My Name is Sam, and I'm a Helicopter General
It seems to me that all this obsessing about the "problems" of being a helicopter general misses a number of larger points. I think it's time that we begin to face the fact that we're never going to get rid of this problem, and Hey, you know what? That's O.K.
First of all, whenever you give a massive advantage to both players, you negate the effects of that advantage. The very fact that both players are helicopter generals means that neither one has any "unfair" battlefield perspective.
Second, the much-vaunted "Fog of War" is vastly overrated. Come on now, everybody - let's see a show of hands for all those wargamers who actually like the Fog of War. Now
Come on, tell the truth. You enjoy those nasty surprises that render your entire battle plan stupidly obsolete? You enjoy being out of control of what's happening? No, of course you don't. We wargamers - even those of us who claim to be die-hard "simulators" - actually hate the Fog of War. We only feel compelled to try including it in our games because (as far as we can tell) historical generals had to deal with it, and we're pretending to be "simulating" what historical generals did.
Third, any attempt to simulate the Fog of War is absolutely futile. The Fog of War is, by definition, the impact of randomness and lack of information upon a general's ability to manipulate his forces. But any system we devise to simulate it is just that: a System. And there's absolutely nothing systematic about randomness. Systems are predictable and can be manipulated by us. The Fog of War is unpredictable and out of our control. You can't use one to simulate the other. The harder we try, the more we wind up with something like Empire or Legacy of Glory - a vast mountain of rules that require precise comprehension and memorization: in other words, exactly the opposite kind of behavior which is generated by the real Fog of War.
The old Prussian Kriegspielers has a pretty good system for simulating the Fog of War. The players on each side spoke only to their own referees, and saw only the units the referees moved on their maps. There was very little direct contact with the enemy, and in fact no player ever moved a unit himself. (There were also no hard "rules," and no player had any idea about whether his cavalry got a higher melee value or movement allowance that the enemy cavalry.) Each player wrote his orders. and then hoped that the referee moved the unit the way he ordered. In order to pull this off, though, we would need a team of several referees, two separate rooms for the teams to operate in seclusion, and a hell of a lot of preparation before each game. And we'd have to be willing to tolerate the caprice of the referees. Most garners are too uptight for that. They want a written rule, rather than a referee's opinion. And a written rule, to be fair, has to be available for all to see, and apply to everybody. Thus, the written rule takes away randomness and applies more system. The more rules in a game, the less Fog of War.
Computers have great promise to do all this for us. And in fact, this is what I think: if you want real Fog of War in your gaming, play computer games, or find a bunch of 19th-century Prussian referees. Otherwise, you're going to have to come to grips with who and what you really are: a regular person with only a few hours to spare on a Sunday afternoon, with only enough space for a modest table in a smallish room, and a bunch of guys like you, one of whom might be willing to referee if you pay for his beer and chips. That's the material we're working with: garners, not Prussian staff officers, and certainly not real generals commanding real troops in a real battle.
We often hear game designers talking about the "appropriate" level of concern for a player in a given scale. In big strategic games like Napoleon's Battles or Volley and Bayonet, for instance, it is not appropriate to worry about the use of skirmishers. Usually, the bigger the game scale, the more attempt is made to avoid micromanaging, so as to speed things along. But here's another thing we're all going to have to admit to ourselves: we're all micro-managing. Whenever we move a unit ourselves, we are (even subconsciously) imposing our superior will and desires upon the small-unit commanders represented by the individual units. If we really wanted to worry about the appropriate sphere of an army commander, then we would do what the 19th century Prussians did in their Kriegspiels, and let the referees move all our units for us. That's not feasible, so we move everything ourselves, and of course as we do, we look for little local advantages, like getting those guns across the bridge before the enemy's charge phase, or making sure the light infantry is exactly 2" inside the woods, because that's how deep fire can penetrate soft cover.... You see, there's no getting around it. As long as we control each and every unit ourselves, we're always micro-managing, and we're never really in the head of the commanding general. Instead, we're a big conglomeration of 22 different divisional commanders, all psychically channeling the commanding general.
What I'm saying is this: short of computers or Kriegspiel, there is no way to get rid of the helicopter general who is running the whole thing, one battalion at a time. So we might as well come to terms with that.
