It is a rainy, gloomy day in Metropolis, and the passing commuters take no notice of a bedraggled figure emerging with haggard step from the cellar exit of the vast Public Library. He mumbles to himself as he shambles along, his hair thin and grey, his eyes wild. The good citizens give him a wide berth on the sidewalk, afraid he might accost them or demand money. But this is no ordinary street bum. No, this is Winston Wargamer, who has just completed all his research for his new game, The Glory of Glory.
Winston has spent four years in the dungeon-like archival section of the library. He has memorized vast tomes of information about marching rates, weapon ranges, tactics, the transmission of orders... he has absorbed so much arcana on the period that he is utterly incapable of thinking or talking about anything else.
Let us take one last look at Winston as he boards the commuter train, headed home. Because at this moment we see him at the height of his powers: believe it or not, this is Winston having a Good Day. Soon he will begin to design his wargame rules, and it's all downhill from here.
THE PEWTER HITS THE FLOCKING
Winston has decided upon a game scale. He wants to do a battalion-level horse-and-musket game. He wants to be able to do corps-sized actions on a single table, and thus a 1:50 scale seems obvious. One figure will equal 50 men, one inch 50 yards. Now safely home, Winston pops the lid on his Starbucks Super-Mega-Skydome-Sized Mocchalattegrandissimo, grips his pencil firmly, and gets to work.
First of all, Winston confronts the issue of time. How should time be managed in the game? Winston is a basically conservative guy, and doesn't go for the weird alternativetime structures of games like Piquet or Crossfire, or even the variable-length turns of that wretched Grande Armee. No, you see, Winston is designing a Simulation, not a game. You can't just make-believe when you design a simulation. Things have to be based firmly in fact. That means that - just as in the real world - certain things happen in a certain order, and take certain amounts of time to happen. The cavalry trots, then it gallops, and then the infantry can try to form square, and then they can shoot muskets, and so on. So Winston is designing a fixed turn-structure, and he has decided that each complete turn should represent 15 minutes of real-time.
His first calculations are relatively easy. He knows that Prussian infantry marched at a normal pace of about 140 feet per minute. With Winston's game scales, that's a 14" move for an infantry battalion. He knows that cavalry "walked" at a speed of 330 feet per minute, thus yielding a 33" movement rate for horse units. Winston's eyebrows rise a bit at this, but the numbers don't lie. He knows that the effective range of a 6-pdr cannon was about 1000 yards, he knows how many casualties a single cannonball could cause upon different formations of men, how many shots the gunners could take in a 15 minute turn, and multiplying it by eight guns in a battery, he knows how many men a battery could kill.
So Winston clears the ancient pizza boxes from a patch of floor and sets up his figures for his first playtest. He wants to simulate an attack on an artillery battery. First the cavalry: from nearly three feet away, the cavalry "walks" right to the muzzles of the guns in a single move.
Oh dear, thinks Winston, this isn't going to work. The cavalry has a movement allowance greater than the artillery's maximum range (20"). They can attack the battery without ever getting shot at, and leap across the entire table at a single bound. So Winston tries the infantry next. He sets them up 20" from the guns. The infantry advances to just over a foot from the guns on its first move, carefully avoiding "stopping" in canister range. And then on the next move, it leaps right into the guns, just like the cavalry. Winston shakes his caffeine-addled brain. "I know I've got the data right," he says. "I must be doing something wrong."
YOU CAN NEVER EAT Too MUCH FUDGE
Winston's first instinct is to shorten the game-turns, so that infantry and cavalry will move more slowly. But in order to get the cavalry's movement rate less than the artillery's maximum range, he has to have a turn that equals only six minutes. "Six minutes?" he gasps. "I can't do a six-minute turn. Each turn already has eight phases. We'd never get done with the game." He needs to find a way to get time to move along faster.
Without even seeing himself doing it, Winston commits his first fudgy rationalization. "Well," he says, "Just because the turn is fifteen minutes long, doesn't mean a unit has to use all fifteen of those minutes to move. Maybe they're only moving for half that time. I can cut all movement rates in half, and the proportions will still be right." Snip. (Of course, it doesn't occur to him that there might indeed be some units that are using all fifteen minutes to move, and others that aren't, and that because he's divided the turn up into phases, he has no way to represent a unit that moves and moves and moves, rather than a unit that moves, then stops, then fires. Everybody stops moving when the movement phase is done, period.)
