"Limited Tabletop Simulations" Topic

Tabletop battles, by their nature, can only replicated a small aspect of a battle and often reflect the bias of the rule set used.
Discuss.
Cite exalples.
Keep responses to five lines or less. 😜

Most good games does one thing great.

Disagree. By adjusting the scale of your thinking (small unit to grand scale) it is possible to represent an entire battle of medium size. Bias is in the eye of the beholder.

Heck, I've done Gettysburg. It's all about scope and limiting players knowledge and control.

True, but sometimes the limit is you want to play a game in a 3-4 hour period. Even when determining scale eg. traditional tabletop encounter, generally speaking, ammunition supply, logistics, and missile troops shooting effectively after melee are often oversights. Let alone seizing the high ground, wind direction and position of the sun…. 😁

I really don't see the point. No, two men on a 5x9 table for an afternoon cannot replicate everything done by 200,000 men over three days and several square miles, but if the designer is careful and skilled, they can explore the same options the historical commanders had.

We /can/ however recreate the battle the way it looked on a dodgy television documentary :-)

Isn't this what all discussions about wargaming during the past 100 years have been about?

Tabletop battles, by their nature, can only replicated a small aspect of a battle and often reflect the bias of the rule set used.

But since the most important two people in the engagement are the respective commanders, you are only aiming to replicate the decision points faced by those two people. That seems doable. Where it gets complicated is when you want to simultaneously experience the battle from the POV of the Captain-General, the Colonel and the Captain (never mind the Corporal).

We /can/ however recreate the battle the way it looked on a dodgy television documentary :-)

Ph, Wease;, we can do better than that! We can duplicate completely bonkers theories of historical tactics. All the best craziness has bibliographies.

As noted above, we can very easily recreate entire large battles in a restricted space. It just depends what degree of abstraction you are happy with. I did the entire Six Day War on a 4x3. It just depends.

"We can duplicate completely bonkers theories of historical tactics."

Indeed we can. As at the end of the day it is only numbers and mathematical models, and you can make models of anything. Even a notional 6:1 combat effectiveness superiority of German armour in 1943, or the 'unstoppable' Imperial Guard.

Now, if you are trying to bathtub the whole of Kursk with NUTS!, then the OP has a point.

Abstraction is the malleable ingredient. When you strive for a minimum of abstraction and go for literal modeling, then the scale of the game becomes a dominant factor. To ignore scale is to depart from literal modeling and pursue abstraction.