Paddy Griffith is a long-time miniature wargamer who has come to personally realize that there is enjoyment to be obtained, not to mention something to be learned, in wargames which do not include miniature "toy soldiers." He has contributed much to the the field of miniature wargames and I would presume that his current activities, which as alluded to above include wargames without "toy soldiers", will result in a continued contributation. I trust you will enjoy this look at miniature wargame's renegade!
MWAN: Please give us some background on yourself.
PADDY: I was born in 1947, into what I think was a highly militarised society. It wasn't just that Britain had just won two world wars in quick succession, and was starting rearmament for a third -- it was that we had come so close to losing the first two -- especially the second -- that as a nation we had to pull out all the stops. We had turned into an armed camp rather more completely than any other country except Russia, and perhaps Germany from 1943 to 1945. It came out in all sorts of little ways: rationing and conscription were only the more obvious. For instance when I was walking in the park one day I saw tanks manoeuvering! I think I was especially impressed that even my parents, the most peacable of people, had been very heavily involved in the war effort on the home front -- i.e. this was total war which affected civil society almost as much as the forces.
By the late 1950's a lot of this atmosphere had passed -- and the 60's represented a conscious revolt against it -- but in my early youth I got it between the eyes, and I have been interested ever since. Actually I started off with Hop-along Cassidy before I moved onto regular armies -- the first wargame I remember was at age 5 with lead cowboys -- but by about seven, I'd got the bug. A lifelong obsession, I guess. I slowly built a collection of about 200 assorted lead and plastic soldiers -,real "toys" that I played with endlessly, along with the Britains' Long Tom cannon with spring-loaded cartridge. Great stuff! In my mid-teens I graduated to the Timpo Napoleonic range (still 1154m") and also the marvellous new Airfix 20mm's. Like many another, I longed for the day they would do Napoleonics (and was disappointed when they did). While waiting I did conversions -- I still have my battalion of hopping Indians painted up as French line infantry, c. 1815. Things happened quickly in those days, because at school I was starting to get involved with real, serious history, and even reading some military history books. And at this same moment, I discovered Don Featherstone's book WAR GAMES, and then the NEWSLETTER. I even attended his first convention in London, which was quite an eye-opener. That must have been in about 62-63, and I was surprised to find how many people were already active in this peculiar sport. I was rather ashamed of it at school, being a grown lad by then, and the moral support of all those other grown-ups playing with toy soldiers helped me come out of the closet, as it were.
Actually the point was that they were grown-up and I wasn't really. Part of the attraction of wargaming was paradoxically that it was a very "serious" and "important" activity -- all those rules to master; esoteric history and uniforms to research; the whole art of war and the unspoken assumptions of military culture to find out about. As I have already suggested, I found "military culture" had been an important influence in my youth -- and now here was a hobby which would enable me to find out what it was all about. Wargaming promised to give me the inside information which was denied to children -- and after the abolition of conscription at that very time, this information was also being denied even to grown-up civilians. I have always suspected that there was no coincidence about the rise of wargaming in the early 60's. It fits too neatly into the decline of Empire and the shift of ethos away from a militarised society. "Coming of Age" no longer took place by joining the warriors -- you had to find some other way. I did it by joining the amateur warriors. I don't know if other wargamers had this same experience. Maybe they have some similar experience which strikes them a bit differently because they don't happen to be specialising in military history so centrally -- as I was at this time -- or because their psychological makeup is different from mine. In any case the ups and downs of militarism in USA followed a different pattern from those in Britain, so I guess American wargamers would have a different perspective on the background trends. Your "loss of Empire" came some fifteen years after Suez. I'd be interested in any feedback you get: it's a fascinating area for speculation.
After the early 60's I played a lot of Featherstone-style games in various eras, mostly post-1800, although I once dabbled with English Civil War, and Bob O'Brien even converted some Airfix Confederates into pikemen and musketeers for me. From an aesthetic point of view my favourite was the Napoleonic navy -- a line of airfix "Victories" on a polished wooden tabletop gives the nearest approximation to an antique battle painting that you can get in a wargame, I reckon, without diorama techniques (like hiding the bases) being used. I was also lucky to know Stephen Connolly at this time. He had the most exquisite Airfix ACW layout, and showed me what a really aesthetic ground wargame could be like. He became an art student and went from strength to strength (The photos of his recent layout at his home in Australia show literally the finest wargame terrain, bar none, that I have ever seen). In 1970 1 spent a year in Paris doing research for my doctorate on the French Army 1815-51. In 1973 I became a lecturer at Sandhurst. In 1976 I married and in 1979 my son was born. MWAN. Please discuss your responsibilities at Sandhurst.
