Wargames on your Doorstep

It has always been something of a mystery to me why many wargamers have developed a taste for the exotic. I suppose that as wargaming and communication technologies have developed, the opportunity to find something really off the wall has presented itself. Thus, we land up with, for example, 1920’s Chinese Warlord games, or skirmishes on the Thai frontier, or such like.

Now, I am not denigrating these sorts of wargames, although I confess that they are not for me. The thing that puzzles me slightly is that finding anything out about them is, even in the days of the Internet, really rather difficult. Part of me wants to wonder if that is not the reason why some wargamers choose to play in these eras; it makes the research so much easier if no-one actually knows.

A long time ago now, one of the wargames magazines ran an article on what to do if you feel a bit jaded with your wargaming, a bit out of sorts and out of ideas. Have a look around your local area, it suggested. You might be surprised as to what ideas lie out there.

This may well work a little better in the Old World than in the New, but it is, I think, an idea worth pursuing. History, like geography, is all around us, but often we manage to ignore it, or simply pass it by altogether. Part of being a history ‘buff’ or a wargamer is, surely, to try not to ignore the military activity on our doorstep.

On the face of it, I live in a pretty boring part of the country, militarily. Too far away from the continent to have any decent defences against invasion, probably too poor to be really interesting to anyone except other sheep farmers, and really rather out on a limb, geographically speaking. In fact, so far as I can tell, most wargamers only know where I live because the local market town is named (for reasons I cannot account for) on the Kingmaker map.

So, let me look a little closer.

In fact, my area is a wee bit more interesting that it appears at first glance. To start with, I can think of at least five medieval battles that were fought within a forty mile radius. Not all of them were the Scots against the English, either, although granted that does seem to have been a medieval hobby for the local gentry (and the Bishop of Durham). So that is something that may well take up a fair bit of a wargamer’s time.

Secondly, I live a bit south of one of the most northerly Roman villas in the UK. Oddly, there is a cluster of known villas in the sort of middle reaches of the River Tees.

Why, you might ask, were they there?

The answer, I think, is access to the sea. The river is fairly wide there, and is passable by small boats, so in terms of getting supplies in and out, for the Romans it was a simple business of loading up a few merchant ships and waiting for the right tide.

I suspect that as modern people, we forget (or at least I do) exactly how much easier sea transport was until at least the 18^th Century. It was safer from bandits, for one thing, and quite a lot harder to get lost on (provided you stuck to the coastal routes). While, of course, ships were often lost at sea, they could also carry bulk cargoes more easily and cheaply than wagons, even if the wagons were on Roman built roads.

So the Tees-side Roman villas were, probably, commercial enterprises, although who exactly they were supplying is anyone’s guess. They could even have transported grain to Newcastle and the granaries there at the end of Hadrian’s Wall, but that is pure speculation on my part.

A little bit south of where I live are the ruins of a much smaller Roman villa. This was probably not a commercial enterprise, but simply supplied the local estate, maybe with a little left over for buying a few luxuries. Interestingly, the ruins are next to a modern Farm Shop, which performs a similar sort of function.

A little bit further away there are more Roman bits a pieces. There is a bridge, a town (site of another possible medieval battlefield) and a few small forts. Some of these have been investigated archaeologically, and one of the good things about the Internet is that it is possible to find the reports (although often you have to buy them). While these are frequently bogged down with detail about pots, they occasionally give interesting snippets for the wargamer’s imagination, such as destruction layers.

I have not even mentioned anything more ‘up to date’ so far, although there was certainly activity hereabouts during the English Civil War. The local history society believes that there was a firing range over the back of the village. I am, in all honesty, not sure I believe that; ECW outposts did not often have spare powder and shot to waste practicing, although I could believe pot shots at rabbits or similar game.

The point that I am trying to make is that, in parts of the world at least, there are rich layers of history just lying about, waiting for the wargamer to discover them. With a little bit of imagination an interesting back story could be created for most of them, and suddenly you have a wargame on your hands.

