Now What? I have some experience publishing fiction, and early in that "career" I became the umpteenth person to learn one of the old and frustrating truisms about fiction: Don't Try to Write About Reality. You can take real people you know, reproduce them faithfully, detail-by-detail, in a fictional story - indeed, you can make the whole story nothing more than a recounting of actual facts - and readers will call it "unrealistic." I can't tell you the number of times I've seen this happen, both from the writer's and the editor's perspective. Fiction is one animal, and Fact is another, and the truth makes for lousy fiction. What readers want is an invented story that, in its own invention, seems "true" because it plays on their pre-conceptions of what Truth ought to look like. (And after a while, of course, we start to see reality in terms of the fictions, and get irked when reality doesn't measure up. Hence the use of Hollywood imagery in the verbiage of all our politicians - they know what we like to hear.) Thus also with wargames, and doubly so. You have to give the garner what Wally Simon used to call "recognizable patternry." For the sake of argument, let's take the following as givens: 1. We'll never get rid of the Helicopter Effect; everybody can see what's happening on the whole table. 2. We can't model a process; only a series of events, as we pick up figures and put them back down again. 3. We can't replicate the actual process of staffwork, because of #1 and #2 above, but also because we don't have the people present to do it. Three or four wargamers on a side can't replicate the actions of dozens of brigadiers, divisional commanders, corps commanders, etc. There aren't enough brains to go around. 4. Over the decades, garners have gotten used to having certain things in their games. Once upon a time, some game designer must have rationalized them as "realistic" in some way, but nobody now thinks that deeply about them anymore. They're just understood as needing to be there, otherwise the game will feel "wrong." (For instance, we take it as a given that if Player A gets a chance to fire each turn, then Player B should, too.) So where does that leave us? It leaves us needing to create a system that has all the recognizable patternry of command-control, but without any of the actual physics: a fiction of command-control - something fake that looks real. Let's start with #2: events. We can't alter the fact that we reproduce events, not process. But we can alter the order of events, the criteria for when those events may take place, and the opportunities players might have for interjecting unexpected events. In other words, we can construct an alternative sequence of play that isn't really a sequence at all. The classic model of game-play derives from Chess. It's called alternative-move, or "You Move / I Move." This is still the model used by the vast majority of games - even many computer-based games, which seemingly don't need it at all. It has several advantages. For one thing, it's indisputably fair; you always know that you'll get your turn, and you'll get the same number of turns as the other guy. It's also extremely clear. And - this is what, I suspect, most gainers love about it - it's very predictable, thus enabling you to formulate plans and carry them through without all the annoyances of chance and chaos interrupting. It doesn't much resemble real life, but it works, and so it's one of those attractive fictions that people love; we think we're seeing a replica of reality even though we aren't. From a designer's point of view, Alternative Move has another advantage: it lends itself very well to the modeling of events. In Chess, for instance, each turn you can move exactly one piece. In most games, there is some variation of this concept: you can move all your pieces one move, for instance. So how can we keep the convenience of this system for modeling events, but leave behind all the predictable drudgery and automation of You Move / I Move? The trick will be to have a flow of events, with that flow being unpredictable and interesting, yet still consisting of discrete events that can be easily modeled in game terms. In order to do this, all the events will have to be quick (i.e., the game mechanics need to be simple, without much recourse to charts or tables). A quick flow of discrete events can trick our brains into feeling like we're experiencing process, and not just discrete events. (Imagine you're watching somebody dumping a big bucket of golf balls off the side of a table. If you watch long enough, and/or stand back far enough, it looks like a sort of white stream. But the bigger the objects being dropped - in game terms, the `bigger' the events being modeled - then the less likely you are to have the illusion of a flow, and the more likely you are to see it for what it is: a series of balls dropping off the table.) So this is what we want: a system that gives us a stream of little events, constantly running. How shall we do this? 1. The Big MO  In a piece I wrote in MWAN118, I proposed a system based on momentum, not a predetermined sequence. I called it "the big MO." The idea was that the game should be focused on goals, not pre-designated increments of time. I envisioned this mainly as a system for the preradio era, and especially at the tactical level. Instead of a turn structure, this game will be based on one side or another having a certain amount of MO, reflected by a single number. For instance, the French have 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. The