"Is "bad leadership" adequately covered by the gamer himself?" Topic

Actually KoenigKrieg used to do this, and it was infuriating. If you got a significantly worse general than your opponent (who was naturally of equal ability) it made the game over before it started. It was acceptable in campaign games, where you might be standing in for a poor general, but it was wildly inappropriate otherwise.

OK, but that's a fault of the rules rather than the rule !

Imagine a different set of rules – quality of genrals is tied into the command and control system. Say the player is allowed to have three command figures – one for the centre and one for each wing of his army. And has, say 10 command skill points to distribute.

Maybe one would be inclined to go for 3-4-3 as a distribution. But if one wanted, say, to launch a complex cavalry assault on one wing then a distribution of 5-3-2 might be attractive. The player would then be exercising skill over where to place his best officers as well as skill in deployment of the army units (you've been saddled with an incompotent general of brigade, so put him where he does the least damage to your army !).

A system of this type could be used in both historical and points battles.

My approach to C&C rules lately is to have armies function poorly without higher leadership. Units take action tests (roll dice) to see if they can do anything other than move straight forward. (perhaps even that should be a test)

Staff officers allow a certain number of failed tests to be re-rolled. The better the officer, the more re-rolls per turn. So a poor officer is better than none.

Rather than punishing a player, officers give a bonus. Playing with crappy officers against better leadership will be a problem, but presumably the crappy side will have numbers or some other advantage.

Organic C&C: Volley & Bayonet has very simple, almost non-existent C&C. Players on the Yahoo group mostly agree with the OFM and say large teams negate the need for any C&C rules. I have played large team games in days of yore and it's true, getting a team to follow any plan other than a frontal attack all along the line is like herding cats.

BUT my reading of history says the friction of team games is unlike the friction of actual battles. Gaming tables are full of Marshal Neys, Custers and Fettermans. People came to play and after an hour watching other people play they will attack, orders or no. They don't worry about being killed, maimed or disgraced. If they lose, it's just a game and some hours gone.

The standard behaviour in actual commanders is to sit tight until forced to advance. I've worked in large organizations for 30 years and see how much initiative is routinely displayed by middle management. They are interested in not making mistakes (being BLAMED!) and much prefer doing nothing risky until higher management demands action repeatedly. This is without the risk of death or maiming. So I figure realistic C&C means it should be hard to get troops going forward in most cases, even harder to coordinate two or more such moves.

Finally, I don't play large team games anymore. With one or two players per side, the armies respond to changes on the far flank with amazing speed. So I like C&C rules to gum up the works and yes, penalize slow-witted generals or poorly staffed armies.

You want to play with little or no C&C? Fine. I like such rules.

Dear Mark,

I see your point, but from my perspective an "Historical battle" does not require play balance.

Adopting the name of an actual battle and then playing it out in miniature without reproducing the ground, same forces and numbers, possibly even the weather, the state of supply of both forces, etc, and adding anything to make the game "even" is NOT fighting an "historical battle."

No, no game can "simulate" everything, so that should not be the goal. But no "historical battle" was "fair" to both sides--unless possibly neither side won and BOTH quit field.

"Toy soldier" games are NOT inferior to "historical games," they are simply different in intent.

Or, I don't need to mess with vanilla to taste like chocolate if I can just order chocolate.

TVAG

Good one John, really good. I'm with you on this. There really is no need to hamstring a gamer with a "bad commander" rule in any game unless said commander had a material impact on the composition and training of the forces in place at the time of the battle or campaign. The point of the handicapping is to emulate the mistakes and dithering of McClellan.

That can be handled by throwing in historical "alternatives" that the Union and Confederate player each would learn about independently before play starts. The GM pre-rolls which alternatives are in effect, but may also roll for which alternatives each player is notified of. Some may be correct, others may not be correct. In any event the historical alternatives will give each command an appropriate feel for the "fog of war" at least in terms of the intelligence information they have to work with.

One of the things that makes the Battle of Midway so intriguing to me is that a great deal of it depends on who knew what when. Also it hinges greatly on an action one month before and what both sides think of the possible dispositions and availability of enemy forces. Playing Midway "as it happens" is pretty darned dull. Playing it with historically plausible alternatives and intelligence delays or misinformation spices it up considerably.

Ultimately it will depend on how much work the individual GMs and players want to put into such a scheme. I like the idea of the variability as it forces me to deal with historically plausible, but different circumstances than the real general or admiral and hence makes me a more active participant than just someone pushing chits or tin soldiers around a tabletop or game board.

Piquet does handle this differently. For Antietam, McClellan IS the sequence deck and he is Abysmal. The players actually play corps commanders who have are restricted by the poor cards in the McClellan deck. A player might run all of the corps in the army,, but he is really just playing the role of all of the corps commanders at once. So, in a way, Piquet makes the player a corps commander(s) who has an opportunity to overcome the poor leadership and guidance he receives from his decks.

Having the "Stupid McClellan" rule is the point of the exercise in playing the battle. Can you do better? Can you do worst? We are changing history if anything comes out different then what actully happened. We then have stepped into alternate history. If you do not like the "stupid McCellan" rule then why are you not giving the Union forces all Sub-machine guns?, or hand grenades? Is not the poor commander rule part of that historical units makeup. It can never be changed, we cannot go back in history and take McCellen out of the mix. If you just leave out that rule you get right back to alternate history that never happened.
If the gamer wants to do that I cannot see anything wrong with playing like that, it is just a different game and history, not the one you are portaring.
This all comes down to winning the game, and everyone likes to win, but one side is going to lose. If you are a bad player to begin with, getting rid of the "stupid McCellan" rule is not going to help.

I always thought that the point was "YOU are in command!". We recreate everything else – the terrain, the troops, the weather – exactly as it was at Antietam or Waterloo or Alesia and then see if we could have done any better than McClellan or Napoleon or Caesar. If we recreate all of this and the blunders of the commanders too, then should we even say we are gaming the battle or just pushing lead around in a sort of stop-motion animation of what happened?

A lot of hyperbole going on in this thread.

My biggest concern would be in cases where we judge a unit, leader or similar based on one or two incidents. Leader X ordered a retreat twice, so they are rated as -1 to rallying, while Leader Y ordered two retreats that historians forgave them for, and thus, no penalty.