I have a confession: I write wargames rules for fun.
I'm currently working on a Bronze Age naval set called Brazen Seas, intended to be a fast, simple skirmish game. My little group also regularly uses my SYW rules, A Glorious War, and my Late Antiquity set, Shieldwall. I've written others too, with varying degrees of success.
So while I'm no Daniel Mersey, I suppose I can style myself a rules writer… of sorts.
When I write historical miniature rules, I've come to think of it less as designing mechanics and more as negotiating between history and playability.
For my own group, that negotiation is fairly informal. We already share certain expectations about a period, so the writing tends to be light and iterative. Much of it is simply capturing what we think is important, what level of granularity we enjoy, and what level of complexity we're prepared to tolerate.
My rule of thumb is that if you lean too far towards history, you risk creating a game that bogs down under detail. Lean too far towards playability and you can lose much of the character that attracted you to the period in the first place.
What interests me is that the writing process itself feels like the real balancing act. You're constantly deciding what to compress, what to abstract, and what bits of historical friction should remain because they help define the period. For example, in Shieldwall I use an events deck where unusual occurrences are framed through the superstitions of the age rather than modern explanations.
I'm curious how others approach that balance when writing rules rather than simply playing them.
How much research do you do? How much playtesting? And at what point do you decide you have enough history and enough game?
learns to pay attention to all of the details when buying two-part epoxy...
