Home Forums General General Military disapproval of RNG methods?

Viewing 8 posts - 1 through 8 (of 8 total)
  • Author
    Posts
  • #86997
    Avatar photoNick Riggs
    Participant

    A few months ago I was explaining some of my ideas for a potential wargame to a serving officer in the British Army. He told me that the playing card resolution mechanic I was suggesting would not be acceptable, as cards have unfortunate connotations with gambling. I can see that the use of any random number generator could be seen as gambling, and indeed, does part of the thrill of wargaming involve taking a gamble? (For your opponent, I mean, I’m sure you yourself are very tactically aware and have a carefully thought-through plan, etc.)

    If you are currently serving in armed forces, can you say which resolution methods (cards, dice, coins, pulling stones from a bag etc.) would be frowned upon, and why?

    #86998
    Avatar photowillz
    Participant

    Having serve in the Royal Navy for 36 years, never a problem using playing card, playing uckers (ludo), rolling dice for fun, darts.  The problem in the the armed forces is if money or IOU’s change hands it means you are open to coercion, black mail, pressure to look away, favouritism and much more, military discipline breaks down if you owe someone money.  Especially if higher or lower ranks or rates are involved.

    #87009
    Avatar photoMartinR
    Participant

    I wouldn’t read too much into the opinion of one individual.

    I gather dice are often a harder sell for military wargames than cards.

    The random movement table in the 1978 British Army Tactical Wargame cracks me up as it is modelled as percentages (presumably to be used with percentile random number tables such as those found in the Cambridge Log Tables book) but go up in increments of 16, 33, 50, 66….

    "Mistakes in the initial deployment cannot be rectified" - Helmuth von Moltke

    #87011
    Avatar photoGuy Farrish
    Participant

    Were you trying to ‘sell’ the card idea in a recreational wargame in an army wargames club? Or were you trying to sell it as a training aid?

    The latter would probably appear ‘amateurish’ – I think (I don’t think it IS per se, but it’s about perception – as Martin said: dress up a d6 as ‘random number generated percentages’ and you pass – a d6 would loook like playing ludo).

    Which brings us on to the other thing – where again perception is probably key.

    I’ve played all sorts of wargames in military wargames clubs and never had any problem from anyone about ‘gambling’. I guess it depends on the local command interpretation of games of chance – but as William said it’s the financial aspect that causes the issue not the dice or cards. I’ve attended ‘casino nights’ in various wardrooms/messes where roulette, blackjack etc were played – but they were for tokens not money. You bought the tokens but that money went to charity, and you ‘won’ the fun of a night out.

     

    Oh – sorry – not serving.

    #87044
    Avatar photoNick Riggs
    Participant

    Thanks for the feedback guys, interesting.

    Guy – I was thinking along the lines of a training aid that would involve items one might expect to be able to readily find, and I thought it more likely that serving members of the forces would be more likely to have a deck of cards to hand than a couple of dice.

    #87060
    Avatar photoPatrice
    Participant

    It certainly depends of the “cultural” wargaming background of the military personnel involved, i.e. what they understand and are willing to do with it.

    My own military experience is from a quite long time ago 😉 and French army personnel (and general public) hadn’t heard much about wargames then.

    A friend of mine who served as Reserve officer in a Train (transport) unit introduced his colonel to 2d10 to calculate % chance of a convoy passing safely through enemy attacks. The colonel was a bit surprised at first, then he thought it was funny; and my friend was happy enough, on the next day, to see the faces of professional officers of the regiment looking with surprise and awe as the colonel rolled these (then almost unknown in France) dice and said : “Um, sorry, this convoy has been attacked. What will you decide to do now ?”

    http://www.argad-bzh.fr/argad/en.html
    https://www.anargader.net/

    #87062
    Avatar photoJohn D Salt
    Participant

    I haven’t served in the armed forces for 35 years now, and when I did it was on a strictly amateur and part-time basis. Mind, a lot of the NCOs in my TA battalion were wargamers, and our RSM was the principal author of the WRG’s “Infantry Action 1925-1975” rules (available at http://www.wrg.me.uk/WRG.net/History/OLDWRG/InfantryAction.pdf and still, for my money, one of the best and most carefully-considered sets of rules at this tactical level). The TA background perhaps explains why, as early as 1972, the rules included night fighting, trip flares, and smoke grenades, and distinguished between belt-fed and mag-fed LMGs. At that, one might perhaps detect a strain of sergeant-majorly disapproval of excessive randomness, as the intro to the rules says “On first sight, you may think we make undue use of dice. This is forced on us because we are dealing with individual figures. Take heart, the dice do not decide how many get hit, only who they are.” On the other hand I do vaguely seem to remember that in the 1970s there was a bit of a fashion for variance reduction in wargames rules, on the grounds that skill should count for more than chance.

