After receiving his Masters at the University of Illinois, Frank Chadwick persuaded the university that what they needed was a learning resource center with him at its head. One of the tasks that would fall to this center would be the design of simulations for educational purposes. It was as a result of his experiences here and the people he met while at the University that he and his friends would establish Game Designers' Workshop (GDW). Among the first projects of the fledgling company was a game on the German invasion of the Soviet Union called Drang Nach Osten. The game was unprecedented in size and scope, including as it did half a dozen maps and thousands of counters. It was also to be a part of an even bigger project called Europa. When completed, this series of games would provide a massive simulation of the European Theatre of Operations of World War II, incomparable in the history of boardgaming. GAME NEWS caught up with Frank Chadwick at Origins 1985 in Baltimore, and it was only natural that the topic of the still incomplete Europa series would arise. The question was whether or not such a thing as Europa was playable. "There's playable and then there's playable," he remarks. "Playable compared to Campaign for North Africa? No problem! Europa is not that complex a system. It's just big. There is no inherent limit on its playability. After a while you run into playability problems just for the sheer size of it. It just makes it logistically difficult to get an area... and a group of people large enough." Europa continues to grow with new additions at regular intervals and periodic revisions such as Fire in the East which is a revision of Drang Nach Osten. Soon the project will be complete, and we can decide for ourselves. Traveller What may have actually put GDW on the map as a financially liquid company was the science fiction role-playing game, Traveller. Applying a quasi-historical approach, Traveller was born primarily through the labor of GDW staffer Marc Miller. It was not an instant success. "For about a year it didn't go anywhere." "So the answer we came up with was to do supplements for it. When we started coming out with support material, it really began picking up tempo. And every time we came out with an additional support product, the sales of the basic sets increased. We gradually built it into a very powerful, well entrenched system. Since then, that's become the modus operandi for everyone. You come out with a [roleplaying] game and support it, or it goes nowhere. " Traveller was a big success for many years, and while sales are admittedly sluggish now, the game is still popular and a money- maker for GDW Nonetheless, Chadwick admits that the state of the art has come a long way since the design of Traveller and that if it were to be done again, it would be done very differently "I've been doing a lot of thinking about the environment of a role-playing game and what sort of environment is really conducive to long term enjoyment of a campaign. I think people buy an environment... not just a set of rules." He asserts that if players like an environment provided with a game, they will do what they need to do to make the game playable, including redesigning it. Twilight: 2000 In GDW's new post-holocaust roleplaying game, Twilight: 2000, the actual game mechanics are quite simple. The majority of the work went into thinking about the background, the situation it's set in. "The criteria I have tentatively identified are that the environment be violent and anarchic. Role-playing is individuals playing roles, and what an individual does is not so interesting if there's someone telling him what to do. The more anarchic the environment is, the better the role-playing situation is. "D & D is anarchic by default. There's just nobody to tell you 'no.'" Nonetheless, Twilight: 2000 is a military role-playing game, and this would seem the very antithesis of anarchic. He agrees, "Nobody's ever pulled off a good military role-playing game, because its not anarchic enough-- it's just the opposite. If you're in the army, there's somebody always telling you what to do." He maintains that Twilight: 2000 avoids these problems because even though the characters are military in nature, the hierarchy of the military is gone, thus providing the essential anarchy. Traveller, in his view, is not nearly anarchic enough. "If we had to do Traveller over again, I think we'd think more in terms of making it much more wide open instead of having everything that's been settled for a very long time." Twilight: 2000 is selling quite briskly Many more modules are in the planning stages including one to get the characters stranded in Poland back to the United States. He admits that then the characters will find themselves back in the army, but suggestions will be provided for terminating that relationship. Also discussed were modules set in other parts of Europe and one dealing with Australian commando raids in southern Europe. In role-playing however, there is the problem of character death. "In Traveller, someone shoots at you with a fusion gun and you're not just dead, you're too icky to pick up. You spent all this time generating a character in Traveller and zap, he's dead. That really takes the wind out of your sails. It's realistic, but it's not much fun." He admits that the weapons in Twilight: 2000 are intentionally underrated in order to maintain play value. "The problem we had with Twilight: 2000 is