Reply To: Soldier Load in Wargames

[John D Salt]

I can’t remember whether I’ve bored Whirlwind with this by e-mail or not, but the only historical game I aware of that makes any real attempt to model the effect of soldiers’ loads is one I put on myself at COW some years ago, called “A Footslogger Situation.” This is written up in The Nugget no. 221, including some nice piccies fo the equipment cards I produced:

http://www.wargamedevelopments.org/Nugget2008-9/Nug221.pdf

…use the password “cunard”.

Rules for “encumbrance points” are of course commonplace in RPGs since D&D, and the use of “portage points” (which always suggested carrying canoes to me) in Squad Leader has been mentioned. However the ony penalty is to reduce speed, and if you want to move faster, you can just drop stuff. The point I wanted to make with my game was that, as S L A Marshall pointed out in “The Soldier’s Load”, fear and fatigue are fungible: tired men frighten more easily, and frightened men tire more easily. Combined with Lord Moran’s principle that “A man’s courage is his capital, and he is always spending”, this produced a simple morale system showing both that “anyone can be brave for a short time”, and that everyone has a breaking point. The game was also designed to educate people who have not tried it with real kit in the fresh air just how much crap an infantryman has to tote around.

My game was set in WW2; a modern game would be far crueller, as none of the crap infanteers had to carry in WW2 has gone away, and technology has added body armour, CamelBaks, personal-role radios, ECM, and all sorts of electric widgetry, which all requires loads of batteries. The failure to master this problem meant that Western infantry in Afghanistan practically lost the ability to do fire and movement, which would have been a real worry against a first-class enemy.

All the best,

John.