters would move in and out of each other's zones based on a test, with bonuses for longer-ranged weapons, speed, and maneuverability.

From there it was easy to add dimensionality, such as obstacle modifiers for asteroids/debris fields, and shield and power mechanics, etc. The latter was especially easy as we played A LOT of X-Wing and TIE Fighter video games. A pool of power dice could be divided among shields, speed, or weapons. Shields and Hull worked like armor. Each system had a few points that acted like hit points.

Some time later, our buddy showed up in a stranger's car with a can of gas. It seemed he had his own adventure while we geeked out.

From those notes, though, we fleshed out a fully, workable system - complete with laminated fighter sheets! It was great, but we didn't have the focus to make it really work.

But what did work was transposed and adjusted for use in the next version of the Wheel. Range & Cover was born!

*This is as best as I can remember it! It's been a long time since...