that you have all these tremendously lethal, modern weapons, but we have a very elaborate character generation system." Nonetheless, carelessness will usually lead to the necessity of generating a new character. The Third World War GDW has recently made a substantial commitment to board games of the modern era with its system games, Assault and The Third World War. Assault is a series of tactical board games set in the current era. The Third World War is a series of games dealing with a prospective conflict between NATO and the Warsaw Pact, each game providing a different geographical area. Is the recent interest in games on the subject of modern warfare a fad or is it a trend in the gaming hobby of modern warfare? Chadwick has no doubt. "I tend to view [the interest in games of the modern era] as a trend. I've seen... interest in World War II steadily declining and interest in the modern era growing because World War II is becoming a little more remote [as] history It's not as immediate to a lot of the people playing war games today as it was when I was in high school playing war games. Eventually all the games of the series, specifically The Third World War, Southern Front, Arctic Front, and the as yet unreleased Persian Gulf, will be mateable in the form of one very substantial game on the subject. Persian Gulf may not be the last game in the series. "There is a possibility," he said, "of a Sino-Soviet frontier game that would be independent of The Third World War and not a part of The Third World War scenario." It would be identical in terms of scale so that it could be linked with the rest of the series in an alternate scenario. The only problem he saw with the Assault system was the complexity of the scenario generation system. Prior to game playing, it is necessary at this point to generate a wide variety of variables including force levels. This slows down play considerably. "We're going to simplify it a bit. We're going to publish some fixed scenarios." Chadwick feels this will enhance the system's accessibility. Though GDW has spearheaded the recent spate of double blind board games that have been finding their way on to the market, Chadwick does not see this as the wave of the future as has been suggested in some corners of the industry. It's really a neat idea, that works out well in a number of situations. But there are some inherent limitations that are going to keep it from being the future of gaming. One is that you can't play it solitaire. "If you get it too big," he goes on, "not only is it about impossible to play but you get too [much] limited intelligence. By the time you get done [with] your move, you can't remember what you encountered in the beginning. And that limits intelligence too much. "Within some very limited situations, I think it's a very exciting game system, but the world is not going to beat a path to double blind. If people think it is, they're kidding themselves. " In fact, the sales of GDWs first two double blind games, Normandy Campaign and 8th Army, have not been all that good, according to Chadwick. The company's most recent offering however, Operation Market Garden is doing very well. He characterizes that one as the best of the lot. Originally Operation Market Garden was to be the last of the series, at least for awhile. However, Chadwick suggests that there is a strong possibility of one more double blind game, this one on a modern topic, probably NATO/Warsaw Pact operational battle game. GDW is one of the few board game manufacturers to have published miniatures rules in a big way In fact, the first four H. G. Wells Awards for best miniatures rules were won by Game Designers' Workshop. "If you go to a convention, the place where you see the most excitement is the miniatures tables. People in miniatures are still excited about their hobby And I'm excited about miniatures." In fact, he says he rarely plays board games since designing them has become too much of a job. He adds, "I'd like to see GDW become more involved with miniatures [rules] because that's where I see a lot of customer excitement. "Right now no one has really done a good job of marketing a set of miniatures rules. No one has done a good job of taking all this real enthusiasm that's in miniatures and trying to direct it. "I think [miniatures] has every potential of being as big a part of the hobby in stores, in terms of national exposure, and in terms of recognition as boardgaming ever was, and I think its got the potential of being significantly bigger." Command Decision Chadwick's most recent effort is a set of World War II tactical rules that he has been demonstrating at conventions everywhere called Command Decision. Chadwick admits this project is not exactly a high priority item for the company. Nonetheless, he expects it to be released soon. "Command Decision is a fairly simple game. To the extent that it tries to be detailed on a technical basis, it is accurate. But the mechanics are very streamlined. In a sense fit] is the most playable set of World War II miniatures rules I have ever seen. "I don't think it's possible to have an accurate game about mobile combat that takes two hours to play one minute. The most important element of mobile combat is the rapidly changing nature of the situation. The need to make actual command decisions [exists] beyond just saying this tank's committed to this thing and it's going to take twenty hours of game time to get there. I don't think you can