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

[grizzlymc]

I always let a Pollack burn all the way, just in case it grows back.

[McLaddie]

I will have you know that as I pick up the die to see if my cavalry charge, I feel that hollow in the pit of my stomach, the clenching of the teeth, the smell of horse and sweaty leather,, then…….  as I check the modifiers, I can feel the horse moving slowly forward, hear the zzzzzzziinnnnnngggg, as my sword leaves its scabbard, as we approach our enemy and I start moving through the charge bonus distance the sleeves of my pelisse occasionally smack the side of my face and necfk and my arm starts to cramp from holding the sword forward.

They roll their die and stand, but do not countercharge, the pelisse is now flattened on my shoulder, the drumming of its sleeves on the edge of my feelings, sword arm rigid, I pick my man, the dice roll, the charge goes home, the shock of impact and the feeling of the sword cutting through flesh and gristle, deflecting on bone, a spatter of blood on my face as the dice roll 4 casualties against him!  That fatalistic expression on his face as he picks up the dice and realises that, although he cannot yet feel it he has suffered a mortal blow, he rolls a one, my horse speeds past him lifeless in the saddle, again and again I experience the savage joy of running fleeing men through the back, the whinney of crippled horses, screams of terror!

 And you call that an ersatz experience?

Unless you are actually wiping blood off of your face and smell like horse sweat, yes, it is a pretend experience of *something else*, not that your feelings while pretending aren’t real.  All simulations depend on that ‘acting as if’ something is real–and the attendant real feelings they engender. That is definitely part of the fun. It is for me.   That is the great thing about games and particularly simulations. For example, in training simulations of conflict resolution skills, the tension, the defensive feelings and anger usually found in the real situations can be very real in playing the simulation. That is one thing that makes simulations effective as training experiences and research… or as entertainment.

Best Regards,  McLaddie

[McLaddie]

All my wargaming life I’ve thought that rules that used dice to determine how far you went were stupid. Now I’m wondering if – given they operate within a min-max range – they may make quite a bit of sense.

Bandit:

So, what do the sources suggest is the range of movement, that mini-max range and what kinds of things affect it?  Again, any indications from the historical record?  I ask this keeping in mind that all the rules you list already provide for delays in formation changes, terrain, and often order transmission.

Best,  McLaddie

 

[Sam Mustafa]

If the forces start X distance apart, and within X distance any attack would historically be made fairly directly forward, why does it matter if the units cover X distance in 1 turn or 15 turns?

Or put another way:

In all games there is a distance “X” where from there on in players are just closing to contact forward, why does it matter how many turns it takes them to do that?

 

It matters because you need to know what can happen in the time between X and… whatever.  Can the defender shoot? How many times? Can he countercharge them? If so, from how far away and with chance of success? Can he react in some other way, like falling back, changing formation, bringing up reserves?

Are you still searching for some sort of historically accurate movement rate?   If so, then you’ve tied yourself down to some sort of fixed relationship between distance and time.*  That of course, then connects you to the limits of the table size, as explained above.  And I assume that marching isn’t the only thing that you’ll want to require some historically-justified amount of time. A firefight should last the correct amount of time, too, right?  Or a bombardment, or a charge, or a retreat, and so on.  And all across the table, different units will be doing those different things, in different situations against different enemies, more or less simultaneously.  Thus games tend to use turns and phases in an attempt to sort it all out into fixed increments of some sort, or at least into “opportunities” that are limited either by some fixed or random mechanism.

If you’ve got a suggestion for how to do all of this without turns or phases, or some sort of fixed increments, then by all means share!

 

If you’re not searching for historically-accurate movement rates then you can do whatever you like.

 

—-

* Although if the truth be told, even the guys who do all that research and math and think that they’ve figured out a system by which they’ve got their miniatures marching at an historically-accurate rate per turn… still pile on the fudge when it comes to things like advancing after combat, or falling back after combat, or changing formation when the enemy attacks, and so on.

Take for example, two battalions, A and B.  Battalion A marches across the field, nowhere near the enemy, and is done.  Battalion B marches the same distance across the field, attacks the enemy, presumably fights him for a while, and then falls back from that combat.

If they had the same movement rate, and that movement rate was based upon what their historical counterparts could have done in X-number of minutes, then how did B manage to find all that extra time to do so many more things?  What was A doing all that time, just standing and watching?

 

[grizzlymc]

Sam

Whilst I tend to agree with your POV, the example is pretty easy to work around.  You can have melee happen in the next turn, or in the next turn if the charge is over half a move distance …….

 

I think that one of the biggest fudges of time is in firefights, we almost always do as much damage in turn 1 as in turn 5, but by turn 5 the men are huddled together in their unit footprint, ballsing up their drill, half blind with salt petre and smoke, stuffing balls down fouled barrels, physically exhausted and all the rest.

 

 

[McLaddie]

I think that one of the biggest fudges of time is in firefights, we almost always do as much damage in turn 1 as in turn 5, but by turn 5 the men are huddled together in their unit footprint, ballsing up their drill, half blind with salt petre and smoke, stuffing balls down fouled barrels, physically exhausted and all the rest.

I don’t know how much game designers presently fudge on things like the time involved in firefights, but such things can be approached much like the march times.  You find a large number of accounts and start drawing circles around the question, just like military men did.  They often talked about how much time engagements took. While individual estimates could be off for a variety of subjective reasons, dig up enough examples, and patterns emerge, ones that can be used in wargames.

For instance, few firefights led to the situation you describe, based on the accounts. The closest is Albuera, and military men actually gave times for how long that particular firefight lasted between the Spanish, then British and the French. Close to 2 hours.  Exact? hardly, but with enough examples we can draw a circle around the times.  Another example is Ferey’s division’s last stand at Salamanca. It lasted an hour according to accounts, Ferey beating back with fire, several British adavances and Ferey conducted an orderly withdrawal afterwards, so they weren’t in the condition you describe.  Thiebault, of St. Hilaire’s Division at Austerlitz describes the firefight that developed with Austrian 4th battalion troops. It lasted fifteen minutes and was ended by charges from advancing Russians and then the French.  What seems to be the case with the majority of the ‘firefights’ I have found, 87 so far, most were ended by flank attacks or charges of one side or the other.  So, even a rough range places 2 hours at one extreme and two or three volleys and a charge at the other.  By placing those accounts within the larger timescale of a battle, several things can be discovered:

1. Most firefights were ended with flank attacks and charges, officers stating that your description of a firefight was to be avoided.  The British officers at Albuera felt the 2 hour firefight was extreme, a waste and unnecessary and very much out of the ordinary.

2. Most firefights ended within 15 minutes  or less, based on accounts and how such actions fit into the battle timeline.

3. A prolonged firefight was to the defender’s advantage and not something the attacker wanted to see.

4. Tactics, such as the British volley and charge, often dictated how long a ‘firefight’ would last.

So, while hardly exact, we can draw a spectrum from the accounts where the time it took to fire two volleys is on one end and 2 hours is on the other extreme, the median running between 10 and 15 minutes.  With enough examples, we can also start talking about what conditions and decisions led to different times in those firefights.

Those numbers are hardly exact, but they are far better than saying it can’t be determined at all.  And if the wargamer and/or the designer doesn’t care about portraying history, then it really isn’t relevant.  However, the second you decide to portray history, whether that is with a ground scale or not,  whether there is a time scale or not, such considerations become very important.  Historical wargames are based on and portray history, so the accounts is where you have to go.  Games are designed around numbers, chances, patterns and the odds of things occurring. IF you are portraying Napoleonic history, then the history has to be the basis for all those things.

