What's it like playing a diceless wargame?

[Harry Faversham]

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

Wot he said!
 

[Bolingar]

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.

[Ethelred the Almost Ready]

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. 

[TheDaR]

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."

[Hitman]

Hey Easy E....use the following:

Rock-Paper-Scissor-Lizard-Spock

🤪🤣🙂

[Bolingar]

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.

[mikedemana]

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

[Bolingar]

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 and VASSAL module here.

[SteveBurt]

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

[Elbows]

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.

[TheDaR]

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.

[Bolingar]

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.

[SteveBurt]

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.

[Bolingar]

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.

[jon_1066]

?
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.