The Beautiful Game

Consider the following scenario:

You go to a wargame show. The first game you see if a veritable feast for the eyes. The miniatures are wonderfully based and painted. The terrain looks like a slice of the countryside has been lifted up, reduced in scale, and plonked artistically in the room. The wargamers responsible have managed to remember to keep all beer glasses, coke cans, rule books and other paraphernalia off the table. You admire in awe the skill of those who have put the game together.

Having pulled yourself away from the first game, you wander, eventually, into the competition area. Here, a series of wargames are underway. However, in contrast with the first game, there is nothing here to keep you admiring them. The miniatures are very nicely painted, it is true, but the terrain is, to put it politely, rather less good to the demonstration game. Woods are irregular bits of felt, roads and rivers are chalk marks or coloured string. The aesthetic impact is rather less than the first game.

I am not now going to launch forth about how competition games should up their standards and be able to hold their heads up high before the world with wonderful terrain. That, after all, is not the nature of competition games. The terrain is only decided when the game is about to start, and so it is a bit difficult to have already sculpted the relevant pieces.  In a competition game, the game is the thing.

I am also fairly sure that the game we go away with the memory of, that we wish to contemplate and, if we can, emulate, is the initial demonstration game. While we realise how much time, energy and effort goes into that sort of game, it is what we imagine our games should aspire to. That, we might consider, is the beautiful wargame.

I could, at this point, give lengthy descriptions of these sorts of games, but as I am sure much of the readership of this blog (such as it is) will realise by now, I do not really do pretty pictures. Many other blogs do, however, and so I suggest you check them out (say, God’s Own Scale or The Awfully Big Towton Project) to see what I mean.

The point is this, however. Why does one wargame stick in the mind, while the others do not?

Here, we land up in the field of aesthetics. By what means do we judge between one object and another, and declare one to be more beautiful than the other? Why is it that we do judge, that we can even think that making these judgements is a reasonable and rational thing to do?

One answer is that “it is all relative”. One wargame is as good as another. The competition games are just as valid as an expression of wargame-ness as the beautiful demonstration game. To claim otherwise is simply to express a personal view, that of an observer. The true values of any wargame is that given to it by the participants.

That is all very well, and certainly scores quite high on the post-modern aesthetics table. On the other hand, the post-modern aesthetic scale is also responsible for (to quote Prince Charles) some monstrous carbuncles, including, in my view, the “Shard” in London. But I digress.

The thing is that the claim ‘it is all relative’ is clearly not the case. Firstly, the claim itself is contradictory. To argue that it is all relative is to either reduce the statement itself to relativity or to give it a privilege that it claims does not exist.  This is, to put it in philosophical terms, self-stultifying.

The second thing about the claim that our view of the different varieties of wargame and their aesthetics is all relative is that, in our own experience (or mine, anyway; I suspect it is a wider view than just me, however) it simply is not true.

In terms of wargaming we do, I think, make aesthetic judgements all the time. I see it on the wargame related internet frequently, where wargamers enthuse over the latest line of wonderful figures from their favourite manufacturer. These are aesthetic judgement – the reviews in magazines are packed with them.

You could argue that the view of a figure is, in fact, based on something other than a purely aesthetic judgement. You could say that it is based on how well the designer has captured the human body, on the historical accuracy of the clothing of the figure, on the pose, and so on. All this would be true, to an extent, but the basic question we have is “does it look right?”

Here, I suspect, we start to get to the crux of the matter. The demonstration game, in some way, looks right. It has some undefinable rightness about it which the competition games do not have (and, indeed, cannot have and should not be expected to have).

The question now arises ‘what is this “rightness”?’

Here, I think, we are in some tricky areas. For example, we can look at a door frame and say Yes, that looks right. We can look at a building and say Yes, that looks right. In each case we need to consider what this rightness consists of. The door frame is appropriate to its use and its proportions please us. The building is, in some way, balanced, and again, the proportions please us.

How does this work with a wargame?

The truth is, I am not sure. But it is the case that we do draw these conclusions.

However, I think I do have to add that it is not about the match of reality to our game. One of the things that does please us is uniformity. We like our figures to be all of the same height, and all doing exactly the same thing on a given base or in a given unit.

I defy anyone to find an example of that in reality, but somehow it seems right to us.

Polemos SPQR Q&A Part 3: Army Lists and a Scenario

Being now in the business of increasing the size of my own PM: SPQR armies, I have been looking at my own army lists and spotting a few infelicities and typographical errors, so I thought I may as well record them here.

On the other hand, no-one has pointed them out yet, so have either ignored the lists or made their own up, or assumed we cannot count….

Anyway:

P57 Numidian Army list: For some reason the composition table and the random troop type table have got swapped around. I suppose the correction is obvious, but I thought I had better mention it.

P59 Dacian Army list: The total number of bases listed in the composition table is 19. The extra base should be a Dacian light horse.

P59 Dacian Army list: The Youth (skirmisher) bases are interchangeable with Archer bases. So you can have either 4 youth, or 4 archers, or two of each, of whatever, totalling 4 bases.

P60 Pontic Army list: The total number of bases listed is 24. This is because you can have either 4 bases of pike or 4 bases of imitation legionaries, but not both. Nor, in this case, can you mix and match.

As this seems a bit short for one of my normal posts (do I hear distant cheering?), I thought I would add another scenario below. No pretty maps, though, sorry, but some ideas for scenarios.

The original manuscript for PM: SPQR actually had loads (well, nine) scenarios picked up from my various reading, of which only two, Charonea 86 BC and Mons Graupius 83 AD made the final cut.

Below, then, is a scenario for Nicopolis, fought during 48 BC between the revived Pontic state and a fairly scratch force of Romans and hangers on. The small army sizes total 20 bases. The large actually attempt to represent the forces on the field to Polemos: SPQR scale. The medium sized armies are, of course, somewhere between the two. The formatting of the tables has, of course, gone bonkers,  because blogs do not seem to render either columns or HTML tables very well.

Nicopolis 48 BC

Mithradates’ Crimean kingdom was, with the blessing of the Romans, inherited by Pharnaces, the son of one of Mithradates’ concubines. During the civil war, Pharnaces resolved to attempt the recapture Pontus. He had a small army of Bosporan Greeks and some Scythians.

Initially sucessful, he met with Domitus Calvinus, one of Caesar’s generals with a scratch force. This consisted of XXXVI legion with two Galatian legions led by Deiotarus the Galatian tetrarch and another raw legion raised from Roman citizens of Pontus. Domitus sent to Cilicia and Cappadocia for auxiliaries and had about 200 cavalry. Numbers are largely unknown, but we can speculate about 4000 legionaries in legion XXXVI, 9000 in the two Galatian legions and 5000 in the raw Pontic legion. We do not know how many Cilician auxilliaries were raised, but could guess at about 4000. Possible armies are below:

                                       Small  Medium  Large

Legionaries                        4          6            8

Imitation legionaries           12         20          28

Tribal foot (Cilicians)          2          3            4

Skirmishers (Cilicians)         2          3            4

Cavalry                              1          2            2

Even less is known about Pharnaces’ forces. His cavalry greatly outnumbered Domitus’, and his frontage was three legions wide, as this matched Domitus’ deployment. Presumably they consisted of imitation legionaries and thureophoroi. Later, at Zela, Pharnaces deployed scythed chariots, so it may not be unreasonable to include a few here, although their employment usually caused some comment in accounts. The numbers are speculative, to say the least. Possible armies are below.

                                     Small Medium Large

Imitation legionaries        12         20        28

Thureophoroi                 4           6          8

Skirmishers                    2           3          4

Cavalry                          2           4          6

Scythian light horse         2           4          6

The Pontic army deployed in three or four lines, and dug trenches between the wings and centre, with the cavalry outside. Pharnaces was aware of the fact that Caesar was in trouble in Alexandria and had ordered Domitus to send reinforcement. Pharnaces therefore believed that he could afford to wait. Domitus, on the other hand, felt he could not disengage successfully unless he defeated Pharnaces. Domitus formed up with legion XXXVI on the right, the Pontic legion on the left and the Galatians in the centre on a narrow frontage. The fighting was fierce and Legion XXXVI broke the Pontic left and attacked the centre. The Galatian legions, however fled quickly and the Pontic legion was disordered by the trench and overwhelmed. This left the XXXVI legion isolated and surrounded. However, they drew off to high ground and Pharnaces did not further attack them as the battle was won. Domitus rallied the remains of his army and withdrew.

Pharnaces carried on conquering Pontus and living the life of an eastern despot. The next year, Caesar himself marched against him and utterly defeated Pharnaces at Zela. Pharnaces rallied a few and withdrew to the Bosporous. He was killed fighting against a revolt.

References

Webster, J., The Battle of Nicopolis 48 BC, Miniature Wargaming, October 1999, p 7-8.

Duggan, A., He Died Old: Mithradates Eupator, King of Pontus, London: NEL, 1976.

Caesar, J., The Alexandrian War, The Civil War, London, Penguin, 1967.

Games and Simulations

When is a game a game? When is a simulation a simulation?

That gnomic expression actually arises from some ‘professional’ reading I have been doing. I happened to stumble across some papers on ‘serious play’ and serious games’. In one of them the author was at pains to try to distinguish between simulations and games.

I suspect that, like me, you were probably unaware that there was a particular distinction between them. However, my author (Rushby, N.,(2012),  ‘Making Serious Games Better’, British Journal of Educational Technology, 43, 2, 179) declares that serious games are not simulations, although a serious game may include simulations.

Now, it is possible that you are as confused as I was by this, so I will try to unpack what is going on here.

A serious game is something which is designed to help people to learn. Empirical evidence suggests that people learn quite effectively using serious games, and they enjoy doing so. In this context, a serious game is something like the computer games that the US Army uses for training purposes.

For example, I seem to recall that, a while ago, there was some amusement in the press when the Australian Army bought a US Army training package, and the US vendors changed all the cattle in the package (I think it was for helicopter pilot training) into kangaroos. The veracity of the story is, in my mind, somewhat open to doubt, but you get the idea of the purpose of the game.

A simulation is something slightly different, at least in this context. For example, a flight simulator is reasonably familiar, at least in concept, for most of us. If you turn left the simulator turns left, and if you slow down too much you stall. The point about simulation is that represents a slice of reality, with known inputs and outputs, and this can be assessed for correctness.

The key words used here are validity and fidelity. Fidelity, at least, varies with the skill of the trainee. Someone start off in a flight simulation will need something that is more forgiving of mistakes than an expert there to learn how to deal with specific emergencies. Both, however, need a valid simulation, that is, one which does replicate some real world qualities. Furthermore, in this case, the learning needs to be transferrable, but which we mean that some aspects of the system need to be recognisable in the real worlds as well.

So, then, what is the difference between a serious game and a simulation?

A simulation has a well-defined set of inputs and outputs, closely related to the real world. A game is, I suggest, more open ended, and, in some senses more immersive than a simulation, and has a stronger narrative thread running through it.  

Therefore, the argument is, a game may well include a simulation, or even several simulations, but a simulation does not, of itself, include a game.

Fair enough, I hear you cry, but why is this interesting and what is it to do with wargaming?

Well, I think there are a number of issues, here which the distinction points up.

Firstly, the question is which camp does wargaming, as an exercise in pushing toy soldiers around a table, fall into?

I guess the answer to that is fairly straightforward. Wargaming is a game, in the sense defined above it could also, possibly fall into the serious game category. But wargames also include a simulation, in the sense of a model of combat and movement.

Now a model, as I’m sure I’ve bored you with before, is a stripped down and abstracted version of reality, often represented (even in wargames) by some mathematics, even if it is just adding and subtracting numbers. So a wargame, in this definition is some sort of mathematical model engine of reality, with known inputs and outputs (the simulation) plus something else.

