I've been reading the discussion on combat in Matrix Games with some interest. In all the time I've done MGs I never have come up with a good solution. I've used lots of hybrid miniatures/MG methods but never found them better than just using miniatures or board games till PBOM. PBOM creates a fun Tea and Humas game but is really just a hopped up skirmish game. Still it got me thinking. What is going on in rules? I posed the question to myself from a MG perspective. The answer seemed obvious. All actions in games are arguments. Some arguments are automatic (like getting 6 movement points). Some are variable in effect (like rolling to see how far you move). Some are up in the air - but effected by strength of arguments (like, does my shot hit). Some are arguments that stem from other arguments (like morale checks - stemming from successful hits). In the end all the rules we have attempt to set up ways to make arguments to change the world (or at least what we measure in the world). The great weakness of all rules is not what they do but what they don't do. Games handle fire well, but miss minor twists of morale that can but don't always prove decisive in battle. Adding more rules is not the answer. We live in the age of the digital battle field (information is in abundance - deciding which information is meaningful is now the goal). We need to look at processing information and integrating it rather than adding to the din. Of course I have some ideas on how to do this. First a look at John Kantor's point about formal structure. John has pointed out to us on many occassions that with out a formal structure information is meaningless. Existentially, when we are free to do literally anything, we lack any common context. We are workers at the Tower of Babel, unable to cooperate due to lack of a common language. For this reason it is important that we use a few common terms in any kind of game. I think that military history and wargames have given us a lexicon of good words - no need to invent new ones. Where I differ from John is that I do not believe in assigning rigid values to words. This is a numbers based approach and it presupposes that no information exists outside its structure. This is not true. Words have implied values. They are a structure. BUT they are highly flexible which makes them very sensitive to changes in environment. Rigid systems fall appart in highly changable situations. The structure I'm playing around with is more linguistic/grammer than possitivist/science. So - John - I have thought about your points and taken good lessons from them. SO HERE'S THE GAME This game is meant to be played with toy soldiers on a terrain board. It will look just like a regular miniatures game, the only difference is that the rules are almost non-existent and the game dove tails smoothly with the Classical Matrix Game. Players control a certain number of troops. They move and fight with them. Players take turns moving and attacking. I will run through one players turn. A full turn has all the players move and fight. SPOTTING HIDDEN At the beginning of each full turn I have each side roll one die. I use this to reveal hidden units. Players start with only one stand on the table. They may be one stand or as many other stands as the player wants. I use a simple spotting table that makes it easy to see large groups and hard to see small ones. It is largely a rigid non-matrix approach. I'm not fully satisfied with it. What it does do is make the approach phase of a game easy to do. Few troops to move mean speed. UNEXPECTED EVENTS Once a full turn (ie everyone moving and fighting once) each player gets to make a Matrix Game argument to do anything they want to. They can interrupt another player's turn. They can try anything. This technique removes the need for movement, morale and weird game rules. The players can make them up. They can help their own side out or give trouble to the enemy. Argument are resolved just like in Classical Matrix Games (in fact if you take away the rest of the following rules, this is a Classical Matrix Game!) MOVEMENT I use the varriable movement from PBOM. Basically roll 1d6 to see how many inches the troops move. Players always get to move. That keeps the game somewhat satisfying to players who like total control. There are no movement restriction but cross dangerous terrain at you peril - a player can jump in with an unexpected argument as screw you big time! If there are movement barriers (ala the barriers in Classical Matrix Games) a player needs to use an unexpected argument to cross them. This allows for fortresses, mountain ranges and big rivers to slow down but not totally stop movement. EMERGENCY RESPONSES Once a player has moved, the other players begin to whine and bitch. "But I wouldn't let him move on my flank like that!!!" FINE! Players who are put at risk can make a free argument to say how they respond to the move. If the argument succeeds then they make that move. If it fails then they did let the enemy move up on their flank! CASE CLOSED!!! (I stole this rule from Howard Whitehouse's Science vs Pluck) FIGHTING When a side is in range to start fighting I let them do so. The attacking player can make one attack argument per unit engaged or he can opt to combine units into a single encounter. The player then makes an argument about what he wants to be accomplished by the fight. Before rolling on this argument, the defender makes a competing argument (Yes and this happened, Yes but this happened, No actually this happened). The two then do a dice rolling competition (like in the Classical MG). They keep it up till only one argument remains in play. BUT unlike the Classical MG, if they both roll out at the same time the fight was "Inconclusive". The players arguments alone tell what happened and what resulted from the fight. So at a stroke of the pen morale, weapons, training, and tactics are covered. TRACKING INFORMATION For my money, I only want to track the most important information. I do not want to get into the minutia of each unit. I want to know if they are alive or dead (as a whole unit), do they have casualties, how is their morale, and what is their supply situation. As a short hand for endurance and wear and tear, I want to track how many turns a unit was in combat, or how many turn they were fired on or fired, or how many months they have been in existence. Some simple measure that will show battle fatigue. Players will give units specific damage in battle arguments which may be important but it will soon be ignored by the referee because of information overload. Which is probably good. People have a tendency to fix all ills given time - no fan fare needed. SCALE I see this game working for scale of company level or higher. 1 figure representing 100 men gets one to the point where the player (who is commanding a battalion or brigade) would see any companies action in an abstract non-detailed manner. This could work at higher level games as well, where a stand is a brigade and the player commands an army. Beyond that and I think we are back to the realm of the Classical Matrix Game. Campaigns not battles. As an aside, I can see this approach working for a very low level game. Say a martial arts contest. Move and response, attack and consequence. It could work. THE WEIRDNESS FACTOR I like to evaluate games to see if they can be used to simulate non-combat conflicts. My favorite is "Boy asks girl out for a date." Strange as it may seem, this system could be used to simulate such an encounter. Imagine, boy at party. Sees girl across room. Girl moves to avoid. She fails to get away. Boy asks her out (combat!) The girl decides to give him the brush of (her competing argument). Say the rolls are inconclusive - the boy loses but can keep trying. PLAY TEST RESULTS I've done three solo game using this system. They produce very quick games. A full game between 10 stands in 5 to 10 minutes. They look like battle reports for miniatures games but take less time to do. I figure the game could be lengthened by adding more units but I imagine it could hold together up to players controlling 100 units. At that point the players would hit information overload. Sadly I do not think that mainstream gamers will like this game. It is very fast and though detailed, it is not at all like other games. Players who like to live in rigid boxes will not like the absolute requirement that players think and be creative at every turn. On the up side it does make campaign in a day games very doable. This game could be done easily as a internet based game. I could see doing this with a digital. camera, some good troops and a web page. In fact it would work much better than face to face traditional rules because the players gain control of events (which they lose when they don't actually move their own troops). This might be an avenue to spread miniature gaming to the internet - though the good graces of Matrix Gaming! Back to Table of Contents -- Matrix Gamer #25 To Matrix Gamer List of Issues To MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 2001 by Chris Engle. 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