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Other Stuff => General Wargames and Hobby Discussion => Topic started by: Bolingar on 06 March 2025, 01:41:28 PM
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Some musings (https://wargamingwithoutdice.blogspot.com/2025/03/whats-it-like-to-play-diceless-wargame.html) on the topic.
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I’m not sure what you mean by diceless?
Do you literally mean not rolling dice, but using a different method of generating random results (eg TtS or FKaP using cards for this).
Or do you mean rules that do away with chance and use deterministic mechanisms?
If I’m being picky your first photo shows each unit with 3 dice behind them.
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Brilliant. That’s what it’s like.
The best games (chess, Diplomacy) are purely tests of skill, guile and strategy, with no random element of luck involved.
The second best games rely on some random element like the turn of cards or the drawing of pieces, combined with skill, guile and strategy.
Almost all miniature wargames alas, are hugely dependent on dice, which vastly and capriciously affect the outcome. Your skill, guile and strategy counts for absolutely nothing if you keep rolling bad dice.
I love playing wargames. I hate rolling dice because I’m very bad at it lol
Law of averages would say that can’t possibly be the case, of course - but I’m afraid it really is. Some people seem to be lucky more often than others.
So for me, wargames and board games that dispense with or minimise the use of dice, are my favourites. Unfortunately they’re rare as hens’ teeth. Especially when it comes to tabletop wargaming.
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"Almost all miniature wargames alas, are hugely dependent on dice, which vastly and capriciously affect the outcome. Your skill, guile and strategy counts for absolutely nothing if you keep rolling bad dice."
I've tried to get round the latter by having rules where low is good in some circumstances, high is good in others. Doesn't seem to work though, the lucky people remain lucky :(
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One of our group is a demon with rolling d6s.
The way we have found to counter this is to use games based on d10s or d20s - his dice rolling bonuses are much diminished. Even better is to play games that use a mix of poly dice - he never manages to pick the right one, so rolling a d8 when a d10 or d12 should be used, makes it hard to hit a high target number!
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I’m not sure what you mean by diceless?
Do you literally mean not rolling dice, but using a different method of generating random results (eg TtS or FKaP using cards for this).
Or do you mean rules that do away with chance and use deterministic mechanisms?
If I’m being picky your first photo shows each unit with 3 dice behind them.
Without chance and using deterministic mechanisms. Those "dice" are marker cubes that track morale, disorder, shooting hits, etc. One can also use counters.
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Brilliant. That’s what it’s like.
The best games (chess, Diplomacy) are purely tests of skill, guile and strategy, with no random element of luck involved.
The second best games rely on some random element like the turn of cards or the drawing of pieces, combined with skill, guile and strategy.
Almost all miniature wargames alas, are hugely dependent on dice, which vastly and capriciously affect the outcome. Your skill, guile and strategy counts for absolutely nothing if you keep rolling bad dice.
I love playing wargames. I hate rolling dice because I’m very bad at it lol
Law of averages would say that can’t possibly be the case, of course - but I’m afraid it really is. Some people seem to be lucky more often than others.
So for me, wargames and board games that dispense with or minimise the use of dice, are my favourites. Unfortunately they’re rare as hens’ teeth. Especially when it comes to tabletop wargaming.
I'll be honest: dice are fun. It's the gambler's addiction, stacking the odds in your favour but still having that thrill of uncertainty - will I win through? A pure mind game like chess has a different thrill: seeing a winning combination and knowing the game is yours. Each to their own fix.
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There needs to be something to represent friction be that dice, cards or pieces of paper drawn from a hat. Battles are not always determined by skill alone.
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I prefer my games to be mostly relying on the skill and tactical prowess of the players, with a smidge of luck in the form of dice or cards. What rankles me though, is the munchkin type of feat/ability/power combinations that turn a miniatures game into a session of Magic the Gathering.
Whenever a game has the word 'synergy' in its description, I shudder and move on...
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Whenever a game has the word 'synergy' in its description, I shudder and move on...
I include "genre", hate that word!!! >:( lol
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I include "genre", hate that word!!! >:( lol
'intuitive gameplay' :D
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There is a reason Dice or Dice-like games have been around for centuries. The dopamine hit of "beating the odds".
That said, I have toyed with the idea of a Diceless game, but ultimately it devolves into a game of paper-rock-scissors. This can be good for some games/genres (Like Nappies or Naval), but not others.
I am interested in thoughts on how to overcome that Paper-Rock-Scissor factor in the game?
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While you could easily get into the weeds regarding "chance" in a game (and indeed, real combat), I find you're generally simply shifting the chance of dice, to the chance of something else.
I'm the opposite of many people here. I don't care about being in absolute control of my fate during a game. I don't particularly enjoy chess, etc. Thats' the furthest from what I want in a wargame, generally. I've long considered "chaos" the third player in any game. I love random events, weather effects, hesitant commanders, fluke failures, or fluke victories, etc. To me the game is about surviving the chaos..and also winning.
I don't mean "roll a D6, on a 4+, you win!", but with careful planning you should have a very strong chance of achieving what you want, just not 100%. I don't care how good my tactical acumen may be in a certain game, I enjoy the chance of flubbing it. I enjoy the chance of succeeding where I should fail, even if it's a microscopic chance. In fact the microscopic chance moments are what make gaming great to me.
I don't mind playing a generic arbitrary-style board game every now and then. In fact I used to have a rather good Napoleonic wargame which was played on a vacuum-formed board consisting of forests/plains/hills, and you moved your units in secret and then used the rock-paper-scissors method to determine which units won, etc. That's fine and fun on occasion, but I want the chaos.
To me a wargame shines when you can enjoy it...while losing. When both players are laughing and cheering for the rare moment when you perform a miracle...that's grand. I cannot put into words how much I don't care about winning, or mastering the art of winning, tournaments, etc. When I think back to my favourite moments in wargaming...almost all of them came down to a tiny amount of chance that won me the game or lost me the game. All the moments where we were laughing or cheering, or hurling dice or stomping around...all came down to chance and not 'strategic brilliance', etc.
On the flip side, I think a game can make dice pointless, such as the way GW frequently designs their games. "Oh your unit rolls 120 dice...hits on 2+, gets to re-roll those 2+, and then wounds on 2+...and then gets to re-roll those failed rolls too? Why are we rolling dice?" lol At that point, yeah, don't even bother rolling.
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I'm with Elbows above. I want to have fun, I want to have a laugh, a jeer, a whooo! when I play. I don't do big battles because I find it too difficult to keep tabs of my "120 units of cavalry, 600 footmen, one troll...". I want to have that bit of unpredictability, yes, you can try to stack the odds/ probabilities in your favour, but nothing is a given.
I do enjoy cards mechanics, but I really dislike when people play it to "find the perfect combo" and when they sit there umming and aaahing for ages before actually making their move, considering all their possibilities :-[. I tend to get bored waiting for my turn at that point.
We have a chap at our club, he's been a member for donks. He's ALWAYS happy to play a game, 9/10 his dice rolling is appalling and he loses the game but he NEVER mopes or complains about it, the next week he's up for another game of some sort. THAT's the type of player I think is the best. Those who actually want to play, it's about having fun. In the grand scheme of everything, what importance is that victory you just had on the table with little metal people/ aliens/ monsters? Really? Were you having fun? Now THAT's something worth considering.
Just my two pence worth.
Regards,
Legionnaire.
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The Game of Thrones board game had an interesting mechanic where combat was decided by adding a leader bonus to the unit strength to determine the winner. The trick was that while each player's card number were the same (3 1's, 2 2's, 1 3, 1 4, 1 5) the cards had unique consequences by faction. Once played a card could not be replayed until the player's entire deck had been used up.
I adapted this to a Fantasy game, with a minimal amount of randomness, and it was interesting as many attacks were a ploy to get an opponent to spend a high card as much as to win a combat. It did slow the game down though as it added a whole other level of decision making. Good and bad.
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We have a chap at our club, he's been a member for donks. He's ALWAYS happy to play a game, 9/10 his dice rolling is appalling and he loses the game but he NEVER mopes or complains about it, the next week he's up for another game of some sort. THAT's the type of player I think is the best. Those who actually want to play, it's about having fun. In the grand scheme of everything, what importance is that victory you just had on the table with little metal people/ aliens/ monsters? Really? Were you having fun? Now THAT's something worth considering.I'm with Elbows above. I want to have fun, I want to have a laugh, a jeer, a whooo! when I play. I don't do big battles because I find it too difficult to keep tabs of my "120 units of cavalry, 600 footmen, one troll...". I want to have that bit of unpredictability, yes, you can try to stack the odds/ probabilities in your favour, but nothing is a given.
I do enjoy cards mechanics, but I really dislike when people play it to "find the perfect combo" and when they sit there umming and aaahing for ages before actually making their move, considering all their possibilities :-[. I tend to get bored waiting for my turn at that point.
We have a chap at our club, he's been a member for donks. He's ALWAYS happy to play a game, 9/10 his dice rolling is appalling and he loses the game but he NEVER mopes or complains about it, the next week he's up for another game of some sort. THAT's the type of player I think is the best. Those who actually want to play, it's about having fun. In the grand scheme of everything, what importance is that victory you just had on the table with little metal people/ aliens/ monsters? Really? Were you having fun? Now THAT's something worth considering.
Just my two pence worth.
Regards,
Legionnaire.
Yes, yes and yes! It's difficult to have an ego as a dice wargamer. Chess players have egos. My great goal in life is to cater for the egocentrics who like wargaming. If they pay me.
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I should also clarify...I don't have anything against people who enjoy different kinds of wargames. I only dislike when someone presents one method as "the" method, or someone insists that anyone who plays Game A...must play the same.
I think the best time anyone is ever going to have is simply finding someone who enjoys games the way they do. I wouldn't enjoy playing a try-hard tournament gamer, and I don't expect they'd enjoy playing against me (unless they're a 'club baby seal' type gamer who is a wholly different thing).
Tournament gamers should player tournament gamers, and narrative folks should game with narrative folks, etc. I find the easiest way to have a crap game is to cross streams, as it were.
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I should also clarify...I don't have anything against people who enjoy different kinds of wargames. I only dislike when someone presents one method as "the" method, or someone insists that anyone who plays Game A...must play the same.
I have absolutely nothing against other wargamers, playing whatever rules, mechanics, periods, flavours they like, in the manner they like. But I really dislike, being an adult, self-thinking man, when they try to force it upon me, despite me saying: "no thank you!" >:(.
I like a variety, different settings, different takes. I'm one of those people, a grown up, who is happy as a pig in muck, with a single sheet of "rules, that you somehow still fluff (it's ish, isn't it?) some glitzy coloured minis, making sound effects when I play! :o To most people's amusement :D!
Me and my usual comrade in crime, have played Imperial Teddybears armed with pop guns hunting Dinosaurs, heroic human vanguards against the Forces of Darkness and a lot of other themes. Most games the other members have shook their heads and muttered: "Bonkers! They are certified bonkers!" but still, they couldn't help looking ;).
The only caveat I have, and to be fair, I've NEVER seen it otherwise at my gaming club, is that the miniatures HAVE to be painted, even badly. An unpainted mini will not be touched in a wargame, only scoffed and sneered at. Board games I can live with that, but not if it's my own copy :).
Regards,
Legionnaire.
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The only caveat I have, and to be fair, I've NEVER seen it otherwise at my gaming club, is that the miniatures HAVE to be painted, even badly. An unpainted mini will not be touched in a wargame, only scoffed and sneered at. Board games I can live with that, but not if it's my own copy :).
Clearly you haven't come across Warhammer players.
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+1 (actually +1 zillion) to the person above who dislikes combo-tastic "synergy". That's fine for MtG, but really sucks for tabletop games.
I think I've only ever played one completely diceless game. It was a GW counters game, came with WD I think? Anyway, it was an attack/defence game that really turned on how you set up your units (both spatially and how they were grouped together for combat purposes). I really enjoyed it, but after a number of games the re-playability got very low as we worked out the optimal approach for each side.
That might seem like a silly example, but Magnus C has basically abandoned classical chess because the re-playability value has gotten too low for him, so I'm going to assume the point can generalise? See also the Oldschool MtG folk who are getting bored now they've tested pretty much every viable top-tier option in their format. Deterministic mechanisms are going to end up creating a closed system of possibilities for any particular scenario that someone with enough time on their hands can assign an optimal ordering to, aren't they? If you think long and hard enough about chess, or for that matter MtG deck construction, you can find the objectively optional play and once you've found it nothing stops you executing it.
My hunch, based on nothing much, is that what you really want is a degree of uncertainty in the game somehow (not necessarily dice), to take that approach away, so that it is more about thinking on your feet rather than thinking mostly in a chess/MtG way. (Obviously there is a bit of luck in MtG, but not in a good way: there's nothing you can do about a bad draw other than hope your opponent has a worse one. Really excellent deck construction goes a long way to taking any interesting luck out of it).
All that said, I did really enjoy following the classical chess world title thingy a few years ago, where the challenger had an exceptional ability to memorise openings and optimal paths. Carlsen seemed to decide that he had to play sub-optimal moves to throw off the guy's calculations, without playing badly enough that he was screwing his own chances. That's fascinating in its own way, but I don't want to play wargames like that.
