The Proof is in the…

… reading. Those few of you who have taken up following me on Facebook will be aware that the final proofs for the Solo Wargaming book have arrived and, by the time you read this, should have been read and returned. I am not entirely sure I am the best person to do this, but needs must. I think that I am far too close to the text to discover any great errors or mistakes – so far I have run across 4 things or so that could or should be amended. As a novie book writer, I have no idea whether this is good or not.

Anyway, I teased on Facebook with the start of the table of contents. If you want to see it, you’ll just have to use the link above and go and have a look at at what is in Chapter 1 and the start of Chapter 2. So here I will show something else, which does not appear to have anything wrong with it.

This is, obviously, a section of the list of references. A long time ago, when I wrote the Polemos: SPQR rules, Mr Berry remarked that he had never seen wargaming rules with references and footnotes before. That was, probably, true, and it is broadly true of wargaming books in general. As someone of a vaguely academic bend, I do referencing and footnoting and so on. Publishers, on the whole, do not much like footnotes, as they use up a fair bit of real estate on the page, and they prefer endnotes. However, Pen and Sword have not complained, and so the text has footnotes, to tell you where I get the information and ideas from. As someone who worked on the edge of academia until fairly recently, I live in fear of being accused of plagiarism. So, as much as I can, I have documented where the stuff comes from.

The above image also shows the rather alarming variety of what I have read, from something to do with Aztecs to Macbeth, science fiction to the history of Israel, and all sorts of points in between. I even managed to cover a bit of World War Two and Napoleonics, which I do not, on the whole, wargame very much. On the other hand, as the regular reader of the blog will be able to establish, I do read quite a lot. Mind you, not everything I read is documented here, which is probably just as well for the sanity of the said reader.

It is, as I hinted above, a rather strange experience, proof reading the final text. I submitted the manuscript to the editor about a year ago, so far as I recall, having already, of course, proof read it once. Then I got the copy editor’s comments back, which I suppose counts as a third proof read. Then I got the first proofs back, which was a third proof read. I believe that the publishers sent it to an independent proof reader as well, which would be the fourth. And now I am doing it again, so the fifth proof read. I am willing to lay money on there still being some errors, typographical, logical, or grammatical left.

As I said, I am maybe not the right person to proof read at this stage, although I am the inevitable proof reader. I am, as the last paragraph suggested, very close to this text, even though I have not seen it for a few months (quite deliberately). Nevertheless, as I was reading it this time I found I knew what came next, and what went before, and all the points in between. I even knew what I was trying to say, even though, on occasion, I would not put it like I did last year. Things move on: a book is a snapshot of a set of ideas at the time; they are printed on paper not written in stone and can, and do evolve.

As an example, when I was a paid employee, we got a paper back from the journal after it had been refereed. The referee’s comments were positive, except that they had a question: ‘You write this here, and yet you wrote the exact opposite in a previous paper. Could you explain what has changed?’ Um, no, not really. Things move on.

So it is with the book. My ideas, some of which have been blogged here, change. I have been engaged with skirmish level wargames, and with the Italian Wars I have read a bit more about warfare and a bit more about wargaming. My ideas have evolved. The book is not my definitive and everlasting last thoughts on the subject.

That said, I still like it as a text. I hope it will be useful to wargamers generally and to solo wargamers, be they full-time solo or part-time. There are a lot of ideas in it, I think, some of which, after my re-reading of the text, I might try to develop myself. One of the challenges of how I chose to write was to not be didactic, and not to supply any complete rules for anything. The idea was to challenge the creativity of the solo wargamer. It seems quite likely that I have ended up challenging myself.

So, what now? The Text will, presumably, go for printing and will then launch itself on the world. This, of all of the processes, is my least-liked bit of publishing. I really do not like looking at the final product, at least initially. When I was publishing academic papers I had to get someone else to open the packages – this was in the days, of course, when you received a bunch of printed pages as the paper. It is perhaps a psychological oddity, but there it is.

I hope that some people will read the book. No doubt some will not like it very much. Some might find it too obvious, or boring, or it might just not cover their own favoured periods in their own favoured way. That is life, and that is publishing. I’ll try not to take the criticisms personally, and hope that many more people will find something useful or encouraging in it. I suppose, on that note, I’ll wind up by showing you the final paragraph of the whole thing.

Sienese Disaster

It was all going so nicely. I decided to, in the Estimable Mrs P’s words ‘have a battle’. It took a while to organise because I decided to revisit the Italian Wars campaign and see how Siena was getting on at taking over central Italy. The answer was ‘rather well’. I started with a few moves where not much happened except that I captured, took over, or negotiated suzerainty with a number of cities.

