War Games Design Issues...

A recent posting by Big Andy of 'Glorious Soldiers' though not lengthy, posed some interesting, and, speaking for myself as a war gamer, important issues.   One of these had to do with the kinds of rule sets that subsumed regiments or battalions into larger formations, brigades and above, that have little 'unit personality' to them.  This struck a chord.

ACW firefight between two 27-figure regiments at short range.
Armed with smoothbore muskets - it must be early in the war - volley groups are 6.
Die Range is 4 that is pip scores greater than 4 are ignored..

I have long wondered why it is I've never had the hardness of heart to transform my Airfix ACW regiments and battalions into brigades.  As brigades tended to take on the name of their commander (retaining such names well after said commander had moved or passed on) one could argue that [a] they formed a de facto tactical unit, and [b] they did have a unit - or strictly speaking, formation - character of their own.  So why not change? 

Result of shooting.  USA did well, scoring 10 hits!
CSA shooting is below par -  only 5 hits.

The reason for my conservatism, I think, that 'formation character' is still made up, in part, from the character of its constituent regiments and battalions, along with their respective commands.  

The 'impersonal'  style of rule set, such as Volley and Bayonet, I've never really cottoned to - at least not for 'pre-industrial' armies - though I actually thought highly of the DB* concept qua concept.  A friend saw in DBM a board game with miniatures, and I believe he wasn't far wrong.  But Volley and Bayonet I never could get my head around.  I'll be honest here and say I rarely had any luck with that rule set - some very improbable things would happen (I mean, really WTF country) - and found I wasn't learning much of anything, neither.  Some of the game mechanics struck me as so artificial as to make it impossible to rationalize in terms of what might be happening internal to the unit or formation, or indeed to the situation I was looking at as a battlefield context.  I mean, what's with this 'go stationary' thing? I didn't like them because they just didn't suit me.  sometimes that's the way it goes.

USA's 10 hits are divided into a group of 8 plus a remainder group of 2.
The 8 dice rolled give 5 distinct pip scores, ignoring duplicates; the 2 group rolls
double-1 - 1 distinct pip score only.  1 plus 5 = 6 casualties.  The CSA's 5-dice group
very fortunately comes up with 5 casualties!

I've been looking at Pike and Shotte lately, and there is no doubt they produce nice armies with individual battalia.  They are quite flexible about how you present your armies, though with an over-riding 'envelope' (if you like) of footprint ('base') per block or battle line 'units' (I won't go into the authors' idiosyncratic use of the word 'unit').  Even then you can adapt to your own requirements.

The first moments of the fire-fight lose the USA 5 figures; the CSA 6.
As these losses are greater than 10% for both sides, both would require a morale check,
but for our purposes, let us suppose they 'pass'.

There are a number of matters therein though that I might have problems with.  For one, a reasonable sized Pike and Shotte army demands a hell of a lot of figures.  I bought quite a few Revell 30YW figures in the mid-1990s and wrote my own, rather old-school, rules for them. That rule set I wish I still had. Then came DBR.  It seemed to be enjoying a popularity in this part of the world (I started using my Byzantines to stand in for Ottoman Turks late 17th century).  I delayed and delayed converting my plastics to DBR, partly because I would have had 900AP of Imperialists and 750AP of Swedes, but mainly because I was afraid that what did happen, would happen.

The firefight continues.  Losses have reduced the volley-groups
to 3 each (the US extra figure is ignored).  USA scores 3+1=4 hits; CSA, presumably
blinded by smoke, score none at all!

It was like magic.  Almost the moment I made the change, re-basing my figures, local interest in DBR evaporated practically to nothing.  It was if Fate, Kismet or Karma had been waiting with bated breath and sand-filled sock for me to make the commitment.  Yet that loss of interest was understandable.  It seemed to many of us that DBR was wanting a lot of further development.  Mind you, wargamers' attitudes also counted for a great deal.  The designer tended to think in terms of region and periods, and quite explicitly stated as much. Having a lot of sympathy with the designer's view, I formed the impression that what was uppermost in war gamers' minds was ... ***COMPETITIONS**** (think bells and whistles, here).

