Tony Bath Campaign Rules #6
All because an English bloke wanted to make his fiction a reality.
Tony Bath understood wargames far better than anyone has ever given him credit for.
Many times in Tony's book, he will explain the reasoning behind the rules he presents. He will give anecdotes about trying different things, or friends of his coming up with variations, or how the obvious solution is actually bad and his version seems better.
I think that Tony is actually quite bad at explaining himself. He knew, intuitively, what was a good wargame and what wasn't. The reasons he gives for certain rules may seem fine at face value, but upon deeper inspection he was fixing deeply rooted problems in modern games with extremely clever methods.
I am not here to spell out Tony’s Rules for you. I am here to open your mind to the layers behind the words, so that you may further understand his genius. These are principles of Wargames, this list is far from exhaustive, but I hope it points your ship in the right direction.
I urge you to think back to your last game of Catan, or Diplomacy, or Dungeons & Dragons, or Adventurer Conqueror King System, or Monopoly, or Risk, or Chess. I urge you to think of any friction points between the overall game and the internal factions, the specific rubbing points where conflict was avoided, the times where individual actions didn’t have any effect on the group and when large swathes of the game moved towards a new game state and some were unaffected, when faction interplay and conflict was discouraged or allowed to be avoided, where gameplay systems and rules interrupted and funneled the game into a game that it didn’t want to be.
All of these great games have shortcomings. They have opportunities for the players to choose NOT war, to avoid the conflict, to not play the game, to hide behind rules.
Why are we here? What are we doing?
Every time I open Tony’s book, I find another rule that I ponder. And every time, it has such far reaching implications that I can’t believe these are all in one place.
Read for yourself, thinking critically of all the good and bad aspects of wargames you love, and I hope you find a new appreciation for the genius of one, Tony Bath.
Closed System, Zero Sum Games
When one side gains something, it must necessarily come as a loss to another side.
It is completely necessary to a wargame to have conflict. The baseline conflict to be generated is wanting something that someone else has. If a player can sit and wait passively, and gain resources without the loss of resources from a different player, we are not generating any conflict. We might be generating potential energy for a conflict in the future, but we are not generating one right now.
The most vicious and exciting moments of games are not when potential is built up, but when it is released. If every resource is accounted for at the start, and the only way to gain resources is to take them from another player, there is constant, unavoidable conflict.
The balance of the game and the forces is always going up and down simultaneously. This will create new and lost opportunities for engagement every single time an event happens.
Important to note that zero sum games still create and release potential energy, they just do so without an ever expanding lull that has no impetus to compress. Factions gaining resources forever without any conflict is a poor excuse for a wargame.
Undisputed Command and Control
The mechanism of player agency in most games is that the player is the almighty and undisputed ruler of their faction. While this is good for simplifying the logistics of play, it is terrible for generating exciting play over long periods.
The bigger the factions become in map based games, the worse this problem becomes. When the entire world is taken up by only two or three factions, the game changes significantly in terms of pace and scale of conflict.
Generally speaking, when looking at large wargames with many factions, the most exciting and interesting and complicated part will be at the very start, when there are many players and factions all fighting for position.
Once the factions are reduced and the players eliminated or grouped together, this engaging and ongoing pressure is removed. It is only removed, because there are little to no mechanisms to simulate or continue the jostling of many conflicting goals.
Having unbridled reign over a faction results in stale, boring factions in the same way that playing Risk with only 2 players is terrifying boring compared to playing with 8. The more conflict that can be generated between pieces of the game's resources, the more interesting and exciting it will be over time.
When rulesets take a homogenous command structure of the entire faction, it greatly simplifies some logistical aspects, but by its very nature neuters the faction’s ability to create internal and interesting tension over time. When we have too many of these flaccid factions in a game, it reduces the friction points that lead to the fires of war by an astounding, and ultimately disappointing degree.
Disruption of Discrete Resolutions
Even within 'perfect' games like chess, there needs to be some interruption of the discrete nature. Pawns can't move backwards! This is extremely important to the nature of the game. It means that the battlefield and the possibilities are constantly changing.
It is extremely important for any game with conflict to have well understood and reliable resolution mechanics. To go along with that, it is very important that and discrete resolution system have disruptions that the players can use to jockey for position outside of that.
It is worth it to note that using dice within the tactical stage of battle is already a method of dealing with this. If armies are checked against each other on a deterministic chart, then this effect would be even more pronounced.
Any game that allows changes to be reverted, and has discrete or highly systematized conflict resolution, has the chance to become stagnant. There needs to be some kind of mechanism to permanently change the gameboard and game state over time to keep the experience evolving over time. If a game board or state is reset at any point, there must be something that changes between each setup.
It is when we mix non discrete resolution systems, and an ever changing game state, that we acquire the highest degree of variation and potential for varied conflict, especially over a long period of time and gameplay.
Rulings, not Rules
By far one of the most misunderstood aspects of Dungeons & Dragons, is the infamous ‘Rule Zero’.
I will steal an example from Here.
“The purpose of rulings and “rule zero” must be addressed. Rule Zero states that it is the spirit of the game, not the letter of the rules, which must prevail. In a sense this is true, but it is also far too vague: what IS the spirit of the game, and when is it enough to override the rules themselves? For that matter, what are the rules?
To give an example, the rules for combat are well defined. The chance for a man in leather to be killed by an attack with a dagger is factually defined, killing the target on a roll of 7 or better. The letter of the rule insists on a 40% chance of failure. But if the thief is sneaking and the victim is asleep, the victim is most certainly a dead man, and the roll is not necessary. Here, the spirit of the game would be to declare the victim slain, killed easily in his sleep.“The more a process of rules is laid out in the rule book, the less room for rulings there are. Codification of interactions between political factions is death to freeform roleplay. The primary reason diplomacy is so excellent at producing a wargame simulation with a high degree of social engineering and real world politics is because there are practically no rules to how the players can interact with each other outside of a very small subset of situations.
By leaving the roleplay and politics, of both internal and external conflicts, as rules lite as possible, and only providing rules for very direct confrontations, the rules leave the most room for the most complex and organic of interactions.