What sort of rules do you prefer?

[DanJ]

With the core mechanics and of my WW1 rules now settled I thought I'd see what types of rules people prefer and why.

There seems to be a consensus that rules fall into two broad schools, Top Down â€" command driven or Bottom Up â€" detail driven.

The top down approach isn't terribly concerned with details of weapons, ranges or movement rates, rather it says that within a few broad parameters most armies were similar in any particular conflict.  How far a bow can shoot or how long a spear shouldn't be the primary concern of a general, what should be important is how commanders controlled their forces to bring them into the most advantageous position.  Time scales are generally fluid and a "turn" may be defined as "the length of time it takes something important to happen".

The bottom up approach concentrates on realistically reproduce a model based known factors like how far a man can march in a minute, how far weapons can shoot, how thick a breastplate was etc. etc. etc.

Both approachs are equally valid but will produce fundamentally different types of games.

Personally I prefer the top down approach and that’s how I've built my WW1 rules.

[lentulus]

There seems to be a consensus that rules fall into two broad schools, Top Down â€" command driven or Bottom Up â€" detail driven.

Top down, with a lot of attention paid to point of view.

Of course, taken to an extreme an accurate army level WWI game would consist of sitting in a comfortable room sipping sherry and having people tell you how brilliant you are, with the end of the game announced by someone throwing a rotten tomato at your head.   

[Sandinista]

somewhere in the middle suits me, i hate the over detailed rule sets, but get bored if there are no differences to troop types. basically i think i look for something that can give me a good, fun game in 3-4 hours without theneed for a maths degree.

[Aart Brouwer]

@DanJ, that's an interesting take on rulesets. I think you're right. The group I play with right now (WWII) would be 'bottom up' in that we want to reproduce the look and feel of a battlefield on batallion or even company level. If necessary we correct the range of a gun or the speed of a vehicle during the game. We don' t give a hoot about who 'wins', if the game runs well we feel that we have all won and that all the painting and scenery paid off.

It takes all sorts to make a pointless bloodbath world and it's really no use quabbling over styles. The more objective information a post on rules contains, the more useful it is to me.

Cheers,
Aart

[DanJ]

Hi Aart,

After many years crunching lots of data I came to the conclusion that I have a problem with "bootom up" rules because people often try and make them do too much in a quest for realism, especially in the techno centric worls of WW2 armoured warfare.

For instance I spent a long time compiling masses of data about WW2 armour, speed, guns, penetration, rate of fire etc. and produced a very comprehensive set up rules.  There were two problems, I'd forgotten about ground scale/model size and they were too complex.  It took me a while to realise that with a ground scale of 1:1000 (a reasonanble scale for 10mm figs) my tiger tank models were taking up a piece of ground about 30m wide by 40 meters deep.  So was this the area of 1 tank or that covered by a group of 3 tigers and if it was the area of 3 tigers then what could be said about flank shots and the use of correct small scale tank formations?

The complexity people got over by ignoring it and using the bits they could remember, suprisingly it made very little difference overall and the games flowed much better.

Dan