Changing approach to wargaming.

Started by Leman, 05 March 2019, 10:06:25 AM

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Leman

This topic crops up here and there, so I thought I would nail it down in its own thread. I started wargaming as a young teenager in 1966, having played with toy soldiers for at least 10 years before that. I was looking for a formal way to continue to play toy soldiers. Rules needed to be simple, fast paced and fun. Along came youth club, meeting another wargamer there and an introduction to Donald Featherstone's rules.

By my twenties I was looking to intellectualise the game with a search for realism, which inevitably led to more complex rules, but little real satisfaction. Nevertheless I persevered with the likes of WRG. This was the period where I played more ancients than anything else.

However, as middle age approached I was drawn back to the world of black powder and the desire to refight some of the great battles of history. this resulted in my 15mm ACW collection, followed by the FPW (10mm)  and the SYW (10mm). I was now playing Johnny Reb, Fire and Fury, Warfare in the Industrial Age, 1870 and Minden Rose.

As I got into my fifties I was still looking for something elusive. I still felt that the rules were getting in the way of the fun. Fortunately in the
last ten years or so a number of rule books have appeared which have at last fulfilled my desire for an enjoyable game coupled with straightforward mechanisms. I feel I am having fun but also feel that historical plausibility is being satisfied. Games like Bloody Big Battles, Honours of War, Maurice, Longstreet, Altar of Freedom, Field of Battle 2, Square Bashing, Age of Hannibal and Basic Impetus 2 have been keeping me entertained for a good few years now. I am still willing to try out new approaches, such as Ronin, Saga, The Men Who Would Be Kings and Furioso, but know that there are good rules there to come back to if they do not live up to expectations.
The artist formerly known as Dour Puritan!

steve_holmes_11

An excellent summery of a journey that feels very familiar to me.
The specific rules and figures may differ, but I recognise the landscape.

My detailed memories hark back to particular sets of figures and rules.
I'm also quite conscious of feeling driven by trends, from oldSkool simple to intricate complexity, then back to a more minimal approach.

Only during the last 10-15 years have I felt that the gamer now has a significant range of choice for HOW to play the games.
HOW not WHAT to play - there has always been plenty of choice of scale and army, but I feel that older rules (whether oldSkool, or complex) delivered a common core for 80% of the rules, and offered "choice of chrome".

We now have a lot more choice, and some genuinely original approaches to how to play a battle.
Of course this comes at a price: 20 quid for a rulebook, and the fragmentation of the hobby described in the Current state of Wargaming thread.

Despite the cost, I'm prepared to run up the flag and declare that we are living through a golden age for gaming.
I feel the journey has been worthwhile, and intend to remain on board as long as health and the hobby permit me.



FierceKitty

Clumsy buckets of dice and many charts, with bad amendments welded on in attempts to compensate for shoddy structure (aka FeatherGrant) - over-abstraction and endless rationalisation where it failed to make contact with reality (aka DBx) - present relatively elegant systems which would really work very smoothly if my opponents would read the things!
I don't drink coffee to wake up. I wake up to drink coffee.

Genom

Started with HeroQuest while at school, which developed into Games Workshop games as that was all we could find in the big city. Our first foray into historical didn't last long, we'd found a little place called Mac's Models in Edinburgh and picked up an a5 booklet thing of Napoleonics rules that was far too complicated for our young minds so it was back to Fantasy and Scifi for us through University years and then everyone started to go their separate ways.

Fast forward a bit and the invention of the internet making things much easier to find, I went hunting for our local Wargames club, where I was welcomed by a rather friendly bunch. (Falkirk District Wargames Club) where I discovered to my delight that historical rules weren't all about charts within charts within charts that referenced other charts.  I was introduced to a plethora of options and eventually started to settle on a few core rule sets though some cover entirely different periods.

So from the mass fantasy battles of youth, these days I prefer simpler sets of rules and generally Skirmish type games for their ease of setup and play-ability the IHMN stable of games, Rogue Stars and Burrows and Badgers, model size has changed a lot over the years, these days for bigger games it's all about smaller men, 10mm Pendraken is a favourite and we use things like Warmaster, Blitzkreig commander etc for those. 

