In defence of the workhorse rules

[Ivan Sorensen]

Game rules of course come in a wide range of tastes, flavours and smells.

There is a tendency towards experienced gamers wanting things that are a bit clever: Whether its a cool activation system, a unique way of handling casualties or a big campaign module.

That being said I think there is also a joy once in a while to play what I call a workhorse game:
A game with solid but fairly unsurprising mechanics. Move your troops, shoot, roll morale checks etc. All works in a fairly predictable manner and if you have played any wargame you probably have a decent idea of how it all works.

Workhorse games don’t have to be simple but they are often on the simpler side of things as they tend to lack a lot of chrome and flair. It is possible to combine workhorse rules with a lot of unit flavour rules of course.

Rapid Fire is probably my definition of a workhorse game, but it could also apply to something like Warhammer Ancient Battles or the sort of straight forward club game you put on so 12 players can play a battle to completion in an evening.

What say you? What workhorse rules have you enjoyed?

[Mike]

Warhammer. Elegant they are not. Quick they are not.

But they have plenty of rules for all manner of situations and the core mechanics are easy to remember.

Plus nostalgia and simple d6.

[Mike Headden]

Ivan Sorensen wrote:

What workhorse rules have you enjoyed?

None in a very long time.

As far as I’m concerned Warhammer is an abomination that can’t decide if it’s a skirmish game or a big battle one and winds up being neither. As for Age of Sigmar I have no idea, I despaired of Games Workshop decades ago. Nice mini’s though. But if they go on as is with WH40K marines will be 54mm scale before you know it 🙂

I like Warmaster far better. And Strength and Honour. And for King & Parliament.

To quote “Less Than Jake”

Can’t stand the normal
Can’t stand the ordinary
Find me anything that’s extraordinary
Show me something
Show me anything
Am I the only one?
Am I the only one?

😀

 

There are 100 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who can work from incomplete data

[Shaun Travers]

It may not be classified as workhorse by many but Armati 2 is my go to workhorse game.  It does not have a lot of chrome and the mechanisms are simple and all work tightly together.  After only a few games I found I do not need a QRS.  But they are not easy to play well!

Another “workhorse” one I like to play is Take Cover!! which is basically a Rapid Fire clone from the late 90s. 🙂  Although it does have a bit of chrome that I usually ignore.

[Punkrabbitt]

DBA

Rampant family

Fistful Of Lead

Bolt Action

Please visit my OSR products for sale at
www.drivethrurpg.com/browse/pub/17194/Punkrabbitt-Publishing

[Sane Max]

There is a tendency towards experienced gamers wanting things that are a bit clever:

I totes disagree with your initial suggestion – all I see as i get older is players going for something simpler. I am one of those people and I am as old as soil.

All of the Rampants

Black Powder

Neil Thomas Rules

Epic 40k

all really basic in their essentials.

I would argue with the idea that Warhammer has a rule for all sorts of stuff – it might, but the problem is first of all remembering which version you are playing, and then finding the bloody rule. Much better to come up with your own if an ad-hoc issue arises.

[Mike]

Sane Max wrote:

I totes disagree with your initial suggestion – all I see as i get older is players going for something simpler. I am one of those people and I am as old as soil.

For me I agree, sort of.
I want something easier, which for me turned out being not learning something new.
WFB I was familiar with so took no proper reading, just a re-cap.
The core mechanics are simple.

Whilst I do prefer easier and simpler, I also now have the time/facility to leave games set up so they no longer need to be quick set up/play/put away.
So longer more detailed games like WFB are an option again.

[Sane Max]

Oh, i missed out Grimdark Future – 40k for people who don’t like 40k game but like the fluff and the figures.

anyone tried OPR’s fantasy rules? any good?

[Whirlwind]

Ivan Sorensen wrote:

What say you? What workhorse rules have you enjoyed?

