One of the ideas that seems to have come and gone in miniatures without ever really having "it's day," is "role playing. " Some systems, like "The Sword and The Flame," were designed to introduce elements of "role playing" into classic miniatures battles. Other more esoteric systems have also been tried. All suffered from problems caused by combining two genres with very different game philosophies and methods.

In role playing one person, a non-player, is the game master, and he or she provides the entire world around the player characters and with which the latter interact. The players represent only themselves and make decisions only for their own character. Their character is defined by ascribed statistics in certain categories like strength, intelligence, dexterity, etc.

Miniatures are completely different. In miniatures the "world" is absent or abstracted, and in fact mostly extraneous. Its impact on the game is limited. The player does not represent a single personality but several, and corporate personalities (units, wings, groups) rather than individual. Often there is no "game-master" or umpire.

Having been both a miniatures gamer and an adventure gamer for many years, and having done a lot of "Dungeonmastering," I soon realized that, in role playing, any increase of figures controlled by one person, soon brought into the game elements of classic miniatures that were destructive to the role playing.

For example, in one adventure, because of the specifically difficult nature of the challenge, and my own perverse desire to experiment with situations, players were able to recruit up to five or six "henchmen". In effect they could "play" up to five or six additional characters. The D&D adventure soon degenerated into a miniatures game. The players were unable to role play each henchman individually and wound up making collective decisions for all of them.

At the same time the players ceased to be individuals. Their own "characters" became little more than "super-henchmen" and the players were far more involved in coordinating the activities of their group of figures, taking care that the wounded were not dragged away to be eaten, reinforcing "gaps" in the line etc., than in acting out the "persona" of their game character. They acted, in fact, like squad leaders because they had become squad leaders. In the end the extraordinary abilities of their game characters were not used at all, but their own initiative, imagination, and skill as small-unit leaders had far more of an importance.

What Do You Mean By Role Playing?

By role playing I mean the small-scale "street theatre" that is so much a part of the genre. The acting out of the persona one has chosen is the chief attraction of role-playing and this is only peripherally achieved by having "stats" that reflect bulging muscles or extraordinary agility. Thus any attempt to introduce this into miniatures games of a more classic style will fail because players simply cannot keep the act going when they have to step out of it constantly to handle the minutia and decisions of a miniatures game.

Yet this does not mean that all elements of role playing are incompatible with a wargame, only that the role playing must be expressed by collective individuality. This is not an oxymoron.

Each and every army (even different armies of the same country) have attributes and personalities just like individuals. Knowledge, training, religion, habits, mores, predispositions, social status, and habits are differentiators between armies as surely as they are between persons. While I do not mean that an army has a "collective soul" or a real spiritual consciousness, there is a real autonomous self-aware entity created by every army, nevertheless it frequently acts as if there were. For example no one would deny there was a fundamental difference, between the "character" of Lee's Army of Northern Virginia, and the Army of the Potomac.

Modern buisno-babble calls this "corporate culture, " and much the same thing applies in military matters. Writers contemporary to the army called it the "soul" or "spirit" of the army. Indeed, one could point out significant differences between the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia, and the Confederate Army of the Tennessee. The two armies were, although drawn from the same society and the same human material, completely different entities, and in fact, the Army of Tennessee resembled far more the Union Army of the Potomac.

Thus, role playing comes about not through the role playing as individuals but through that of the armies. This is really only to be expected, and rather more useful than actual role-playing. It would seem rather silly for a gamer to go around the table with his hand stuck into his shirt if he was playing Napoleon. This is not the least of it. Would a World War II gamer playing the Germans have to, as Hitler, subject his deputy commanders to a three hour infantile tantrum-tirade, laced with obtuse and arcane references to German history, garbled Nietschean philosophy, and crack-pot theories of race, uber and untermench? Would his sub-commanders then be obligated, in the spirit of correct role playing, to attempt to assassinate him? Obviously I exaggerate, but the hyperbole points to the difficulty of a strict link. On the other hand, while the individual personalities of the commanders cannot be easily (or at all) employed, their armies can.

