MISSING ISSUE RESOLVED Bill Nevins Thank you for the extra issue. Believe it or not both issues arrived the same day. I will pass the extra issue on to someone who may enjoy it and perhaps be a future subscriber. As someone who has been a subscriber to MWAN since issue 14, I have been critical of your takeover of the magazine. I have voiced my opinion on TMP on several occasions. I feel that you have not followed in Hals' tradition and have changed the magazine from a homespun publication into a more "clinical" (for lack of a better word) publication. MWAN is dead. However, now that you have decided to revise the magazine and combine it with the "Courier" I think you are on the right track. Life goes on, things pass and new ideas sprout forth. Retire the MWAN name and move forward with your own publication. Take it where you will and allow it to succeed or fail on it's own merits. The new format will attract a new and different breed (as compared to the old fogies, like me). I suggest you start with a clean slate and christen the next issue # 1. I will support your new endeavor and become a subscriber immediately. I wish you success and look forward to receiving the first issue of whatever you choose to -all your new publication. I admire your determination in attempting to move forward and trying to better the state of American wargaming publications. Good luck and remember to listen to your subscriber base. MY REBUTTAL TO MR. COGGINS' REBUTTAL James Manto Oh dear... It appears that I am being challenged to pistols at dawn. I never called Mr. Coggins a liar. I said he was 'dissembling.' There is a difference. These are from the on-line version of the Oxford English Dictionary: dissemble verb hide or disguise one's true motives or feelings. - DERIVATIVES dissembler noun. - ORIGIN Latin dissimulare 'disguise, conceal'. lie noun 1 an intentionally false statement. 2 a situation involving deception or founded on a mistaken impression. verb (lies, lied, lying) 1 tell a lie or lies. 2 (of a thing) present a false impression. liar noun a person who tells lies. Mr. Coggins did not make any intentionally false statements. But he was concealing an unwarranted attack upon a rival ruleset with a veneer of pseudo-philosophic verbiage. Grande Armee and Napoleon's Battles are two entirely different styles of games with entirely different approaches to Grand Tactical Napoleonic wargaming. I have played both and didn't really like either. However, if Mr. Coggins wants to promote his rules then he should write an article of use to his players such as a scenario or how to command a cavalry division when playing NB. He should not state that players of anything other than Napoleon's Battles are irresponsible horoscope readers "who would abdicate responsibility for their actions to their stars." In his rebuttal, Mr. Coggins implies that I am stupid and a poor cavalry general and did not come to the game with the required detailed background in Napoleonic army command. I managed to get through Graduate School at a well respected university, so I don't think I'm stupid. Three of us read the rules and came up with the same interpretation, so there's something wrong with the rules if the players aren't interpreting them correctly. In my own rules, if a player interprets something wrong then I feel that I wrote the rule badly or not clearly enough. Of course I am not a good cavalry general. The cavalry generals are all dead. I am only a wargamer and I am obviously not worthy to play his game, being only an amateur historian and generalist in the horse and musket era along with the other 5 periods I enjoy playing. I understand the iconic concept of the wargames unit representing the area covered by the brigade. I always did. However, I still think that attacking one brigade with two of my own is a Good Thing. A defending body of troops, when already pinned from the front and then threatened on its flank will suffer from a diffusion of combat power, a loss of reserves and supports (who are dawn off to face the threat to the flank) and the very serious erosion of morale as the troops start to worry about their line of communication and retreat. Another definition from the OED: deconstruction noun a method of critical analysis of language and text which emphasizes the relational quality of meaning and the assumptions implicit in forms of expression. DERIVATIVES deconstructionism noun deconstructionist adjective & noun. A set of wargame rules CANNOT be deconstructionist because they DO NOT engage in 'Critical analysis of language or text'. The essence of Deconstructionism in historical and literary criticism is that 'the text has no definitive meaning.' All wargame rules try to impart meaning (the rules of the game) and all wargames try to represent something (a battle) so they must have meaning. Granted Grande Armee is more abstract than Napoleon's Battles but that is what makes them different games, which will appeal to different wargamers. Mr. Coggins and I apparently have different definitions of a turn and a sequence of play. I think a sequence of play is everything that happens within one turn from where my Player Aid Sheet says 'start of new turn' to where it says 'end of turn'. It doesn't matter whether that turn includes one set of move-shoot-melee-morale or 101 sub-sequences, it's still the sequence of play and one cycle through it constitutes a turn. So I think we must agree to disagree on this