"What is "Home" to you?" Topic

When you are stuck in a game design problem or working on a new idea, and especially when making a new effort from scratch what is the base rule set or organizing principle you "run home to" to help yourself? What do your refresh in your mind or ask "How would Don Featherstone or H.G.Wells handle this?

For myself it's Joe Moreschauser in his book "How to Play War Games in Miniature leavened by Brig.Peter Young and "Charge!"

My organizing principle is "Simplicity." The simplest games are the best.

My "rule" is the rule of twelves. Twelve 8 1/2 pages tops, three quarters inch margins, 12 point Times Roman, all text, rules, examples, diagrams, pictures, charts, tables and designers notes in that 12 pages. If it can't fit get out the red pen and start slashing. Turns on the table top from start to finish should take no more than 12 minutes for both sides.

More Featherstone, I think--or Glidden. But I am more likely to reduce a longer set to two pages than to work from scratch these days.

I go back to telling myself a story, what is it I want to capture. If all else get the models out and play the story what happens who dire who lives. To me the trick is knowing what you want the answer to be, not in game mechanics. Say for me I want 3 rifle teams firing at 1 rifle team in a trench to be suppressed, how long should it take? If I am an infantryman and I am surprised by fire, what to I do, go to ground or run like hell to get off the killing ground. When you have all of this down and know what you want to happen then you can decide probabilities and with that pick a mechanism. To may rules to me start mechanism first, it to me is not how you model you need to answer the question before you start rule. To me Feathersone is a great example of utter rubbish, even when I bought the book as a kid it was disappointing.

Pig Wars. Hard not to get out of the 20 man unit/three stripes mentality. Seems to work for a lot of stuff.

Full Thrust. If it moves in a vacuum, I have a hard time not seeing it through the lens of an SDS.

I research first. Really immerse myself in the period and the combat arena. The general and the specifics until I have a feel for what I think is relevant. The trick to me, is to know what you can leave out while still keeping the feel of struggling with the same issues that the original people did. That will be different at different times, places and levels of command. If I get stuckI go back and ask what needs to be added, removed or amended to get the feel right without killing playability. Dunno whose style that equates to. But my go to position is have I replicated the restrictions faced by the person who made the decisions in reality.

When you are stuck in a game design problem or working on a new idea, and especially when making a new effort from scratch what is the base rule set or organizing principle you "run home to" to help yourself?

If I am stuck, something is not working, like a football coach, I go back to basics:

1. The goals I set for myself in designing the wargame

2. The four fundamental elements of all games and simulations and see if using another element or mixture of elements can work better.

3. Review those game designs I know of that tackled the same goals of subject matter.

When I realize that a generic rule will not cover an infinite number of variables, I try to make a "catch-all" or default rule that will cover most situations. This comes from John Hill's approach to gaming as illustrated in his "Johnny Reb" series.

Featherstone & Grant to refresh the mind than the KISS principal at work.

I am not typical or necessarily successful in my designs but I follow the following basic principles.

Consitency. I try to use consistent definitions of every basic element in the game. And I start bottom up, not top down. I don't want to say the French in the napoleonic wars were better and give them an advantage just for being French. Was it morale, training, experience, equipment?

Complexity is allowed if it pays off. I think many players nowadays miss the 'meaty' rules of their youth and get board by over simplified games that are popular now. There is still a place for a quick and fun game that can be finished in an evening by middle aged gamers who have to get home before midnight!

But that is not enough IMO. We need well designed games that take more investment of time and effort – as long as the effort is rewarded with a deeper game experience.

I still go for the simplest possible solution to a problem. But some problems do not have simple answers.

Skarper has it. You need the absolute minimum to achieve you goals. To be many games have a far too lower a threshold for their goals and hence are unfulfilling. This includes to me Featherstone, the overall games lacked credibility. However that down to personal requirements.

0. Decide "What's the point?" If there's one thing than can bring you back to center it is focusing on what experience you want to create.

