Quick and Easy or Slow and Hard

[Mike]

Wargames of course.
I am following the news about The Old World and the associated drama and what not.
There is a definite theme of it being good as it will be quick and easy, not have too many rules, and not be too difficult to play.

I can see the attraction of this, but for me when doing something as complicated as war in the Old World and indeed beyond, then giving the variety of races, the differing gods, the various types of magic, the disparate technology levels and more, I feel that more rules and more details would allow you to better capture the rich tapestry that is the world of warhammer.
True from a marketing point of view, quick and easy is a good selling point.

But does that always make for a good game?
I am not sure it does, not for me anyway.

I like WFB 3rd edition as it has lots of rules for formations and troop types and weapon types.
These three things alone can make all the difference on the field, I like that there is a lot to it, and it allows you to create specialist units that capture the quirky feel of warhammer.
I worry that too quick and simple will encourage less nuanced games and army building.

Anyway, I am bored of myself now.
Just wanted to say that I think quick and easy has its place, but so do more complicated and time consuming games.

[Mike Headden]

Quick and easy and still giving the feel and flavour of the setting whether fantasy, sci-fi or historical … great!

Quick and easy because it misses all nuances that set one mileu apart from all the others …. bleugh!!

Horses for courses in all things – including wargames rules.

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

[Albert of Winterpig]

The key, is making each army play and feel different and thematic (and different builds within each army doing the same). Quick and Easy too often ends up with everything tasting vanilla after a while.

[Konstantinos Travlos]

Time is precious. I cannot afford long games anymore and have little interest in complicated ones (These are things that were part of my younger and freer days.).

Thin gruel is better than no gruel imho.

That said systems like Saga, Xenos Rampant show that fast and simple can be good.

Of course if you have the time and energy Slow and Hard is great.

 

 

 

[Andrew Beasley]

As Mike knows I struggled with Warhammer as I just could not get my head around the differences between troop types and the stats / charts you had to keep track off.

My games (see here if you do not know) have become simple out of need and trying to stretch has frustrated me (I used to play SFB with 1k+ pages of detailed rules). I may be in a unique position here but simple lets me play and that’s a win 🙂

I would say as long as you are getting fun out of the rules then set the level you are happy with and enjoy it…

[Tim Snoddy]

I have to vote for quick and easy.  Complex rule sets are fine if you have regular games and regular opponents.  My experience is that most people play a variety of systems and the same game only a few times a year.  The best ancient rule set I know is ADLG but I had to stop playing it as I only had one opponent and the gaps between games were stretching on for months by which time I had forgotten so much of the rules it sucked the enjoyment out of the game.  I would not even suggest ADLG to someone who was not committed to regular games. I now play Hail Caesar, not as historically accurate and not as tactical but accessible to the casual player.

I hear Warhammer has 70+ key words which apply to all factions.  I would think this is more than enough to differentiate troops.  Oathmark Battles of the Lost Age was outstanding in how it differentiated factions.  3 rules around morale, shooting casualties and command were enough to make the undead feel totally different to all the other factions.

[Aethelflaeda was framed]

I find the less unit types,  the more nuanced the interactions and importance of leveraging an advantage from terrain and position: ie tactics. Napoleonics does well with a few different sorts of infantry, basically 3 types of cavalry and  2-3 categories of artillery.  Interaction is infinite.

 

If you can’t even figure out which sort of unit you are facing because of the plethora of rules and thus cannot even make common tactical decisions based on that…ya might as well just roll dice and count the sixes.

Mick Hayman
Margate and New Orleans

[Mike]

Tim Snoddy wrote:

I hear Warhammer has 70+ key words which apply to all factions.

I think that is the case for The Old World and for some of the later additions.
Not so for the earlier editions.

Aethelflaeda was framed wrote:

If you can’t even figure out which sort of unit you are facing because of the plethora of rules and thus cannot even make common tactical decisions based on that…ya might as well just roll dice and count the sixes.

But if you can?