To do role playing on this level first requires a clear understanding of the army one is commanding, and the basic composition of it will begin the basic role playing. Role playing is in a sense acting, ancl in acting (be it comic or dramatic) the actor exaggerates and the characteristics of the subject. No villain, for example is as villainous as Shakespeare s Richard III, no woman so lovely as Juliet. No hero can approach, Sigfried, Orlando, or Ivanhoe.

The first thing to therefore establish is what kind of army you would like to command. This is not at all the same thing as desiring an invincible army. In miniatures role-playing, objective invincibility or winning, must become entirely extraneous to the game.

Winning Isn't Everything

Let me illustrate this by an anecdote. Years ago, Ed Manning and I played SPI's "WinterWar" a great deal. After about 50 games Ed refused to play it with me anymore because he said that he could not win. I remonstrated with him that in all the times we played he had won 95% of the games! He said "Yes, I have won but you are never defeated. It doesn t matter which side you play, Russians or Finns, at the end, you have a serene self-satisfied look when you gaze on the enormous pile of destroyed Russian units."

It was true. It is the nature of most of mankind to sympathize with the under-dog (for we are all, if we are not rich, underdogs) and where could one find more under of an underdog than Finland in the Soviet-Finnish Conflict. So powerful is this emotion that even the ostensible "top-dog" in a game becomes complicitous in his own defeat. As I recalled what Ed had said, I realized that even when I, as the Soviets, had won hands down, that enormous pile of Soviet dead was more valuable to me than the winning. Not because I despised or hated the Russians or Communists, but because no one roots for Goliath.

Winning according to the victory conditions had become completely irrelevant. I had my own victory conditions. This phenomena is not peculiar to me alone. Another friend, Pat Quinn, freely admits he plays, not for winning or losing (although that gives some "structure" to the game, but to "arrange the beauty of the action" as he puts it. To marshall the soldiers and units in an archetypical a way and to contrive to bring about artful, or dramatic events, even if such events are utterly disastrous to his own side. Defeat is not important so long as the overriding "art" of the game he had in his mind is fulfilled. As Pat (who, as I, also loves Opera) notes, "When Valhalla falls in Gotterdammerung, it must really fall, The Gods and Heroes must struggle valiantly, superlatively, extravagantly, but in the end, they must fall, fall totally and utterly for the opera to work and the more crushing their fall, the better the opera."

The implications for gaming then are not that we are there to "win" the game, but rather to play the game as "artfully" as we can. The game then becomes not simply a contest to see who can "win" by the objective conditions of the game, but rather who can "win" by playing the better game. Playing the better game here is of course defined as "role-playing" it better.

What this means in detail is simple. If your army has a high percentage of shock troops, and it is faced with a situation where shock troops are at somewhat of a disadvantage, then the best role playing would be to "bull on through" even when it may not be entirely necessary to do so. A more definite example might be where the Arabs could "win" the game by falling on the flank and rear of the Byzantines and completely destroying them, or plundering the exposed camp. If the Arabs surround the Byzantines, the latter will almost certainly be destroyed, but if the Arabs attack the Camp, the rest of their army (facing the Byzantines) will undoubtably be routed and the battle lost. Clearly the best game decision is to surround the Byzantines, while the best Role-PIaying decision is to go for the camp.

Many rules have tried to force this attitude on the players through highly imaginative, creative, and utterly futile ways. We always normally go for the destruction of the enemy--it is part of our heritage as westerners. However, this only holds true while the game contains explicit western conceptions of victory, or any conception of victory at all. If you compose victory in your own mind (as I did in Winter War), then victory comes when you obey the internal and particular logic of you own army.

This attitude is only a highly advanced expression of sentiments and actions already present in each and every game and gamer. A common superstition among gamers is that when you bring a newly painted unit onto the field, the first action it is in will portend the entire life of the unit. If it succeeds gloriously. there is nothing it will not do in subsequuent games - if it fails miserably, it is only downhill from there. This has absolutely no basis in logic, for they are only little lumps of lead which have their characteristics ascribed by us, and whose performance is gauged by random dice rolls.