You do have, however, to stop, and look around, a bit more closely at some of the places which are in your local environment. As I said, often, we take these places for granted.

Also, I suspect that often we prefer the exotic to the local. If you feel that your local history has little to commend it, then consider this: If there were a large wargaming community in the Far East, they may well consider, say, the Hundred Years War as being really exotic.

On Skirmishers

I have been reading a bit about ancient wars and battles, specifically, for those of you with long memories, those in the Greek and Classical worlds. One of the things that has struck me is the large number of light troops which are attached to the armies.

Numbers, in the ancient world are, of course, always rather dubious. However, the normally reliable Thucydides reports 10,000 Boeotian light troops present at Delium, although they had little influence on the battle (IV.93). Sabin, in Lost Battles, represents them with one ‘token’ levy unit.

Wargame rules (and writers of history, both ancient and modern) tend to be rather dismissive of skirmishers. I myself have fallen into this: in Polemos: SPQR a base of skirmishers is set at being about 75 people running around with javelins and so forth. Now if I transferred that to Delium, I would need over 130 bases of skirmishers alone, which would fill up most people’s wargame table without any of the battle-winning troop types getting a look in.

It seems to be the case therefore that while my representational scale might be awry, the effects could be accurate. Skirmishers had very little impact on the ancient battle. I know that there are occasional exceptions, but in the ancient world they tended to be peltasts, who appear to have been more professional and capable than your average javelin chucker.

It also has to be admitted that many sets of wargame rules do not represent skirmishers terribly well. Notoriously, in one of the version of DBM, a single base of skirmishers, set at an angle to a block of advancing heavy infantry, could delay the latter hugely. Treating skirmishers as just another troop type with compatible capabilities does not seem to represent their actual activity terribly well.

The other problem, of course, is that ancient writers were not, in fact, terribly interested in skirmishers. They were not of the right class, for one thing. Battles were won and lost by the heavy infantry (I generalise, but then, so did they). Skirmishers were the necessary but uninteresting part of the army. Exceptions do, of course, occur, but in general, light troops are not discussed or reported upon. Again, peltasts may be, but the general skirmisher is not.

So, how can we handle skirmishers within our wargame rules?

In Polemos: SPQR, as I have said, a base represents about 75 men, which, I confess, is probably incorrect. However, in my defence, I have come up with a novel (to me, anyway; I don’t imagine that it is original) method of modelling the performance of skirmishers.

If you read the few accounts that there are of skirmish type tactics in the ancient world, I do not think that you find the more modern ideas of ‘clouds of skirmishers’ or skirmishers advancing in open order. The best description of skirmishing is not, in fact, from skirmishers at all (please correct me if I’m wrong), but of the Persian cavalry at Plataea. Here, they advance in groups, throw javelins at the Greek hoplites and then retire to the main body.

There is no description of the cavalry being in open order, just advancing in smaller groups from the main body, discharging missile weapons, and then retiring.

The more I thought about this, the more likely it seemed to me to be generally the case for ancient world skirmishing. In the ancient world, there was much less emphasis, in the first place, on the individual, and so individualistic activity, like skirmishing 10 feet or so from your neighbour, is less likely. Additionally, I cannot imagine that any such troops would be trained and so, as I believe it to be the case, that untrained troops tend to huddle together, it seems to me highly likely that skirmishers would too.

There are other factors at play, as well. At Caharre, as is well known, the Parthians skirmished pretty well all day. They must have had some means of relieving their front forces, if only to resupply with arrows. This is much simpler if the whole unit was not involved at a given time. If a bunch of 50 men were dispatched from a unit of 500, for, say, ten minutes skirmishing, then each batch of fifty would have about an hour and a half to rest in between such activity, while the enemy simply saw a screen of men discharging arrows at them, constantly. The rest could be seeing to their horses, restocking with arrows, having a drink and a bite to eat, and so on.

What is very wearing for one side would be a walk in the park for the other.

