To beam or not to beam

[Eugel]

Greetings.
I´m quite new to victory at sea, and in our first games, we had some discussions about the to-hit modifier when shooting at a ships "beam".
The questions were: What is a ships "beam" and when exactly do you "face" it ?
I gave it some thoughts and some research, and came up with a little drawing (sorry for the low quality, I´m at work and only have microsoft paint available). I hope I attached it correctly ...

Well the first question was easy to answer after a little research, a ships "beam" is its width, so in the picture that would be the little black line marked with "b"
But when is an attacker "facing" it and thus gain a +1 modifier ?
My interpretation is this: "Facing" the beam means an extension of the little black line - the beam, which would create the area marked in grey, so any ship that is firing from within this area would receive a +1 hit modifier. So red ship number 1 would not get a +1, but red ship number 2 does.

My argument would be that for a ship in the grey area the target would present the biggest silhouette and would also just be moving on one axis, while for ship 1 it would for example move right and away from it at the same time.

The gameplay advantage would be that this grey area would be very clear and easy to determine without any discussions.

But is this correct ?
I would love to get some opinions on that, maybe it was even clarified in some FAQ ?

Cheers

 

[rcbecker123]

My interpitation is not quite as tight as yours. But this is not an issue since you and your players agree on use. We always use the fire chart picture to see if your caught in the side beam arc. You may also find based on angle of both ships that different arcs my or may not get this.
I always check to see if the whole side can be targeted not just a little part. So either will work just depends on how tight you want to be.


Can't stand fudging in games ( no you bad player don't get the bonus for seeing the last 1/8" of the arc no fudging) and I have seen my share of players who think they can do miraculous stuff in games. Ha ha.

 

[elektroschnitzel]

Hi there,

thank you for your answer but is there no other player who like to join in the discussion .

A question to the original template. Some ship do have really different length so how do you decide where to place the "angle part"? It is really not wise to use the center point

 

[leopard]

I've always gone with the two side 90 degree arcs, if you are in the targets side arcs, then you have it on the beam, if you are in its front and rear arcs you're not.

Its simplistic, also work with the 90 degree arcs centred on the measurement point, as with all measurement to and from that point thats the only thing that makes sense (I ignore the arc template in the book, which seems to contradict the written rules on this, it also makes the scale of the models irrelevant to how the game actually plays)

Also by using the centre point of the models you avoid the 'half in/half out' situations where you have the centre of the ship, but not both ends in a given arc (one of the flaws in DW to my mind, that method of in/half in/out doesn't work with a d6 system), VaS as written gets this right, its abstract, but it works

You can go a lot more detailed than this, but would suggest thats best for duels and small actions using more detailed rules (I have played such, and enjoy it, but VaS s a lot easier for larger games where to be honest the micro managed details get lost in the law of averages anyway)