Ithoriel

I started in the 60s with Flettcher Pratt's Naval Rules which I discovered through Don Featherstone's "Naval Wargames" book. Direction of fire determined by placement plant label markers, guess as to range written on label (in inches), damage location determined by chucking a dart at a silhouette of the ship tucked into a dart board, damage determined by cross referencing calibre of gun against thickness of target's armour at point of impact. Pretty much all the rules I've used since have been simpler. :)

Months later I got a copy of "War Games" from the library and my days of flicking marbles at toy soldiers came to an end.

Started buying lead figures in London on holiday - handful of German flats. Very soon thereafter I discovered Minifigs figures in the Toytub in Stockbridge in Edinburgh. Cheaper, smaller, more detailed than the flats. I was hooked.

Have patronised all of the wargames shops in Edinburgh at some point, including Mac's Models.

Since then I have gamed in 1/6000, 1/3000, 1/2400, 1/1200, 2mm, 3mm, 6mm, 10mm, 15mm, 20mm, 25mm, 30mm and 54mm  in periods ranging from dinosaurs to spaceships and most major wargaming periods in between. Game sizes have ranged from 1 figure a side (gladiators) to some massive multiplayer games. Game rules varied from literally back of a fag packet to several tomes thick.

Currently interests are 15mm cavemen (and beasties) using "Tribal" rules, 1/600 scale "Cruel Seas," 10mm BKC2 and 20mm scale stuff for my irregular sci-fi RPG. My love of Warmaster is "more honoured in the breach than the observance" if I may followed the great unwashed in misusing what Bill the Bard wrote.
There are 100 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who can work from incomplete data

Norm

I suppose marketing and product have become more professionalised. What we own can look nicer and what we want is generally more widely available .... less need for head swaps and other shenanigans these days I suppose. Game mats have transformed the home table.

So why is it that actual game hours are reducing and I increasingly look backwards in the hope of catching some of the simplicity of yesteryear!

paulr

Quote from: Ithoriel on 05 March 2019, 07:27:43 PM
Since then I have gamed in 1/6000, 1/3000, 1/2400, 1/1200, 2mm, 3mm, 6mm, 10mm, 15mm, 20mm, 25mm, 30mm and 54mm  in periods ranging from dinosaurs to spaceships and most major wargaming periods in between. Game sizes have ranged from 1 figure a side (gladiators) to some massive multiplayer games. Game rules varied from literally back of a fag packet to several tomes thick.

To me one of the great strengths and challenges of our wonderful hobby is its breadth

There is a very good chance you can find what you want :)
The challenge is finding like minded individuals (or a way to make solo play work) :-\
Lord Lensman of Wellington
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steve_holmes_11

Quote from: Norm on 05 March 2019, 10:45:26 PM
I suppose marketing and product have become more professionalised. What we own can look nicer and what we want is generally more widely available .... less need for head swaps and other shenanigans these days I suppose. Game mats have transformed the home table.

So why is it that actual game hours are reducing and I increasingly look backwards in the hope of catching some of the simplicity of yesteryear!

I like to think I'm getting quality game hours; 2 hours of action and decisions.
This compares favourably with games in the '80s - whole day affairs where the armies spent most of the morning slowly shuffling forwards, and most of the afternoon fighting their opposite number until the routs began.

Who remembers having to move the routing units, occasionally removing figures until they left the tabletop or lost their last figure?
Who wishes that was still a mechanism?

Leman

Yes, I remember. Yes, I love it when a set of rules says, 'the unit routs and is removed from the table.' For those who are really keen, maybe to have the event cause repeated morale tests, there's always the option of having a base of routing troops making it's way to the table edge (although the only ones I can think of are 6mm made by Irregular). TBH though, if the other units are going to stand firm when the unit first breaks, there seems little point in having repeated tests - a case of 'they've gone, we're ok and we're too busy to worry about them now!'
The artist formerly known as Dour Puritan!