PADDY: The main job is to give introductory courses on the international affairs and strategic issues, military developments which have been important since 1939. There are some opportunities for wider forays into military history, but nothing in any real depth. Most of the academic courses last for only a few weeks: Sandhurst is more to do with military training, which is of course the responsibility of military officers.
MWAN: How does the average professional military historian view wargaming?
PADDY: It depends on what you mean by a "professional military historian"! Very few people make a full time living out of this subject, certainly not those whose full time living is Sandhurst teaching. But among published military historians those who are trying to attract the "general reader" or the "literary elite" are systematically scornful of all military amateurs. It helps their image as "caring and compassionate people" or as "non-fanatics", or something. I have reciprocal scorn for such people, since they are very deeply ignorant of the better side of wargaming.
Among historians who are aiming at the university market there is a trace of the same attitude in some quarters, since the universities are highly suspicious of anything with "military" in the title, and still more suspicious of anything amateur which might undermine their own privileged status as fountainheads of knowledge. On the other hand the universities do have a scientifically open approach to data and argumentation, which you do not find among the journalists and careerists I have mentioned earlier. Some university military historians try to use wargames for their work -- although the danger is that they get side-traced into mathematical or sociological hocus-pocus and miss the real historical lessons. The fund of universities too often rewards them for hocus-pocus and penalises simple truths, in my opinion. That leaves the remaining military historians -- surely the great majority -- who work for the amateur market. Most of these historians are amateurs themselves and the work is a labor of love. Many of these people are open to wargame ideas (although some are not: there is a temperamental block with some people which I do not think that even deep therapy could remove). These folks are the salt of the earth!
MWAN: How do you feel about wargaming with miniatures?
PADDY: The trouble is that toy soldiers are like peacocks -- far too gaudy for their own good, far too slow-moving, and impossible to adapt to changing environments or changing demands. They are a drain on resources rather than a multiplier of effort. I still play toy soldiers occasionally, but only on condition that they are recognised as bearing about the same relationship to military history as those 19th century battle paintings in which the uniforms were all spotless, the soldiers all cheerful and the horses' hooves all off the ground at the same instant. It's not just a matter of the way the soldiers look, please not; it is also very much to do with the way you have to move them about and the perspective (from a "balloon") you must adopt to look at them. I could imagine games in which the player was presented with a series of peepshow views of dioramas, representing "what the soldier sees around him", and if laid on with the right sort of special effects this could stand a chance of being effective. But it is so hugely complicated to arrange that it seems more sensible to try some other approach.
MWAN: How did you break with miniatures?
PADDY: Two things happened. One was that I started to see problems with the "first generation" type of wargame, and the new wave of more carefully "legislated" games which succeeded it didn't seem to me to be any improvement either. As wargamers will, I started working on various sets of my own rules, which I hoped would portray what I felt were the important aspects of battle. But of course all that was a long term affair. It took ages to work out the concepts I wanted and fit them all together. Meanwhile I went to university and ran out of time to play as well as other wargamers to play with.
The more military history I did at university, the more unsatisfactory the existing wargames looked anyway. It was only in 1971 that I really came back into wargames. That was in London, so I had a good opportunity to look at the state of the art. It didn't seem to have moved much since 1965-- and to tell the truth I'm not sure it has changed all that much even today. One exciting revolution had taken place, however, in the shape of 5mm blocks. There were made for a short time by Miniature Figurines, then went off the market. They gave a really "Napoleonic" sort of close-order unit which I don't think the more popular inidividual 5mm men really do. In any case few people seemed to see the real advantage of 5mm -i.e.that you can do battles at Corps and Army level, not just Division. It's only in the 1980's that this is starting to be generally understood - a paltry decade after the technology was invented! Actually in my time in London I spent most of my time on some variant of the free Kriegsspiel; mostly naval games on maps, but also some over-ambitious invasions of France by Prussia in the 1840's. This was a very formative time in my wargaming, greatly helped by my friends John Davis G Peter McManus.
