Imagine that the room is getting colder. Breath begins to look like clouds and objects become cold to the touch. Imagine there is a bowel of water sitting next to you on the floor. As you watch the water it slowly glazes over the top. With time it hardens the whole way through. It is now ice, and as everyone knows ice has very different properties from water. This is a systems shift. So what has this got to do with wargaming?
Carl Carlson is working on an idea that takes system shifts out of hard sciences and moves them into wargame rules. Carl's basic idea has been printed in the Lone Warrior. The idea simply says -- why not use several LEVELS of rules when running a game? As the play progresses from one phase of a battle to the next the rules change as well. It sounds complicated at first sight, but in fact it simplifies playing games enormously.
Consider the way say, miniatures rules are laid out at the present time. There is definitely a debate going on between having lose simple rules (ala Featherstone) and highly structured rules (ala WRG ancients) but both of the factions argee that ONE set of rules should cover the whole game. There is a problem with this. Simple rules that say "a hit is scored on the roll of a 6.11 quickly look unrealistic/invalid when placed into the context of the battle. For instance -- do my routing warriors really fight just as hard routing as they did in their first charge? Of course not! WRG type rules try to take such things into account by adding dice modifiers, but this too fails to get the point. The point is that somewhere during the battle one or more SYSTEM SHIFTS occurred so that the same soldier is NOT the same person he was even an hour before!
Complex accounting systems to keep track of "fatigue" or "energy" quickly overload the players memory and so impede play. Using tables of dice modifiers throws up a lot of static information which confuses the players thinking and slows down the game. On the other hand, if the rules call for a complete shift from one set of simple rules to another set of simple rules then there is neither too much information to track or plow through.
Carl gave a few guidelines on how his multiple levels rules work. Rather than keeping track of the number of casualties inflicted and the exact morale state of each unit he looks at who is firing, who is broken, who is rallying, and most importantly how many rolls has a given side failed? The first three factors are all graphically shown by the miniatures on the game table. Only the last factor has to be tracked with pencil and paper, but this can be done by simple tic marks. In fact, the system is so easy to keep track of the Carl uses it to run solo wargames.
Carl mentions this at this system of rules focus the play onto levels of decision making that is more what a brigadier general actually makes. For instance, rather than worrying about what formation each unit is in and how many casualties they have taken the general worries about the over all morale state of his men. He will pull a failing unit off the line rather than let Its failure turn the tide of initiative against him. This is an Interesting point, It may not be true but it is worth looking Into.
What follows is a set of rules that use Carl's Ideas. Feel free to tinker with the rules as you see fit.
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© Copyright 1990 by Chris Engle
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