have an accurate simulation of mobile combat if all you do is simulate a total of eight minutes of time." Command Decision was designed to be played in "real time." Played with a referee, the turns should average about 15 minutes which is the amount of "real" time simulated per turn. The unit scale is basically one to five, where one unit corresponds to a platoon. "One of the things the game enables you to do is put the stuff on the table that everybody wants... without breaking the table." The result is a very fast and mobile game. Miniatures If he's excited about miniatures, Frank Chadwick is concerned about the future of wargaming. A feel there's not a lot of excitement in gamers and there's not a lot of excitement on the part of the publishers. I've always felt a poorly developed game... that was done by somebody who was really excited about what he was doing would have a much better reception than a game that was perfectly polished by somebody who didn't give a damn. " While he is quick to admit that a publisher must be sensitive to the interests of his customers, he states, "I'm not doing games any more just because the market wants them. If I think there's an interest in it and I'm really excited about doing it, I'll do it. "Right now, the industry is not in real good shape because people are experiencing sluggish sales and most of them don't seem to have the slightest idea why. "Partially, it's the manufacturers' fault. in a lot of cases, they're just going through the motions. Sales start getting a little stack, and I see companies rushing to copy whatever else is currently successful. That doesn't help the hobby." Part of the problem is that many gamers, in his view, are becoming jaded. He also finds fault, a great deal of it, with the hobby press, who have become 11 self destructive." He explains, A get the feeling that there are a lot of people who are writing reviews for their own personal ego gratification. "Criticism is not bad. I can take criticism but what infuriates me is criticism for criticism's sake: the idea that you cannot do an objective review without finding something to bitch about." He says that this is one of the reasons that much of the enthusiasm has gone out of the hobby "The hobby press does not have a very positive outlook on the hobby itself. The hobby press is not doing a lot to boost the hobby "There are certain criteria that you can meet for a good review and they are totally unrelated to how well you're going to sell the game. [The criteria] has to do with the level of detail, the level of complexity that a certain group of people who've been around for a long long time and have played everything there is to play and are looking for a new challenge... That's totally different from what's from what the average person really will enjoy. "You need people who are knowledgeable about games but that knowledge ability can't get in the way of accepting a game on its own merit and looking at it from the point-of-view of [what] someone that's new to the hobby might enjoy. "You've got to work in nurturing a hobby and I don't know that in a lot of cases the hobby press is nurturing the hobby. " Chadwick seeks to convey a message to gamers in general. "People should... really give some thought to why they enjoy gaming and not be ashamed of that. A lot of times, people enjoy gaming for one reason but then rationalize it with another and the rationalization ends up getting in the way of their enjoyment. "The example that comes to mind is in miniatures. In miniatures, people enjoy playing with toy tanks--I enjoy playing with toy tanks, but to enhance that enjoyment I need the illusion of reality. However, a lot of people are a little ashamed of the fact that they're playing with toy soldiers and they're enjoying it so they say 'I do it for the simulation.' if they use that rationalization too much they end up getting opted into gaming things that are more and more complex and destroy their enjoyment--what they originally started gaming for. And that's true of boardgamers as well. "The object of a commercial board game is not to be a perfect simulation; it is to be a perfectly enjoyable experience. We're in this hobby, because we're interested in history and we want to participate in a sort of living history. "Ultimately, we're playing a game with enough history in it to make us enjoy the game so it's not so abstract; it has some meaning to us. The object is not to make a perfect simulation, because that's no fun. " Chadwick has designed many games and is pretty much a solid figure in the hobby. Asked if he thinks he is an institution, he replies, "You're not an institution until people say you are. I don't feel like an institution. I feel like another guy who happens to have designed a lot of games." Ironically, the day following this interview, Frank Chadwick was inducted into the Hall of Fame. By his own definition, this would seem to make him an institution. The prospect, however, does not excite him. He claims that less notice would be preferable. "When you get real big, people root for you to fall down." Marion Bates has been wargaming since 1960 and is currently a regular contributor to The Grenadier, Fire and Movement, and The Wargamer magazines, as well as GAME NEWS. Back to Table of Contents -- Game News #12 To Game News List of Issues To MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1986 by Dana Lombardy. 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