In MWAN #115, I made some observations about scale, and in particular came down pretty hard against the current systems used in horse-and-musket games for basing figures and for measuring time. For the past couple of months I've been pondering some ways we might address those problems on the tabletop and produce a game that actually looked something like Napoleonic formations maneuvering. At the moment I'm in the final stages of producing my grand-grand-tactical game, Grande Armee, so these ideas will remain just ideas for the foreseeable future, but I think my next project after G.A. will be a stab at the so-called "petitetactical" scale.
My first-ever miniatures experience was as a teenager in the early 1980s with a 1:20 scale game, the now-ancient Tricolor rules. Neal Smith and I had no Napoleonic figures, so we spray-painted our 20mm Airfix World War Two figures: mine were blue for the French, his red for the British. It was great fun, but since then I've never really returned to the petitetactical scales, and indeed (with the exception of Dave Brown's General de Brigade, which isn't readily available in the US) there haven't been any new rules at the smaller scales in a long, long time. A notable exception, of course, was the mid-nineties Chef de Battalion, by Scotty Bowden and Jim Getz. By Getz's own admission, this was a bear: 220 pages of rules, with 124 charts and tables. I'm thinking along the lines of something with about 120 fewer charts.
1. Bases and Scale
Let me start by acknowledging a deep debt to George Nafziger's book Imperial Bayonets. While I'd encountered most of that information in various places over the years, I'd never had it laid out all in one place for me, in such a clear and logical way. George has done a wonderful service with that book, in making sense of some rather complicated things, and reminding us of some very simple things that most game designers have always ignored: like what a "column" or a "line" actually looked like.
I decided on a ground scale of 1" = 10 yards. This is both mathematically convenient (everybody loves multiples of tens), and also happens to be the maximum tolerable "zoom" for most people: a battalion in line at this scale stretches out more than a foot on the tabletop. Since most of us like the battalion as a basic building-block, any closer zoom in scale would result in unwieldy table-spanning lines with zillions of figures.
At this scale, though, we still come across a problem of depth. The basic "unit" is the company (or platoon - it depends on the army). For most systems, this is only three ranks deep, or about ten feet, on average. Let's look at a French unit from the 1808-15 period to see how that works out:
One company stand is 2.5" of frontage by one-third an inch (@8mm) deep.
We can pull that off with 6mm or maybe 10mm figures, but nothing bigger. Using 15mm figures we can fudge a little and stretch out to a one-half inch depth. But look at how weird this battalion will be in line:
One battalion in line will be 15" of front, and one-third an inch deep.
To see how strange this looks, draw it on paper with a ruler. That's the shape we're talking about, if we're going to do it right. No game (to my knowledge) has ever used a basing system anything like that. But that's the way it will have to be, if we want an accurate reflection of the shapes of Napoleonic battalions. Wargamers are going to have to completely re-think tactics, because the unit shapes they've become accustomed to are so grossly wrong:
One battalion in a closed "assault column" (column of divisions) will be 5" of front, and one inch deep.
You read that right: a column that's five times as wide as it is deep. This is going to freak a lot of people out.
2. Figure Basing
One of the supposed joys of going petite-tactical is being able to reflect soldiers in multiple ranks: getting the "look" of ranked formations. But alas, that's not how it looked at all.
You can see from the above calculations that with 10mm or 15mm figures we will only be able to mount one rank. Again, the 6mm people might be able to pull off two ranks on a base that's only one-third an inch deep, but I have my doubts.
This brings me back to a point I raised in my last article (MWAN #115): it's time to give up completely on the "one figure equals..." concept. Instead, I propose a new mantra: "It's the bases, stupid!" We use the base itself as the representation of where and how big the unit is, and we mount figures on that base in whatever system is convenient, given the size of figures we use. In this case, they will have to be a single rank.
And again, people aren't going to like this: a single rank of l5mm figures stretching for fifteen inches! But that's the shape of a Napoleonic battalion, like it or not.
Incidentally, there's another reason why we shouldn't bother with precise figure ratios. In this period, as a unit took losses, the second and third-rankers would step forward to fill gaps in the line. It was crucial for a unit to have the correct number of "files" (man-sized frontage), or the complicated evolutions for formation changes wouldn't work. (Imagine trying to form a square if each of the six different companies had a different frontage.) So units actually got even thinner with casualties, not "smaller" in game terms. An understrength battalion would still have the same frontage as a full-strength one. Our standardized base-sizes are thus not only convenient, but historically accurate, at least until a unit has taken truly staggering casualties, such as 67% or more.
If you place figures elbow-to-elbow, as they were historically used, then a 15nun battalion at this scale would probably mount about 40-50 figures. This will most likely require players to mount figures specifically for this game, which is always a major detraction for a new game, so the game will be small.
3. Orders and Command
In most cases, the fattest part of a Napoleonic rulebook is the chapter devoted to the command system. But it occurred to me that one of the liberating things of a true petitetactical game would be the ability to throw all of that stuff right into the trash from the outset.
