The House Rule

Thinking about a post on the Palouse Wargaming Blog - about a very important and rather different subject - got me on to thinking about house rules. I have been working on some house rules currently, both in historical tactical games and in role-playing games. House rules seem to be quite common in wargaming, perhaps more than in any other game. Why should this be? 

I don't think my intuitions on this would be that different from most other gamers. The 1mm-deep answer is: to make a better game. But that doesn't get us very far - what would constitute better. Some potential top-level descriptions:

 

To make mechanical changes.

To add extra options.

To re-calibrate the model. 

And these would have two top-level goals:

To make a game easier to play.

To make the game better reflect history/other source material.

 

Making mechanical changes:

In two separate senses, this has been very prevalent in wargaming since the earliest days. The first sense might broadly be thought of as the clarification: where a rule is not understood (and perhaps because it is genuinely incomprehensible or internally contradictory), where two or more rules are contradictory; or where a specific situation which must occur in the rules is under-written or unexplained.  In more recent times, these have become less necessary, since rules authors are often reachable directly and quickly, whereas in the old days the cost in time and inconvenience of the old 'send an SAE to Wyoming' encouraged more local rulings.

The second sense deals exclusively with deliberate mechanical changes. The most obvious one is when a rule which is overly fussy gets dropped, but it could also be where a special case is eliminated and that case is resolved in the general way.

 Adding additional options:

These are typically made to increase the scope of the game. It might be as simple as adding a vehicle, or leader, not present in the original rules; but it could be as much as adding entire new troop types. This kind of thing seems to roughly divide between adding niche capabilities for conflicts designed to be refought using the rules, or adding things to increase the applicability of the rules (e.g. adding the troop types necessary to refight the Jacobite Rebellions or Mughal Indian conflicts to a set of Marlburian or generic C18 rules).  Role-playing games are full of this kind of thing: new character classes, new equipment, new spells, new monsters, new NPCs, new countries, and so on.

 

Re-calibrating:

These changes are aimed at altering the relationship between the different 'elements', whatever that may be in the context of an individual game. Sometimes - and again, I would point to role-playing games here, although there are some examples in historical wargaming - there is re-calibration for play balance. Sometimes the complexity of a system allows there to be 'things which are the same, but worse' and it may be desirable for these to be changed. But in historical wargaming, this is where a lot of the tinkering happens, especially regarding morale and troop quality and leadership quality and suchlike; but also in weapon and armour effectiveness, or whatever. Occasionally it might be desirable to reduce the number of statistical variation in a ruleset.

Easier to Play:

All of these changes might be done with ease of play in mind. Certainly mechanical changes are the most likely to fall into this category - and with particularly clunky or under-written rules, it might be entirely necessarily to do this. Original D&D and Shadowrun hacking are in the grey area between practically impossible and theoretically impossible to play as written; I have sometimes felt the same about some historical sets. One interesting case is where there are a lot of statistical blocks with very minute differences - some players might want to eliminate the differences for ease of play, others might want to eliminate them for reasons of accuracy, believing these minute differences to be spurious at best and downright historically vicious at worst (by pretending that differences that small can even be detected in the historical records).

For me, expanding the period would come ultimately under 'easier to play', since the thought here must be to expand an existing 'known' system rather than pay the 'costs' in money, time and effort to learn a new set which already deals with another period. Maintaining unity of basing and leveraging existing terrain collections and including new troop types and equipments would all be sub-sets of this.

Better reflect history/other source material:

However, the prime source of the house rule is often the desire to be more accurate; or to put it another way, feeling that the ignorance/misinterpretation/bias of a rules writer has caused them to use an inaccurate model (i.e. stat blocks, factors, special rules) within an otherwise very adequate framework (i.e. game mechanics). Black Powder probably ran with this idea most explicitly, using its Warmaster-derived mechanics as the rules and effectively saying to the players that the rules will offer some examples, but these are not to be interpreted as calibration rules. Of course, Black Powder doesn't escape calibration issues entirely, far from it: it calibrates the effectiveness of muskets and square formations in certain specific ways.  In a really radical 'mechanics-only' approach, they would have only suggested values for musketry ranges and the defensive bonuses of squares versus cavalry.

As a personal aside, I do think that the prevalence of 're-calibration' house rules really puts paid to the 'hard' form of the "it's only a game" argument.  If it were being treated purely as an abstracted, fun game with toy soldiers, no-one would really care about factors - although they might still change mechanics for ease and calibration for balance. To me, it is simply not logically possible to argue about the effectiveness of 8pdr as opposed to 6pdr guns or that of Cuirassiers compared to Hussars in game terms unless you think that the game should in some way reflect those values approximately correctly.

House Rules: Good or Bad?

The overall answer we might guess is 'it depends', but I think that we can go at least one level deeper, and ask 'depends on what?'. Generally speaking, I think that traditional wargames rules are very friendly to house rules, partly because they are so under-designed to begin with: they generally have maybe 4-10 distinct mechanical systems and the values and outputs of those systems don't look to be generally very rigorously mathematically tested.  There is a lot of eyeballing it and seeing if it 'looks about right'. Wargames writers have generally been amateurs and it isn't like the history they are based on is tightly modelled, or even generally agreed on. These two approaches make it hard for anyone to argue that the post house-ruling rules would automatically be less accurate or less fun than the numbers which come with the rules.  Ultimately, rules with lots of factors are inherently very moddable. All this does come with risks though: it is sometimes too tempting to play with the numbers to chase one's own biases a bit too hard. This is most true of all when 'better' troops are made better across the board. What do I mean?  Well, imagine a Napoleonic game in which the infantry of one nation is rated as better in morale. But an enthusiast for that nation feels that they should be rated as better in all areas (and that enthusiast might be correct). But if the mechanics of that game are quite coarsely-grained, then giving a bonus across the board might minimally make that unit now 50% better and off the charts better than the historical record, rather than the 10-15% better they had been supposed to be.

It is even less clear when more calibration is mechanically factored in. Special abilities and so on may essentially be a form of conditional factor, which is not necessarily too hard to mess around with, but when these are more tightly baked into the mechanics, it is not so easy.  If the side with archers is rewared not in the stat-block of archers but more hidden in the damage effects, that may not be as obvious to alter. Abstract mechanics may be used to include the abilities of very poor or very good troops that don't fit onto the 'usual' factorial scale. Liberties taken with troop and ground ratios may be again to protect against game-breaking things happening at the edges of the calibration space. This might be true when rules take lots of liberties with things like time, and is hugely true if points values are an important part of a game.

On the other hand, house rules may be the only way of getting to a set which one likes. For example, a realistic Medieval skirmish game might be best made by house-ruling an existing set, by attempting to take out the 'cinematic' and 'game balance' assumptions within the existing rules, if the would-be modder can work out what those are (they may, or may not, be the same as the designer thinks they are, if they are the type of designer who writes notes or blogposts explaining their thinking). One wise wargamer thinks that the future of computing in tabletop wargaming shouldn't be in 'game-assistance' apps, but rather in being used much more extensively to test the embedded systems within games rules for likely outputs given likely inputs, to help designers ensure the whole thing is working as designed.

Anyway, this post is a bit of a 'work in progress' but I wanted to scribble down a few thoughts now whilst they were fresh.