Of course, the commanders would need to be careful to keep their units out of harm’s way, and we do read often of the skirmishers simply being chased off by heavier troops. However, they usually did reform and return, which suggests, in my model, that the charged skirmishers simply run back to the mother unit and reform upon it.

This then, is the model I have attempted to work with in Polemos: SPQR, and intend to implement in the Greek rules when they finally get off the drawing board. Skirmisher units represent the base unit, and their range represents the distance to which the packets of men are sent out to throw their javelins (or whatever). The whole unit is not fighting at any one time, nor are the men standing at the base and shooting. Only a small proportion of them are doing that at any one time.

Of course, it is still required that the skirmisher’s action is still, mostly, disruptive, not fatal to the enemy. That can be fixed through the relevant combat factors, of course.  And the units under attack can still advance to drive off the skirmishers, although they would have to get at the mother unit to do any real damage. A failure by the skirmishers to inflict any damage  can, of course, be interpreted as a local success by the attacked base.

Finally, of course, I can now rationalise my representative scale. A base of skirmishers can represent many more than 75 individuals, but it is that 75 who are in action at any one time. The overall base would represent, say, 750 individuals, which makes it much more viable to have the whole lot on the table at any one time.

So, there you are: a model of skirmishing in the ancient world. I wonder how much it leaks…

The Battles of Marathon

It was mentioned, I think, on the Joy and Forgetfulness blog recently, that we have, as wargamers, our key battles. These are the actions that interest us, that we keep coming back to and having another go at, or, perhaps, we have never tried but are our goals or aim, when we get the right figures painted, or the right terrain constructed, or the right rules, or some combination of all three.

For me, this battle is Marathon, and this arises because one of the first reports of a wargame I ever read was by Charles Grant in ‘Military Modelling’, and was of this battle. It was a long time ago and I was very, very young, but it made a lasting impression on me. For years, at the back of my mind was the idea that someday, I would refight on the wargame table, the battle of Marathon.

For many years, of course, I did not even try to refight it. I have a limited time budget, and even more limited resources for buying, painting and researching figures. However, after a major effort in the last few weeks, I am now the proud possessor of a 21 base Persian army, suitable, so far as I can tell, for being the opposition to my Greeks at Marathon.

Now, of course, I should be rushing off in glee and be rolling dice. Perhaps, however, I have become too cautious, or elderly, in just plain suspicious of the historical accounts of battles to do so. I need some sort of idea as to what Marathon was about, how it happened, before setting figure to table.

This is, of course, where the fun starts. Herodotus’ account of the actual battle of Marathon is four paragraphs (6:112 – 115), just about a page in my Landmark edition. This is not really very much, although of course the build-up to the battle is much longer. The brevity has both upsides and downsides.

On the up-side, it does mean that, as a wargamer, I do not actually have to read very much before I have an idea of the action, its deployments, movements and outcome. It really is very simple. The Athenians and Plataeans lined up, charged the Persians, broke their wings and turned in on the hitherto successful centre, capturing a few ships on the way. What could be simpler?

On the downside, the record does not really tell us enough about the action. Lots of questions remain unanswered. For example, where were the Persian cavalry? The Persians landed at Marathon, we are told, because it was good cavalry country (6:102). But mounted activity is not recorded in the battle account itself. A puzzle, then.

Not only that, but the number of Persians in the army is not really recorded at all. Herodotus records 600 triremes in the Persian fleet, including horse transports. This might give some sort of figure for the maximum number of people in the force, but helps very little in determining the number of soldiers on the battlefield. Herodotus’ claim that there were 6,400 Persian casualties may, or may not, be correct. Even if it is correct, it does not help an awful lot. It gives a lower limit for how many Persians there were in total (6400, plus at least 1 trireme crew?), but that is really of little use.

From the information we have to hand, then, we can say that there were 10,000, or 11,000 Greeks, and some Persians. It is usually assumed that the Persians outnumbered the Greeks, but this is by no means certain. It is quite possible that there were fewer Persians on the field than Greeks.

There are further problems with the terrain of Marathon. While the general layout is well known, a plain with the sea on one side, hills on the other, and marshes at both ends, it is not actually recorded at what angle the Persians deployed to the beach. Some modern accounts have them with their backs to the sea, with their ships behind them. Some have them deployed at right angles to the sea, with the ships behind their left wing.

Neither of these accounts is wholly satisfactory. Only an idiot, perhaps, would fight with their backs to the sea. The advantage of this deployment, however, is that it is clear how the routing Persians could then attempt to launch their ships. In the other scenario, with their wings broken first, it seems a bit unlikely that the Persians would have all streamed to their left rear to get away. As Terry Pratchett once remarked, the whole idea of running away is to get away; routing troops are unlikely to think that the best result would be obtained by running through a bunch of disorganised but victorious hoplites.

So, even with such a simple appearing account of a fairly straightforward battle, we have some seemingly unsolvable problems. The size of at least one of the armies; the composition of that force itself. Even the deployment of the forces is by no means obvious.

In fact, were it not the case that it is impossible to read the account of the battle without trying to reconstruct it in some way, I would argue that we face an insurmountable obstacle. The account of Herodotus has sufficient detail to constrain what we can do in reconstruction, but insufficient to tell us exactly how the action happened.

Perhaps, at this point, turning to Phil Sabin’s Lost Battles might help. There are a large number of modern accounts of Marathon, all differing in detail. Sabin’s modelling for the battle suggests that the key factor is, in fact, the number of Persian infantry, not the location and actions of the cavalry or the angle between the armies and the sea. As he notes, the triumph of the Persian centre indicates that the Greeks had no unqualified superiority over their enemy (p 95).

So, in summary, we have not just a refight of Marathon, but a whole slew of considerations, estimates, guesswork and prejudice to work through before we can come to something that could even slightly be called a historical battle. That should not, of course, stop of from trying, but we do have to admit that the relation to history is, at best, irrecoverable.

Models and Rumours of Models

I have written a lot over time, and quite recently, about models and how we use them in wargaming. It is worth considering, I think, because wargaming, and writing wargme rules are essentially modelling activities. There is no getting away from the concepts of models at all.

Models, of course, come in various shapes and sizes. There are scale models, representational models, computational models and so on, all of which, I think, appear in most wargames. But it is also worth taking a bit of a step back and considering exactly what the models are, and what they can do.

In Chapter 3 of Ian Barbour’s Models, Myths and Paradigms (London, SCM, 1974), there is a list of four ways of understanding models in science. These are naïve realism, positivism, instrumentalism and critical realism. I will have a go at describing how these models might fit into a set of wargame rules, and which interpretations of our models we might choose.

Firstly, then, naïve realism. In this case we assume that our models give us direct access to the world. The entities we postulate in our models are those which ‘really’ exist, even if they are not directly observable. For wargaming, this means, for example, that we would have to claim that the factors we use to calculate a wargame unit’s morale were really existing factors, and that they can be summed up and reach a given outcome of ‘hold’ or ‘rout’. This is really rather, um, naïve, as the name of this view suggests. Morale calculation is a computational model, and bears little relationship to the real world.

Naïve realism corresponds to a literal view of models, that is, that the model is a replica of the world. While some of the bits of a wargame might correspond to bits of the world, for example our soldiers are scale models of real soldiers, I do not think that many wargamers would fall into the trap that our wargames are one to one readings of the real world, although some wargamers do seem to sometimes speak or write as if they are. Literalism, however, runs the risk of pushing the model too hard, of expecting, in the morale example, soldiers too be looking around and thinking ‘enemy on flank, that’s bad, taking casualties, that’s bad, rear support, that’s good. Hmm, two bads and one good, and a roll of two on the dice. That’s it, I’m running away.’ This is not a realistic model of morale in the real world.

Secondly, we have positivism. This argues that all a model is is a representation of experience, a convenient way of classifying empirical data. This claims that all we have is a means of correlating data. In wargame terms, this suggests that all we can do is give a relationship between a cause and an effect. Thus, if the effect is ‘the infantry run away’, the cause ‘the cavalry charged’ is correlated with it. Those who have good memories, or who know something about empiricism will observe the hand of David Hume sitting on this idea.

So far was wargaming goes, I think, positivism is not terribly helpful. A positivist will claim that a model has no real use, and is simply a means of abstracting from data. Thus, in this concept, we would be unable to wargame anything except historical battles. In science terms, positivism means that theories are stripped of their predictive ability. In wargame terms, then, we are limited to the strict data of history. This seems unlikely to produce a satisfactory wargame.

Thirdly, there is the idea of instrumentalism. This is similar to positivism in that the claim is made that our models are not representations of the world, are not true or false, but techniques for creating inferences. The argument here is that the terms of a model cannot be translated into observational terms, at least directly. Again, using wargame morale as an example, we can see that this might well be the case. We can assess, as a wargamer, the morale of a unit, but that assessment is not translatable into the real world directly, as I argued above. Instrumentalism, however, allows that our concepts and models may have results that are discernible in the real world. Real army units do, from time to time, run away, and the outcome of our models can predict that, even though the computational aspect of has no real world equivalent.

A model, then, in this view, is neither true nor false, neither accurate nor not. It is simply a useful way of giving us mental devices for thinking about things.  Once we understand the data and the theory behind the model, the claim is, we can discard the model; it has outlived its usefulness. In the case of, for example, wargame morale, this seems unlikely to be the case.

Finally, we have critical realism. Here, theories are representations of the world; theories are true and useful,, but incomplete and selective. Models are abstract systems, representative of some bits of the real world, created in our imaginations for a given purpose. A model, then, is an inexact account of the world, missing out huge chunks in an effort to provide something that is intelligible and tractable. Thus, a model will need validating against real world data. This, in science, is the role of experiment, while in wargaming is the role of historical accounts of battles.

It seems to me that models in wargame ruleas are something of a mix of instrumentalist models, such as calculations of morale, and critically realist models, such as combat rules. In the first, the calculation bears no relationship to the actual real world process of how units ‘decide’ to stand or run. Thus all we can do is make the calculation and compare it with empirical outcomes.

In the second case, we can actually see the process of combat in some sort of detail, and, in a highly selective manner, model it, comparing the model and its stages with the real world and its outcomes.

But, at the end of the day, we do seem to need both concepts of models to create a wargame rule set.

Decisive Battles

There has been some debate recently here about decisive battles, and Chris challenged me to discuss this, so here goes.

What, exactly, makes a battle decisive?

To start with I looked at what is probably the earliest definitive list I could find of decisive battles, from Fifteen Decisive Battles of the Western World by Edward Creasy, which was first published, I believe in the 1850’s. It is free from Amazon on a Kindle, incidentally, which makes it even more suitable for this task.

Creasy’s list of decisive battles is instructive: Marathon, Syracuse, Arbela, Metaurus, Teutoburger Wald, Chalons, Tours, Hastings, Orleans, the Spanish Armada, Blenheim, Pultova, Saratoga, Valmy and Waterloo.

Now, I suppose that any list of battles claimed to be decisive would be arguable, but perhaps more interesting are Creasy’s reasons for choosing them. Firstly, he claims that it is not the size of the battle, nor the casualties, that make this set decisive. Nor, he suggests are to be considered battles which, although dramatic, had either limited effects (particularly geographically) or ‘merely confirmed’ already noted trends. Thus Plataea is not on his list because the trend noted at Marathon, of Greek military success over the Persians, is, he argues, the decisive one. Hence also the absence of Zama from his list and the presence of Valmy instead of other actions of the Revolutionary Wars.

Now, of course, this is a highly debatable issue. Every statement that Creasy makes could be disputed. I have discussed his ideas so much simply because they give a starting point to trying to understand what we mean as decisive. As I mentioned in a comment at the time, decisiveness seems to work at many levels.

