In a recent issue of the PW REVIEW (April, 1999), Wally began talking about a subject which has never been fully broached in many places. I refer specifically to the "surveys" of rules. He gave both Dick Bryant's survey and his own, and both were good and adaquate up to a point. Any feed-back, or evaluation is good, but only if vou can establish clear criteria and points of measurement. The rest is just opinion. Nevertheless Wally and Dick have started something that the hobby needs. It must be refined.
Yet I would like to interject my own opinion on this. Let me ask you a question. What's better, the engine in a Ford Escort, or that in a Centra? If you didn't answer with a question, you fail The question is "better' for what? Or "in what way?" You don't drive the engine to work, you drive the whole package to work (chassis, body, transmission, windshield wipers, seats and interiors). You can evaluate a Centra or an Escort in the same tasks, but you have no way of evaluating the engine, except against certain abstract standards (like horsepower, fuel consumption, time till repair) but none of these statistics are meaningful, really, outside of the package they are to be a part of.
The point is simple. Before we evaluate the rules (the engine of any game) we have to evaluate the package - the game itself. By evaluating your games you may come to the shocking conclusion that the problem is not in the rules at all! By evaluating games I mean the entire package! The rules, to be sure, but also the the equipment used, the environment, the preparation, the content, the time expended, the satisfaction (or lack thereoD experienced, and the players! If you're driving to work and you keep getting there late because the car you have gets 32 miles to the gallon and you work 64 miles away and the car has only a 1 gallon fuel tank, I submit that the fault may not be in the engine.
My own ideas on evaluations would be something like this. Fill out the ten questions below on a scale of 10 to 1, ten being agree very much, and 1 being disagree strongly.
- 1.I enjoyed the game. 10987654321
2. The game did not require an excessive amount of time.
3. The termination of the game was caused by a satisfactory and clearly defined decision being reached. 10987654321
4. The game did not require a large amount of time to set up. 10987654321
5. The game proceeded with a minimum of arguments10987654321
6. There was no acrimony in the arguments between players. 10987654321
7. The players spent a minimum of time consulting rules and charts and looking up rules. 10987654321
8. The rules were internally consistent and logically written. 10987654321
9. The figures and terrain were adequate to portray the desired scenario. 10987654321
10. Little or no previous knowledge of the history of the period was required to play the game. 10987654321
11. You were able to easily comprehend what was goingon in the game 10987654321
12. There was an omnipresent sense of danger and risk. 10987654321
The questions are formulated to be logically consistent and arithmetically manipulable without reflexive inversions. What that means is that all questions are framed where a higher number is a better situation, and none where a "yes" means a "no." Putting in a question like "Was too much time spent in measuring?" would skew the values, for if it was a 10, it would be an agreement.
Statistically you can't average this with all the others to get a numerical rating overall, nor can you do comparisons of one question to another to "tease out" meaning. Also the questionaire has no "Do you still beat your wife" questions - that is, questions that can only be answered in one way or in a way such that only one response or conclusion can be gained from it.
I was happy to see that both questionaires in the PW REVIEW obeyed these rules.
Anyway, a few words about the questions and their interpretation.
1. I enjoyed the game
Not a hard one to figure out. Any game should have an over-all rating. If you get a consistently high or consistently low overall rating from BOTH sides it means either you are a very good or a very bad scenario designer, or your players are an especially easy to please bunch, or they're just a bunch of tight-assed, crabby, mean spirited rules lawyers. If a separate tallying of each side consistently yields markedly contrasting ratings, that can be either a reinforcement of the problems noted above, or an indication of play balance or player attitudes. Future surveys might have to be nonanonymous, to see if these are personal differences or not.
2. The game did not require an excessive amount of time.
Not much here. It's very straightforward, or so it seems! The key is in the word It excessive." Once again, what is excessive to one may not be so to another. Further, this can be compared with other questions to get an indication if you are just not allowing enough time for games, or, on the other hand, allowing too much. If you get consistently very high ratings here, it might mean that you are not ambitious enough in your scenarios. Time is a very variable thing depending on the group.
3.The termination of the game was caused by a satisfactory and clearly defined decision being reached.
Besides the obvious, it also serves as a "corrective" or "correlation" question to #2. If you get consistently low values in #2 and also here, it's a good indication that something within the game mechanics is taking up the time, probably the rules are too complicated, your scenarios too huge, or the players are arguing themselves into exhaustion. On the other hand, if you get high marks in #2 and low marks here, then it probably means that you have inter-player conflict.