Map gaming was really the key, because it showed the need for proper staffwork problems to be confronted realistically, in a way that is excruciatingly clumsy and difficult with lead soldiers. It also helped suggest various types of disjointed time scales: the type of thing that Jeorge Jeffrey has recently taken a whole lot further. I remember getting very excited at this time when I thought of the possibilities of combining 5mm with a map game and with disjointed time and a "free" set of rules. That sort of Napoleonic game struck me as about a light year ahead of the usual Divisional set-up of 25mm figures for an eight-bound slog. It still does excit me, actually, although these days I wouldn't use the 5mm figures as part of it. The actual break with miniatures began after I left London and went to Lancaster for 8 months where I got my hands on a lively wargames club -- the Jomini group -- and tried to see how my ideas would work out in a bigger group than the "one to one" sessions I'd had up to then. One result was a realisation that with a large, mixed ability group youhave to go very slowly, although overall I was encouraged at the success which the general method could have. The other result was that I met Andy Callan and our minds met!
But the frustrating thing was that you couldn't really operate on the frontiers in a big group of this sort: you had your work cut out on the basics. Whatever progress I made with Andy was in private conversations, it was back to square one on club nights. The same thing happened when I got to Sandhurst and took over the club there. It wasn't just that a lot of people wanted to stick with miniatures, but that they insisted just which sort, and refused to change. All this did marvellous things for helping me lay on the sort of games people wanted -- often at very short notice -- but it frustrated me that there was so much inbuilt conservatism. It confirmed my suspicions that most wargamers fail to think through what they are doing and why -- they want to build bigger mousetraps when they could be out there hunting elephants! Sandhurst did, however, introduce me to a number of new (to me) types of games and, perhaps even more important, new attitudes to gaming. I had the chance to run some very big games -- "Operation Sealion" 1974 was big in that it was an ambitious tri-service battle, and because a lot of senior officers attended to play and give advice. I even was able to computerise the air battle, which was an utterly new experience for me. After that I sometimes ran games for students with 60-70 participants: true "megagames". In games of this size one realises the need for role-playing, and even acting a part, far more than if you just have two people facing each other across a table. In a megagme you have the chance to actually create the sights, sounds and emotions of a real headquarters in a battle. It is terribly difficult to do this well unless your budget literally runs into millions; but the itch to get near (on a shoestring) has kept me megagaming since "Sealion". Also implied in this is the "committee game," in which the action consists of people sitting around for discussions.
That is a fascinating format which has a long way to go. I think in this and the other types of game I was discovering, the "military mind" was a helpful ingedient, because soldiers are far more familiar than civilians with the idea of someone setting up an exercise for them. They will usually throw themselves into it -whatever it is -- with gusto..and usually they'll be quite polite about it at the end. They also accept a chain of command far more easily than civilians, and are prepared to wait for events to mature or a longer timescale. Thus, the make excellent wargamers, since so much of their professional training takes the form of large scale exercises which do have much in common with wargames. If I encountered the military mind at Sandhurst, I also encountered military historians who could point out the shortcomings of wargames, and in many respects I had to agree with them.
Since I was starting to publish books at this time I also had to think of some of the wider implications of the activity -- and so the "morality debate" became important to me. It seemed right to question what we were doing, partly because there was a sizable body of opinion which rejected it, and party because the idea of making a game about war is itself such a bizarre one. In any case, questioning is an essential element in "thinking deeply" about something, and I felt that deep thinking on the basis of the hobby was in short supply. Incidentally I should say that the days of the Sundhurst club saw many of the best miniatures games I've ever played in, ranging from sprawling megagames on a floor 24' X 36' to the dreaded individual skirmish; from the 5mm army level game to such exotica as "Men Against Fire (published as a boardgame but actually more suitable for miniatures). The ideas were coming thick and fast in those days, but behind it all there was a growing realisation that two things, more than any others, got in the way of game design. One was the need to make "exportable" rules. This took up 98% of the time writing rules, when the really important part of the business -- the essential 2% of what the game was all about -- was just the "in house" sketch for the rules.
So -- if you cut out the idea of formal rules you multiply the number of games you can design in a year by something like fifty times! The second great obstacle to flexibility, of course, was the miniatures themselves. I have explained elsewhere what I find awkward and clumsy about them, so I won't rehearse all that here.
