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So, there is THIS TOPIC which I thought was interesting and fired the old brain box around something I had been meaning to post years ago…
Fantasy vs Historical games and their worlds.
Looking at LOTR or WFB as examples, they both have a huge amount of lore and background, huge.
I am wondering if the amount of effort to play these sorts of fantasy games as true to their settings as possible, is more work than playing a historical game true to history.Now, I am not saying historical games have little information to digest, you could read up on WW2 all your life and still be missing loads of details.
But with historical events we all have a head start.
We don’t need to read about the planet or the races that inhabit the Earth, we already know this, we know the languages, the customs, we understand at some basic level what various battles were like.
Even a history noob like me would have a rough idea what to expect for a game set during the ECW, AWI, WW2, etc.However when wanting to play WFB true to the lore, you have no head start.
There are thousands of pages of rules across various books that detail individual races and their cultures.
Technology is a blend that on Earth did not happen.
Races are all unique with their own history and culture.
The geography of the place is not ours so this all needs to be learnt.You are essentially/kind of maybe learning about a world as complex as Earth from scratch.
After dipping my toe into the world of WFB recently it is a little scary how much of this vast fantasy world so many people know.
I can’t help but admire their dedication to learning all this.Anyway that is sort of it really, just thinking out loud about how playing a historical game vs a fantasy game both true to their settings may be easier for historical?
Or not… you tell me .
😀
Isn’t learning about that just as daunting?
For me no.
I already know about our world and having a quick Google, I know a bit about the countries involved and the time period in that conflict.
I have a basic grasp on the framework of that.If you said the Battle of the Bulge was a WW2 battle in the Ardennes, I instantly have a framework around it.
But the Third Battle of Blackfire Pass.
No idea where that was, when, who was involved or anything at all.So learning about history is less daunting as even at some basic level I already know something about it.
Because of this, games like WFB, which are lore heavy, are also less to my taste.
I can dig that, my WFB army is not ‘official’ by any means, too much reading and research.
They are based heavily on the WFB lore, but there is a big ass pinch of salt involved.
Is gaming fantasy harder than gaming history, both require some research to play a reasonable game.
As a young man in the late 1970’s I used to play dungeons and dragons regularly, as I was at sea and it took up little space. Plus after a couple of months dived at sea your imagination is in overdrive. As we moved into the 1980’s I progressed onto Rogue Trader and sci/fi gaming all of which I enjoyed and still do, though these days I do more historical gaming. I think fantasy probably is harder than historical as there is probably more experts in fantasy than historical gaming especially when Games Workshop is taken into account.
When I have put on a historical demo or participation game occasionally I have had the arm chair expert telling me that the paint on my tanks or the dust on my figures are the wrong shade? (this has happened a couple of times, all I do is bore them into leaving with my expert advice on painting real submarines and how many shades of black it is possible to paint something large
).As to fantasy I have noticed highly volatile debate over what set / issue of rules or what movie reference the game is using or based on (most appeared friendly debate). Everyone its seems is an expert when it comes to fantasy gaming and I suppose we all are as it is all made up and all the references have to be made up or researched to insure the back story / plot makes sense. With historical gaming the interweb thingy verse has made it easier for historical gamers to do online research, fantasy games have a lot more work to do as which genre do you game, Lord of the Rings, Michael Moorcock, Conan or made up of your own invention.
In the end both historical and fantasy gaming require some form of research and like everything in life the more you put into something the more you get out it. So be it tons of historical or fantasy research to play a game / battle / campaign both I suggest are enjoyable. Roll the dice and shove the toys across the table and may your dice be lucky.
(I wrote this before I saw Willz piece – he says it much more succinctly PLUS -Submarines! +1!
Still – here goes…)I remember reading the Lord of the Rings and thinking the Rohirrim would be great to model and game. And then so of course did every one else and before long I was up to my eyeballs in arguments about lance lengths and what sort of Orcs they were fighting and were the Uruk Hai really Orcs anyway? Then there was the great wtf is a Balrog debate, and then the Silmarillion etc got dragged into it, and before you knew where you were I had painted another 56 figure battalion of French line infantry and I’d lost interest in LotR as a game source.
I occasionally reconsidered the idea but found the ‘source’ material no longer held me. And if you play a fantasy source (or a mythological source) as a game it struck me you can’t really change the flow of the story. Fiction or myth is constructed as a whole piece of cloth. The reason Gandalf dies (suspend argument about the nature of his disappearance) and is resurrected (see disappearance note) is to elevate him to a status where he can access more power to advance the plot and enable the ultimate destruction of the Ring. If he whacks the Balrog on the bonce in the first round and strolls through the caverns, what then? You’ve rather stuffed up the rest of the narrative. Same if the Uruk Hai remember to form a shield wall and see off the Riders of Rohan.