The something else is, of course, that which makes a wargame a wargame, and it is, I think, to do with narrative. Even a simple ‘pick-up game’ has a narrative, even if it is an abbreviated one. The abbreviations comes in not having some sort of back story as to why the two forces are there opposing each other, but the main narrative of the battle is usually unaffected by this.

The second issue to come out of this is to question how educational a wargame might be. A serious game is there for people to learn stuff – about how to do things in terms of achieving overall goals, negotiations with other players and so on, while a simulation concentrates on the immediate inputs and outputs.

Therefore, a goal of educational wargaming might be to try to understand why some decisions were taken, or even forced on the opposing sides. A simulation of a battle would be more constrained; the suggestion is that simulations should, for a given (historical) input produce a given historical output, even if you can see, by working out the process from one to another, how it happened in real life.

Most wargames are not of that nature, however, but we do require some sort of historical veracity and validation to our games. That is, if we wargame Waterloo, we want a logic to why, on the table, Napoleon won, something which we can reflect upon and say “well, that was the critical point”.

This brings us to another issue about the relative failure of educational games to make an impact. A game is more than just doing stuff, it is part of a culture, where wargames do meet, face to face or virtually, to share experiences, tips, ideas and concepts. This blog is an example of such. This relates back to the immersiveness of the game, and how the cultural context of the game and gamers impacts on their playing.

That last point is a big subject, and I have mumbled about it in the past (and I probably will again in the future). In the mean time, perhaps we should be a bit more careful with our language, and say that we game rather than simulate, because I suspect we can agree that the narrative is important to us as wargamers.

Generals and Communication

Some thought has been niggling away at the edge of my consciousness for a while, now, and I have finally managed to bring it out into the open and take a look. It was originally caused by a paper of generalship I was reading, and then tucked up as an interesting thought, but it has been re-awakened by a thread on one of the mailing lists I keep an eye on (but I forget which).

The issue is this: I have covered how generals can plan, react to events in the middle of a battle and so on. But what is much more difficult to ‘model’, in I think any sense, is the fact that general can, and did make mistakes.

I dare say that we can all think of mistakes that were made by commanders. Off the top of my head, Prince Rupert is often blamed for losing control of his cavalry at both Edgehill and Naseby rather than exploiting the fact that the Parliamentary infantry had a flank exposed. At Raphia, Antiochus attempted to exploit the victory of his right flank, while Ptolemy launched a counter attack with his centre. Antiochus, on incomplete evidence, assumed that he had won, and turned out to have lost the battle.

I dare say that these sorts of accounts could be multiplied throughout history, and these are simply the tactical or grad tactical errors. Strategic mistakes are also manifold. As many of you probably know, Monty’s third law of warfare is ‘Don’t start a land war in Asia’. Both Napoleon and Hitler made this mistake, and paid for it in spades. As a matter of fact, it could be argued that Alexander of Macedon made a similar sort of error when he invaded India.

As a wargaming issue, I am sure that you can see the problem. Wargamers, standing over the table watching all the action going on, are unlikely to make these sorts of errors. The information presented to them is much more complete than any real commander and his staff could possibly have hoped for.

As mentioned in a previous post, there are some things that you can do to limit the damage. Scenarios can be disguised, so that Edgehill looks like an American Civil War battle, or Gettysburg is presented as a Franco-Prussian war clash. All this is well and good, and at least might throw the players initially as they try to match the set up with the real battle. But once the action starts, the knowledge that the players have of the status of the units and the state of the battle is far more complete than any real commander.

It is, I think, very hard to find any rule sets that tackle this as a problem. I suppose DBM, with its irregular commanders who could lose control of themselves and their troops made a stab, at least, in the direction of making sure that troops did things that generals did not expect or even, particularly, like or want.

In a similar way, older rules had some sort of ability for certain troops to run out of control. For example, the old WRG Renaissance rules by George Gush classed (some) Royalist cavalry as ‘A’ class morale, which had to check morale when, for example, they saw enemy troops for the first time. All well and good, perhaps, except that it does not really account for the times when the Royal horse did behave as their commanders wished, or, for that matter, when the Royal horse did not just charge off on a whim (which in fact was most of the time).