Firstly, I think there is what we might term ‘tactically decisive’ battles. These are the ones with clear cut outcomes on the field. Classically, of course, up to the twentieth century (more or less), a decisive battle would be one where one side was left in control of the battlefield and the other had fled.

In ancient Greece, for example, the victors would put up a trophy, while the defeated would send a herald to ask for a truce while the dead were properly buried. This was an established custom, and serious repercussions could ensue if it was not followed. Of course, in some cases, it was unclear as to who the victor might be, in which case both sides could set up a trophy. But the dead were still buried.

The tactically decisive battle, however, may not actually resolve anything. Marathon, for example, only increased the Persian determination to invade Greece (or so Herodotus reports). It could also be argued that neither Salamis nor Plataea actually achieved anything very much apart from a local defeat of the Persians. Looked at from the perspective of, say, 360 BC, you could argue that the Persians had, in fact, won. This victory would not be a military one, per se, but that, by switching their money from one side to another, they could achieve a balance of power in Greece which gave them access to Greek mercenaries and otherwise kept the fractious cities from being too annoying.

At the next level up we have what I suppose we could term ‘operationally decisive’ battles. By this I mean battles which did, at least, terminate a campaign. An example of this could well be the complex of actions which led to Plataea and Salamis. These battles did, in fact, terminate the Persian invasion of Greece, even if the Greco- Persian wars continued. Another example might be El Alamein, which did at least (more or less) terminate the campaigns in the Western Desert.

At the top level are what I am going to call ‘strategically decisive’ or ‘politically decisive’ battles. These are the big ones, the ones which cause the fall of nations, the transfer of territory and so on. Actually, in that case, there do seem to be relatively few of them. Hasting, probably, is one of them, although I believe that historians can see increasing Norman influence in England significantly before that. Waterloo would be another good candidate, although again, given that Napoleon had already fallen it could be argued that it was simply a post-script to what had gone before.  Similarly, while Bosworth was decisive in terms of the switch from Plantagenet to Tudor dynasties, many historians today simply regard it as an aberration, for the “Wars of the Roses” had already finished and the only argument was who, exactly was to be king.

I would imagine that even the categories I have outlined above would be as arguable as Creasy’s criteria for deciding upon which battles were decisive. I suspect that the decisiveness of a battle depends more upon the time frame in which you consider it, and your interests, than by any objective criteria.

If you are interested in the rise and fall of dynasties, for example, then both Hastings and Bosworth are decisive. If you have a broader view history and tend to discount individual events, then, perhaps, Bosworth is a mere hiccough in the development of English monarchy and nation. Perhaps it is only because humanity likes to categorize things extensively that we land up with these sorts of discussions. Ultimately, the answer to the question ‘Was battle X decisive?’ depends on what you mean by ‘decisive’ and at what level you are looking.

So, finally, to the specific example that Chris and I were discussing. Was Solway Firth decisive? Well, obviously, at a tactical level, it was. The Scots were effectively ambushed and trounced by a fairly motley array of  English borderers.

At a campaign or operational level, I think that the answer is that Solway probably was decisive, given that the Scots Lords would not cross the border for another go. Whether the demise of James V was a consequence of the defeat is another question which, I suspect, history cannot answer.

Was Solway a strategically decisive battle? Probably not. The Scots and English were still fighting a decade later; neither had been knocked out nor been dealt a decisive blow. In fact, I think that few battles really count at this level of decisiveness.

Wargame Granules…

… just add water for an instant battle?

Well, perhaps not. What I do want to consider is the issue of the granularity of our wargames, but first I had better explain exactly what I mean by that.

Wargames, I have argued, are based on sets of models, which we then apply to a situation on the wargame table. The models are scale models, representative models, interaction models and computational models, covering aspects of our toy soldiers, terrain, rules, dice rolls and so on. These models interact (or perhaps conspire) to give us a wargame.

In science, models, usually mathematical ones, conceptual models or, possibly, computational models are used to give some insight into the ‘real’ world. Now models in the sciences are applied within a known set of errors. I can apply, for example, a magneto-hydrodynamic model of a tenuous plasma in a tokomak, but I would not expect it to give exactly the right answer. The reason for this is that, in order to make the model even slightly tractable and intelligible, I have had to make a number of approximations. My model calculation needs to be compared with real life and, if it does not fit, I need to adjust the approximations to make it so.

Normally, of course, reality is not adjusted to fit the model, although some attempts have been made.

In terms of wargaming, therefore, we need to consider the scale of battle to which our models, approximations as they are apply. Our battles, obviously, cover all levels of conflict from small skirmish games (or even role playing games) at a one to one figure representational scale, to major battle where a figure can represent perhaps scores, possibly hundreds of original soldier or pieces of equipment.

Within this, of course, lies one of the problems of wargame rules. I have mentioned before that certain behaviours emerge at different levels, and I do think this is true. Isaac Asimov wrote a number of short stories (the titles of which escape me) having fun with the idea that humans only panic in large groups, while the humanoid aliens stayed calm in large groups but panicked in isolation. Either way, the behaviour in larger groups was emergent; individuals did not behave in the same way.

Thus, I think that wargame rules can sometimes use models in inappropriate ways. For example, some skirmish rule sets I have seen suggest that we can simply apply larger group morale rules to individuals. Thus, if an individual figure in a skirmish game is, say, shot at, a morale check is made using the same sort of rules that would be used for a unit in a battle rule set. The question here is: is this appropriate?

It is an interesting fact that role playing games, which a close equivalent of skirmish wargames, so far as I know, do not have morale rules. The reliance is upon the player’s identification with their characters and hence, their desire to keep them from too much harm.

One of the most amusing things I ever saw as a role playing game umpire was a group of player characters running away, as fast as they could, from a machete armed non-player character, from whom, in fact, they needed to extract a vital piece of information. The game was Call of Cthulhu and, of course, in that game there were no healing spells. This meant that the players fled, rather than fought.

So, if role playing games need no morale rules, why do skirmish wargames? Why cannot a set of skirmish wargame rules rely upon the player’s instincts to look after their figures to reproduce small group dynamics?

I suspect that the answer to that question is that there is no particular reason. As wounds build up, both in skirmish and role playing games, the tension builds and players become more reluctant to take risks which might mean further problems for their characters. However, I do think that when the game is undertaken, a skirmish wargame has different connotations to a role playing game.

A set of wargame rules comes with an expectation of certain items in its model, one of which is a model of morale. Morale rules, are, of course, needed in most larger scale (by which I mean battle) wargames, and so a set of wargame rules is expected to have them.

But the point I am vaguely attempting to make here is that, at the individual level of granularity, morale rules may not be necessary. It is only at higher levels, bigger formations, that such behaviour as running away in a group emerges. At a skirmish level, such behaviour becomes ‘obvious’, in that a single figure is not (sensibly) going to stand its ground when all its friends are running away. We do not exactly need to roll dice to establish this, the player, as the figure’s character, is quite capable of making that decision for themselves, on the figure’s behalf. In some circumstances, running away is an entirely rational thing to do.

So the point is that not all items of a traditional set of models which make up a set of wargame rules are necessarily, applicable at all levels of granularity of the wargames which we might play. We need, perhaps, to be a bit more discerning, a little more analytic about which models apply at the level at which we are playing.

Which, I suppose brings me to a last point, which is that sometimes, it seems to me, wargame rules are not that good at deciding on a level and sticking to it. Some wargames are, in fact, skirmish games even though they claim to be big battle games. I dare say that the converse is true as well. This seems to me to indicate serious flaws in the design, even though the mix of models might result in an acceptable, in terms of fun, game.

But, perhaps, I am too much of a purist for my own good.

Problems of Wargame Plumbing

I suspect that we can all agree that wargaming is based around modelling. We model all sorts of things in a wargame. For example, our troops are models of the real thing. So are our artillery, houses, and trees and so on. In fact, these objects are two sorts of models, I suspect.

