Reply To: Rules that offer historically accurate movement rates – are there any?

[McLaddie]

McLaddie, I might reply to that with a remark asking how many Napoleonic pundits have written long threads on Napoleonic theory , but have never shown us a set of rules? Guess they never got ‘a round tuit’.

Bob:

I have had a Napoleonic wargame published, Bob. And I am quite confident that I have designed and commercially produced more simulation games and types of games than you have under far more rigorous requirements.  When you think that describing a design as a ‘narrative game’ separates it from other ‘types’ of designs when all games are narrative in their very construction–when you see the old hoary D=R*T as something unique to archaic games, I have to wonder what you have learned about basic game construction while designing your games.  Perhaps that’s the difference between hobby and professional approaches. Regardless of my background, experience and even if I was raised by Gypsies, that doesn’t change how games work and the elements of design.

In a very real sense, a rules designer has no obligation to do anything but publish a set of rules to be judged by the wargamers who use them.  

I wasn’t talking about designers being obligated to do anything. I was commenting on the years of research, work and discoveries designers have done that is simply lost to the hobby–that is a waste regardless.

What most designers find fruitless is going on and on over some point that has no real bearing on the design, it’s premises, or, in many cases, a usable application of history.  Most designers, who want an actual end product that is tangible and can be played, would echo your sentiment about getting too involved with the collection of data and finding they have no time to design or play wargames.

That is quite understandable. Whether that is most designers or not, I don’t know. I’m simply commenting on those designers have who have stated they did the research, often lots of it. It is a shame that no one ever sees all that work.

 

Designing wargames has very little to do with simply assembling snippets.  If that were the case, there would be a lot more rule sets being ” aggregated” by earnest collectors of factoids.

Yes and no. If the wargame is designed to represent some aspect of history, and history is the assembling of snippets, it cant be avoided.  However, that assembling isn’t necessarily collecting factoids.  Game design is assembling a system from game mechanics and materials.

You need a firm grounding in history, an ability to cull the meaningful fact from a sea of “snippets”, an inventive turn of mind, a realization that there is a substantial difference between a game and a doctoral dissertation, and some level of interest in fun that moderates the natural inclination of the “expert” to a noble didactic mission.

Gosh, there are more obvious conclusions we can agree on.  I believe that if we are going to design a Napoleonic wargame, knowing what the military men of the time did to ‘cull the meaningful facts’ [as opposed to factoids] from the sea of ‘snippets’/their experience could be far more pertinent to that “firm grounding in history” than my attempts at the same thing.  That is what I and Bandit were doing here.

So, obviously

1. Games are designed for fun, certainly if they are going to be played.  Wargames provide a wide variety of fun, but fun is the point.

2. Game design has some basics that are common to all games, wargames and simulation games.

My hobby is writing wargame rules, other people’s main hobby seems to be writing about writing wargame rules.

My Job until recently was designing simulation games for education and training. My hobby was and is wargaming and the study of history. So far I haven’t really written about particular wargame rules per se, but rather written:

1. In defense of simulation games as being possible and done all the time [not required] in response to designers who state such things are impossible, while claiming they design them, based on very inaccurate information about what simulations are.

2. In response to rather meaningless game design distinctions such as ‘narrative games’ or presenting basic game elements in all games as ‘new ideas’ or the opposite, an irreducible problem.

I only do that because I enjoy and value what can be done with simulations and games and hate seeing such misinformation being disseminated.