The 4 hits scored by the USA work out to 3 casualties - or
to be precise - 3 fewer figures remaining with the CSA colours.  Reduced now
to 18 figures - two-thirds strength - the CSA might be well advised
(supposing it passed its morale check) to pull out.  The USA have no need to check morale
this turn...

It was the war gamers' complete and utter refusal to see DBR in any other than ****COMPETITION**** terms (do you detect a note of scorn here?) that led to the long hiatus for about 10 years (a little bit of a revival has taken place since then - not that DBR had undergone much refinement in the interim).  I'll give an instance of the way ****COMPETITION**** war gamers think.  The 16th Century Muscovite army list included wielders of firearms that we might call arquebuses. These hadn't the range of later firearms, and might have been classed as (I) - 'Inferior' - but because these guys were armed with an axe, and historically (I gather) were not above getting up close and personal, they were classed as (S) - 'Superior.'  This gave them a 200-pace 'musketry' range.  I place the word 'musketry' deliberately in quotes, for reasons that should soon become apparent.

Pike & Shotte rule book, Volley and Bayonet profiles
DBR Swedish foote.

Of course, distant combat tended to be discussed in the rule set in terms of  'shooting' and 'shooting ranges'. But it seemed to the punters a bit strong that the Russian dudes should be able to foot it with and even defeat enemies armed with technically superior weapons like firelocks or whatever.  Bearing in mind this argument was being waged in the context of early 16th Century guys taking on 17th century guys, it seemed to me that the designers' decision could be justified even so.  If you were facing an enemy known to be the bloody-minded sort not apt to keep their distance, 200 paces distance might not seem very much separation.  You might be much less apprehensive of incoming bullets than of incoming Muscovites armed with axes.  Do you know, no one, not one single person, would give this argument a moment's consideration?

V & B profiles are 3-inch square. or 3-inch by 1.5-inch.  Though the minimum
equivalent profiles should be 8cm square or 8cm by 4cm, and would accommodate my
DBR basing a little better, the figures would look bally thin.

But if I go the Pike and Shotte way (please pardon the lengthy, though no doubt fascinating, digression), it will require another change of bases (no easy task) and my Swedish army will be able to field precisely one Brigade of 3 battalia.  I suppose it will do, but in Pike and Shotte terms I'll be looking at a small army...

I have to admit, though, that crammed on this way and photographed
 from a low angle does give us a dramatic picture... But maybe
15 'pikes' per stand and 10 shotte per 'half-stand' would look the part...?

 Then there are some peculiarities that I would certainly accept for solo play - but as a game of skill between two or more people?  War gamers sometimes talk of a 'long run' when discussing the vagaries of the dice. But in a given war game, there is no 'long run'.  Some situations are more crucial than others, for one thing, but even with fistsful of dice, there are too few rolls to constitute a long run within a single game.  In my view, if rules designers choose to take out of a player's hands control of his own army - even just a sizable chunk of it - there has to be a very good reason.  Volley and Bayonet does this without sufficient reason  in my view, as does General de Brigade.  The net effect is simply to piss me off.  I have an uneasy feeling Pike and Shotte, with some very idiosyncratic game mechanics, might turn out to be Poke and Shitte.  But I hope not...

For play testing purposes, this is probably what I'll do.
I still think very highly of these Revell figures.

The accompanying ACW pictures are by way of illustrating the shooting rules I use for my 'Horse and Musket' type games.  I've kept things pretty basic and simple, just to illustrate the mechanic.  Very similar, but not precisely the same, as used by Charles Grant's The War Game.  The 'Die Range' concept comes from the Wizard's Quest board game.

Acknowledgements:

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