Damned if you do, Damned if you don't

I have stumbled across this rather interesting interview with Rick Priestly on the Realms of Chaos blog. It's short but well worth a read as he is very candid.

It also contains a couple of gems of information I didn't know about. Specifically that Warhammer 4th edition was put together on the cheap. This seemed odd because 4th edition always felt to me to be the point at which Games Workshop shifted from being quite anarchic and random, to much more organised. I have written before about how hard it was for new players to start, something which changed notably during 4th edition.

Thinking about it though, it does make a lot of sense. It was certainly the point at which the number of artists and writers working on Games Workshop products decreased and, if you don't have a pot to piss in, you have to be organised. There isn't the money around to throw at any old project the studio comes up with because you have to get a decent return.

The really interesting comment comes in answer a question about 3rd edition being the least playable version of Warhammer. He equivocates a bit, but generally agrees that it was very sluggish, a comment I can certainly agree with, but it is a throwaway remark that is most interesting to me.

The next edition [4th]was way more energetic and actually got people playing Warhammer again (sales had really slumped prior to that).

The revelation that sales of Warhammer had slumped in 3rd edition certainly fits with my experience. 3rd edition was current when I started playing and the interests of my friends and I was focused firstly on Warhammer 40,000, secondly on Epic and thirdly on some the other games GW produced at the time (such as Space Hulk and Advanced HeroQuest). Warhammer was not on our radar until 4th edition came along and we all started collecting Warhammer armies (I actually had looked at Warhammer prior to this and had the rule books but hadn't persuaded any of my friends to take an interest).

However, I am not sure the reason for Warhammer's poor sales prior to 4th edition had much to do with the rules. My friends and I had never played a game and had no idea how it played. I think the sales slump can be blamed on the absence of new material for the game and the consequent lack of coverage in White Dwarf.

Amazingly it was a good six months or so of reading White Dwarf before I even registered that such a game as Warhammer existed. This may sound odd, but by the time I started reading White Dwarf in 1990, Warhammer and Warhammer Armies had long been released. The only new Warhammer material was from the forthcoming "Realms of Chaos: the Lost and the Damned" book and these articles were titled "Realms of Chaos" so I was assuming that it was a separate game in its own right. The only other Warhammer material were a few 'Eavy metal images, scenery articles, which were effectively generic, and material for other games set in the Warhammer world like Advanced HeroQuest and Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay.

This did change a little over time. White Dwarf started to run a series of spotlight articles on particular players armies, starting, memorably, with Andy Chamber's skaven in White Dwarf 138. It was these articles that sparked my interest in the game. But when 4th edition came along, White Dwarf was saturated with coverage of new models, new rules (mostly army book previews), background (also from army books) and battle reports, then a relatively new idea that really show cased what a Warhammer army could and should look like. All of this did a lot to encourage us to take an interest in the game and build our collections.

For us, and I suspect for many others, what turned our attention to Warhammer wasn't the rules, but an explosion of new models and content.

If my supposition is correct, then it has some intriguing implications. Games Workshop is often castigated for churning out new rules and new editions endlessly in order to cynically encourage sales and "force" players to update the armies in order to keep up with rules changes. In fact Rick Priestly says as much in the interview when he describes the current design studio as "the promotions department of a toy company". But if sales drop when rules and models are not constantly being updated then the question is 'what else are they to do?' To keep up sales you need new material which means, once a game has reached a certain maturity you need endless revisions. Games Workshop are caught between a rock and hard place, castigated for releasing new material, ignored if they don't.

Not that this excuses every bit of bad behaviour from the evil corporate behemoth, but it does make me consider their position in a slightly different, and maybe more sympathetic, light.

New Years Resolutions

So we've hit January 6th and the Christmas decorations should be down if they were ever up in the first place, the Christmas Radio Times is in the bin, the last of the chocolates used up and things are starting to feel properly like January with all the fog, rain and gloom that that implies. Nice upbeat start to the new year there.

And yet, 2013 feels like a year of possibilities. If 2012 was the year in which the wargaming community collectively went nuts about Kickstarter and Indiegogo, and every company felt it had to crowd source the funding for something, even if it was just their new Kitchen, then 2013 ought to be the year in which a million projects come to fruition.

Of course, to some extent we are already there, Dreadball, Sedition Wars and Zombicide have already made into the shops, but there is still a great deal to come, from Kings of War goodies, to new Bushido models, to Relic Knights, Reaper Bones and a whole bunch of things to which I wasn't paying much attention. So this year should be a fantastic boom time for new miniatures and games.

Either that or it will all be a tremendous flop and we will learn a valuable lesson about not having hope or faith in anything.

Not that the boom is over yet. Rick Priestly and co have just launched the Beyond the Gates of Antares Kickstarter. It's hard to know what to make of this. Other than some nice illustrations, a few bits of background and a list of gaming noteworthies associated with the project we really don't have much to go on. This is apparently the plan however, as the aim is for the players to co-develop the universe and for it to be based around the games we actually play, using the Internet to have players games impact the development of the game Universe in a measurable way.

