I have been reading Sam's various articles with great interest and was happy to see that he had read my Piquet Regimental rule set. I was even happier to see that he thought the objective horizon movement concept was "brilliant" - at least until he tried it!! I would like to respond to his critique a bit later, but first want to jump on his band wagon about the problems of time scales that he raised in both his "Reality Meets the Wargamer (and loses)" and "Magic Movement" articles.
This is especially appropriate because of Sam's references to George Jeffrey's VLB which takes me back to some very enjoyable times. When Ned Zuparko first brought George's work to the attention of American gainers I was quickly enthralled by it's siren call and George, Ned, and I sacrificed many trees in our correspondence about the concept. It got so bad in fact that we eventually moved to sending audio tapes back and forth because it was taking too long to write all our thoughts. And when George re-surfaced on the internet we, and many others, continued on with our good natured and lively debate up until his very untimely death. As with Sam I tried any number of modifications and variations of VLB trying to get it to work. The very first test version of Chef de bataillon was a lovely, but bizarre variant of VLB providing no less than 6 different time scales ranging from 30 seconds per turn to 16 minutes per turn. The idea here being to match the time of the turn to the critical event on the table; quick events got short turns and slow events got long turns. Since the ground scale of the game was 10 yards to the inch we had to go to the 30 second turn because cavalry at the gallop can cover a lot of table even in that short a time! As screwy as it was, this system actually worked fairly well - until we put the aforementioned cavalry on the table. Then the game would inevitably, as Sam has described, collapse into an endless chain of itty-bitty turns. While the philosophical problems inherent within VLB could be dealt with if by no other means than simply ignoring them, this mechanical problem of an infinite number of baby step turns was, and I think will ever remain, unsolvable.
While I never was able to adapt George's ideas successfully, the discussions concerning them helped immensely in shaping my ideas about the role of time in wargame design. When my good friend Bob Jones came out with the Piquet system, the pieces really fell into place for me. The simple truth of the matter is that the best way to deal with time in a wargame is to essentially ignore it - time plays no useful role whatsoever. All the designer needs to do is provide mechanics that establish the appropriate sequence of events.
Let's look at it this way, there are three ways of including time in a wargame design: as a design scale, as an input variable, and as an output variable.
The classic method is to use time as a design scale, for example, in Empire we said that each round is approximately an hour in length. But as Sam pointed out, in the vast majority of wargames the designer never has a unit doing the same thing for an entire hour. You don't move for an hour, you don't fire for an hour, you don't fight for an hour, etc.. The unit can do multiple things in the hour and the rules NEVER say how much of that hour was used to do each of these things. The simple reason for this is that in the real world nothing takes the same amount of time to happen. The designer probably never really considers the time scale when determining the majority of the mechanics for the game. Empire was completely designed, play tested, and written before we ever decide that each round would be advertised as an hour. None of the mechanics depended on 60 minutes in any way shape or form during the design. When the designer gives a time scale what he is really saying is that "on average the stuff that happens in a turn can be considered to have consumed that amount of time." What he doesn't say is "and don't push it any further than that because I can't tell you."
The VLB system is the only gaming concept that I know of that attempts to use time as an input. It is based on rates and once a critical event is determined the time it took for this to happen since the last critical event is determined and then that time becomes an input to determining the out come of all the other actions that are in progress on the table. The practical playability problems resulting from this have been described. The other design problem is determining the rates to be used to calculate the results of 'X' amount of time of volley fire at a specific range at a specific cover by a specific quality of troops under the leadership of a specific quality commander under specific weather... well, you get the idea.
I don't recall ever seeing a wargame that generated time as an output, and if you really, absolutely, positively have to have time in the sense of hours and minutes in your wargame, this would be the way to do it. For the compulsively detailed, this could be done by finding the unit that moved the furthest during the turn completed and then using a rate to convert that to an elapsed time; the number of modifiers that could be attached to this calculation could make a tax attorney smile with delight. For the rest of us it could be as simple as a die cast at the end of each turn. For example, taking Empire again, we could decide that the average turn would on the average represent about 60 minutes of action - but it could vary a half hour either way. So we would have someone cast 3d20 and add 30, the result being the number of minutes the round lasted. This could be as few as 33 minutes or as great as 90 minutes, but on the average would be 60 minutes (OK, 61.5 to be exact...). While this is in practical terms no different than the time scale usage, it is probably more honest in that eliminates the illusion of "exactly 60 minutes of time." Wish I had thought of it back then!
The critical point here is that of the three possible uses of time listed, two of them don't really use time at all and the third one, which does use time, doesn't work! The moral to me is clear - don't bother.
Wargames designers create the illusion of time by designing mechanics that create a believable series of events, not by generating a continuous flow of time that is then used to establish the events.
I must admit to getting a bit confused when Sam talks about events and processes and says that I was trying to show a process in Piquet Regimental rather than events. To me a series of events is a process; but, I think what Sam was drawing a distinction between was what I would call continuous events and discrete events, like the difference between analog and digitized sound recordings. Wargaming events are, as Sam points out I think, discrete events not continuous - the unit is either at the location from which it started the move or it is at the end point of the move, it does not move itself along each point of the move path in an uninterrupted flow. For this reason I would argue that Sam is wrong about Piquet Regimental. The game provides only three types of information to the gamer about events: 1 - the action that will result in an event has been ordered, 2 - the event has been completed, and 3 - there are 'X' more chips to be removed before the event is completed. Since the removal of chips is based on dice casts, this last piece of information can at best be considered an estimate. Between the start and the stop of an event, the game provides no other information. If the event is a move, the game will not tell if the unit has started to move or is still processing the order, is stalled half way across, is rushing to make up lost time, or proceeding at a 'normal' pace. The only interim information that is provided is the third piece - the number of chips.