4. The game did not require a large amount of time to set up.
A no-brainer, straight forward question * Ye t important because set-up time frequently is a part of game time, and if this is the case and you get low marks in #2, it may mean you have to set up ahead of time, mail scenarios out to save time, or adopt some other solution.
5. The game proceeded with a minimum of arguments.
6. There was no acrimony in the arguments between players.
For me, these (#5, #6) are the most important questions in the survey. I have found that nothing burns up game time faster, causes scenarios to go awry quicker, and causes more dissatisfaction, than arguments. If you get high marks on #8 and low marks here and on #2 and #3, then your problem is not the rules or the game, but the players. No degree of excellence in rules or materials is going to compensate for a bad apple.
After years of experience with this situation I can tell you the only solution you have is to drop the bad player - and quick! On the other hand, if you get low marks in #8, #2 and #3 and low marks here, it is an indication that you have to do something about the rules first, which may be causing the arguments. Here again, checking the two sides independently can be a valuable source of data, and likewise checking individual players as part of your diagnosis.
7.The players spent a minimum of time consulting rules and charts and looking up rules.
Not necessarily an evaluation of the rules. Checking which player feels that way against who actually was doing the most arguing, will give an indication of a problem.
Rules lawyers, because they like looking up charts and rules, generally give this question high ratings, and low ratings on the arguments questions. The problem is always other people arguing with them. On the other hand, consistent low values across the board here, means there is definately a problem with the rules, but the solution may not be to toss out the rules, but simply to develop a good set of "game aids".
Modern period rules may have armor penetration charts for thousands of different makes and models of tanks when attacked by thousands of different models and makes of weapons, but if in your games all you're going to have is T34/76 versus Mark IIIs and Mark IV's with only 57mm and 37mm A.T. guns and satchel charges to attack them with, then a simple game chart on poster-board will do, with just these values on it. Likewise, ff a game requires complicated formulas, you can, if you know what's going to be available, partially compute the formula and simplify it by constants.
8. The rules were internally consistent and logically written.
Notice I say "internally" consistent. This is the only concession to realism I allow. Frankly, I think arguments about historical accuracy, and the premesis behind them, are pointless and worthless. None of us were there, and all of us have different subjective predispositions which color what we think is "accurate" and few of us will agree on anything.
I feel you have to treat each set of wargame rules as an operating manual to an "alternate reality" where the rules of human behaviour, and perhaps even the laws of physics, are not the same as in our own.
Holding up this set of rules, or that set of rules, to a yardstick of historical accuracy is pointless, for if we all held up our yardsticks to each other, few would equal 36". None of us is going to abandon this yardstick, nor our opinion if the rules are accurate or not, and hence, whether we like them or not. If we don't like them we won't adopt them or get very interested in them, but we will still probably play a game using them at our buddy's house. All of this means that "historical accuracy" as a criterion is useless to us, for we can get no data for evaluation from it, we can't even agree on terms.
What we can evaluate is if the rules are consistent to themselves. Do they accurately depict what will happen as the game designer sets forth in his notes? Do they avoid internal contradiction (saying you can do something in one place and can't in another) or are free from lacuna (the rules tell you to "see Chart F but no Chart F is to be found. Or they leave out important sections, like movement or infantry firing. Likewise, not being able to find a clear path through the rules is another problem.
9. The figures and terrain were adequate to portray the desired scenario.
A "no brainer", but the hardest one of all to remedy if you have low marks. Quite usually this is far more a killer than rules.
10. Little or no previous knowledge of the history of the period was required to play the game.
Although I am a historian and completing my Ph.D in Early Modern Europe, in no way do I believe you have to have a deep knowledge of the period in order to play wargames intelligently, or at all. While we all get into it because of some of the mystery and glamour of ages past, we do it primarily, I feel, as a game. I have found that most gamers' knowledge of history, even military history, is superficial and top-of-the-head at best. Beyond that, into the deeper cultural, intellectual, social, religious, and philosophical aspects, it is somewhere between slim and none, and Slim was last seen leaving town in a hurry!
This is not a complaint, just an observation of a phenomena that we must deal with. If you need such detailed knowledge of the game, you're in trouble. As to the debate of historical tactics being portrayed, or rewarded, what these tactics are should be self evident from the rules. This is vitally important if you want to get new players into the game, who, if they are overburdened by a lot of obscure scholastic details (like the difference between a Voltigeur-Chasseur, and a Chasseur- Voltigeur), or a lot of difficult technical terms, will likely lose interest quickly. In the extreme, 'Stickers' and 'Shooters' in the ancient world is a good example of terminology everyone can understand..
11. You were able to easily comprehend what was going on in the game.
12. There was an omnipresent sense of danger and risk.
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