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What is chess? A game in which the exact same pieces are set up in the exact same configuration on the exact same terrainless board. Sure, after a while (several centuries) you'll figure out the best playing combinations and watch the game devolve into a routine sequence of best moves.
What is Optio? A game for hundreds of different armies that deploy as the players wish on a battlefield that has different terrain for every game. There isn't a snowball's chance in hell it can devolve into a routine sequence of best moves.
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One-Hour Skirmish Wargames, a brilliant game system using only ordinary playing cards ;)
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There isn't a snowball's chance in hell it can devolve into a routine sequence of best moves.
Oh, I'm sorry if it came across as a dig at Optio, I wasn't intending it to be. The thought was just that the set of possibilities can get significantly narrowed in various ways (scenario constraints; the minis and terrain me and my mate own; etc.), all of which effect the re-playability of *any* kind of game. My quite probably naive thought was just that when combat is resolved deterministically, isn't it more likely that the replay value decreases quicker than a more luck-based game? For example, my early teens self with a very small playing group, all of whom had very small collections of miniatures, had loads of fun constantly playing Rogue Trader because the rules were so bonkers random that things hardly ever went the same way twice even with exactly the same forces and basically the same scenarios. Had the rules been less bonkers random, the groundhog day feeling might have set in a lot quicker.
I should also add that isn't necessarily a good thing about Rogue Trader! As others have already pointed out, too much randomness takes quite a few good things away from a game.
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If you did want more variability in Optio your leaders are the perfect mechanism. If these are hidden at deployment (both level and location) you could play the same scenario a number of times.
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Oh, I'm sorry if it came across as a dig at Optio, I wasn't intending it to be. The thought was just that the set of possibilities can get significantly narrowed in various ways (scenario constraints; the minis and terrain me and my mate own; etc.), all of which effect the re-playability of *any* kind of game. My quite probably naive thought was just that when combat is resolved deterministically, isn't it more likely that the replay value decreases quicker than a more luck-based game? For example, my early teens self with a very small playing group, all of whom had very small collections of miniatures, had loads of fun constantly playing Rogue Trader because the rules were so bonkers random that things hardly ever went the same way twice even with exactly the same forces and basically the same scenarios. Had the rules been less bonkers random, the groundhog day feeling might have set in a lot quicker.
I should also add that isn't necessarily a good thing about Rogue Trader! As others have already pointed out, too much randomness takes quite a few good things away from a game.
No offence taken. :) I imagine (haven't experimented with it) that if you played exactly the same scenario with the same armies and same deployment often enough you would get into a best moves rut. Fortunately that doesn't happen.
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If you did want more variability in Optio your leaders are the perfect mechanism. If these are hidden at deployment (both level and location) you could play the same scenario a number of times.
True.
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Regarding replayability, I wonder whether games that are over-reliant on randomization might also diminish it? If the game outcome is determined by die rolls/ card draws/ luck to the point where tactical strategy hardly matters, you get a situation where the outcome is unpredictable but boring because the player didn’t have put much into creating the outcome. You could play it again and get a different outcome, but why would you bother? Classic board games like Snakes and Ladders, or Sorry, are like that - roll the dice, move the pieces, repeat. I think it is rare for wargames to reach that level for sidelining player decisions but some feel weighted too heavily towards randomization.
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Pattus, agreed, and it'd be interesting to know which aspects people are happier/unhappier with regarding randomisation. More people seem to find randomisation annoying when it affects movement rather than combat, for example (though Tactical Painter on this forum has some very interesting things to say about CoC on his blog on that).
Worst example of too much randomization I can think of is early 90s GW Ork rules. Waaay too many rolls to see if your weapon did what it was supposed to/did nothing/did something game-breaking/killed your own guys.
Sorry if I'm drifting off-topic! I'll stop now.
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Pattus, agreed, and it'd be interesting to know which aspects people are happier/unhappier with regarding randomisation.......
Some degree of randomisation is not out of place in a game, but the random factor should not be what determines the outcome. Much though they are out of favour now old school rules using opposed "average dice" rolls help a lot, "Fudge dice" (named from the RPG where first used) are even better.
Worst example of too much randomization....
Frostgrave.
Really any game where the difference in result on a single opposed die roll is of relevance, the larger the potential variance the worse the effect. Frostgrave is just the first example that came to mind.
For a diceless system that works really well take a look at "En Avant!" and "En Avant! en Masse" by Jim Wallman
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Anyone else old enough to remember the boardgame Kingmaker? Combat was decided on a card draw, which gave results based on the ratio of attacker vs defender. It also gave randomised casualty lists of the various nobles in the game, so if they were part of the combat, they died, with all their cards being discarded! This prevented players from risking too many of their nobles in a single combat to gain a huge numbers advantage. It also prevented players from piling too many resources into any single noble because they could be lost way too easily.
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One-Hour Skirmish Wargames, a brilliant game system using only ordinary playing cards ;)
Wot he said!
:-*
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For a diceless system that works really well take a look at "En Avant!" and "En Avant! en Masse" by Jim Wallman
I did. Looks really good (https://www.jimwallman.org.uk/wargame/En%20Avant%20version%202.pdf).
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But surely tabletop wargames are not board games or chess and, to some degree, are meant to have even a minimal amount of “simulation” of a real battle.
“No plan survives contact with the enemy”.
And even Napoleon believed some generals were lucky.
Dice are a way of factoring all those things out of the control of the commander.
Are the orders to a unit delayed (horse stumbles and breaks a leg)?
Are the orders misinterpreted?
Are the soldiers of a particular unit tired from a forced march and not at their optimal?
Has a sudden panic affected an otherwise stable unit?
Has the commander of a unit misjudged the distance to the enemy and ordered a musket volley too early and so this is less effective?
Did the cavalry launch their charge from a fold in the ground that can’t be modelled on the table? This might take the opposing infantry by surprise and make the charge more effective.
In a skirmish game, do I slip on a banana skin or pull a hamstring while in combat?
For me, a system with no chance implies a general who can see-all, and influence everything. This is getting back to chess and Diplomacy (both excellent games).
I can understand people wanting to play a game based purely on skill – but I don’t (personally) see wargaming being suitable for this.
I don’t see dice as making a game completely random. If you read the Madaxeman reports, you will see he generally wins the majority of his games. This must imply a degree of greater skill rather than just being particularly lucky.
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You may wish to check out the wargaming works of Chris Engel of Hamster Press (of Matrix game fame).
He wrote a series of diceless wargames starting with Ein Ritter Spiel, with followups Fusilier and Jabberwocky, and a couple of further variations based on the same idea but played on a chess board like Centurion. The core conceit was a long list of combat factors like "Retreating units are always defeated", "Infantry defending works cannot be defeated" and eventually troop classifications like "Blades defeat Pikes" and "Pikes formed in double ranks cannot be defeated". You would just start at the top and scan down until you found the first one relevant to the combat. Defeat caused recoil, and destruction of units primarily only happened if a unit could not cleanly recoil. So like real warfare the majority of the tactics involve herding your enemy to positions which would prevent those safe retreats, using flanking units or terrain.
The other interesting factor was that each army had ratings for how many moves and conclusive attacks they could perform and how many units that they had to lose before morale broke. The amount of movement and command was substantially smaller than the full army, so "turns" ended up acting almost more like bounds in a larger turn with many units not doing anything relevant within a single turn, being assumed to doing things like redressing lines or fighting to no particular advantage.
On paper it read a bit clunky, having to look up the matrix every time. But in practice it wasn't any worse than having to remember all the modifiers to a die roll like DBx, making the actual roll and doing math to see if you doubled and checking a result table. After a few games you largely memorized the order of the most important rules and after a few more games you'd learn the proper tactics and the majority of combats you initiated would be ones you knew where you had advantage and which advantage that was. So resolving an entire turn's combat can take literal seconds, no dice, math, or even tracking or tokens of any sort (unless using the optional exhaustion rules). "Blades beat Pike on the front, forcing retreat, and you're flanked so unit is destroyed."
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Hey Easy E....use the following:
Rock-Paper-Scissor-Lizard-Spock
🤪🤣🙂
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But surely tabletop wargames are not board games or chess and, to some degree, are meant to have even a minimal amount of “simulation” of a real battle.
“No plan survives contact with the enemy”.
And even Napoleon believed some generals were lucky.
Dice are a way of factoring all those things out of the control of the commander.
Are the orders to a unit delayed (horse stumbles and breaks a leg)?
Are the orders misinterpreted?
Are the soldiers of a particular unit tired from a forced march and not at their optimal?
Has a sudden panic affected an otherwise stable unit?
Has the commander of a unit misjudged the distance to the enemy and ordered a musket volley too early and so this is less effective?
Did the cavalry launch their charge from a fold in the ground that can’t be modelled on the table? This might take the opposing infantry by surprise and make the charge more effective.
In a skirmish game, do I slip on a banana skin or pull a hamstring while in combat?
For me, a system with no chance implies a general who can see-all, and influence everything. This is getting back to chess and Diplomacy (both excellent games).
I can understand people wanting to play a game based purely on skill – but I don’t (personally) see wargaming being suitable for this.
I don’t see dice as making a game completely random. If you read the Madaxeman reports, you will see he generally wins the majority of his games. This must imply a degree of greater skill rather than just being particularly lucky.
All boils down to one thing: is fog of war the same thing as pure randomness? With the follow up questions: does pure randomness adequately simulate fog of war? Can anything else adequately simulate fog of war? Does the inability to calculate all the possible outcomes in a chanceless game better simulate fog of war than pure randomness does?
My answers to the questions are: No, No, Yes, Yes.
With all this in mind there is one thing to remember and one thing only: nothing replaces the thrill of crossing your fingers, invoking the dice gods, throwing the cube and getting that crucial 6. That's why we have dice, gents.
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There's a World War I aerial game called Aerodrome that was very popular around here for awhile. It is completely diceless. A certain type of gun at "X" range and "X" angle (deflection, etc.) does so many points of damage. In addition, that was further delineated by whether you fired a "long burst" or "short burst" (using up less of your ammo). The randomness comes from what the enemy pilots do. There are enough types of maneuvers that the game worked with no dice.
However, what DIDN'T work was the cheating. Pure and simple. The panels that people plotted their move on for their aircraft (and whether they fired a short, long, or no burst at all, damage accumulated, etc.) remained hidden from the enemy. The players and GMs really got into building their aircraft and wooden panels. They just wouldn't acknowledged that some players cheated, and it broke the game for most people. Sad, really, after all the efforts the players put into it. All which could be fixed by simply installing a swivel so that everyone spun their panels around so that others could verify their move. >:(
Mike Demana
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There's a World War I aerial game called Aerodrome that was very popular around here for awhile. It is completely diceless. A certain type of gun at "X" range and "X" angle (deflection, etc.) does so many points of damage. In addition, that was further delineated by whether you fired a "long burst" or "short burst" (using up less of your ammo). The randomness comes from what the enemy pilots do. There are enough types of maneuvers that the game worked with no dice.
However, what DIDN'T work was the cheating. Pure and simple. The panels that people plotted their move on for their aircraft (and whether they fired a short, long, or no burst at all, damage accumulated, etc.) remained hidden from the enemy. The players and GMs really got into building their aircraft and wooden panels. They just wouldn't acknowledged that some players cheated, and it broke the game for most people. Sad, really, after all the efforts the players put into it. All which could be fixed by simply installing a swivel so that everyone spun their panels around so that others could verify their move. >:(
Mike Demana
Sounds a bit like Phil Sabin's FD Lite, a diceless WW2 fighter game that you can't cheat at. Youtube overview here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ts0HqvecIw8) and VASSAL module here (https://vassalengine.org/wiki/Module:Fighter_Duel_Lite).
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You have a false dichotomy there.
Fog of war vs Pure Randomness.
I don?t think anyone is suggesting that. A bit of randomness is required, not pure randomness. The point is that real commanders do not have access to all the information; they don?t know exactly how their own troops will perform, nor those of the enemy. Further, every combat, even a mass combat, is subject to random factors. The death of a subcommander, the heroic performance of a centurion, a dead horse falling on the front line. None of that can be modelled with a diceless system, but it is exactly those sort of imponderables that dice give you. Not pure randomness, but some randomness
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I think you can inject the same randomness dice give you with other options...such as cards, chits, tokens, etc., but if you remove all of that, then yes we get back to 1980's "compare column X with line Y for combat resolution" style of stuff, which doesn't much appeal to me. Again, in it's own setting, I don't mind stuff like that (see my comments about the obscure board game I mentioned earlier), but in a proper wargame...not for my personal tastes.
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I think one thing to note here is that some people are conflating and confusing "randomization" as a mechanical physical process (dice, cards, chits, tokens, whatever) with "uncertainty" in results. Then further, based on this confusion, making assertions about what randomness/uncertainty brings to a game or simulation.