Neil Thomas. To me, his rules are the distilled essence of all the others. I have only played a little bit with Charlie Wessencraft’s rules, but they seem to fit the bill too. Arty Conliffe’s rules get a nod also.

And I mean it depends on how you define such things, but for me several of the rules mentioned earlier do (or at least, did for the time) have cool activation systems or casualty removal mechanics and what-not. On the other hand, I have less experience of these, but I have always thought that Dave Brown’s rules were very traditional – have I got that wrong?

I am still thinking whether pre-DBA Phil Barker counts.

[Whirlwind]

I have always wanted to know if people were limited to a single family of rules, like “Warmaster-derivatives” or “Too Fat Lardies’ rules” or “DBx and derivatives” or “5-Core” and so, which would people pick.

[Jim Webster]

Interesting. At the club we’ve decided to limit ourselves to two sets of WW2, not because the others are rubbish, but these are OK and we want to get to know them.

We found we were trying rules and sort of liking them but never learned them well enough to get the best from them

For ancients and suchlike we tend to use variants of the Osprey Rampant series, in that we’ve modified them to taste and whilst there are better rules out there, we know these and people can just come in and pick up a game.
To me these are workhorse rules, good enough 🙂

https://jimssfnovelsandwargamerules.wordpress.com/

[Ivan Sorensen]

To clarify, I intended the term to be pretty broad so if it’s “workhorse” to you then that’s all that counts.

I feel like DBA probably fits but again thats all personal.

[Jim Webster]

Ivan Sorensen wrote:

To clarify, I intended the term to be pretty broad so if it’s “workhorse” to you then that’s all that counts. I feel like DBA probably fits but again that’s all personal.

 

I agree in that there were (and probably still are) scores of DBA variants being used for various eras which makes it workhorse for me 🙂

https://jimssfnovelsandwargamerules.wordpress.com/

[Ivan Sorensen]

Ive seen WW1 and scifi games so that’s a pretty good indication!

Many years ago there was a blog (now long gone) with a guy who decided to prove that the scenario and GM mattered more than the rules and ran a bunch of Napoleonic games using Rogue Trader 🙂

[Jim Webster]

Ivan Sorensen wrote:

Ive seen WW1 and scifi games so that’s a pretty good indication! Many years ago there was a blog (now long gone) with a guy who decided to prove that the scenario and GM mattered more than the rules and ran a bunch of Napoleonic games using Rogue Trader

 

The original 40K games always struck me as ‘pike and shot’ in the relative importance of close combat and missile fire, so I can see them working well enough for Napoleonic 🙂

https://jimssfnovelsandwargamerules.wordpress.com/

[Whirlwind]

Ivan Sorensen wrote:

I feel like DBA probably fits but again thats all personal.

Sure. I guess I am just about old enough to remember how innovative and iconoclastic with its  cool activation system, unique way of handling casualties and campaign module and generally ‘not’ like a typical wargame it seemed at the time!

[Not Connard Sage]

Nimitz seems to have potential to become a workhorse naval game, if the bolt on more complications freaks don’t sink it first (swidt?).

It certainly avoids the death by a thousand cuts of most naval rules. ‘I hit your aft jackstaff tripod, that’s another 2.5 damage points. Only 25,286 to go’.

Obvious contrarian and passive aggressive old prat, who is taken far too seriously by some and not seriously enough by others.

[Ivan Sorensen]

Not Connard Sage wrote:

Only 25,286 to go’.

Oh you must be playing the quickplay version.

[Guy Farrish]

I confess to being completely confused by this  concept.

‘Workhorse’ means someone or thing which does a lot of routine, boring work reliably without complaint. I don’t see how a rule set can do this .

Workaday perhaps makes sense – not special or interesting – rules which do a job but don’t enthuse you?

Or do you mean a ‘go to’ set that you know and like but which has no/few bells and whistles?

DBA was all  bells and whistles when it came out (it still is – but it’s a good game with no resemblance to ancient warfare – which is why you can call the ‘units’ anything you like and the same stone paper scissors calculations work whether ancients, napoleonics or fantasy).

