Having enjoyed this forum for a little over a year, I regularly see discussions concerning the perceived realism of Epic rules, be it movement, the assault mechanism or clipping assaults.

I cannot help but wonder if a lot of GW (and other companies') miniature games have put a real dent in gamers' conception of realism. Many times, I think it comes a lot closer to "fairness" than "realism". Coming from the strategy board games' direction, myself, I see no problem in how over-stretching, (by for instance attacking) can be problematic, no matter how "elite" the formation is. Is clipping "gamey", or is it how an assault would be conducted in real warfare? Many wargames (probably for the thrill and fun of it") seem to favour heroic acts, rather than realistic.

A digression, surely, but my biggest pet peeve with the Lord of the Rings movies is when Gandalf strategically advices Theoden to meet Saruman's army on the field, instead of using the castle that never had fallen (which, incidentally, also happens to be Gandalf's original advice). The "new" advice is probably construed by Team Jackson to reinforce the theme of courage, which is rampant throughout the entire movie, but it is nonetheless significant of a "romantic" view on warfare.

To return to the original thought, I think one cause to this debate is that Epic is a game, and that a game is supposed to be fair. Most miniatures' games are designed to put two equal forces on each side of the table, whereas for instance strategic board games are designed to represent actual forces, and stalling the inevitable defeat can be considered a victory.

I will leave it at this for now, but it would be fun to read other people's thoughts.

/Fredmans

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Follow my Epic painting projects: Tyranids vs Steel Legion and Inquisition vs Lost and the Damned @
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fredmans, don't go there. PLEASE....!

   

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It would be nice to get lightspeed,
so far we can only reach slight speed.- Erik M
092b85658e746a91d343e53509d357744e56f641

I see Epic as being semi-simulation in style, but with some concessions made for playability's sake...

...for example by playing the game in turns, instead of in real time!

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Currently doing a plastic scenery kickstarter

That's how I look at it, also.

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"I don't believe in destiny or the guiding hand of fate." N. Peart

Agreed ... And realism is in the eyes of the beholder ...

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Legion 4 "Cry Havoc, and let slip the Dogs of War !" ... "People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf."

The activation system is closer to actual combat than IGOYOUGO, I think Epic´s engine works very well and it can be addapted to historical wargaming with great success   ( by just dropping speeds of the units by 5cm and increasing the range of the weapons by 15cm    )

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Epic Armageddon in Spanish: http://www.box.net/shared/aii6v2xqu3

In the end, the questions about a simulation game -- much like questions about a work of history -- is what kind of story does it intend to tell, and, crucially, does it succeed in telling that story on its own terms?

One general issue:
'realism' can be a fool's errand if you think it means simulating everything.

E.g. SPI's Air War had subsystems for everything in Modern air combat -- radar contact, Missile lock-ons, etc., etc.  But by nature, when you complete a turn of 2 scale seconds in an hour or two hours, you've lost something of the 'reality' of the situation.

Much of the first wave of 'realistic' wargames were heavily focused on the technical details of the weapon systems that were their main characters -- e.g. Tobruk, or Tractics.  They ended up doing a good job of simulating results on a firing range, but a far poorer job of capturing the battlefield, mainly because the human element was hard to simulate quantitatively.

Beyond a sort of equipment fetishism, there's a secondary challenge involved with getting the scale right. Briefly, the smallest scales don't 'scale' cleanly -- a company-sized skirmish played with 1:1 figure scales doesn't actually capture company scale-combat that well, in part because the player in command knows too much about what is going on at the individual's level.

Some interesting thoughts and experiences.

One of the greater wargames' experiences I have had, was a chain-of-command game where GM:s ran the game (it was a very simple Avalon Hill WWII European Theatre's game) and briefed the two teams' commanders in non-game terms, then interpreting the players' orders back to the game. It was a fun RPG approach to wargames. The two teams had their own copies of the board game and tried to guess what was going on on the GM:s board.

I am not advocating that a sci-fi miniatures' game is the pinnacle of wargaming realism, but I would still like to contend that many cries of 'unrealism' really stem from the perceived notion of 'unfairness'. I know (and play) gaming systems with far worse mechanisms where unrealism really is a euphemism. WHFB springs to mind, where troops who sprint forward counts as standing still during the other players' turns, where troops mm:s away from friends in battle refuse to lend a hand because it is not their turn etc.