The normal response to this sort of problem is for wargamers to start muttering the word ‘umpire’. However, in this case, I am not at all sure that an umpire, except under special conditions where the players are given highly restricted views of the table, really solve the problem. Most wargamers are sufficiently experienced in the way of wargame to know, roughly, how things are proceeding and how they might turn out.

Only if the commanders are in a separate room, fed incomplete information from forward commanders and subject to intermittent cannon fire can we really start to ‘simulate’ the sorts of conditions where commanders make real time mistakes.

Of course, we could argue that as normal humans, we make mistakes all the time, and that would be true. Even Grand Masters make errors in chess, but I suspect that, in the cosy world of a friendly wargame, general mistakes are less common than they would be in the real world.

One way of simulating mistakes might be via a campaign game, where it is relatively easy (using a matchbox system, or an electronic equivalent thereof) to create some uncertainty in the minds of commanders, and thus create the conditions where errors due to lack of information might occur.

This is fine so far as strategic moves may go, but does not really create the battlefield conditions where tactical mistakes might happen.

I suppose the most sophisticated attempt to deal with this sort of issue is the Piquet series of games (which I have seen but not played). Here, you can see what combats are occurring but not how it is going, and thus, at least, some of the information is concealed from the player. A similar situation can arise in a role playing game where the players can see that they are inflicting damage on the enemy, but not how much damage they can take.

The problem with both of these, as compared with a conventional wargame, is that both have a fairly high threshold for preparation. In a role playing game, the game master has to set up and control the non-playing characters, and asses the state of their morale (for want of a better word).  In Piquet the card deck has to be created, and a whole load of equipment is needed to run the game (at least in the demonstration games I have seen at shows).

Maybe, then, this is a problem that does not have a particularly good or elegant solution, but until it is tackled, we cannot really gain much insight into the problems of command.

Elegance and Complexity

One of the joys of having written a set of wargame rules is, of course, the opportunity for people to criticise them (I may be being a tiny bit sarcastic, here). Recently, the order mechanics of Polemos: SPQR were praised by someone, who then went on to say that the combat mechanics were far too complex because they had 20 factors which needed to be added up.

Now, there are several responses, more or less grumpy, which I could make to those sorts of comments, along the lines of ‘you might think this is complex, but look at those rules over there’, or possibly some insulting reference to the fact that adding and subtracting numbers is not actually complex per se, and I’m sure that given some thought I could come up with other, more or less crushing, responses.

On the other hand, I’m not sure that any of these sorts of responses would help and, after all, my critic did describe the order and movement rule as elegant (although, of course, someone else described them as a ponderous game mechanic – I guess you cannot please all the people all the time).

I have written before about the problems of complexity in battles, and I think it is generally agreed that a battle is a complex thing which cannot be handed by probabilistic mathematics, and least within any reasonable time frame. So I will focus on the other factor that is mentioned in this context, that of elegance.

Now, in my chequered past, I was a physicist and, as such, encountered, as regular readers of this blog are probably painfully aware of by now, mathematical models. The interesting thing about these things, in the context here, is that some models were described as elegant, and even as a struggling student with a reasonably low mathematical ability, I could see that some were, indeed, aesthetically pleasing.

The most obvious place where this occurs in modern physics is in the theories of quantum mechanics (QM). It is not a widely known fact that there are three basic approaches to QM. These are the Schrodinger equation, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and Dirac’s spinor.

I will not go into detail, but I will say this. Of the three, I used Schrodinger’s equation most, because it gave tractable answers that could be compared with observations (which I what I did as an active researcher). However, the most elegant of the theories was that of Dirac. I recall sitting in a tutorial while my tutor expounded Dirac’s theory and came up, inevitably with a 4 vector (a single column of items, with four entries). The top two ever electrons, and the question was ‘what are the bottom two?’.

The answer, of course, was “anti-electrons”, and that piece of work both predicted anti-matter and won Dirac a Nobel prize. But how did anyone know at the time it was right? Why would anyone go and look for anti-matter, which is a pretty counter-intuitive sort of thing?