It was all trundling along rather nicely, and my personal rating was increasing steadily. There were a few hiccoughs, such as a rebellion in Siens itself, with external aid, but the rebels submitted readily enough when I appeared with my army outside the walls. No problems, I thought, this will land up with me being practically canonized in Siena.

Well, the system is not set up to give the solo wargamer an easy ride, of course. The next random event was an external enemy appearing on the scene, and the dice roll indicated that they were the French. I was not too worried by this, as the French are a small army (12 bases) and I was at full strength. All that is needed is to be aware of their Swiss pike, who are very destructive, and to meet their gendarmes with gendarmes, which I could do.

Then I rolled for allies for the French. A heart was drawn, and then a 3 rolled on the dice. Ouch. Three allies. These turned out to be three bases each of crossbow skirmishers, crossbows and, cripplingly, gendarmes. Who on earth would loan the French that many gendarmes?

Anyway, now I had a problem, and I pondered long as to what to do about it. I could stand on the defensive (obviously) or I could call in allies. The problem is, even calling on allies might not guarantee a win, and I would not be able to call on them again for 3 years anyway. I had a fair potential for allies, of course, having taken over eight cities, but something suggested that I shouldn’t.

The terrain rolling might have suggested that this was reasonable, as I was partially defending a stream. That seemed to give good scope for being able to ignore or avoid some of the French hordes. The other side of the table was a bit cramped by enclosures, and hopefully, the French cavalry advantage would be negated, especially as I had an advantage in mounted crossbows.

A few moves in and you can see the situation developing. My mounted crossbows are in the middle of the shot, skirmishing, while the French left gendarmes have crossed the stream and are in disorder (brown markers). On the far side, you can see the French right making progress. On reflection, I think this was a mistake on my part. The French gendarmes were probably unnecessary over there, at least in such strength, and could usefully have been employed on the left, infiltrating on the far left side (nearest the camera) behind the fields and then swinging onto my right flank. As it was, four French bases were tied up by two of mine at the stream.

Moving on, the next picture shows the critical point, in my view, of the battle.

The French infantry are crossing the stream, covered by their skirmishing crossbows. This has worked well for them, although you can see that the skirmishers have mainly been disposed of or dispensed with. On the far side, the stand-off between the French gendarmes (4 bases) and my gendarmes (2 bases) is continuing. The French simply cannot afford to risk crossing the stream with the accompanying disorder and being exposed to a charge as they struggle up the bank.

The action, such as it is, is on the near flank. As predicted the terrain has caused the French cavalry to reduce their width, and my mounted crossbowmen will, this move, recoil theirs, exposing the gendarmes. After a bit of hesitation, I charged them with my right flank cavalry. It was, I thought, a gamble, but worthwhile. I could crack open their left and I might get their main general (the French, learning from the defeat of a large Spanish army, had a sub-general with the infantry).

In theory, that could have worked. My troops gamely charged home. But then the dice deserted them. While one enemy base was recoiled, the other actually recoiled my gendarmes, followed up and put them to rout. At the end of the turn I rolled for my army morale – only one base down. Then I rolled a 6:1 on the morale dice and my brave troops fell back a move. Except the gendarmes on the left who were in combat, and whom the dastardly French managed to gang up upon and rout the next turn.

That was not quite it. I threw my mounted crossbows out on my right to delay the gendarmes and the infantry started to get stuck in, my sword and buckler men magnificently holding the Swiss pike on my centre left. However, the dastardly French gendarmes, who, recall, had not charged so were still in hand and accompanied by the army commander, simply ignored my skirmishers and turned in on my centre right foot, charging downhill onto their flank. Naturally, this was successful and my other sword and buckler men, a base of shot, and a base of crossbowmen, were routed.

The charge of the French gendarmes was halted by the rough ground in my centre, but the French centre left, with the sub-general, was about to turn to take my centre left in the flank. As it was, my army decided it had had enough and withdrew.

*

There is a certain fascination, not to mention a thrill, in designing a system that can defeat you. As it is all is not lost for Siena. Granted, I am 5 bases down in the army and that will take 5 years to make good, but I might manage on allies. The French, however, might go after some more of my cities. On the other hand, my personal rating, while having taken quite a knock, is still fairly high.

On the other hand, I might surrender and spend the rest of my days drinking Bordeaux at the French court.

Paris, 1635

No sooner said than sorted. That is, of course, not quite correct. The sharp-eyed and really bored among you will note differences between the setup here and the one suggested the other week. However, that is simply because the assembly was demolished and then rebuilt, and I did not make a map nor look at any of the pictures for the scenario when rebuilding. So the scenario is as below.

The idea of the scenario is that my player character, a man of good wit and very little else, has to proceed from the near edge of the table, where you can see him with his walking stick, to the far edge to meet a certain M. White, an English secret agent. I am to be his translator, having facility with English and Latin.