Mechanical randomization is a convenient shortcut for potentially huge numbers of factors that might be tedious or even impossible to realistically calculate. But it also can be applied more artfully than many current wargame rules do. As a whole rule sets in the wargaming space have been incredibly conservative over the past century or more; someone contemporary and familiar with HG Wells Little Wars would probably be quite comfortable playing the most recent edition of DBA, a hundred years later. There's no particular reason why mechanical randomization has to always be in the form of "unit strength + dice roll vs unit strength + die roll" on every single combat. There's a ton of mechanics for how to apply dice and other randomizers to rules, even looking as closely afield as board games and rpgs. Likewise, not every interaction has to be randomized if your only goal is uncertainty/fog of war. And too much randomization removes elements of skill from the game; if everything comes down to the randomizer and no amount of tactics can overcome good/bad rolling, that's just as poor a game as one where there's no uncertainty because the game is so predictable it's "solved" (ie, tic-tac-toe or connect 4, where there are simple techniques that guarantee a win or at least draw).
But the flip side of all of this is also true. You can easily have uncertainty of results without any mechanical randomization. Hidden information, bidding (blind or otherwise), resource management, simultaneous or written orders, guessing games like Rock Paper Scissors, and other mechanics can all factor into uncertain results without being "random" in a physical sense. Again, all tools commonly used in board games. Even in games with perfect information and limited and strict action options like Go or the entire family of chess-like games, you can have very uncertain games just based on what actions two players choose to take. No one is likely to argue a game of shogi is not uncertain just because no one ever rolled a die or flipped a card. But Stratego is a very similar style of game, and the imperfect information of initially hidden pieces adds a lot more uncertainty.
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The death of a subcommander, the heroic performance of a centurion, a dead horse falling on the front line. None of that can be modelled with a diceless system, but it is exactly those sort of imponderables that dice give you.
But does that need to be modelled? Individual events tend to average out in large formations, leaving you with an overall performance that remains constant throughout the battle. One example: 1000 Spartan hoplites fight 1000 Athenian hoplites on an open plain. The Spartan hoplites will win the fight, every single time. The only variable will be how many Spartans are killed before the Athenians inevitably rout. No need to model the individual casualties since the overall performance of the unit remains pretty much the same.
To change the outcome you have to introduce a significant external effect: Athenians have a terrain advantage, Spartans are hit in the flank, something like that. All of which can be represented in a game by modifiers without any need for dice.
If you want a bit of randomness try this: two armies are deployed and move to contact. The first moment a unit resolves combat throw a die. The result slightly modifies the unit's performance for the rest of the game, during which no further dice are thrown. This simulates the overall variability of a unit on the day of battle: troops aren't all that good or are in high spirits; they have indigestion or are inspired by an especially good pre-battle speech by their commander, whatever. But once set, their performance remains the same thereafter.
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Do you have any evidence that once set, unit quality remains the same all day?
I can think of quite a few examples where it didn't. Apart from anything else, fatigue will degrade unit quality as the fight wears on.
Your example of the Spartans is true, but it is right at the end of the possibilities. Things were seldom so clear cut, and more importantly, ancient commanders did not have the perfect information you seem to be proposing; combat was and is an uncertain business.
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Do you have any evidence that once set, unit quality remains the same all day?
I can think of quite a few examples where it didn't. Apart from anything else, fatigue will degrade unit quality as the fight wears on.
Your example of the Spartans is true, but it is right at the end of the possibilities. Things were seldom so clear cut, and more importantly, ancient commanders did not have the perfect information you seem to be proposing; combat was and is an uncertain business.
Sure, fatigue (a certain demoralisation from not immediately winning as opposed to physical fatigue) will wear a unit down over the course of a battle, but I was thinking of an extreme dice-driven variability of performance from one turn to the next. That you can't justify historically (if anybody wants to bother justifying it historically).
Re Spartans: as a group they were better hoplites than the part-time citizen hoplites they generally faced. Everyone knew that. Perfect information would be perfect knowledge of one's own troops' capabilities as well as that of one's enemy which of course nobody had. I would say a commander had a good overall knowledge. So he knows hoplites will beat sparabara and takabara in a frontal fight. A Macedonian commander knows phalangites will beat hoplites in a frontal fight on level ground. They know enough to make all the necessary decisions.
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Mechanical randomization is a convenient shortcut for potentially huge numbers of factors that might be tedious or even impossible to realistically calculate. ...
This comes to the crux of it for me. If they are impossible to calculate how do you put odds on them? There is insufficient data to do so with any kind of rigour, especially for ancient battles. I am convinced by the Ops approach as being just as good history as any other wargame. The execution needs to be a good game as well and the AARs appear to bear that out. I would give it a go for sure.
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So Freebooters Fate is a Fantasy Pirate Skirmish game that doesn't use dice, but it does use number cards (1 to 10) for effects.
However, combat (melee and shooting) were decided by body part cards - head, torso, abdomen, legs, right arm, left arm.
The attacker selected a number of cards based on his attack stat, the defender selected a number of cards based on his defence stat. Any cards that matched were defended successfully, any that weren't defended resulted in a hit.
Select one location that was hit and then do a strength plus number card vs toughness plus number card check, if the attack was higher it caused the difference in damage points.
Now draw the next number card, if it was equal to or lower than the damage caused, it causes a critical hit in the location.
Each body part had 2 stats - critically damaged & undamaged - which related to:
Head = Attacks
Torso - Toughness
Abdomen = Defence
Legs = Movement
Right Arm = ability to use weapon in that hand (stat is the strength of the weapon)
Left Arm = ability to use weapon in that hand (sta is strength of the weapon)
So the element of tactics is not only in deployment, how to achieve your objectives, who to attack with whom, but also in the body part cards you select in the attack.
If you have a musket, you need both arms to use it, so obviously if I attack you I'm going to go for your arms. You know this, so you'll defend them. I know this, so won't actually attack your arms, I'll go for somewhere else. You think I may bluff you, so you defend somewhere other than your arms.
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Sounds like a lot of steps to resolve a hit or not...
I tend to prefer streamlined and simple over complex, nowadays. And if that means dice, so be it. Especially in light of the fact I tend to roll them poorly... ;D
Mike Demana
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This comes to the crux of it for me. If they are impossible to calculate how do you put odds on them? There is insufficient data to do so with any kind of rigour, especially for ancient battles. I am convinced by the Ops approach as being just as good history as any other wargame. The execution needs to be a good game as well and the AARs appear to bear that out. I would give it a go for sure.
But equally, the factors you assign to the troops in the first place are impossible to calculate.
The truth is, we do not understand all the factors that determine the outcome of combats whether one on one or between a thousand men a side. This is especially true of ancient warfare.
A diceless wargame gives a false impression that we understand what is going on. Dice, judiciously used (not causing wild swings of fortune, but affecting the outcome), model that uncertainty very nicely
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That's likely double true for ancient warfare, indeed. I've read plenty of books and listen to several ancient warfare based podcasts and the overwhelming take away is that we know almost nothing. What we do know is derived from people writing stuff 200 years after it happened, often with a heavy bias, and even the remnants of equipment that we have...we base entire uniforms on two discovered samples. lol
The one thing I do see consistently, is the previously mentioned chaos. The endless scheming, the backstabbing, the "failure to show up", the fleeing from the battle for no reason, including one bizarre instance where both commanders thought they were losing the battle and both committed suicide! The presence of weather, be it simple sun in the eyes, muddy ground, rain, or even lightning strikes during a battle (not doing damage, but inspiring certain religious zeal), dust storms. Loads of instances where entire units or armies failed to act until it was too late - often to the detriment of their allies, sometimes by mistake, but often due to cowardice or treason. Lots of bribery, drunken behavior leading to weirdly successful sieges, even petty insults resulting in the successful siege of castle during the Albigensian crusade, lol. Besiesging armies so concerned with security that they build vast structures, which were then besieged...by the besieged castle.
During many crusades, crusaders only had to serve 40 days/nights. How do you model that when they decide to attack on the 38th day and all of those peasants know they're two days from heading home, absolved of their sins?
Warfare has never been simple...never in the history of human existence, and that's why I love a bit of chaos involved.
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That's likely double true for ancient warfare, indeed. I've read plenty of books and listen to several ancient warfare based podcasts and the overwhelming take away is that we know almost nothing. What we do know is derived from people writing stuff 200 years after it happened, often with a heavy bias, and even the remnants of equipment that we have...we base entire uniforms on two discovered samples. lol
The one thing I do see consistently, is the previously mentioned chaos. The endless scheming, the backstabbing, the "failure to show up", the fleeing from the battle for no reason, including one bizarre instance where both commanders thought they were losing the battle and both committed suicide! The presence of weather, be it simple sun in the eyes, muddy ground, rain, or even lightning strikes during a battle (not doing damage, but inspiring certain religious zeal), dust storms. Loads of instances where entire units or armies failed to act until it was too late - often to the detriment of their allies, sometimes by mistake, but often due to cowardice or treason. Lots of bribery, drunken behavior leading to weirdly successful sieges, even petty insults resulting in the successful siege of castle during the Albigensian crusade, lol. Besiesging armies so concerned with security that they build vast structures, which were then besieged...by the besieged castle.
During many crusades, crusaders only had to serve 40 days/nights. How do you model that when they decide to attack on the 38th day and all of those peasants know they're two days from heading home, absolved of their sins?
Warfare has never been simple...never in the history of human existence, and that's why I love a bit of chaos involved.
Looking at the factors that substantially affect the outcome of a battle, they nearly all boil down to fog of war, i.e. one side doesn't know everything about the other side, such as the quality and location of the enemy troops and the enemy's battleplan. None of this is random: once these things become known their effect is constant for the rest of the battle. You don't have an effect that varies widely during the course of a battle. Weather: it rains or it doesn't; at the most doesn't rain initially then it begins to rain and carries on raining for the rest of the battle. An unreliable ally: he joins in the battle or he does not: he doesn't change his mind half a dozen times in the course of the battle. And so on. Pure randomness means arbitrarily variable performance, and that doesn't happen on a real battlefield.
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Looking at the factors that substantially affect the outcome of a battle, they nearly all boil down to fog of war, i.e. one side doesn't know everything about the other side, such as the quality and location of the enemy troops and the enemy's battleplan. None of this is random: once these things become known their effect is constant for the rest of the battle. You don't have an effect that varies widely during the course of a battle. Weather: it rains or it doesn't; at the most doesn't rain initially then it begins to rain and carries on raining for the rest of the battle. An unreliable ally: he joins in the battle or he does not: he doesn't change his mind half a dozen times in the course of the battle. And so on. Pure randomness means arbitrarily variable performance, and that doesn't happen on a real battlefield.
Nobody is arguing for pure randomness. A bit of randomness is present in all combat.
It is true that in ancient battle commanders tended not to have a big influence once combat had started. But even then there are many exceptions; Alexander charging in, Caesar seizing a sword and shield, a veteran of the tenth legion wounding Labienus with a javelin, Epaminondas dying.
More importantly, the accounts are so vague that events that may have swung combat between units are often not mentioned; that doesn?t mean they are known in advance, nor that a unit?s performance would always be the same during a given battle. We know from more recent wars that a unit which fought well in one combat could lose heart in a later one in the same battle. That is what dice (or cards) are modelling. Not pure randomness, but variability.
I?ve played diceless games, and the lack of that variability turns them into rather sterile experiences, but more importantly doesn?t seem to reflect accounts of combat.
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Looking at the factors that substantially affect the outcome of a battle, they nearly all boil down to fog of war, i.e. one side doesn't know everything about the other side, such as the quality and location of the enemy troops and the enemy's battleplan. None of this is random: once these things become known their effect is constant for the rest of the battle. You don't have an effect that varies widely during the course of a battle. Weather: it rains or it doesn't; at the most doesn't rain initially then it begins to rain and carries on raining for the rest of the battle. An unreliable ally: he joins in the battle or he does not: he doesn't change his mind half a dozen times in the course of the battle. And so on. Pure randomness means arbitrarily variable performance, and that doesn't happen on a real battlefield.
I feel like you're arguing against something that no one is saying...you seem to weirdly equate dice with "pure random madness!", but no one has said that or supports that as an argument?
PS: Curious how you know what happens on a real battlefield, particularly historical ones? Even well-read historians admit we know very little about how the battles looked or were fought. We don't even have a solid idea how Roman legions fought (really), and they're one of the most well-researched periods with the most evidence on hand.
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I feel like you're arguing against something that no one is saying...you seem to weirdly equate dice with "pure random madness!", but no one has said that or supports that as an argument?
But that's precisely what dice are: they give randomly variable outcomes for things that should be constant. A unit fights well or badly; it doesn't veer between heroic and hopeless in the course of a battle.
Let me be fair and take the other side. The point of dice is to represent fog of war, we can agree on that. Fog of war for a unit means an imperfect knowledge of its capabilities. So one knows that a spear unit is pretty good against enemy spear and cavalry, but one doesn't know if this spear unit is a bit better or worse than them. Dice throws should slightly modify its overall performance without a single die throw completely upending the unit. This means attrition steps.
