"Approach to historical product releases." Topic

I am in my sixties now and no longer a rising new designer as I was in the 1980s. Now I focus my energies on selling products, even though I still conduct research on various topics.

This leads to the purpose of my topic. For many conventions I have participated in and just listen to various groups talk about historical gaming.

Many historical gamers seem to feel that production concepts are being controlled by guys with more in common with fantasy systems that historical conflicts.
As a result many wars are being bastardized. The lack of following historical purity and continuity causes many of these players to tire of following a system which requires having to buy more and more.

I am not talking about the lax rules which do not seem to have a foundation in reality. Or even army lists and source books which lack historical foundations. They are put together with options with the intent of forcing further purchases.

While fantasy and science fiction can be viewed as a long running soap opera with no end in sight.

Historical conflicts should be viewed as mini-series with a set beginning and end. This means a set level of project able sales. When the level is maximized, then it is time to produce another mini-series.

So is there a question? Yes, several are implied. We can talk about impressions of certain game systems. Or we can talk the attitude so manufacturers vs stores vs customers or clients in my case since my target base is small. Lol.

There are many ways to look at the issue and I hope to see some that I have not already heard about at conventions.

An example would be the Pirates of the Spanish Main system. It was very fun in the early few expansions but then it got too flaky. It was also becoming more difficult to stock a complete range of ships and packs with the expectation of heavy sales.

I agree with the "fantasy" aspects of some "what-if" historical rules, especially those that throw reasonable TO&Es out the window, and permit a regiment or division's worth of SPAA vehicles to be "purchased" with points, in order to support a few platoons, or a company of armor.

Same goes for helo gunships, etc., etc..

The speculative matchups of available TO&Es for some rules sets are perhaps the stuff of an armored tank company commander's fantasies, or hallucinations, but stretch things a bit too far for me to want to even permit half of that on the tabletop.

One aspect might be that some rule writers start with "what do players want on the table" and then get to the "how can we achieve this".

This may well lead to a WW2 platoon being supported by a single armoured car from an armoured car unit along with a single AT gun from an AT gun unit and a single tank from a a tank unit. Alongside this they may well have dedicated air and arty support for their platoon! This however does suit many gamers who want a variety of models and aspects in their game. I do not subscribe to this idea, but can see that it makes commercial sense to others.

martin

Dear Rudy

To answer a few points.

You say " The lack of following historical purity and continuity causes many of these players to tire of following a system which requires having to buy more and more."

Then why do you do it? Why buy more and more if you don't want to? Tell the people who bring out new rules to hype new models and sell inventory to buzz off. Don't buy them or implement the rules. I haven't the faintest idea why this would turn anyone off. If others in your group want to buy these and do these, just tell them the motto that is framed above my war game table. "When I'm at YOUR house I'll play by YOUR rules."

Here again this is a matter of context. I game in the 18th century and before primarily so there are no TO&E's and history is well -- history. No one's holding a gun to your head. My midwar to WWII games are pitched at an ARMY level with four men on a 2" by 2" stand representing a battalion, At Army level you get anything you want.

With that I go to your first sentence,

You say "Many historical gamers seem to feel that production concepts are being controlled by guys with more in common with fantasy systems that historical conflicts.
As a result many wars are being bastardized." How do you know? We weren't there and we really don't know WHAT they had. Again, a general fidelity to history is all that's needed. Besides back before 1900 armies were extremely fluid things and you really didn't know often how much you had in your own army? What they had in the Middle Ages is anyone's guess, and a guess it is. Again though, why do you feel constrained by others in your games.

Your complaint seems to be in the mutability of rules which is driven by manufacturers coming out with new great things they want to move and they do this by making the new releases "super troops." This has been the method of Games Workshop, Con men from the Coast and a host of others. The tradition is venerable, going back to Barker and DBA and other rules of the alphabet soup variety. The answer is simple.

Tell them to put it where the sun don't shine. Buy what you want, game what you want, and play as you wish. It's YOUR vision, YOUR dreams, YOUR time, money, sweat and treasure!