It is easier and in some ways harder than many folks want to make it.

Best Regards,  McLaddie

 

 

 

[Bandit]

Sam,

I think you are requiring the adoption of unspoken presumptions limiting how to address any problems posed by “historical movement rates”.

Sam Mustafa wrote:

Can the defender shoot? How many times? Can he countercharge them? If so, from how far away and with chance of success? Can he react in some other way, like falling back, changing formation, bringing up reserves?

So the system needs to allow for the defender to react. Sure. Of course it does. I don’t see how letting a division move ~1000-1400 yards in a turn necessarily prevents a defending player from reacting. That is a question as to what other mechanics are present in the system and what they allow for.

Sam Mustafa wrote:

Are you still searching for some sort of historically accurate movement rate?   If so, then you’ve tied yourself down to some sort of fixed relationship between distance and time.*

I reject this on its face. You said that if someone is seeking to determine a historically accurate movement rate and explore the use of it in games then the only possible outcome is a specific implementation that you define through presumptions later in your post. Remove your presumptions and then discuss it, there are options.

Sam Mustafa wrote:

That of course, then connects you to the limits of the table size, as explained above.

I’m not certain what you refer to. In this post you say that one has to allow the defender the ability to react, sure, but that isn’t a table size problem. Previously you referred to Mark’s (ExtraCrispy) explanation which I thought was a perfectly good one but I also, I think, requires a presumption. The presumption is that players need multiple turns of movement to come to contact. I object to this as support for your argument now because it presumes your conclusion. I am challenging why it matters if you take 1 turn or 15 turns to make contact and in this instance you just said because people need to move 15 times, i.e. they need to because they need to. Your other argument that players need to be able to react makes sense but 1) that is a separate point and 2) as I’ve said, I don’t see how the universe of all potential designs necessarily prevents a defending player from being able to react if historical movement rates are used.

Sam Mustafa wrote:

And I assume that marching isn’t the only thing that you’ll want to require some historically-justified amount of time. A firefight should last the correct amount of time, too, right?  Or a bombardment, or a charge, or a retreat, and so on.  And all across the table, different units will be doing those different things, in different situations against different enemies, more or less simultaneously.

I don’t know if you read the post I put up on page #2 of this thread outlining the Battle of Eylau and mapping to a 20-minute-turn timeline of events. Whether someone could accomplish the same as occurred historically with a given set of rules will depend on many factors but through this exercise, as Grizzlymc says, can be determined. Evaluation of if you can accomplish that is a nice place to start rather than presuming it can’t be done or for that matter, presuming that it can be done.

Sam Mustafa wrote:

If you’ve got a suggestion for how to do all of this without turns or phases, or some sort of fixed increments, then by all means share!

This doesn’t seem like a real question simply because I don’t know why you’d have to throw out turns or phases to accomplish this stuff. Honestly, I’d argue we do all this stuff now in traditional rule sets with traditional mechanics. Like marking “FIRST FIRE” in Johnny Reb with a 15 or 20 minute turn, we’re compressing 15-20 minutes (depending on game revision) of musket volleys into a single outcome. Thus, it is a question of what a designer chooses to combine into a single outcome.

Sam Mustafa wrote:

* Although if the truth be told, even the guys who do all that research and math and think that they’ve figured out a system by which they’ve got their miniatures marching at an historically-accurate rate per turn… still pile on the fudge when it comes to things like advancing after combat, or falling back after combat, or changing formation when the enemy attacks, and so on.

This, and your example following it, are where you outline the presumptions I mentioned above. You presume that any implementation of “historically accurate movement rates” requires that the tolerances of the time allotted for a turn and the movement rate are so tight that nothing else can occur during that turn without breaking consistency and that is not a necessary truth. This will vary based on implementation of many mechanics not only movement.

[Bandit]

grizzlymc wrote:

Whilst I tend to agree with your POV, the example is pretty easy to work around.  You can have melee happen in the next turn, or in the next turn if the charge is over half a move distance …….

Indeed. I concur. Or you could have an “assault declaration step” followed by a “defender reactions step” which each occur prior to contact or perhaps prior to the attacker’s movement even starting. I’m just pulling this off the top of my head because it is a really old mechanic. Guns of Liberty which was written and released… over a decade ago (or more like two?) has the following steps in a turn:

Charge declarations
Defender rolls to stand (morale check) – if passes, may react in XYZ ways, if fails a reaction is stipulated
Attacker is moved
…Rest of the turn transpires…
Charge resolution

So yeah, there are obvious methods of dealing with this and many of them were dreamed up a long time ago and published in various rule sets already. It isn’t a new problem requiring a new solution.

[Sam Mustafa]

All right, I give up, then.   I no longer understand the question(s). I can’t tell, from one sentence to the next, whether you’re talking about a game that has turns, or doesn’t,  or which desires historically-accurate movement rates, or doesn’t,  or which uses some sort of fixed time scale, or doesn’t.  So I just don’t know how to respond.

So the system needs to allow for the defender to react. Sure. Of course it does. I don’t see how letting a division move ~1000-1400 yards in a turn necessarily prevents a defending player from reacting. That is a question as to what other mechanics are present in the system and what they allow for.

I’ll  offer one parting thought about that:  one of the mistakes I sometimes see in game design is when people think of a game problem in terms of one discrete action, such as:  “How should the 1st brigade close with these defenders at the farm?”

A game whose mechanics are based upon the assumption of a single discrete event, often bogs down or collapses altogether because as soon as the players begin playing, they generate not one clear event, but rather dozens of overlapping and complex events, all of which need to be resolved with some degree of simultaneity.  This was one of the classic problems of VLB, and  generally of any system that tries to get away from traditional incrementalization of time or opportunity, unless the game is very small with very few units/figures.

The reason that most games are subdivided into artificial turns/phases/actions/opportunities/whatever, is because there’s never just a single simple situation in which one attacker is closing with just one defender. Rather, at any given time there are many units across the table in different stages of engagement with the enemy, some close-up and some at a distance, some shooting and some charging, some delayed and some early, some trying to work around a flank and others partially engaged with one defender and partially engaged with another, some having already recently engaged and now advancing or falling back…  and each needing different amounts of time to resolve, due to terrain, distances, relative positions, or other factors. And of course, the results of one encounter often spill over onto the next encounter.  (It might take 15 minutes for the 1st division to reach the defenders on the hill, but before that happens, the 3rd division might be falling back at an oblique angle from its engagement in the nearby forest, and might overlap part of the path across which the 1st division must advance, although some units of the 4th division were able to flank those defenders in the forest, so did that happen before 3rd division had to fall back, which in turn would mean that 1st division’s path is in fact unimpeded?  But if it was impeded, then the defender could have had time to bring up reserves to the hill… unless those reserves were sent to prevent your 4th division from flanking the woods in the first place, which means that….”)

The question is therefore never just:  “How should the 1st brigade close with these defenders at the farm?”   But rather:

“What systems of managing time and space will work, when all of these different potential contacts and non-contacts will exist, each under different circumstances, each potentially affecting the others, and each representing different amounts of both real and game time?”

Historical accuracy is usually not the issue when debating whether it’s better to have a 4″ movement rate or a 24″ movement rate, but rather:  how many extra rules will you have to write, to prevent the guy with the 24″ movement rate from abusing it and doing all sorts of silly things?

Game designs have generally therefore tended toward smallish artificial increments of some sort, not in any effort at historical accuracy, but because it works better as a game and constrains the natural tendencies of players to search for and exploit any advantage in the rules…  in ways that they themselves allegedly think are “wrong,” but alas, that’s the nature of the species.

God knows that every time I’ve had some cool outside-the-box idea that would dispense with this or that traditional constraint and open up a whole new chapter in Wargaming History…  I’ve been humbled by the ability of my play testers to break it in a matter of minutes by figuring out how to use it  in all sorts of absurd ways. So I sigh and come shuffling back to the basics.  Those “presuppositions” of mine that you read above have been learned from years of long, hard experience and the realization that in most cases, if the idea was as brilliant and revolutionary as I originally thought, then somebody smarter than me would have already made it work by now.

[Whirlwind]

For the OP: yes – Kriegspiel:  The move distance works out at about 75yds per minute.

 

 

[McLaddie]

“What systems of managing time and space will work, when all of these different potential contacts and non-contacts will exist, each under different circumstances, each potentially affecting the others, and each representing different amounts of both real and game time?”

That is the backbone of any simulation, let alone game. How time is managed.  It is also a major focus of military men.  Regardless of the game or simulation, the passage of time and in what order things happen will be the framework for the game.  And time will always be divided up incrementally, even in a simultaneous game system.  The problem with VLB is that George allowed too many things] at any depth of scale] to happen at the discretion of the players.  Any game method for parsing out time has to be player-proof.

So it is a question of what systems of managing time and space will work. The assumption seems to be that only a very few can work because of the table size or game needs etc.

There are four basic parts to any game or simulation system, each can be used to monitor time:

1. Time

2. Activities

3. Events

4. Player decisions

Time can be used to determine when and what activities occur, such as IGO/UGO turns representing 20 minutes.  Activities can be used to determine the passage of time, whether with cards, Command points, or stating that there are 3 actions allowed per unit per turn.  Game events can monitor time, from sundown to morale collapse ending the game, but having random turn lengths is an example of event controlled time, if only with done with a roll of the dice.  Another is Grand Piquet‘s ‘event horizon’ movement or Crossfire.  Warhammer Ancients has multiple dice throws determine when the player must end his turn.  VLB is the only attempt at player decisions determining the passage of time and it wasn’t handled well.  And all of this involves what rate an infantry unit could move in X amount of time.

Then there are an infinite number of combinations of the four parts being used to monitor time.  Having X number of activities within a sent time is the classic example of combining time increments and activities, but the reverse is true to, where the number of activities determine the amount of time that has passed.

Of course, a designer can come up with a very workable game system and nobody will play it because of player expectations and current conventions.

It’s interesting that this thread was simply trying to determine an average march rate and it leads to game theory, practical limitations and what is possible on the table.

 

[Bandit]

Sam Mustafa wrote:

All right, I give up, then.   I no longer understand the question(s). … So I just don’t know how to respond.

Well, I am sorry to see you depart the conversation so quickly and I won’t leave out that I am generally confused as to why but I will respect your choice to do so.

To address your post I will share several points:

Sam Mustafa wrote:

I can’t tell, from one sentence to the next, whether you’re talking about a game that has turns, or doesn’t,  or which desires historically-accurate movement rates, or doesn’t,  or which uses some sort of fixed time scale, or doesn’t.

I have not outlined or referred to any given game as the basis for this thread. In fact, I acted against that sort of narrow framing by listing over a dozen games in my original post. I sought a discussion about how various games have handled movement and wanted to have that conversation in light of the fact that few if any seem to be at all consistent with historical rates.

Bill (McLaddie) is certainly correct when he posits that the place to begin is establishing what a historical rate might have been and I would further concur that using an average gleaned from a variety of circumstances that can be roughly defined (simply so that one can know if the average already accounts for any variation they caused) is the way to go.

I’m not sure from where you drew the assumption that I was talking about systems without turns or that I was talking about systems without fixed time scales though I suppose at least the latter is worth discussing in the broader topic.

Sam Mustafa wrote:

I’ll  offer one parting thought about that:  one of the mistakes I sometimes see in game design is when people think of a game problem in terms of one discrete action

I believe this is a self-evident and obvious fact.

Throughout my participation in discussions of design, criticisms of rule sets and various other circumstances, I have been very outspoken in my view that mechanics must be integrated throughout a system for it to function properly and for any impression of the game representing anything at all to be true. If rules regarding ranges, movement and morale are all independent modules that can be swapped out “without impacting the others” then I could only conclude the system is anything but a system and all such mechanics are entirely arbitrary. Sparker and I once had a real drag out argument on TMP about his view that a strength of Black Powder was the flexibility that such a modular design provides while I felt it demonstrated a fundamental flaw in the system at a conceptual level.

This is simply to say: “The bits, they must be integrated, duh.” So yes, I am aware and would concur.

That you point this out and to what depth you go in discussing it seems to indicate that you presume I do not understand it, so I wanted to make very clear that I do.

As I noted in my response to Grizzlymc, there are games that have been on the market for years and are widely played which include mechanics for providing defender reactions for an incoming attacker. Guns of Liberty does this, Johnny Reb does this, lots of games do this. How such should be implemented and integrated is a question of specifics but your statement that it can only be done in one of a couple ways baffles me completely.

Further more I’ve got to say that how you end your post is… just negative:

Sam Mustafa wrote:

…in most cases, if the idea was as brilliant and revolutionary as I originally thought, then somebody smarter than me would have already made it work by now.

On this I have to disagree entirely. I think this drives us in the wrong direction in all aspects of life it can be applied to. To the contrary, while I rarely quote people, a man I knew was fond of saying:

“Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you…”

He was a pretty bright guy and I learned a lot from him. Optimists are commonly pretty foolish but man oh man, does the world ever benefit from the ‘greater fool’.

[Bandit]

McLaddie wrote:

It’s interesting that this thread was simply trying to determine an average march rate and it leads to game theory, practical limitations and what is possible on the table.

Indeed.

Moving back that direction the potential problems with using historical movement rates appear to be:

1) potentially running out of room due to physical table size limitations.
2) providing appropriate options for a defender to respond to an attack.

Those seem like perfectly valid concerns.

Are there others that haven’t been brought up yet?

[grizzlymc]

I think that a major issue is whether distance divided by pace gives you time on all, most, many, some, few, occasions.

So, was Soult’s achievment the norm or not?

 

For that you need a reasonable population of transit times that work, and preferably any that don’t as you would hope that the ones that don’t have specific characteristics which show why they are not the norm.

[McLaddie]

So, was Soult’s achievment the norm or not?

 For that you need a reasonable population of transit times that work, and preferably any that don’t as you would hope that the ones that don’t have specific characteristics which show why they are not the norm.

Grizzlymc:

Exactly. Statistically speaking the higher the number of the base [That reasonable population], the firmer the conclusion.

So for troops moving across open terrain [with all the possible variations even that involves] you have three points for reference: 1. What was practiced–the planned speed.  Then you have the estimates for what the military men expected. Soult’s comment can be taken as one, so can Riesswitz’s 1812-1826 Kriegspiel. I’ve mentioned others.  The third point is that population of examples from history.

Now on a crude level, if there is a large variation in times, then that means there are variety of significant conditions that impact an infantry unit’s speed.  If the results are very consistent across all the points and examples, then the expected random conditions that could occur simply aren’t significant and don’t have to be simulated.

What I have found is that the regulation practices, the officer estimates and the actual movement of troops all are very consistent: @ 75 yards per minute on the battlefield.

Soult moved his two divisions on a cold December morning against no opposition and made about 75 yards per minute.  More than fifty years later, the three divisions involved in Pickett’s charge marched against serious artillery fire on a hot July afternoon, dressing BY DIVISION twice along with crossing two fence lines and still made 75 yards per minute.

With two or three dozen more examples with the same results, the only conclusion you can come to is that all the conditions that could affect movement in each separate situation weren’t significant…and didn’t affect movement. This could be because of officers speeding up and slowing down movement or that the obstacles were really insignificant.

Now, with at information as a norm, you start looking for examples of troops moving through or across terrain that wasn’t ‘open’.  You can even group them by the type of terrain.  I have already given the example of the Allied 3rd Column’s movement along a muddy and damaged trail.  44 yards per minute.  Now IF I find that is a rough average for troops moving over mud, or other terrain, then I have an average how much such terrain slows troops.  Say 44/75 or 58% of open terrain movement.

The rougher the evidence, the more examples you need for a solid conclusion… unless the results with 20 or more are so consistent as to make that unnecessary.

That is one basic method in developing simulation data, but not the only one.  It does give you a solid ‘average’ to work from with enough examples.  As others have pointed out, it is only one piece of a much larger interactive set of data that make up a wargame.  Each piece deemed important has to be confirmed, depending on what is being represented.

Best Regards,  McLaddie

[Patrice]

Sam Mustafa wrote:

The question is therefore never just: “How should the 1st brigade close with these defenders at the farm?” But rather: “What systems of managing time and space will work, when all of these different potential contacts and non-contacts will exist, each under different circumstances, each potentially affecting the others, and each representing different amounts of both real and game time?” Historical accuracy is usually not the issue when debating whether it’s better to have a 4″ movement rate or a 24″ movement rate, but rather: how many extra rules will you have to write, to prevent the guy with the 24″ movement rate from abusing it and doing all sorts of silly things? Game designs have generally therefore tended toward smallish artificial increments of some sort, not in any effort at historical accuracy, but because it works better as a game and constrains the natural tendencies of players to search for and exploit any advantage in the rules… in ways that they themselves allegedly think are “wrong,” but alas, that’s the nature of the species. God knows that every time I’ve had some cool outside-the-box idea that would dispense with this or that traditional constraint and open up a whole new chapter in Wargaming History… I’ve been humbled by the ability of my play testers to break it in a matter of minutes by figuring out how to use it in all sorts of absurd ways. So I sigh and come shuffling back to the basics.

Yes I agree. That is what I was trying to suggest (although I wrote it less clearly) in some of my earlier posts.

McLaddie wrote:

It’s interesting that this thread was simply trying to determine an average march rate and it leads to game theory, practical limitations and what is possible on the table.

And that, too.

http://www.argad-bzh.fr/argad/en.html
https://www.anargader.net/

[McLaddie]

The question is therefore never just: “How should the 1st brigade close with these defenders at the farm?” But rather: “What systems of managing time and space will work, when all of these different potential contacts and non-contacts will exist, each under different circumstances, each potentially affecting the others, and each representing different amounts of both real and game time?” Historical accuracy is usually not the issue when debating whether it’s better to have a 4″ movement rate or a 24″ movement rate, but rather: how many extra rules will you have to write, to prevent the guy with the 24″ movement rate from abusing it and doing all sorts of silly things? Game designs have generally therefore tended toward smallish artificial increments of some sort, not in any effort at historical accuracy, but because it works better as a game and constrains the natural tendencies of players to search for and exploit any advantage in the rules…

So the message that a 4″ movement rate is simpler to game and a 24″ movement rate would create the need for all sorts of special rules.  Does it follow then that a 9″ movement rate is inherently going to be less complicated than a 12″ movement rate?  So, Volley & Bayonet with a movement rate of 12″ to 16″ should in all likelihood be more complicated than say Age of Eagles with 6″ to 9″ movement rates. Then again, Field of Battle and Black Powder can allow one to three 8″ and 12″ movements in one turn, or a possible 24″ to 36″ movement.  So, those rules must have more complicated rules simply to keep players from abusing those massive movement rates.

Of course, this isn’t what we see with any of those games.

Game players do have a natural tendency to exploit any small advantage in the rules they.  It doesn’t follow that the number of inches a unit can move on the table has some inherent quality that must increase the players’ ability to abuse game rules as the inches multiply, requiring more rules to avoid it.

Personally, I think if games tend towards smallish artificial distances regardless of the time increments, that is a designer choice, or a perceived customer preferences or simply a lack of imagination, rather than some inherent, irreducible problem with longish movement rates on a table top. I think it is merely convention or unchallenged  group-think that keeps most all movement rates hovering around 6″-9″.  The above named rules sets have been able to provide popular games with much longer movement rates.  I would think that such long movement rates, whether historically based or just game driven, disproves that proposed relationship.

In saying that, I certainly don’t want to suggest that the issues of movement and time/space management are trivial or easily answered. I just don’t see that relationship of movement inches to complexity and player abuse as some natural, irreducible condition in tabletop games.

 

[Patrice]

McLaddie wrote:

So the message that a 4″ movement rate is simpler to game and a 24″ movement rate would create the need for all sorts of special rules. Does it follow then that a 9″ movement rate is inherently going to be less complicated than a 12″ movement rate?

Nobody suggested that. You seem to be looking for new questions and new difficulties inside each answer to one of your previous questions?

It’s just that if a unit does six 4″ movements it’s easier to know when the opponent can shoot (=between these moves) that during a single 24″ move when you probably must add a rule for opportunity fire or something. But between 9″ or 12″ it makes no real difference.

http://www.argad-bzh.fr/argad/en.html
https://www.anargader.net/

[Bandit]

Patrice wrote:

Nobody suggested that.

Actually I also took that away from Sam’s post, that he was inferring there was a relationship between faster movement and complication. McLaddie (Bill) is obviously pointing out that there is a huge logical hole in that.

Anyways…

Patrice wrote:

It’s just that if a unit does six 4″ movements it’s easier to know when the opponent can shoot (=between these moves) that during a single 24″ move when you probably must add a rule for opportunity fire or something. But between 9″ or 12″ it makes no real difference.

I think this is what Sam intended and we should just take that and move on so as not to become mired.

On this point I’ve mentioned a couple times that many rules have for the last 20-30 years, provided for opportunity fire and defensive fire without being terribly complicated.

The implementation to any solution should obviously be tied to the scope and scale of the game. In a grand tactical game I am not certain it would be bad to conflate all defensive fire (small arms and artillery) down to contact and just make sure the combat resolution modifiers note a modifier for the defender that appropriately represents their fire during the attacker’s approach.

Using something like that would be nice because of how simple it would keep the process, no new rule is needed, you just have a modifier present on the resolution table. The downside would obviously be that if assaults – in a grand tactical game – should be able to be halted or broken up well before contact, say 300-500 yards out or more, then this sort of solution would obviously fail to represent that possibility.

Anyways, my point remains that there are options for dealing with this particular problem and they are 1) not new 2) not crazy complicated 3) don’t require slowing movement rates down.

The table size point that Mark (ExtraCrispy) brought up is a different story. I’m not convinced it is a problem but whether it is or isn’t, I don’t believe it is fixed through game mechanics.

[ExtraCrispy]

Well now we’re beginning to bump into yet another issue with games – the players. I play with a crew that is very self-policing in terms of not allowing “gamey” moves. You know, the kind of thing where the cuirassiers change into column, and shoot the gap between two infantry units with just 1/4″ to spare thus reaching the limbered artillery behind. Saw this once with sword and the flames where zulus shot a 2″ gap and swarmed all over the inside of the perimeter and heated arguing ensued.

SWith regards ot the 4″ versus 24″ I’d say it has much more to do with game scale than absolute measurements. If a horse moves 24″ to reach the foot soldier, his reactions will be more about how much time elapsed. Did that turn represent 30 seconds (get one shot off) or 10 minutes? Whether that 30 seconds is represented by 4″ or 24″ is not really relevant in my mind. The bigger issue is having a table big enough to handle 24″ movement rates…

I don’t think of table size as a “problem” so much as a variable. I would argue that a significant percentage of gamers are limited to tables around 4×6′ so it is one variable for a game designer to keep in mind. I know a few rule sets that can’t be used (as written) on anything smaller than a 6×9 table. So right away a poriotn of gamers know they’ll need to reowrk charts and base sizes if they want to play that game.

[McLaddie]

It’s just that if a unit does six 4″ movements it’s easier to know when the opponent can shoot (=between these moves) that during a single 24″ move when you probably must add a rule for opportunity fire or something. But between 9″ or 12″ it makes no real difference.

Patrice:

How is that different from what I wrote?  It still sounds like the conclusion is that the longer the move, the more complications compared to a shorter move.  Basically a 4″, 6″ or 9″ move is inherently easier to game and less complicated than a 24″ move, regardless of the game system.   Correct?

McLaddie

[McLaddie]

I don’t think of table size as a “problem” so much as a variable. I would argue that a significant percentage of gamers are limited to tables around 4×6′ so it is one variable for a game designer to keep in mind. I know a few rule sets that can’t be used (as written) on anything smaller than a 6×9 table. So right away a poriotn of gamers know they’ll need to reowrk charts and base sizes if they want to play that game.

 

EC: From what I understand, one reason for the very long moves in Black Powder is that the designers liked playing on large tables and wanted to get into the action quickly. And of course, scaling down is a solution when gaming on smaller tables.

[Bandit]

ExtraCrispy wrote:

I would argue that a significant percentage of gamers are limited to tables around 4×6′ so it is one variable for a game designer to keep in mind. I know a few rule sets that can’t be used (as written) on anything smaller than a 6×9 table. So right away a poriotn of gamers know they’ll need to reowrk charts and base sizes if they want to play that game.

Sure, I’d agree with all of this.

McLaddie wrote:

EC: From what I understand, one reason for the very long moves in Black Powder is that the designers liked playing on large tables and wanted to get into the action quickly. And of course, scaling down is a solution when gaming on smaller tables.

And this does provide a limiting factor for designs and markets. If people are going to play a game on a 4×6′ then 1″ = 75 yards isn’t terribly practical, 1″ = 150 or 200 yards would work pretty well but that likely means you’re talking to 2mm, 6mm and 10mm players not 15mm and 20mm players…

[poniatowski]

Very good discussion…. I have put a lot of thought into this myself….

All things considered, soldiers coudl wiz around a battle field…. if there was no combat.

To me, speed depends on training AND discipline…. not always the same thing. You can have gung ho illy trained troops.

Anyway, what bogs them down is combat… or the threat of it. Unless highly trained and well disciplined…. they tend to slow the closer they get to danger. Couple this with training (staying in formation or ability to do so well) and discipline (following orders and advincing against fire)….

Then enter fog of war…. smoke, miscommunications, etc…. the true differenc between a birds eye view and the “in the trenches” view….

commanders on a hill can send orders via courrier to troops form their bird’s eye view to troops who might not even be able to physically see the troops that they are being sent to engage….

Ordfers to fire sir!…. Fire? Fire at who? There is no one to see….

And then… touching back on the whole discipline…. the troops would slow unconsciously as they got to musket range, hoping to be halted, formed up and then volley fire…. at most likely very ineffectual ranges…. over 100 yards say…..

Some rules try to extrapolate all of this….

I tend towards 1:40 for Napoleonics…. you get difinitive formations and can tell line vs column, etc…. and each should have different movement rates.

There is so much to say in this topic.. I hope I get a chance ot write more from home!

 

 

 

[McLaddie]

Anyway, what bogs them down is combat… or the threat of it. Unless highly trained and well disciplined…. they tend to slow the closer they get to danger. Couple this with training (staying in formation or ability to do so well) and discipline (following orders and advincing against fire)And then… touching back on the whole discipline…. the troops would slow unconsciously as they got to musket range, hoping to be halted, formed up and then volley fire…. at most likely very ineffectual ranges…. over 100 yards say…..

P:

That’s true. The question would be how close to the enemy was that ‘slow’ down on average? It would seem to be within musket range.  And then there are examples of troops, even poorly trained troops, speeding up as they came into range of artillery and musket fire.  And there are a number of accounts of the French, certainly well-trained veterans, firing at ranges between 150 and 200 yards.  Oman mentions this in several places.

Again, it’s just a matter of finding enough examples to make some meaningful generalizations.

McLaddie

[poniatowski]

Yes, I do agree…. it seems to infer the opposite of what I take as “cannon”, but you are correct. There are so many factors to consider and it seems nearly impossible to include them all in a rule set without being to cumbersome… I mean, you can have well trained with very low morale.. they would tend to stop and fire further away….  then you have to consider the leaders… their moral effects on the troops and even their own fears, etc…

I have 9 morale levels in my game.. it seems like a lot, but morale does affect everything that happens on a battle field. The leader’s morale can modify that level with their own modifiers. Morale governs how fast a soldier follows orders and so much more…. will that poorly trained mediocre morale peasant unit stand and fire against the Old Guard advancing upon them…. no, usually they wouldn’t…..they would break and flee long before a shot wa sfired… the “fear” would be in them… yet, even poor troops if well led…. just might… in my game, if conditions are right… the very high morale leader with a good leadership mod too is attached to said peasant unit…. they just might stand… it is a very slim chance, but they might, if the troop commander wants to try.

The strategy and tactics of the era have so much “positioning” and “posturing”… that effect a battle even without shots being fired… I try to build a lot of these mechanics into the game. I mean, please don’t misunderstand, I do not try to force players to do play my way…. but to play historically, using the doctrin of the time….

My inspiration for this was playing Wooden ships and iron men… when I first learned ot play the game, I would sail my ships all over, really.. willy nilly…. my brother-in-law would go nuts trying to explain to me what a line of battle is…. well, I learned… that is just how they fought back then… as fun as it was ot do what I wanted.. it didn’t make sense in the game and was just wrong… there is a time and a place to break doctrine, but not all of the time, every time…. ships sailed in a line of battle… as they took damage they would lag or retire from the line…. the same can be said for Napoleonics or any other era game…

Mind you.. I know it is a game and I don’t get bent out of shape when folks don’t know the doctrine for the era they are playing….

But trying to play using th estrategy and tactics of the era I am playing is what make sth egame fun… you have to kwo when to retire a ship or ounit from the line…. these guys didn’t always fight to the death… there was a time to do that, but there was also a time to recognize you have lost and withdraw…. something a lot of gamers don’t quite get…. we tend to fight every battle ot the end… to our lats man… and, we have little to no fog of war.. as we always have a birds eye view….