Every game has to abide its mechanics, and often rules are written in the specific way they are written, because the alternative is games-wise even worse, or worse, even more un-realistic

/Fredmans

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Follow my Epic painting projects: Tyranids vs Steel Legion and Inquisition vs Lost and the Damned @
http://www.tacticalwargames.net/taccmd/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=14636

When I talk about realism, I'm talking about the overall flow of a battle and seeing that real-world tactics work on the game board, such that someone can play reasonably well without a lot of rules knowledge as long as they have good tactical know-how.

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Neal

Many years ago I had the great pleasure of playing the 1962 Avlon Hill game WWI, which was a two player game covering the western front from the start of the war. The game itself was really quite abysmal in it's original form, but a member of the club decided to play it as a campaign game with seven players per side each in control of an army (around 5-7 pieces) and under the control of a commander in chief (I was Joffre commanding the allies). The players were 'blind', issuing orders for the next moveto the umpire and only being told what their forces bumped had into or what their CinC knew, while the CinC had a few reserves to distribute as necessary. The resulting game was played with great interest for over 40 turns an something like 1.5 years, covering the first 3 months of the war (2 days per turn).

Not knowing much about WWI I decided to read up on the events after each move, only to discover that I was making the same plans and decisions as my earstwhile counterpart often to point of moving the same divisions and corps to the same towns on the same dates. While flattering myself that this showed I was 'General' material, it more likely showed what dunderheads the general staff were (and possibly one of the reasons why Joffre was replaced following the disasterous battles for Verdin). Consequently to me this represented one of the more 'realistic' games I have ever played.

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"Play up and play the game"

Vitai lampada
Sir Hemry Newbolt

That's incidently how I have been thinking of making modern submarine game. Being rather fan of them in computers I would like to get miniature game out of them with all that sonar sound searching. Problem is if players know where everything is much of what I LIKE about submarine warfare goes out of window...

So crazy idea was to have 3 tables. One for both players which shows situation how they see it and one for GM which has whole picture. Players would get different strength sound waves from different directions according to rules from which they would have to figure where's stuff and WHAT that stuff is(least you torpedo civilian liner instead of soviet nuclear submarine!!!).

Not sure how feasible that would be but would be fun to try just for heck of it if I had 3 rooms and 2 other players to try it. Bad side would be though that this would kill lots of social aspect of miniature gaming since players would obviously have to stay in different rooms...

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www.tneva.net

Interesting... yes... double-blind stuff can be very cool -- and it is an effort to deal with one of the more irreducible problems game designers face: their players tend to know too much.

Clausewitzian friction is, I think, one of the essential elements of warfare, but also of the hardest things capture on a game board.  Certainly swapping IGoUGO with 'ImightGOYouMightGo' -- characteristic of Warmaster/BKC/FWC and E:A is helpful in capturing some of this friction

In some ways the RPG can capture this element of warfare a good deal better than a miniatures 'game,' though the issue there is that it loses the strategic interaction between sides and commanders.

Certainly, I think, it helps in assessing a game design to think through the RPG aspect:  what role is the player supposed to play?  where does he sit in the command hierarchy?  To what extent does this design focus on the essential challenges that a 'real' life actor would face at that level.

E.G. this is one of the reasons MMP nee The Gamer's Operational Combat System has been so successful; the effort to force operational level (Corp/division/army) commanders to focus on supply as a key element of Manuever warfare.

One of the more innovative miniature wargaming systems, by the way, was Frank Chadwick's Command Decision, a platoon scale, battalion level game on World War II.  Chadwicks' designers notes waltked through a lot of his thinking about how achieve 'realism' in a miniatures game at a larger scale -- well worth the read.


You've encountered the Harpoon ruleset, haven't you?

IIRC it was fairly good at capturing limited intel, but would be much better with a GM.

Problem is, it's even better on computer.

Yes but it isn't quite what I want. And also it's not specifically submarine game. I'm thinking more akin to 688(i) hunter killer in tabletop version.

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Activation is a great step towards being a little more "realistic" ...  We added that since SM1 ...

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Legion 4 "Cry Havoc, and let slip the Dogs of War !" ... "People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf."

I must confess, I have very little interest in realism. A game must be convincing, yes, but realism?
It makes me laugh sometimes- as if rule makers and gamers had real experience of "warfare in the 41st millenium"! The most important considerations are balance, playability and fairness.
Mind you, I must admit I come from a scientific family, who always used to spoil a good movie by constant interruptions of "well, actually that's not scientifically possible".

From my own limited perspective I believe real warfare is often highly unbalanced and, in the grand scheme of things, very low on heroism beyond the courage of those determined to survive!

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Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition.