That particular beast which wargamrs know as the skirmish game, falls, by and large, into two general categories;
1) The 'Individual character' game, which details the actions, especially the violent ones, of single men. The rules are very detailed in most respects, with different kinds of wounds and often long lists of weapons/armur/etc. Commercial RPG's tend to fall into this category, and some have quite astonishingly complex combat systems -- like the one which dictates that a roll of one on percentage dice means you have something totally stupid, lopped off your own leg, etc.
Gladiatorial combat games and sow of the western gunfight rules also belong to this group, The major problem generally is that the game slows to a crawl if the players control more than one to three figures. These games, therefore, emphasise what I shall call "Personal Experience."
2) The "Small Battle" game which looks at the actions of squads, platoons and the like. The combat rules, if not necessarily simple, are geared to the collective behavior of soldiers in groups, The player's own Personal Figure, represents a leader, whose role it is to command, in some form, his fellow toy soldiers; various kinds of mechanisms can be employed to this end. Games such as "The Sword and the Flame" or "Cry Havoc" fall into this class. Whilst these games are often very enjoyable with a dozen, a score or a hundred figures per side, their lack of detail at low levels means that they don't work well with only a few combattants involved -- they portray too crude an image of action to satisfy us. I think of these types as 'leadership' types, since the emphasis is on the player as commander.
There is no reason why it should not be possible to combine the better aspects of each type. What I'm thinking of here is a system in which the player's personal figure fights, moves, shoots and receives wounds in a detailed manner, emphasizing the personal nature of battle experience, while other figures, which I shall call "The Other Blokes" operate on a far simpler "Is 'e dead or ain't 'e?" rules system. This in a given round of combat our personal hero "Sergeant Strong" gets to clear his carbine, fire a hurried round and dive for cover as a bullet clips his ammunition pouch -- all very detailed stuff while his comrades Corporal Smith and troopers Brown and Jones simply move, shoot and get killed/wounded/not hit at all, When the brave sergeant gets into close combat with a foe, the enemy figure (who may well be an "Other Bloke" in the general run of things) fights on the more complex system, reverting back if he survives his scrape with the stalwart Strong!
The mechanisms here need not be too difficult to arrange - merely a few alternative tables I suspect, and a deliberate policy of looking at the Personal figure first and the Other Blokes second. Perhaps an umpire could control, in fairly disinterested fashion, the Other Blokes, while the player dealt with his figure, and relayed orders as applicable to the Other Blokes, who were then moved by the controller. Indeed, me could do away with formal rules and have another umpire operating all the outside events and simply telling a player what the results are of each close action; this would go a long way to putting the battle in "real time", i.e. 10 seconds for our toy soldier on the table being playing in 10 actual seconds. Then you'd see why soldiers are supposed, according, I'm told, to recent Canadian research, to take five minutes to think up, coordinate, and carry out the 30 foot risks that take 3 5-second turns in most skirmish games. This is all very much at the "brainstorm" stage at present, though I'm convinced that not only 'Umpired" games, but "multiple umpired" games have a great deal to offer.
Why not an umpire, even two, for every player? Games could be brief but loaded with detail and tension, and then we could all swap roles. All it would take would be imaginative umpires who could respond to the playerts "I'll stand up" by rolling a D6 (on a 1=very bad result, 6=very good result) and responding "Shot in the arm, chum!' as an almost immediate response, Is this possible? I think so...
Other issues, (1) Tim is usually a problem in most kinds of tactical games, and a real difficulty at low levels, We use turns of a few seconds and men move around like the Keystone Cops. Frequently we get 10 minutes real time to decide what our figure has 10 seconds stuck behind a tree to think up, The answer lies, I think, in longer turns - maybe several minutes - in which vast distances can be moved at considerable personal risk (how difficult is it to machine-gun a jogger?) or small, cautious moves with much creeping and peeping made.
The time problem runs into the "intelligence issue". Sure I can run across the farmyard if I know there are only six enemy figures active seen the other player put them on the board! The standard RPG format of umpire vs players does wonders for this. The "back to back" system of separate tables also deals with this, though it isn't often practicable. Night actions, according to Arthur Harman's practice (See Miniature Wargames 15 and/or Nugget 9) of using black cardboard circles on which the figure stands in the centre and the terrain moves as he advances works well; depicting unrecognized figures with unpainted or black-painted figures ("shadows"), adds to the tension.
Other points: Reaction/morale is always difficult. I favor a system in which one of the various types of casualty, apart from killed/wounded is "unnerved", roll a dice to see whether the fellow bolts for how , hides, ducks his head or stands like an idiot! Group reaction should be simple to operate, without too many modifiers - after all, the poor devils can probably hardly see a thing!
Remember too that men in skirmish order, especially in cover, take forever to pass orders along, aren't willing to leave good bits of cover and don't think much of moving quickly through terrain they haven't scouted out well in advance. Those sitting ducks in close order lines and columns are a far better bet to do those things!
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© Copyright 1986 Hal Thinglum
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