Most command systems rest upon a very large assumption: that the game embraces some kind of predictable A-B-C-D sequence of movement and actions, with one turn being (structurally) exactly like any other. This comfortable rhythm of action is occasionally challenged by bright and ambitious designers, but most gainers appreciate the simple predictability it offers. It's also quite "fair," in a gaming sort of way, in that I know I'll get my chance to fire every turn, and so on.
Every now and then somebody comes along who offers an interesting alternative to the turn sequence. Most recently has been Bob Jones with the Piquet game, which is quite clever. Some years ago Victory Games (in those days an Avalon Hill subsidiary) produced a boardgame called The Civil War which had a brilliant variable-impulse turn system in which players never knew how long the "turn" was going to last, or who would get the last word. And of course, there's the old "Variable-Length Bound" concept first proposed by George Jeffries. This was a great idea conceptually, but utterly impossible to carry out. It's one of those games that everybody praises but nobody dares try to play. Allah knows I don't want to try keeping track of four or five different "times" or "changes of situation" at different points on the board, or cluttering up things with a bunch of home-made paper "clocks" lying around.
I've been thinking recently, though, that wargame rules have gone about as far as they can go with command systems, unless they ditch the standard A-B-C-D turn structure. My idea is that instead of making command a sub-system of the game - something carried out at a certain point in the turn - we could make it the spine that holds everything together. Absolutely every action taken by every unit would, in essence, be a part of the command system.
Also, instead of thinking about time as something that we can divide up arbitrarily into "turns," I've been pondering how we might develop command rules that reflect the ways in which people use time and distance. In a traditional game, we say first that "one turn equals fifteen minutes," and "one inch equals fifty yards." The "normal" game then goes on to say that General von Schmuck is an "average" commander, who can perform Action X in Y turns, up to a range of Z inches. (Remember my Empire general, who needed two hours to process the change of orders.)
But could we not say instead that a "superior" general is somebody who can manage time better than the average person, perhaps concentrating on one thing, perhaps devoting a little time to each of several things ... ? In other words, might a general have a pool of "Command Points" he could devote to certain tasks, "spending" those points like money. (He only has so much time and so many staff officers, after all.) In a system like this, "command" would no longer be a hard measurement, like the Magic Circle or the linked-arms systems. It's not an either/or proposition. Rather, command effectiveness could be measured as the amount of attention a general chooses to give to various units, under the limitation that he has only so much attention to give. (And some generals are better at doing many things at once.)
I'm thinking of stealing Rich Hasenhauer's die-rolling idea from Fire and Fury, but instead of using it for units, I would use it for subordinate generals. Some commanders were micromanagers and some weren't. (And with some, it varied from day to day.) There are Corps commanders you'd want to keep on a tight leash, and others you can trust to handle things themselves. For some Corps commanders you'd expend command points to keep them under control, but for others, you'd roll on the chart, representing the fact that you've left them to their own devices.
But the Commander's attention is limited. He can only directly manage so many things at once. The more spread out his army becomes, the harder it is to manage, and the more his attention will be sapped (and, thus, the more he will have to depend upon his subordinates.) Think of Napoleon's reverses in the Autumn of 1813. Would Wellington have done any better? Probably not. Even a great mind can only do so much at once.
So ... for lack of a bettor name..
Sam Mustafa's Command-Pool System:
I've been working on some concepts for a command system that I'd like to share. I've only tried these out once, using a fairly limited number of units (it was a fantasy game, in fact.) It seemed to work well enough for the time being.
I proceed from the following bases:
1. We're all helicopter generals. There's no way around that, and my system won't try to get around it or make you pretend you don't know what you obviously know about the battlefield and the enemy army.
2. Right now I've only gotten this working for one layer of command. In other words, this is how a general would interact with his Corps commanders. I don't have an answer (yet) for how that would break down to divisional level, so I'm beginning to think that this would be a command system for a Grand Tactical game, where you simply don't have general figures below the Corps command level.
3. Some generals are - overall - better than others, but not always! Frederick the Great had his bad days. Sometimes "poor" commanders can really get their acts together. The system will randomize a commander's abilities, and keep those abilities (mostly) secret from his opponent.
4. "Leadership" permeates everything. In this system, leadership determines the structure of the turns, the actions of the units, the attempts to rally broken troops - everything.
5. I've shamelessly stolen all kinds of ideas from other people. Talk to my lawyer.
Finally, I get the sense that this system would work best for very large-scale games that use small-scale figures. In other words, something like Volley and Bayonet games with 6mm figures, in which you have all Borodino on the battlefield. I envision a game with big units representing whole brigades or divisions. Maybe that's just my own preferences showing through, but when I think of this command system, I think of large distances and potentially long stretches of time.