point as well as many others. But using such value-laden terms as 'holistic' to describe his sequence of play as opposed to the other rules is more smoke and mirrors. In the Napoleon's Battles sequence of play I have before me, units move in various parts of the Maneuver Phase, then in step 4 certain units are allowed to fire. The Maneuver Phase is repeated a few times until all movement factors are expended. Then we have a Fire Phase. Great. Units get to fire multiple times. Wonderful. Each time my artillery shoots, I still have to measure the range from the artillery to the target and resolve the attack at the given range during any of the multiple opportunities to fire. At each of those ranges my artillery have a different modifier. Mr. Coggins then finishes by declaring that my letter was an unwarranted attack on him and his rules and that he should have been allowed to read it first. Perhaps his original article should have been reviewed by Mr. Mustafa as well then. After all, fair is fair. However, I think Mr. Coggins should remember the old show-biz adage that 'there's no such thing as bad publicity.' He wanted to stimulate debate and got it. He got an opportunity to clarify some of his game's concepts. Perhaps some of the readers of MWAN will agree with Mr. Coggins and go out and buy a copy of Napoleon's Battles. If you want a debate, then you have to expect that not everyone will agree with you. MR. COGGINS AGAIN, I'M AFRAID Chuck Hamack I would like to thank you for publishing Mr. Coggins letter in this past issue MWAN. I sorely wished he would have just responded to the article "Pardon My Chaos" in a friendlier manner. That being said I did appreciate his opinions and clearing up about the Napoleons Battles rule. I had played the rule correctly but for other interested in the game it may sway them in one way or the other. My opinion on his request or demand for articles to be made available to him before publication is laughable and sad. Please don't implement Mr. Coggins suggestion to mail articles about his product to him for response before publishing. As MWAN has shown it will publish replies from anyone even when they are a harsh. Mailing an article to him is a courtesy not a right. The author of the article can respond on Mr. Coggins comments in a letter and this is as it should be. MICHAEL COSENTINO'S IDENTITY CRISIS FOR THE HOBBY Pat Condray In issue 132 Mike Cosentino raised the issue of whether we are just playing a game? Is it a simulation? Or, as he has heard, "that a tabletop game is teaching military history"? Although he seems to conclude that we are kidding ourselves, artificially trying to claim altruism or distance ourselves form Ores and Elves, the most perceptive statement he made concludes his first paragraph "The answers seem to be tied to the type of person you ask." All true. He makes a convincing case that he is not being educated in military history through his exposure to the hobby. To make that case he states: "I do not think I have ever learned more history than I already knew by playing a miniature game. For example, one of the periods I own is the Boxer Rebellion. I became interested in this period because of a game I played at HISTORICON 2000 by Bob Giglio. After the game I did not go out and do research, but picked up a video copy of 55 Days At Peking." In a very meager way, he described a game attracting him to an historical period, after which he did what for him amounted to historical research. As he said, it depends on who you ask. I'm willing to admit that Mike may be historically challenged based on the evidence he offers. But what of Uncle Duke. When Uncle Duke does LOTR he studies his Tolkein. But on page 32 of Issue 132 he goes into some length to compare the New Kingdom Egyptian with Hittite equipment, TOE, and tactical doctrine for Chariot Warfare. Uncle Duke is not a professional historian. But he obviously does more than go out and buy a Hollywood Video when he gets interested in a period. Or for that matter, Mike's friend and my nemesis, Bob Giglio contributed an article on "The Battle of Tipton Green, 12 June 1644" in Issue 131. Did he get it out of a video? Copy it from White Dwarf? I don't think so. Most of MWAN involves articles on historical periods which reflect rather more than having seen a neat game and buying a video. At the same time, several articles deal with balancing accurate historical representation with playable game mechanics. That is a recurring theme. And the relative importance has been an issue since Don Featherstone split with Jack Scruby over Wargames Digest Editorial policy. Don was actually challenging what he termed the "Command and Staff mentality" in which rules designers were going into too much detail (in his opinion) to make their games training kriegspiels. Years later Wally Simon (he of the basement) got into an argument with Bob Coggins in the PW Review and the HMGS EAST Newsletter about the distinctions between sci-fi and historical gaming. I cite these cases because I've been to the homes of both Don Featherstone and Unca Wally, and seen rows upon rows of historical works on their bookshelves. And Don, who has always emphasized playability in historical games, wound up writing historical novels and memoirs about battlefield tours. He also, pursuing an intriguing line of inquiry from his colonial gaming, established himself as an expert in the history of the death of the Prince