"WRG First thoughts" Topic

I've seen them played back in the day (late 70s) but have never played them. I picked up a copy of 6th edition from Ebay but have not read through yet. Having a slow day at work, I downloaded a copy of 5th edition to see what all the hub-bub is about.

First off, I was surprised to see the 52 pages of rules compared to barely 20 for first edition. Much of this deals with setup, troop definitions and the like. It's not really until page 16 that you get into the game rules. The rules end at page 42 followed by some supplements. So, in reality, there is a modest 28 pages of rules to study.

The rules themselves are surprisingly straight forward. There is little in the way of fiddly dice rolls. Their is a reaction table that is resolved by a 3 dice roll and some modifiers. You read the result based on troop type and carry that result out. Pretty simple.

Combat, be it ranged or melee, is conducted in the same manner. You get a starting number based on weapon vs the target type, add some modifiers and then throw 2 dice, (One counting as + and one counting as -1) Tally up the result and consult the casualty table. Again pretty straight forward.

Based on reactions, some troops may recoil or route or even break into an uncontrolled charge.

So, I'm not quite sure why folks call these rules overly complicated. There are a few fiddly parts.

The orders system, at its core, is pretty straight forward but you do have to write orders.

There are also rules for army standing orders which I think is where many gamers manage to abuse the system. Tossing this rule out would go a long way to closing loopholes.

The reaction system seems easy enough though there are a fair amount of modifiers.

Melee/shooting is pretty straight forward and leaves little room for interpretation. The rules are the rules.

In all, at a first reading through, I would think the rules would be playable by players who just want to have some fun. I could definitely see how the game could be lawyered into something un-fun.

The way the rules are written and amended makes them feel like a tournament set. Definitely a venerable set but probably still a serviceable one.

John

You hit the nail on the head – they are a tournament set and as others have pointed out in other threads, most of the parts that are overwritten were done so to combat tournament rules lawyers. I honestly prefer the rules to FoG (which I still don't understand) and don't find them particularly difficult as long as you follow the procedures properly.

The reaction test system in 5th and 6th was brilliant.

But it was wading through it over and over again that made it odious.

I sold off all my ancient armies because nothing in vogue took my fancy. If WRG came back (not 7th edition) I'd start painting again.
As with any points based system it opens itself up to abuse and misuse by a lot of gamers. Also, the motorcycle ability in response to the 200' general was a criticism. Tactica took it too far the other way IMHO. I never found them complicated once you played a few games and got to know your troops.

@acarhj,

They are definately still servicable.

With a 1:20 figure ratio, it was a treat to see a full legion with auxilia fielded. Writing orders became an exercise in brevity and sometime hilarity when two Roman Legions fought each other; two long blast on the cornicen, my legion moves forward.

Hold on, the why are you retreating?

We still use the WRG 1685-1845 rules set published in 1979. The only thing that have changed are the colour of dice.

Cheers,
Robert
18thcenturysojourn.blogspot.com

WRG 6th is a great game if all the players know all the tables inside out and back to front. Add in rolling a D20 to see if the odd figure dies so that there is no record keeping and it is really really good fun.

The problem is that the reaction table and combat table are really rather complex and most people can't remember it all. Then add in the scraps of paper to work out complex combats and it all starts to pale.

For me FoG is a cleaned up and modernised 6th that most people can play like my mates and I used to be able to play 6th.

Tables that aren't easily memorised = time consuming.
The complexity isn't a mental challenge so much as a time drag.

I do sometimes miss 6th.

For me FoG is a cleaned up and modernised 6th that most people can play like my mates and I used to be able to play 6th.

This is coming from reading but not playing either set. FoG, to me, seems more complex and less straight forward. The language in FoG is cleaner than WRG 5 or 6. The actual mechanisms are a bit more fiddly and less straight forward than WRG.

FoGs big advantage is the lack of written orders. It tends to heap the complexity with the points of advantage and combat with multiple rolls for resolving and lots of dice.

WRG, OTOH, seems to have an open ended orders system and the army standing orders leave the game open to abuse. I think the standing orders may have hit the cutting room floor in 6th ed. I have to take a closer look. Few dice are rolled in WRG by comparison to FoG in any facet of the game.

EDIT One more thing. FoG has often been compared to WRG as the cleaner version. With the exception of size and scope, they really are both very different games. I would definitly say that Might of Arms is a close cousin to WRG.

Our group still plays 6th edition after 20 plus years. If you play regularly you start to remember most of the modifiers and can run through combat and morale checks pretty quickly.

