Heretical Gaming is my blog about my gaming life, featuring small skirmishes and big battles from many historical periods (and some in the mythic past or the far future too). The focus is on battle reports using a wide variety of rules, with the occasional rules review, book review and odd musing about the gaming and history. Most of the battles use 6mm-sized figures and vehicles, but occasionally 15mm and 28mm figures appear too.

Saturday 6 May 2023

Marginal Differences...

The Polemarch has written a typically excellent blogpost, riffing on some things about bias which I had mentioned in an earlier post on this blog. But, as these things do, it inspired some thoughts of my own on something he mentioned, namely game designs and the dependence of victory and defeat on marginal differences: he is experiencing something of this in his current Italian Wars campaign based on the boardgame, Machiavelli. I am experience something similar in test games of Europe in Agony, ready for my Thirty Years' War campaign.

To rehearse the argument, a game can be very fairly balanced in that all sides are equally likely to win, but this is in turn heavily dependent on some marginal differences in conflict outcomes early in the game. So in The Polemarch's example, Venice and Turkey are both highly motivated to control the Adriatic early on the game, there is no alternative strategy for either side which has the same pay-off, and the result of their conflict is highly unpredictable and basically dependent on small swings of fortune in the outcomes of dice rolls. Something similar pertains at the beginning of Europe in Agony, when the Protestants are highly motivated to attack Vienna, it is a 50:50 thing, but winning or losing the Early War scenario at any rate is highly dependent on the outcome.

And this is inherent in real warfare: it is often, not always, but often, a zero-sum game in which an action that benefits one side must harm the other.*  In real warfare this is one of the true importances of the 'fog of war': it stops decision-makers on either side from effectively calculating the utility of actions, and thus both sides can take actions which might ultimately benefit the other side.  But in a boardgame, this is relatively uncommon, and the odds can be calculated more exactly.  This then takes away the importance of the decisions, since the optimal path is clear, and then why would someone playing properly not take it?  This I guess also ties in to the thinking behind blogger Paul Leniston's recent decision to write a new set of Napoleonic rules after hundreds of games with a previous set: they had just become too well known between him and his opponent that (he felt) the games were becoming predictable, since the logic of the rules was too well known to both parties.

However, wargaming has another problem: it (very broadly speaking) aspires to some degree of realism. But there is nothing in the laws of nature which dictates that these problematic situations should be rare in military conflicts. So, in probabilistic terms, the initial set-ups of the wars mentioned above might be 'realistic' in the sense of generating the most plausible outcomes of the conflict; and this might be true at more tactical levels too. 

It is slightly difficult to know what to do here.  One can of course sacrifice everything to the game, but that is not always entirely satisfactory, since re-creating to some degree the issues and situations of history is a major attraction of historical wargaming. But, allowing that still grants us as rules-writers, scenario-designers and players a latitude, and we should always probably err on the side of the game where we can.  Specifically, I think we should be careful about designing rules and scenarios where the early turns are the most crucial rather than the least, as far as we can.

(* I am by no means a game theorist, but I assume that there are lots of outcomes in real wars which look like interractions between the two combatant sides but are really interactions between elements of the same side e.g. a combatant nation and a supportive country supplying weapons and money but not participating directly; this pressure helps to keep war from descending into total barbarity in all instances).


8 comments:

  1. You provide much to ponder.

    To bring forward only one thought from your response to Polemarch's post, I wonder if your promotion of non-crucial, early turns holds up to scrutiny in the historical record or game table. Not all battles begin as attritional affairs with a crucial climax at the end. Often battles begin when one army sees an advantage and seizes the initiative from an unsuspecting foe. Whether successful or not, these early-stage battle attempts may actually be the most crucial part of the battle.

    Regardless of the outcome of these early forays, both players may be forced into playing challenging positions once the dust settles. Players wrongfooted must test their mettle and grit in an attempt to overcome their misfortune. Players having fortune smile upon them must fight off the tendency to become complacent and overconfident.

    Whether on the attack or defense, the battle may take an unexpected and interesting path directly flowing from these early-game shocks to the system. Could an early, crucial shock end the battle prematurely? Sure but that happens in many of our tabletop recreations even when started innocently.

    When recreating a historical battle, we ought to follow the historical account even when key elements are frontloaded into the scenario.

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    1. Thanks very much for that Jonathan, appreciate your thoughts. They have inspired a couple of additional thoughts on this topic, I want to try and put a second blog post together on this (but first, some real wargaming to get in!)

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  2. Crucial events in early turns can surely screw a game but only if their result offer no alternative. In my tabletop games, the control of villages or towns may change early on and move one side far ahead in terms of victory. But if the French (for example) take the key village early with a troop concentration, the Prussians can apply pressure on the many other spots on the table where the French line is thinner. Similarly, a campaign might just need more possibilities to react to big events.

    Specifically for first turn events in campaigns, it might be a good idea to move the start date of the campaign forward one turn and just assume what is best for gameplay. Especially if there is no way of offering an alternative for a player.

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    1. Thanks very much for that Pascal, really appreciate it. Will try and engage with a couple of those points in another blog post.

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  3. Interesting post, thank you. I think that it might be that the concept of decision points could help here. Where does a player have to make decision, and how critical are they for the outcomes. Trivial decision points are boring, of course, but I suppose the idea is to have several key decision points spread across the scenario or campaign, each of which can turn the flow of events.
    Thus in a seize the hill scenario the first decision point is whether to rush in or not. The second what to do when the enemy has seized the hill, and so on. The point is that each decision has to give a chance of changing the narrative of the battle.
    Just a thought, hoping to move the thinking about scenario design on a little.

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    1. Thanks very much, very interesting comment. I will try and expand on some of that in another post.

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  4. ‘Events, my dear boy, events,’ if your games are not just that, games, but meant to represent the reality of international relations and conflicts then there should always be the possibility of the unforseen throwing out any calculations. This is one of the reasons that most wars are started with the expectation of a quick win to minimise the window of opportunity for chance events. Likewise many wars have dragged on because the weaker side has just hung on hoping for something to change in their favour. Most wargames have victory conditions that are far too predictable and clean - real life is much, much messier.

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    1. All very true. Although that is also not so true for historical conflicts which did in fact last for a long time and the results was in doubt; nor necessarily true for tactical actions in periods when armies could relatively easily avoid being brought to large-scale battle.

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