Suffice it to say that technically they limit the sort of game you can play to an amazing degree (and the more they cost you in time and cash, the more they limit you); while their intrinsic glossiness and prettiness creates a false ethos. If you wargame for the aesthetic effect of the figures, then you are wargaming for different reasons than mine. I still appreciate the aesthetics of a miniature game -- don't get me wrong; that was one of my main starting points in the hobby -- but I am now completely convinced that, however magnifique, ce n'est pas la guerre!
MWAN: I've seen you use the term "Suspension of Disbelief". What do you mean by this?
PADDY: Suspension of disbelief is a term used, I believe, by theatre critics. It represents the extent to which a play can lift the audience out of themselves and transport them into a fictitious world -- even though they really know they are sitting in a draughty auditorium and the costumes are anachronistic. Once one has ahieved this, moreover, one should try to make sure that it is the right sort: it is no good making the audience laugh when you are trying to make them cry. The success or failure of the play can be assessed by this -- and by extension so can that of a wargame. I find that toy soldiers can actually be quite good at suspending disbelief, in many games, but it is usually the wrong sort of suspension. That seems to me to be inherent in the medium.
MWAN: Please discuss some other types of wargames.
PADDY: A normal wargame is taken usually to have very much a "Chess" sort of structure, with two players, a playing board or table between them, a set of pieces and a set of rules. Conventionally this arrangement takes the form of either a "boardgame" or a "miniatures game." Each of these two formats has its own strengths & weaknesses, the type of battle it is best of portraying, and so forth. But many people make the mistake of imagining that these two formats consititue the whole of wargaming -- one is EITHER a board wargamer OR a miniatures wargamer. Maybe we can add a third type, in which the player plays against either a GM or a computer -- a solo game in which there is a more or less pre-programmed opponent. My point is that once you have mastered those three types, you have still hardly scraped the surface of the many different wargame structures & formats which are on offer. You could play wargames as a re-enactment ("1,800 mm scale'!) either outdoors in full uniform or indoors with an improvised makeshift. Or you could go outdoors to look at the landscape and imagine how your toops, and the enemy's, might be manoeuvering over it.
We call this a "TEWT" or "Tactical Exercise Without Troops." Another approach is to go outdoors and set up a debate between several players who are each arguing one particular course of action against the others. This is a "committee" game or "council of war" game. If you have a blue committee in one roam planning their strategy & a red committee in another room planning theirs, then at a certain point you can bring them both together to compare their plans and see who won. Alternatively it is perfectly possible -- as in D&D itself -- to have a single committee playing against an umpire. Other variants we have used are two committees on the same side trying to manoeuvre to find each other while attempting to beat off an umpirecontrolled enemy; a committee giving orders to a conventional playing team which was itself trying to beat off another playing team; a committee giving orders to a subordinate committee-and so on.
The "Muggergame" is a committee game without an umpire and without rules, in which players are no longer trying to role play as in the shoes of a particular individual, but are looking down upon a situation as supposedly impartial historians, and simply trying to agree among themselves what would have been most liekly to have happened in history if a particular situation had cropped up. The only rule is that everyone on the committee must be allowed to speak as much as they want: no one should be considered so much of an expert that he can tell others what they are supposed to believe. This is a non-competitive type of game which can nevertheless be great fun -- or very instructive as a teaching experience or research aid.
MWAN: Do you see any evolution in wargaming with miniatures?
PADDY: I honestly can not see much evolution in toy soldier games. It was essentially perfect, in itself, at least twenty years ago. The exception to this statement may be 5mm and 2mm figures (Yes, I did say 2mm, They exist!), which are only now starting to be widely used and understood. They allow a bigger operational picture to be portrayed than was possible with all the "old" scales and they have a number of other appealing features, while remaining a sort of toy soldier. But ultimately I think the progress available from such scale shifts is relatively limited. The only other way forward for the toy soldier game seems to be to transplant elements of other games into it: map games, committee games, muggergames, etc. This sort of hybrid can be very successful indeed, although for my money, the weakest link in it remains the toy soldier. Put it another way -- if all you want is to play with toy soldiers. and do it well, then why are you looking for a change? Where is the rationale for debate?
MWAN: Do you have any thoughts on simple vs. complex rules?
