"Where 15mm game designers missed the boat" Topic

Way back in the antedeluvian mists of time, most gaming was in 30mm scale.
Then, cheap tightwads discovered 25mm. And, all was good.

Then, along came 15mm figures.

I broke in to miniature gaming through 25mm WRG Ancients. Back then, in the 70s, archery ranges were roughly 24 inches. I was able to suspend disbelief that the range of a bow was roughly 24 X the height of a man. Ditto when I played with muskets in AWI games (my next period).
Today, you see 25mm archery ranges of 8". I'm sorry, that just does not LOOK right. Purists will say that with the figure to man ratioo … scale … blah blah blah yadda yadda yadda. Look. IT DOES NOT LOOK RIGHT.

Back to 15mm figures.
Why did they not use 15mm figures, but keep 25mm move and shoot distances? One thing it would have done is to make the range/figure scale ratio LOOK a lot more "realistic".
If you play a 15mm DBX or Warrior game, and you have archers shooting at a target, you STILL have the range at 12-20 times the figure height.

I really think that my nostalgia for WRG 5th ed rules is the fact that archers shot FAR, longbows FARTHER, slings NOT SO FAR, javelins SHORT, and so on. It LOOKED right.

In a related vein, how much less claustrophobic would a Flanmes of War game look played with micro-armor, but retaining FoW measurements?

Donning my asbestos suit, and putting a lot of ice in my drink…

John, I play WAB with 15mm models and leave all the ranges, and even movement, as is. It makes for a much more sweeping game maneuver-wise and everything does indeed feel "right".

"Why did they not use 15mm figures, but keep 25mm move and shoot distances?"

Come to that, why don't we use 6mm figures or even smaller? (Pete Berry is laughing all the way to the bank now … !). Let's face it unless we use figures and a ground scale that matches the figure scale there will always be these problems.

I once played a game with 6mm figures and a ground scale of 1ft to 100yds. Quite an eye opener …

Hear, hear!

I find the same thing now and then in 28mm scifi – I read things like 'well, if ranges were more realistic then an assault rifle/laser blaster could shoot across the whole table', to which I say, 'So?'

Did you say (or write) "realistic"?

Huh?

Did you?

You, of all people, should know that there is NO realism in miniture games rules. You know who taught us that? Huh? Do you? YOU DID!!!

They don't play real, don't feel real, don't smell real (except maybe at Historicon), and don't look real!!!

That's why.

Okay, next question.

Hear, hear. We chose 15mm figures as the default for Ambush Alley precisely because their size on a standard sized table allowed us to have figures move and fire distances that felt more natural than the usual truncated ranges found in most games written for larger figures. Strangely, some players have had trouble getting used to the idea that mere infantry can cover a fair amount of ground on foot and that rifle ranges are basically line of sight – especially on the little 2'x2' tables used for most of our "in your face" scenarios.

We went with a WYSIWYG approach to ground scale – movement and fire distances were established to "feel" right – so the actual ground scale is abstracted. We find this looks and feels great!

Why did they not use 15mm figures, but keep 25mm move and shoot distances?

Kept it inclusive….it brought in gamers/players who wanted more detail painted on their mini's?

se ???

cpmodels.co.uk

Irishserb, I wrote "LOOK a lot more "realistic".
That alone should show that I know we are deluding ourselves when we seek "realism".
I want it to LOOK right. Archers should not be shooting at each other, looking that if they take two steps forward they could bite the nose of their target.

Playing at a "realistic" scale:

"OK, I'm going to have my longbowmen shoot now. No, not the ones down by the pool. The ones up on the deck, by the chaise longue."

"Who are they shooting at? The knights. No, not those knights. The ones over by the barn. The ones with the blue standard. Well, go on over and look then. Yes, I know it's a long way: go and look."

"…Flanmes of War game look played with micro-armor…"

Cant do. Not offishul.

Look at me mah! I'm on top of the world! Playing official games with unofficial minis!

Bwah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha

Narf

Does the rules concept of "thusandsuch ranged attacks are short ranged, and are just taken into the pot with melee" sit well with you? I figure that's the extreme of that viewpoint.