Nimitz sounds like it is a good game and possibly ‘elegant’ in achieving a fair amount of the feel of naval warfare without the mind crushing boredom of ticking off flotation boxes, damage points and checking to see if damage to your signal lamps have cut your comms to the fleet.

If  however the definition of ‘workhorse’ is a set of rules that can cover warfare from Chariot era to Merkava (think about it) then there is  no defence for them. Down with workhorses!

[kyoteblue]

Original DBA, FOW V 3, Rampant Fam, Sword and the Flame.

[John D Salt]

Guy Farrish wrote:

DBA was all bells and whistles when it came out (it still is – but it’s a good game with no resemblance to ancient warfare – which is why you can call the ‘units’ anything you like and the same stone paper scissors calculations work whether ancients, napoleonics or fantasy).

Weird. I am not quite old enough to have participated in ancient warfare, but one of my reasons (apart from being able to finish several games in an evening, not having to tick off casualties, and having a good chance of explaining the rules to a first-timer so that they could play creditably) for loving DBA as soon as I met it was that, unlike the WRG 4th-6th edition rules (and at the time WRG was pretty much the only game in town for ancients) the movements of the units on the board bore some resemblance to all those little battle maps in Arthur Banks’ “World Atlas of Military History” for the ancient period. If one considers the allocation of PIPs to model the allocation of the commander’s attentional resources, it’s perhaps unsurprising that it works across multiple periods and environments.

On the question of horses and days, I think it makes some sense to speak of workhorse mechanisms, that come up again and again. PIPs is one such. I would also suggest the reaction test (which I think of as a WRG idea but probably pre-dated them), the saving throw (which I first heard of through Featherstone, but little of his stuff was original to him), strike and defence values (Lionel Tarr?), and GHOD. Board wargaming still having a distinct culture from figure gaming has its own workhorse mechanisms, attack and defence strengths, odds CRTs including retreat results, step losses, untried units (Panergruppe Guderian), opportunity fire, turn sequence chits.

John Hill made a reputation for himself by deliberately designing games to include mechanisms that would already be familiar to anyone who had played other games. When he did introduce innovations (the morale check from “Yalu”, made famous in “Squad Leader”, the “vamp until the music stops” turn sequence in “Battle for Stalingrad”) they were surrounded by comforting and familiar old mechanisms.

No doubt this is good design practice — innovation for its own sake is just annoying, as recognised by the patterns movement in software development. I suspect, though, that most writers of wargames rules have done a lot more reading of wargames rules than they have primary research. This gives rise to what I call “wargamerisms” — things that happen in wargames because it has become traditional, not because it bears any resemblance to the way real combat happens. Morale failure arising principally from accumulated casualties is one such. Having manpack flamethrowers increase the vulnerability of the element carrying them is another (and John Hill’s fault, from “Squad Leader”). The crackpot idea of massive points values for ships in naval games, rightly derided by Connard Sage above, is a particularly dreadful example — Fletcher Pratt wrote his rules in the 1930s, we really should have moved on by now. You can probably think of other wargamerisms to make Mr. Picky gnash his teeth in doddering rage.

All the best,

John.

[Guy Farrish]

John, I wish I’d posted the original thing I’d written  –  specifically the bit where I said I liked the concept of workhorse mechanisms vice rule sets. The same, or very similar, mechanisms turn up again and again doing good solid work whereas I find it difficult to reconcile the concept of a ‘workhorse set’ with how rule sets address the aim of enabling the recreation of particular periods of warfare.

As for DBA, I thought you might think I’d gone mad. When I saw it at COW prior to publication I loved it (and still do) but I was immediately struck by the idea it’s a great game but not necessarily the best representation of ancient battle. I just dug out my (rather fluffy) March 1990 copy and am struck by its neatness, brevity and simplicity. I have an uncomfortable feeling I may have been a little harsh.

