"What wargames inspired you to write your own rules" Topic

What wargames inspired you to write your own rules and more importantly why they inspired you. My own list is unapologetically UK centric and may not even be the originator of the idea, but it was my encounters with these rules that paved the way for us to define our own rules. Now many things inspired us to write our own rules and though these games were a part they were by no means the only issues that made us want to write for us a better set but to cover all aspects would be boring I am sure, even this bit maybe.
Stargrunt II
It was innovative in many ways some far less inspiring than others. But for us it was an encounter with an IGOUGO system at squad level that worked, and was comprehensible in the round. I had previously encountered ASL, but it left no impression on me other than it was not my cup of tea. The system in Stargrunt also had some limited command and control systems that allowed us to begin to see that the ebb and flow of a modern battle could be done in a way that side " A goes then Side B" the "Classic" dawn of time games never allowed.
Crossfire
The early stuff before it was compromised for sales, defined at all parts being effective in rifle range so no range factors were applied. I only played it a few times but it left a lasting impact, it demonstrated that the range obsession of many wargames was not as vital as some would have us believe. It showed that the comments from some serving and ex-servicemen that war gamers are far too range obsessed was true, it did not fall down having a single "range band".
DBM
This was an inspiration not so much the mechanism but a pointer as to what could be achieved. The two things that stood out if played as intended and not with excessively large armies were:-
1) Units deployed in march column could move and out manoeuvre units in battle formation in the right conditions i.e. screened from enemy picket's. This allowed serious manoeuvre and the potential to bring in reserves in a normal battle timescale. Something up till then had never been possible in other systems I had played.
2) A system that as a battle progressed the chaos that is endemic is created without special rules, as the battle progresses it gets harder and harder to keep your forces "under control". In fact it engenders a real world event, the ceasing or at least reducing levels of combat in order to reform and maintain effective command and control. Crude though this was, it was the first system I had ever seen that had such intrinsic properties. Having such a fundamental mechanism was a vital requirement for our new rules and showed that it was possible, not just a pipe dream.
3) As a Donald Featherstone "Hater" (his books were some of the early ones I read as a kid and they were awful even than), I grudgingly have to acknowledge in his advanced wargames rules book there was a section on better modelling the speed changes of vehicles. It was a horrendous system, in early trials of our rules we tried it and it was still awful 20 years on. However it did show that if you wanted vehicles to behave credibly, then something less horrendous was vital if you were to genuinely get the strengths and weaknesses of vehicles more credibly modelled.

With their inspiration, lots of reading books and manuals we began our 2000 hr odyssey to write and publish our own rules.

So to the point, what games (if any) and more importantly, what in them inspired you to set out on the gruelling task of writing your own better set of rules!

I did not wrote a "better set of rules," I wrote rules that did not exist, for what I wanted, what I knew of. I later discovered there were other rules for my chosen genre/figure types.

I wrote an introductory set of dice-based rules for wargames with plastic Army Men, in 1998 (no tennis balls, no dirt clods, no rubber bands, etc.). I based them, very loosely, upon the board game, Squad Leader. I liked the Fire Power rating system. I took the concept, and shaped it into a new, simpler system: each Infantryman has a Fire Power of 1; all other weapons are based on multiples of the Infantryman's Fire Power, but with different Ranges. The system is simple, and in my opinion, elegant and intuitive.

I self-published hardcopies of my rules, selling them by mail order, via a free website I created. I was an early adopter of PayPal, as well, which made it easier to sell them: PayPal handled CC transactions on my behalf, without the need to set up a CC service -- I never knew the CC information my customers used to pay, I just knew they paid; PayPal protected them, and me, at the same time.

Prior to that, I only accepted Postal Money Orders: same as cash; the full weight of the US Postal Service supporting both me, and my customers, so we both knew it was a safe transaction.

I never tracked my time working on my rules, nor how long I spent assembling the booklets, or mailing them. I also never tracked my total sales, which were slow, and sporadic. I kept a rough count on how many copies, but it was very rough. It was a hobby for me, not a profitable business venture.

