For some time now, I’ve been working on a set of American Civil War naval wargaming rules (more and that some other time). This naturally led me to thinking about naval wargaming in general and what I like or dislike about it specifically. Which, in turn, led me to think about games and game design in general. The result was a bit of a muddle, but prodded by David Manley, I decided to write it down, in the hope that it might serve as a basis for discussion.
When I started to get into naval miniature wargaming a couple of years ago, the first thing that struck me was that, in contrary to land-based miniature wargames, what is sometimes called the simulationist approach to gaming is still very strong. In this context I mean by simulationist an approach that uses process-oriented mechanisms, tries to represent as many technical and quantifiable details as possible, often neglecting human or qualitative factors such as command and control, that involves players on all levels without assigning them a fixed role and that downplays what is usually called “friction”, namely the unplanned and often unplannable things that happen in war.
In hobby wargaming, this approach reached its peak during the 1970s and 1980s, with rules by Wargames Research Group for land games and Harpoon (which I owned as a teenager) for naval games usually cited as examples. In land miniature wargames, the simulationist approach is nowadays almost gone. Contemporary land wargames usually have result-orientated instead of process-orientated mechanisms, they put the player into a certain perspective or role, and they include command, control, and friction. All those things, I think, represent important innovations that would also benefit naval wargames. Let me look at them in detail and argue why I think so.
1. Designers of process-oriented games often argue that their mechanisms simulate a real-world procedure. So, for example, rolling to hit simulates the probability of a weapon to hit an object, and the traditional next step, rolling for penetration, simulates the probability of a projectile going through the armour of a ship. If you follow with a roll for hit location, this simulates the probability of a projectile hitting this or that piece of machinery. This procedure can involve lots of modifiers and tables, with the number of tables often seen as an indicator of how realistic rules are. Result-oriented mechanism, on the other hand, take a known result as their departing point. So, for example, you know from historical data that there is a certain probability, that, when firing for 15 minutes, your ship will cause enough damage on another ship to reduce its ability to fight by a certain factor. You now just need a mechanism to test if this event occurs – often a dice roll (or an opposed dice roll, which is more fun as it involves both players).
The reason that process-oriented shooting and damage procedures with lots of tables are often seen as more realistic is that they create a narrative with clear causes and effects. In terms of game design, they are storytelling machines: in discrete consecutive steps, they tell the story of a projectile hitting something and then causing this or that effect. If you like that kind of story, you’ll anticipate each step with suspense and therefore enjoy those kinds of mechanisms. Personally, I don’t like them because they take too long for something that has no decision points. But apart from such personal preferences, I don’t think they necessarily give more realistic results than the other approach, especially as for many historical periods, the exact and detailed data you need to create such procedures and tables without making them fully fictional is lacking.
On the other hand, result-oriented mechanisms quickly give me the necessary information (e.g. that my ship is slower due to damage) which I, as a player, need according to my role in the game.
2. This leads to the second aspect, namely into which perspective or role the game puts the player. In land wargames, it has become common to ask at which “level” a game is set: corps level or brigade level or company level etc. This usually designates the role the player takes on in the game. As their real-life counterpart, a player playing a corps commander will not be bothered with positioning the skirmishers of the 33rd Regiment of Foot. In many naval wargames, the player’s role is undecided or vague: They must make decisions usually made by the ship’s commander, but then they also have to get involved in the nitty gritty of targeting, shooting and resolving damage. When I talked about this to a friend, he said that naval games would be boring if players only had the role of the commander, because there is just too little to do. But surely this is a fault of the rules and nothing that reflects reality – I can’t imagine a captain leaving the bridge to squeeze off a couple of shots from B turret because he is bored by his duties. Wouldn’t it rather be the task of the game designer to make the role of the commander enjoyable by providing challenging rules for command and control instead of just adding details elsewhere to prevent the players from losing interest?
3. Mechanisms for command and control have become commonplace in land wargames, with some very innovative examples. Some of the efforts I have seen in naval wargaming try to emulate real-life procedures by using flags or similar contrivances. But I don’t think this is necessary, on the contrary, I think it’s a dead end as it stays too close to the thing it wants to model. I’ve never seen a land wargame use Chinese whispers or string-and-can telephones to simulate the transmission of orders. Admittedly, there was a time when written orders were en vogue, but this has since long been replaced by more interesting and efficient ways of modelling command and control, as embodied in the innovative activation mechanisms in games such as Chain of Command. This also ties into the issue of friction, as friction is often most visible when hampering command and control. No one would deny that friction played at least as big a role on sea as on land, but I have rarely seen it implemented.
Considering these points, I would argue that there is not more simulation in the simulationist approach than in other, more abstract approaches. I’ve recently listened to a podcast discussing naval wargames and I was struck by a couple of comments. They did acknowledge the lack of command-and-control mechanisms in many naval wargames, but then stated that adding them would make the game too complex. But if too much complexity is the problem, then why give up command and control mechanisms? Why not simplify shooting and resolving damage instead? I don’t think the men serving under Nelson would agree that the hardware was more important than the leadership of the fleet, and I don’t think a game can claim to be a simulation without accounting for such things.
People might argue that things like leadership can’t be simulated because they are hard to quantify and the mechanisms used to model them are too abstract or “gamey”. That’s why I try to avoid the term simulation and prefer to use the “translation” instead. The concept of translation hints at one important fact: whatever you do, you must use the means provided by the medium you translate into. If you translate Shakespeare’s sonnets to German, you must use the German language to express whatever Shakespeare wanted to express. There is simply no other way. This, of course, opens a lot of choices: Do I go for a literal translation, trying to get the meaning of the individual words right, but ignoring the rhyming scheme? Do I stick to the rhymes and sacrifice the exact meaning of some words? What to do with ambiguous words, or puns? One thing is certain: I won’t be able to do everything at once, and I can’t use any other means than those the German language provides.
The same, I think, is true of games: If you want to make a game about ACW ironclads fighting each other, you can only use the means of games. I can’t shoot a cannon ball through your living space or bolt iron plates to my window. Fortunately, games are an incredibly rich and varied medium, offering lots of tools (mechanisms) to achieve all kinds of effects. None of those tools are “closer to reality” than others. On the podcast mentioned before, someone said that wargames should not use mechanics that are too far from what people do in reality, so you shouldn’t make players solve a puzzle for instance. But is rolling dice really closer to what a gunnery officer on a warship does than solving a puzzle?
Of course, one could argue that rolling dice is a method for resolving objective probabilities, while solving a puzzle just tests a subjective skill (like guessing distances in Fletcher Pratt’s game). But if a game puts a player into a role (a captain or admiral), there might be other things than objective probabilities that are interesting to explore – things like behaviour under stress, the ability to prioritise or allocate resources, or the willingness to make decisions based on incomplete information. All of those aspects can contribute to the enjoyment of a game, as players of rules like David Manley’s Broadside and Salvo (resource allocation via action points) or TooFatLardies’ Kiss me, Hardy (stress and incomplete information due to dynamic turn order) can testify.
I want to end here, as this is already too long. I guess my conclusion is that I would like to see more naval wargames designers experiment with new and innovative mechanisms to translate problems of command and control, friction and numerous other things I haven’t touched upon (and probably don’t think about) that mattered to historical commanders of ships. And for those that want to take on other roles than that of a ship’s commander, lets experiment with campaign systems (as has been done by David Manley and recently Sam Mustafa) or even with ship design games (such as the fun little game published by Drachinifel some time ago). I think there is a lot of potential for experimentation and innovation and I’m looking forward to seeing what people come up with.
The Raft 