What's it like playing a diceless wargame?

[Bolingar]

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.

[Elbows]

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.

[Legionnaire]

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!  To most people's amusement  !

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.

[Bolingar]

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.

[Belligerentparrot]

+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.

[Bolingar]

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.

[traveller]

One-Hour Skirmish Wargames, a brilliant game system using only ordinary playing cards 

[Belligerentparrot]

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.

[jon_1066]

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. 

[Bolingar]

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.

[Bolingar]

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.

[Pattus Magnus]

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.

[Belligerentparrot]

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.

[robh]

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

[Cubs]

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.