I can't lay my hands on them right now, I believe it was fifth or sixth edition, but standing orders and mandatory pursuit were the seriously goofy things I remember. You could play the rules in totally unhistorical ways and really screw with your opponent. I obviously feel this is wrong. It's one thing to play the player, and another to hit your opponent over the head with the rules.
Additionally, the language they were written in is fairly straight ahead Barkerese. The problem was not that they weren't clear, but the group of guys playing would argue over what the multi-clause sentence meant! I remember long arguments about a single sentence. So, how clearly written it was became irrelevent – the group experience was WRG was obtuse and unclear.
But the mechanisms are not difficult, and seem to me more straightforward than FoG. I think they would produce great games between like-minded friends who did not use standing orders, and did not use mandatory reactions to win the game.
I spent many a happy hour playing the rules. That was a time when I could and did play all day.
I also agree with acarhj -- Might of Arms is an excellent follow-up set to WRG, and you can play a big game in an evening.
BO

For me FoG is a cleaned up and modernised 6th that most people can play like my mates and I used to be able to play 6th.

This is coming from reading but not playing either set. FoG, to me, seems more complex and less straight forward. The language in FoG is cleaner than WRG 5 or 6. The actual mechanisms are a bit more fiddly and less straight forward than WRG.

Not really for this forum but if you want to discuss this on the FoG fourm I would be happy to do so.

I really don't see what is more fiddly in FoG than in 6th and would be interested to hear where you think this is the case.

Played 5th and 6th and they were both good. 7th made me give up wargaming for a long time…..

I was a fan of WRG 4th and 5th edition. I stopped playing it after that.

I think after a few games you got used to the tables and it didn't take long to rattle through them.

I really don't see what is more fiddly in FoG than in 6th and would be interested to hear where you think this is the case.

Comparing reletive fiddliness…

FoG has for reactions a fairly straight forward system to govern morale and maneuver. Other than the complex moaneuver test or a failed morale roll you can move as you like within the rules.

WRG uses the reaction test for everything. There are a fair amount of modifiers to parse and about 8 cases where reaction tests are taken. This is probably the most complex part of WRG.

Advantage FoG.

Maneuver.
FoG tells you specifically what you can do and how to do it. Many words are expended to accomplish this. Maneuver includes charging, evading, turning, changing formation etc.

WRG tels you only what you can't do. It seems to be a bit more open ended WRT maneuver. Evade is allowed. There are still rules for charging but there are much fewer restrictions regarding maneuver. Reaction tests seem to be one of the big exceptions to maneuver. You do have to issue orders though in WRG 6th ed you have very limited orders governing what you do.

Advantage Tie

Combat
Be it missile or melee, combat is the most complex part of FoG. There are actually 3 kinds of combat. Missile fire can be performed separatly or as part of the impact phase. You need to figure out how many dice per stand you use to attack with. usually 2 and this can lead to 16 or more dice. Then you figure out the points of advantage. There are 14 for shooting, 15 for impact and 12 for melee. After that is figured out, you need to figure out if any stands were lost based on the number of hits scored. There is, of course, the cohesion test but that is part of morale.

WRG, you figure out your combat factor based on the weapon vs target type, Add modifiers and then add a random factor based on the difference between a negative and positive die. You finally look up the result on a table based on eligable figures in the fight. Comparitvly straight forward and easy. There is a reaction test based on results but again, that was already covered. There are 5 shooting modifiers and 10 melee modifiers.

Advantage WRG

As combat is the big part of any game system, I would definitly say that WRG 5th or 6th edition is less fiddly. It's fiddly bit, the reaction system, is still pretty straight forward. There is just a fair bit that needs to be parsed. In the case of both games, there are bits that will be dead easy and other bits that will be a bit of a chore to work through.

Hope that answered the question.

John

As combat is the big part of any game system, I would definitly say that WRG 5th or 6th edition is less fiddly. It's fiddly bit, the reaction system, is still pretty straight forward. There is just a fair bit that needs to be parsed. In the case of both games, there are bits that will be dead easy and other bits that will be a bit of a chore to work through.

Hope that answered the question.

Well it did but I have to say I dissagree.

I was at a FoG tournament today and while the majority of players have played a fair bit some were reasonably new to the game. What you almost never see are people looking at Quick Reference sheets running down lists of modifiers or looking at tables to find out what factor Pike get against Medium Cavalry then crossreferencing 16 at factor 7 to get a number of deaths then writing it down on a piece of paper and doing some admitedly basic maths.

