The Campaign Paradox - The Heretical Take

Top wargaming blogger Polemarch maintains his prinicpled refusal to court click-bait by showing pictures of gorgeously painted miniatures and lovingly sculpted lavish diorama battlefields and instead keeps on discussing a wide range of issues around wargaming. They nearly all pique my interest to some degree or other but this week's article was really searching. Perhaps it might be summed up as "so why don't wargamers play more campaigns, when many acknowledge it as the pinnacle of the wargaming experience?" And obviously, there is a lot to be said for this: I can think of many different wargaming 'thought-leaders' who designed, played and wrote a lot about campaigns. I can think of no wargaming writer who has argued that campaigns were a bad idea and a waste of time that could better be spent playing one more game of DBA (or one more game of 6th edition, 1000 points a side...).

 

I am not sure if this blog gets counted amongst those which do campaigns or don't. He mentions that most blogposts he reads concern historical refights (guilty) or scenario games, especially from Neil Thomas' One-Hour Wargames book (very guilty!). On the other hand, I have played and recorded quite a few campaigns over the years...but I guess they would be in the (slight) minority overall.  In any case, it doesn't really matter: I guess the point here is that if we think of campaigns are being the pinnacle, then I could have spent more time playing campaign games and less time playing historical refights or scenario games.

 

What are the positive reasons for playing scenarios and historical refights as one-off tabletop battles. Wargames scenarios are, on the whole, well-designed. They give a chance - definitely not an equal chance, but a chance - to both sides, either through balance of combat power or through victory points. Historical refights have a specific charm of their own. The 100 Days is interesting - but so are Quatre Bras, Ligny, Waterloo and Wavre as standalone events. The history supplies some context.  Of course, playing the campaign allows us players to look at the strategic and operational contexts...but wargaming with miniatures is largely (although not necessarily) an affair of tactics anyway. I think 'supplying context' is an over-rated justification for playing campaigns. If one's gaming interest is focused on the tactical - and there may well be an element of self-selection here, because if you weren't, it might be a bit surprising that you were into tabletop wargaming - then it isn't clear that setting things in a campaign context improves the tactical experience. The only tactical issue it solves is one that older players will remember as a real issue - rules tended not to have formation or army morale, so therefore it was always tactically optimal to keep on pushing until the last unit collapsed (because, you never know, right?). However, this was largely solved by rules adding in army and formation morale.

Both of these forms of game have other specific virtues too. The real-world is physically and conceptually complicated. Scenario games get around the problem of how to translate the real world directly onto the tabletop by accepting conceptually higher levels of abstraction, especially in terrain. The temptation to model every ditch and rise on a historical field is strong but that makes design and set-up quite difficult, sometimes. Typically campaigns won't generate the full possible range of scenarios unless the campaign rules have sufficient complexity to allow for the possiblity of rear-guards, raiding logistic hubs, reconnaissance parties and so on.In somewhat similar vein, historical scenarios, thrown up as an emergent property of that vast system 'real life', generates tactical situations that are hard to throw up as part of any campaign game, because the systemic constrictions on the latter reduce the possibilities that can be thrown up. Also, iconic battles have a romance of their own - again, Waterloo is interesting as part of the 100 Days, but also it is interesting in its own right.

 

There is also the reduced importance of failure: if a game doesn't work for whatever reason, then maybe you lost a couple of hours. But the failure of a campaign can represent a couple of months' investment of gaming time, perhaps more. And these seem relatively common.

So, those might be some of the under-played attractions of non-campaign games. What about campaign games themselves, why do they not lend themselves to as much play as might be imagined?

Well, one possibility that I somewhat favour is that they are somewhat under-developed as a game form. Yes, I do know that several very good books have been written about them - I have read them. But, at best, it resembles a situation where the 'key texts' would consist of:

 

Don Featherstone's Wargames

Charles Grant's The War Game

Bruce Quarrie's Napleonic rules

Tony Bath's rules

Lionel Tarr's WW2 rules

Phil Dunn's Sea Battles

DBA & HFG

Henry Hyde's Shot, Steel and Stone

Chain of Command

Polemos: Napoleonics

Sam Mustafa's Blucher 

Most THW and Nordic Weasel games

(we might include Paul Leniston's blog on here as an example of serious devotion to Napoleonic campaigns and specific rules to support them - or should that be the other way around?)

I don't think I am being unfair here: these are the authors who I can think of who have written somewhat influential books or rules on campaigns, but I have listed their tactical rules rather than their campaign rules. Now, this certainly isn't a bad list at all, but I think it would be a stretch to say that campaign rules development has been a focus for rules development in the same way that tactical miniatures rules have been, and it shows. If you take a skim through The Wargames Website or The Miniatures Page and so on, you will find lots more discussion about the tactical aspects of period than aspects which relate to the operational level or the strategic level. This is reflected in a lack of models that can be translated into campaign structures. Of course, board games add something to the thought that has gone on here but almost definitionally, they haven't included the aspects relevant to refighting actions in miniature except incidentally. I think it is worth noting that relative to the popularity of the periods, I get the impression that campaign games in WW2 and C20-21 generally are much rarer than in other periods - I think this is probably a reflection that the game structures don't exist to generate the types of tactical action that players generally want for many of the rules systems, although the 'follow the platoon in action' system of Nuts! and the ladder campaigns of Too Fat Lardies' pint-sized campaigns do seem to cater really well for the section-platoon and reinforced platoon levels of action.

What I will say is that integrating the various levels of warfare is hard. What I mean here is how to incorporate and integrate political, strategic, operational and tactical elements. Now, we don't want (at least I don't want) to create a campaign version of the tactical rulesets which demand that you simultaneously adopt the personae of 1 general, 4 brigadiers, 14 colonels and 50 captains. But if we concentrate on a single command point - say a Napoleonic corps commander or a WW2 German Kampfgruppe commander - how do we incorporate the levels of command that we aren't focusing on? This can be somewhat easier in eras where an army commander was all things simultaneously (to some degree, I think I am right in saying this was never wholly true in any period), but the issues remain.

And finally we come to the practicalities. Although it is relatively easy to improvise some campaign materials - a sketched map, a few scribbled in hexes, some home made counters, some notes in a notebook - the equivalents wouldn't necessarily be that pleasing for a tactical miniatures game.  Making nicer yet practical versions of these things is somewhat harder and more time-consuming. This is especially true for digital components, which have great advantages in terms of storage, legibility, portability and so on, but a higher overhead in terms of getting it to work in the first place.

 

Now, I have concentrated in this post entirely on the positive aspects of not playing campaign games and on the negative aspects of playing them. This doesn't represent my views - I love campaigns! But there are practical and theoretical issues to overcome - although conversely I think this does give an opportunity space for wargames writers who really want to take this on. For myself, I hope to get more campaigns to the table, and soon...