The negotiations between the English and French governments are in a delicate state. The French have shut off the Spanish Road from Italy to the Low Countries, and the Spanish would like reinforcements to still get to their possessions in what is now Belgium. The obvious route is along the English Channel, but of course, that has to be by the permission of the English Government and Royal Navy. The RN, of course, has been massively expanded using the controversial Ship Money under Charles.

There are differing views of the potential treaty, of course. There are pro- and anti-treaty factions in both England and France, the Dutch probably have a view as well, as do the Spanish. The set up above has a number of civilians on the street. These are, in fact, markers for random encounters, ranging from street entertainers and traders to agents of the various government factions. My aim is to get along the street without being intercepted, hurt, and, preferably, drawing my sword.

And so I proceeded. The first encounter, in front of the shops on the left, was with a Spanish secret agent. He was quite aggressive, blocking my progress towards the marketplace. Fortunately, the next encounter, whom I managed to trigger while trying to avoid my Spanish interlocutor, was a patrol of the City Watch.

They took a rather dim view of a gentleman citizen being hassled on the street, and moved in, whereupon the Spaniard legged it up an alley, to reappear later in the marketplace.

Fortunately for me, the watch decided to hang around, because my next encounter, just behind the wagon towards the top of the picture, was with a bunch of drunk students. These proved very difficult to get away from; I had to charm my way past them and the character’s charm is rather low. The drunk’s charm was high, although their wit and dexterity were lowered significantly. This caused me a problem as, as I was trying to sidle past them, the leader of the students tripped over his own feet and landed at mine. His colleagues, somewhat muddledly, thought I had struck him and attempted to pursue me.

The watch, too, became interested and I hurried on towards the corner where I encountered a Cardinal’s Guard loitering. As I was employed by the Cardinal, I hoped that this would provide some protection, but he was a bit slow on the uptake. In the picture, you can see the Spanish agent has just got ahead of me in the marketplace, as well.

Further up the road to the left, the next encounter has been unmasked, which turned out to be a sober student. Hearing the commotion on the street with his colleagues, he assumed that I had assaulted them and started to pursue me. He kept failing his wit rolls (he had a wit of 7; I don’t know how universities recruit such people now, it must be for their fees).

The oncoming student had the effect of persuading me to double back past the Cardinal’s Guard and drunken students towards the shop on the right, where the lurking encounter turned out to be a couple of Huguenot officers. Fortunately, these were pro-treaty, and one of them had a wit of 18. He failed to spot what was going on, but his colleague did and moved to cover me from the advancing Spaniard.

In the ensuing fracas, the Spaniard hit me below the belt (the cad!) and I lost an action, but I managed to stagger out of the fray. One of the drunken students took exception to the assault on a Frenchman and hit the Spaniard back, which stunned him too. In the ensuing chaos, I managed to slip away while the Spanish secret agent was surrounded by students, the City Watch, the Cardinal’s Guard, and a Huguenot. He drew his sword, but only to surrender it to the sergeant of the City Watch.

The next two encounters, both triggered at the same time, were with a bunch of street entertainers and some traders, so, as the Watch arrested the Spanish secret agent, I strolled (or limped) up the road to the tavern and saluted: ‘M. White, I presume.’

*

Well, that was fun. It turned what would have been a ‘You meet at the local tavern’ into an amusing game, and also one which I learned quite a lot from. One was the usefulness of having a grid on which you can quickly roll up non-player characters. In Flashing Blades most things are rolled from the main attributes of the character, so you can roll someone up, look at their strength attribute, for example, and work out their chance to land a punch on you. Something for next time.

Another thing learned was the importance of context. This scenario is in the Latin Quarter of Paris, near the university. Hence the chances of students, both drunk and sober. I was lucky that I only rolled up one encounter of someone against the treaty, though. The Spanish agent caused enough trouble, A bunch of English or French anti-treaty agents would have caused a whole lot more.

The planning for the scenario was simple. The situation was written up, my message from the Cardinal typed in a peculiar script, and a table of random encounters, (20 in number – FB uses 1d20 rolls most of the time) written, and off I went. I wonder what happens next...

Humanity

 Humanity

As those of you who have bothered reading my Facebook page will know, recently I have been reading

Glover, J., Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (London: Pimlico, 2001)

The first thing I have to say about it is that is was not exactly what I was expecting. It is not a history of, say, philosophical or theological ethical thinking in the Twentieth Century, but a history of, more or less, how things have gone badly wrong, and occasionally, have not.