For me FoG is way less fiddly in terms of combat than WRG. For you it is clearly the other way round.

BTW, the default number of dice in FoG is effectively 2 per frontage so for any unit to roll 16 would be highly exceptional. * dice is a lot and all you need to know is do you know is who has the advantage which after a game or three is something that almost everyone can remember.

Hi James,

I think the "I don't need to look at the QRS" phenomina is not limited to FoG. Once anyone gets a bunch of games under the belt,they often will stop looking at the QRS often. I would think that it would take much longer to learn the WRG reaction modifiers simply because there are so many. You will always refer to the casualty chart to see what you did. Conversly, you would and should learn the comples maneuver charts at leats for the units of your army. That's only natural. The combats would likely follow on.

From my perspective, WRG is just plainly more straight forard…fewer dice rolls, fewer dice, linear way of figuring out combat. I think we shall agree to disagree on this one I suspect.

Happy to agree to differ. As we are not going to agree and this is the WRG forum I will go quietly ;)

Hi, after some test-gaming WRG 6th I would point out as "complicated" the transfer of missle casualities to the close combat phase, the mathematics involved in calculation the outcome (it is not possible to alwasy do it without writing it down), for (at least the beginner?) the possibility to change your front and overlap your enemy figure by figure (total chaos until you relize that after conmbat a unit simply "reforms"), the aforementioned reaction test over and over again, and mybe things like faster movment sideways by changing frontage than normal move allowance (so I have heard) etc. In my opinion the order-thing is not overly complicated, because in 6th these are abstract orders (sector, speed, agreesion), not specific ones.

I loved 5th and 6th edition and went to home grown rules to avoid 7th edition

I did start with 5th but 6th came along soon after. The orders were a lot tighter in 6th and preferred that.

I have recently acquired a set of rules called Imperium that were produced by a club somtime in the 80 or 90s (I don't have it with me) and are very similar to 6th, without some of the complexity. But have not read it thorughly yet. I also think that "The Die is Cast" are rules similar to 6th (again, don't have them with me and haven't read them for a few years) and may be a decent alternative.

Lastly, I have always wanted to play 6th using the Slingshot rules for larger figure ratios (to play bigger battles).

I used to use WRG 6TH but now play DBM. T he reason being less factors which were always a bind. I do miss the orders though. Does anyone remeber 'Simple Ancient Rules' by Gush? Or 'Hoplite Warfare' by Adams & Clarke? A narrow set of rules for between 650-330 BC. I did like the dicing for forces bit in the army lists.

Yes, I liked Hoplite Warfare and its expansion set, Hellenistic Warfare. Lots of good ideas in those. WRG rules were always the favourites, though – still DBM for me too.

When I first discovered WRG back in the late 1980's I was very impressed. After playing them for a few years I was highly put off by the rules lawyering that accompanied the qame as each player tried to interpret the rules in such a way that would give his army the greatest benefit.

Some of my favourite wargame moments were with WRG6. The book keeping, the long reaction tests would keep me away as a regular player now though they did add alot of fun too. The triple armed Romans and halberds that kept on thrusting were a bit of a fiddle though! :o)

The comments about memorizing the combat tables makes me wonder why some think that is desirable. Most of the games I've played had at least one table that was too complex to memorize. Most of those that didn't were so abstract that it wasn't obvious what the table actually represented.

The reaction tests generally went very quickly after the first in each turn. You would get a pretty good idea of the modifiers that were in effect for a portion of the table and then just look at the dice total. I would say that after playing a few games of 5th or 6th Edition rules we probably only did the full check when an extreme dice total came up or if for some reason the check was done in an area of the map a long way from the rest. Remember that checks were run from right to left so you'd often see the minor differences as you went across.

I never thought someone that needed to write a single sentence with 14 semicolons was writing "clear" English. But that could be because I'd become accustomed to the SPI rule writing where the outline laid out subordination pretty clearly and almost everything related to a single topic was in a single rule section.

I never thought someone that needed to write a single sentence with 14 semicolons was writing "clear" English. But that could be because I'd become accustomed to the SPI rule writing where the outline laid out subordination pretty clearly and almost everything related to a single topic was in a single rule section.

I think that style originally was menat to save space and wrap up as many potential loopholes as posible within a single rule. If people could have just agreed to be sensible then a lot of the problems with the text wouldn't have arisen.

I found my first encounter with SPI's rule style (the "in this situation apply Rule 1.3.4.7 clause (ii)……) quite off putting at first, but one gets used to it.