PADDY: Any wargame must be designed to fit into a certain space & time. This is a matter of juggling with the rules (i.e. their level of complexity & the level of command/level of resolution, as well as the arrangements for timescale) and with the physical artefacts you will need to use. You can not play a ten move game in three hours if each move takes half an hour, just as you can't play it if setting up the table takes four hours. You have to think of the whole context of the event you are hoping to lay on -- how long it will take people to arrive and hang up their coats; how long it will take to explain the rules, or the scenario, etc.
I suspect that most wargames are abandoned half way through because these aspects have not been properly planned. If we say that the best games have several players, many of whom may be newcomers to that particular game, and are finished within a few hours, and include lots of action, and reach a tactical conclusion, then obviously we are also looking at a requirement for simple rules. But note that "simple" need not also mean "historically inaccurate"; quite the contrary. In order to pose a single problem to a brigadier it is more realistic to have a single simple rule than six rules for his colonels, even though in reality it is the sum total of the Colonels' action which makes up his problem. In a wargame, if you have six rules instead of one, that makes six times the opportunities for silly results to creep in.
MWAN: Who has had the most influence on you in the hobby?
PADDY: My friends Steve Connolly and Peter McManus really introduced me to the modern hobby -- Steve with his beautiful ACW terrain and troops, and Peter with his strong historical opinions & knowledge. Then John Davis had both the pretty models & the historical perspective to launch me into 5mm's..while Greg McCauley & Henrik Kiertzner got the skirmish games, with "high frustration" factors, going. In a negative sense I could mention a few very prominent figures gamers whose ideas have seemed so strange and so anti-historical that they have helped put me off; but I'll leave them in decent anonymity.
MWAN: Who do you think has had the most influence on the hobby?
PADDY: Donald Featherstone with his early events and dear old Newsletter, of course. He was a powerful influence on me, and I especially appreciate his willingness to take ideas from all sides. He doesn't try to fit them into one rigid system, and he's not out to prove that he's a know-all.
MWAN: How do you go about writing wargames rules?
PADDY: It's a spiral of reading to get inspiration, then thinking about the elements in the subject that you want to game, then sketching out an appropriate format, then going round again to do more reading and then refining the constructs. Hopefully you won't have to make any complex rules -- but you have to put lots of care into the scenario and the structure. I like to design "one off" games for particular occasions (i.e. social occasions) rather than the "exportable" type of game that tries to please everyone.
MWAN: What is about wargaming that you find personally enjoyable?
PADDY: The hobby attracts me because it allows me to make a concrete response, in physical action, to my reading and thinking about military history. It allows me to leap out of my armchair and do something about it. This helps purge the emotions as well as to throw a different kind of light upon the subject, and of course it involves sharing all this with other people, to the mutual benefit and education, we hope, of everyone. I am interested in finding ways to improve the ways we think about military history through the medium of games or, at least, social meetings with a "ludic" element in them. What I like most about it are the good people I keep encountering in it. What I like least are the other sort -- the few who have genuinely nasty personalities, and the many perfectly normal people who are mislead into thinking that war is just a clash of technologies, a sort of "chess with a thousand pieces". That's an inhuman view, and we wargamers have to be especially careful not to propagate it.
MWAN: What type of response have you had regarding your article THE CASE AGAINST TOY SOLDIERS in which you presented the view that "toy soldiers" are inhibiting to the wargame?
PADDY: The trouble is that I don't get reader's feedback from the editor, so I don't really know! I have a feeling that a lot of people reacted badly without reading it properly or understanding it, and a lot of others appreciated it as a constructive contribution, even though they didn't immediately rush out and sell their models. A few people have, in effect, done that!
(Editor's Note: If any of this interview appears disjointed in any way, I must accept the responsibility as it was complied from two separate interviews and I somehow lost the interview questions for the main interview and had to reconstruct them from Paddy's answers. I also compressed paragraphs in the hope of fitting more into this.
Paddy has published the following books: NAPOLEONIC WARGAMING FOR FUN (Ward Lock, 1980), FRENCH ARTILLERY 1800-15 (Almark, 1976), FORWARD INTO BATTLE (Antony Bird, 1981), A BOOK OF SANDHURST WARGAMES (Hutchinson, 1982), NOT OVER BY CHRISTMAS (A. Bird, 1983), and his most recent effort WELLINGTON-COMMANDER! (A. Bird and the V&A museum, 1985). Thank you very much, Paddy!
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© Copyright 1986 Hal Thinglum
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