"Is “historical accuracy” overrated on the tabletop?" Topic

At what point does accuracy stop improving the game and start getting in the way?

Uniforms, basing, ground scale, morale, weapon ranges, command friction — all of them matter, but not equally, and not always. We've all seen games that are meticulously "accurate" yet dull, and others that bend history but feel right.

So where do you draw the line?

What level of uniform accuracy is enough?

Does ground scale trump figure scale?

Are morale systems more important than weapon stats?

What do you happily abstract, ignore, or house-rule?

Where does accuracy genuinely improve play — and where does it not?
And what does that say about where you sit on the history ↔ game axis?

You are correct saying its a fine balance! Playability and fun are the main aims in games I like.
An example being when I wrote my Coastal Forces Rules link – having fairly meticulously worked out the effectiveness of torpedoes etc. That version was accurate, but rather frustrating for me as well as my playtesters. I opted for a simple expedient and doubled the chance of a hit, and increased damage, and it worked!

No, not overrated. More rules have a problem with being ahistorical rather than overly historical. IMHO pre-gunpowder skirmish rules tend to be the worst here.

But that said, being historical doesn't mean kitchen-sinking detail. Lots of rules contain really high degrees of marginality, which at best make no difference and at worst are really fiddly AND produce less accurate results than if you just ignored them.

I think Herkybird makes the very valid point that some conflict situations can just be inherently quite dull (essentially where there are lots of low odds attacks) and you might have to spice things up by deliberate re-calibration.

What level of uniform accuracy is enough?

I'm an AWI gamer. My favorite example is the 23rd Foot, the Royal Welch Fusiliers.
They were part of the Boston Garrison in 1775.
Did they wear the Fusiliers cap? I wish one manufacturer, anyone (!), would make a figure in the 1768 Warrant uniform wearing that cap. I'd buy a unit.
But did they wear that coat with cocked hat?
I've seen the woodcut of the Boston Massacre. That uniform looks like a cross between the FIW and 1768 Warrant.

Okay. They were evacuated and came back for the 1776 campaign. Did they wear 1768, modified or the (in-)famous Germantown coat?

Later they were in the South. How were they dressed at … Guilford Courthouse? Yorktown?

The Light Dragoons, on both sides, seem to have worn different uniforms every year.

I cannot afford the cost, time to paint accurately the varying uniforms for a single unit. Nor find the room to store them.
They should consider themselves lucky I don't just use FIW figures. A Redcoats is a Redcoat, right?

At some point it will happen, but where is going to be different for everyone else. For me I like my battles to play out like (but not exactly the same as) historical examples. I play these for enjoyment not for winning.

What exactly do you want from your rules system: identical results to history, or ____________? Serious question.

Where am I coming from, you ask? The American College of War, in the 1930's, war gamed the US Navy versus the Imperial Japanese Navy, more than 300 times, over a period of 5+ years! They looked at the outcomes of each campaign, and they believed that the average outcome of those 300 games was true. In the 1940's, the real world battle matched the average results of their 300 games…

They played the same basic series of scenarios 300+ times. They did not play each scenario, or even each campaign series, once, then moved on to another enemy campaign to simulate and evaluate, as modern amateur war gamers do.

When I played historical games in the 1990's with history buff friends, they were all too frequently disappointed with the game results because they did not match the historical results. They played each scenario, pretty much once. A few major battles got re-played 2-3 times in their gaming careers, but usually with different players, different locales.

If you expect every historical game to play out as it did in history, what is the point of playing it? You will be disappointed nearly every time…

I play games to see what I can can do, tactically, to achieve a victory. If I do better than my historical counterpart, Huzzah! Well, it sucked to be him, back then. I got lucky, and I will take the victory lap and be happy about it.

If you want to ensure that your rules system is "historically accurate," then play a campaign series of battle scenarios, 300 times, to determine whether the average results match history: if they do, then your rules are "historically accurate."

With regards to historical accuracy in uniforms, if the period is prior to color film and video cameras, all you have to go by are drawings, woodcuts, and paintings! How technically accurate was the artist? Remember that the victors write the history. "Historical accuracy" is limited by our archeological evidence, and that is still changing, today, with new digs, new discoveries. Our knowledge is incomplete. Therefore, our "historical accuracy" is simply a somewhat educated guess.