The idea is that you are a brigadier. You command a small force - say, four infantry battalions. As the game opens, you have just received your orders. The game represents your "mission." You might, for example, command a brigade of Hungarian grenadiers, with the orders: "Take and secure the granary of Essling." Or perhaps you command a brigade of Young Guard infantry, and you've just been told: "Drive the Prussians from Plancenoit." In any event, there is no need for a command system at all. You have your orders. If you can fulfill them, you've won the game. If not, the other guy has won.
I envision a game between two players, each commanding a brigade (or thereabouts), lasting only about two hours of real time. How much game time would that represent? Ah, who knows? As I wrote in my last article in MWAN #115, I am dropping a precise time-scale altogether. Instead, for a game of this style, I have devised a new concept....
4. Time Scale and the Big MO
For the past year - for an unrelated project - I have been reading memoirs of Germans involved in the Napoleonic wars. There are a billion of them, from every rank imaginable, and from every possible point of view. And I've noticed something interesting with regard to their accounts of battles. The higher in rank the author, the more precise he becomes about the passing of time. A man like Muffling (quartermaster and occasional de facto chief of staff) will write that, "At a quarter past three, I finally received the report from Colonel von Stumpf, and learned that the Russians were retiring on the village of Schlurpnitz...."
But the closer we get to the action, the more vague and fuzzy time becomes. It is extremely rare to read of a lieutenant or captain (and certainly not a private soldier) looking at a watch or clock, or noting the time. Instead, they talk about standing under enemy fire, "for what seemed like an eternity." Or something like this: "at last it began to grow dark, and we feared the enemy might make one more attempt on our lines...." Or they mark time in terms of events: it began to rain, or Colonel von Stumpf rode up and gave us new orders to advance, or several squadrons of enemy light horse suddenly emerged from the smoke....
This has given me the idea to try something very different with time scale.
First, let's start from the assumption that the game begins with you, the brigadier, reading your orders. You are to move out immediately and implement them. So what counts is not necessarily the precise time on a clock, but whether or not you can accomplish your mission. In game-design terms, that means that victory conditions are more important than time. The game should be focused on goals, not pre-designated increments of time.
Second, let's take a cue from all those memoirs: what we never see is a turn-style description of events. (Nobody ever wrote that "the enemy did something, then we did something, then the enemy did something, then it was our turn again...") Instead, what we have is recollections of the enemy pouring in from all sides like a tidal wave, and our boys can't stop them... Or: "they charged toward us, but showed a reluctance to close with our squares, and they began to fade back in frustration as our men jeered them...
In other words, battle memoirs often speak of time in terms of Momentum. Our side seemed to have things in hand for a while, but then something happened - there was some loss of momentum, and suddenly the whole thing stalled. Or worse, suddenly the enemy gained the momentum, and now we were scrambling or falling back.
Instead of a turn structure, this game will be based on one side or another having a certain amount of Momentum (hereafter referred to as "The Big MO.") MO can be reflected by a single number. Let's say the game opens with the French having MO=6. The French commander may begin to take actions. These actions have MO costs associated with them. Some are easier to perform than others (and this can vary, according to your army's doctrine. Forming square from line is easier under one system than under another, for example.) If your action has a MO cost lower than your current MO, you may perform it, and keep going: choose another action. But if the MO cost of the action is greater than your current MO, you must roll based on the difference. Passing the roll means you've sustained the momentum, and can keep going. Failing means you've lost some MO. Your MO level is lowered, which of course lessens the chance of completing any more actions. This continues until you've completely exhausted your MO.
As you draw closer to the enemy, the MO cost of actions increases. Additionally, under various circumstances, the enemy has the chance to interrupt your momentum in certain ways. He could suddenly try to charge you, for instance, or he could fire at you, as you perform an action. The game would freeze for a second to resolve that. If the enemy succeeds, he has suddenly seized the MO. If he fails, then he has actually increased your MO.
Here's a possible example of this in practice:
The Young Guard has the MO and is advancing on Plancenoit. The French are advancing in a supported line, with two battalions up front, and two about 200 yards to the rear. The Prussian commander is holding his fire, hoping for a really telling blast at close range. The French, with uninterrupted MO, thus advance all the way to the town when suddenly the Prussians loose a battalion volley on them. It is telling fire: the French are staggered, officers and musicians are killed, and their advance stalls. The Prussian player has seized the MO. But what now? He doesn't want to abandon his position. He allows his infantry to continue firing instead, but now their fire has become less disciplined. (If fire is not effective against the enemy, it costs you - the firing side - MO.) The French are recovering the MO. The assault is about to resume.
To this point, I've only been describing infantry actions, but you can see how this kind of system would also lend itself to the ebb and flow of cavalry melees, as each side commits reserves. I'm thinking of an action like Liebertvolkwitz, where the two sides chased each other back and forth across the field like a football game all day. Or Auerstadt or Waterloo, with successive waves of cavalry unable to break the infantry squares.