[Aethelflaeda was framed]

Mike wrote:

Tim Snoddy wrote:

I hear Warhammer has 70+ key words which apply to all factions.

I think that is the case for The Old World and for some of the later additions. Not so for the earlier editions.

Aethelflaeda was framed wrote:

If you can’t even figure out which sort of unit you are facing because of the plethora of rules and thus cannot even make common tactical decisions based on that…ya might as well just roll dice and count the sixes.

But if you can?

 

With magic and arbitrary technobabble weaponry, it takes more  study and investment than I am willing to take.

 

 

 

Mick Hayman
Margate and New Orleans

[McKinstry]

I believe quick and easy can be challenging and flavorful. With just a bit of effort and creativity the sides can be given a different feel without recourse to a massive chart collection. I do enjoy big games but if 90% of that time is spent searching charts and applying modifiers, I can give that a pass.

The tree of Life is self pruning.

[Aethelflaeda was framed]

Albert of Winterpig wrote:

The key, is making each army play and feel different and thematic (and different builds within each army doing the same). Quick and Easy too often ends up with everything tasting vanilla after a while.

 

I would think that just the painting of figs and composition of the armies would be enough to keep it different.  A heavy infantry formation of orcs, dwarves, humans, skellies or elves all basically should behave more or less the same on the table even if they look different and some have pan galactic gargle blasters and laser pikes and the others crossbows and spears.  Combat is basically all about units with slightly different movement rates, close combat values (shock), ranged combat capability and morale/cohesion, couple with terrain and command control. (I really want to toss in logistics and production costs and even a political influence from on high but will save that for another day)

You can add a quality or elan rating (call it toughness, discipline, training, morale, elite, mediocre, militia, etc) for a lot of difference.  If we get baroque about using lots different terms that basically boil down to essentially the same thing, it’s all still vanilla, just you now have esoteric and hard to remember names for all the different exceptional tints to look up.

 

Chess only has 6 unit types and one army type, and the play remains infinite, nuanced, and very interesting.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mick Hayman
Margate and New Orleans

[Mike Headden]

If armies only differ in the colour of their jackets we might as well be playing draughts.

I want rules that give me a flavour of the period and, where such things existed historically, a sense of what was distinctive about the forces involved.

Ideally, I want that with mechanisms that are easy to grasp and implement and without a list of modifiers as long as my arm.

But I’ll take charts, tables and modifiers over “this is so bland it could be anything.”

Others may feel differently and more power to their respective elbows, if so.

 

 

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

[Aethelflaeda was framed]

Mike Headden wrote:

If armies only differ in the colour of their jackets we might as well be playing draughts. I want rules that give me a flavour of the period and, where such things existed historically, a sense of what was distinctive about the forces involved. Ideally, I want that with mechanisms that are easy to grasp and implement and without a list of modifiers as long as my arm. But I’ll take charts, tables and modifiers over “this is so bland it could be anything.” Others may feel differently and more power to their respective elbows, if so.

 

Draughts has only a single unit type, with one upgrade and a single army type.  Even the most undifferentiated period or genre we might play still is going have more unit types with a minimum of three: foot, “horse” & gun, with up to three levels of skill: poor, line, veteran and the size and composition of all armies will vary.  The terrain best suited for a particular force will vary and the level of command control of an army could be differentiated by doctrine, professionalism and national character.

Mick Hayman
Margate and New Orleans

[Mike]

Aethelflaeda was framed wrote:

I would think that just the painting of figs and composition of the armies would be enough to keep it different. A heavy infantry formation of orcs, dwarves, humans, skellies or elves all basically should behave more or less the same on the table even if they look different and some have pan galactic gargle blasters and laser pikes and the others crossbows and spears.

 

Aethelflaeda was framed wrote:

You can add a quality or elan rating (call it toughness, discipline, training, morale, elite, mediocre, militia, etc) for a lot of difference.