I like the way Phil Sabin does it in Legion: it usually takes a few dice throws to score a hit and most units have 2 steps before being destroyed. Furthermore a "spent" unit (has already taken one hit) can transfer a second hit to a friendly adjacent unit. This means a battleline degrades more or less evenly and a line with superior quality troops will almost inevitably defeat an inferior line. But one doesn't know exactly when, or how many superior units might be lost in the process. The randomness can be interpreted as the unit is better than expected (good dice throws) or worse than expected (bad dice throws) but not unreasonably so in either case.
I don't like DBA where a qualitatively superior unit can be destroyed by a single die throw of an inferior unit. There are too few units (12) for that to be absorbed in the general casualty attrition rate - lose 4 units and you lose the game. It's too variable, too random. Not for me - if I'm trying to take it as something approximating to an historical simulation. Fine as a beer and pretzels game.
Are dice as used in Legion better than a deterministic mechanism where you don't know the final outcome as there are too many variables to calculate it? Maybe not. The real reason wargamers like dice is because of the thrill: each time you throw the cubes something should happen, and there's a good chance something important will happen. Hence the popularity of the DBx systems. The less a single die throw has a significant effect the more boring it becomes. In Legion the chances of causing a hit are usually 1 in 3 or 1 in 6. Most dice throws accomplish nothing: attrition takes time and hence is not too drastic and uneven in its effects. But all that useless dice throwing is boring and in consequence Legion never really took off as a wargame. Diceless combat is much quicker to resolve and the thrill is of a different kind: knowing that outcomes depend entirely on your tactical skill. Like chess. Take your pick.
PS: Curious how you know what happens on a real battlefield, particularly historical ones? Even well-read historians admit we know very little about how the battles looked or were fought. We don't even have a solid idea how Roman legions fought (really), and they're one of the most well-researched periods with the most evidence on hand.
I've made a study of the topic. Even got a book (https://www.amazon.com/Ancient-Battle-Formations-Justin-Swanton/dp/1526740060) published on it. I cover the Roman legion in it.
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A unit fights well or badly; it doesn't veer between heroic and hopeless in the course of a battle.
.. it does, though? A fighting unit is not a digital system with limited inputs and outputs, it's a body of people, and people are extremely complex. Bodies of people even more so.
A world class tennis play doesn't even play consistently to the same standard during the same match. A large body of people trying to kill each other has a huge number of variables.
Entropy is real, randomness (might be lol) real - diceless wargaming as a principle or idea is hardly in itself a bad thing but the topic of whether the same battle under exactly the same conditions, which is generally acknowledged to be impossible would have the same outcome, is straying into determinism and the philosophy of free will.
Chess isn't a wargame simulation.
Wargames are supposed to represent battles.
Battles have a huge number of unpredictable elements.
You seem to be taking the stance that an omniscient general could extract a perfectly predictable performance from their troops, and that is I feel incompatible with most human philosophy.
I don't think it's necessarily incompatible with a fun wargame! I'm certainly intrigued as to how a more deterministic game could play - but I think the thread has somehow evolved into suggesting that games are either mostly random, or not at all random, and that one or the other is a better representation of war. In truth, no simulation can equate to reality without being reality. It's only a question of what's the most enjoyable ruleset - it's simply silly to suggest that random, pseudo-random, or deterministic, or some mix, is better or worse at being a game of war.
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.. it does, though? A fighting unit is not a digital system with limited inputs and outputs, it's a body of people, and people are extremely complex. Bodies of people even more so.
A world class tennis play doesn't even play consistently to the same standard during the same match. A large body of people trying to kill each other has a huge number of variables.
This is a great point. Among many possible examples, Red Badge of Courage is a wonderful account of how a unit (and indeed an individual) can see-saw in effectiveness quite dramatically in a short space of time.
I guess scale of the game might be very relevant here. If the game is basically skirmish-level depicting one small moment, how a unit fights should probably be fairly stable. But if the scope of the game is more temporally extended than that, I struggle to see why we should assume stable effectiveness.
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Edited to remove unnecessary argument.
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.. it does, though? A fighting unit is not a digital system with limited inputs and outputs, it's a body of people, and people are extremely complex. Bodies of people even more so.
A world class tennis play doesn't even play consistently to the same standard during the same match. A large body of people trying to kill each other has a huge number of variables.
I've heard this argument many, many times. A single individual is a complex assembly of causes to which it is impossible to assign deterministic outcomes. Fine. However a large body of individuals sees all those causes average out, leaving the body with an overall efficacity that can be represented by deterministic factors. So a single Spartan hoplite (the example I always use) can be killed a single Athenian hoplite: the Spartan slips on a loose stone at the critical moment, whatever. However a thousand Spartan hoplites will - all else being equal - defeat a thousand Athenian hoplites, every single time. The only variable being how many Spartans are killed before the Athenians inevitably rout.
Entropy is real, randomness (might be lol) real - diceless wargaming as a principle or idea is hardly in itself a bad thing but the topic of whether the same battle under exactly the same conditions, which is generally acknowledged to be impossible would have the same outcome, is straying into determinism and the philosophy of free will.
If the armies are exactly equal, balanced on the edge of a knife, then the outcomes might vary. But if one army has a noticeable advantage over the other, or if one army uses the same better tactics than the other, that army will win, every single time.
Chess isn't a wargame simulation.
I know. Didn't say it was. I said that the thrill from playing chess equates to the thrill of playing a diceless wargame.
Wargames are supposed to represent battles.
Battles have a huge number of unpredictable elements.
Just as unpredictable in a deterministic as in a chance-driven system. How many chess players know the outcome of a game from the outset? Lots of unpredictability. Yes, chess isn't a wargame - you get my point anyway?
You seem to be taking the stance that an omniscient general could extract a perfectly predictable performance from their troops, and that is I feel incompatible with most human philosophy.
No. I'm saying that the unpredictability of a deterministic wargame better simulates fog of war than the unpredictability of most of the popular wargames that use dice.
I don't think it's necessarily incompatible with a fun wargame!
Of course it isn't. That why dice wargames are so popular.
I'm certainly intrigued as to how a more deterministic game could play - but I think the thread has somehow evolved into suggesting that games are either mostly random, or not at all random, and that one or the other is a better representation of war. In truth, no simulation can equate to reality without being reality. It's only a question of what's the most enjoyable ruleset - it's simply silly to suggest that random, pseudo-random, or deterministic, or some mix, is better or worse at being a game of war.
Let's separate enjoyable from historically realistic. Enjoyable: no argument; historically realistic: argument. My growing impression is that wargamers use dice because dice are fun: nothing replaces the thrill of throwing the cube at a critical moment and getting a 6. But it's futile for them to try and justify dice as presenting something historically accurate. They just don't.
Obviously no game simulates reality. Question is which game simulates reality better whilst remaining fun? That's a tricky one to answer.
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This is a great point. Among many possible examples, Red Badge of Courage is a wonderful account of how a unit (and indeed an individual) can see-saw in effectiveness quite dramatically in a short space of time.
I guess scale of the game might be very relevant here. If the game is basically skirmish-level depicting one small moment, how a unit fights should probably be fairly stable. But if the scope of the game is more temporally extended than that, I struggle to see why we should assume stable effectiveness.
For a skirmisher-level game, where individuals have a significant effect, you'll probably need dice as there's no other manageable way of representing the hugely complex interaction of cause and effect that goes into an individual's performance: an individual sniper takes aim at a target, but an exploding grenade blows up some smoke, obscuring his vision whilst his target moves at the same time, and he misses. Stuff like that can't be simulated by anything deterministic.
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Also a great point, Bolingar :) I agree that at skirmish level, the relevant idea of "how a unit fights" isn't really applicable, because you'll want the ruleset to track much more granular considerations. I hadn't thought that far through my thought - if that makes sense - when I posted earlier.
I'm not sure about the claim that over a large body of individuals things average out, but even if that isn't true I can see why a ruleset might want to abstract away the resulting complexity.
For what it is worth, even though I do like dice (it is, as you say, fun), I've never liked "a 1 is always a failure" type rules. Sometimes, as you say, the outcome just isn't in doubt: *that* gun is never going to hurt *that* tank; *that* troop type is never going to beat *this* troop type etc.
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EDIT:
I should have read the previous page - everything I've argued in my post has already been said on the previous page, we've gone in a circle lol Suffice it to say I think it's self-evidently untrue to suggest that deterministic gaming is more realistic than games with at least an element of random modelling. This is quite simply a debate about simulation vs reality and how complex a simulation can be made. We cannot simulate battles anything like accurately enough to the real thing, without actually going and recreating it - not yet anyway, with current computational capabilities (and lack of understanding of what the history actually was, which won't change until the time machine!). Certainly not on the tabletop.
However a thousand Spartan hoplites will - all else being equal - defeat a thousand Athenian hoplites, every single time. The only variable being how many Spartans are killed before the Athenians inevitably rout.
If the armies are exactly equal, balanced on the edge of a knife, then the outcomes might vary. But if one army has a noticeable advantage over the other, or if one army uses the same better tactics than the other, that army will win, every single time.
I fundamentally disagree with this - people, weather, circumstances, equipment, etc, many things make up an army. An army is not a precisely controlled set of statistics. It's a loosely conglomerated group of variables.
I think you have missed my point - there is either randomness in life, or there is not. If there is, then no battle, no matter how huge the numbers involved and how much historical data there is to draw on, will always have exactly the same result. Nothing in life is truly deterministic and therefore a deterministic wargame can't be more 'accurate' (in and of that being the definition), than one with some random elements.
If there is not, then everything is predetermined and simply unknown yet which is philosophically depressing - but even if true that doesn't mean we have sufficient data to model battles with anything like statistical certainty.
I'm sure you want me to say that chess is not unpredictable, the person playing chess is unpredictable - which of course I agree with.
The general ordering his troops in the analogy is not playing chess - they are ordering other groups of people to carry out actions which they may or may not interpret differently, may or may not find a random sinkhole on the battlefield, may or may not spot a bad omen while moving to their next position and so on.
The general does not have deterministic control of the battlefield. They are not omniscient. A deterministic wargame is less realistic because of that.
For a skirmisher-level game, where individuals have a significant effect, you'll probably need dice as there's no other manageable way of representing the hugely complex interaction of cause and effect that goes into an individual's performance: an individual sniper takes aim at a target, but an exploding grenade blows up some smoke, obscuring his vision whilst his target moves at the same time, and he misses.
The general orders the cavalry reserve to engage; a gust of wind blows the flag the wrong way; the cavalry takes to the wrong flank. Stuff like that can't be simulated by anything deterministic.
There are no battles in history where both sides had full, precise, omniscient knowledge of what would happen when they took each specific action. That's a fantasy.
There were of course battles where one side had such a huge advantage that the conclusion was foregone, sure - but we wouldn't play those because what's the point? Unless there's the chance the luck could go our way... but in a deterministic system such a battle could only be won by the underdog if the player with advantage deliberately squandered it entirely. Again, why bother?
I've never liked "a 1 is always a failure" type rules. Sometimes, as you say, the outcome just isn't in doubt: *that* gun is never going to hurt *that* tank; *that* troop type is never going to beat *this* troop type etc.
I agree, some situations don't need any randomness modelling in. BB gun vs Tiger - fail.
In contrast any simulation that tries to model exactly when tank A will knock out tank B, is only 'accurate' if it extremely closely approaches reality i.e. actually run the tanks, man them, fire training rounds etc. Everything else is far too complex and therefore either needs some manner of randomly weighted resolution mechanic, or is painfully unrealistic because it requires suspension of disbelief; they always get a knock-out if under X range and from Y angle for instance, everything else is a fail. Works as a game but absolutely isn't more realistic than dice, cards, whatever.
Framing the discussion in a context of units of fighting men doesn't change this, it just shifts the probabilities and at best moves the focus to what unknowns the general has or hasn't got in view. Which comes back to - we can't simulate that, it needs some randomness.[/s]
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That's a much more polite way of putting what I had written earlier.
Simply put, Bollingar, I disagree with you immensely on almost everything you've stated. I found it insulting and childish to pull out the "Well I did a study and wrote a book on it" nonsense. If that's true, it gives me even more concern...
But you're on your sales pitch, so I won't disrupt it further by opposing your opinion - and let's be very clear, what you're stating is opinion and not fact.
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That's a much more polite way of putting what I had written earlier.
Simply put, Bollingar, I disagree with you immensely on almost everything you've stated. I found it insulting and childish to pull out the "Well I did a study and wrote a book on it" nonsense. If that's true, it gives me even more concern...
But you're on your sales pitch, so I won't disrupt it further by opposing your opinion - and let's be very clear, what you're stating is opinion and not fact.
No, not a sales pitch, but a reply to your post:
Curious how you know what happens on a real battlefield, particularly historical ones? Even well-read historians admit we know very little about how the battles looked or were fought. We don't even have a solid idea how Roman legions fought (really), and they're one of the most well-researched periods with the most evidence on hand.