principle of the Big MO is that the game moves forward in increments - events - with one player testing the limits of what the opponent will let him get away with. The opponent has the option at various points to interrupt the first player's actions, and force a kind of showdown. That showdown will result either in the first player succeeding and thus carrying on, or the opponent succeeding, and thus the MO switching to him. Either way, we get a flow of events, with no one event necessarily privileged over another, until the players choose to make it so. 2. The Piquet System Fans of Piquet will no doubt have stopped reading by this point, since they believe that their game has already solved all these problems. And of course Piquet does have a novel approach to modeling time, the impact of randomness, and the basic `unfairness' of a battle situation. Some of these things make people hate Piquet, of course. My first experience was miserable: I commanded an infantry division in line with attached artillery, watching as the enemy cavalry closed across a mile-long field. During that entire mile of their travels, I never turned up a "reload" card, and thus my artillery never managed to fire at an enemy that, in game scale, would have taken nearly forty minutes to reach me. C'est la guerre. But any Piquet enthusiast will tell you that the Piquet "turn" is really just a bookkeeping exercise; to reshuffle cards and so on. Time is understood to keep flowing. 3. Intelligence-Based Sequence of Play Even before I started to work on Grande Armee two years ago, I began sketching out a game for what I felt was a totally neglected and potentially rich scale/period: grand-tactical World War Two gaming. I envisioned a fast-moving game with figures representing whole companies. You could do huge battles with multiple corps on a side, and if you had a decent-sized table and some self-discipline, you play big sweeping maneuvers with turned flanks and all that. I envisioned starting with the 1941-43 North African campaign. It would be a WW2 game that focused on big things like command control and overall unit quality, rather than how thick the armor was over the auxiliary booby hatch of the Mark XIVa4 jlb Tank Destroyer (the special 1944 version, with the three extra toothpicks in the commander's cupola.) So I wanted a command system that took electronic communication into consideration, but which could create some sort of uncertainty based on the imperfection of knowledge, due to the huge distances involved. (Not knowing what the enemy has in reserve three miles behind the line seems very crucial.) Unlike the Big MO, both players have a rating for their grasp of the situation, which I called "Command Level" (CL). This could be modified by various things like bonuses for having air superiority or better staff, or penalties for poor communications, or bad weather, night, etc. One player will always have a higher CL than the other. (There is a tie-breaker die, just in case.) The side with the initiative may perform an action, which uses up a certain number of his CL. Certain actions allow the non-initiative side to respond by next performing an action of their own if they choose. They go back and forth like this until the initiative side has used up all his CL. If the non-initiative side has any left, he may now use them. Then, once both sides have used up all their CL, they roll again for a new turn. For example: A round of bombardment or a "reserve move" wouldn't trigger an enemy reaction; you could keep doing those until you use up all your CL. But a move into the contact zone would trigger a reaction option. In this way, we have a flow of events, with a compression of time toward key events involving conflict, or the responses to conflict. I've tested this out. It has some nice features. For instance, Player A tries to goad B into using up his CL by doing things like making small pinning attacks in a non-crucial sector. Then once B has no more CL, he can't react to A's major thrust. (At least he can't respond until next turn, when he'll have another chance, with a fresh batch of CL.) This system has a nice sense of momentum to it, and even though it's not "fair," in that there is never a symmetrical balance of moves or options, it feels "fair" because the decision process is always in the player's hands, not drawn randomly from a deck of cards. A (sort of) Summary Many people are perfectly happy with the fixed You Move / I Move system, and see no need to dabble in exotic wargames fare. But judging from the enduring popularity of George Jeffrey's Variable-Length Bound idea, there is a substantial plurality of wargamers who want some new way of managing time in their games. Most of their desire seems to be focused on the idea of compressing 'down-time' and emphasizing the important stuff: when clashes occur and decisions have to be made. Unfortunately, most of the methods devised thus far for accomplishing this are riddled with flaws. Most of our problems, I think, are problems of perception. We want to see process happening on a table that can only provide us with snapshots of discrete events. So the next-best thing would be to create a fiction of process - a flow of events that the players can manipulate to a degree, and which to a degree manipulates them. In this way, the basic micro-systems of a game are not really altered (how to shoot, how to resolve melee, how to rally, etc.) What is up for grabs is the control players have over the sequence and repetition of those events. We may no longer need the "turn" as