It was certainly a ‘paradigm shift’ compared to what preceded it. The PIP mechanism was a great idea to limit command efficacy (perhaps not enough for an ancient battle) and I can see why it, in various disguises, has become one of those workhorse mechanisms.

The 12 elements each side, moving to contact and shuffling to base edge and corner to corner contact with no part element overlaps, all troops of a type being exactly the same just feels a little too stylised for me.

Although Phil rightly says that most wargamers (certainly then) placed too much emphasis on weapon differences, it still feels as if weapon and shield combinations still count for more than the character of the people behind them.

I like the fact casualties are not the determining factor of a long drawn out morale calculation like earlier WRG sets.

I suspect my main gripe is that ancient battles are intrinsically boring if done correctly. The command decisions are largely made in the alignment for battle and the main(only?) influence the commander retains once battle starts is in control of a small uncommitted reserve and his perception of the best time to release/lead them to victory is at best limited.

I remain unclear what a workhorse set of rules is but am ecstatic that workhorse mechanisms are a thing.

 

(I will now meditate for some days to consider other wargamerisms for your rage inducing delectation)

[Not Connard Sage]

Ah, Battle for Stalingrad. One of those not a monster games, but nearly. Kursk was another from the same period. Dear old SPI ‘sniff’.

Obvious contrarian and passive aggressive old prat, who is taken far too seriously by some and not seriously enough by others.

[Ivan Sorensen]

A lot of the games that get big are pretty conventional, but with like one clever idea in there and then the rest is fairly straight forward.

There’s a reason I suspect that f.x. Chain of Command has a really clever activation system but then shooting is the standard “roll to hit roll to kill”.

Of course clever ideas also become conventional. In skirmish games alternating activations are common now, but at one point they were something you only saw in cutting edge scifi games.

[Sane Max]

Guy Farrish wrote:

I suspect my main gripe is that ancient battles are intrinsically boring if done correctly.

I sort of agree with this. if your Hoplite V Hoplite battle is not a bit dull, there is something wrong. Similarly, while I really like Neil Thomas’s games, his Ancients are, once you have deployed your stuff, just a slogging match. too realistic perhaps?

[Ivan Sorensen]

Sometimes I enjoy a game where its more about seeing the process unfold, though it is obviously not as exciting and I don’t want that every time.

[John D Salt]

Guy Farrish wrote:

The command decisions are largely made in the alignment for battle and the main(only?) influence the commander retains once battle starts is in control of a small uncommitted reserve and his perception of the best time to release/lead them to victory is at best limited.

I think we might have discovered The Greatest Wargamerism Of All (TGWOA), namely that a player’s decisions will mainly determine the results of a combat once it has started. It’s true that an ancient general had very few levers of control once the army was arrayed in battle order, but it’s true in other periods as well. I remember, having done my research for my game “The Moon-Grey Sea”, wondering if it was even possible to make a game about being escort commanders in the Battle of the Atlantic, given the comprehensive direction given in Western Approaches Convoy Instructions (wonderfully illustrated with Jack Broome cartoons, but definitely prescriptive). Even where a commander may have substantial freedom to decide things, those decisions normally have to be “pickled” and preserved in the form of a plan, which then needs to be shared with the people who are going to make it happen; but wargamers don’t like committing themselves in advance. The people who are going to make the plan happen may have very little discretion in how they make it happen, their duty may simply be to be efficient little cogs in the machine.

As Guy points out, this is also intertwingled with the problem we were grumbling about the other day, that in most wargames players are actively punished for keeping a reserve.

TGWOA is, I think, necessary in order to make a satisfactory game. Tony Hawkins defines what makes a good game in terms of the frequency of significant decisions it presents to a player (if a decision makes no noticeable difference to the outcome, it’s not significant), and I think he’s right. So the player is cast as the hero, and probably with much more control over events even than a hero should have.