I disagree with this. We can have a pretty good idea of what happened at least with some battles, and the more recent the battle the better our idea. We know what happened at Waterloo. But even for battles in Antiquity we know what happened for the better documented ones like Cannae. The problem with a large part of contemporary academia is that it is overly skeptical of the primary sources, far too ready to doubt them when there is no objectively good reason for doing so. This is compounded by the problem of translations when the source material isn't abundant, for example in the case you give of how the legion worked. I made a study of the primary sources in the original languages, notably Livy and Polybius, and realised that the quincunx is a complete fabrication, right down to the word itself. The legion could not and did not work that way. The quincunx theory developed from a mistranslation of Livy's description of line relief in History 8.8:
"The first line, or hastati, comprised fifteen maniples, with short distances between them." - Prima acies hastati erant, manipului quindecim, distantes inter se modicum spatium.
Every standard translation makes the "between" apply to the maniples, and has maniple-wide gaps between one maniple and the next. In the Latin however, the subject of the sentence is the hastati, not the maniples, so the small gaps logically apply to them. Furthermore the Latin term for "between" - inter - has the primary meaning of "in the midst of". It's the root of the word "internal". So it is the hastati who are standing apart from each other. This immediately suggests the open order disposition described by the military tacticians of Antiquity: Aelian, Arrian and Asklepiodotus, where the files in a formation each occupy a width of about 2 yards, with about 4 feet between the shoulders of the men of one file and the next. This permits other men to occupy the spaces between the files and move along them, i.e. one body of men can pass through another. This could be light infantry (insertion - parentaxis) or heavy infantry (interjection - parembole). Livy, using non-technical language, was describing something familiar to military men who had technical terms for it.
But we can happily agree to disagree. We're talking about games after all, not about politics or religion. 😱 Pax?
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I think you have missed my point - there is either randomness in life, or there is not. If there is, then no battle, no matter how huge the numbers involved and how much historical data there is to draw on, will always have exactly the same result. Nothing in life is truly deterministic and therefore a deterministic wargame can't be more 'accurate' (in and of that being the definition), than one with some random elements.
Sure. Battles are fought by human beings and human beings have free will. Which is why it's impossible to use deterministic mechanisms to model skirmish-level warfare where individuals are the units. But units composed of hundreds or thousands of individuals tend to behave in more predictable ways, never 100% predicable of course, but sufficient that deterministic mechanisms give at least as plausible a simulation of them as dice do.
The general orders the cavalry reserve to engage; a gust of wind blows the flag the wrong way; the cavalry takes to the wrong flank. Stuff like that can't be simulated by anything deterministic.
You have a point. The charge of the Light Brigade happened because Lord Cardigan misread his orders. Bit hard to simulate though - the entire battle is decided by a single throw of the die: 1,2,3 and the British charge the wrong guns and are wiped out; 4,5,6 and they charge the right guns and are victorious. Then you have the impetuous Ney at Waterloo who thinks the English are retreating and orders an immediate cavalry charge whilst Napoleon is out of action from stomach trouble - and the French cavalry are decimated by the English squares. How would you game that?
I think though that in earlier battles this wouldn't happen, or at least happen rarely: commanders got their orders before the battle took place and there were several ways for the general to time the execution of those orders in a way that is clearly understood by his commanders. Battleplans in any case were much simpler then - generally wait until you hear the sound of trumpets. Then advance. Much less chance of a commander getting a message in mid-battle that he misunderstands.
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Battleplans in any case were much simpler then - generally wait until you hear the sound of trumpets. Then advance. Much less chance of a commander getting a message in mid-battle that he misunderstands.
Bolignar, you may be underestimating the universal human capacity to bugger up even the simplest plan!
I?m kidding, of course, but there really is a wide range of ways that people land on sub-optimal choices.
For gaming, I think one of the most important factors is building into the game mechanics the need to make decisions with imperfect information. In a dice or card driven game, the randomization mechanic serves that function.
There are ways to achieve imperfect information in purely procedure driven games that would give a complex game experience. First, have both players initially deploy blinds rather than units. The player knows the strengths of their own force, but not exactly where the enemy will place his strongest units, so has to make some initial guesses. Also, both players deploy without measuring, so the exact timing of contact is difficult to gauge - you want to be the one to have momentum in the charge to contact, but can?t effectively min-max by measuring. Just those limitations on player information will force some decisions that are analogous to what ancient generals faced. You know what you have, but not necessarily where it will do the most good, so strategies that hedge risks and hold a reserve make sense.
Once the deployment is complete (or maybe when enemy units get close enough to identify - deploying with a scout screen would be useful, but redeploying based on the new information would be risky), the then the figures go on the table. There are still some procedural ways to generate incomplete info, though. Each unit can have a couple of stats (offense, defense, etc), so once contact is made the offense reduces defense at a given rate - the problem is that you may not know the exact numbers the enemy unit has until they make contact and it can take a few turns to defeat the enemy. So, the Spartans might have higher offense than typical hoplites, but similar defense - they will probably beat the enemy unit in front of them, but will it be before the perioikoi or allied hoplites in the line next to the Spartans collapse and leave them isolated? (Always worth consider with Spartans that a lot of their field forces weren?t Spartiates, and might not be especially motivated?).
I can see a purely procedural game giving just as many ?oh, shit!? surprises as a randomized game system, but there are some different game design challenges. I don?t see replayability being a problem- even two experienced players will be able to give each other surprises if they have imperfect information to work from!
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Very nice Pattus, that's a great illustration of how a more deterministic game can be both fun and simulate the general not being omnipotent and omniscient (as regards their own forces and the battlefield at least).
If a GM sets up various hidden information then I'd have to agree that's as good a way of simulating unknown conditions as having, say, a card draw which triggers one of a set of possible events.
I still entirely disagree with Bolingar's assertion that a deterministic game is a more 'accurate' simulation than one with some randomness built in.
Even if we agree to disagree on the performance of given units being entirely repeatable and predictable, for a 'realistic' battle simulation there still needs to be some degree of uncertainty for the general in how their commands will work out. That doesn't have to be via randomness, on that I concur - a GM could arbitrate that a unit gets unexpectedly bogged down or confused and so arrives late, for example, simply to make the game more interesting (or because the GM knows that route is via marshy ground but the general doesn't).
The charge of the Light Brigade happened because Lord Cardigan misread his orders. Bit hard to simulate though - the entire battle is decided by a single throw of the die: 1,2,3 and the British charge the wrong guns and are wiped out; 4,5,6 and they charge the right guns and are victorious. Then you have the impetuous Ney at Waterloo who thinks the English are retreating and orders an immediate cavalry charge whilst Napoleon is out of action from stomach trouble - and the French cavalry are decimated by the English squares. How would you game that?
I think you're being reductive in order to try to strengthen your argument. This is the false dichotomy another poster referred to. There simply needs to be some representation of the possibility of the charge going awry, it absolutely doesn't need to be 50/50 - it might only be a 1 in 100 chance.
As I've pointed out repeatedly, the general is not omniscient or omipotent, that's what is in contention - it doesn't have to be simulated via randomness, Pattus (and I'm sure your good self too!) have given some examples of how it can be done differently, but there has to be uncertainty to make the battle (a) worth gaming and (b) 'feel' right.
I understand that you're contending that the actions of your opposing player will provide the uncertainty, which is clearly agreeable to a point, but that doesn't overcome the hurdle that units and battlefield always behaving in a way which is entirely predictable to the player, is terribly unrealistic and therefore no, a deterministic approach is not a 'better' way to simulate a battle.
Too much randomness, I agree, is the opposite side of the same coin as too much determinism.
I think though that in earlier battles this wouldn't happen, or at least happen rarely: commanders got their orders before the battle took place and there were several ways for the general to time the execution of those orders in a way that is clearly understood by his commanders. Battleplans in any case were much simpler then - generally wait until you hear the sound of trumpets. Then advance. Much less chance of a commander getting a message in mid-battle that he misunderstands.
I still don't quite agree it's that simple, but let's say I do. You said yourself, there is a chance - which needs modelling.
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I entirely agree that fog of war is best simulated by fog of war: a player has imperfect knowledge of the capabilities and whereabouts of his opponent's units. Columba Games' blocks do that nicely. But I suspect it doesn't go down well with most players which is why it isn't widely practised. Players want to be God: seeing from heavens their army and their opponent's army deployed in all their glory. Sure, some rulesets allow for hidden units secretly deployed for ambush, but how popular is that, really?
Wargames invariably give the player far more control than an historical general actually possessed. For a typical pre-gunpowder battle, the general usually made his plans the night before, gave his commanders their orders, then took up position next morning with his personal unit and prayed his plan was a good one because there was precious little he could do about it now. The advance is sounded, he leads his unit into battle (or stays back in reserve) and watches his army attempt to carry out his prearranged battleplan. If his opponent has outguessed him or he has forgotten something then it's curtains. Not much fun as a wargame.
It's better for a horse and musket army with its system of mid-battle orders but even then the general was not always in a position to see the entire course of the battle himself. Often he had to rely on reports and they could be vague, distorted or out of date.
Anyhow, point is that most players IMHO want more control than that, including perfect information of their opponent's dispositions.
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Bolignar, that?s a fair point about the preferences of players. I was thinking more in terms of the feasibility of procedure driven games to generate fog of war than in terms of whether or not the game would be widely popular. Even then, how a procedure driven game is received has a lot to do with individual gamer ?type? (as discussed in other threads, and magazine articles). I am solidly a scenario or narrative gamer- I play mainly for the process of finding out what happens, so a procedural game appeals to me as long as it tells a good (interesting) story. Folks that are more into tournament gaming will probably have more trouble getting behind the assumptions built into a procedural game engine.
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I think you're being reductive in order to try to strengthen your argument. This is the false dichotomy another poster referred to. There simply needs to be some representation of the possibility of the charge going awry, it absolutely doesn't need to be 50/50 - it might only be a 1 in 100 chance.
Sigh...I wrote that in answer to your post, agreeing with it. A single commander can by a bad decision virtually give a battle away. But I don't think we attempt to wargame that. Other decisively fortuitous events like the appearance of a small force over the hill on the enemy flank that the enemy takes as an entire new army and routs in panic we also don't wargame.
As I've pointed out repeatedly, the general is not omniscient or omipotent, that's what is in contention - it doesn't have to be simulated via randomness, Pattus (and I'm sure your good self too!) have given some examples of how it can be done differently, but there has to be uncertainty to make the battle (a) worth gaming and (b) 'feel' right.
There's dollops of uncertainty in a determinist game, but I think it depends on what kind of uncertainty you're looking for.
I understand that you're contending that the actions of your opposing player will provide the uncertainty, which is clearly agreeable to a point, but that doesn't overcome the hurdle that units and battlefield always behaving in a way which is entirely predictable to the player, is terribly unrealistic and therefore no, a deterministic approach is not a 'better' way to simulate a battle.
Not quite. I'm contending that the impossibility of predicting outcomes is what constitutes the uncertainty in a deterministic game. Battlefield units behaving in a predictable way without any arbitrary random variability is not terribly unrealistic, just no less unrealistic than using dice to impose randomness.
Too much randomness, I agree, is the opposite side of the same coin as too much determinism.
I still don't quite agree it's that simple, but let's say I do. You said yourself, there is a chance - which needs modelling.
I'm not on a crusade to abolish dice in wargaming - might as well try to fly by flapping my arms. However I do affirm that chanceless wargaming is fun in its own way and just as capable of satisfying a player's suspension of disbelief as a dice-driven game, perhaps even more so. But let players decide that for themselves.
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Bolingar wrote:
Not quite. I'm contending that the impossibility of predicting outcomes is what constitutes the uncertainty in a deterministic game.
Except that clearly you can predict the outcomes; if the rules are simple enough to work out combat outcomes, then they are simple enough to work them out in advance. I get that what you are saying is that you may know what will happen in one round of combat, but what might happen after another when another unit intervenes is harder to know. But it is still possible, and clearly much easier than in a combat system with an element of chance. I have certainly in the past worked out the odds of something several moves in advance even with chance; I can easily figure out rough percentages of different outcomes over several different scenarios. In rules without any chance, that is much simpler.
You say that predictability is no less unrealistsic than chance, but I think real combats, even between large numbers, are not nearly so quantifiable as you do.
Don?t get me wrong. I admire that you are trying something different. I just feel that the assumption you have made about mass combat being predictable is not supported by evidence.
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The key to the rules to me appears to be that a small change on the input to a combat can have a marked effect on the output of the combat. So trying to quantify all of those inputs in advance and how they will cascade through the battle line will be beyond most players. Sure a computer could spit out the answer but we are not computers. It also does have user input in ordering stuff about, especially the light troops. If you combine that with hidden info on leaders then it would be very difficult to predict the final outcome at the start. You also aren't going to be fighting the same battle all the time so even if you "solve" one just move on to the next.
For a wargame you need to be able to suspend your disbelief (does this give a realistic feel within its own setting?) and have interesting decisions to make. Trying to do that in a deterministic way is really quite difficult so I take my hat off to the OP for trying.
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Bolingar wrote:
Not quite. I'm contending that the impossibility of predicting outcomes is what constitutes the uncertainty in a deterministic game.
Except that clearly you can predict the outcomes; if the rules are simple enough to work out combat outcomes, then they are simple enough to work them out in advance. I get that what you are saying is that you may know what will happen in one round of combat, but what might happen after another when another unit intervenes is harder to know. But it is still possible, and clearly much easier than in a combat system with an element of chance. I have certainly in the past worked out the odds of something several moves in advance even with chance; I can easily figure out rough percentages of different outcomes over several different scenarios. In rules without any chance, that is much simpler.