Why do you play historical games? What do you expect from them? Set your expectations accordingly, knowing that you lack one hell of a lot of accurate details because no one present had our modern technology, and they were all biased: period historians wrote their accounts according to their slanted views; artists presented their interpretations likely based on 'first-hand accounts' (purely un-biased, of course!); leaders often 'edited' historical accounts to improve their own heritage for the ages. Cheers!

Not sure I understand the question. There are a bunch of us with different understanding of history and relative importance--and importance is always relative.

For me, history is best served when the miniatures are appropriately dressed for the war or period and I can tell troop and equipment types apart, and the decisions I make as a commander more or less reflect the options open to the real-life commander and will have (so nearly as we can determine) the same effect they would have had in real life. The important things, and the unimportant ones will not be the same for different periods and levels.

Can't do better than that with a question about the entirety of historical miniatures.

The gaming structure to achieve the historical( or the feel of) outcome, as for a guys painting and uniform accuracy that's between him and his god, Ive played 7yrs war against imaginations in a campaign. The rest scale of figs is choice., ground scale on the size of battle you want the level of command you want etc, so the question is too simple to answer. But my best shot is to play a game that reflects your and your friends opinion of the conflict and if the games give you the feel you want be that bang you dead or rules of more finesse. Like warfare and history its all interpretation until your their for real

+1 Robert Piepenbrink

Rules and Scenarios also should set the correct stage for a game that needs to be more than the game Risk – less than a historical simulation.

Also not really interested in pike units that move with the speed of a Zulu Impis. Or creating rules or scenarios that reward guerilla forces that line up in that Thin Red Line.

Well, they should be able to try, but with huge penalties in disorder, morale and fighting abilities.
"Hey! I didn't sign up for this!"

I think that the over complication equals more realism crowd is not achieving historical accuracy.

BINGO! Pay the man.
All you accomplish by complicating the rules is … complicating the rules. That does not equate to "realism".
Remember the SPI game "Sniper", where you rolled the dice while going down stairs, to see if you tripped and fell? 🙄 Yeah.

Make your figures as close to history. But to me the rules are the key to unlock history.
One reason I still play Empire 3 is yet to find some rules that arexas close as I can find.
Came to the conclusion the best conference rules in Napoleonic at least is Carnage and Glory.
I love Napoleonics so still get something out of the rules as dummed down as it gets, either a 1 page chart or anything makkng a battle go as fast as a skirmish line in real life could go through its motions.

I have a sort of rule that if I can tell what a model/figure is supposed to be, its good enough for me!

What I'm really struck by in these replies is how often "accuracy" is being treated not as a fixed standard, but as a calibration problem.

Several posters have mentioned deliberately changing things that were technically correct but produced results that felt wrong or dull in play — Herkybird's torpedo example being a good case in point. That seems less like abandoning history and more like adjusting the model so that the outcomes over time better resemble what we think actually happened.

It also raises an interesting distinction between the accuracy of inputs (uniforms, weapon stats, movement rates), and accuracy of outputs (how battles tend to unfold, what decisions are rewarded or punished).

I suspect a lot of disagreement in this hobby comes from people prioritising one over the other without realising it.

So maybe the question isn't "how accurate is accurate enough?", but where do you insist on fidelity, and where are you happy to recalibrate to get the right feel or tendencies?
And does that differ by period or level of command?
I think considering "period" will be extra interesting.

"I think considering "period" will be extra interesting."

Oh, I agree. Just as an example, Napoleonics and AOR games tend to pay attention to equipment only in the most general way, but get deadly serious about training. Compare and contrast with WWII, where the equipment stats can be a full volume accompanying the rules.

And the higher-level WWII rules can be deeply concerned with how fast orders can be generated and the chances of non-compliance, where in an ancients game some rules almost put the armies on autopilot following the initial deployment--very hard for any commander to make changes once the fighting starts. Different again for most AOR battles. And "force of personal example"--often critical in a skirmish--becomes steadily less important with higher command levels after the Middle Ages.

I think 79thPA and the OFM have it right. While we sometimes screw up the history directly, more often we fail by overcomplication--trying to know too much and breaking down in time-consuming detail something our level of command would know only in broadest outline. We know that tank platoon is facing a 37mm AT battery, which can't penetrate frontal armor at this range. All the real commander knew was the platoon that the platoon was taking fire, but continuing to advance--if he knew that much.

All the real commander knew was the platoon that the platoon was taking fire, but continuing to advance--if he knew that much.

That is why I like 'What a Tanker' so much!!!

Its also interesting that infantry had an advantage in that they could hear the enemy weapons and determine their types sometimes after even limited combat experience.