Now, I fully admit. I am a complete nominalist. The troops are only tokens and have no mystical transubstantial connection to their real life counterparts. The only "reality" they have in the game is the arithmetic values and abilities ascribed to them. So in my modern games (actually between the wars up till mid WWII, there are only light tank, medium tank, or heavy tank, and wether the model of the Mark IV goes into light or medium quality is a function of what I need in the battle. One time, a while ago, for an ancient battle, I needed more elephants than I had gotten off my painting table. So I substituted three of the Dragontooth Saurian Behemoths (Triceratops with howdahs on them) for real elephants. They used the same rules as the elephants did, the same capabilities, and that was it.

I even make an extreme case. Joe Moreschauser made a set of ancient rules where each side had 10 heavy cavalry units. You could have a game of Russians versus Mongols, with the Mongol heavy cavalry being their horse archers, and the Russian Heavy Cavalry being T34 tanks. Wouldn't matter in the least so long as both sides "heavy cavalry" had the same values. Likewise the light missile infantry could be Chinese auxiliaries for the mongols and machine guns for the Russians.

You already do this with the rules. The rules are simply a collection of procedures and tests which have nothing at all to do with the actual difficulty of accomplishing the same actions in real life. Rolling a die to see if a 12 pounder hits has nothing to do with ACTUALLY loading and firing (and hitting something) with a real 12 pounder. It's all abstract rules. So……….

In a modern game we have a rule which says for a tank to hit an enemy tank it must roll a 6, but if it is using armor piercing shot, you hit with a 5 or a 6.

In a Mediaeval game you have a rule that says that for a bowman to hit an armored cavalryman it must roll a 6, but if it is an English longbow, you hit with a 5 or a 6.

In a fantasy game, you have a rule that says for a bowman to hit a fire breahting Dragon it must roll a 6, but if it is Elvish bowman, you hit with a 5 or a 6.

In a Musket Period game you have a rule that says for a 12 pouner to hit a target at long range it must roll a 6, but if it is a Guard Artilleryman you hit with a 5 or a 6.

All of these are examples of the same rule applied to widely different prototype situations, and it shows the pure nominalism of rules. If the rules are merely nominal, why not the figures? So why not have your Elvish Longbowmen of the Old Guard firing APDS against the fire-breathing Tiger Tank?

Oh to be sure-- we all like our little lead guys in the costume and form of our favorite period and that's why we collect them and even nominalist that I am I do not have an army of Russians with T34's against Mongol Horse Archers (though it would work just fine). But the complaints you seem to be voicing are simply that gamers seem compelled to be led around by the makers of the figures into buying what they want to put out next.

You can stop that quite easily.

Just don't buy them.

They'll get the message right quick!

I find that in the "weeds" of indie publishing, you can find all manner of interesting things going on.

If you want to hit the national stage, then you gotta do what draws people and that's the path of Bolt Action or Flames of War.

Being able to construct "pick up" armies blindly is a big boon to club and store play, and that's what will drive wide scale sales and adoption.

Of course, getting people to pin down what "historical" means can be hard enough. :)

It's worth noting that a game that caters to, as Martin says, letting people play with their toys, will probably also do better than one that does not.
For all that Warhammer does wrong, it never comes out and says "That tank you spent all week painting? Yeah, you can only use it when the guy you're gaming with agrees on it".

A couple of months ago my friend Gareth brought over an old tank game from the 1980s and we managed to play a few turns of it before dinner time. It was incredibly detailed. Every vehicle had a card about 100mm square, with masses of tiny numbers, indicating all the various factors to use if you're shooting from exactly this angle, or hit in exactly that spot, and so on. Movement had to be plotted on a tablet with a pencil each turn.

I have no idea whether all that data was meticulously researched and accurate or if it was pulled out of the designer's a**. I can't imagine anybody having the time to verify that, so I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that it was "historical purity," as you say.

Did it give a good game? Not really. We spent more than three hours trying to resolve a combat between five Shermans and three Panthers. (After I lost three Shermans, I conceded).

OK, so: were those three hours well-spent? I suppose it was fun to realize that our old-guy nostalgia was rose-coloured. But if I could have those three hours of my life back, I'd much rather spend them playing some more modern game that is better-written, better-streamlined, and more dedicated to keeping things fun and moving along quickly to a decisive conclusion.