The MO system also eliminates one of the eternal problems of wargames: time compression. What to do with all those turns and phases before actual combat? Here we can "fast-forward" to crisis-points where decisions are made. And the outcomes of those decisions actually structure the pace of the game.
This system also makes the keeping of a reserve an absolute necessity, if you don't want one loss of MO to end your entire game. Many games try to use artificial rules to enforce players' keeping a second line: die roll modifiers, "integrity distances," and so on. In this case, happily, there wouldn't be a need for such rules: if you don't have a second line, you've got nobody left to take back the MO from the enemy.
5. Managing Units
Given the small scale and the small number of units in play, this could easily be a rostergame, with nothing marked on unit bases themselves, except perhaps puffs of cotton to show firing. Since the enemy would have trouble determining the depth of your formations (he sees only the number of files, not ranks), he shouldn't have precise information about your losses and morale condition. I envision a short roster for each unit, to keep track of casualties and perhaps some other details, like the loss of a standard, or whether or not confusion has set it.
Again, simpler is better. Units would have two basic ratings: "Discipline," and "Esprit." The former would determine how and whether the unit could perform actions like formation changes. The latter determines how it deals with MO on an attack or in defense. If an attack is made when your side is almost out of MO, then you have less chance of that attack being successful, than if you'd made it with a lot of MO. If your men are full of esprit, though. they might just pull it off, and thus restore MO in the process. You're the brigadier: you're supposed to know the mood of your men. It's your decision whether or not to risk the assault at this precise moment.
6. Combat Resolution
Here my ideas are fairly fuzzy, I admit. I know that I want combat to be a function of the game's actual time-and-movement system. One example is the system I mentioned above, in which the MO (which is also the mechanism by which you move) determines the likelihood of success in an attack. But another important concept would be to make all combat functional, instead of incidental.
Most games don't do this. In most games, each phase of a turn is a discrete entity: You move, then stop moving. You shoot, then stop shooting. You fight, then stop, and so on. What you've done in one phase rarely connects to what you'll do in the next. But if we break down this tidy time-management, we can re-connect unit functions in interesting ways.
First, we have to decide on the role of the brigadier. Is he a micro-manager? Can he exert precise control over his battalions, as to when they shoot or don't`? Second, we need to "see" combat as a participant would have seen it. Is it predictable? Can you see it coming, and thus plan (and change) accordingly?
The answer, I think, is to have a kind of running status of awareness and control. I haven't decided yet whether this, too, could be worked into the MO levels, or whether it would have to be a separate element. But the idea is that the brigadier has a value expressing the degree to which he is able to exert control and anticipate the unexpected. As events occur, check against that value. A passing check means that the brigadier can control the way in which his men respond to the event. (For instance, having a battalion hold its fire until at point-blank range, or having them form square when enemy cavalry approach.) Failing the check would mean that the men react in an arbitrary way, or simply don't react at all.
All of this means that combat is triggered by the actions of the enemy, more often than it being a deliberate action chosen by your side. I like this notion, the more I play with it; it seems to be the opposite of most games, where combat is always initiated by an omniscient commander who chooses the time and manner of his men's actions.
7. The Final Frontier...
People like what they like, period. I predict it's going to be very hard to get a lot of people interested in a game system that is radically different from what they've come to expect. Too many things will just seem "wrong." One solution would be to include an avalanche of historical data alongside every rule, to justify it. But that won't convince anybody, and will just clutter up the rulebook. People's beliefs are rarely affected by encounters with things like proof or evidence. (When is the last time you've ever changed somebody's mind on any serious subject? Honestly. No matter how high a mountain of evidence you had.)
So I'm not really sure what kind of reception a game like this would receive. For one thing, it will have to be fast and simple. Now I knew. I know... every rulebook on earth claims to be both fast and simple. Even the 200+ page rules make that claim, although I do remember one author's introduction that claimed his game was "surprisingly easy to learn." (It's a bad sign if somebody is surprised to like your game!)
I'm hoping for something that can be comprehensively explained in about 25 pages. Much of the game detail will come in the maneuver systems, and since these would be different for each nationality, I was thinking of having a little 2-4 mini-book for each army, showing how they formed squares, lines, etc. For speed, that book would have redundant copies of all game charts, too, so that the "British Pack" has everything the British player needs to play, right there in front of him, even though half of it is also found in the "French Pack," too. That way there would be no tables and charts anywhere else on the field.
Finally, I am going to design this game as a very naked core of rules, around which players can add fancy things as they see fit. There will be, for instance, no rules for bridging, or Congreve rockets, or grand batteries, or sieges, or trained assassin fleas, or any of the other things that you probably will never use in a short game at this scale.
I welcome all thoughts, comments, and various forms of abuse:
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© Copyright 2002 Hal Thinglum
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