Yet there is not a gamer in the world who does not in his heart of hearts know (not believe, but KNOW) that this is true. We know it will happen, we look for it to happen, we wish it to happen, and we therefore unconsciously arrange the circumstances so that our expectations will be fulfilled. When it does not happen, when our expectations are confounded, well, that is the stuff legends are made of The Moscow militia defeats the Old Guard in one battle and the event goes down into the wargaming "legen" of the group of gamers forever.

There are many other examples. Pat Quinn hates one unit of my Renaissance Army, a unit for which I used a Ral-Partha Casting called "High-Elf Cavalry with Flame Sword". Whenever I bring this unit on the field, all normal victory conditions are abrogated and the chief goal of his army is to destroy them.

In another group an entirely different circumstance has taken place. Through a complicated and convoluted series of events that would take too long to explain, one unit in one army will not (by the player's own volition) fire upon a specific unit of the enemy army, and the gamer will tell you that "they have too much respect for their chivalrous and noble foes." At the same time the unit in question will not (by that player's volition) charge the first unit, nor allow other units to "screen" behincl it. "It is," as the other player says "poltroonish to abuse another's honor. "

These are but a few examples of "role-playing" in miniatures games through the vehicles of the armies. If you examine your own group, I'm sure you will recognize a whole host of superstitions, vendettas, rivalries, romances. and courtesies in operation. If not, I pity you, for you have not even begun to appreciate and experience the joys of the game.

This can even get into picturesque vignettes which border on the personality laden milieu of classic role playing. For example in one action the right wing of a player s "Turkish style" Army was about to charge the left wing of an Army of Landsknechts which was heavily entrenched and supplied with artillery. In the "special action" part of the turn the commander of the Landsknecht's left wing rode out his command figure (alone) to the Turkish lines and announced, " Gentlemen of Islam, I pray you not to attack, for we are too strong for you here. The Turkish commander of the Wing then chivalrously replied "Yea we know it, but Allah requires martyrs and our desire for paradise is Great. "

Personalize Your Army

To do this type of personalization, I myself find that it is only possible with personal armies, that is armies modeled after your own likes and dislikes and paying only a general lip-service to history. Strictly representational armies from history are fine, but they represent someone else's personality. Certainly you can start with these. but you should add a few units (and take a few away:) that would "customize" it. Eventually. you will add and subtract more till it is truly your own.

For example, I like infantry and don't like cavalry. It comes from when I was young and took riding lessons. I took the lessons for five years and just couldn't do it. I could never even control the horse let alone get him to jump. It was highly embarrassing, especially to my instructor. Finally she suggested that perhaps I should try a different sport. I took fencing instead. Now, in my Landsknecht army, the infantry is superb, the artillery is good, and the cavalry is terrible. There is a lot of it, it looks beautiful, but it's awful in battle. This is only one of the features by which I have "customized" the army.

In this, and my other armies, many of the characters from my Dungeoneering days (my own and other gamer's:) have shown up as officers, leaders and personalities. Each has its own unique "rules of engagement" which are not written down as concrete rules, but comprise a certain "etiquette of play" kept largely in the memories of the group of gamers.

In order to "role play" in this manner you have to do some preliminary work. The first and foremost is a variant of those excruciating self-awareness games of the 70's like "If I was an animal, what sort of animal would I be?" If you were an army, what sort of army would you be? Are you a "charger" or a "shooter" a "digger" or a "dancer."

A charger, for example wants high melee values to get in and mix it up quickly, not caring about casualties and relying upon the incredible violence of the encounter to break the enemy line and morale. A "dancer" on the other hand doesn't like to get caught standing.

One problem with this approach is that few people are frankly honest with themselves as to what they are. Oligopolistic American capitalism has perverted and twisted most people's natures so that they have suppressed their real identity in an attempt to present an image to the boss of whatever he wishes or the situation demands.