Without weighing in on the rest of the argument, I will disagree with this specific assertion.
Reducto ad absurdum, you have chess. No variability at all, extremely limited board actions allowed, fixed grid, etc. Yet very few people will assert that chess is too predictable. Predicting more than 2-3 moves in advance puts you in the very highest echelons of play. It doesn't matter that you can calculate that a pawn takes a bishop an infinite number of turns in advance; every pieces always takes any other piece if you can force the position such that the attack can happen at all. The trick is putting that pawn where it will be able to take the bishop without giving up other more tactical sound positions.
Now compare that to a wargame where you have factors like larger variability of unit capabilities, terrain's effect on movement and combat factors, movement that isn't necessarily on a grid, tactical modifiers to combat like flanking, etc. Yes, you can calculate the factors of a single combat many moves in advance, be it diced or diceless. The question is can you actually force that combat to occur as you want without those other factors changing the results along the way.
I came to historical games via a fairly typical route of passing through Games Workshop mass market games first; games that were largely throwing large buckets of dice and the strategy and tactics being much more about army building, fairly trivial tactics (because you don't get to move much in a 6 bound game) and getting occasionally lucky on a roll. When I passed into games like DBA, I struggled quite a bit before realizing that most historical rulesets were not about winning the dice rolls, but forcing the match ups on the table you needed. Artillery vs Infantry vs Cavalry as a classic example. Or getting multiple troops into position where the opponent could not evade an attack with flanking and rear support.
Zooming out to the larger conversation, I reiterate a point I made earlier in pointing out that how you apply randomness can be much more important than a lot of people tend to consider. It is interesting to note (without judging), that the more dice you throw, the closer to statistical averages you are likely to see (Law of Large Numbers). Thus, in some ways, huge buckets of dice games like Warhammer are actually closer to diceless resolution than games which use only use 1 or 2 dice per combat. When you start a round throwing 40 dice, then re-throwing 30 of them that registered as hits, and the opponent effectively rerolls 20 of those to "save" the wounds... Then the opponent goes and rolls his 30 attack dice, etc, etc. 150 total throws in a single combat out of a half dozen on the board each turn starts making significant deviations from averages quite uncommon. Compare with a WRG DBx type game where a single combat resolution is 1 roll on each side, and thus a much higher variability, and a half dozen dice rolled for an entire turn of combat might be typical, and suddenly that randomness of the classic 1-6 roll feels a lot more impactful.
Another consideration is what are you making measurements of. The standard deviation of human performance isn't that high for bodies of trained troops. Are Spartans really that much better than Athenians because they were individually stronger, faster, more enduring, or so forth and thus won more hand vs hand combats across the length of a battle line? Or did Sparta win because their officers trained enough to be able to follow directions in chaotic tactical battle conditions, and were thus were more often able to perform maneuvers that broke them out of slogging battles of direct attrition and end up with "tactical factors" like getting bodies of troops into flanking positions? Or did they win because at the highest levels their kings and generals strategically they ensured that they didn't take the field in losing conditions and instead refused to give battle until they had superior battlefield and morale conditions? Each of these have different ways they can be represented. Maybe it is fundamentally okay to assume that a Spartan body of troops is within standard deviation of Athenians in close combat score and thus a die roll is fine, but that instead Spartans should have better Command points or scores or whatever allows them to maneuver and rally better, or that they should be the ones to dictate terrain and deployment. In the end, none of these things necessitate the lack or presence of physical randomization; you can construct rules that use any method of unpredictable behaviors, so long as you're putting the unpredictability in the right places.
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TheDaR wrote:
Without weighing in on the rest of the argument, I will disagree with this specific assertion.
Reducto ad absurdum, you have chess. No variability at all, extremely limited board actions allowed, fixed grid, etc. Yet very few people will assert that chess is too predictable. Predicting more than 2-3 moves in advance puts you in the very highest echelons of play. It doesn't matter that you can calculate that a pawn takes a bishop an infinite number of turns in advance; every pieces always takes any other piece if you can force the position such that the attack can happen at all. The trick is putting that pawn where it will be able to take the bishop without giving up other more tactical sound positions.
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But that is my point; if both players in a game of chess, or a diceless wargame, make the same moves, the outcome will be the same.
I contend that is manifestly *not* the case in warfare. Even if the commanders make the same decisions and commit the same units at the same time, the outcome will not be the same. There is randomness in real warfare; even at the level of mass combats. It doesn't even out into some kind of nice statistical smoothness. Outliers can and do occur. Imagine a game of chess where there is a certain percentage chance that a capture fails. Suddenly many things which used to work do not, but conversely some things that were impossible become possible.
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But that is my point; if both players in a game of chess, or a diceless wargame, make the same moves, the outcome will be the same.
But who does that? Chess players aren't trying to replicate a previously played game; they trying to beat their opponent, which means catching them out with a different strategic development and different tactical combinations. Ditto for wargamers, but in their case it's compounded by the fact that no two games start out the same: with hundreds of different army lists to choose from and free deployment on terrain that is different each time, the odds of an identical setup are vanishingly small. Deterministic games in consequence are as variable and unpredictable as dice-driven ones.
And in the real world the same thing can have absolutely the same result if done the same way. When the Romans besieged the hillforts in southern Britain after the initial fighting had been settled, the commander would write a report on the victorious outcome of the engagement before it had even taken place. They knew exactly how to assault a hillfort and got the same routine result each time they did it.
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But that is my point; if both players in a game of chess, or a diceless wargame, make the same moves, the outcome will be the same.
I contend that is manifestly *not* the case in warfare. Even if the commanders make the same decisions and commit the same units at the same time, the outcome will not be the same. There is randomness in real warfare; even at the level of mass combats. It doesn't even out into some kind of nice statistical smoothness. Outliers can and do occur. Imagine a game of chess where there is a certain percentage chance that a capture fails. Suddenly many things which used to work do not, but conversely some things that were impossible become possible.
This ^ This is the point in contention.
Chess is not a solved game. It's beyond current human capability. However there is soft proof that it *can be* solved/.
Someone mentioned that wargames, even diceless, are more complex and therefore even harder to solve. But they can *be* solved, should sufficient computing power become available (decades away unless quantum computing pans out quickly).
I do think there is a distinction between some of the assertions being made:
Compex diceless is more realistic due to being harder to predict - disagree, consensus appears to disagree, logic appears to disagree! It's in practical terms hard to predict but it's deterministic so it's only a matter of capability and the underlying premise that for the same exact set of conditions, the outcome for the same set of actions is identical, is literally the opposite of realistic. If that were true in the real world, free will doesn't exist. One can argue over just how much variance a given army might have in performance if the other parameters on the day were somehow miraculously identical, but there absolutely would be variance.
Complex diceless wargames in practice can be varied enough that the lack of randomness doesn't make the play experience worse or make it 'feel' pre-determined - yes, I think that's fair, as someone referenced for chess a couple of posts ago.
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Compex diceless is more realistic due to being harder to predict - disagree, consensus appears to disagree, logic appears to disagree!
I'm not saying that. My point is that a deterministic wargame better simulates fog of war in that fog of war consists of lack of knowledge of factors that themselves are not random in their operation. Whereas fog of war is best simulated by fog of war, deterministic mechanisms - which are impossible for a human player to calculate in advance right to the conclusion of a game - provide that imperfect knowledge of effects that are not random. Dice provide lack of knowledge but only of random effects which correspond to nothing in the real world.
As for the human factor - not knowing how an opponent's forces will act - that is supplied by the opponent himself. Two human beings playing a deterministic game ensure that gameplay is anything but deterministic. Free will remains intact.
With the caveat that this works only for games where units represent large bodies of men whose individual behaviours average out. It doesn't work for a skirmish-level game where the individual is the unit and the complex web of cause and effect in a human being is impossible to simulate with deterministic mechanisms.
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I'm not saying that. My point is that a deterministic wargame better simulates fog of war in that fog of war consists of lack of knowledge of factors that themselves are not random in their operation. Whereas fog of war is best simulated by fog of war, deterministic mechanisms - which are impossible for a human player to calculate in advance right to the conclusion of a game - provide that imperfect knowledge of effects that are not random. Dice provide lack of knowledge but only of random effects which correspond to nothing in the real world.
As for the human factor - not knowing how an opponent's forces will act - that is supplied by the opponent himself. Two human beings playing a deterministic game ensure that gameplay is anything but deterministic. Free will remains intact.
With the caveat that this works only for games where units represent large bodies of men whose individual behaviours average out. It doesn't work for a skirmish-level game where the individual is the unit and the complex web of cause and effect in a human being is impossible to simulate with deterministic mechanisms.
The real world is inherently not deterministic. Further, all the factors which affect the outcome of a combat are not just unknown, they are unknowable.
If two units fight twice, the outcome will differ, maybe by only a few percentage points, but maybe not. Sometimes a random event during a combat can have a huge effect; for instance, you might say that a well formed square in a Napoleonic game can never be broken, but then you get instances like a dead horse falling across it and the square being broken. Very unlikely, but it did happen. A deterministic system cannot model such outliers; it assumes that things will be nicely in the middle of the bell curve at all times. That is misleading. Effects do not always average out.
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I feel like there is maybe some talking past each other going on here? Sorry if that sounds condescending, it really isn't meant to be. I'm not trying to over-explain anything to anyone, just trying to keep up with the debate!
Bolingar - and apologies if I am misunderstanding you - you seem to be very focussed on how to model "fog of war".
Steve and others - and again apologies if I am misunderstanding you - seem to be more focused on a different point, which is that there is something unrealistic about combat resolution with no randomness.
I agree (with Bolingar) that much of the fog of war is down to imperfect information, which this thread has convinced me can be modelled quite well in a deterministic set of rules.
But agreeing on that doesn't take away from what I take Steve's (and Boneio's, unless I've got it wrong) main point to be: that every violent encounter on a battlefield goes the way it goes in part due to pure luck, so a ruleset that aspires to realism (insofar as any truly can) should leave room for some degree of randomisation affecting combat resolution.
For me, that point is where I really part company with the idea of wholly deterministic combat resolution, though it was only through reading the thread that I came to realise this. Leaving aside the extreme cases (e.g. trying to shoot down a Stuka with a pistol; or exceptional elite forces coming up against very poor rabble), I do not know of any reason to think that when large numbers of people are involved violent encounters become less subject to the effects of pure luck.
I guess it might also depend on the relevant victory conditions. E.g. no sane person gaming Iwo Jima is going to stipulate the Japanese need to drive the Marines back into the sea. If *that* is what victory looks like for Japan, then yeah, as Bolingar said of the Spartans vs Athenians, every single time one side is going to win. But as soon as you stipulate more interesting victory conditions, it seems realistic (to me at least) to think that very careful planning and some good luck is going to be needed to carry the day.
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SteveBurt, that?s not quite accurate about the real world- it definitely is deterministic. If it was not deterministic, chains of cause and effect wouldn?t be a thing, but they are. The problem is that the precise cause and effect chain can only be traced accurately after the events have occurred. The reason that is the case is that nearly all real-world phenomena that happen on scales human beings are interested in during day to day life (including military combat) are outcomes of complex adaptive systems - systems with large numbers of mutually influencing parts. Interactions between parts are completely deterministic (something causes something else) but the final outcome is usually the result of multiple sets of interactions, so knowing how a small part works does not tell us how the whole thing behaves. Statistics help for prediction, because over a large number of repetitions (or a large number of events happening at the same time) most outcomes fall within a limited range of variation. But statistical prediction only takes us so far because not all outcomes do, and a complex phenomenon will occasionally produce unexpected outcomes. Those unexpected outcomes look random (and may as well be, for the purposes of predicting when they will occur) but they are generated by 100% deterministic processes.
For the purposes of wargaming, the game designer?s task is to define what phenomenon they are trying to depict, at what scale of interaction, figure out how the parts at that scale usually interact, then come up with game mechanics that generate plausible outcomes in an elegant way (which to me means relatively few modifiers and exceptions). Using dice or cards usually achieves that (it proxies for the deterministic interactions at lower levels that influence the outcome - a shot horse disrupting a charge, or a subordinate officer making a really bad choice, etc). But, as I said a few posts earlier in this thread, a fully deterministic set of rules could also do the job. It just might not be worth the additional effort?
BelligerentParrot, I missed your points, must have been typing at the same time! I think your summary is fair (possibly because you have landed on pretty well on similar conclusions ;) ). It seems like the main point of divergence for game design is how much randomization is a reasonable representation of the impact of unknowable variables in a battle. There?s a pretty wide range!