such any more at all, except as a way of keeping track of time. Or we might want to keep it as a useful gimmick to show that one side or another has got the upper hand in the management of time: perhaps Player A has the ability to force the game "turn" to end, and that ability changes hands each turn. The "Magic Movement" of Wargames Part III in the "I Hate Scale" Trilogy by Sam Mustafa For the past several months I have been sending to MWAN my thoughts about the problems that wargames traditionally have with scale. I talked about this at the grand tactical level in issue 116, then at the petite-tactical level in #118. All along, I've been advocating systems that do away with scale as much as possible. My ideal game designs have no particular figure-to-man ratios, variable and unpredictable movement rates, and "turns" (if they exist at all) that represent a variable length of time. I think I've achieved a good bit of this with my new game Grande Armee, but in retrospect I'm still guilty of some very conventional thinking when it comes to one of wargaming's biggest scale-violations. I'll call it "Magic Movement." In general, my objections with precise scales center on the problem that game designers lay out these scales, claim they're the basis for all game considerations, and then promptly ignore them in a hundred different ways. Base sizes don't conform to the ground scale, movement rates don't conform to the ground or time scales, and casualties often seem as if they're drawn from a hat. Plus, there is a problem with the ways in which games represent combat results. Usually, when a combat results in one side winning and the other losing, the winner and loser suddenly take moves outside the normal move sequence. A unit that has a movement limit of 9" might move its full allowance, lose a battle, and then fall back another nine. So much for scale. You're wondering: "What's the problem with that? Everybody knows units might fall back or rout, and thus move more than they would normally do when formed up on the attack..." Sure they might. But when? I'm not arguing that your unit might be able to advance, fight, and fall back, but it's a question of time. If you argue that the unit only has a movement allowance of 9" for this, say, 15-minute turn, then you must mean that it can move up to that maximum in the time allotted. We must assume you mean that, once that move is completed, the time is up. Where, then, has it suddenly gotten all this extra time in which to fall back another full move? Let me give some examples. In Napoleon's Battles, cavalry unit X in line has a movement limit of 14". It charges, loses the combat, and now must make a "bounce move" (i.e., falling back, maybe disordered, maybe not.) It may fall back anywhere from 1" up to its maximum. In other words, it has suddenly availed itself of another move (which supposedly had just taken it half an hour), and this move is instantaneous. In Shako, a unit's division might suffer a loss of "division morale" which would require it to fall back at least 18". Considering that an infantry unit in line has a base move of only 6", this represents a sudden triple-move, backwards, no less. Most games require some sort of variation of a normal move, except it's backwards and instantaneous. In Warfare in the Age of Reason, for instance, it's variable, anywhere from 2" to a full move. There are many other examples. Virtually every game does this. Bear in mind that I'm not talking about breaking and routing. (I have a separate set of beefs about how most games do that, which I'll get to in a minute.) I'm talking about units that are allegedly still formed and under control, and are suddenly very fast and capable in ways they weren't moments ago. In their regular movement sequences, all of these games normally apply stiff penalties to units that are trying to move backwards. You could not, for instance, fall back away from the enemy nearly as fast under your own steam, as when you've lost a combat. And you certainly couldn't hop, skip, and jump instantaneously during the normal turn sequence. This is why I call it "Magic Movement." Along with the magic movement ability to move out of sequence, stealing time out of nowhere, is the often transporter-beam nature of this movement. Many games tell you to ignore terrain penalties, and just fall back a certain number of inches. (Let me be the first to utter a mea cu/pa here... I'm guilty of this in my game designs.) Remember that this kind of movement is done (usually) in the midst of resolving combat - i.e., in the midst of something else that is actually more important. So the designer doesn't want to dwell too much on the fall-back move; we don't want to be distracted from the real task at hand, which is resolving combats. And of course, due to the physical limitations of our game table, we don't want to get into all these tricky metaphysical questions about what happens when this unit falls back, perhaps near this other one who hasn't resolved combat yet... are these combats happening at the same time, or literally in the order that the players are rolling dice for them... and so on. So in short, what we have here is a time scale and its attendant movement limits, and then a host of possibilities that those movement limits will be exceeded. And they'll be exceeded in ways that defy the normal rules for movement, not to mention time. Once again, the game's scales are flagrantly broken. What is Combat Resolution? Wargame physics limits us to replicating discrete events: we pick up a stand of figures