"How do you represent "trash talk" in a wargame?" Topic

My older brother and I are doing a play by email game on the Battle of Castagnaro (3/11/1387). He tired to inspire his troops with this speech:

"These are the men who take your harvests, destroy your fields and vinyards!
Who dishonour your sisters and daughters!
Who destroy your lives!
These foreigners! These evil devils!
KILL THEM!
Kill them all!
Charge!"

To which I responded with:

• We shall respond by forming committees and focus groups to study why the poorer classes are over represented in the casualty lists when compared to the nobility.
• We will provide your key financial backers with an expense account and offer to join us on a key fact finding mission to Naples for the summer.
• Your supply organization will be infiltrated with animal rights activists who will need to study how to treat your horses and oxen for their stress from pulling your wagons.
• The NIEPA (Northern Italy Environmental Protection Agency) shall require impact studies before allowing your long supply trains to move anywhere.
• We shall ask the women's suffragette movement to examine why you do not have enough females in your general staff.
• The national media will be provided "evidence" that your commander has been cutting the pay and benefits of the common soldiers in order to obtain the necessary funds to impress his latest mistress.

Let them flounder under the weight of bureaucracy!

Well played sir

We use Hail Ceasar to play viking battles with some of our own bolt on rules. Being in shieldwall gives you defensive benefit but we don't allow movement. So we had occasions where the two sides would get close but not fight and just stare at each other. So we instituted taunting for units within 4" of each other.

Each opposed unit rolls a die. If one doubles the other the doubled player must drop his shieldwall and charge ASAP. If no one is doubled they continue to face off behind their shieldwalls.

We also instituted new leader abilities that make them +1 or -1 to their taunting rolls.

Adds some flavor to the game.

Perhaps some sort of morale check as well, similar to the above, but with other options to just charging home, e.g.

1. charge impetuously (as mentioned above)
2. one half-hearted attack, followed by stalemate
3. no result
4. morale level of army drops
5. utter devastation – unit(s) break, and attempt to withdraw, retreat, or rout, depending upon the severity of their morale failure (represents loss of confidence in their general/king, or other leaders)

It's usually not a problem in a face to face game.

I like that taunting rule. May use it.

So if you roll result 3 you must be taunted a second time…

SuperSystem had the "Soliloquy Attack" that had to be preceded by the player delivering a long haranguing monologue about how he would crush/defeat/overcome his foe because his cause is righteous/evil/destined. It had to be role-played to the hilt.

YouTube link

Tim

"So if you roll result 3 you must be taunted a second time…".

Yes, just like in the Monty Python and the Holy Grail movie.

We get plenty of trash talk without trying hard to get it at all!

Trash talk is to be found in the designers notes.

My gaming group never has a problem coming up with trash talk. One member in particular is a master of the art especially in e-mail exchanges prior to the day of battle.

Grenadier's Fantasy Warriors had it as part of the game turn.

I can see many wargames being forgotten altogether after the participants decide to concentrate on winning The Dozens instead…. ;-)

It sounds like you work at a university.

I have a taunt rule in my Oz frontier game, Boomerang. Historically, during the muzzle-loader period, outnumbered colonists knew that survival often depended on keeping their weapons loaded. Their Aboriginal foes knew it too, and would taunt them with insults in English(b----y white b------s!, and the like) designed to make them fire off their one and only shot so they could rush them before they could reload.

In the Aerodrome 1.1 game outfit I'm in,one of our rules is about "smack talk"-encouraged ,but with care as we have minors playing at the table often.

So, who's doing your missus whilst you're playing with toy soldiers then?