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SteveBurt, that?s not quite accurate about the real world- it definitely is deterministic. If it was not deterministic, chains of cause and effect wouldn?t be a thing, but they are. The problem is that the precise cause and effect chain can only be traced accurately after the events have occurred. The reason that is the case is that nearly all real-world phenomena that happen on scales human beings are interested in during day to day life (including military combat) are outcomes of complex adaptive systems - systems with large numbers of mutually influencing parts. Interactions between parts are completely deterministic (something causes something else) but the final outcome is usually the result of multiple sets of interactions, so knowing how a small part works does not tell us how the whole thing behaves. Statistics help for prediction, because over a large number of repetitions (or a large number of events happening at the same time) most outcomes fall within a limited range of variation. But statistical prediction only takes us so far because not all outcomes do, and a complex phenomenon will occasionally produce unexpected outcomes. Those unexpected outcomes look random (and may as well be, for the purposes of predicting when they will occur) but they are generated by 100% deterministic processes.
For the purposes of wargaming, the game designer?s task is to define what phenomenon they are trying to depict, at what scale of interaction, figure out how the parts at that scale usually interact, then come up with game mechanics that generate plausible outcomes in an elegant way (which to me means relatively few modifiers and exceptions). Using dice or cards usually achieves that (it proxies for the deterministic interactions at lower levels that influence the outcome - a shot horse disrupting a charge, or a subordinate officer making a really bad choice, etc). But, as I said a few posts earlier in this thread, a fully deterministic set of rules could also do the job. It just might not be worth the additional effort?
At the lowest level, down in the quantum realm, reality is probabilistic, not deterministic. You can say that 50% of the atoms in your radioactive sample will have decayed after a certain time. But you can never say, even in principle, when a particular atom will decay. There is no 'cause' which makes it decay at a particular moment, and there is no system of hidden known variables which can reproduce quantum behaviour.
However, that's beside the point. The point is the one you bring up next. Complex systems exhibit chaotic behaviour. The three body problem is a good example, so is the weather, and combat is another. Tiny variations in initial conditions, or events which you can never model, influence the outcomes. So while it might be deterministic in principle, in practice it exhibits chaotic behaviour. 95% (or whatever) of the time the legionaries will withstand the charge of the Gauls, but the other 5% something happens (maybe a centurion dies, an order is misinterpreted, the Gauls are a bit bigger and have more impressive moustaches.
The job of the game designer is to decide what the outcomes should be, and what the probability of each one should be. A lot of that is educated guesswork, plus playtesting. But if the rules say the Romans always withstand the charge, they are not doing their job properly.
Spartans beat other hoplites pretty consistently, until they didn't. What changed? Maybe the Spartans were less good, maybe Epaminondas came up with novel tactics. But the point is that nobody, certainly not the Spartans, and probably not the Thebans either, knew who was going to win. Once the Spartans had been beaten, their mystique was lost. It would certainly not be realistic to let either commander go into battle knowing that his tactics would work for sure. I'm not talking about the evolution of a battle here; hoplite battles were very static affairs until one side broke. In a deterministic set of rules you know exactly what will happen in that first clash. That might be correct for many battles featuring Spartans, but not for all (some of their initial struggles against Argos also seem to have been close run).
Claiming the a deterministic set can reproduce fog of war may have some truth, but clearly a set with chance involved can also do so. Taking chance out doesn't make the rules more realistic.
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Someone mentioned that wargames, even diceless, are more complex and therefore even harder to solve. But they can *be* solved, should sufficient computing power become available (decades away unless quantum computing pans out quickly).
I'd argue that most wargame rule sets, even if otherwise entirely free of randomizers, would not be algorithmically solvable. The instant you put any sort of movement or terrain placement into the game which does not rely on a strict units of measure on a fixed board (grid, hex, territories, or any other analogue of an undirected graph), the choice of each action becomes potentially infinite and in turn unsolvable.
I do think there is a distinction between some of the assertions being made:
Compex diceless is more realistic due to being harder to predict - disagree, consensus appears to disagree, logic appears to disagree! It's in practical terms hard to predict but it's deterministic so it's only a matter of capability and the underlying premise that for the same exact set of conditions, the outcome for the same set of actions is identical, is literally the opposite of realistic. If that were true in the real world, free will doesn't exist. One can argue over just how much variance a given army might have in performance if the other parameters on the day were somehow miraculously identical, but there absolutely would be variance.
Complex diceless wargames in practice can be varied enough that the lack of randomness doesn't make the play experience worse or make it 'feel' pre-determined - yes, I think that's fair, as someone referenced for chess a couple of posts ago.
Agreed. Again, I think the general issue in this thread is the mistaking of any sort of physical randomization as the only possible source for unpredictability and that it needs to be applied to most or even every possible action to get "realistic" uncertain results. There are lots of non-mechanical ways to introduce unpredictable results. Hidden information, bidding, resource management, rock-paper-scissors effects, etc. There's also lots of ways you can engage with randomness (or lack thereof) in the rules.
Let's do a mini game design exercise showing how big this space can potentially be.
Imagine a game where all combat resolution is deterministic. It doesn't even have to be complex, simple attack and defense values like a board game with some number of wounds/hit points/morale to reflect durability, just 3 simple stats and a unit type. We keep the idea of the standard WRG/DBx type tactical factors, such that flanking and herding your opponent into unfavorable ground and how various unit types interact matters, affecting how much "damage" occurs as a result of combat. But each player also has stack of tokens equal to the number of units with a pair of small modifiers to attack and defense (such as +1/-1, or -2/+1, or 0/+2, etc), with the totals of attack and defense across all tokens summing to 0. The numerical effect of tokens should be to change how much a combat is won or lost by or nudge very close combats one way or the other, rather than being the primary factor. Maybe a recoil becomes a rout, a unit that should have broken hangs on by the skin of its teeth in the face of a charge, or a bloody and expensive victory becomes a steamroll of negligible loss.
In our first set of game variations, we'll go with allocating tokens repeatedly, either per combat or at least per turn. As a result, like in many wargame rule sets, units may vary in capability over the course of the game. They get a token when needed (either at combat time or the beginning of a turn) and only keep it until their next combat is resolved. Despite this, one version is still completely randomless, and only one is completely random each time in the style of traditional wargames.
First we play the most traditional wargame version of the game where on every combat resolution, both sides blindly draw one token from their own bag, treating the tokens as pure mechanical randomizers, until the bag is emptied and refilled with the discarded tokens. The tokens here might as well be dice, and have all the same strengths and weaknesses any such game design would have. Every combat has some degree of uncertainty and unpredictability due to the tokens, but playing to the fixed tactical factors can mitigate that to a large degree, since the modifiers are fairly small. The use of a set of fixed tokens that are exhausted does at least mean that no one has to suffer the effect of an unrelieved string of very good or very bad draws, every token is seen once per bag refill. There's a large degree of mechanical randomization here, every combat on every turn sees a new randomization.
Second variation we flip the script completely. For each combat you can choose any one of your undiscarded tokens to give to a unit until the end of the turn. You can't reuse any token until you've discarded all of them. Now there's no actual randomness involved at all, but still a great degree of uncertainty; you have no idea which tokens your opponent will chose to allocate. Maybe he plays his aggressive tokens on one flank and his defensive ones in the center. Maybe the reverse. Maybe you have to not use an aggressive token in one combat to shore up the line in order to guarantee an effective unit kill elsewhere. Every action you have to play the same guessing game of which token will most effectively counter or overcome your opponent's. Plenty of fog of war, you never know each action if your opponent's units will be especially effective or not.
Third we do the same as second, but at the turn level. Each turn allocate one token to each unit until the end of turn. Same general guessing game, but now you have to anticipate all the potential combats you could potentially get involved in, not just making the best choice as they happen. Still no mechanical randomness, but high unpredictability because both sides have to guess what the other will do.
Next, we give a similar turn level treatment to random allocation. At the beginning of each turn we blindly distribute one token to each remaining unit without a token, and only flip it face up if that unit engages in some sort of combat, and then discarding all face up tokens at the end of the turn. Some tokens will have no effect in a turn, if that unit doesn't get into combat. There's no knowledge of which token is where until combat occurs, so you can't do too much planning around it. Every combat is still uncertain, maybe even more so, since some tokens are effectively out of play each turn. But if a unit does engage in multiple actions (perhaps because they are shot at and then charged, then perform a combat during pursuit), their performance remains consistent for the whole turn, so the total randomization is probably slightly smaller than our first version.
Last is a mixing of the previous two, to reduce but still keep some amount of mechanical randomness. At the start of the turn each player blind draws tokens one at a time, then looks at and places them face down on a remaining unit without a token, until all units have one. At the end of the turn any revealed tokens are returned to the unused pile. In the beginning of the match there's no real randomness as every tokens will end up on a unit, but as units are removed from play, the pool of available tokens is larger than the number of units and some tokens will remain unrevealed on the field, so you can't count on drawing the exact tokens you want for each unit every turn. You still have fog of war in that you don't even know in advance what tokens are on enemy units, but have knowledge (if not exact control) of your own forces. This nicely feeds into the idea of commanders slowly losing surety of control as the battlefield grows chaotic.
Now a set of variations where instead of doing token allocations every turn, we do them at deployment time, placing the tokens face down beside the unit. They stay face down until that unit engages in combat of some sort, at which point they're flipped up and revealed, but stay the same value until the end of the game.
First variation here is to blindly allocate tokens at deployment. Neither side knows the exact performance of their units until they engage, and only thereafter can they accurately plan around unit capabilities, but said capabilities are consistent. Here you've got a good representation of many aspects of fog of war in a large mass combat scenario. Some units are just having good luck or a good day, and others might not be (or if the modifiers aren't symmetrical, maybe they're feeling aggressive but not very disciplined, or stubborn but worn out), but no one knows for sure until it's go time. It's a fairly small amount of mechanical randomization compared to per turn or per combat allocations, just once at the beginning of the game and then never thereafter, but still a high degree of uncertainty, especially in the early game.
Next variation, each player gets to select a small number of tokens based on the rating of their commander/army and place them where they like, and then every other token is shuffled and placed blindly. Each general knows how a few of their units are going to do, but a majority of their units are still somewhat uncertain. Same fog of war applies, you know nothing of your opponent's forces (except maybe by reading on their few units that move with more purpose because the opponent knows what they're doing), and only a bit more about yours. There's even less mechanical randomization overall, but still more or less the exact same level of uncertainty and unpredictability.
Final variation, each side gets to select which token to place on each unit during deployment. From the other side of the table the lack of information is exactly the same, you still have no idea to start which of your opponents units have which bonuses or penalties until first engagement, except maybe by divining what they're doing with specific units before they're engaged. So you've still got the same fog of war effect to nearly the exact same degree, because the lack of information on opponent capabilities is still equal and symmetrical. But there's now exactly zero mechanical randomization anywhere in the rules again, despite the conditions of combat being highly uncertain, especially until most units have engaged at least once.
So more than a half dozen variation of the rules. The exact same physical components, the exact same simple deterministic resolution mechanics for combat, with the only difference being how a unit gets their modifier token. Multiple versions where the randomness/choice is made every turn, multiple where it's done strictly at deployment. All use hidden information in some form, except the token draw on every combat variation. All of these variations and only really 1 of them is even remotely equivalent to "just roll dice for every action". Some have a lot of mechanical randomness, some have very little, and some have none. How, and even if, we choose mechanical randomization ends up mattering quite a bit in terms of game feel, but relatively little in terms of actual uncertainty and unpredictability of play, thanks to the hidden information.
You could mix and match aspects of several of these variations. Here's just a few random examples I thought of while typing this up.
- Select some number of units to get specific tokens at deployment face down, then for every other unit you have to draw from the bag each turn or even each combat (representing some units which are very consistent, while others are more fickle).
- When placing random/blind tokens, but the player gets to look at them upon placing them (but maybe not after that) so they have knowledge but not control.
- Revealed tokens are turned face down at turn end, as part of player skill testing (did that unit there have +2/-1 or +1/0... it was 3 turns ago, now I don't remember....).
- Tokens are allocated face up so both sides can see. Maybe only some are face down based on various factors.
- Tokens are only discarded when a unit takes damage to their durability/morale score, otherwise they remain in play (face up or flipped down, depending on other variation rules choices).
- Instead of one per every unit every combat/turn, each side has a limited number of tokens to allocate, or limits to how many can be deployed per turn, leading to some combats with no modifier tokens involved
And this is just the tip of the iceberg in the design space. All these are variations on one basic core mechanic, hidden information, and the possibility of chosen or random allocation of a fixed set of resources. I've workshopped similar ideas around using Rock-Paper-Scissors type mechanics, including variations with 4, 5, or 6 "elements", or using cards where you can't replay the same card the next turn, but your hand might be larger than 3 and thus have more than 1 of the same element in it. Where success of a specific type allows you to activate unit or army level special abilities (and each faction could purchase extra cards with their own faction-specific special abilities as part of their roster). Or each card gives different numerical bonuses depending on win/loss/draw, rather than being just an absolute win/loss/draw.
You could easily go in a dozen different directions for less-randomized more-deterministic rules without giving up any degree of uncertainty or fog-of-war unpredictability. Chris Engle's Ritter series of games, mentioned earlier, uses a deterministic combat matrix list, relying on positioning and very limited active actions per turn relative to force sizes. The Crystal Clans board game has a shared track for "initiative points", and various actions cost different points, and once you've spent into your opponent's side of the track, they take over the turn until they've spent back to your side, in combination with a Rock-Paper-Scissor effects on various unit cards. Imagine extending this to a wargame where you could buy varying degrees of success if you won the RPS aspect or the reverse, spend points on actions and RPS determines the degree of success. Either way you have a combination of guessing game and resource management to give you unpredictable results, as you'll never know for sure what your opponent will choose to spend on or which RPS element they'll decide to use for a given action, but neither is truly random, mechanically speaking.