In other words, I'd have much rather played a "fantasy" game of Flames of War, with, say, my US against his British. At least that wouldn't have been tedious and math-intensive and wouldn't have felt like work.

I have a somewhat different perspective on this, as I'm primarily a RPG gamer and only secondarily a wargamer. But the whole discussion reminds me of the very first WRG Ancients game I played, somewhen around when Rudy was a young designer. It was at my college wargames club, and it was very much a "run what ya brung" thing. The people who had miniatures had what they had painted because they liked them, not because someone else might have historically-accurate opponents. I forget what all we had on the table after all these decades, but the units we had could certainly never met up without a TARDIS. And it got me hooked. I've spent more time than is good for me moving lead or cardboard or pixels around on tabletops ever since.

We have to look at historical games from two angles: both historical and as games.

Garth talked about three hours to resolve a tank battle that might historically have taken minutes. I remember the era of the monster games, that came in boxes the size of small items of furniture and took weeks to actually play. I remember Advanced Squad Leader, which got so bogged down in detailed rules that even my more hardcore buddies quit playing it in frustration. All of these were historically accurate -- they hit the historical part squarely on -- but where they failed is as games.

The most important thing any game needs is fun. Nobody believes Chess is an accurate battle simulation, or Monopoly is an accurate business simulation -- they're games, not historical. I'm fairly certain that a lot more copies of Monopoly have sold than of one of those monster games. Why? Because it works well as a game, even if not as a simulation.

Let's take a game at its most abstract: Checkers. There's no pretense of simulating anything, just a game that you play for fun. You can learn the rules in five minutes. You can play anywhere without any more advance planning than having access to a checkerboard. (I've played with coins on a pizza parlor tablecloth) And you have fun playing it. We'll mark that 0% historical, 100% game.

On the other hand, let's look at what Garth was talking about. Three hours for one tank fight, most of that time being spent on paperwork. Frankly, that sounds a lot less like fun and a lot more like doing my taxes. In a game like that (or a fair number of others I've read, and one or two which I actually played) the game aspect took a back seat to the simulation aspect. I'd rate that as 95% historical, 5% game. Obviously there are people who enjoy that -- I knew an insurance actuary once who loved his job! -- but there are not as many of those people as there are people who enjoy Checkers.

So I think, in terms of historical gaming, that there needs to be a balance between the historical and the game aspects of any historical game. Garth's game went too far into the detailed historical; in the context of historical wargaming, I think we can agree that Warhammer is too far into the game. Different people want the balance point in a different place -- and that changes over time, as well. Back in the day, I devised ridiculously detailed rules for various things in D&D; now I play Munchkin.

Another factor with strict historical accuracy is the limitations imposed by history itself. If your game is limited to recreating historical battles -- and with miniatures, that's often historical battles of one very narrow era, because buying an army isn't cheap and painting it isn't fast -- you will probably run out of battles before you run out of interest. How many times do most people want to re-fight the same battle? Sure, you can drill down and find ever-smaller ones (in 1807, four British soldiers surprised ten French soldiers in back of a farmhouse…) but you're still pretty much circumscribed by what army you have and what battles it was historically a part of -- and how many of those battles are sufficiently balanced to be good game material. (remember, no general wants a fair fight -- there are no good sportsmanship awards in war -- so whenever possible a battle is as one-sided as someone can make it) So you have a fairly limited amount of historical source material suitable for gaming. (note: I don't find "lose less badly than happened historically" to be a fun sort of 'victory') It's a mini-series, yes, but a mini-series for which the participants have to expend a significant amount of money and time to participate, and are often reluctant to just abandon that investment after they've played the life out of all game-able battles that their chosen unites participated in.