That was the biggest accomplishment to my rules…. I really think I put the commanders into the stirrups… there are orders, command and control.. and an integrated morale system to help influence players to follow the startegy and tactics of the day.

In the end, it is only a game, but I get the biggest fullfillment, win or lose…. when I played my best trying to do it the way they would have at the time, based upon my knowledge of the era.

Man, the stories I could tell…. (we all have them). My favorite was being under the command of a guy at an HMGS Cold Wars.. I’ll say no more on that, but he wanted me to exhaust my troops… throw them away…. I was getitng pounded…. with no support… I formed up and withdrew to reorganize. I even voluntarily broke one of my units to flee to a safer reorganizing range (I wa shoping to actually fail my morale roles a few times, but just kept on rolling well). The guy was furious….  in the end, I did very well and the rest of the guys under his command got destroyed. I just smiled and told him the lives of my men were more important and I knew when to withdraw… He was moving his mouth like a fish out of water, he didn’t know what to say other than “this is a game!! Those are toys, this isn’t real!!!” In the end, we lost, but at least I used the tactics and strategy of the day… I was the last Russian player on the field.

The best part was, even though I wasn’t on the winning team, the GM talked to me after the game and I got a gift certificate for $15 for my performance and playing well. The other players on the winning team agreed as well. The certificate wa ssupposed to go to the best player of the winning team. Those guys are great and still run great games at the HMGS shows…

p

 

 

 

[McLaddie]

I even voluntarily broke one of my units to flee to a safer reorganizing range (I wa shoping to actually fail my morale roles a few times, but just kept on rolling well). The guy was furious….  in the end, I did very well and the rest of the guys under his command got destroyed. I just smiled and told him the lives of my men were more important and I knew when to withdraw… He was moving his mouth like a fish out of water, he didn’t know what to say other than “this is a game!! Those are toys, this isn’t real!!!” In the end, we lost, but at least I used the tactics and strategy of the day… I was the last Russian player on the field.

The catch phrase stating the obvious,  ‘It’s just a game’, seems to cover so many different attitudes and dismiss any considerations regarding the history in our historical wargames, right down to your convention experience.  If it isn’t ‘don’t bother with the history’ in creating the game, then it is in how you play it…     But, hey, you had fun doing it ‘historically’, which was the point.

There are so many factors to consider and it seems nearly impossible to include them all in a rule set without being to cumbersome… I mean, you can have well trained with very low morale.. they would tend to stop and fire further away….  then you have to consider the leaders… their moral effects on the troops and even their own fears, etc… 

Agreed. You can’t include them all, which is one thing that can make Napoleonic rules sets different, providing unique game experiences:  they all focus on different factors.  Then again, while there are a legion of factors involved, too many to count, the question really is which are significant.  Again, that’s where generalizations from a large body of examples help.  Insignificant factors tend to disappear.

Your rules sound interesting and a fun challenge to play.  Have you published them?

[Patrice]

poniatowski wrote:

he didn’t know what to say other than “this is a game!! Those are toys, this isn’t real!!!”

Oooh I hate when a player says that.

I always answer: “Don’t say that, it hurts them! Each time someone says that the miniatures are not real, one of them DIES!”

http://www.argad-bzh.fr/argad/en.html
https://www.anargader.net/

[poniatowski]

I am trying to publish, but I am thinking that they should just be a free PDF. I had a copyright lawyer look at them for IP infringement and everything else concerning those rule sets that “inspired” the mechanisms and he said I am good to go. There are just some things that cannot be copyrighted. Kind of like how you cannot copyright “d6”.

I have learned a LOT from playing other games over the years and there are mechanics I have enjoyed that I developed and made into my own, but they were inspired by things from other rule sets. I had a huge moral issue here as I wanted to make sure whatever I did was different enough from the original mechanics, but did not lose the flavor of what I was shooting for.

As you mentioned…. so many flavors/types of Napoleonic games that each dwell upon the author’s fancy… well. I looked at what I would like in my wargame and developed the mechanisms and playability of those items… so in a sense, the game has everything I think should be in a wargame and it plays the way I think it should for the age of musket.

For me, it boiled down to this… scale is everything and I HATE abstracted scales…. I struggle with this every time I play FoW.

My rules are 15mm company level 1:40… a French company has 3 figures a Russian 4. In my appendix, I list paper strength with average combat strength. Btn command is a seperate stand and it can attach… then, there is command stand for each level above that all the way up to over all army command. I use a simple order system that must go through the chain of command from the Army commander… the command rating of all of the commanders in the chain to the Btn commander AFFECT the amount of turns it takes for the Btn commander to get the orders, organize the troops and pass them through his Btn. (act upon them), thus, a commander wiht poor leaders needs to always be thinking turns in advance, while a commander with good subordinates can get orders changed quicker… it works very well… oh, and obviously, the orders can never get there in “negative” turns… I briefly contemplated creating a mechanism that gave some kind of bonus to a Btn based upon how quickly the orders got there… say you had all excellent commanders… the orders still take one turn per level of command, but the leadership mods could feasibly make the number negative in turns because they are so good… like give a btn in good order and command an extra “action” per -2 because they are part of such a smoothly oiled machine.

And the reason it takes one turn per order level in the command is that at each level, the commander would read the orders, see whom they go to and then have to locate that unit before they sent the aide on to distribute those orders… a commander with a good rating could quickly read them, evaluate the situation and pass them along… a commander with a poor rating would spend some time “getting their act together” before passing them along…

It can even develope into friendly fire very, VERY rarely…

So it has decent command and control rules.. when a leader attaches to a unit.. he can effectively remove himself from the chain, thus leaving the rest of his command to technically be “out of command”…. where they will do nothing, continue their actions if given orders, etc…

The Btn commander does have limited control on the execution of the received orders: Advance, engage, charge, withdraw, etc… are just a few. They can also take some defensive measures… like emergency square, etc… and for this, there is a command role… (leaders have a morale and command rating and they affect the appropriate dice roles).. so a commander with a poor rating when in line sees cavalry forming to charge or simply charging…. they can make an emergency square roll… which is modified by their rating.. an astute commander will make the roll while a poor commander would most likely fail… meaning they couldn’t form square fast enough…. and, well.. we all know where that goes…

Also, having the many levels of morale really works well… as I mentioned before… for example… a peasant unit being advanced upon by the Old Guard or elite units has to take a morale and their modifies include thei immediate commander’s rating, but they also suffer a bonus or penalty of + or – depending on how many levels of morale the two differ by… this sets up situations where players are sort of coerced to play realistically… those peasants are not going to stand and deliver against the old guard as they make the morale check, it is impossible for them to stand UNLESS they have an inspirational leader (applying his grood modifier to the morale roll) and even then, the player would have to roll very well to stand. It has happened…. very rarely, but more often than not, the poor morale unit will break and flee without firing a shot…

Note, I use the term peasant, but you can have peasants with really great morale and poor firepower/melee abilities.. and you can also have better trained troops that have suffered morale loss so that they could be excellent troops if they stand, but have poor morale and will possibly fail those morale checks.

It might sound complex, but it comes together really easily and the charts bring it all home.

I am sorry for the length… hopefully you found it a tad interesting.

p

[poniatowski]

I want to compare my actions with some WW1 air combat games…. I play a LOT of campaign games…. it is far better to leave the board with some force than commit them in a losing battle to their total destruction. I am always thinking of tomorrow’s battles… and the poor grieving widow’s, etc..

