Dawn of the Lead

As I’ve written before, I’m not really that much into competitive wargaming – such as WHFB – anymore, preferring the narrative aspect of games instead. This is probably due to the fact that I’m a roleplayer at heart, having played RPG’s for 20 or so years compared to my 13 years of miniature gaming.

Every now and then I start toying with the idea of combining RPG’s with miniature wargames, and every time the whole process ends with no real conclusions, except for the fact that it’s pretty difficult to seamlessly integrate the two. The reason for this is the paradoxical nature of the problem, as what I’m basically trying to do is to remove the strict goal orientation from wargames and at the same time retain something of the game aspect in there as well. What I want, then, is a game you want to win and can win, but where winning is secondary to creating an interesting narrative with memorable scenes.

The problem this approach generates is that it easily makes either one or the other of the main components – miniature gaming and RPG’s – redundant. If you want a game you can win, you might as well play a full-blooded miniature game. If you want a narrative, why bother constricting your RPG with miniatures?

The current (4th) D&D edition combines these two elements, but in a way that’s not completely satisfactory. Basically whenever there’s combat, the game goes from RPGing to a very mechanical combat mode that is pretty much a grid-based miniature game. While this would suggest an actual combining of the two styles of game, it’s really more like two different games. When combat is entered, the characters often drop their personalities and become machines geared for optimally disposing of their enemies. This is all well and good, but simply alternating roleplaying and tactical gaming isn’t what I’m after.

How to make games tell a story? The obvious first answer is simply to insert some sort of story into whatever game you are playing.  It’s a valid point: To create a game with a story, we need a setting. I’m sure that a lot of miniature wargamers agree (they should!), that scenario-based games are usually more interesting than battles for battles’ sake. The scenario doesn’t have to be very detailed or even have a lot of effect in terms of game mechanics.  If there’s a rock in the middle of the battlefield, you can just state that you’re battling to claim that rock. What do you know, you have a scenario. Now while this is a step in the right direction, it will not carry the game on its own. Even if you call a game of chess the ultimate battle between good and evil, at its core it’s still a game of chess.

In addition to the setting, we need characters. This is pretty standard fare. A block of plastic soldiers isn’t nearly as interesting as the 43rd Colonial Marine battle squad under Lieutenant Harris. By giving characters, units and places names, you’re also defining them and suggesting that there is something more to them than what you see on the table. That’s where you’re evoking the imagination to fill in the blanks in the game/story.

Those two things are the prerequisites for a narrative game in my view, but they’re also only the starting point. Even if you do have your 43rd CM battle squad battling a horde of bloodthirsty xenomorphs on planet X336, you’re still just basically playing the same game as before. See the chess example, above. The question that now arises is how to differentiate this particular game from a hundred others, and this is where it gets tricky as we wander off into the grey area between miniature games and RPG’s.

Let’s look at this through an example. A lot of games feature some sort of mechanic for handling morale and reactions to killed companions etc. In my view this makes it too mechanical to have significant narrative impact, as basically a characters entire mental structure is compressed into a single characteristic. You roll a six and he’s a hero, you roll a one and he’s a coward. Why can’t you just decide whether he’s brave enough to stand fast or if he just runs away?

Because of the rules. The rules dictate what to do, and if you break them, the game is no longer fair. But fair to whom? As you’re striving to play a narrative wargame, you most likely are not playing against a complete stranger. What you’re trying to do is to have fun, not win by any means necessary. So my first real piece of advice in this article is

Don’t be afraid to change the rules.

The rules are there to serve you and to act as guidelines for resolving conflict situations in the game you’re playing. If they’re getting in the way of your fun, change them. You don’t have to throw them away, you don’t have to ignore them completely, tweak them and tamper with them a bit so that they suit your game better. Often you’ll find that there are parts of a rules system you don’t like even if the system is otherwise perfect. Solution? Simple. Just do away with the bit that doesn’t work and replace it with something more suitable.

This might seem like something so amazingly obvious that it doesn’t need to be said, but trust me when I say it isn’t. 13 years of playing WHFB and we still won’t change a rule without an official decree from GW. Why? We (sometimes unfortunately) play WHFB for its competitive aspect, so the rules are very important. You tamper with one, and you might put the whole thing off balance, which then would lead to it no longer being fair which in turn leads to everyone not having an equal chance at winning. And this elegantly leads to my next piece of advice, which is

Have fun first, try to win second.

This doesn’t mean you have to completely ditch the idea of winning, you just have to put it in perspective. As it’s summertime, I’ve played a lot of football with my friends and would love to see the mentality shown in those games transferred to wargaming. In our football matches it’s not really important who scores the most goals or which side wins. Nobody wants to ruin the fun by taking the whole thing too seriously. You’re probably not playing wargames for money, and most adults don’t need to build their self-esteem on winning in miniature games, so lighten up and have a bit of fun. Once you grasp this mentality, games will provide you with endless chances to create memorable scenes, from the noble knight’s heroic but doomed charge into the ranks of the enemy to the desperate hunter’s useless bullets against a werewolf. Often losing and going out in style can be just as, or more satisfying than winning.

It’s up to you how much emphasis you want to put on winning the game. If you want to retain some amount of competition in the game, you could assign different victory conditions and goals for different characters. You could create relationships between characters, making them act in a certain way (“He will always protect her”), or create rules to govern their actions in specific situations. The sky’s pretty much the limit.

The one thing you have to bear in mind is that in the end it depends a lot on whether players are willing to sacrifice victory in favour of a more interesting game. I’ve found that the more players like to do this, the better the games get. Correspondingly the more people tend to focus on winning, the drearier the games get. I could tell more than a few stories about glorious WHFB battles with mighty dragons, epic heroes and ancient wizards all hiding behind houses or inside woods so as not to risk giving your opponent victory points. Personally, that’s not something I want to see in my games.

