Kindling

Barking Monkey

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The appearance of ENEMY OBA sparked terrain blazes in a game I'm just finishing up made me think; 'I never use kindling in SASL - maybe I should'. "Kindling is NA" is so ubiquitous an SSR in standard ASL that employing it as a regular tactic just doesn't enter my head. Having said that, every official SASL mission, and every unofficial one I can think of offhand, permits kindling. It's a tactical tool that I think I should at least keep in mind.

The upsides are it's a potentially useful area-denial instrument - and deployed against an ENEMY that uses formulaic movement perhaps doubly so. It can also be used to generate sometimes useful smoke. Night missions make up a vanishingly small number of the missions I've played in my SASL career so I'm on less firm footing here, but it seems like the light that terrain blazes make could be useful in some situations.

Oh the other hand there are pretty substantial downsides. EC are often (usually?) less friendly to kindling in SASL than in standard ASL, where 'moderate and clear' rules the day. I use a houserule where I determine the EC by rolling two dice and taking the higher result* so this could impact me somewhat less than others, but I still seem to end up with a lot more 'moist' condition days than dry ones (though you don't apply EC modifiers to kindling attempts inside buildings, so there's that.) Secondly, there's the risk of an out-of-control brushfire gifting a VPO to the ENEMY if it engulfs it. Thirdly, and I think most significantly for SASL, you have to commit both an MMC and a leader during a friendly player turn to a kindling attempt. While it's not unusual to have a spare SW team with a baz or an ATR hanging around waiting for an ENEMY AFV to show up, it's pretty rare that I don't have better things to do with a leader during my player turn than making him TI trying to start a fire.

What do you guys think - do you ever try to start terrain blazes in your missions? I'd be curious to hear how this has panned out.

*I started the two dice EC houserule b/c 'deep snow' and, especially, 'mud' make some missions almost unplayable, and several more just boring. The monthly drm to the EC roll seem to create a lot of 'mud' missions. I'm not sure the scenario designers worried too much about what EC, weather, and 'night' results would do to the playability of several of the missions.
 

Ahriman667

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Never tried kindling (nor dealt with prisoners either for that matter), but from a gamer perspective, it could be used to some effect I would think. Like you say, usually, you have better things to do with your troops than start fires.
 
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