I wouldn’t.
Playing different species is what makes fantasy what it is for me.
Magic helps make it less real, but I can play fantasy without magic, in fact in our warhammer games we use house rules that limits the amount of magic we use.

In terms of the point you made.

I would expect Elves to mostly forgo heavy armour in favour of light or none, they are faster on foot than men and dwarves and I would expect them to stay light so they can out manoeuvre the enemy.
In terms of closing in HTH, I would expect their immortal years of experience coupled with their supernatural inhuman reflexes to mean that they cut down slow humans before they can react.
Much like a bird of prey swooping down on a slow and mostly oblivious fish.

I would expect a fight between identically equipped troops of humans and elves to almost certainly end in the humans being cut down in droves.

Now, were it elves and orcs I would expect that superior toughness and resilience to pain of the orcs to mean that even though the elves would get the first blows in and be harder to hit back, they would be able to take a lot of punishment the weaker elves throw at them, thus meaning that whilst they get slapped about a lot before they can defend, they do not die and they stay in the fight giving back as good as they get.

In terms of psychology I would expect elves to have better morale and discipline.
I would expect orcs and goblins be prone to in fighting and squabbles.
I would expect undead to cause fear whilst being incapable of emotion such as fear, and as such I would expect undead to never rout.
That right there makes games different to most non fantasy, an enemy that will never rout?
That requires a different mindset to fight.

The way WFB works (at least the early editions) means that you need to tailor both your army composition and tactics to the enemy you are fighting and that is before any consideration of weather and terrain.

My Empire army composition is different when fighting undead to elves and different again to chaos.
The types of troop I field vary depending on the foe as do the unit sizes.

In terms of toughness, elan, militia, discipline etc.
In a fantasy world they can mean very different things.
You can have races that are physically tough but not well disciplined.
Within those races you can have units that are militia and less well disciplined and trained and elite that are better at fighting and obeying orders.

In fantasy games, there are simply some races that are just more powerful than others and in a straight up fight they will win unless the dice gods are very bias.
That is the nature of it, like vs like and all things being equal then maybe it is 50/50, but that is not the nature of most fantasy.

 

If as you described all units were pretty much the same, what would be the point of playing fantasy at all?

[Mike]

McKinstry wrote:

I do enjoy big games but if 90% of that time is spent searching charts and applying modifiers, I can give that a pass.

Same, but also for all games.

[Chris Pringle]

I can see the appeal of ‘Quick and Easy’ to players who like to dabble in many different games or just don’t get to play very often.

I can also see its appeal to a games publisher who might want to lower the barrier to entry and encourage new players who could be put off by a game that looks too complicated, or who are sick of being beaten by more experienced players just because there are so many rules to learn.

Its appeal to me is that a game should be Quick enough to finish it in a reasonable time. (My definition of ‘reasonable’ is 3 or 4 hours max. I’d rather play two 4-hour games than one 8-hour marathon.) It should be Easy enough that players’ options are clear to them and they can focus on tactical decisions rather than wrestling with rules.

That said, as others have noted above, there still needs to be enough variety in the armies to make those tactical decisions rich enough to be interesting. Asymmetry is always good, as the decisions then become about exploiting your own strengths and the enemy’s weaknesses. Terrain is important too – spare me those sterile tables with just two or three bits of terrain or a single objective, ‘fight for the bridge’ – more terrain makes for more complex and interesting interactions between troops and terrain without any need for more complex rules.

I will blow a trumpet here for my own ‘Bloody Big Battles!’ rules for 19th-century big battles. These have gained a decent following (1,000 members of the BBB io group; collected reviews here) and kept our club entertained for over a decade now. Partly this is because the rules are Q&E enough for occasional players to cope with and for new ones to pick up quickly; partly it is because the period they cover has such a rich diversity of wars, battles, armies, weapons and tactics that the games stay fresh and the rules don’t get stale. I’d imagine the same could be true of a decent set of fantasy rules too.

[greg954]

For me both, I look back on all the games I played and the QE was just as fun as SH.