I ran classes teaching children my Army Men rules, in the local Community Education system, which did pay me for my time. I made vastly more profit on my teaching salary (pure profit, little overhead costs), than I did in sales (small profit margin per booklet). LOL! My classes were always full, with them asking me to run additional classes to meet demand. I generated around half of my sales through the classes, and the other half through mail order. It was great fun, for several years. I pulled the plug on everything after nine years, as mail order sales had dried up, and I had payment issues with the local Community Education system. Cheers!

I leave "gruelling" work for others.

I have "written" a few simple sets (5x7 card) to use with my son, or as a convention game. Why? I want/ed something quick and decisive that got people pushing figures after a few minutes of introduction.

I worked on a set covering the 1840's expansion into the American West. At the time, I didn't see anything commercially that addressed US Dragoons, Indians, etc.

Wellington's Victory. Made a set of Napoleonic era miniature based rules from WV back in 1977. Still gaming with them forty six years later. Expanded with same rules for the War Spanish Succession with changes for infantry formations, cavalry action, and weaker artillery…plus very limited skirmishing on the tabletop.

My rules are based to some degree or another on earlier sets. Stargrunt, Retinue and others come to mind.
I am sure we all stand on the shoulders of Giants!

For me it has followed a few tracks

Aside for early rules for Plastic Armymen – fire crackers and all.

Initially it was how do I convert a board game like Kingmaker to a Miniatures Game – for the individual "battles" in the game – Ultimately in using the game as a campaign backdrop.

Or using miniatures with games like Close Assault or Fire Power but keeping everything else the same.

Lastly created sets of rules for periods where I didnt see or like rules for that era – usually replacing them when a better rule set came out

All of the coastal forces rules that were around in the early 1990s. I didn't enjoy any of them so I wrote my own which became "Action Stations"

I only write rules for topics not covered to my satisfaction by someone else. For well-covered periods, I inevitably start with published rules and just add house rules as required. I continue to use GQ3 and CY6 and RF&F for most of my gaming, but the house rules to go with them grow yearly.

I have a bunch of 1880s ironclads I want to play with. Naval rules for the age of steam are all written for the 1860s (mostly ACW) or pre-dreadnought period (roughly 1890-1905), and many can be stretched to cover a few years before or after, but abstract out all the characteristics that made the weird ships of 1870s and 1880s interesting. If I want to see what happens when stodgy, plodding ironclads belching thick smoke clouds steam into knife-fighting range to fire the biggest MLRs ever made at the thickest armored walls ever constructed and then take 5-15 minutes to reload… I have to write my own rules. (I know exactly one game that covers the era, written in the 1970s, and it uses all the primitive game mechanics that implies.)

I have other projects in the works along similar lines:

• Ancient galley rules to incorporate the advances in research and scholarship outlined in The Age of Titans;
  
• Ancient siege rules that play quickly but incorporate the growing naval component that (probably) drove the development of giant polyremes;
  
• Renaissance naval rules that incorporate strong C3 and preserve the distinctions between varying ship types while still remaining fast-play, and include an amphibious component;
  
• Age of Sail fleet rules that encourage period line tactics, punish Nelsonian adventurism, and use on-table markers for all status indications (NO PAPERWORK!);
  
• A version of GQ3 for pre-dreadnought naval combat (1895-1910);
  
• Some way to make shore bombardments and amphibious ops from 1850-1918 fun and interesting to play;

…and so on. I'll happily give up on all of those projects as soon as somebody like David Manley or L.L.Gill does them for me. I'm happy tinkering, like any wargamer, but I'm really not a good rules writer.

- Ix

My inspiration came from a set of rules published by Strategy & Tactics magazine (back in the day before they included a board game).

I tend to be more inspired by scenarios or tactical problems than by existing rules. I find something interesting to wargame, and if I don't find something short and fast-playing at the right level, I try to create or modify something.

My first was my own fantasy take on the SPI game: Great Medieval Battles. But I didn't get far!

