Wednesday 11 May 2016

In Praise of Simplicity

 About a month ago down at the library Martin and I play tested a set of rules that I downloaded and printed out recently. Called Panzer War, they are a free set of quite detailed but still I think playable skirmish rules. How we ended up play testing this set of rules is a bit of a funny story. Originally it started out as a quest to find a decent set of modern period micro armour rules, as I'm dissatisfied with the ones I have so far. I downloaded and read a few sets of rules but could never find anything that really clicked with me. So I went back through my list of files and some of the older games that I have downloaded a while ago and took another look. Remembering that I had a set of rules called AirLand War I took a look at them again. AirLand War is actually an expansion to Panzer War. So with the rationale that I should try the basic game first before the expansion set I suggested we try Panzer war to Martin. But owing to the complexity of the rules, with such factors as vehicle angle and turned rotation speed we decided that it would be best to try it out in 15 mm first. So there you have it they went from modern micro armor to 15 mm, so does that make sense?

The result? Well let's just say things didn't work out exactly as we planned. For a more detailed after action report I direct you to another club member my friend John and his blog The Minstrel Boy. But I can summarize here, the game went very slow and owing to the long range of weapons (we were not using the recommended ranges for that scale) it ended rather quick. I think perhaps there was too much on the table and perhaps not enough scenery. Although the tank combat results where more "realistic" I don't think the extra detail really added much to the game. And so it occurred to me that if the extra detail didn't add to the enjoyment of the game why bother with it? Martin imparted a wonderful piece of wisdom to me recently about gaming whereby he explained to me the difference between modeling the process and modeling the results. Or to put it quite simply how it happens versus what happens. I realized there was more interested in what happened then exactly how it happened. The house were still somewhat important and should be modeled realistically towards expectations but the process should not bogged down the flow of the game. The Panzer War experiment certainly ran counter to my personal trend of moving toward simpler systems. I have already switched to far simpler games in other genres. For instance instead of Full Thrust, which is a terrific system don't get me wrong, I now play Sunder The Stars. And instead of Dirtside I will try Laserstorm, by Nordic Weasel Games. In these two examples it's mainly because I want to spend more time playing a battle then designing units for it. Specifically in the case of Full Thrust I've seen battles lost or one in the design phase rather than on the table, and that was before the plethora of options opened up in the newer unofficial supplement Project Continuum which is over 150 pages long. My main goal with gaming is to get figs on the table, push them around and roll dice. And simpler games serve this purpose well. It will only be a balance between simplicity and detail. As too much of one and not enough the other can spoil your enjoyment of a game.

After purchasing the PDF of Laserstorm I splurged and bought PDFs of FiveCore the generic skirmish game and Five Men at Kursk their more detailed will work to skirmish rules. As well as some expansions and add on modules. So I'll be giving the FiveCore System some testing in the future. How it goes, I will keep you posted.

So yeah, a longer post and it's about gaming, yeah me.

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