Imperial in Zululand in 1879. Worse, in terms of his ideological split with Jack in 1962. Don has actually been invited to military science activities based on his general reputation, although the reality checks he offered were often based on his experience in the Royal Tanks during WWII. History is the stuff of which historical miniature gaming is made. When we game, we are manipulating our "toy soldiers" based on the game designer's appreciation of military history and tactics adapted through his sense of game mechanics. If the latter distort the former in our eyes we consciously play to the rules, and tend to be rules lawyers. If the rules consistently produce a range of results which conform to our appreciation of history we can relax and play the game in terms of the tactics of the era. The same, of course, could be said of sci-fi or fantasy gamers, except that their point of departure is an appreciation of the properties of characters from the other genre. If Games Workshop says Elf longbows can hit at 30" and Moria Goblins (an inferior grade of Orc) can only return fire at 18" that's the way it is. Of course, I refer to the LOTR game series. People who have read Tolkien may find discrepancies in some GW values, but probably many of them read GW material before (or instead of) Tolkien--just as Mike's research on the Boxer Rebellion is limited to a video and a game. One result of our grounding in an appreciation of history is that on the whole, serious historical miniatures gamers are better grounded in military history than the aver- age history professor (provided the latter is not a wargamer.) I'm open to arguments that history is bunk, or that there may be no reason for historians to understand military history, but in the context of this article those would be digressions. My point is that historical gaming tends to draw on and stimulate (for most of us) the study of military history. And of the historical gaming genre, miniature gaming tends to favor critical thinking by gamers in that area. To us rules are not sacred. If we don't like the way they work, we write our own, or rebase our toy soldiers for a game which suits our appreciations of history and/or playability better. The computer gamer, and to a lesser extent the board gamer is less free to do that. But the difference is not absolute. It isn't a question of detail. A board game counter representing a division may have properties and achieve results based on a careful evaluation of the performance of that division or type of division, as in the so-called "Smithsonian Series" of historical games by Avalon Hill. If the results of divisional combat don't seem to track with the gamers' appreciation of the historical range of results he may well be turned off. Mike offered his own case as an example of an approach to gaming an historical period. I shall do the same. In the mid 1980s Hal Thinglum interviewed me for MWAN and one of his questions was what do you look for in a game. What came to mind was that I enjoy games, other things being equal, in which the results are historically believable. The examples I cited were not miniature games, although the first had little plastic airplanes as playing pieces. I once got into a Milton Bradley Dogfight Game. I found that attacking enemy aircraft on the ground, which is a much sought after option in real life, was almost suicidal because the flack effectiveness was about 50%. In air to air combat cards were required to make turns, fire machine guns, etc. If you didn't have a left bank card you were well advised to position your aircraft with its left wing on the edge of the board so that you couldn't be attacked from that direction. In short, you had to disregard everything you knew about WWI Dogfights to play the game. It left me cold. In contrast, I liked Lou Zocchi's Battle of Britain. It only had cardboard counters, lacking even the crudest little plastic airplanes. But realistic historical strategies could be applied to it with success. At the time I first played it, I had just received a master's degree in what amounted to Modern European Military History. My thesis topic was "The Battle of France 1940, Crisis in the Theory and Practice of Airpower." A primary conclusion of it was that the allies handicapped themselves because they did not concentrate on achieving air superiority over the battlefield(and secondarily, they were not trained or inclined to use aviation assets in connection with the ground battle.) Also, the most frequent criticism of the Germans in the Battle of Britain was that they let themselves be diverted from attacking RAF targets by responding to RAF Bomber Command's rather insignificant attacks on Berlin. My advisor, Dr. Gordon Prange, was receptive to my conclusion that victory in the fighter battle was crucial. He has come to know Commander Wattanabe (the IJN "God of Operations") in his research on Pearl Harbor and Midway, and Wattanabe told him the same thing. It was my experience that if I disregarded Lou Zocchi's victory conditions other than achieving favorable air to air combat situations I usually won, regardless of which side I played. (Shoot down the enemy airplanes-you can worry about murdering the civilians later.) The same sort of approach can occur in computer wargames. As a case in point, my sons and son-in-law have played a Pacific Air War game whose name I forget. When it first came out, the Japanese Betty Bomber's 20mm rear