In the aricraft games it is always funny to see a player fly his plane until they run out of fuel and then try to glide back to their own lines or whatever… stuff like that happens, but not as the norm.. In real life you have a point where “self preservation” kicks in… as war gamers, we often forget that and go totally “all in” when playing.. it is fun… sometimes, just not my style.

[ExtraCrispy]

Which is why so many rules put in “break points” so that regardless of what the player does, a division says “time to skedaddle.”

[poniatowski]

Not only do I have break points, a unit can break from just taking too many casualties in one round…. and they can keep disintegrating and losing morale levels if they fail to rally…. you can have an elite unit take a beating, and stay on the field, but they can be so reduced in morale and effective field strength the the player will want to withdraw them.

One thing though… a unit that hjas lost morale levesl can regain them dureing the reorganization part of th erally phase if they have an inspirational leader, pass the check, etc… but they can never get back lost elements/figures.

[McLaddie]

And the reason it takes one turn per order level in the command is that at each level, the commander would read the orders, see whom they go to and then have to locate that unit before they sent the aide on to distribute those orders… a commander with a good rating could quickly read them, evaluate the situation and pass them along… a commander with a poor rating would spend some time “getting their act together” before passing them along…

It can even develop into friendly fire very, VERY rarely…

 

P:  What does that mean, develop into a friendly fire fight?  You’re descriptions make sense. It looks like you’ve put a lot of thought into them.

Not only do I have break points, a unit can break from just taking too many casualties in one round…. and they can keep disintegrating and losing morale levels if they fail to rally…. you can have an elite unit take a beating, and stay on the field, but they can be so reduced in morale and effective field strength the the player will want to withdraw them.

One thing though… a unit that has lost morale levels can regain them during the reorganization part of the rally phase if they have an inspirational leader, pass the check, etc… but they can never get back lost elements/figures.

How do you see your rules handling something like the fire fight at Albuera?  It has been a real challenge doing combat as there isn’t a consistent relationship between casualties, unit behavior and morale.

[poniatowski]

@McLaddie…

It doesn’t happen often, but because of poor command roles and delays in getting and activating orders, a unit might have “engage” or charge as their order which, unless a leader is attached (btn or higher) to try and stop the order by taking direct control of the unit…. the unit will do as it is ordered. And sometimes, the Btn commander is needed elsewhere, a casualty.. somtheing… and cannot get there or perhaps the battle is so tight that the player does NOT want to risk attaching the commander and place his other units out of command as they will lose the modifier he provides… then the unit must commit to their orders.

I can honestly say, this has only ever happened a verly limited number of times during playtest and it was either because of tense battle where the commander was already attached to another unit or wounded. The result is the ordered unit fires at a unit to its front within range…

From my minds eye… when this did happen, it was in areas of heavy fighting where there would be so much smoke it is very possible that the commander issuing the orders saw something different or saw something wrong… it makes for a very good fog of war… an army commander has to plan things well in advance and if things develop wrongly in the field… well, it can be very bad.

I know it isn’t perfect, but it does really reflect the competance of the commanders at all levels….

For most games, we usually have one person be the over all army commander for each side with limited access to any troops except their own guard units…. you might think that is boreing, but you should see the frustration as the over all army commanders write orders and then are interpreted by the officers in the filed so to speak… the game isn’t “locked” in so much… the players controlling the lower command levels have some room for interpretation as long as it meets the definition of the order given.

Now, as for battles like Albuera, you can start the units off actually at whatever historical/interpreted field strength and morale the battle warranted… a unit running out of food would have a reduced field strength and morale…. so any records available or existing OOB could be used.

For example…. at Borodino, many Russian units were undersized on the field and some btns were actually closer to company strength than btn strength according to record. So you would have a btn called out in the OOB, but the amount of men in the field would be drastically off…

That is just noted on the set up sheet… a unit has a morale level, melee value and ranged value. Commanders have a command rating and a morale rating…. you can have a very charismatic leader with horrible tactical skills…. one rating affects order based abilities and the other is used solely for morale.

Hope this helps.

 

 

[McLaddie]

From my minds eye… when this did happen, it was in areas of heavy fighting where there would be so much smoke it is very possible that the commander issuing the orders saw something different or saw something wrong… it makes for a very good fog of war… an army commander has to plan things well in advance and if things develop wrongly in the field… well, it can be very bad.

I know it isn’t perfect, but it does really reflect the competance of the commanders at all levels….

 

P: Thank you for the explanation. Sorry it took me so long to respond.  That is an interesting possible ‘fog or war’ complication with your order mechanisms. That pre-planning was critical.

Now, as for battles like Albuera, you can start the units off actually at whatever historical/interpreted field strength and morale the battle warranted… a unit running out of food would have a reduced field strength and morale…. so any records available or existing OOB could be used. 

I was more interested in how your morale system would handle the prolonged Albuera firefight.  It was a combat resolution question rather than a unit size question.

For most games, we usually have one person be the over all army commander for each side with limited access to any troops except their own guard units…. you might think that is boreing, but you should see the frustration as the over all army commanders write orders and then are interpreted by the officers in the filed so to speak… the game isn’t “locked” in so much… the players controlling the lower command levels have some room for interpretation as long as it meets the definition of the order given.

 Frustration can be boring too.  I’m assuming that your order system can be used with just two to four players, right?  The ability to orchestrate larger games with multiple players make them difficult to hold on a regular basis.

Best Regards,  McLaddie

 

 

[McLaddie]

Are you still searching for some sort of historically accurate movement rate?   If so, then you’ve tied yourself down to some sort of fixed relationship between distance and time.*  That of course, then connects you to the limits of the table size, as explained above.

* Although if the truth be told, even the guys who do all that research and math and think that they’ve figured out a system by which they’ve got their miniatures marching at an historically-accurate rate per turn… still pile on the fudge when it comes to things like advancing after combat, or falling back after combat, or changing formation when the enemy attacks, and so on.

 

I had to come back to this statement:  “If so, then you’ve tied yourself down to some sort of fixed relationship between distance and time”  only because it is so obvious a conclusion.  The second you decide you are going to represent Napoleonic battle, you’ve tied yourself down to a whole boatload of ‘fixed relationships.’  The decision makes it unavoidable.  What you are doing has to look like *something else.*   If  I want to build a model of a Sherman tank.  Presto. I’ve tied myself down to some fixed relationships.  I can’t create a M1 Abrams and still claim to have built a model of a Sherman tank.  The fixed relationships between my model and the real thing make it a representation.

The truth be told, how exactly do you avoid all fixed relationships between distance and time on the table top or anywhere else and still claim to be representing something of historical battle, or is that simply admitting defeat with a larger helping of fudge?

 

 

[Bandit]

McLaddie wrote:

I had to come back to this statement:  “If so, then you’ve tied yourself down to some sort of fixed relationship between distance and time”  only because it is so obvious a conclusion.

Yeah, I was confused by its inclusion too. Especially when it was followed by the fudge comment. Essentially it felt like Sam was trying to polarize the conversation into:

You must abstract nothing or everything!

And that makes no sense to me. It is all abstracted, the question is what degrees of abstraction are applied in what areas and how those respect the focus of the game’s scope and scale.

Absolutism generally confuses me.

[repiqueone]

This is at the crux of why so many rules wedded to the literal process of D=R*T always fall apart in actual practice.  This leads to your initial lament about whether there are rules that accurately capture “true” rates in a game (and whether that makes for a good game or simply a horrid experience).