    Possibly more relevant is my experience of umpiring doctrine development wargames at RMA Sandhurst in recent years. Here, the brief was to reduce chance factors as far as possible. The reason for this was nothing to do with any puritancal dislike of gambling — anyone who has seen “Monopoly” played for blood in the RA mess at Larkhill will know that there’s such thing, and from my time writing fleet operational availability simulations for helicopter squadrons I understand that RAF maintainers are inordinately fond of conract bridge. Nor was it even to do with the preference for “games of skill” over “games of chance”. The reason was that the game was not being played for the sake of the game, it was being played for the sake of the insights the game produced into questions of future force suitability against different enemies in different environments. Insights on future force development should not depend on chance.

    We had been warned beforehand that there might be a negative reaction if polygonal dice were produced, as a snarky remark along the lines of “Oh, I didn’t know we were playing dungeons and dragons” might stop people taking the exercise seriously. However I did see one occasion where it was generally agreed that the results from a certain situation would have to be determined randomly, 10-sided dice were produced, and the game proceeded smoothly — but then we were dealing with a bunch of very bright officers, mostly young lieutentant-colonels, who had a strong professional interest in the exercise. One might not get the same reaction in a training game for company officers.

    The objectives of a training game will probably be very different from a doctrine development game, but it is still probably more important to draw the right training lessons than to have a fun game. One of the training lessons you might want is “some days you can do everything right and still get killed”, but more likely you will want to teach people how to make tactical plans that are robust under uncertainty, so a healthy measure of randomness might be useful here, and indeed it was incuded in military training games such as SPI’s “Firefight”, the Canadian Army’s “Contact”, or the US Army’s Dunn-Kempf game.

    All the best,

    John.

    #87147
    Avatar photoPhil Dutré
    Participant

    One has to make a distinction between the use of random numbers (or pseudo-random numbers), and the actual mechanic to generate those numbers.

    The use of random numbers to compute/approximate/simulate… mathematical equations is a well-respected discipline in numerical analysis, going back to even before computers were invented. Techniques such as Monte Carlo integration or Markov Chain methods are well known in many application areas. In some areas, the use of random numbers is sometimes discouraged, e.g. when you need reproducability of a certain calculation, or coherency over a set of calculations. Since random numbers invariably introduce stochastic noise in the result, this might or might not be a problem.

    In a (war)game, we typically want to generate a random outcome, chosen from a list of plausible outcomes. Hence, in the game, stochastic variation is often seen as a good thing. It means you can play the game various times, with different results each time.

    A total different matter is how you generate these random numbers. In the old days (i.e. before computers generated random numbers), there were tables with “random numbers”, and you had to pick a number from the table. But in games, we often use devices such as dice, cards, etc. to generate a random numbers. Although statistically it usually doesn’t matter what device you use, the actual device or mechanic often determines the look and feel of the game, and might even instill a degree of trustworthiness in the players.

    Suppose you have to determine the outcome of an event in a wargame, with a 50% chance of succeeding. And we have different mechanics for doing so:

    • roll a D6, 4+ is a success
    • roll a D100, 51+ is a success
    • draw a card from a deck, red card is success
    • draw a marble from a bag full of white and black marbles, white marble is a success
    • look at a digital clock when you need a number, an even minute past the hour is success, an odd minute is failure
    • put 6 pingpongballs in a bag, 3 are painted with a yellow pokemon face, 3 have a black pokemon face
    • Play paper/scissors/stone to determine the outcome
    • Etc…

    I guess if you used the pokemon balls in a wargame, many wargamers would complain about the “sillyness” of the thing, and it might even transfer to the perceived quality of the rules. Cfr the many debates wargamers have about using cards in a wargame. Same goes for other professions that want to use random numbers.

Viewing 8 posts - 1 through 8 (of 8 total)
  • You must be logged in to reply to this topic.