My biggest 15mm scale distortion issue is with the minis themselves:

Say, twelve 28mm minis is a regiment. OK. We'll let it skate on 'toy soldier' factor. But twelve 15's scooting around in teeny serried ranks looks silly. At least with 6mm, most rules say, "just use the base size of the larger scale, and pack on as many teeny dudes that look right." But noone ever does this with 15mm. It's like fifteen's are the poor man's 25's, but rules never (that I have seen)have a 'one base size fits all' attitude towards them.

DBA, Mighty Armies, and the like are excluded from this rant. I don't think anyone ever claimed their scales were "realistic-looking".

"I want it to LOOK right. Archers should not be shooting at each other, looking that if they take two steps forward they could bite the nose of their target."

In that case the effective range of a 15mm archer should be about 6ft …

Gee, John. Where have you been? We have been big proponents of using 25mm move distances and ranges for use with our 10mm figures for over 10 years now! Using 25mm base sizes but putting as many 10mm figures that "looks" good on them. If in the rules, they call for 4 per base, just count 4 "hits" before you remove the base regardless of how many smaller figures populate the base. It sure changes the "look and feel" of the game.

Sure, it's not really in scale with the figures, but it's MUCH closer than what you'll get with using 25's.

Best
Tom Dye
GFI

Agree, agree. But lets be fair shooting ranges and movement distances on the table are far more to do with the table size we use. So long as most gamers play on a 120cm wide table than standard 10-15cm moves and similarly small ranges will predominate.

Okay, now, don't get ME started!

I've given up entirely on the ancient lie that "figure scales/ratios" have any place in game design. I believe I've finally come to understand that this has always been a limiting factor in game design and creates more false problems than it solves.

Starting with "John Company," but now reaching--we think!--full flower in "Gone To See The Elephant" (GTSTE), there is no reference at all to "figure scale." EVERYTHING is predicated exlusively on GROUND SCALE.

To wit, if 1" equals 100', then the only question is how many actual men in their most common interval for the subject/period occupy that space. Whatever that number is determines the number of STANDS in a given unit (rounded perhaps to the nearest number of men implied in that space).

Thus, the number of figures on a stand is totally irrelevant--the figures become strictly representative, as they should be. So long as all Fire, Close Combat, and casualties are calculated by the full STAND, there can be as few as one 28mm figure on it, or up to perhaps 18 or more in 6mm, and nothing has to change! Weapons ranges, movement distances, etc, never have to alter to match the figure sizes.

Theoretically, I could play with my 28mm figures against your 6mm figures, and except for looking ridiculous, there would be no rules problems at all.

Stand/Base sizes could be whatever best suits the organizational level of play your rules permit. For example, if your game wishes to ignore Companies as discreet units (as single bases), then you choose a Stand/Base size that represents a distance longer than a single Company front. In GTSTE, we use 1.5" long Stands to represent some 75 men, in two ranks, in Open Order (c. 4' per man). Since Company sizes for both Mexican and US Battalions were generally smaller than that, as few as four or five such Stands represent the frontage of the whole Battalion, which is about half as many stands to move in a game as when each Stand represents a Company.

Larger units have more Stands, and when these engage smaller units (fewer Stands) they get advantages in Close Combat for the "overlap."

By this approach, weapons ranges can be figured based on their effective reach, and not somehow to accommodate the size of figures on your Stands/Bases. In GTSTE, a ridiculously long range for a smoothbore musket might be 400yds, but that's only 12" by the ground scale. Using 15mm figures, this looks fine, but would look even better in 10mm or 6mm.

In short, by focusing on Ground Scale--and not the toy soldiers themselves--a game model can be based on how far you WANT weapons' ranges to be on the table, and how far you WANT to let units move in a given increment of time.

Thus endeth the lesson.

TVAG

John, you are an old geezer. Just like me. So you'll remember that all 1970s rules were built around the assumption that the figures were 25mms. Maybe they were Airfix HO/OOs but, still, before scale creep, we could claim they were the same thing. There were retired colonels using 30mms, but nobody I knew was a retired colonel.

When 15mms came out, the original thought of Peter Laing (inventor of 15mms) was that people would use lots and lots of these little men to make battalions of 48 or 72 figures, taking up about the same space as the traditional unit we knew from Don Featherstone and friends – about 9-12" wide.