However

Ivan Sorensen wrote:

Sometimes I enjoy a game where its more about seeing the process unfold, though it is obviously not as exciting and I don’t want that every time.

…and I remember Martin Wallace pointing out that a lot of customers in the Eurogame market got their kicks from operating the game mechanisms, so my instinct to try to make wargame processes as simple as possible was not necessarily the correct one. This brings me to that curious beast that is “B17: Queen of the Skies” (On Target, 1981; Avalon Hill, 1983), an extremely successful solitaire wargame that has spawned a family of imitators. Charts and tables and dice rolls the game has aplenty, but one searches in vain for a significant decision. The player picks the name of their B-17F, but has no control over the quality of their crew, their target, the weather, the opposition, their position in the formation, or anything else that I can recall. One is in a position like “dummy” in a game of bridge. Rather than being a solitaire game, I think of “B17: Queen of the Skies” as being a nullitaire game, the human is the dummy and the player is the game. This I dislike intensely, but the game continues to have a large and enthusiastic following, so it is still just as well that we don’t all like the same kind of things or they wouldn’t sell many mixed biscuits.

All the best,

John.

[Whirlwind]

John D Salt wrote:

TGWOA is, I think, necessary in order to make a satisfactory game. Tony Hawkins defines what makes a good game in terms of the frequency of significant decisions it presents to a player (if a decision makes no noticeable difference to the outcome, it’s not significant), and I think he’s right.

This obliquely reminds me of an ACW “card-menu” game published a long time ago in one of the magazines, might well have been Miniature Wargames.  The two players each had a menu of options and could pick one and that was all they could do (it was simulating the attack of a single regiment). I thought it was a very promising approach, since the whole thing was quite exciting and typically lasted 1-2 minutes but made a fair stab at all the decisions a regimental commander would actually take in the 20+ minutes the real thing might have taken.  Anyway, given the paucity of actually important decisions, it has been my vague intuition that there could/should be games which are much, much, much shorter than the ‘player-admin’ games we often play now.

[Guy Farrish]

Andy Callan came up with Dark Age Infantry Slog (which has been morphed into slightly more traditional game formats by various people) to make an interesting game of a period and warfare where the height of tactical sophistication is often portrayed as line up and hit each other.

I think it worked pretty well, but after a few games the gloss of the system wore through a little – not because it didn’t work at representing what it was trying to represent but because it did it so well that you yearned for a bit of unrealistic helicopter viewpoint and Bowman (or Clansman at the time of design) to contact the far end of the line. There was basically no manoeuvre and your influence once battle commenced was your hearth guard and the immediate neighbouring mobs (I don’t think you could dignify them with the name units).

I’m pretty sure it’s online somewhere – it will be in a Nugget but I’m pretty sure the early ones aren’t online – wait a min… Yes they are on the Wyre Forest site: DAIS

Players do like to feel they are controlling something though – possibly one of the reasons many of us like games, knowing that, unlike real life, our actions matter in them (bit of a jaded view I know).

I sold B17 Queen of the Skies (Avalon Hill version) after I’d played well short of my 25 missions. I decided I might as well flip a coin and see if I survived and spend the money on something life affirming like Stolichnaya or Black Bush.

 

[Not Connard Sage]

I still have my copy of B17 QotS. It hasn’t seen daylight for a very long time. Ditto Patton’s Best.

Obvious contrarian and passive aggressive old prat, who is taken far too seriously by some and not seriously enough by others.

[Konstantinos Travlos]

DBA and Bloody Big Battles for me. These are the basic rules I first visit when wanting to represent something.

[MartinR]

I honestly can’t think of a single “workhorse” set of rules I play (whatever those are). I do regularly pillage DBA, Horse, Foot and Guns, Strategos, WRG 1925 to 50,  Spearhead and Command Decision for ideas and, gulp, unit stats, because I am very lazy.

