I am an admittedly unadulterated, pure-bred gamer, as opposed to a war-gaming simulatorialist (one who stands at table-side and actually imagines he's re-creating what went on on the battlefield a hundred or a thousand years ago). My interests lie in the gaming procedures, trying to furnish the participants with a number of decision points throughout the battle... at least enough to keep them awake. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, witness the innumerable times I've torn up a set of rules that went to the extremes... either (a) there were too many decisions to be made by the commanders, and the game slowed down interminably while all players cogitated and weighed their options before adjusting their troops, or (b) there were too few decisions to be made by the players, control of their units was taken out of their hands completely, and they stood by as observers of the battlefield. An example of this last is my current adventuring into the unexplored world of Inverse Pip Theory, wherein a player's units may take off on their own, leaving the participant with little to do but glare at me for foisting such a ridiculous situation on him. I'd say about 60 percent of the enjoyment I derive from gaming stems from creating the basic rules structures themselves. That leaves a gap of 40 percent, and the 40 percent enjoyment factor arises from attempting to plug the holes in the set as the system is playtested and the participants get a chance to comment on how easy, how hard, or how silly it is when the outlines I've generated are followed. In a recent issue, I described a skirmish game in which each man on the field was given an order (Fire, Rally, Move, etc.) and he got to carry out his order when it appeared on the random draw of a card from an Order Deck whose cards were annotated with all the permissible orders. Alas! The particular sequence gave rise to too many cries of "I wuz gypped!", and since the appearance of the article, the rules have been altered. The "I wuz gypped!" situation arose because of the way individual orders were handled: a.When the Order Deck card was drawn, denoting the order to be carried out, all players whose men had that particular order diced to see whose men carried out the order first. b.Then, to determine how many men actually carried out the order, we drew a card from another deck, called the Sequence Deck. This card said that 1, 2, or 4 men would carry out the order. c.On the next Sequence Deck card, the other side had a number of its men to carry out their order. d.Now, here's the rub... one of the Sequence Deck cards was an "End of Phase" card, which terminated that entire order phase prematurely, which meant that some of the men never got a chance to carry out their order. Hence the cry of "I wuz gypped!" In my own mind, I saw nothing wrong with giving one of my men a particular order, and suddenly, during the bound, finding out that he couldn't carry it out. To me, it's somewhat similar to the situation in which one of my units incurs casualties, takes a morale test, fails the test, and takes off to the rear, despite my orders to the contrary. This, to me, is what makes wargaming so fascinating... a particular outcome may be both undesireable and unexpected, and the problems it sets forth may completely change the scope of the situation on the table-top. But, alas, in the case of the prematurely terminated order phase, the "I wuz gypped!" crowd didn't agree with me. "I gave my man an order," was the argument, "And if we're going to play a game, then bigawd!, he's going to carry out that order!" It's of interest to me that every time I try a system sequence in which one of the phases can end prematurely... resulting in units that, during the bound, fail to move, or to fire... the "I wuz gypped!" crowd sings out loud and clearly. Most gamers want complete control of their units. To be denied the ability to push their units around takes much of the joy out of the game. In this regard, it's interesting to consider the pip movement system of DBA/DBM. During the game, one's units are broken up into a number of blocks, where, for simplicity, a block is defined as a number of contiguous stands. A 6-sided die is tossed, and one can move the number of blocks indicated on the die toss. Now, if you have, say, 7 blocks on the field, and you toss a '1' indicating that you can activate only one block, then 6 of your blocks are immobile... in effect, you've been denied control of most of your forces. Of interest is the fact that, to-date, the "I wuz gypped!" crowd has been silent on this issue. One might wonder if, in fact, they realize the issue exists, In one sense, the problem is slightly alleviated since, even though only one block can be moved, the choice of the block is up to the gamer. In the long run, however, gamers want to play a game, and the definition of playing means that they must have continuous control of all their tokens. He who generates rules sets must take this into account... or be hung by the neck... Back to PW Review June 1995 Table of Contents Back to PW Review List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1994 Wally Simon This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com