This is all quite interesting, but I can't help but be a touch sceptical about mixing an online concept with an inherently traditional physical game. Can analogue and digital concepts mesh comfortably? This will be one to watch, though I may still through a few quid at the Kickstarter based on Rick Priestly's name alone.

Turning to myself, if I have an overarching plan for the year, then its to try and be more focused. 2012 was characterised by much activity to only limited effect. I got a lot of models painted, not to mention scenery, acquired a whole new bunch of stuff and yet used very little of it in an actual game. My Inquisitor warbands remain nicely painted (by my standards) in a cabinet, but unused, while the gaming I did do was either with largely unpainted models (Warhammer, Kings of War, Warpath) or with games that don't need painted models at all (Last Night on Earth, Small World, Ticket to Ride).

With that in mind, I have set myself a concrete goal, and only one concrete goal. I will finish painting my Chaos Dwarf army, after leaving it unpainted for nearly twenty years, make some scenery and a new gaming table appropriate for it and actually play a game. I have already made a good start, my Chaos Dwarf warriors and Blunderbusses are done, as is my Iron Daemon and my Bull Centaurs are well underway. Pictures soon, promise.

More important than the goal, however, is my approach to it. This time I will fix on this goal, set no others until its done and not allow myself to be distracted by any other wargaming projects until then. I can play games, even buy new stuff, but no new painting or building until the Chaos Dwarfs are ready.

I really mean it this time, I'm confident I will hold until at least February. And you can hold me to that.

Missing the Point

A few weeks back I wrote about the contrast between the very tightly written, tournament focused rules of Field of Glory and DBMM and the looser style favoured by Rick Priestly in Black Powder and Hail Caesar. Today I want to return to that theme but focus on a particular aspect of it - point values.

There is a tendency in the tradition of the more narrative focused, more loosely written games like Hail Caesar and Black Powder to be quite down on points based systems for army selections. Rick Preistly seems to be quite down on it in the interviews I've read, equating it with Tournament and Competitive play specifically. In fact Preistly is not particulary keen on army lists at all.

"we will do them as players feel they need them - in reality there's no surviving evidence to make these judgements but dedicated researchers have given us the WAB and FOG army lists and people feel they need them." (Miniature Wargames 333, January 2011)

Its interesting that Jervis Johnson, the Black Powder co-writer, also tried to limit the use of points in Epic: Armageddon for Games Workshop, creating tournament specific lists and leaving large numbers of older miniatures with rules but no points values.

The rather wonderful free Doctor Who Miniature Game also left out points values, justifying it with this statement

Points values are not given for models in the DWMG. This has been a subject of much debate, but my final word is that I think that balancing games with a fixed points limit on models limits creativity and encourages tournament style play. Most scenarios for the game involve mismatched forces – true to the episodes themselves – with victory usually obtainable by achieving specific conditions in each game.

I quote this statement because it sums up the view of many about points-based systems, that they encourage competitive, tournament style play and are not suitable for looser, narrative based games.

I'm not sure that I agree. I think it would be true if players expected points to provide a perfectly balanced rating system such that armies of equal points would always be of equal effectiveness on the table. But in practice I think gamers are more nuanced than that. Points values are there to provided a rough ready reckoner such that two players can quickly rustle up to armies and, 9 times out of 10, play a reasonably fair and balanced game.

But why should this be so important? As the statement from DWMG says, not all encounters will be between balanced forces. In real life armies are rarely of equal size or effectiveness. But the crucial thing to understand here is that these are Wargames, the Game element is as crucial as the War and in a game both sides need a reasonable chance of victory in order to keep it interesting.

I'm not saying that games have to be scrupulously fair or that players should enter into them with a 'win at all costs' attitude. I am saying that games in which players are pitted against one another require both sides to attempt to win and to have a chance of doing so in order to keep things interesting. Of course fair play and good humour is important, particularly in friendly games, but there is little enjoyment in playing a passive opponent or in being beaten without even the possibility of being able to fight back.

So where do points values fit into all this? Well, points values give players a ready reckoner for wants constitutes a balanced scenario. This is important if you want to make sure that both players have a roughly equal chance of success and helps to avoid a one sided game.

That isn't to say that all scenarios should involve forces of equal size or strength. There has been a Warhammer scenario since 5th edition called last stand in which one side has twice the points of the other and the underdogs only roll is to keep at least one unit alive until the end of the game, gaining a big victory point bonus for doing so. It is possible to tweak relative points values to allow for more unequal encounters or to handicap more experienced players.

The point that sometimes seems to be forgotten by games designers is that not everyone is like them. Which is to say, not everyone has a great deal of experience creating balanced scenarios and judging the strength of armies. Some years ago I was introducing a friend to a new skirmish game. I had two lots of models, one were supposed to be elite troopers the other raw recruits so I devised a basic scenario in which the raws outnumbered the elites 2 to 1 figuring this would be balanced. The elites got slaughtered, clearly because I had overestimated the effect of troop quality. This is the draw back of having no mechanism to help players judge the relative strength of the troops.

Of course not all points systems are fair and balanced and mistakes happen. But points can still do a lot of good in helping players to devise more interesting games.