and we put it back down somewhere else. Then we pick up another, and put it down, and so on. What we can't do is model an ongoing process, except very sluggishly and with artificial opportunities to stop and think things over. Most game designers over the years have tried to divide time up across the whole board by the use of turns. Within each turn, you can do certain things, and logic (and the designer himself, usually) tells us that the turn's length was chosen to correspond with that limit of what you can do. So if the turn has X minutes, and your unit can do Z number of things, then it must take roughly X minutes to do Z things. But there's another problem. The turns themselves are sub-divided into segments, phases, whatever. In most games, there's a "Movement phase" in which all your units move, then perhaps a "Firing phase," and so on. There is almost always a "Combat Phase," in which all those combats caused by movement are now resolved. And that's where time scale breaks down in most games. The combat phase is assumed to come at the end of movement (i.e., at the "end of time" as allotted for this turn). But of course the combat itself requires time to resolve, and then it will probably occasion more movement, which naturally shou/d require time, too. But all of that happens instantaneously, as if there were magic extra time. Perhaps you say, "No Sam, in my game I build in the assumption that the turn mightinclude all that stuff. My turn length is an average that could cover an advance, a protracted firefight, a breakthrough, and then a fall back." Fine. But if that's the case, then how come you only allow that basic 9" of movement for a unit that is not involved in all of that? What, after all, is it doing with all that extra time while the other guys are shooting, fighting, and falling back? The answer is: it's a wargame, so it's standing there, stopped, because now we're in the Combat Phase.  If you give this any thought at all, it begins to look very stupid. If anything, a unit that is not involved in combat should be moving a lot faster than a unit that is, but most games give you the reverse. I can only assume that this is another one of those things that nobody has ever really thought about because it's always been done this way, and therefore looks "right." What is a Move? Boardgames have made great strides in recent years at a more flexible approach to resolving movement and combat. Once upon a time, all board games were stiff in structure: I Move Everything, then I Resolve all Combats, then You Move Everything, and so on. But many boardgames now have variable turn structures, and moving is not necessarily before combat, or perhaps it can be in lieu of combat, or perhaps I can activate this unit and move it, then activate that one for combat, then move it, then activate this other one for a rally, and so on. Miniatures rules haven't really kept pace with this sort of new thinking. It's harder for us, because we usually have a lot more units, and we use an unmarked table with an infinite number of variations of angles, distances, and so on. No neat, tidy squares, hexes, zones, or whatever. The boardgame system of individual unit activations doesn't work well for big miniatures games (and let's face it, we all like a BIG battle every now and then.) You can activate one unit at a time if you only have, say, 10-15 units per side, but anything more than that is dreadfully slow (and boring, with multiple players.) So we need some kind of miniatures system that would allow for resolution of combat as a function of movement, and yet still allow the game to flow. Here is a possibility I've been toying with recently: Timing Combats and Moves Equally: First of all, movement would be asymmetrical. As I described in my previous article "Reality Meets the Wargamer," there would be a sequence of play that flowed back and forth between the players in ways that were partly chanced, and partly deliberate. So, for instance, you might move to contact the enemy, and that might or might not afford him a chance to move in response. You commit to action, each using up your ability to move into contact until your units are in contact, and neither can move anymore. As units move to contact, they are frozen and the other movement continues on, perhaps with other combats getting marked, until movement is done. When you exhaust your initiative (or whatever mechanic you use), then mark units that were not in combat. Now resolve all the combats, marking those units according to their results. For all this "marking," you would need a bunch of chits. The chits would read: NIC: Not in Combat R: Routed FB: Fall back AD: Advance Nothing tricky so far, but here's the catch: once all those chits are placed, the turn is over. Don't touch any of those units that just resolved combat. You go through the next beginning-of-the-turn process, getting your fresh batch of initiative, and now it's a new turn. In this turn, first move all the routed and fall-back units. Then remove their chits so you can keep track of who has moved thus far. Next the Advancing units move. Remove their chits. And finally, move the NIC units, and remove their chits. As you're moving, you're going through that whole process again, of freezing units into combats, and so on. And once all movement is done on both sides, mark NICs again, resolve combats again, etc. Consider the implications of doing it this way. First of all, time flows - the turn structure is bare-bones, and both players have frequent chances to steal the initiative away from each