1. The General's Skill - Turn By Turn
We measure the General's skill in terms of how well he can manage his army. In other words, skill is relative to the forces under his command. (In most games, a General is given an arbitrary rating - Wellington is an "A" General, no matter how big or small a force he is commanding, and he is an "A " General every single turn. Not so here.)
A General gets one of three skill ratings for this day: Good, Average, Poor
At the beginning of each turn, you'll roll a d6 on a chart, cross-indexing with your general's skill rating, and you'll get a number of Command Points. (Cps.) I use little chits marked "CP," and I count out this turn's allottment, and each general puts his allotted Cps in a cup. Leftovers are in a pile somewhere, which is where each CP returns after it is used.
Problem:
How do you decide how many CPs to put on the different columns of the chart? At the moment, I'm using a chart with arbitrary numbers. An "Average" general who rolls a 4 gets 28 Cps that turn, for example. This works fine in my fantasy game, where I can regulate exactly how many units the general will have in his army. Each unit requires a CP to do anything - to move, change formation, etc.
But for my historical version of this, you'd be spending Cps to activate subordinate commanders, not specific units. And there's no way of regulating the number of Corps and Division commanders in an historical army. So you'd have to have a system that represents the General's ability to manage his Corps commanders at that battle on that day.
Think of the implications of that! Napoleon or Robert E. Lee might no longer be "Excellent" generals. If you were gaining Waterloo or Gettysburg, both men would be lucky to be rated "Average" for that battle. Think of a guy like Murat, or BRicher, whose behavior varied wildly from battle to battle. Sometimes he was great, sometimes abysmal. Now we can represent that. And if you really want to be fair about it, we could even roll for each general before the battle, randomizing that, too.
Possible Solution: You count up the number of subordinate commanders each general has for that battle. You roll a die on a chart to get a multiplier (like 2.2, if he's really on the ball at that moment, or 0.8 if he's not.) Then for that turn, you multiply the multiplier by the number of subordinates, and that's your CP total for this turn.
So let's say that Napoleon is at Waterloo with 7 corps commanders. Today, he's an "Average" commander. You roll a 4 on the chart, and the result is a multiplier of 1.8. Seven times 1.8 equals 12.6, rounded up to 13. This turn, Napoleon would have 13 CPs with which to control the actions of his subordinates.
Rationale: This system would give us a flexible, always randomized turn-by-turn assessment of how the commander is doing. Instead of a master chart where Frederick is always "Great," it recognizes that on any given day - and indeed from moment to moment - generals attentions and abilities wax and wane.
2. Time Management 1: The Day of Battle
Although most of us have never led armies in battle, I'm sure we've all had the experience (maybe even while playing a wargame) of losing sense of time because we were engrossed in our activities. Recently I've been thinking about a system that does away with any pretense of one "turn" equalling a certain fixed amount of real time, and thus a game being limited by a specific (pre-announced) number of turns. Instead, I'd like to see time worked into the command system itself, because it seems to me that that's one of the measures of a great commander: he can keep more balls in the air at once, and can keep a better handle on the use of time.
At the very beginning of the game, after both players have set up, one player should roll two dlOs. If the result is five or less, re-roll until a number greater than five is rolled. The result is the minimum number of turns that the game will last. Once that last turn has ended, both players must roll two dice. If they both roll equal to or less than the current turn number, the game ends then and there, and victory is assessed. If not, they play another turn, and then roll again. When, at the end of a turn, both players roll equal to or less than that turn's number, the game has ended.
Rationale: Both generals will know roughly how much time they have to fight this battle. But once the battle has gotten underway, they are distracted, and always a little behind the curve of events. Both generals will have a sense for roughly when the battle is drawing to a close, but with this system we eliminate the surething knowledge that it's all over on Turn 8. We eliminate those dumb last-turn actions and instead hold out the possibility that the loser might just have enough time to reverse things. Think of Melas, the Austrian commander at Marengo. He thought the game was over! But Napoleon gambled on there being a couple more turns left to play.
III. Time Management II: The turns themselves
Here's where I start to plagiarize everybody. First of all, like the old boardgame Civil War, I want to see turns which vary in length, sometimes giving advantages to one side, sometimes to the other. Instead of representing a fixed division of time, the turn would represent a period of activity. Think of parties, where many conversations are going on at once. Even with all those conversations, there comes a time when just about everybody has stopped talking. There's a lull, and then people re-form into different groups, or get up for another beer, or whatever. The activity starts again. I want a time-management system that does that.