The Devil's in the Details

With Rick Priestly's recent departure from Games Workshop discussion of him has been all over the Wargaming community's message boards and blogs. As a consequence of this I've found myself reading a number of interviews with him both recent and old. Interestingly a prevailing theme has emerged. Take this comment from an unabridged version of an interview from Battlegames 21 February 2010 (sadly I've lost the link).

"Your sense of overview is very poor as a teenager, but your sense for detail is fantastically precise. That’s something that people sometimes forget, and even today, when I’m writing rules, some of the criticism I get, particularly from older gamers, whilst occasionally I’m accused of dumbing down, it’s usually, “Oh, this is far too complicated,” and my answer is, “Yes it is too complicated for you, but it’s not too complicated for kids! Anyone who is 14 can pick this up, and they’ll have grasped it like that!”

This struck a chord with me because it perfectly describes how I used to be when I first started out in Wargaming in the 1990s, obsessed with detail and rules and able to absorb and process them at great speed. I remember being actively dissapointed that when Warhammer moved from 3rd to 4th edition it shifted it's focus from d100 tables to cards. The tables seemed, somehow to be more detailed and 'rulesy', the cards were too straightforward.

The theme emerges again in an interview in Miniature Wargames 333.

"Asked what gap in the Ancients rules market has had identified, Rick replies that "Existing ones like DBM and FOG are based on tournament and competitive play and geared to 15mm. Black Powder is a really fun, enjoyable and refreshing games system that's not comercially orientated."

Later in the same interview he talks about the development of his Black Powder rules. They resulted from informal evenings with friends in which they had a curry and decided to push some miniatures around a board.

The contrast Priestly identifies is between, what he sees as, the prevailing taste among wargamers for very tightly written rules designed to cover all situations and his approach, which concentrates on fun but open-ended rules that players are encouraged to develop themselves.

I'm not sure how accurate his perception of the hobby is, nor am I sure whether it is intended to be read as a criticism, but his comments did strike a chord with me. In my more sanguine moments I can find myself nodding along with Priestly's comments and I certainly have no competitive streak or interest in the tournament scene. But in the middle of a game I often find myself flicking through rulebooks desperately searching for the elusive paragraph that explains an apparent contradiction.

Priestly's comments came back to me again recently when I read an announcement from Wyrd Games, producers of the rather unusual and wonderful skirmish game Malifaux. Since the release of the Malifaux rulebook, Wyrd have released a number of eratta, rules clarifications and rules tweaks intended to ensure balance in the game. They are now applying these updates to the summary cards packaged with their models and the new cards will be included with future production runs. At the same time, they are offering to exchange existing player's old cards for the new ones if they are posted to Wyrd along with a self-adressed envelope.

This announcement and the reaction to it has prompted illustrates a number of things about the Wargaming community that I intend to return to again, but the reason I thought of it in this case is because it chimes with what Rick Priestly had been saying.

Let me emphasise that this plan has not been prompted by a new edition of Malifaux and that the old cards are still compatable with the rules. The new cards only clarify a few words or make a few minor tweaks. This has been done in the interest of maintaining game balance.

At the same time, Malifaux is one of the most narrative based games I have seen. A good half of the page count of it's two rulebooks is taken up with story explaining the background of the game world and it's characters. The world of Malifaux is a bizarre hybrid of fantasy, victoriana, steam punk and the wild west, in which a western gunslinger can take on a victorian undertaker or an arachnid cyborg face a demonic baby with a doll and a knife. And yet, the creators of this stranged story-based game still feel the need to optimise the rules for tournament play. Treating the game as a strict competition.

It's worth noting that several of the changes have been incorporated to eliminate rules loop holes that, if exploited, can lead to a huge advantage to one side and a boring game for all concerned. There is certainly merit in the argument that if the rules are that lopsided something needs to be done to correct it.

Yet I find myself thinking, if I found a loop hole that allowed me to win, but wrecked the game and rendered it no fun for myself or my opponent, wouldn't I just ignore it? In a sober moment, yes, but I suspect that I, and many other gamers, when faced with that situation in a game would exploit the loophole. Not due to any excessive competitive streak, but simply because when faced with the rules we feel obliged to play them as written and deliberately ignoring an advantage feels like a kind of cheating.

I have often thought there is a touch of the autistic in the wargaming community. Possibly I'm projecting because of my own diagnosis, but I think the obsession with lists and rules has an obvious appeal to the autistic mind. How much time to wargamers spend obsessing over the details of historical uniforms or the precise composition of an army? How much space is taken up on Forums on rules questions? Not that everyone does this, but plenty do. A literalist reading of the rules certainly fits into this characterisation. Not that I would see this as a criticism, getting the details right can be hugely important and a hopelessly unbalanced game is no fun for anybody, otherwise why employ playtesters?

So what conclusions can we draw from this? I'm not sure. Possibly a happy medium can exist between tightly written rules and the flexibility to be creative with them. At the same time, the next time I find myself uncertain of the rules I'll try to take a deep breath and thinking logically before reaching frantically for the rulebook.