Part I: Move Your Bishop I've been thinking a lot recently about how many gamers are focused entirely on process, when they should be worried about outcome. There's a very interesting discussion thread right now on "The Miniatures Page.com" about "Why People Hate Napoleonics." This period - my personal favorite - consistently ranks as one of the three most-loved and three most-hated, usually simultaneously. And one of the most oft-heard reasons for the latter is that the period is often gamed using very complex rules that try to satisfy the process-oriented gamers who must see certain things happening, or "it's not Napoleonics!" Take for instance, the cavalry charge: you might check your cavalry's morale (roll a die), then the target unit's morale (roll a die), then to see if the target unit formed square (roll a die). If yes, then will your cavalry break that square, or ride around it, or recall? (roll more dice.) What will be the casualties? (roll more dice.) Will you have to check morale again afterwards? (roll yet more dice.) Multiply this process by the number of units and then multiply again by the number of turns, and you can begin to see why people dread to play Napoleonics. Personally, I much prefer to trust a single fistful of dice on each side to "resolve" all of these things in a single moment. If you roll a lot of ones and the defending infantry rolled a lot of sixes, then your charge failed for any or all of the above reasons. Far away at the army headquarters, you really wouldn't have much more knowledge than that, anyway. You would ask only: did our boys break the enemy squares, or were they repulsed? Sure, we'd have situational modifiers, and things that determined how many dice each side rolled, and with what goals for resolution, but when the crunch comes, it needs to be quick. Let's say we're playing chess, and I am going to move my bishop several squares. I could pick the bishop up and set him down in each square, one at a time, until I was done. Or I could pick him up and put him down only once - in his destination square. Either way is "correct," but I think we'd all agree that the latter is better. We all know that the bishop moved through those squares, and that such a move was legal. But we don't need to see the bishop moving through all those squares in order to get the feel of the bishop's move. And most importantly: the bishop's moving through those squares just doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is the outcome: where he ended his move, and how that will affect my move. I hope we'd all agree that having the pieces hop along, one square at a time, would needlessly slow the game and be somewhat distracting, not to mention annoying as hell. Imagine how dumb it would be for a player to demand that you make your bishop move, hop by hop, through each square, because otherwise it doesn't "feel right." Yet that's the kind of thing that Napoleonics gamers do all the time. Part II: In Defense of Saving Throws Lately I've noticed is a sort of fashionable disdain for certain game mechanics as just being "wrong." Take for instance, Saving Throws. The idea of a saving throw is that Player A has done some damage to Player B, but B might have some mitigating circumstances, by which he could evade some of that damage. (Perhaps he's behind cover, or the ground is muddy, or what have you.) So B gets a shot at negating some or all of the damage. For some reason, Saving Throws are (as they say here in New York), 'Sooooo last week!" Here we have another case of people getting all worked up about process, when they should be concerned with outcome. Perhaps you've read some of the comments that appear on e-chat boards for wargaming (or perhaps you wrote some of them!) about saving throws. One guy was posting something about a new game he'd tried once and immediately quit because it had (and I quote now): "Saving Throws, for God's sake!" If you'll pardon my saying so, this is a really stupid way to think. Imagine saying: "I won't drive a car with a McPherson strut suspension. I don't care how smooth the ride or how well it handles... McPherson struts are old-fashioned. III only drive a car with a double-wishbone suspension!" Personally, when I drive a car, I'm concerned with the performance, not particularly with the specific engineering. A reliable and wellperforming system is what matters to me, regardless of what tools were used to create it. Most games that use dice do so to inject chance into that junction where your intentions and the outcomes meet. In other words, you fire your cannon because you intend to kill the enemy. But all you're really sure about is that you're firing your cannon. The degree to which you've actually killed the enemy is the result of a formula composed of fixed variables plus chance. For instance, you'll probably have to consider the following: Size of your cannons Number of guns firing Length of the turn Distance to the target Ground condition Type of target Formation of the target Target's cover from fire Gunners' proficiency and skill Visibility Casualties suffered by your gun crews thus far Relative elevations (and thus, trajectory) Bounce-through damage of roundshot Is the target moving? Okay... that's enough for now. Most game designers feel the need to incorporate some, if not most, of these important considerations into whatever system they develop for resolving how a cannon kills the enemy. There is also, of course, the use of the dice. You might be able to rationalize that the dice can "cover" some of these things that are more variable (visibility, perhaps, or bounce-through), but the dice can't cover 'hard data' like the size of the gun, the distance to the target, and so on; these things are fixed, and thus must be incorporated somehow. How are you going to do it? You can use the "Shooter's Perspective" in your system design, by which all things are factored in a single stream of data from the perspective of the firer. Empire does this, and for the most part, so does From Valmy to Waterloo. You start on this chart, then get a value, then go to that chart, get another value, then go over here and calculate this, and... so on. All along, it's only the shooter who is calculating and then rolling dice to randomize. Or you could use a competitive dice method, where both sides randomize. This makes a lot more sense, because you divide up the chores of calculation between two players, giving both shooter and target something to do. The shooter has his modifiers to calculate, the target has his, both roll a die, and then by competitive difference the result is obtained. This is the method used by Napoleons Battles. And finally we have Saving Throws - that much-maligned system that I still like. The idea behind a saving throw is that you don't need all the data up-front at once, and you don't have to have it all in one player's calculations. You can proceed with the shooter and some of his criteria, and then if his variables plus chance warrant it, the target has to follow-up with his variables and chance. Therefore, the shooter might use things like number and size of guns, distance to target, and gunners' proficiency. Break the calculations here and inject chance (a die roll). If the chance intersects with the variables favorably to the shooter, now you proceed with the target. He will suffer the damage from the shooter unless his variables and chance prevent it (cover, ground condition, moving target, etc.) All of these things would be factored into a single Save roll, and now applied, hopefully in an incremental way that allows three possible outcomes: 1) No Effect to the shooter's result, 2) Some mitigation of the shooter's result, or 3) Total negation of the shooter's result. The beauty of Saving Throws is that they allow for an acceleration of the shooter's play, because you only apply the saves if "hits" are scored. If the shooter's criteria don't warrant enough damage, then there's no need for a Save - no need to factor in those variables or chance. Another nice thing about Saves is that they allow for a second application of random chance, which allows the designer to separate the criteria and group them, applying different kinds of probability, as needed. For instance, you might shoot with a d10, but save with a d6, or vice-versa. The more variables you have, the bigger a die you probably ought to use. The bottom line, though, is that players who are obsessed with specific engineering items within the game are missing the point. As I demonstrated back in MWAN 114, there are many, many creative and sophisticated ways to use six-sided dice that very few game designers ever consider. Some deep thinking on systems of probability, game flow, and the distribution of game "labor" are necessary for a good design. It's not the type of shock absorbers you use: it's the overall quality and smoothness of the ride. Back to MWAN # 122 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. Other articles from military history and related magazines are available at http://www.magweb.com