The answer, of course, is in the elegance of the theory. Nothing is forced; anti-matter arises quite naturally in the mathematics. Dirac knew it was correct because it was an elegant theory.  

Now, of course, we have to let complexity have a bit of a play. In some senses, particle physics is easy, because the objects at its heart are simple. Bosons, electrons, leptons and so on are, at core, fairly simple, (so far as we know) unstructured objects. They are tractable by mathematics, conceptulisable (if not imaginable) by our minds, and, of course can be observed (or strictly speaking, their effects can be observed) in the world.

On the other hand, someone once said ‘Understanding atomic physics is child’s play compared with understanding child’s play’. Human behaviour, even in relatively benign environments, is not simple, and cannot be predicted by mathematics, no matter how elegant.

That being the case, how can a set of wargame rules ever be described as elegant? Not only are we dealing with humans on mass, under very stressful circumstances, but we cannot even start a mathematical model of the environment. There are too many factors to take into account.

Let me take an example, that of DBA. There are 17 basic troop types, with a factor against foot and one against mounted. There are 6 tactical factors. However, by my counting, there are 78 different combat outcomes. This is generally accepted to be a fairly elegant example of a set of wargame rules, but it has to be accepted that the complexity is hidden in the combat outcomes; as I recall, these are the bits that people find most confusing.

Secondly, let me have a look at PM: SPQR. There are 11 troop types, each with 4 factors, and 22 tactical factors (not all of which apply, of course). However, there are 5 outcomes to combat.

If you add on to this analysis the fact that PM: SPQR has provision for different grades of troops (so is more like DBM than DBA in this respect), then, I submit, that it is no more complex than DBA. The difference, of course, is where the complexity is hidden.

Now, I am not claiming that PM: SPQR is the simplest, most elegant system that is possible. I do think that some aspects could be tidies up, but I do claim that, by comparison with a widely used fast play rule set, it is no more complex. After all, the close combat factors are clearly set out in two tables, and a little experience means that you can glance at the table top situation and work out the factors very quickly. In DBA, I’ve never managed that, I always have to read the outcomes (it helps, I discovered, if you read them out loud).

So where are we left?

I think the answer is that a battle is inherently complex, and that complexity has to be represented somewhere. In SPQR it is in the initial factors, in DBA it is in the combat outcomes. There just does not seem to be an elegant solution to this, so, to return to my QM analogy, we will just have to stick with Schrodinger, as Dirac seems to be beyond our reach.

Return to Fuzigore: Ocram’s Tale

Some of you may recall, about a year ago, the start of an imaginative campaign called Fuzigore. At the end, I commented that the next step was to zoom in on one particular person and their experience, and to feed that into the overall game. Here, then, is Ocram’s’s account.

*

Ides of Hcram

Sirap

Dear Father,

We have arrived safely in Sirap, although not without incident. I have delivered the scroll to Oicn, and he seemed pleased to have received it. He took me to the market and helped me to get an excellent price for the wine – 35 denarii! The drum beats of war are increasing the price of all imports here, I think, but a fivefold return is more than I could have hoped for.

The biggest thing on the journey, though, was on the first day, towards evening. We had walked all day, leading the donkeys, thirteen merchants in all. We were all, I think, looking forward to the inn, washing the dust off and having a meal.

Suddenly, Mr Yrret, near the front, cried out in pain. Almost at once, Mr Kcab, behind me, screamed. Father, we were under attack. I looked round to see Mr Kcab on the ground, with a scoundrel or two running at him. As I looked, another stood up and shot a bow at our party, but it missed, and another javelin came in hitting Mr Nevele in the arm as he was trying to draw his javelin.

The scoundrel who had hit Mr Yrret shot his bow again, but missed. Then, at a cry all of the scoundrel charged at us. Mr Eno and Mr Eerht threw their javelins at the one in front but missed. Behind me, Mr Nevele tried to defend himself from one of the scoundrels, while Mr Evlewt  had to fight another one.

Father, I started running towards the scoundrels at the back, to rescue Mr Nevele. Mr Enie shot his bow at one of the scoundrels and hit him in the chest, and the scoundrel fell over. It was a great shot and I saw it with my own eyes, father!

