Reply To: Spotters

please dont take this the wrong way…. but you are falling in to a common pit-fall… (took me a couple of years, and playing around with house rules /interpretations for VaS to realise it )

Bolt Action is not a historical simulation game but a beer & pretzel game based on the Hollywood vision of ww2.  What this means is that some things make no sense in the real world BUT if you try and implement the real world mechanics in to the game 3 things happen.  It stops being the beer & pretzel game BA is written as, it increases the conflict / contradictions within the rules, and you end up with even more of a problem of points /balance.

Basically what I understand you want is for the spotter to have to take an order check in order to provide LoS to their parent unit…..

So now you have added a none activating unit taking an order check (which is a contradiction to the rest of the core rules), which increases the likely hood of it not happening (and now its less of a decision to shoot / assault the spotter by the opposition) it also decreases the number of times an indirect unit will fire.  This with the rules about losing ranging in markers if you dont shoot every turn (ok this is not clear in the rulebook but mentioned by the author in a couple of places online) means that they are now worth less points than you currently pay…. both the spotter & the indirect weapons team.

ps: pg 71 of the printed rule book is clear that the weapons team “are able to see whatever the spotter can see” so it IS a change of the written rule… one which frankly I dont see any point or need for.