The fact is, the table top is an abstraction both in size and complexity from real ground.  Once you distort all matter of spatial relationships with miniatures, regardless of scale, and then lather on structures that are even more absurd distortions on a typical wargame table, you’re playing a hopeless game of rationalization if you suddenly want time and space proportions to reflect anything akin to the real world.  Some people, such as George Jeffries, went to absurd lengths in attemptiing to reconcile this, which is rather like squaring the circle.  Other people have worried about these matters in ever greater detail, only to find the games they designed were…well, a real bore to play, and ended up as even worse abstractions!

The greatest gift to wargamers in the last 20 years was that most designers of any merit moved beyond this endless quest and started creating games that dealt with events and their sequencing, usually through the use of cards, but also with inventive means of progressive dice sequencing.   These designs created a form I call narrative gaming where the “truthfulness” and “reality” of a set of rules was in how the narrative unfolded and whether it seemed, as with any creative fiction, to reproduce for the user a sense of reality, history, a believable experience and a good “story.”  I call these designs Narrative Wargames.

Narrative games are not dependent on the hoary concepts of D=R*T in a wargame, but on creating a believeable illusion, making it actually enjoyable, and making it consistent with history in terms of the events that occur in a game and their consequences, and not counting drill rates, engaging in calculations whose known factors approach non-existent, or sacrificing good design to pedantry. Wargames have been liberated from the dead hand of drill books and other minutiae that hold no sure effect upon the outcome of a battle.

I’ll argue military history with anyone, but the pupose of wargaming is NOT to simulate drill, but battles; not to sublimate insightful understandings of warfare and the support of good history to merely the accretion of dozens of factiods, and circular arguments that have NEVER produced anything but extremely long threads on every wargame forum, magazine, and website for 40 years or more!   It a game!  A bit more complex than Monopoly (though not always), and unavoidably abstract in its presentation of historical fact.

To nail this pelt to the wall… First someone, somewhere, must actually prove that some of the more arcane facts of battle in a given period actually had any measurable effect on the battle’s outcome.  They might demonstrate just how they know the actual facts of movement rates, weapon effectiveness, etc. IN BATTLE!  They don’t.  They extrapolate.  They “Abstract”. They cram it into gameplay because they want to demonstrate their mastery of the meaningless detail of a given period.

Thank the gods that people such as Mustafa, Borg, Oman, Getz, and myself stopped this silliness years ago, and turned to writing war-games using narrative techniques, or we’d still be playing games from the 80s, and waiting for somebody to figure out just what a COS is!

 

[Bandit]

repiqueone wrote:

This leads to your initial lament about whether there are rules that accurately capture “true” rates in a game (and whether that makes for a good game or simply a horrid experience).

First, my initial post started with me comparing what various games claim and lamenting if they were internally consistent which they are not. It ended by me asking if dicing for movement made more sense than I’d previously believed.

Second, I didn’t say anything about some ultimate truth or even remotely insinuate there was any linkage between this and quality of experience.

repiqueone wrote:

but the pupose of wargaming is NOT to simulate drill

Has someone proposed otherwise in this thread?

repiqueone wrote:

First someone, somewhere, must actually prove that some of the more arcane facts of battle in a given period actually had any measurable effect on the battle’s outcome.

You are comparing me looking at how fast large formations of troops moved at battles to “arcane facts” that you conclude don’t have any impact on a battle. That seems kinda absurd, how fast troops got from point A to point B had a huge impact on battles. Like, for instance, how long it took L’Estocq to move and deploy from his arrival point at Althof to the opposite end of the Russian battle line south of Kuschitten during the Battle of Eylau. Making his movement faster or slower would have a radical material impact on the chain-of-events and the outcome of the battle.

And to attempt to maintain perspective, I’m not talking about his movement varying slightly, I’m talking about variation akin to that provided in many rules which might reduce movement to 10-50% of their historical averages. I’m stressing the word average again because your earlier reference to me “seeking truth” purports a highly inaccurate representation of my posts.

repiqueone wrote:

It a game!

Really? I had no idea. The proceeding five words were sarcastic. What’s the deal with pointing this out? I mean, 1) it has already been pointed out, 2) I’m unclear why someone said it before either since it is so obvious and ubiquitously accepted.

Actually, what’s the deal with most of your reply, the whole thing seems to just be disparaging this topic, largely through objecting to things that no one has expressed or suggested.

If this post seems disproportionately rude or aggressive it is because I have lost patience with people posting just to say they think the topic is stupid while criticizing claims that weren’t made and positions that have not been suggested. If you’re posting just to tell me you think my area of interest is dumb, please go contribute to a different topic that you don’t feel is stupid.

[McLaddie]

The fact is, the table top is an abstraction both in size and complexity from real ground.  Once you distort all matter of spatial relationships with miniatures, regardless of scale, and then lather on structures that are even more absurd distortions on a typical wargame table, you’re playing a hopeless game of rationalization if you suddenly want time and space proportions to reflect anything akin to the real world.

 

Bob:

I think what makes this a hopeless game are the all or nothing beliefs that refuse to simply ask what military men of the time thought and did on the battlefield about space and time, about that hoary old D=R*T.  IF they didn’t worry about it, then we don’t need to either.  So, How did they view the issues and deal with them?  How can you portray them on the tabletop?

Of course, the table top is an abstraction. Any and all simulations are nearly total abstractions of the real thing. Wargame and simulation design have always been about relationships, proportions and ratios, not factoids.  However, those elements are far more versatile than presented by you. What makes such arguments circular is to present a rigid, unworkable definition and application of things as D=R*T and then argue that it can’t work.

This  all or nothing view of D=R*T as though it is an indivisible formula with only one application is a good example. The only other possible response seems to be the brilliance of admitting defeat and  ” creating a “believable illusion” of a ‘narrative game’… as though any game or simulation game can avoid being narrative, an illusion and ‘believable’ if it is representing something real, past or present.

Games that dealt with events and their sequencing, usually through the use of cards, but also with inventive means of progressive dice sequencing.   These designs created a form I call narrative gaming where the “truthfulness” and “reality” of a set of rules was in how the narrative unfolded and whether it seemed, as with any creative fiction, to reproduce for the user a sense of reality, history, a believable experience and a good “story.”  I call these designs Narrative Wargames.

Then lets deal with some design reality that has a lot to do with believability and that ‘sense of reality’, let alone a good story.  Whether cards, dice or or rigid, predictable  movement, any sequencing of movement requires that time + rate of movement = distance relationship.  Any game is based on that relationship among many others, whether Chess or LaSalle, Piquet or Empire.   ANY game sequencing requires a use of the D=R*T in some form.

There are many, many ways of representing that D=R*T in a wargame, not just one, but the relationship is unavoidable in game design.  If the game is supposedly representing the ‘illusion’ of reality on the tabletop there has provide some relationship between actual movement on the battlefield and in a game sequencing battlefield events.  To actually design a game, there has to be a D=R*T consideration involved regardless of scale or no scale, even if its Chutes and Ladders.  No one could claim that their game can be played in two hours etc. if they didn’t consider that formula in some way.  To pretend that you can sequence a battle without reference to some form of D=R*T requires one to use a lot of vague language such as ‘narrative wargames’ to avoid that simple fact.    Another fact is that  ‘Space and Time’ were critical battlefield concerns for military men, which is why they spent so much time on such issues.

If it is impossible to determine how far units traveled in X amount of time as a generalization, impossible to portray that relationship on the table top, then you can’t ‘believably’ sequence the game, if it supposed to represent real battles.

 

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