Wargaming realistic? Daftest question I've ever heard, only a wargamer could come up with such drivel!
Does playing Monopoly give a good insight into the world of high finance?Does the CID (coppers in distress) learn detecting things from playing Cluedo?
A wise man once said 'there's no such thing as a daft question'.'Are wargames realistic?'
Now, that's a daft question!
lol
I think there's far too much made of the 'well the military use wargaming' We do, but not in the way most wargamers know it. A particular problem will be presented to a commander and he may well say 'let's wargame it' We don't get out some well painted 28mm figures and a copy of CoC. It generally involves sitting round a map or model of the ground and using lots of 'what if's 'so what' 'how would' type questions to find the most likely courses of enemy action and our responses. A bit like the muggers rules idea.
Did you actually read the article?
Rules should be just enough to avoid real bloody noses and not much more. Simpler rules, funner games.
How can a war-game be realistic?
It can't, on any level. It is a game, pure and simple. Toy soldiers, toy terrain, toy buildings. And, no, I did not read the 'article' though I glanced at it. Like Harry, life is too short.
Who wants the bile in your throat, the horrible smells in your nostrils, the gut wrenching fear, seeing your best friend blown to unrecognizable pieces, or a life long trauma from the experience? Certainly not I.
Yeah, sure, we can do our best to recreate a historical battle using terrain and orders of battle, done it many times, and - always - five minutes into the game the history is gone and the 'gaming' is on. But sometimes the game has a 'historical' result, more or less. And that is cool - but it is never like the real battle, just the result is similar in interpretation.
I land here and this is all I need to know, "Wargaming is grown men, mostly, playing with toy soldiers. And having too good a time to care what others think." I long ago got over trying to take it seriously. But the 'take it serious' folk are still popping up here and there.
If I want history, I read a book. A game is supposed to be fun.
Rules should be just enough to avoid real bloody noses and not much more. Simpler rules, funner games.
Fun folks. That is supposed to be the goal.
Wargaming realistic? Daftest question I've ever heard, only a wargamer could come up with such drivel!
Does playing Monopoly give a good insight into the world of high finance?Does the CID (coppers in distress) learn detecting things from playing Cluedo?
A wise man once said 'there's no such thing as a daft question'.'Are wargames realistic?'
Now, that's a daft question!
lol
Thanks for sharing your opinion, but it is just that.
How can a war-game be realistic?
It can't, on any level. It is a game, pure and simple. Toy soldiers, toy terrain, toy buildings. And, no, I did not read the 'article' though I glanced at it. Like Harry, life is too short.
Who wants the bile in your throat, the horrible smells in your nostrils, the gut wrenching fear, seeing your best friend blown to unrecognizable pieces, or a life long trauma from the experience? Certainly not I.
Yeah, sure, we can do our best to recreate a historical battle using terrain and orders of battle, done it many times, and - always - five minutes into the game the history is gone and the 'gaming' is on. But sometimes the game has a 'historical' result, more or less. And that is cool - but it is never like the real battle, just the result is similar in interpretation.
I land here and this is all I need to know, "Wargaming is grown men, mostly, playing with toy soldiers. And having too good a time to care what others think." I long ago got over trying to take it seriously. But the 'take it serious' folk are still popping up here and there.
If I want history, I read a book. A game is supposed to be fun.
Rules should be just enough to avoid real bloody noses and not much more. Simpler rules, funner games.
Fun folks. That is supposed to be the goal.
The problem with this approach is that it reduces a wargame to a completely barren exercise. If "fun" is the only goal what constitute fun? Why play a wargame? Why play a miniature wargame? Even at your reductionist simplified extreme there has to be a work of imagination in there somewhere or we could as easily play monopoly. The game needs to engage your imagination and allow some suspension of disbelief in the same way a movie does or a novel. You can stand there thinking this could have happened and the wargame is telling a story of what might have been. Just like in those entertainment forms the point at which the game jumps the shark is when it loses that suspension. In an extreme case if an F16 turns up on a ww2 battlefield you lose that. So there has to be a hard limit to what is acceptable in a game. Even if the game is a time travel Final Countdown rendition it still needs to operate within that context. So you would still need the rules to be accurate to an extent such that Zeros can't fly as fast as a Tomcat........
Further to my reply about how we use wargames in the military. I would just like to add that although a game can never be realistic as in actual combat, they can give realistic results, IF they are played using the actual tactics of the day. The biggest thing that makes games unrealistic is the massive casualty rates accepted by gamers. I often get comments like 'this is your job, why are you so rubbish' because nobody is making me roll a 6 before crossing the Line of Departure! lol
I believe the only real breakdown in accuracy/realism in most of table top games comes from lack of true fog of war with our accurate helicopter views of the terrain and the positions of all units both enemy and friendly. Real battlefield commanders rarely had that level of precise knowledge even of their own forces. This coupled with immediate command control annd constant movement rates and our games are closer to chess than to real battlefields.
I think design of a historical game falls into two distinct parts. It needs the history and it needs the game.
I think a good starting point is to ask, what are you looking to recreate in your game? What role are you asking the gamer to take?
Then set up a table and assign two appropriate historical forces for the level of game you want to create, then without any preconceptions ask yourself, what happens next? Not in a game mechanic sense but historically - how does it all kick off? Who makes the decisions? What do they know? How do they get their subordinates to act etc etc
If you can map that out then I think you can begin to devise game mechanics to represent those activities and their responses.
To be honest I think the first part, the history, is quite straightforward and is really about researching the subject. The far harder part is creating streamlined and elegant mechanics that deliver a satisfactory playing experience that stay reasonably true to the history.
Unfortunately mate, you've started a discussion about which quite a few people have very firm opinions.
Further to my other posts, I've been sat here thinking more about the realism most crave. I think another aspect I haven't seen done really satisfactorily is the concept of time. Uber realistic skirmish games make 5 seconds of actions take 5 minutes of gaming, at the other end of the scale turning a huge formation that would take ages for real takes 5 minutes on the tabletop. Other scenarios that for real would require instant decisions, can allow far too much deliberation.
I'm quite inspired to have a go at writing some rules now, how hard can it be? lol
Good stuff! Go read it!
The fact we don't know everything doesn't mean we know nothing!
For instance, we may not know the mechanics by which Roman legions rotated legionary lines but we have enough evidence to suggest they did. Unless we are reproducing legions at 1:1 figure scale we don't need to also reproduce the mechanism. However, we do need to reflect the ability of the legions to introduce fresh troops into the fight in a way other forces apparently could not, with a boost to Roman effectiveness in continuing fights or a reduction of the effectiveness of their opponents in the same circumstances.
Also, since ancient battles could last hours, it's a safe bet troops were not continuously hammering away at each other. Human Biology 101 should tell us that even if the relatively low reported casualties for the victors in many battles did not.
So, we can take the things we know, add our best guess at the things we only partly know and fill in the bits we don't know at all with inferences from other areas and come up with something that comes as close as we can get to the real thing or we can go,"It's only toy soldiers, what does it matter?"
Neither approach is inherently wrong but those approaches, and all the others in between will float some people's boats but not others.
Pick your poison.
I trust I can post this without needing to don my asbestos underwear :)
Uber realistic skirmish games make 5 seconds of actions take 5 minutes of gaming, at the other end of the scale turning a huge formation that would take ages for real takes 5 minutes on the tabletop.