guns were devastating. In real life, while they were a problem, the Betty remained highly vulnerable to stern attacks. Brett (my son-in-law) had even spoken to pilots who had faced the Betty in combat, and while they told him the tail gunner was a priority target, the risks were not prohibitive. When last I asked one of my sons about the game they told me the fearsome tail gun had been tamed. Enough gamers complained, and the designers got the message. Is it a game? Or does it stimulate historical study? Over 40 years ago when I was working my way through college as a psychiatric attendant I asked one of the Psychiatrists a question. "Do people go into your field because they want to make a lot of money, or because they become fascinated by their own eccentricities?" His answer serves equally well for Mike's conundrum. "Those are not mutually exclusive hypotheses." MWANABEE NO MORE Michael Demana Well, it is with disappointment that I write you this time. I do not believe I will be renewing my long-time subscription to MWAN when it is up. And this from the guy who patterned the newsletter he edits after MWAN and referred to himself as a "MWAN-abee." Why? Well, for one, I am so heartily sick of the constant back and forth of the writers on "Is it a game or simulation" question. I skipped every single article dealing with this in #132, including the one masquerading as a Letter to the Editor. The dead horse has been beaten to an unrecognizable pulp. An editor should know when to recognize this and cut off the debate. Also, the editors seem to be out of touch with what is good for the gamer-which is who the magazine is directed at, isn't it? Raise the price of Historicon/Cold Wars/et al to $30 for a weekend? Just so people "appreciate it" more? Now, exactly WHO would that be helping? Not the average gamer, that's for sure. Not the dealers, who might otherwise get that money. Severely restrict the flea markets? I'm not sure who Mr. Cosentino thinks he'll be benefitting with his suggestions, but it isn't anyone I know. The whole direction of MWAN seems to be away from a folksy journal and instead into a controversy stirring tabloid of questionable agenda. I hope that, over time, MWAN proves my misgivings are wrong and it continues on as the wonderful magazine it has been. However, in the meantime, I am expressing my displeasure (and disapproval) by not renewing. MISSING ISSUE ARRIVED Paul Elkin I just received my replacement copy today thank you for the extremely quick response. I've been buying MWAN since Issue #98 and a subscriber for the last 5 years. I'd like to take this opportunity to say that you and the rest of the staff are doing a great job-you've taken the solid foundation established by Hal and have improved upon it by the format and look. While I prefer the digest format as it reads like a book and they look great on my bookshelf, I understand why you made the decision to go to a magazine format. As to the title change, while it is an apropos, it will take me a little while to get used to. Regardless, I will be renewing my subscription; I look forward to enjoying many more years of your periodical. Hopefully, I'll get around to submitting some for you to consider publishing. HOW DOES HAL DO IT? Wesley Rogers I just finished reading through issue #132. Very good articles, as usual. Duke Seifried's Clash of Concepts gave us a clear look at ancient chariot combat. Ancients has never been one of my periods, but the writing kept me engrossed, and the photos were excellent. They really helped tell the story. I'm still a little confused about exactly how a medium chariot was used in melee. It sounds like they were either a sort of mounted infantry, or were used in a straight charge. Horses back then (if I recall correctly and I may very well be wrong) were much smaller and weaker than modern horses, more like burros or donkeys, which is why chariots were used: The horses were too weak to carry men very far. So in a wargame, should chariots be useless against spearmen? It's easy to see how a unit of skirmishers or levee archers would panic vs. a chariot charge, but not spearmen; those little horses would never have the mass to break through, even if they didn't balk. And if the archers did not panic, what then? Should the chariots have to veer off and dismount their infantry? Don Bailey's Simulation in the Real World article was also fun to read, although (as he admitted) it was a lot to take in. His idea of calling a set of wargame rules an emulation is excellent." It sounds like it would satisfy both camps. After reading Bill's and Sam's articles, I had decided that a set of rules is a set of instructions for building a dynamic model to use as a game engine (whew...), but what is a model if not an emulation? Finally, a question for Hal: How the blazes do you do it? Nine battalions at 36 figures each, in two months??? My God. I've had a unit of 24 SYW Prussians on my painting table since September, staring at me. Ok, maybe all you did was repainting, but you're still making the rest of us look bad. It's too bad we live so far apart. It would be great to see your collection. Back to MWAN # 133 Table of Contents Back to MWAN List of Issues Back to MagWeb Magazine List © Copyright 2005 by Legio X This article appears in MagWeb.com (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other articles from military history and related magazines are available at http://www.magweb.com