As I turned, I saw Mr Evif loose as sling stone against the scoundrel at the front, and he too hit. See father, how the good merchants of Emor can defend their good name and that of their country! The scoundrel fell as the stone hit his leg and he lay there, moaning.

Mr Xis and I arrived where the other scoundrel was still fighting Mr Nevele. We both lashed out at the scoundrel, but neither of us hit him. I did so want to be a hero, father! Lots of us were now fighting at the back of the donkey train where poor Mr Kcab lay on the ground. There was lots of confusion, but I think Mr Xis hit one of the scoundrels in the leg, who then made to hop off. I was going to hit him again but Mr Xis said ‘Let him go, lad’ and I did, because the other two scoundrels decided to run off then as well, leaving us all panting, with weapons in our hands and looking at each other and wondering what had happened in those few moments.

We patched Mr Nevele up as best we could, and did our best for Mr Kcab, loading him on his own donkey. I do not think that a wounded man on a donkey is the best treatment, but it was all we could do, for evening was drawing on and we had to get him to the inn.

The innkeeper was extremely good, and he patched Mr Nevele up really well, but he struggled to help Mr Kcab, and we agreed to leave him there until we returned while the innkeeper brought him back to consciousness, he having fainted after being hit in the leg. Indeed, the arrow was still sticking out of it. I hope we will find him better when we return.

We sat in the bar afterwards and ate and drank, but none felt like carousing, and after a while I started to shiver and Mr Xis said I should retire and I wrapped myself in a blanket and slept.

The next morning we set off again, the innkeeper having assured us that the road to Sirap was clear. My Lord told you to ask me to keep my eyes and ears open. Aside from the scoundrels on the first day, this day we saw some cavalry men, and travelled with them for a while. I may say we were all pleased to see them after the attack the day before.

Anyway, the commander told us that they were going to a muster of the whole T-sae army which was called out for battle. He said that if any of us would join him, he would be pleased to have us along, but none would, and he laughed and took his leave of us.

The next day we met a merchant train he told us that the way ahead was clear. They too were going to the T-sea muster to sell at the market there. They said that they were expecting raiding parties from Ht-ous, but we would be as safe in Sirap as anywhere. They said they had met several tens of warriors going to the muster, and the next day we met some ourselves, although they must have been late for it and passed us without a word.

The day after we arrived in Sirap, where the trading conditions were good enough, but as I said Mr Ocin helped me to get the best price I could have imagined for the wine.

So father, I wait at Sirap for a returning caravan, and remain your most obedient son,

Ocram.

*

So, now, I really do need to get painting some more Gauls for the inter-Cillag battle which is now on the horizon. Ocram’s journey has fleshed out some of the earlier issues, and we are definitely looking at a battle, not some ineffective raiding by the two sides.

The skirmish with the bandits did cause me a little pain. I spent some time looking for my copies of either Runequest of Flashing Blades for rules for the combats, but found neither. I think they have vanished over many house moves. So I had to make my own up, based on Runequest’s ‘strike rank’ concept and Flashing Blades’ ‘slash, lunge or sidestep’ tactical approach. It seemed to work quite well, and the skirmish (despite the write up above) was quite exciting and fun to do. It actually lasted 32 strike ranks, which I suppose would be about 4 minutes in real time.

Now, back to the paintbrush!

Rituals, War and Wargaming

I’ve been pondering a few interesting snippets I have gathered over the past few months, mostly around the rituals associated with wars. There is a school of thought that seems to suggest that most ‘primitive’ warfare is mainly ritualistic, by which they seem to mean that it is mostly displays of aggression rather than sticking spears in people. I suppose this is something along the lines of the display the New Zealand All Black rugby football team give before a match.

The last comment, of course, about the All Blacks indicates an immediate issue which arises from the use of words like ‘ritual’. We all have rituals, after all, even if we do not describe them as such. Take a soccer match, for example. The teams process out to the applause, cheers and so on of the crowd. Why? They have not actually done anything yet.

