Reply To: What's your favourite ancients ruleset and why?

[Shahbahraz]

I also disagree with the implicit statement that more complexity = better simulation. In other environments it’s referred to as spurious accuracy. You know, like the Project Manager that brings you budget numbers to two decimal places. You know they can’t possibly be that precise – but it looks like everything has been factored in.

The whole subject of warfare is so immensely complex, so subject to the vagaries of Clausewitzian ‘Friction’ that it is impossible to accurately model all factors. In Knowledge terms it’s a ‘Wicked’ problem. Classic examples have even migrated into folk memory, like the rhyme around the want of a nail..

Previous sets of rules, notably those with developmental roots in military simulation, attempted to cover all sorts of technical aspects of warfare, including famously, sets like Tractics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tractics with aspects such as the angle of shot, armour thickness in detail and so on. The problem with this, is that they don’t model the freak outcome, and they have layer upon layer of detail obscuring the aspects you actually want to simulate.

As a novelist once said in an interview: “I am so limited by comparison with historians, everything I write has to be plausible.”

Once you accept that the rules cannot possibly cover every single factor and detail of complexity, (the rabbit warren in the path of the cavalry charge, the mares in heat distracting horses, the individual effects of disease, hunger, tiredness, insect bites, poor care of weapons .. etc.) it then becomes a question of what you do want to model. To achieve a playable game there are four aspects I believe to be critical:

1. It must have sufficient decision points where the player feels they can affect the outcome, (without unduly antagonising their own ability to suspend disbelief). (Game)

2. The player must feel that any arbitrariness in the rules is not overwhelming (the ‘I drew this card, you lose’ factor). (Fairness)

3. It must be capable of reaching a satisfactory conclusion in an evening’s play. (Playability)

4. It must allow the player to believe in the narrative. (Plausibility)

You make a good point about the general inability in the ancient world for the CinC to do much more than to deploy, issue general orders and possibly, intervene with the critical reserve. But that’s a very dull game. To make it more exciting and interesting, we accept the CinC can do pretty much that, and extend it slightly. To model the unusual event, we make it almost commonplace. In any good set of rules, the writer is fighting to limit the ability of the player to influence events. The player is almost always better read than his historical predecessor, and has much more knowledge of the theoretical capabilitites of his troops. We could have rules, not dissimilar to Principles of War, where the player sends in the Silver Shields and to his horror, finds that they are weaker than the Sparabara they are facing. But this would breach 2.

Each player will have a differing tolerance for the aspects of the game they can live with. An interesting exercise might be to assign scales to each factor and rate ancients rules accordingly. So for values of 1(low) – 5(high) I could construct a view of DBA for example:

Game – 5 loads of decision points.

Fairness – 2 (PIPS can seem highly arbitrary)

Playability – 5 (yep.. 4 games in an evening is pretty easy to do)

Plausibility – 3 (hmm… arguable, but between historical opponents, it actually works very well)

Now ask players what type of games they enjoy and map them on this quadrant.

--An occasional wargames blog: http://aleadodyssey.blogspot.co.uk/ --