In the book, for example, you get a section on ‘Tribalism’ which can be related to a race or a nation. As Glover observes, all of these things are, in fact, human constructs. Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities gets a name check here. We are taken on a rather scary ride through various conflicts, such as Rwanda and the massacre in 1994, and the chaos in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. In this case, Glover bemoans the lack of a suitable internationally accredited force that could impose order and stop the naked murder and ethnic cleansing that was underway. As a book written over 20 years ago, it is scarily up to date.

There are other items perhaps of more interest to the wargamer. Glover argues cogently that the First World War ensured that the military was no longer so sure it should not target civilians. The Allied blockade of Germany did so target and, he notes gloomily, was continued beyond the Armistice. Somewhere around 750,000 civilians died from starvation. By the time the Second World War came around, the bombing was supposed to be precision-targeted at military installations. A bit of practice indicated that this was, with the technology of the day, impossible. As civilians had already been targeted in the blockade, it was a shorter step to area bombing. Again, Glover notes that this continued even after the Allies had air superiority and could have reverted to precision bombing.

Moving further along the line, Glover discusses the development of the atomic bomb, and how it started with trying to deter Hitler’s Germany from doing the same. In fact, the German A-bomb effort was destroyed at the cost of 28 civilian lives, by partisans targetting a ferry. But the project had its own momentum. The targeting of Japanese cities and civilians by area bombing was already established. It was only a short step to using the atomic bomb.

A further issue with the A-bomb specifically is that everyone tried to believe that the decision to use it was someone else’s. The scientists were only developing a bomb. Their job was to make sure it would work if it were used. The use was the responsibility of the politicians and military. The military, of course, followed orders from the politicians. The politician with ultimate responsibility was Truman, and he created an advisory committee to recommend the course of action. The advisory committee spent its time trying to guess what Truman and Churchill wanted to do. Eventually, the decision was made to use the bomb, of course.

Another aspect is what Glover calls the trap. Exemplified by the soldiers in the First World War trenches who, if they went over the top, got shot and, if they refused, also got shot. They were, in short, trapped. Glover outlines a number of instances of informal agreement across the lines, not just the Christmas Truce of 1914. Needless to say, High Command on both sides tried to put a stop to this.

Glover’s discussion of the outbreak of the First World War and its contrast with the Cuban Missile Crisis is instructive. In July 1914 no one could find a way out of warfare. The mobilization timetables were fixed and everyone, as it were, got on the train. There were options for limiting the war. For example, Germany could have gone to war with Russia and not France, and not invaded Belgium. However the military was out of control and refused to change their mobilization plans. Carnage ensued.

With Cuba, Kennedy was firstly aware of the destructive potential of nuclear war and also aware of the risks of sliding into it in the same way as in 1914. Krushchev also wished to avoid war, having seen the effects of the Second World War. Both managed to keep their hawks under control and find an acceptable solution. It can be done, but we need wise and well-informed politicians to do so.

Glover then trots through the Terror of Stalin, Mao’s China with the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, and Pol Pot’s Cambodia. This is all to do with Belief – in the great leader, in the creation of a better society, and so on. This is well worth reading, if only as a salutary to today’s politicians who seem to be trying to make a cult out of themselves, and to the people who seem to uncritically follow their every word and pronouncement. The views of the British Communist Party members about what they could do over the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 are instructive and alarming.

Finally, we pitch up with Nazi Germany. While Hitler was not the greatest mass murderer of the Twentieth Century, Glover regards the regime as the worst, bringing together both tribalism, in the sense of nationalism and Lebensraum, and Belief, in the messianic claims of Hitler and his acolytes. Thus through multiple little compromises, the distortion of the philosophies of both Nietzsche and Kant, and a large dose of anti-Semitism in the world at the time, the Holocaust was born. Glover points out that railway bureaucrats were quite happy to charge the Reich for return tickets for the guards on trains going to concentration camps, but only singles for the guarded. Children went free. The bureaucrats did not regard themselves as murderers.

No one gets off lightly. Not, obviously, the Germans who, at best, acquiesced to what was going on. Not the Western politicians who decided that they had taken enough humanitarian refugees. A few, such as French civilians who hid Jews, the Italian army who decided that aiding the deportation of Jews was beneath their honour, the Danes who enabled the escape of most Danish Jews to Sweden, and a few others who spoke up against various outrages get positive mentions. But they are not many.

As for wargaming content, well, there is not much, of course, but perhaps sufficient, when coupled with a previous post on the Scope of Wargame Ethics, to give us pause for thought, at least at a strategic level. If the military does not believe in area bombing of targets, they will want armaments that permit precision bombing, and that will affect the equipment they, and wargamers, can deploy. Similarly, wargamers can decide if they attempt to plaster the city which contains a ball bearing factory, or attempt to hit the factory itself, accepting appalling casualties in aircrew to achieve it. In this sense, at least, ethics does have an impact on wargaming.