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@TheDaR: very thorough and very interesting, thank you!
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The real world is inherently not deterministic. Further, all the factors which affect the outcome of a combat are not just unknown, they are unknowable.
If two units fight twice, the outcome will differ, maybe by only a few percentage points, but maybe not. Sometimes a random event during a combat can have a huge effect; for instance, you might say that a well formed square in a Napoleonic game can never be broken, but then you get instances like a dead horse falling across it and the square being broken. Very unlikely, but it did happen. A deterministic system cannot model such outliers; it assumes that things will be nicely in the middle of the bell curve at all times. That is misleading. Effects do not always average out.
It's true that there are individual events that can substantially affect the outcome of a battle or even determine it: a small force appears over a crest on the enemy's flank, the enemy mistakes it for the arrival of an entire new army and routs in consequence; a keg of gunpowder unexpectedly explodes during a battle, nearby raw recruits panic and run, triggering a general rout, and so on. But - as you say - these events are rare and wargamers don't actually model them: Throw a D100. If you get 99 something spooks your army and it automatically routs. Meh. Dice certainly don't model them, since unexpected events don't substantially affect every single combat of every single unit in every single turn. Wargamers affirm that a typical unit will substantially vary in combat capabilities every 10 or 15 minutes and dice perfectly replicate that. I say bollocks: dice are an integral part of wargaming purely and simply because they are fun: they supply the gambler's thrill: the odds are good but who knows? Will I make it? Won't I make it?....Yes!
BTW very interesting thread chaps, and I appreciate the thought you've put into the posts. :)
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At the lowest level, down in the quantum realm, reality is probabilistic, not deterministic. You can say that 50% of the atoms in your radioactive sample will have decayed after a certain time. But you can never say, even in principle, when a particular atom will decay. There is no 'cause' which makes it decay at a particular moment, and there is no system of hidden known variables which can reproduce quantum behaviour.
That sounds a bit odd: I don't think purely spontaneous behaviour is a thing with matter, though it can be with free will. Does quantum theory allow for a possible causality in decay?
However, that's beside the point. The point is the one you bring up next. Complex systems exhibit chaotic behaviour. The three body problem is a good example, so is the weather, and combat is another. Tiny variations in initial conditions, or events which you can never model, influence the outcomes. So while it might be deterministic in principle, in practice it exhibits chaotic behaviour. 95% (or whatever) of the time the legionaries will withstand the charge of the Gauls, but the other 5% something happens (maybe a centurion dies, an order is misinterpreted, the Gauls are a bit bigger and have more impressive moustaches.
The three body problem is a good example of the incalculability of deterministic causes. Orbital mechanics is deterministic just impossible to predict in the case of three objects orbiting each other. I wish you'd give Optio a try - it has the same unpredictability, surprises all the time. Point is that that unpredictability doesn't require bigger Gauls or bigger moustaches. My contention is that a large enough body of men will behave in a predictable way within narrow parameters, enough to assign determinism to it. It excludes wild and rare events that would make it behave differently, but I think wargamers exclude such events anyway.
The job of the game designer is to decide what the outcomes should be, and what the probability of each one should be. A lot of that is educated guesswork, plus playtesting. But if the rules say the Romans always withstand the charge, they are not doing their job properly.
Why not? Here's the question: wargamers accept that one unit that is seriously superior to another must beat it, every single time. So knights charging skirmisher foot in open terrain must overrun them, every single time. If the skirmisher foot rout the knights then the player will conclude, quite naturally, that there is something wrong with his ruleset. But if decent quality legionaries are notably superior to Gallic warband, why shouldn't they beat them in open terrain, every single time, if no external factor affects their performance? At what point must the inferior unit be near enough in quality to the superior unit to have a chance of beating it? When things are balanced on a knife, with both units virtually equal, then sure, you need something that can tip the balance. In my system commanders affect combat performance and a die is thrown for a commander after each combat. If he gets a 6 twice he is dead and his unit is in trouble. Dice for individuals is fine and that's your balance-tipper.
Spartans beat other hoplites pretty consistently, until they didn't. What changed? Maybe the Spartans were less good, maybe Epaminondas came up with novel tactics.
Exactly. You need to change the numbers for the Spartans to lose. The Theban column drives them back irresistably, not because Thebans are better hoplites, but because the column is a tactic the Spartans hadn't catered for. Or you swop out real Spartan hoplites for inferior hoplites that are Spartan in name only. You have to change something.
But the point is that nobody, certainly not the Spartans, and probably not the Thebans either, knew who was going to win.
Epaminondas knew he was going to win because he had a massive modifier the Spartans had no answer for. The player knows this too: Theban column +2 in melee combat. Nothing random about that.
Once the Spartans had been beaten, their mystique was lost. It would certainly not be realistic to let either commander go into battle knowing that his tactics would work for sure. I'm not talking about the evolution of a battle here; hoplite battles were very static affairs until one side broke. In a deterministic set of rules you know exactly what will happen in that first clash. That might be correct for many battles featuring Spartans, but not for all (some of their initial struggles against Argos also seem to have been close run).
Claiming the a deterministic set can reproduce fog of war may have some truth, but clearly a set with chance involved can also do so. Taking chance out doesn't make the rules more realistic.
Again, to alter the sure and certain outcome of a superior vs inferior unit combat, you have to either convert the superior unit into an inferior one, or impose an external modifier - which is better represented as a fixed combat modifier, not a random dice throw.
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That sounds a bit odd: I don't think purely spontaneous behaviour is a thing with matter, though it can be with free will. Does quantum theory allow for a possible causality in decay?The three body problem is a good example of the incalculability of deterministic causes. Orbital mechanics is deterministic just impossible to predict in the case of three objects orbiting each other. I wish you'd give Optio a try - it has the same unpredictability, surprises all the time. Point is that that unpredictability doesn't require bigger Gauls or bigger moustaches. My contention is that a large enough body of men will behave in a predictable way within narrow parameters, enough to assign determinism to it. It excludes wild and rare events that would make it behave differently, but I think wargamers exclude such events anyway.Why not? Here's the question: wargamers accept that one unit that is seriously superior to another must beat it, every single time. So knights charging skirmisher foot in open terrain must overrun them, every single time. If the skirmisher foot rout the knights then the player will conclude, quite naturally, that there is something wrong with his ruleset. But if decent quality legionaries are notably superior to Gallic warband, why shouldn't they beat them in open terrain, every single time, if no external factor affects their performance? At what point must the inferior unit be near enough in quality to the superior unit to have a chance of beating it? When things are balanced on a knife, with both units virtually equal, then sure, you need something that can tip the balance. In my system commanders affect combat performance and a die is thrown for a commander after each combat. If he gets a 6 twice he is dead and his unit is in trouble. Dice for individuals is fine and that's your balance-tipper.Exactly. You need to change the numbers for the Spartans to lose. The Theban column drives them back irresistably, not because Thebans are better hoplites, but because the column is a tactic the Spartans hadn't catered for. Or you swop out real Spartan hoplites for inferior hoplites that are Spartan in name only. You have to change something.Epaminondas knew he was going to win because he had a massive modifier the Spartans had no answer for. The player knows this too: Theban column +2 in melee combat. Nothing random about that.Again, to alter the sure and certain outcome of a superior vs inferior unit combat, you have to either convert the superior unit into an inferior one, or impose an external modifier - which is better represented as a fixed combat modifier, not a random dice throw.
This has been a very interesting discussion.
I don't agree that wargames don't allow for unlikely events. I can think of plenty of rules where things with a very low probability do occur occasionally, even if most of the time the results are predictable. In DBA, if I throw a 6 and you throw a 1 (only a 1 in 36 chance) we may well see an outlier result. In a system using d10, a 1/10 split is a 1% chance. Likewise, 'buckets of dice' systems will mostly give results in the middle of the curve, but every once in a while you'll throw 4 6s or whatever. Very unlikely things will happen from time to time. Not too often; that would be neither realistic nor fun to play.
My problem with the Theban/Spartan fight I think goes to the heart of our disagreement. You say that the Theban commander knows he has a +2. Of course, the Spartan commander knows that too. Because there is no chance involved, we know what the outcome will be.
But in the real battle, neither side knew what the outcome would be. You have given the commanders too much information.
My contention is that some randomness better models that lack of information than a fixed system. The Theban commander may know he has an edge, but he can't be sure of what will happen until the fight has started. If the Spartan knows that his unit may survive the initial impact of the Sacred Band for long enough, he can hope to win the fight with the rest of his line, but if he knows what will happen, he will not engage, and the historical battle will never happen.
I'm unlikely to try Optio not because it is diceless, but because in your shots of battles I see each unit carrying around a little tray of markers. Way too much book-keeping for my taste, I'm afraid. To the Strongest is more my thing.
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I think we're perhaps in danger of going in circles and certainly, as can easily happen in debates about complex topics, some of us are arguing slightly different points to one another, I agree with whoever pointed that out lol
Also echoing both above that it's an interesting conversation :)
Just to attempt pr?cis again:
- Modelling fog of war can be more realistic with a diceless system than one with some manner of randomisation - my position has shifted a little following the examples given recently, I feel it is reasonable to say that a complex deterministic decision space can be in practical terms just as (or more) 'unpredictable' feeling to the players, but I still think it doesn't meet the definition of being a more realistic simulation in strict terms. I can agree that it certainly can reasonably simulate the experience of being a commanding general as long as hidden information is a key mechanism.
- Combat outcomes can be statistically predictable enough that removing randomness of outcome is OK - in a purely game sense, of course that's down to preference and many games play well in this manner; in terms of real-life engagement modelling I am never going to agree, the variables are too complex and nobody repeats the same or similar enough battles so we'll never really know, other than looking to general statistical modelling etc.
- Trying to not incorrectly paraphrase Bolingar - dice are only used because gamers like the risk/reward thrill - strongly disagree, dice are used in many different ways to model unknown outcomes and to make the game be not just a battle of will vs will (as chess is, really)
- Again trying to not incorrectly paraphrase Bolingar - the use of randomness can result in uncomfortably jarring outcomes - yes, but that's down to the system not the principle of randomness. As someone else pointed out, the probablity curves are often a lot flatter than people intuitively think, GW games (especially current ones) being a great example. Although they are still often hinging on some key rolls, so the point here isn't to prove/disprove the assertion but to highlight it's a scale from very random to only slightly random
As an aside it seems that we don't actually know if randomness is real - quantum theory says yes, but some sub-field of quantum theory so no, we just don't know all the variables yet lol I discourage thinking too deeply about it as you may wind up convincing yourself that free will isn't real and that you as a person will always take exactly the same actions under exactly the same circumstances etc o_o More spiritual people may have a way out of that thought trap regardless lol
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Very nicely put, Boneio! I don't have anything to add other than this:
I discourage thinking too deeply about it as you may wind up convincing yourself that free will isn't real and that you as a person will always take exactly the same actions under exactly the same circumstances etc o_o
Honestly, if there is no free will then the idea of convincing yourself of anything also goes out the window, doesn't it? (Convincing yourself is a judgement, and so presupposes the spontaneity of reason, which determinism seems to foreclose. Sorry, this is a rare moment where LAF converges with my day job - philosopher - so I am legitimately working in replying to this lol)
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I think we're perhaps in danger of going in circles and certainly, as can easily happen in debates about complex topics, some of us are arguing slightly different points to one another, I agree with whoever pointed that out lol
Quite ;) :D lol
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oozlum_bird
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Very nicely put, Boneio! I don't have anything to add other than this:
Honestly, if there is no free will then the idea of convincing yourself of anything also goes out the window, doesn't it? (Convincing yourself is a judgement, and so presupposes the spontaneity of reason, which determinism seems to foreclose. Sorry, this is a rare moment where LAF converges with my day job - philosopher - so I am legitimately working in replying to this lol)
I think you may have won my award for 'most awesome job on LAF' lol
For what it's worth (which won't be much to a professional such as yourself, I'm sure!), my current belief is that consciousness is simply one becoming aware of the decision, the decision actually having happened by either a minute random event which then cascades into being perceived as a choice (why did I put the glass down at that exact moment rather than one just before or just after, those moments being equal insofar as a conscious choice goes...?), or being effectively predetermined and inevitable.
I am quite concerned that the growth of 'AI', LLMs, neural networks etc will lead us to understand that the brain and consciousness is simply an incredibly complicated but deterministic machine that only appears to possess free will because the variables are so immense and rapidly processed.
But... I haven't thought too much about it because it's a bit depressing and I'm distantly aware there are some quite nice contra-positions. lol o_o
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Quite ;) :D lol
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oozlum_bird
This is new to me... I resemble this remark lol lol
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This is new to me... I resemble this remark lol lol
LOL sorry I couldn't resist, if you are old enough to remember "Carry on up the Jungle" then you may remember the expedition to capture the Oozlum bird ;D :D