Firstly, they are scale models. That is, they are scaled down versions of the real thing. As models, of course, they may not function as the real thing functions. Our model cannon do not fire, or at least, if they do they shoot matchsticks, not shells. Our toy soldiers do not march.

Secondly, our models are representational models. Consider a weather forecast on the television. Rain, for example, is shown as a black cloud with black dots coming out of it. This is not a scale model of a cloud, but it represents rainclouds in general. In a similar way, our models do not represent one particular person, but the soldiers in general.

Some rules, particularly older ones, have a representational scale. One model soldier, they declare, is twenty real ones. Even with based groups of soldiers we usually have a representational model, of, say, one base is five hundred men, or whatever.  

So even something as simple as a toy soldier works within two models: a scale model or the soldier in the real world, and a representation of many such.

As I have written fairly recently, there are other models at work here, as well. What I want to do is to try to draw attention to the plethora of models that we need to have running, at the same time, in order to have a satisfactory wargame.

The problem is, I think, that the models in wargames are largely unnoticed until they no longer work together. Then we have what Mary Midgley describes as a ‘problem of philosophical plumbing’. By this she means that plumbing works, most of the time, and we do not, usually notice it.

The only time we do start to be concerned about plumbing is when we start to notice a smell. Then, of course, it is a bit late to start working out how the plumbing has been functioning; we have a far more difficult problem, of working out why it is not functioning, without knowing exactly how it was supposed to work in the first place.

So, we have our wargaming scale models, and they also function as representational models. This applies also to our terrain, and I have observed before that this requires us to do some private mental gymnastics in order to match the scale of the terrain items to the ground scale of the rules. It is something that we often ignore or skate around, but it is the first joint in our plumbing that can start to leak.

I have also observed that rule sets themselves are compendia of models. We have models for movement, ranged fire, close combat, morale, orders and so on. These tend, in many cases, towards the abstract model. The specific aspects of the model may not, indeed, be realistic, and, given the constraints of other models, cannot be.

For example, a command system model cannot be a scale model of the real thing. This is because our scale models of the soldiers do not respond to being given orders, as their real life counterparts would. The models interact, and the model soldiers dictate to the rules the things they can and cannot do. Thus a wargame rule set command model cannot be a scaled down representation of the real thing. Attempts to make it so, by issuing written orders to each unit, for instance, are normally doomed to failure at least, if not real arguments between wargamers.

Of course, with a plethora of models, all interacting, we find that there are plenty of opportunities within a set of wargame rules for leaks in our plumbing. Often there is a failure to distinguish the command levels at which a wargame army has to function. One of the nicest things anyone said about Polemos: SPQR was that it forced the wargamer to micromanage the big stuff. By this, they meant that a wargame general had to act as a general, and not worry about unit facing or giving ‘shoot’ orders. That was the aim I had in mind while designing the rules, influenced by Adrian Goldsworthy and the ‘Face of Battle’ brigade.

There are other models lurking in the background, as well. Firstly, there is a computational model, related to the dice you use and the factors you add up. The choice of dice is quite influential. The first version of Polemos: ECW used matched D10 rolls for combat. We rapidly discovered that this give some really wild and wacky results, because the difference between 0 and 9 is quite a lot, especially when you factors are plus or minus one or two. So we reverted to more conventional D6.

Secondly, there are theoretical models of warfare skulking around. I have tried to point one or two of them out here, recently, such as the romantic theory of the decisive battle, or the enlightenment one of scientific warfare. We all have some sort of model floating around, usually, I suspect, of the romantic variety. So we expect our rules to give us this sort of warfare, one based around a decisive battle. But really this is nothing but another model, in this case perhaps imported from our culture rather than explicit in the rules.

All told, then, there are an enormous number of models floating around even a fairly simple sort of wargame. What makes a wargame work, as a hobby, or as an event in our lives, is the fact that these models can, and often do, work together. In fact, in a really good wargame, we hardly notice the joints at all. To return to the plumbing metaphor, there are no leaks and no nasty smells.