1. Think really hard about what is a dynamic transformation and what is an entity state. Keeping these clear helps keep the design clear. Deliberately hybridizing or swapping one for the other needs to be very deliberate.

2. Think really hard on what needs to be in the game and what needs to be defined in the scenarios. How essential is the information to the core intent of the game? How varied could it be?

I start with research from manuals and AAR's. The goal is to examine the different tactics, actions and risk-rewards troops attempted to use in combat. For vehicles and guns, I want to gather real-life performance from combat and trials. Then I put together the data and come up with a draft that concentrates on what I want to recreate. At this point I ignore playability.

After that, I take a break of a few weeks and revisit my work. My general response is was I thinking when I wrote that! I start consolidating and trimming down everything. I think the advantage to this approach is that you can always go back and add stuff that you took out. Designing a simple system from the bottom up restricts in many ways adding additional details and rules.

Playtesting involves watching what players are having a hard time understanding (those are changed or thrown out) and what they are enjoying (may call for additional detail). The idea is to simplify, not complicate. I try to figure a way to lay out the game sequence to align with the player's expectations.

A human mind is a problem-solving machine. If the game is laid out in a way to allow the player to best use his natural instincts and intuition to approach and solve the problem he is confronted with he should naturally embrace the system. At least that is the goal.

So far the "Time & Action" concept is working as it is easy for players to grasp and visualize the "timing" of an event. When a situation occurs in the game not covered in the rules, we discuss the time frame it would take, options and risk-rewards available and the result. The new rule interacts with all of the other Time & Actions with very few exceptions.

Players are able to evaluate their chances of success based on timing rather than attempting to activate a unit or beat a die roll. To my experience, this is a very different approach to the traditional game sequences.

Good play aids really help. I've found risk-reward decisions that allow a player the chance to tempt fate is best so I'm always on the lookout for them. This is where different tactics are implemented.

Entertainment value trumps detail and realism. The more intuitive the game is the better it will be received with fewer explanations. Ideally, players see on their own how and why the game systems make sense is better than having to explain to them non-military game mechanics.

The final design for the tank-tank game was validated by having real tank crewman play it. Since I used the nomenclature and tactics from their manuals they understood the game and tactics with few explanations. However, non-tankers had to come up to speed with these concepts.

Wolfhag

For me is it Joe Moreschauser, Charles Wesencraft and Neil Thomas. I am now also adopting Bob Cordery's Portable Wargame rules more and more.

I prefer games that model from the top down rather than the bottom up so that the mechanics are simple but elegant.

Mike

Depends upon the goal of the rules. For me, the objective is this: do the rule mechanics foster use of historically relevant behavior and tactics? Do the rule mechanics punish historically stupid decisions and tactics? If not, why not?

This approach cannot, of course, be useful if the analyst does not have an accurate grasp of his subject matter. My suggestion (speaking from experience): as soon as you have it all figured out, keep studying because in all likelihood you do not have it properly worked out yet.

B

A lot of games are basically dice rolling plus figures. The luckiest wins.

Sure that can be fun, but it gets old fast. I like a game to challenge me. Games that can't be figured out in one or two sessions so the smart players always know how to win but need to be studied.

If the study leads players to a better understanding of the problems of the time portrayed then it's the jackpot.

To be honest very few games I played have done this – none really. Too often the way to win is ahistorical or gamey.

This may be because the designer doesn't know the history or doesn't know how to model the history with their design.

What has happened in the last 20 years or so is designers have gotten fed up with modeling history and just designed something quick and easy that is fun to play. Everybody gets their toys on the table and has fun.

This leaves perhaps a small minority who are left unsatisfied. Some of the most popular games are great games but lack any value as simulations. They teach the wrong lessons.

At risk of enflaming some, if your rules encourage bunching up and don't make it dangerous to close with the enemy in a WW2 game, then you have an ahistorical game. I don't care how much fun it is, I'm not interested.

+1 Skarper