Altering the result in a historical game is not the same as one based on a fiction. The French lost Waterloo and we know what happened in the nineteenth century. Nothing will change that reality if the Ogre wins in a game. But looking forward as oppose to looking back, reality has no inevitable outcome. The Whig and Marxist view of historical inevitability is no more. History could easily be different without altering any grand overarching narrative because that doesn’t exist, unlike in fiction where unpicking a thread destroys the whole weave.
Looking at the minutiae; with a historical game – the background knowledge is there – yes you will argue about the effectiveness of a musket at 100 yards and wonder why the discrepancy between peacetime tests on cloth targets and battlefield performance. And with luck someone will know the answer and adjust fire tables accordingly.
But who knows how effective an Elvish bow was? Did Tolkien – or was he simply writing a ripping yarn with allegorical overtones as an homage to Anglo-Saxon sagas?
And if we are talking about wider fantasy sourcing for battles – whose elves? Whose bows? Are they magic? Alan Garner’s Lios Alfar have arrows that have a quality of bane for their enemies, enhanced by touching them to the Mark of Fohla. +1 to the hit dice if the Mark is present?
Do we accept this across sources for our games or is it only Garner’s elves?Fantasy Gaming is hard, much harder than Historical. For me, almost to the point of impossibility. I am standing on quicksand when I look at rules and wonder ‘Why? Why do Orcs instil a flinch reaction on (name species/race/beast of choice)?’ Is that because an author said so on p.128 in a battle scene? Or did it balance up an otherwise invincible foe in close combat with Orcs? I have no idea. There are so many ‘fantasy’ universes each with differing background ‘realities’. My Dwarf’s better than your Dwarf? How do you know? For those playing an off the shelf fantasy world game; I thought fantasy was supposed to free the imagination not bind it to some hack writer’s mortgage payments.
People are right when they say reality is a short cut for historicals. I only need to learn real life once and it will carry across all rules for all genres (theoretically at least!). I need to learn a new ‘reality’ for each and every fantasy world I play in.
For me, almost to the point of impossibility. I am standing on quicksand when I look at rules and wonder ‘Why? Why do Orcs instil a flinch reaction on (name species/race/beast of choice)?’ Is that because an author said so on p.128 in a battle scene? Or did it balance up an otherwise invincible foe in close combat with Orcs? I have no idea. There are so many ‘fantasy’ universes each with differing background ‘realities’. My Dwarf’s better than your Dwarf? How do you know? For those playing an off the shelf fantasy world game; I thought fantasy was supposed to free the imagination not bind it to some hack writer’s mortgage payments.
Interesting.
I guess most people know that a Tiger vs a Sherman will almost always end up one way (assuming no excessive positive waves to sway events).But an Orc Vs a Dwarf, is that a Tolkien Orc vs a Warhammer Orc, if so what sort of Tolkien Orc and what sort of Warhammer Orc.
A typical Warhammer Orc vs a typical Warhammer Dwarf I can guess, but Orcs across fantasy are not the same, so you can learn about Tiger tanks and that is you good for Tiger tanks.
But an Orc in one setting could be waaay different to an Orc in another.
Oh and in the case of GW, having learnt the armies and troops and organisation of them, they get changed/retconned every now and then making your knowledge obsolete/irrelevant.
ll be honest, I really don’t see the point of this question.
I wanted to see what people think.
ll be honest, I really don’t see the point of this question.
I wanted to see what people think.
We have, I hope also proved that folks here can have diametrically opposed beliefs, put their arguments forward coherently and passionately and do so without mud slinging, ad hominem attacks or name calling.
Long may we come together in a spirit of “I may disagree with what you say but I will defend to the death your right to ….. be wrong!”
There are 100 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who can work from incomplete data
Is it necessary to have memorised all the lore in order to play WFB?
Not at all. I suspect you can play without knowing any of it to be fair.
Just as you could play Napoleonics without any knowledge of the period.But then here is the thing, if you are playing say Napoleonics with zero knowledge of the period, are you really playing Napoleonics, or just a generic wargame with Napoleonic looking models?
Same with WFB.
.g. in the Warhammer universe, there’s very little information about economy, education, politics, society at large (
I am not sure that is the case?
Local currencies, trade routes, laws around the merchant guilds, there are whole campaigns and novels that go into the politics of the The Empire.
WFRP goes into detail and lists hundreds of jobs from rat catchers, to road wardens, watchmen to pedlars.
Each job is detailed and has an illustration.
There is information on social class and standing, so much stuff.
Typical living costs and foods are detailed.
Each province has details on its folk, their dress, beliefs, superstitions, there is a full on calendar with festivals listed and then detailed.Between the wargames, roleplaying games, years of WD, the novels, the PC games and much more, there is a huge amount of information on the world.
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