I could go on and on with this. I mean, I haven’t even touched on narrated or GM-led games, cooperative gaming or unwinnable scenarios! Who knows, they might be the topics of a future post or three. I feel, however, that I’ve rambled on more than enough. To summarize the whole post, I’ll freely quote a friend of mine who I discussed this subject with.

“So, we make the rules malleable and optional, and there’s no real winner either? We could just as well be kids playing with toys.”

Indeed.

These last few days I’ve been thinking about the following question:

Am I ever going to game all those scenarios I’m designing, or use the forces and gaming tables that I’m building for actual gaming?

For someone who’s invested a fair amount of money and time in collecting, putting together and painting a ton of miniatures and scenery, this might seem like a strange question. Surely all that stuff has been bought for a reason, and that reason is gaming. What use is a gaming table if it’s never played on? Why pick up two opposing forces if you’re not going to get some dice rolling? Good questions, indeed.

I was introduced to the hobby by my two older brothers, who were avid RPG gamers way back when the D&D red box was all the rage – it was even translated into Finnish – and who used to buy and paint all sorts of fantasy miniatures to use with roleplaying games. I was around 6-7 years old, and the little toy soldiers fascinated me. My brothers would paint them up, and of course I wanted to try that too. After I had dunked a mini or two completely in a jar of paint (I figured that’d be the quickest way to basecoat) they decided that I’d painted enough and would have to  wait a few years before trying again.

That few years turned into 6. I kept on playing RPGs and while I was familiar with miniatures, I didn’t see the use in buying them. If we needed miniatures to represent and clarify a combat situation, we’d dig into the old plastic box where my brothers’ more or less painted stuff was. Or we just used pennies or whatever we had at hand. And then I was introduced to WHFB. The stuff was like crack, and I was instantly hooked. It didn’t take me a long while to assemble my first army of miniature orcs and memorize all the fiction in the army book and the rules.  And the painting! I painted them slowly and meticulously, at a pace at which it must’ve taken me 4-5 hours for every single miniature, and looking back I can’t see where all that time went, the minis really aren’t much to look at.

Anyhow painting wasn’t the important thing. Painted miniatures looked better, sure, but it was the gaming that counted. We would spend hours and hours designing army lists that exploited every little loophole in the rules. If your opponent was bringing a knife, you brought not only a gun but slash-proof vest as well. If he had a unit that was immune to psychology, you brought a magic item that ignored psychology rules altogether. And so on and so on. Most of our armies were unpainted, and we used a lot of proxies. An empty base was a giant, a troll was an ogre and a dragon was a chariot. We didn’t really mind, as the painting and the miniatures themselves were clearly of secondary importance compared to the game itself.

Years went on. Armies grew and started to have more paint on them than before. The spirit of the games shifted in a friendlier direction, as new rules and slowly amounting maturity stopped the games from becoming simple tasks of army optimization. Slowly but surely narrative began to creep in. Units were not chosen solely for their combat prowess or special abilities, but for their flavour as well and themed armies started surfacing. The games were still competitive affairs, but now it was becoming more and more fun even when you were losing. It was – and is today – common for us to narrate whatever was happening with the rules, leading to some hilarious battles. It somewhat lessened the frustration of seeing your entire army devastated in two turns, too. The majority of our gaming group have always been RPG gamers first and wargamers second, which might explain our tendency towards narration.

With battles coloured with narration, the same narrative thinking started making its way to my painting as well. As I was painting a miniature I was wondering what his name was, and what the story behind him was. It was glorious to place a unit of such individuals on the table, and awful to see them swept away with a bad roll of the dice. I started to get the feeling, that the best part about creating a unit of miniatures wasn’t actually using them, but instead the process of painting them and giving them life through background stories and painted and modelled detail. It was like a doll house: creating an intricate model of a house for dolls becomes much more pleasing than actually playing with the dolls themselves.

When you combine a narrative mentality like that with my overall tendency for excitability for whatever I think is cool for the moment – mostly due to a book read or a movie seen – it’s no wonder that I tend to easily pick up a bunch of models for this or that genre, which I will paint up and not game with as I shift my attention to something completely different. Aliens, predators, colonial marines, vampires, werewolves, vampire hunters, werewolf hunters, zombies, zombie hunters, post-apocalyptic dragon hunters…you name it. Sure, I always think of all the good games I’m going to have using whatever miniatures I’m painting at the moment, but very rarely end up playing the games. They turn out much more fun when reality is not allowed to mess with good solid fantasy.

Where am I going with all this rambling? Maybe it’s just the question of me no longer seeing myself as a miniature gamer, but as a miniature collector or modeller instead. My approach to the hobby is starting to resemble that of the doll house enthusiast or the model railway hobbyist, as the process of building something and adding details and narrative to it is becoming more important than actually using the thing “as intended.”

As a roleplayer, however, I find the idea of blending RPGs and wargames intriguing. Could it be possible to retain the best elements of both and combine them into a seamless system sporting both the strong narrative element of RPGs and the strategic and gaming element of wargaming? That’s what I’m looking for in my gaming. If I ever manage to nail it, I’ll be sure to let you know. I’ll probably type up a full post one day when the mood strikes me.

Now, to answer the question presented at the start of this post:

Probably not. But with all the fun had with the designing, painting, building and all, it’s not really a big loss, is it?

Oh, and we’re having our annual WHFB summer bash in a week or so. Even with all the fancy-pants talk about narration, it’s always a special feeling rolling 20d6.