Yes, Ancient battles done right give the player little to actually decide apart from which colour dice to pick from the dice bag. Rolling dice is fun though, as is pushing troops around on the table. Strategos focuses on the deployment though, which is mind bendingly intense, as if you get it wrong, you lose.

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

[MartinR]

Oops, meant to add Volley and Bayonet and Fire and Fury. Endlessly useful mechanisms and scenarios, although both are far too fiddly for my tastes these days to actually play.

 

 

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

[Guy Farrish]

I think we had this difference of opinion on V&B before – I meant to ask, and never did – is it V&B Road to Glory’ you find too fiddly – with the slightly insane emphasis on skirmish tactics shoehorned into an Army level game with the brigade as the smallest unit?

Or is it the original as well?

And if so, what would you strip out to make it less ‘fiddly’? I still use it quite a lot and don’t normally have any problems but I’m always open to improvements.

 

[Sean Clark]

These discussions always fascinate me. Ask 10 wargamers for their view on the best rules or some other aspect of the hobby and youll get at least 24 different answers.

One person’s steak is another person’s McDonalds. The original post put across the initial question and yet there is now debate about the term workhorse.

If we can’t take a phrase like workhorse and find a common understanding of the word, then agreement, consensus or otherwise is nigh on impossible when discussing the merits of individual  sets of rules and their mechanisms.

The issue of ‘reality’ also makes me smile. Why is the shooting mechanic in Chain of Command any more or less realistic than in Donald Featherstones rules? Yes, one might be all stuffy and assert that in CoC, Rich Clarke used primary source material to design the mechanisms; but at the end of the day it’s all just rolling  dice and looking for a certain number to score a hit.

I’ve seen far too many arguments between gamers who say their game is best, without adding the caveat of ‘In my opinion’. Their statements are almost written to be read as fact.  It drives me nuts and to be honest keeps me away from online discussion for the most part.

Who really knows what ancient combat was like? Most of the histories are written by the Victors as self publicity documents. How can we consider DBA to be less realistic than Strength and Honour or Warhammer Ancients?

These things are all about subjective opinion amd interpretation, whether from the authors or the people who play the rules. And that’s fine. Just don’t force your opinion on the next person. Too often we critics gravitate towards echo chambers where we gain validation for our opinions from likeminded people rather than stepping outside of our comfort zone to accept some challenge of our way of thinking.

[Guy Farrish]

Hmmm?

Sean Clark wrote:

If we can’t take a phrase like workhorse and find a common understanding of the word, then agreement, consensus or otherwise is nigh on impossible when discussing the merits of individual  sets of rules and their mechanisms.

I’d like a common understanding of the word, then I could find out if I agree or disagree with it.

I understand the concept in terms of mechanisms or rules but not the whole shebang.

[Ivan Sorensen]

I guess people are used to a different term?
I always understood it as a game that is solid, but unremarkable, probably (but not always) on the simpler side and without a lot of chrome or flair.

[Guy Farrish]

Thanks Ivan, that really was all I was after.

Now I know I’m not sure I do have anything that I think fits the bill. I play games that seem simple to play to me, (but obviously not all) but which definitely don’t feel unremarkable. If they didn’t produce what I wanted I’d ditch them and try some others or write my own.

I like your No End In Sight which don’t feel like a workhorse – they feel much more of a thoroughbred experience.

 

[Mike Headden]

Ivan, using your definition then we are talking games that I would describe not as workhorse but as pedestrian. In which case I stand by my use of Warhammer as an example.

And like Guy I would cite one of your own, 5 Parsecs, as an example of the sort of “thoroughbred” I enjoy.

Which reminds me, if I can ever reduce the number of outstanding projects from ludicrous to merely ridiculous I must get a copy of Weasel-tech!

There are 100 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who can work from incomplete data

[Not Connard Sage]

Blimey, it’s true what they say about wargamers 🤣

Obvious contrarian and passive aggressive old prat, who is taken far too seriously by some and not seriously enough by others.

[Author]

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