Post by jdesmond on Feb 27, 2019 4:44:20 GMT
GELIDIS for DBA 3.0 - the Greater East Lansdowne Invitational DBA Instructional Seminar, for today
Back in the '00's I was living about 40 meters outside the municipal boundary of East Lansdowne, Pennsylvania (a borough about a kilometer square, in the Philadelphia metropolitan area, about 7 miles from Independence Hall). Living in East Lansdowne were a couple of good friends and avid gamers, who'd never tried ancients miniatures. So I decided to give them an easy introduction to DBA. I'd have the armies ready and the battlefields set up, pick a side, sit down and go. But, learning the rules, for beginners, not easy is.
Now, I'm one of those guys whose reaction, when sitting down to a new game, is "Stop talking and hand me the rules - I can read faster than I can listen." So, thinking about the DBA rules, decided I'd hand them an epitome, that ...
First; had what you needed to play the game, and only what you needed to play the game. No extra verbiage, historical notes. Rules for 'allies', 'city revolt' and 'rivers in spate' were left for later games.
Second; had the rules everywhere you'd likely look for them. So, there's a 'play' section, and a 'troops' section, with all the specific rules and exceptions for each troop type. The rules you need to know fighting with or against Scythed Chariots will be under 'Scythed Chariots', as well as in the 'Tactical Moves' ... sections.
Third; dealt with Mr. Barker's deathless prose by breaking his long sentences with multiple subordinate clauses* into 'units of meaning', putting them on seperate lines, set off by more white space.
... With the hope they'd be ready to sit down and deploy, needing me only to answer questions and referee...
Finally, I compiled the original version of this in an August heat wave - the acronym being Latin for 'cold water' is not a coincidence.
Now, here is the draft of the 3.0 version thereof, uploaded to our Wiki. It needs some proof reading and corrections. and page 11 still needs to be done (the OCR scrambled the formatng of that page). But as I have Too Much To Do Before Cold Wars, I thot it better to get it out for comments, corrections, criticisms, etc
Thanks for your help with this.
* There's an English-teachers' old, bad, and politically-incorrect joke, which may be apropos. It is here ROT-13ed:
Q - "Jul ner oblf zhpu zber yvxryl guna tveyf gb jevgr ybat, zhygv-pynhfr, eha-ba fragraprf ?"
A - "Orpnhfr tveyf guvax onq guvatf jvyy unccra vs gurl zvff n crevbq."
Back in the '00's I was living about 40 meters outside the municipal boundary of East Lansdowne, Pennsylvania (a borough about a kilometer square, in the Philadelphia metropolitan area, about 7 miles from Independence Hall). Living in East Lansdowne were a couple of good friends and avid gamers, who'd never tried ancients miniatures. So I decided to give them an easy introduction to DBA. I'd have the armies ready and the battlefields set up, pick a side, sit down and go. But, learning the rules, for beginners, not easy is.
Now, I'm one of those guys whose reaction, when sitting down to a new game, is "Stop talking and hand me the rules - I can read faster than I can listen." So, thinking about the DBA rules, decided I'd hand them an epitome, that ...
First; had what you needed to play the game, and only what you needed to play the game. No extra verbiage, historical notes. Rules for 'allies', 'city revolt' and 'rivers in spate' were left for later games.
Second; had the rules everywhere you'd likely look for them. So, there's a 'play' section, and a 'troops' section, with all the specific rules and exceptions for each troop type. The rules you need to know fighting with or against Scythed Chariots will be under 'Scythed Chariots', as well as in the 'Tactical Moves' ... sections.
Third; dealt with Mr. Barker's deathless prose by breaking his long sentences with multiple subordinate clauses* into 'units of meaning', putting them on seperate lines, set off by more white space.
... With the hope they'd be ready to sit down and deploy, needing me only to answer questions and referee...
Finally, I compiled the original version of this in an August heat wave - the acronym being Latin for 'cold water' is not a coincidence.
Now, here is the draft of the 3.0 version thereof, uploaded to our Wiki. It needs some proof reading and corrections. and page 11 still needs to be done (the OCR scrambled the formatng of that page). But as I have Too Much To Do Before Cold Wars, I thot it better to get it out for comments, corrections, criticisms, etc
Thanks for your help with this.
* There's an English-teachers' old, bad, and politically-incorrect joke, which may be apropos. It is here ROT-13ed:
Q - "Jul ner oblf zhpu zber yvxryl guna tveyf gb jevgr ybat, zhygv-pynhfr, eha-ba fragraprf ?"
A - "Orpnhfr tveyf guvax onq guvatf jvyy unccra vs gurl zvff n crevbq."