Bill Owen Q&A
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Post Posted: Wed Jan 06, 2021 9:30 pm 
 

Sorry to hear about your travel business.  This pandemic is really taking a toll on small businesses, especially in the leisure and entertainment areas.

Looking forward to a revamping of Tractics and the Fast Rules!

Are you thinking about a Kickstarter for one or both?  It could give you some working capital, and some ideas on what people are most interested in seeing in the books.  I'd be fine with B&W, but you could have a couple of tiers - standard and deluxe edition.  Of course the Kickstarter versions could be limited editions as well.

  

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Post Posted: Fri Jan 08, 2021 12:17 pm 
 

Hi dbartman,

Thanks for the acknowledgment of the toll on the travel industry. And I appreciate that you are interested in the rulesets.

We will offer an optional booklet of just the "pull-outs" (what Tractics called the looseleaf charts). Those will be in color and will roughly match the original edition's paper colors! While the font size is larger, some charts are condensed. So there will be less flipping through pages. Back then, we bought several copies of the game so that we had charts to glue to the wall and make a handheld version. Compared to current pay rates, this edition will be a bargain. It took me 15 hours of work to buy just one copy of Tractics in 1971!

I will consider offering an edition with color interior pages. I may question its value, but that's for the consumer to weigh and decide.

The book's layout is 95% done with just a few bits that Mike is fleshing out, and the proofreaders are checking.


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Post Posted: Sun Jan 10, 2021 3:05 pm 
 

That's great to hear about Tractics. Wargames often don't get the love that D&D does.

Bill Owen wrote in Bill Owen Q&A:The shutdown of much of travel has decimated my travel business.


It's been my theory all along that your real motivation for slowly making your way down to Antarctica is that you're mounting an expedition to discover the pre-human civilizations that once flourished there. The travel business is just a cover-up to prevent unwanted attention from Cthulhu cultists, right?

  

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Post Posted: Tue Mar 08, 2022 8:26 pm 
 

sauromatian wrote in Bill Owen Q&A:That's great to hear about Tractics. Wargames often don't get the love that D&D does.



It's been my theory all along that your real motivation for slowly making your way down to Antarctica is that you're mounting an expedition to discover the pre-human civilizations that once flourished there. The travel business is just a cover-up to prevent unwanted attention from Cthulhu cultists, right?


We were going to fly over Antarctica in 2015, but bad weather made that impossible. Going around Cape Horn on a big ship was a big thrill. The smaller ship ahead of us would disappear in the trough of the waves, and then her bow comes up high above the crest of the wave she rode. Meanwhile, we walked zig-zag down the hallways brushing first our left sleeves on the hallway walls then our right sleeves. The crew said that this was a relatively mild day for the seas!

Back to Tractics...

I wrote that when I THOUGHT I was nearly done. I found out that Mike Reese kept thinking of new things to add or old things to fine-tune. So we finally got to print in December of 2021. We have eight identical print editions, which only vary by binding (softcover, coil binding, and hardcover), black ink interior pages for economy or full color, and "view" of the 45 pages of game reference charts: Landscape or Portrait.

Then last month, we came up with a PDF version of Tractics. This was in the place of the Kindle edition that proved to be just too difficult for me to master. Has hundreds of hyperlinks within the PDF to teleport to relevant sections.

One can see all this at:
TRACTICSRULES | CombatRules

PS, we have a free downloadable newsletter called Duckbills for Tractics fans. It has all the stuff that would not fit into the book because I told Mike NO MORE, or we'll never get this published in a decade, let alone the 26 months it took. Plus Variants of rules (some simplifying, some further detailing) and explanations.

MAYBE there will be a new book out next with a fantasy angle to Tractics. Mike said he told Gary Gygax that Tractics was the first Role Playing Game. And in the sense that he meant, I think he's right. Though perhaps not as developed as the D&D style of play.


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Post Posted: Tue Mar 08, 2022 8:47 pm 
 

Bill Owen wrote in Bill Owen Q&A:Back to Tractics...

I wrote that when I THOUGHT I was nearly done. I found out that Mike Reese kept thinking of new things to add or old things to fine-tune. So we finally got to print in December of 2021. We have eight identical print editions, which only vary by binding (softcover, coil binding, and hardcover), black ink interior pages for economy or full color, and "view" of the 45 pages of game reference charts: Landscape or Portrait.

Then last month, we came up with a PDF version of Tractics. This was in the place of the Kindle edition that proved to be just too difficult for me to master. Has hundreds of hyperlinks within the PDF to teleport to relevant sections.


That's great, Bill! Glad to see Tractics return. I've been wanting a copy for years; I'll be picking up one of these when cash flow is better.

Congratulations!



  

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Post Posted: Wed Mar 27, 2024 9:30 am 
 

CombatRules.com released Leon Tucker's third WWII ruleset, Brew Up, last December. It is a 6x9" booklet, and the GRC tables can be downloaded for free from its listing so that people can make supplementary tableside charts.

Leon died last year before he could see the near-final draft of the rules. I talked with his son, Greg, about another game project that Leon, his son, and his grandson were working on. Leon's son wants CombatRules to continue to sell Fast Rules and Brew Up.


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