other. It really does give you a sense of a "breakthrough move," without that artificial stuff that so many games do, interrupting the turn sequence. Second, there is no more Magic Movement. Advances after combat, fall-backs, routs, and so on are all integrated into the movement itself; they take up time just like "normal" movement, and you can only do one thing per "move." Third, you commit to combats - and to their resolution and outcomes - without knowing the implications in advance. And Fourth, it forces you to husband a reserve (units that aren't marked with combat markers), because one never knows how the combat will go, and units that were just in combat, even if they were victorious, are moving next turn in ways that don't allow you much flexibility. That, in turn, gives you a nice sense of an attack that has gone out of control, like cavalry pursuing the survivors of a broken square. What is a Rout? Routing and rallying have usually been taken too literally by wargames, which tend to give us a picture of a mob of men running away all together and at once. They are then chased down by a general officer who waves his hat, shouts something patriotic, and gets them all to stop running and re-form. It didn't happen that way. (Unless, perhaps, your game "simulates" a Mel Gibson movie.) Let's take the horse-and-musket era infantry battalion for our basic example. Consider the physical space occupied by a unit that has broken. It is no longer a unit, but a stream of men, stretching from the point of rout (where some stalwarts are probably still hanging on, and about to become prisoners), all the way back several hundred yards to the rear, perhaps even half a mile when dealing with mounted troops. Across this expanse of ground are the @500 men of the infantry battalion, scattered well beyond earshot of each other, and probably even out of sight. Many of them have thrown away their weapons and even if rallied, would no longer be combat-effective. Now consider the likelihood that more than one battalion in this sector broke; let's say a whole regiment or brigade has been killed and/or put to flight. We have perhaps 2,000 men or more from several different formations, intermixed and scattered over half a mile. You can see that a single man - even a legendary hero like Marshal Ney - would not be able to ride into their midst and shout orders, and rally more than a handful. If ever there were a case for Magic Movement, it seems that it would be routing. The unit does indeed "disappear" and may or may not re-appear elsewhere. So let me venture a caveat about the mechanics of routing. A lot depends on how much you "zoom" in game scale. I tend to work in grand-tactical abstractions, so I don't want to try to trace a literal path of rout. In my opinion, it can't really be done anyway, since routing is supposed to be something you didn't want to happen, and now we're asking you the player to control it by moving the unit on the table. A player moving a routed unit is an oxymoron; routing is the exact opposite of formed movement. But if you are doing a very nitty-gritty tactical game, then perhaps it might be important to show that routed men are indeed "there," an entity moving on the table like any other unit. (You might, after all, need to know if they are blocking a line of fire or sight.) Running Away is "Movement" too... Now let's apply this picture of routing to the integrated move system I described earlier. Whenever you get the opportunity to move your units, you do so under certain restrictions. The traditional one is the movement allowance - how far you can go. But there are always others. For instance, once within x number of inches of the enemy you probably can't do certain things like change formation or move by the flank. So all players admit that movement is never truly free or "normal." There are always mitigating circumstances. If your unit is falling back or victorious, then those are its mitigating circumstances for this upcoming move. Since we ended the previous turn having resolved combat but not yet moved any of the participants, then we open this new turn by having to deal with the combat outcomes, in the very same expanse of time as we're still moving other units that were not involved in combat. Your disordered units fall back, your victorious units breakthrough and perhaps pursue. If your unit routed, then we pick it up and move it to the rear; its "move" this turn is uncontrolled. (that's about as close to "magic movement" as this system tolerates.) And life goes on. Conclusions Designing a game is actually more fun for me than playing one. It's like opening an infinite tool kit and laying out all the tools and messing with them. I tend to think of game systems in that way; even though there are a number of wonderful tools in the box, you don't need all of them for each design. So in this series of articles on scale, I certainly am not arguing that each proposed system could harmoniously co-habit with every other one. It all depends on what your vision of a game entails. But I would encourage all designers and would-be designers to spend more time outside the box of traditional game-design concepts, particularly when dealing with that most slippery of all beasts: simulation. As for me, I intend to keep tinkering. Pass the wrench. Reality (Beginning) Back to MWAN # 121 Table of Contents Back to MWAN List of Issues Back to MagWeb Magazine List © Copyright 2003 Hal Thinglum This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. 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