"Are any rule writers "expert historians"?" Topic

okay, so maybe expert historians is going too far, but which rule writers do you think do a good job with researching their history and brining that into their rules?

Phil Barker.

Well you did ask…

Sam Mustafa.

Eclaireur.

Mustafa seems very knowledgeable every time I've talked to him (which admittedly isn't much).

I'd assume Chadwick.

Richard Clark.

Phil Yates, though many would disagree

The Too Fat Lardies produce rule sets grounded in period details like infantry manuals. Play the Period as they say. Great games with a fine balance of gameplay and historical tactics – Chain of Command to name but one.

Chris Peers. He is an expert on 19th C Africa and the Ancient Far East. I've caught him on the History Channel etc in the past, as one of their commentators.

To add a few more,

Phil Sabin (about as professional a military historian as you can get, given his line of work).

Richard Brooks

Ian Drury

Bruce Weigle

plus a second for Phil Yates.

Paddy Griffiths, of course.

John D Salt (again, given his day job…..)

Good lists from Martin Rapier … I don't know Dan (Glutter of Ravens, Lion Rampant etc.) Mersey's academic background but I've read some of his stuff over the years and he may well be a candidate also.

My wargaming started with Brig. Peter Young's Charge! … I guess he would be the exemplar historian/rule writer.

Phil

Agreed, Marshal Mark. Richard Clarke's talent for, and dedication to, translating history into playable game mechanics is exceptional. I don't think that makes him an "expert historian", but it does make him damn good at what he does and a shining example to others.

Dan Mersey.

Scotty Bowden

Charles Grant.

Not this Ian Drury, I presume YouTube link

Note the 'r'
Drury's much cooler than that anyway.

Being an expert researcher does not make you an expert historian. Nor does an expert historian understand military aspects well enough to turn them into game mechanics.
Even taking one or two college courses on research or a overview of a conflict era does not make a designer an expert. It takes years of motivated individual research and practice writing rules to make a good designer of rules.
Other items are available funds and contacts to get rules published. One poor collaboration can sink future chances to publish. (Such as our agreement with a game company in the 1980s.

Pete Berry seems pretty well versed in the ECW.

Dan Mersey does a rare thing among game designers and releases new games to keep up with evolving scholarship. Not just to keep up with evolving rules mechanics and bank balances.

Sam Mustafa is, in fact, a professor of history at a college in New Jersey.

Might be worth defining an "expert" as Rudy points out.

Who is an expert? You read 100 books? You've published papers? You've tracked down original sources in a Russian archive?
Is it relative?

Does it have to be specifically in military history? I've spoken to plenty of history professors who were extremely well versed in their particular field, but were not terribly interested in the type of matters that might apply to a tabletop battle.

On the flipside, I know people with very in-depth knowledge of, say, military hardware, who don't know much about the political and economic situations of the time.

Chris Leach, who co-wrote Shako, Armati and wrote Battles for Empire, has a PHD in History and teaches in a local college. I'm lucky enough to game with him.

I believe that Mark Urban has written Wargames rules.

Greg Novak was an excellent historian. Frank Chadwick has also done significant research which shows in his rules.

As a person with a BA in military Science which is different than military history, and a Masters in history and other areas, including courses on various types of game theory, it would be difficult to state that one particular set of credentials is better than another for designing historical war games or simulations.
So it is not a good practice to condemn a particular designer based on preconceived qualifications.
Personally, I like to know that certain designers have a military or researchers background.

H.G Wells wrote "The Outline of History."

Scotty wrote more history books than rules sets, I think he counts even though he is not a professional academic.

What I would love is to play a game with Glantz, though I don't know if he'd engage in such silliness :-)

I don't think that many really good historians would classify themselves as "expert", let alone the minority who write wargames rules…then again…ah…

As with the other question "Should a ruleswriter be an expert historian", it is not really interesting.

The proof of the pudding is in the eating. If a ruleset is nicely designed, it works, it provides nice games with plausible historical results, we can say that the ruleswriter has done a good job. Whether he is an expert historian or not is irrelevant. Cfr. engineering: if you design and make a machine that works, that's all that counts, whether you are a qualified engineer or not (although for legal reasons this might be different …).

A more interesting question might be: "If someone has written an excellent ruleset for a given period, does that make him an expert historian?".