(I know this isn't perfectly defensible in history. Battles usually had lulls in one sector while activity raged in another sector. But still, that's the feel I'm looking for: an unpredictable ebb and flow of battle that is always testing the commander's ability to manage his forces.)
At the beginning of each turn is a Command Phase, which both players perform simultaneously. At this time they use that chart to determine how many CPs they will have, they make Rally attempts, and do other administrative chores.
Then they each roll 2d6 for Initiative. Each player may (secretly) contribute any number of his CP chits toward this roll. Each chit thrown in gives a +1 modifier. The winner of the roll gets to choose whether he will move first or last in this coming Pulse.
The players then activate their Corps commanders, either by using CPs (to play it safe), or by rolling for each Corps commander, and hoping that he will do what you want him to do.
(On the table for Corps commanders, the rolls will result in big, general things, like "Hold Position," or "Fall Back," or "Attack." I envision a rating for each Corps commander's general tendencies - is he bold, cautious, etc. - which will modify this roll.) Obviously, if your Corps commander has chosen to "Hold" this Pulse, you can't move his units forward toward the enemy.
Once the first side has moved, fired, melee'd this pulse, then the second side gets to do it, too, expending CPs as needed. The first Pulse is over - on to the second Pulse.
Then we come around again to another Initiative Roll. For the second and all subsequent Initiative rolls, throw in another die, but make this one red, or some other color from the two d6s. If that red die shows equal to or less than the number of the current Pulse, then the turn ends right there - you don't have another Pulse. For example, you're starting the third pulse, and during your initiative roll the red die comes up a "Y - Tom Ends. (Obviously, then, no turn has more than five Pulses, but it could have as few as one.)
To make things interesting, there's one other provision in the Initiative rolls. If the modified initiative rolls score a tie, then both players get to roll again on the CP chart and get more CP chits in their cups. Then try again: roll for initiative to begin the Pulse. However, if they immediately roll a second tie, though, the Turn ends right there.
IV. Personnel Management: Giving Commands
Each Army and Corps Commander has a Magic Circle (we'll get serious and call them "Command Radii.") Obviously, they are different for commanders, based on their skills. They work like this:
A unit may only be outside its Corps commander's radius if it has been detached to garrison some built-up area or fortification. It may never move, so long as it is outside his radius, and may not be rallied if broken. Otherwise, the player must always keep all units of a corps inside the commander's radius. (I'm thinking about an exception to this rule for cavalry that has run wild after a charge ... )
The Army commander also has a radius, which is used only to measure the distance between him and his Corps commanders. During a Pulse, when the player's side is active, the player activates his Corps commanders by "giving them commands." If the Corps commander is within the army commander's radius, then the cost to give a command is I CP. If the Corps commander is up to double the distance of the army commander's radius, then the cost to give a command is 2 CPs. And if the Corps commander is more than double the army commander's radius away, then he may not receive a command at all. (He is on his own, acting based on the chart that shows Corps commander behavior.)
When the army commander spends CPs to give a command to a Corps commander, then he can micromanage that whole corps. (He doesn't have to use the corps commander behavior chart.)
Rationale: One of the cool things about not knowing how long the turn will be, is that you won't really know how long you can afford to keep spending CPs to activate your Corps commanders. If the turn drags on for several Pulses and you don't get more CPs, then you will definitely run out of CP chits, meaning that you will have to roll for all your Corps commanders, and your control over your army will start to slip from your grasp. (Or... maybe it won't! It all depends on your luck and the skill of your subordinates.)
And here's another fun aspect to this system: since your CPs are in a cup, hidden from the enemy's view, the enemy will have to be a pretty good book-keeper to remember how many you have left in your cup. Chances are that somewhere during the turn, he will forget, and both of you will not be sure how many more CPs the opposition has left.
Conclusions
As you can see, all of this is still on the drawing board. I haven't made any attempt to clap this onto a specific whole set of rules for movement, combat, etc. All I'm after is a Command System. Indeed, I'm thinking of using the Volley and Bayonet game, but with this system attached, mainly because V&B is so simple that I could really concentrate on the command rules and see if they worked, without a lot of other complications.
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© Copyright 2001 Hal Thinglum
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