A simpler way around this is to ask yourself, if you like a certain army, would you also like to live in the society that produced that army? Granted, as the commander of an army, you would no doubt be in the elite of the population (the top 5% of those who controlled the resources and power), but you would still have to live in it. An Aztec army might be nice, but how's your view of human sacrifice, enormous lip ornaments, shredding your ear-lobes and penis for sacrificial blood letting, and a diet of tortillas, beans, and turkeys? For myself, being a Landsknecht in the 16th century is great. You get to fight in Italy where the weather is balmy, the food delicious, the wine plentiful, the women hot-blooded and beautiful, you get paid for all this, and if Machiavelli is to be believed, the battles are not especially dangerous (unless of course you fight the Swiss). Sounds just like the no-work and all-play situation I'd love to be in.

You are not, however, limited to purely historical armies. Actually, since it's your money, you can buy pretty much anything you want, and so long as you don't have Henschel Tiger Tanks marching alongside Neo-Babylonian slingers you should be ok. I have found that regardless of what figures a player buys, over time, the army he acquires develops its own logic and eventually "makes sense."

Another gamer friend of mine, George Depner, got into the hobby with almost no knowledge of history but with enough enthusiasm for six gamers. He did not have much money to spend on figures when he began, so he bought what was cheap, what was on special, or what was in the big "blow-out-boxes" at manufacturer's tables at conventions. At first it was the weirdest assortment of dwarves, orcs, Fuzzy-Wuzzy camels, war elephants, giants, Greek hoplites, Alexandrian phalangites, Byzantine horse archers, and Zulus you could imagine. It seemed to be an army of samples. As he went on and acquired more units (and by the way became a masterful painter, much better than I could ever hope to be). the army slowly began to "make sense."

In spite of the outlandishness of some of the figures they began to be grouped into types of units, with definite tactical roles, and George began to develop a tactical "system" unique to his own peculiar mix of figures, and a system entirely "historical" in its operation. As George's collection grew, he began to note that certain units "didn't fit" with the tactical repertoire that he was striving for. As it became too big and powerful for the table top he began to think of spinning these units off into an opposing army, an army which he want to have a different tactical repertoire than the first.

In describing this repertoire I have alluded to some concepts already, such as "charger", "shooter", "digger", "dancer" and other descriptive categories. Here of course the essential ingredient is balance. No army should be so powerful as to be unbeatable. I will not attempt at this point to procluce a compendium of rules to aid you in this sort of role play. Frankly I think such things are probably a waste of time and counterproductive to boot. I say counter-productive because they tend to stifle creativity and expression. In this I can only allude to my experience in role-playing games.

I have tried many role-playing systems and some of them were good and most of them were awful. Now I just let players make up their characters however they like, only insisting that they balance the strengths with weaknesses, and make the character interesting. I have gotten far better and more playable characters this way than from any set of abstract rules. I think it would be the same way with armies.

A System To Try

An army can be rated as good or bad in six areas: melee, morale, fire, movement, size, and siege ability. Generally I allow an army to be strong in two, average in two, and weak in two. Weak in size would be a small number of troops as opposed to many. While sieges form an important part of my campaigns, they may not in yours, and you can substitute some other factor, like ability to replace casualties or something. The point however is to keep it simple.

More than this the one absolutely essential to role-playing in miniatures is record keeping, and in this I do not mean lists of troops, casualties, and orders of battle, though those are nice. I mean in histories. You must write down the events of your games as if they were real history. You must memorize your actions. It is only when you have a body of lore that the army maintains a personality. This can take the form of keeping detailed regimental histories, lists of battles, awards, honors, and triumphs (and defeats), but more importantly it must be details of actions. Yet there is another dimension that must not be ignored.

As you compile lists of battles of "your" army, you will have to begin to string them together into some sort of composite history. There must, then arise a "story line" or history of the world. Battles will flow from one story to another, and as you become more proficient in this, the story line will become more sophisticated. It will cease to be a dolorous role of battles and incorporate politics, drama, intrigue, perhaps even romance. Side issue and sub-plots will slowly infiltrate into your narrative, and the personalities in your army will become more developed until you will have recreated exactly the type of world that a gamemaster creates in classic role playing.

This narrative can be constructed within and among your group of gamers, weaving itself into a cooperative and interactive history. Obviously things will change, and the story line with it. In this manner you will attain the interaction between "the world" and the players without the need of a gamemaster though one is still nice.

This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web.
Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com