Clarity versus Inspiration: an Heretical take

I was recently watching a very interesting episode on the Miniature Adventures YouTube channel about clarity versus inspiration in writing wargames rules. For better or worse, it was interesting enough to inspire some thoughts of my own...

I think I agree with most of what the host, Big Lee, is saying. But I think I disagree with one of the main stated assumptions, and I disagree quite vehemently with one of the main unstated assumptions.

The stated assumption that I disagree with is that there is a fundamental tension between clarity and inspiration within wargames rules. Clear writing and explanation of the rules might well be surrounded by or interrupted with sidebars and illustrations but I don't think this is a significant hurdle to understanding the rules. Conversely, concision in rules-writing might be helpful in clearly explaining rules, or it might not. Phil Barker is a very concise and precise rules writer, although it is clear that opinions are somewhat split within the wargames community about whether WRG and DBx rules are particularly clear.  'Charge!' and 'The Wargame' and 'Black Powder' are all full of 'inspiration', aren't particularly concise but are generally pretty clear IMHO. Whereas some other rules, like Firefight! and Firepower and even some of the Polemos rules I play quite often aren't necessarily so. The old SPI-type rules might have been written in a quasi-legalistic or technical manual style, but that didn't of itself make them particularly clear.

This leads me onto the hidden assumption that I disagree with. Discussion of this within the wargames community as far back as I can remember has been dominated by discourse about language. The assumption being therefore that the problem of clarity is mainly one that can be solved by writing in a clearer way. I see this has being a distinctly secondary problem. The primary issue is that some of the concepts in some wargames can be difficult, under-defined, contradictory, or all three. In essence, these are content issues, not failures of description.

The challenge to overcome in wargames is that, compared to most boardgames, the players are free to carry out a really vast number of actions - both voluntary and involuntary - with each of the playing pieces. These actions then interact with the terrain in an equally vast number of possible configuration states.  The number one thing that a games designer can do to make a game more clear is to impose some kind of grid, because that action alone reduces the potential actions and states into something much more manageable and capable of definition. Secondly, the designer can reduce the number of independent playing pieces. This does not mean less toys on the table necessarily, but it does mean that the number of independently-moved elements determines the complexity (since each can interact with terrain and adversary elements independently). Thirdly, the designer can reduce the number of voluntary actions and places in the game's sub-systems where the player can interact with the game. IMHO designers should try and do this anyway, since it makes for better, more exciting and more realistic wargames. Next, the designer can reduce the number of involuntary actions within the game. The main reason that Polemos: Ruse de Guerre is much smoother than its stable-mates is that the author really stripped out a lot of the involuntary actions within the game. This eliminated lots of potentially awkward interactions between elements, and between elements and terrain.  In similar vein, Mike Whitaker on Meeples & Miniatures once noted  the game-breaking way multiple independent special rules, all of which make individual sense, can interact. Lastly, the designer can carefully design and define how terrain should be set-up in a game and how elements should interact with them. This is especially true where there are exaggerated features compared to the ground scale.  

 

Incidentally I don't think that long lists of factors are unclear per se: it isn't that the factors themselves are complex  but indirectly they create exploding numbers of tactical optimization pathways, which in turn also create huge calibration issues, especially in historical wargames.

I don't want to imply by any of the above that clear language isn't important at all, it is. But I don't think it is the most important element at all. Clarity  and opacity are created by design choices as much as by language choices.

Now, I think that a separate issue  is the apparent ease of learning a given set of rules. For me, this is only very partially related to the fundamental clarity of a ruleset, because ease of learning is (negatively) related to the number of novel concepts that I have to learn, the complexity of the language and the way they are presented, whereas fundamental clarity is related to once a player has worked out what the sentence means, is it clear? So quite unclear rules can actually be easy to learn because the unclear bits aren't necessarily going to surface straight away, they emerge from play. Even worse, unclear rules can be thought of as clear because of the style, and the players agree, or use mind caulk, to keep playing despite the lack of clarity. 

Anyway, this is just what I think - what about you?