My first rules I ever did were fantasy rules inspired by original "Chain Mail" rules.

My Civil War rules were based on an unpublished version of "Johnny Reb" as well as frustrations with "Stars n Bars" (not to mention earlier rules that missed the mark.

My Colonial rules inspired by "Sword and the Flame", which despite a large following were not popular with me and my gaming group.

My long time friend did Napoleonic rules inspired by "Empire" as well as Franco-Prussian War before there was any known published rules.

Kim

"MGB" rules designed to introduce kids at a local game store to naval wargaming. A few 10- cent boats and a handful of dice were all the requirements for an ultra- simple game.

I wrote rules for the TYW since there was nothing that addressed the tactics of how a battlia fought. I also wanted it to have an old school feel while 'fixing' some of the problems of old school rules.

It was the norm at my club back in the day when commercial rules didn't exist for most periods [early 70's].

Not a wargame but Bird & Livingston's book, "WWII Ballistics and Armor."

Wolfhag

I know that "King of the Battlefield" Eighteenth Century Wargame Rules were written because the author had fallen out of love with WRG's 1685-1845 Rules.

It was the complex period sequence that did it. If there was a slip by either player it was difficult to backtrack and sort it out. OK, Barkerese played its part.

KotB is still played regularly after 20 years.

The old Metagaming spaceship game "Warpwar" inspired me to take a crack at diceless combat resolution. The resulting games were quite clunky. Lots of individual components on each unit to track damage across.

Ogre/GEV inspired us as well that large battles could be resolved quickly with only a few unit attributes. A bit too broadly abstracted though. A tank is a tank is a tank.

Wellington's Victory. Made a set of Napoleonic era miniature based rules from WV back in 1977.

I did the same thing with Ney v Wellington, but in the end it proved as complex as standard figure gaming rules and never went anywhere. I never liked the way cavalry charging was executed, seemed to be rather complex. I had more success with TSS, but as i am not in america i found few opponents interested in the period, so while it worked well, it died out rather quickly.

For my ACW rules I took inspiration from:
To The Strongest (gridded battlefields generate quick play and few arguments)
Civil War Battles (RFCM/Peter pig) for their ability to create a scenario from two balanced forces
Fire & Fury because I enjoyed them right up to seeing Gettysburg won by a mass cavalry charge at the Wargame Holiday Centre, after that not so much.
Paddy Griffiths books on the ACW…not rules but inspirational nonetheless.
The criteria I set myself were:
1.playable through to a result in an evening
2.Convincing in play and results achieved

Most of my inspiration was negative based.
I played musket and horse era rules where a could turn up to 180 degrees, change formation and charge up to 400 ya ds. That did not make sense and spruced Guard du Corps.
WW2 tank battles where hits failed by a millimeter or two spurred my own set to be faster play.
Slow playing systems sparked some.

What wargames inspired you to write your own rules and more importantly why they inspired you.

Like TimePortal, my game inspirations were negative reactions. History is what inspired me, where the games failed. When Pickett's Charge can't be duplicated within the historical time frame with F&F, when Napoleonic cavalry are one-note ponies in all the varieties of wargames, or command processes are portrayed backwards with 'pips', I was inspired to develop something more historical.

Negatively…I didn't like I encountered so I had to write my own. Dad ha a collections of 1/72 napoleonics and j had wwii

Though actually my first rules were made up up because I didn't have any..
Before that I'd played little wars stylenwith dad using spring-loaded cannon shooting at the 1/35 napoleonics he'd painted for me…and him

I'd been brought up with lots.of subjects being . Can't find what you want? Then do it yourself.

So I did and keep doing so.

A bit of snobby by me. One think I look at is the background of the designer. IMHO, if they have never served in the military then they may have trouble converted book values to practical experience to game concepts.
For example the Tank Gunnery manual of the late 1970s, had a section describing the old WW2 style of using V range finder compared to modern ghost style range finding. How many players would be understand firing 13 round before reaching a 50/50 chance to hit. This was a stationary tank firing at a target only 500 meters.