John Cook

How nice to see that there is at least one other pensioner actively wargaming.  Your story is similar to my own.  I discovered Donald Featherstone's Wargames in a shop in the Burlington Arcade, in London, in 1962 and a subscribed to Wargamers Newsletter until it ceased publication.

I switched to 10mm with 10 High ACW figures in the mid 1980s and anything larger just lost its appeal.  So-called '15mm' figures had become as big as the 20mm figures I'd started with 20 years before.  These days we are almost spoiled for choice. 

I never found a set of commercial rules that I really liked and started using computer moderated rules in the 1990s, first with Follow the Eagle, then Carnage and Glory mainly because they did an ACW version.  These days I just use Computer Strategies rules in eight different periods although Napoleonics remain my main interest, and have done for the last fifty years. 

I probably get as much pleasure from painting and collecting these days as I do from gaming.  I find the constant learning addictive and the side turns that wargaming takes you down are always surprising.   

A couple of decades ago, for example, I started collecting Napoleonic drill regulations, which in turn made me use my O-Level French and army colloquial German.  My vocabulary has become rather specialised though, but it is a useful mental exercise if nothing else!

I now wonder how I ever found the time to go to work.

Ithoriel

Quote from: John Cook on 06 March 2019, 09:38:18 PM
A couple of decades ago, for example, I started collecting Napoleonic drill regulations, which in turn made me use my O-Level French and army colloquial German.  My vocabulary has become rather specialised though, but it is a useful mental exercise if nothing else!

Yes, there are depressingly few occasions on which one can slip "Panzer Aufklärungsabteilung" into polite conversation :)
There are 100 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who can work from incomplete data

Leman

Unless you come across a somewhat strained Joachim Phoenix whilst shopping in a quiet German suburb.
The artist formerly known as Dour Puritan!

Chad

I started in the early 70's when my local newspaper ran an article on the local wargames club. At that time their focus was on 25mm Napoleonics so that was the period that first attracted me. Rules were by London Wargames Club.

The club moved to larger premises and had 3-5 rooms each dedicated to different periods. The big advantage was that games could be started and left on table for weeks. My interests started to widen in particular to the WSS, but figures were scarce with the only range I recall was in 20mm but I can't remember who made them. Rules were 'Frederick the Great' by FGU and had a WSS supplement.

There followed a brief excursion into tank vs tank using 1/72 plastic kIts. Rules were homegrown by one the club (Phil, it was Tony Ackland). I even scratch built an SU76.

Then back to Napoleonics concentrating on Prussian,Russian and Austrian forces. Things shifted to 15mm and we tried 'Vive L'Empereur' grand tactical rules by Ned Zuparko. Always found the mechanics of US produced rules far better than UK rules at that time.

Left the club due to growing 'political' unrest and did not Game for some time. During that time I invested in 15mm figures for the Franco-Prussian and Austrian-Prussian Wars. Still have them largely unpaintedThen out of the blue received a letter from a local guy who had asked Adler if they new of anyone in my area who Wargames. I was at the time looking at moving to 6mm. That contact began a 30 year friendship. I now game at his house every week on a permanent table. He was the one who brought be back into WSS with Pendraken 10mm. From that point we expanded into Late 19c and LOA.

Finally I resurrected Chariot Miniatures 15mm French Revolution figures and have invested the last 2 years in that period. As I get older I am finding it harder and harder to paint 10mm even with a visor so I have also have started to complete a large number of 28mm Napoleonics which I have from years ago.

Recent rules used have been Die Fighting, FOB2, Black Powder and Over the Hills. For the  latter I am working on variations for the French Revolution. As I have got older I find I do not game as seriously as I did at first. Simpler rules giving an enjoyable games now appeal more than over complicated slow games.



Leman

That sounds very much where I am now, Chad. Who would have thought, even only a couple of years ago, that I am now planning to game historical armies with non historical flying machines etc., drunken generals, rampaging mercenaries going off-script and so on. These days, as well as a good historical battle, I also want a bit of silly, colourful fun.
The artist formerly known as Dour Puritan!