Charlie Tarbox (co-author of ARMIES ON THE DANUBE) has written to the Austrian archives and received photocopies of the 'Disposition' given to the Allied army at Austerlitz. Once he gets the orders translated from the German he may be able to shed further light on that battle, and perhaps lay to, rest the 'Zuparko-revisionism' that appeared in this space a couple of issues ago!
The past several WINTER QUARTERS columns have veered erratically into pseudo-history. In this issue I'll try to steer back into a discussion of game design techniques based on that history. Today's topic is how a designer tries to get players to take certain actions in their games, and what this means in the search for a standardized set of rules.
A similar discussion took place in recent issues of THE NUGGET, the WD magazine, centered around how designers try to make players adopt historical tactics, even if our 20th - century hindsight shows those were bad tactics to use. A familiar refrain around many wargame tables is that players refuse to 'act in an historical manner', or "These rules allow unhistorical things to happen!" The two basic methods in wargame design have been to either try to regulate player behavior by rewarding certain actions, or else to adopt a "laissez-faire" attitude and hope that players will choose the correct actions without artificial game bonuses.
If we can make a comparison to chess, we'd see both methods starting with basic values, in terms of the movement ability of the pieces, and certain rules such as capturing, check and checkmate. If the goal of the game was to portray a chess game that used the 'Sicilian Defense', players would receive bonuses for making the moves that appear in that opening. Ideally, the players would make 'all the right moves' and the 'Sicilian Defense' would be played out. This is an attempt to create a 'closed system'. Since players may still choose to take bad options, even if it is disavantageous, a truly closed system can't be created; let's call this then, a "limitedsystem" approach.
On the other hand, the second method would give no bonuses whatever, and there would be no guarantee that the players would keep to the best opening moves at all. The more experienced a player is (that is, he has tried other moves before, only to be beaten,) the more he will understand that this opening is the best in the given situation and he will stay in it as long as possible. Though limited by the abilities of the pieces, I'll term this an "open-system" design to distinguish this from the other method.
The game of chess is an art; experience can be a guide for a while in an 'opening' situation that is familiar, but there comes a point where new, unfamiliar situations come up. The values and abilities of the pieces are still the same, and the player may have certain chess 'principles' to rely upon, but he is largely thrown back on his own abilities to use the best moves in the given situation. A queen sacrifice may lose or win a game, depending on the situation. In this case we'd say chess more resembles an open-system design.
A Napoleonic game tries to get a tabletop result that resembles its battlefield precursor. If Napoleonic gamers are ever to arrive at a standard set, it seems unlikely that it will be a limited-system game, since taste is so personal and it is unlikely that all parts of a design will appeal to all players.
The only other apparent alternative would be the open-system approach. Napoleonic gamers are unlikely to want to adopt the active 'gamesmaster' that fantasy players use. Yet it is interesting to see that the many different 'histories' in each fantasy world do not prevent players from understanding the rules and moving from one to another with a minimum of fuss. If a similar standard structure will work for Napoleonics, players could try out each others' Napoleonic interpretations, or collection of data and facts without having to commit to a new rules-set each time. It may be worthwhile to explore "open-system" Napoleonic design further as a possible answer to a "universal" set of rules.
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