But bobody much followed this. Instead, we all built units of 12-24 figures, which covered 4-6" of frontage, and had lots of units.

So, the rules designers, who were a particularly unimaginative and math-oriented bunch at that time, simply went for the obvious-yet-uninspired choice of saying that 15mm distances were half those of 25mms in every respect. Indeed, 6mms were reduced to 1/4 of all movement rates and shooting ranges. It was almost impossible to perceive that an infantry unit had moved at all.

It was all very lame and very tedious. And bits of it have stuck with us for thirty years and more.

"Old Geezers of the World, Unite!

We've nothing to lose but… our terrible habit of geezing."

"But bobody much followed this."

I blame it on "Empire".

But then I blame almost everything wrong with wargames in that period on "Empire". Especially the headaches.

Allen

I tend to back the OFM.

I know that I am attracted to miniature wargaming by both the "miniature" and the "wargaming" components of the hobby.

If all I was concerned about was Ground Scale, then I wouldn't bother using miniatures. I would eliminate the complication of Figure Scale and do all my gaming with chits to represent the units.

If I was only concerned about Figure Scale, then I would probably be a modeller or a miniature collector whose armies never left the display case.

Because I like both components I want to balance Figure Scale against the Ground Scale against the playing surface limit against time I have to play. Ultimately, I would prefer to keep the figure size, unit size, weapon ranges, movement distances, movement rates and terrain size all in absolute scale to the table size.

But, I can't do that. Not enough omnipotence.

So, I make representational compromises that allow me to play the wargame with my miniatures.

I can't completely ignore Figure Scale; I'm a "miniatures" wargamer. And when I game with minatures I want the figure scale to be considered when calculating range and movement.

Don't let WRG off the hook. That is where I first noticed it. Empire was what those imaginary people who played Napoleonics in other states played. I now occasionally play V, but never saw previous Roman numerals.

Come to that, why don't we use 6mm figures or even smaller?

Gotta love 2mm and 3mm figures!

Way back in the antedeluvian mists of time, most gaming was in 30mm scale.
Then, cheap tightwads discovered 25mm.

You forgot the 20's. 25's came in because "20's are too small to paint." Or so we were told.

Well, I agree with the OFM that the key is that it "feel right."

There's a nexus where movement rates, missile ranges, and lethality of shooting interact. I might have an equally "good feeling" about RULES A, in which an attacker moves slowly or ranges are long, and so comes under relatively ineffective fire several times for a cumulative effect of x casualties; OR RULES B, in which the same attacker moves rapidly and/or ranges are shorter, but the fire is lethal enough to do the same x casualties. If I have a "sense" that a certain attacker is going to take a certain range of losses, but will probably be able to push through anyhow and melee the missile troops, then any combination of number-crunching that produces approximately that is going to be okay. Which set of rules I prefer would then depend on other considerations such as table size.

I almost always just leave ranges the same. A game looks much better that way.

'the ONE true scale????'

erm…maybe not!

I've sorta noticed that whether a figure/series is called 15mm or 20mm or WHATEVER…unless they are all made by the same mfg…(and even THAT has it's exceptions!), ANY 'scale' figure/line/series has it's 'variations' in ACTUAL 'size'…

Do you measure from the bottom of the 'feet' to the 'crown' of the head or eye-level? Or from the bottom of the base to top of head or eye-level or….????

and then…the 'proportions'…(and no, I don't mean JUST the female figures with 'antigrav bust support')…on heads, hands and torso/leg units…and then SPEARS!!!!

One man's 25's are another's 20's…and so on it seems, so I just buy the figure(s) I want and try not to THINK too hard about 'scale'…(especially when dealing with Capital ships or Giant beasties stomping skyscrapers into concrete pizzas….)…

and then you want to start 'comparing' tape measures and rulers when RANGING weapons and damage templates for explosions???? AAAAAARRRRRRRGHHHHHHH!

Time to go back to paper note-taking and sitting around rolling dice and as far as 'figures'….'forgeddaboutit?'

(ducks behind force-field re-enforced ceramocrete simulated mahogany bar)…

Hugs and Slishes,
Sgt DWW-btod (bartentacle only DUCKING)

John, we played 4th and 5th using 15mm and using both straight early on and later modified ranges. It was our choice and not required.