Now that movement is more manageable, Winston can take a look at the punishment that artillery unit is dealing out. He has statistics that tell him how many men should be killed in the target units, but of course now that he's halved movement ranges, should he halve the killing power of the guns, too? After all, the targets are now being much more obliging and hanging around longer, to get killed. Winston tries it using the original firepower values with the halved movement rates, and finds that the artillery obliterates the targets now. That's not right. So he halves the artillery firepower, but now sees that he's back to where he started; units can advance without much difficulty right into the teeth of a full battery. That's not right, either. And so Winston commits his second fudgy rationalization of the day: he chooses a place somewhere between these two figures, in order to the get the artillery firepower to "feel about right."
After tinkering and experimenting with different firepower values, Winston finally finds the one that seems to work when he sets up his units and runs various attacks and defenses.
Here we must break from our blow-by-blow account and consider the little angel on Winston's left shoulder. You see, the angel is disturbed. Winston has spent four long years compiling heaps of data, and yet what does he end up using. for his game values? A make-believe number! Something entirely pulled out of his rear end, massaged until it "works" in the game. The angel is jumping up and down, urgently slapping at Winston's earlobe, to no avail. All that data... all that research...
LET'S Do THE TIME-WARP AGAIN...
Winston's game is based on turns. Each turn has several phases. The transmission of orders comes first, then movement, then firing, then combat, then rallying, and so on. Winston is relatively pleased with this, and he's managed to get the movement rates to "look right" on the table (by totally ignoring what his research found, and coming up with stuff that "worked.")
If you'll recall, Winston had earlier rationalized that he didn't have to demonstrate the actual rate a unit could move in his time-scale, because the "average" unit would not necessarily be moving every minute of that turn. But the angel on his shoulder has noticed a new problem. In Winston's game, an infantry unit can move 9" during the movement phase. If the unit isn't doing anything else, then that's all the movement it's allowed. But if the unit engages in combat, and then has to advance or retreat as a result of that combat, then it gets to move again. In fact, Winston has a "breakthrough move" rule for cavalry which even allows it to move again if it breaks an enemy in a charge, come into a second combat, break a second enemy, and advance still further. This really perturbs the angel, and here he does manage finally to get Winston's attention
by sticking a pencil in his ear.
"Ow! Stop that!"
"Sorry," the angel says, "But it was the only way to get your attention." "What do you want?" Winston demands.
"Your movement is all wrong. Your logic is exactly backwards. You can't have some units moving over and over again in the same turn, while other identical units aren't allowed to."
"What are you talking about," Winston asks, irritated. "You read the research. It said that this is how it happened: a unit charged, passed through enemy fire, and either had to fall back, or swept the enemy and kept going, sometimes right into another part of the enemy line."
"I know," says the angel, but all that took time. What are all your other units doing, while that unit is doing all that extra movement?"
"Huh?" says Winston.
"Look," the angel says as he tries with difficulty to point the pencil at the terribly-painted 3rd Hussars on Winston's table. "These guys moved their full movement allowance, right? And then they stopped. But these guys, the Dragoons, moved full and ended up in contact with the enemy. That combat must have taken a while, right? More time elapsed. And then they broke that enemy and pursued them - more time elapsed - and then charged right into the 5th Hazzard County Landwehr, here - another combat, more time elapsed - and failed to break them, and fell back - yet another move, more time elapsed."
Winston yawns.
"What I'm asking you," the angel says, "is why do you make the Hussars sit there and watch as the dragoons do all this extra stuff? If that time exists in the game world, then shouldn't the Hussars be allowed to make use of it, too?"
"Oh, I see what you're saying," Winston says. "But I can't allow every unit to have that space, and it screws up the damage done by artillery fire. And I can't allow every unit to have three moves and two combats in a single turn. We'd never get done with a turn!"
"So what you're saying," the angel says, "is that none of the research really matters if it doesn't work right in your game?"
"SIMULATION!" thunders Winston, and he maliciously flicks the angel off his shoulder. It flies screaming across the room and narrowly misses being impaled on a stand of Macedonian pikemen.
But still, it troubled Winston. The angel had been right. How could he fix it? If he got rid of the rule that allows cavalry to advance after breaking an enemy, then it wouldn't "look" like a cavalry charge, would it? The beaten enemy could just walk away while the cavalry stood there, as if having hit a brick wall. And if he got rid of the Breakthrough Move concept, then that would take most of the fun and risk out of launching a cavalry charge - that wouldn't "feel right."