I have my own version of the problem: I sell gamemaster's aid software -- specifically a thing called TableMaster, that can roll up anything you can dream of on random generation tables. Okay, someone bought the program, I cashed the check … now what? It's not like a bottle of soda, that they're going to need to buy more of. If the original TableMaster hadn't been limited by operating system issues to Win98 and earlier, there would still be people running it 20 years later instead of me busting my aging tail to write a new version. I have a limited market -- RPG gamemasters who want to computerize some aspect of their random stuff generation -- and for them, basically, it's a one-time sale. I can try to sell them other stuff (back in the day, this included everything from fonts to miniatures bases) but that was more a matter of marketing to a defined, and hopefully receptive, market than it was anything specific to TableMaster. My solution was to reach as broadly as possible -- you can use TM if you're running any kind of RPG in existence, and I'm going to do some wargame-related things with it as well. For me, "Well, it's a great program, but you can only use it with Legends & Loot" would be the kiss of death. It sells (or at least sold; the new version isn't finished yet!) because it was generic, and could be used for whatever you wanted. That's where we get back to the Checkers vs. ASL trade-off again: there's a lot bigger market for Checkers than there was for ASL. And I think we have to accept that that's going to be the case for historical game rules, too. Warhammer has sold a lot more copies than, say, Ironclads. If I ever get my WH army painted up, I can go to the game store and find someone to play against; as much of a Claddict as I am, the chance of finding an opponent for Ironclads in the years since I left a college town with a good wargames club has been slim to none.

So the more narrowly-defined a particular rules set is, the smaller the market it's going to have. A lot of people (and, I've noticed as I've gotten older, increasing with age) just want to take a break, play a game, and have fun, not obsess over the minutia of exactly how effective a Sherman's main gun is against a Panther's armor from some angle other than right behind. And in terms of wargaming, that tends to lead to a lot more less-detailed rules, which in turn enables "fantasy" matchups rather than limiting battles to detailed historical re-enactments -- a fact that also plays into needing to find someone to play with.

I've sort of wandered all over the topic on this -- I've been writing it on and off for the past five hours or so, adding a bit more when I take a break from working on TableMaster II or, at the moment, writing up a change list for it. (note: that 3-hour tank battle is looking better and better all the time … if I have to do that much paperwork, something should at least blow up!) Hopefully I've made some sort of sense, even if it's less coherent than I could be.

tl;dr: There's a historical/game balance in any historical game, and the closer you lean to the "historical" end, the smaller your target market; more people play Checkers than ASL.

I'm not sure that I have ever played or even seen a wargame that really is an accurate simulation, though I have played a few that say they are.

Games are games and I am increasingly understanding that (for me) the element of fun needs to be the strongest part of the design these days.

I have just started looking at the Bolt action rules and I like what they do, same for Iron Cross rules. I have played a host of other systems, so I am in a position to make a choice set against experience.

I would also make two major points.

while researching a ton of videos on Bolt Action and some other games, there was a clear indication that a lot of players were moving from 40K type games to Black Powder and Bolt Action – you might say that tells it's own tale, but the way I see it is that we now seem to have designs that are actually encouraging the fantasy / sci-fi community to move into historicals … For ages we have wanted to see that happen to keep historicals viable …. And then when it happens, people winge about those very designs.

Secondly – I have been in the small scales for ages (and hated painting), I have recently tried my hand at some 1/72 and 28mm and I just love the painting and modelling aspect, I'm not good at it, but perhaps it just takes me back to sheer teenager enjoyment of opening boxes of soliders and having some simple fun.

Market forces are what they are and if certain designs are shifting by the skip-load, then that is all about demand. My own view is that plastic 28's and new accessible rule systems are bringing an excitement to the hobby.

Free market. Horses for courses. There is no "we" in this hobby.

That about sums it up. I like historical games, and I like fantasy games. I write both too. Sometimes the fantasy games get dinged for being to realistic. Sometimes the historical games get dinged for that too. And sometimes the opposite happens.

C'est la' Sham Guerre!

It was at my college wargames club, and it was very much a "run what ya brung" thing. The people who had miniatures had what they had painted because they liked them, not because someone else might have historically-accurate opponents.

That's a good point, very true. It's easy to forget that back in the 'day, the games played fast and loose with force composition and nobody cared if you had the whole 10th SS Panzer division at paper strength with extra King Tigers & Nebelwerfers. But the rules were very, very concerned about making sure that they had the exactly, historically-researched and correct penetration chance (2.1%) for that King Tiger at 1038 meters, in the fog, on a Tuesday afternoon.