Good Designers design mechanics which are playable with multiple scales.

I often wonder why people here get so hung up on figure scale for rules- it rarely matters especially for large scale games (ie 1 base =200 men). Designers join in with this nonsense- "if using 15mm use 2/3 scales" is an annoying one from Shako I. If you are skirmishing then large figures make sense for handling, but for F&F, Shako etc it makes no differece if you mount the figures on 'official' size bases- obviously if you change the bases, you need to change the other ground scales due to LoS and frontage etc.

I have seen 10mm Warhammer,- just put 4 figs on one base- the rules play the same, and units have 80-100 men instead. I will admit amoung the many reasons I don't like 40K is it feels wrong firing 12 inches with 30mm figs- I suggested to my son putting 3 10mm on each base to give that 'platoon' look (not "Platoon" (TM)!), but he's a complete fanboy, and only GW figures can be used by order.

My ECW rules are nominally 15mm, but I am doing 10mm – I get 16 men on a base instead of 4- much better pikeblocks.

"I blame it on "Empire".

But then I blame almost everything wrong with wargames in that period on "Empire". Especially the headaches".

Allen, do I detect a certain degree of animosity here?

As you might guess, I hold a completely different point of view.

Agreed, a 4" – 8" range for 15mm longbow shots, permitting only one volley to be fired before contact just seems wrong to me.

As does the 12" – 18" maximum range for late WWII tank guns.

Of course, I also dislike the units of WWII and Modern tanks and infantry just bunched together, and actually touching one another in many cases.

That just screams out for an enemy artillery barrage to take them all out in one salvo.

In a related vein, how much less claustrophobic would a Flanmes of War game look played with micro-armor, but retaining FoW measurements?

The ironic thing about this statement is that measurements in FoW and 40k are pretty much the same. To me, a FoW game looks less claustrophobic than a 40k game.

"Well, I agree with the OFM that the key is that it "feel right.""

Yes, although this will obviously vary from one individual to another.

As mentioned above, they key to all of this the ground scale in use and the size of unit each element represents so it can occupy the correct amount of ground. Figure scale is irrelevant, as long as the players are happy with the abstraction.

This seems to matter more in tactical games, where direct fire ranges are significant. The closer you can get your figure scale to the ground scale, the better it looks, but at a higher level it seems to matter much less. I have happily played WW2 games with 20mm figs and vehicles where 1cm = 250m, so the battalions literally bump up against each other, divisions deploy as gigantic traffic jams and artillery range is a foot or so. Sounds stupid, but it actually works and looks fine.

The answer is quite simple. Yes it's better to use a ground scale as close as possible to the figure scale but to do so you need a huge table. Lets say you want max archery range to be 12". This might "look right" for 15mm figures. So the ground scale is therefore something like 6" = 100yards. If you want to represent a battlefield one mile wide, you need an 8 foot table. If you want a 2 mile wide battlefield (proabably about right for the larger ancient battles I would guess) you need a 16 foot wide table. The table has to be deep enough to have some room for maneouvre before the armies get into missile range, so probably needs to be at least 6 feet. Most people don't have tables this big, so have to use smaller missile ranges.
If you can't handle the look of large scale figures with small ranges, then use the smallest scale figures possible for mass battles and keep the larger figures for skirmish games.

I dunno, playing with JtOFM certainly smells real enough to me.
:)
Seriously, I think it's a great idea. Why bother to change the game at all, just use smaller figs. FoW with 1/285? WAB with 15 or 10mm? Why switch to Warmaster? Actually, there'd be a bit of a figure desnity issue there, come to think of it, but you could use your DBx bases to play WAB certainly, just keep the rest the same.

It would make for a "narrower" frontage, but would that be a problem?

Nothings stays the same and everything stays the same. 30 years ago, I was scaled at 1:1 and you could get three of me onto a four foor wide base.

Now, that I have 'matured', I remain at 1:1 scale but you can only get two of me on a 4 foot base. Scale creep perhaps !

A batalion of me does not look so good anymore because there are a third less figures and indeed, some people are threatening with putting me on e-bay and replacing me with 10 year old boys because you can fit 6 of them on a 4 foot wide base for the mass effect.