This was starting to get a lot like religion. The more uncomfortable facts he confronted, the more he had to decide simply to ignore what he saw and go with what he felt, instead.
THE POTBELLY TEST
After several months, The Glory of Glory was ready for its first crucial playtest. Winston took it down to his game club, the Metropolis Association of Nerds and Gaming Enthusiasts (MANGE.) After an embarrassing reminder that he hadn't paid his club dues in seven months, Winston set up a relatively small scenario and gave a rules briefing. The guys seemed skeptical, but then again they were always skeptical, so Winston soldiered bravely on.
The guys at MANGE didn't mean to be overly critical. (They really didn't.) It's just that they're... well, you know: wargamers. So five minutes into the rules briefing, Fat Freddy says:
"Oh, you got that from Empire, huh?"
"Got what from Empire?" Winston asks, his hackles already rising.
"That opportunity charge thing," Fat Freddy says.
Nearsighted Neal has been holding the charts an inch from his face, adjusting his glasses. As Winston speaks Neal suddenly chuckles and says, "Ah... like Napoleon's Battles."
Winston is becoming visibly agitated.
"This fall-back thing reminds me of Shako," says Sam Slowmover. "Isn't there already a game called The Glory of Glory?" says Sarge.
Winston snaps. "No, there isn't."
"Yeah, there is," says Sarge. I'm sure there was some guy in 1971 out at this club I used to game at near Twenty-Nine Palms, and he some game called that. You better check."
Winston hadn't anticipated this critique. Sarge had been in the Marines, and was convinced that unless you'd served precisely in the way that he had, you couldn't possibly hope to understand anything about warfare, from the Hittites through Gulf War Two. Sarge could usually be counted upon to critique the Command and Control system as being "unrealistic," and then to give examples from his tour of duty on Grenada.
As the game gets underway, Nearsighted Neal takes his cavalry forward, very close to Sam Slowmover's infantry. Sam, who is the group's rules-lawyer, wants to know why he can't form square at the approach of Neal's cavalry.
"You can try to form square if they try to charge you," Winston says.
"But not if they're only standing 150 yards away?" Sam demands. "That's crazy! My guys can see them, plain as day. What's the difference?"
Winston has to concede that Sam's request is justified in historical terms, but if he allows the non-active side to form square in the midst of the active side's move, then he'd have to allow other defending units time to make "opportunity formation changes" at the appearance of other enemy threats, in the midst of their moves, too. And that would not only slow the game down considerably, but it would also raise all sorts of ugly questions like, `How many opportunity formation changes do I get?' or `Can I move my infantry up close, force him to change into line, then hit him with the cavalry... or when my cavalry approaches, does he get to try to change back into square?' or: `Would there be modifiers for when I could or couldn't make opportunity formation changes, based on command rating, terrain, weather, and the type of enemy approaching?' ...And so on.
"So what you're saying," Sam says, obviously miffed, "Is that you recognize it's historically correct, but you're not going to allow it because it will mess up your game?"
"Simulation..." Winston whimpers meekly.
"You know, this is how my buddy Al did it in his game "Nappy's Big Day..." Sarge says, and proceeds to lay out a completely irrelevant artillery-fire subsystem dating from 1974.
CONCLUSION: (IN WHICH OUR HERO DECIDES HE LIKES THE LIBRARY BETTER)
Winston returned home that night a broken man. Of all the club, only Fat Freddy had said, "Yeah, I liked it," and he'd only said that because it reminded him of another game he liked a lot better. Sarge and Sam got into a heated argument about Hussars. Neal found four typos in the melee chart (which they'd never gotten a chance to use, since the game never managed to get that far.) Nobody offered any commentary on whether or not The Glory of Glory worked as a simulation, but they all offered various critiques on how to improve it as a game. Sam (who generally complains about speed while simultaneously being the slowest player in the group) thought "the mechanics need speeding up." Sarge said, "it doesn't have much period flavor." Neal wanted "the chance to roll more dice."
Winston dutifully scribbled all of this down, packed up his toys, and trudged back to his apartment. The angel, who seemed to be wearing a cast and was keeping a respectful distance, quipped: "You forgot your lucky ruler."
"Shut up," Winston said.
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© Copyright 2004 Hal Thinglum
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