"So what were the good things about original WRG ancients?" Topic

With WRG 1st edition online, I have been glancing at it and thinking about the really fun games I had with 3rd edition.

Whatever they may have become, or how attitudes to them may have changed, they were the "big game on campus" for a long time.

Personally, I think the reaction test was a very good idea:
link

It is a mechanism to take control away from the player, but unlike many mechanisms such as random activation or command rolls presents the players with a definite cause for the loss of control.

The problems with it (IMHO, YMMV) centered on the length of the list of reasons to test and (especially with later editions and knock-offs) the length of the modifier list. But those are problems that game be mitigated in a derivative design. I still like the basic mechanic.

They existed and provided me with my first community of miniature gamers.

The concept of all pre-gunpowder armies being able to face off against one another meant that I didn't need to find a compatible period specific and historically accurate opponent.

Otherwise, I found them inelegant and opaque even then.

I played 3rd Edition in my teens. 4th Edition had the first fantasy rules for large armies – at least that I knew about. That was great for a 16 year old who'd just found Michael Moorcock's books.

They were badly written and too fiddly, but so was almost everything wargaming in 1974.

Having the errata up front on page one was pretty funny, though.

Sorry, let me rephrase that: "Having the errata (see section VIII D) up front on page one (but not pages two or seven) was, pretty and/or funny, though, unless after 54 AD, or 67 in Egypt."

Later editions got completely out of hand on the extra details. I think Phil Barker never really understood that many of the people who drove buses through the loopholes in the rules were in many ways his enemies. They didn't want clearer rules, but rather, they sought more opportunities for gamesmanship. So, while the real solution was to say, "Play by the spirit of the rules and don't be such a jerk!", instead he tried to patch the holes by making the rules ever more complex. In the process he simply provided new loopholes, of course.

These rules were all-powerful in the 70's but hard work--recording "real" losses against figures-forgetting the many causes of disorganisation--long calculations just to cause 3 "real" losses to javelin throwing--long grinding melees when you realised there was no way your Britons on their wider bases could beat those Legionaries--and losing every game against the evil rules-exploiting "footslogger"….

Not too long ago several of us played a 4th Edition game and had a lot of fun. A previous thread on the game:

TMP link

You know what I loved about those rules? I never managed to finish a game using them, oh wait that wasnt a good thing was it.

I played mainly 4th and 5th edition. I liked the counting of casualties. The comparisons of weapons vs defensive armour always made it seem a very valid system.

I played 3rd-6th. Enjoyed them and miss the charts in this modern age of buckets of dice and IGO/UGO. What the heck does "elegant" mean in relation to rules? Much evoked but little explained.

Streamlining them, whilst not losing too much of their essential flavour, shouldn't take too much effort. For example, instead of recording the 'real' casualties, you could use the remainder once you've taken off figures equal to a multiple of 20 real casualties as the chance on a D20 of taking off another.

Example: in a melee, side A causes 168 casualties to side B. The side B player removes 8 figures (8 x 20 = 160). Normally, you'd have to record the 8 'extra' real casualties and carry them forward to the next round. Instead, you could just roll a D20 – if the number is 8 or less, remove another figure, if it's more than 8, don't remove another. It removes another bit of book-keeping and introduces a little more randomness into combat.

OR… You could just re-write the casualty table, rounding all the results up or down to whole figures.

"For example, instead of recording the 'real' casualties, you could use the remainder once you've taken off figures equal to a multiple of 20 real casualties as the chance on a D20 of taking off another."

That was frequently done as a local modification.

Detail is the suggestive, gauze-covered curve behind the beckoning finger of the bottom-up simulation. But more often than not, it is false detail: diseased and error-ridden, if not completely the product of imagination and wishful thinking.

(And so, the heavens opened, and there was DBM…)

A top-down simulation, modeling the gestalt of a unit's capabilities and performance, is more likely to be accurate, because it is possible to measure historical unit results more accurately than the battlefield performance of individual weapons and long-dead warriors. That's usually translated as "elegance" in gaming discussion: rules achieve a better simulation because they replicate the simpler results of victory and loss that are actually measurable.

(Unless you don't effectively communicate what the heck you're trying to do, such as eliminating ranged missile fire from some troop types…)

But the more elegant and representative top-down simulations are frequently rejected because they "don't feel right". There's something about gamer psychology that makes detail "feel" credible, although no gamer alive has ever stood in a real shieldwall or testudo against a hostile enemy to know what *should* feel real.

(Just like some people feel more like they're fighting a real battle by rolling buckets of dice…)

Gamers are weird. So are rule writers. That explains a great deal.

Allen

Eeesh. Nothing. WRG is why our rules got invented; so we could play a game with factors relating to our prejudices about what is "fun". Ponderous, inelegant, vague, inconsistent rules don't do it….

They did it for a lot of people for a long time. Did those people all vanish into a crack of doom when DBM descended?

Thank you AEC. A very elegant explantion which I understood. Yep, we are a weird and wonderful group.

The rules worked fine, but as gamers steadily bought larger armies with more units and figures it fell down.

When I gamed in the '70s we'd usually have a half dozen to a dozen units per side with several players each side. I well remember 'huge' games with mixed 20mm Scruby and 25mm Mini-Figs (and some plastics thrown in) that had units as small as 8-12 figures and only a dozen or so units on a side with 2-4 players a side. Have seen this happen repeatedly over the years as gamers indulge in their addictions (smile).

We were younger, had more time and less money to spend on figures. Now days we're much older, have less time and lots more money to spend on figures we'll send off to have painted by someone else (smile).

Keep your unit and army sizes to a certain size and the rules work well.

Dan

Per DBM.

I never understood how a design that requires players to memorise a nearly 20x20 matrix of combat interactions can be considered elegant in any way. That's not including the grading system.

WRG seemed so good at the time….

But I doubt any commercial rule sets would rehash the same ideas again today.

I liked the air of seriousness that my first games of WRG 6th edition had – and 7th seemed a step forward. But – still gave me some blinding headaches and usually victory depended on some rules quirk or knowing what beat what in a scissors paper stone way.

Then there was the Seleucid factor…

Skarper, In Supreme Warlord: Bloodlust tactical rules, we did return to the WRG 4th-5th concepts of weapon class vs armour class. As a result we had sorta of a casualty counting system.

The chart called for whole and half casting casualty results with simulataneous attacks by both sides. For have casualties there was a simple odd-even dice roll to determine if that half casualty casting was lost or not.

The Warriors rules set is a revised version of WRG 7th. So these are examples of a few early WRG concepts have resurfaced.

(And so, the heavens opened, and there was DBM…)

?

I'm convinced that nobody has actually played a DBM game as actually written. But the rules are so tangled up with exceptions and modifiers buried throughout that nobody has ever actually noticed.

Per DBM.

I never understood how a design that requires players to memorise a nearly 20x20 matrix of combat interactions can be considered elegant in any way. That's not including the grading system

Same here.

DBM/DBMM is structured perfectly for execution by a computer. In some ways it's actually written as computer code with loops, cross references, multiple/parallel table look-ups, etc.

But we're not computers.

MB