But do you really want such an army of brats? difficult to see the individual detail and some have such weak ankles due to sitting around too much.

True, my shooting range is less than it once was and my feet have disappeared from view but when it comes to heft and having plenty of undercuts for shading, I'd like to think that I have many years left of valuable service to the discerning.

Personally 'feel' is important to us. We generally use 'effective' ranges for our shooting which is much less than the range the weapons can shoot at, but is rather the range when a significant effect can start to be felt by the target. Depending on period 15mm 'shooting' infantry would fire at 10cm, 15cm, 20cm, 15cm or 30cm. Size of unit comes into it for us too. In ww2 most of the time a 6 base unit would be a company, but on occasion we have played this as a section and then we use inches for shooting and movement rather than cm.

All rules have annomalies and we do realise that our figures. houses etc are too big, but they are game pieces to us.

WHOA! The Bug is Back! Let's try this again:

***********

[Why did they not use 15mm figures, but keep 25mm move and shoot distances?]

Well, wargamers' brains have gotten a lot more flexible in the past 20 years. It used to be a Sine Qua Non of wargame design that you had to specify (on page 1, preferably) what your precise ground scale, time scale, and figure scales were. Lacking those – and especially lacking a "one figure equals X men" equation, most gamers just couldn't get their brains around the rules.

Now those guys are a dying breed, and we've all gotten used to games that don't have specific figure or time scales anymore.

Ground scale is going out soon, too. People are finally letting go of their need for a precise equation of "one inch equals…"

It'll be happy day, since we all knew in the backs of our heads that ground scale (or sea scale, if you prefer) was always totally whacked, anyway. That two-rank infantry line of yours… ought to be 10" wide and 2mm deep. That dreadnought on the table, ought to be about 3mm long. That little Polish "village," in true scale, would actually be more like a single downtown Manhattan block, with every building about 90 stories tall.

And so on.

It won't be much longer now, before we give up on this last vestige of Literalism, and we all play representative, not Literal. The "historically accurate" weapon range is not some attempt to measure-out its historical range, divided by the ground scale…

…the historically accurate weapon range is that which – when combined with unit sizes and movement rates – gives a realistic-looking result when it fires on that target unit.

Regardless of how much table space that involved, or how big the miniatures are.

I only see one major problem with the final dumping of ground scale that Sam seems to advocate, and it has come up in discussions of using FoW (and its sliding groundscale) for historical scenarios. When designing a historical scenario (an actual historical action) the terrain on the table must resemble that on the actual ground. Real villages are at actual distances from each other and the game distances from A to B to C should, I would think be in proportion to the actual distances from A to B to C. Once you have that relationship on the tabletop you have a de facto ground scale even if you chose not to specify it in your rules. Also, when designing a historical scenario troops that fired on other troops historically should be able, the game, to fire from (and at) the positions those troops occupied historically.

Actually, I was thinking that getting rid of rigid ground scales would finally allow us to do historical scenarios in more realistic ways.

The size of a village would be based upon the number of troops that could have been (or were) put there in the battle – not on some attempt to "scale" it perfectly right, whether or not the bases fit into it!

How many times have we realized that our scale-distorted miniatures can't fit in our scale-literal terrain features? Ever try playing Waterloo, and cramming as many French troops into Hougomont as were actually there? Or how about Blenheim, in which one tiny hamlet ultimately packed about 20,000 infantry?

As for distances, you could scale the board so that terrain features or towns, or whatever, that should be within "one turn" of each other, are in fact that far apart. Instead of trying to literally model scale, you'd model it based on the game systems. So if there is a Redoubt, but a sunken road nearby, behind which the attackers historically sheltered prior to storming the Redoubt… Then you make the distance between them equal to one turn's movement rate for your infantry.

It's that kind of flexible thinking about scale that will ultimately produce more "realistic," "historical," and "accurate" results, because it will allow you to play something that feels like the real thing.

Hang it. I was happy with my Napoleonic 10mm figures on 15mm base sizes for GdB. After reading all this, its going to have to be 2mm figures, 1:1, ground scale of 1mm=1yard.
:-)