I would submit that the typical game mechanic of the fixed move distance is attempting to emulate the continuous event of a real world unit moving while Piquet Regimental is rather rigidly designed to just generate discrete events.
Sam also questions how the system would handle interaction events such as fire on a target as it moves and intersecting move paths. Actually these are quite simple. Fire can only be issued at the unit's current location on the table. Thus if the starting location of a moving unit is within range, it may be fired on at that location during the interval it is removing its chips to complete its move. If the starting location of the moving unit is out of the other side's range, the unit can not be fired upon until the move event is competed, and then it can be fired upon at the new location. Is this different from 'standard' wargaming practice? You bet! But it is consistent with the discrete event nature of the game design - and it is very easy to play.
The question of intersecting movement paths is also handled fairly easily. There are really two different flavors of this problem - accidental or unintentional crossings and deliberate interceptions to pre-empt the other side's movement.
The unintentional crossing of opposing movement paths is really more of a theoretical problem than a real world one. I don't recall it happening in a game. We are very restrictive in how we allow units to angle their movement and as a result opposing forces tend to match-up down the line. However, there are two ways of handling the circumstance. The first is the 'Fog of War' option which just says to ignore the whole thing; for whatever reason the two forces never saw each other and didn't interact. This is the simplest, but some folks have a problem with simplicity. For them we have the 'Fog of War, Light' version which says that if the two formations activate their movement on the same card, then they will meet, fact-to-face, at the half way point of the shorter move distance. Otherwise they are assumed to cross without encountering each other.
It is much more likely that one formation (usually cavalry) will be ordered to attempt to intercept an enemy unit that has already been ordered to move against another friendly formation. This is done by placing the picket of the intercepting force at the half way point of the moving unit's path. If the intercepting force activates its movement first, then it will intercept the moving force at that half way point. The two forces are placed at that point immediately and combat will begin. If the moving formation activates its movement before the intercepting force, then the moving formation is moved and the intercept attempt is ignored and assumed to have failed because of not having received orders quickly enough.
I guess my basic point here is that these types of interaction issues are no more complicated to figure out within the confines of horizon movement than with fixed distance movement. Problems only arise when you try to apply fixed distance movement reasoning to a horizon movement problem, or vice versa. With horizon movement, the critical question is not so much where the event happens, but 'when' the event happens as compared to other events.
Sam also states that the game gives a different perspective on command and control than is normal in wargames. This too is true. Remembering that the ground scale of this game is 75 yards to the inch and that each maneuver element represents an entire regiment and the intrabattalion spacing, my opinion is that the corps or divisional commander of actual troops would not be constantly aware of precisely where each unit was on the Napoleonic battlefield. More importantly, the enemy commander would not know the exact location and expected moment of engagement either and this is an important bit of ignorance to model in the game. While the previous issue was a mechanical one, I feel that this one is more a matter of personal taste and should not be interpreted as a weakness of the mechanic or the design.
One of Sam's "givens" for wargame design is that you can't get rid of the helicopter effect. While that is certainly true in an absolute sense (at least when discussing single playing table games), there are things that can be done to reduce the information the helicopter knows. Not having the moving units proceeding across the table at a predictable distance each turn is one of them. In the Piquet world this is referred to as 'the table lies'.
In a fixed move distance game' 'if a unit is 36" away from you and its maximum movement if 9", you know that it will not be able to make contact with you for at least 4 turns. Any of the various Piquet sequencing techniques destroys this calculus. While not a perfect solution, I view this as a big step in the right direction. And, I am willing to accept that as a result moving units just sit beside standing units as the price of reducing player information. Some people are not willing to make that tradeoff and that is fine, but I don't think that this makes the mechanic wrong or more unrealistic.
For the sake of accuracy, I would also point out that Piquet Regimental does not use the same d20 based initiative system as standard Piquet. This particular game started out as a design experiment in using the Piquet philosophy to generate a 'simultaneous' move gaming system. Simultaneous being used here in a more real world sense of the term in that things can, but don't necessarily have to, happen at the same time; not the wargaming sense of everything moving at once. As a result every player has his or her own card deck and initiative point total and can use that initiative when allowed by their card deck (also different from standard Piquet). Each player turns over a card at the same time (and this 'simultaneous' action is the hardest part of the game to get right!) and each player can use initiative at the same time, within the limits of the card showing on the individual's deck. While this is a substantially different mechanic from that used in standard Piquet, the end result of a controlled unpredictability of event occurrence is equivalent to standard Piquet.
I am intrigued by Sam's momentum concept and have in fact been working with a similar idea I got from one of Wally Simon's articles in the P. W. Review. While substantially different in the mechanics, it seems to be pretty close in philosophy to what Sam is proposing. In fact I don't see that momentum based sequencing is conceptually markedly different from Piquet.
As all the TV network analysts seem prone to say, "at the end of the day" all these questions come down to the taste and desires of the individual gamer. It is not a choice between 'realistic' and 'unrealistic' mechanics - by definition all wargame mechanics are unrealistic. It is a choice of which set of unrealistic mechanics helps the gamer suspend disbelief sufficiently to 'see reality' on the table top.
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© Copyright 2003 Hal Thinglum
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