Games have just changed their priorities over the years. Nowadays, the game doesn't care too much about getting the precise historically-accurate penetration rates for the shot and armor and so on, but cares a lot about not letting you have an "army" of nothing but King Tigers & Nebelwerfers.

If I grasp Rudy's OP, it was that most of the recent Historical games are tied to manufacturers. Flames of War and Bolt Action releases are tied to trying to get the most recent stuff purchased.

This works when you are playing those rules in a store that is trying to sell product in exchange for gaming space. The SF and Fantasy games (where FoW got the model) are much the same.

The catch is that most Historical players don't play at the store and would expect to be able to get the majority of the common troop types for the major sides all at once. Not need to wait for the 1809 expansion to be released to buy Grenzers.

Great discussions. By the way Otto, I do not buy them. I sell them and it is very difficult to be able to stock all of the product numbers. This is a special concern for many local stores since unlike me, historical sites is a very minor percentage of their stock and sales.

Dear Rudy

Oh well to be sure. Even forty years ago with the much more limited number of figures in existence it was impossible for any game store to stock enough minis to allow "impulse buys" to be an effective sales strategy. Stores and even distributors cannot sink that much capital into stock to allow it. Today with the vast number of possible wares, (far more than just minis) it's a physical impossibility. Even distributors and mail order houses can't stock enough for that. The best they can do is work on a good manufacturer- dealer relationship to allow reasonable delivery time.

I don't like to go direct to the manufacturer myself. I prefer to deal with a local hobby or game store and pay him the extra bucks so he can stay in business. Local game stores and hobby stores are places I like to hang out and browse, and if I order my stuff through them and allow them to make a little that's good for me. I'll pay the extra.

Personally the slightest hint of attempting to do what Bolt Action and FOW or Warhammer did with "sanctioned" and "official" is a complete abomination to me. It only guarantees that I wouldn't buy a tree or a piece of lichen from them, no matter how good it was.

I think SAGA is also converting many fantasy gamers; there was a group running a demo game at the last local show I attended who all appeared to be twenty-somethings. And just look at the average age of the people doing box openings of new plastic GB releases.

I get the feeling though, that rather than thinking of themselves as converts to historical gaming they barely register the fact that SAGA is such a game; rather, it's just one more option amongst the various skirmish-style 'systems' they play, whatever the subject matter. I suspect that the same applies to Bolt Action.

I'm a historical board wargamer that also plays miniatures and for the most part this does not occur in that branch of the hobby. Board wargames generally cover a single battle or have scenarios rather than points for buying forces. Being from the background I was horrified by FOW, to me it looked like decisions in the game were always based on selling more models rather than simulation.

From my experience a pretty healthy percentage of historical miniatures players are more about the minis than historical accuracy. They buy, build and paint models and want to get them on the table to recreate a scripted game. They want to get as many on the table as possible – who can blame them after spending $1,000 USD+?

For many people the rules are pretty much secondary and the most popular rule sets are mainly dice mechanics that can give the right "feel" to the game without taxing the brain of a 3rd grader. When I attend conventions people sign up to play the games that have the best eye candy and seem to tolerate any rule set as long as it keeps the game moving along. So what if it's not historical – they still have fun.

I too feel that some rule sets are more about selling you more miniatures – and that's exactly what many people want so nothing wrong with that. I was at a FoW tournament recently and almost every table was a tank/infantry (normally with air support) with some pretty laser cut buildings and other cool terrain. I find it hard to suspend belief when a tank "battle" is composed of tanks next to each other and with a scale looking they are less than 100 meters apart. Not historical but people are having fun and it is visually stimulating and they don't care what I think nor should they. I doubt if many people are going to compromise the eye candy and more detailed rule set for a more historic game.

Unfortunately there are players out there (like me) who would like to play a rule set that is geared more historical AND have the eye candy but we are mainly forced to play the popular rule sets and try to enjoy the game for the quality of the figures and terrain and the social interaction.

Wolfhag