Quote:I would suppose we should first ask Fred which camp he is in. How about it Fred, are you a RAW/fundamentalist type, or are you a reader-how do you make this fit sort of guy?
I almost always play RAW because I assume the designer had a reason for writing a rule the way he did. It also keeps one playing consistent and will not have to adjust when playing against another person. But I will question rules, as I have done .in this case, to see if I've either misunderstood the rule or there has been a change I don't know about, or the there was an error in writing or printing the rule. If a rule is obviously broken, I will fix it with a house rule. That however is rare and usually broken rules are uncovered by us gamers , brought to the attention of the designer/publisher, and fixed.
I played this particular rule in the way Poor Yoreck answered me in his first post. I do question if that answer is what the designer intended. It seems that riders exposed on a tank would suffer greatly from artillery fragmenting the tank. But , let's think it through. In a truck, there would be no protection at all. the mild steel and wood (many beds were wood) would afford no protection whatsoever from artillery fragments. But, on the tank, depending where the shell lands, the turret and the hull, if you are on the other side from the burst, will protect against fragments if the riders hunker down (they will not get this protection form an airburst however). So maybe the writer of the tank rider rule took this notion into account and decided not to give the +1 shift. (One may say you would get the same protection against DF but that is aimed fire at the dudes on the tank and will be vicious). Remember, the riders can still be armed by an effective roll, so I see a side of the argument that causes me to play this one as explicitly written. We can debate it, but there could be a valid reason why it was written as so.