Pirates of the Spanish Main for example. We quite often did a standard 40pts game QE. Mainly because there was a new player and didn’t want to over burden them. Or time was an issue. Same with all my Scfi games, FUBAR I found as a great starting point.

As for SH, both PotSM and Scfi games were played this way. I did find it more enriching to play long campaign games. It always seemed that inorder to do a QE game you had to make a lot of omits. Not necessarily any less fun but certainly felt less engaging.

[Aethelflaeda was framed]

If as you described all units were pretty much the same, what would be the point of playing fantasy at all?

Subtlety vs broad brush.  I dare say if one sourced the Silmarillion for battles and army character rather than a Warhammer codex, it could easily be played with units within AdLG and still be completely different from a historical recreation of the Battle of Gaugamela or Hastings using the same rules.

Mick Hayman
Margate and New Orleans

[Aethelflaeda was framed]

Chris Pringle wrote:

I can see the appeal of ‘Quick and Easy’ to players who like to dabble in many different games or just don’t get to play very often. I can also see its appeal to a games publisher who might want to lower the barrier to entry and encourage new players who could be put off by a game that looks too complicated, or who are sick of being beaten by more experienced players just because there are so many rules to learn. Its appeal to me is that a game should be Quick enough to finish it in a reasonable time. (My definition of ‘reasonable’ is 3 or 4 hours max. I’d rather play two 4-hour games than one 8-hour marathon.) It should be Easy enough that players’ options are clear to them and they can focus on tactical decisions rather than wrestling with rules. That said, as others have noted above, there still needs to be enough variety in the armies to make those tactical decisions rich enough to be interesting. Asymmetry is always good, as the decisions then become about exploiting your own strengths and the enemy’s weaknesses. Terrain is important too – spare me those sterile tables with just two or three bits of terrain or a single objective, ‘fight for the bridge’ – more terrain makes for more complex and interesting interactions between troops and terrain without any need for more complex rules. I will blow a trumpet here for my own ‘Bloody Big Battles!’ rules for 19th-century big battles. These have gained a decent following (1,000 members of the BBB io group; collected reviews here) and kept our club entertained for over a decade now. Partly this is because the rules are Q&E enough for occasional players to cope with and for new ones to pick up quickly; partly it is because the period they cover has such a rich diversity of wars, battles, armies, weapons and tactics that the games stay fresh and the rules don’t get stale. I’d imagine the same could be true of a decent set of fantasy rules too.

Couldn’t  agree more.  Tactical considerations really need to be clear and obvious.  Baroque rules just obscure what really should provide the tension: Should I charge forward, hit the flank, or hold behind my good terrain advantage?

Mick Hayman
Margate and New Orleans

[Aethelflaeda was framed]

As for SH, both PotSM and Scfi games were played this way. I did find it more enriching to play long campaign games. It always seemed that inorder to do a QE game you had to make a lot of omits. Not necessarily any less fun but certainly felt less engaging.

 

Campaign play by far is my preferred way to play but sadly the hardest to achieve for me.

Mick Hayman
Margate and New Orleans

[6mmwargaming]

If the new rules are anything like 40K then the core rules will be quick and easy, but there will be a bazillion special rules for each army/unit. How many of these you need to learn to for your own army or your opponents will be the key.

I like both types of games, eg ADLG and quick and easy games like the Songs series, and it really depends on how much time and energy you can invest in each, and what is the tipping point for learning a new set of rules to a reasonable level.

My 6mm Wargaming site https://6mm.wargaming.info

[Aethelflaeda was framed]

I think AdlG is QE rather than SH.  Empire is SH, DBA is QE.  AdlG is much closer to DBA but still with a few exceptional/special rules that can be a slight pain to remember but easily figured out from the QRS.  WH originally was a simple game but became baroquely bloated with arbitrary exceptions and special rules, essentially becoming a game of mostly pure chrome.  Space hulk back in the day was very QE with minimal chrome. YMMV

Mick Hayman
Margate and New Orleans

[Author]

Posts