Ritual goes on. The teams greet each other, exchange tokens of some description (flags or banners, usually), handshakes ensue, the referee calls the leaders over to decide how the combat (I beg your pardon, I mean ‘match’) is going to take place. The whistle sounds, the crowd roars and so on. Those who were warmly greeting each other a few minutes ago are now scything each other down in ‘committed’ tackles.

Now, while death is not one of the outcomes for a football match, it does have to be said that there is a lot of ritual going on, so we need to take a closer look at the rituals of, say, the Classical Greeks or the Aztecs and their enemies before we just dismiss it as posturing and pointless ritual.

Now that Mesoamerican ‘Flower Wars’ are an interesting case in point. From one perspective they are a pointless waste of time. The warrior elites of two sides engage in a heavily formalised form of combat which may result in a few deaths but nothing too important as an outcome for either side.

Is this view in fact correct? Actually, it almost certainly is not. The issue is that from a certain, western, economically driven point of view, with a ‘decisive battle’ viewpoint, a Flower War is not that important. However, the Aztecs and their enemies did not have such a point of view. For them the outcomes of Flower Wars were of huge significance, in terms of prestige, discerning the favour of the gods, acquiring victims for sacrifice and so on.

The fact that the warrior elite of the other side could be depleted via a Flower War, and hence some sort of strategic advantage could be derived, was a bonus, but not really the point of the exercise. From the outside, from our dominant cultural viewpoint, it might seem a pointless waste of time and blood, but from the inside it must have looked very different. Just consider what another culture might think of our obsession with ball games, for examples. Rituals? Yes. Popular? Yes. Producing heroes? Definitely. The difference between this and a Flower War is what, precisely?

I would not wish to push the analogy between a soccer or rugby match and a Flower War too fact, of course, but the point is that lots of the things we do are ritualised, at least to some extent.

Now, consider another issue, in this case the dis-analogy between modern and ancient warfare. In modern warfare, the emphasis is on concealment, firepower at a distance, speed of movement and, to a significant extent, individual initiative from lower ranks. Our soldiers have battledress and parade dress, the latter of which is a colourful throwback to nineteenth century uniforms, but which a modern combatant would only be seen dead in.

This is very different from the viewpoint of the Greeks and Romans, at least. In Greek and Roman warfare, you wore your best for a battle. Your armour was highly polished, you wore your best crest on your helmet and so on. Even on the ‘barbarian’ side you put on your best show, however that might be construed.

The differences, of course, go much further than that. As an ancient warrior you lined up in formation, perhaps in ranks, and, as I have mentioned before, had very little room to manoeuver, let alone see what else was going on around you. You charged your enemy, perhaps after a few exchanges of javelins, and did your best not to be killed or thought a coward.

As a Greek, at least, after the battle there were further rituals, of obtaining or giving a truce, recovering the bodies of the fallen and so on. Around this were whole religious rituals of sacrifices and omens before battles, paens during the opening phases and so on. The battle, qua battle, was about being killed, wounded, running away and so on, but it was constructed around a whole bunch of rituals.

Now, as wargamers, this gives us a few choices in terms of the game. We can try to recreate the ritual significance of a combat, or we can take a western view that the only really important bit is the combat itself. Some rule sets, such as Hoplomachia and Simon McDowall’s rule sets try to take the rituals seriously while other, perhaps an example of which would be DBA, simply ignore the cultural and ritual context.

In terms of what I have written before, though, we could simply regard the DBA style game as another expression of cultural imperialism. By this, I mean, we are simply imposing our own lens, our own expectations and understanding of battles and their meaning, on a representation of another culture. Now, you might argue that this is entirely justified, as these cultures do not exist any longer and, anyway, it is our game, our hobby and leisure time.

On the other hand, we could be construed as simply being utterly insensitive to the events of the past and, thus, refusing to acknowledge that our way is not the only way of living. It could also be pointed out that most of the wargamers I know have what can only be described as ‘pre-battle’ rituals anyway, even down to picking specific dice. Perhaps we should incorporate that into our rule sets.