So my thoughts have recently been on wargames. More specifically, how they tend to be a 1v1 affair, which...

So my thoughts have recently been on wargames. More specifically, how they tend to be a 1v1 affair, which, if you think about it, tends to not be true for any of the larger scale ones. There's always a bunch of lesser commanders and officers managing individual battles, with a chain of command leading up to the bigger dogs. So I'm wondering, has that ever been done?

I'm thinking like a tournament format, where there's two teams, each with X commanders and one commander-in-chief. Individual battles bringing Victory points, officers being able to ask HQ for reinforcements or airstrikes or such (which are in limited supply), being able to pull out your troops and let your opponent keep what VP you weren't able to score but keeping your army alive for the big final defense/offense on the HQ of the team that had less VP, that sort of stuff.

Just to correct myself because I'm an idiot and can't express my thoughts for shit, when I said "tends not to be true for the larger scale ones ", that was supposed to apply to real battles/wars. And the "has this been done" bit is supposed to mean "has anyone done this tournament format type thing before?".

Sounds good senpai

I mean, yeah, this is something I'd be up for doing. I've organized tournament play before, we'd just have to pick a game, write up some rules and get everyone on Tabletop Simulator or something. Could be fun.

A thread after my own heart.
Unfortunately not much to contribute rn,i fully agree with the chain of command thing tho.
An interesting thing you could do about it is,ssay,in 40k,have the tyranid hivemind be represented by just 1 player that controls everything.
Another thing that i might add is more support for multiple sides in a campaign,and even in a battle,to take it a step further.I've always been bothered by 1v1-ness in systems that are supposed to represent large scale war,like,there's always gonna be more people/sides involved.
Sorry if this came out jumbled,am on mobile.

It would never work.

I have enough trouble organizing a group of five people in a team WW2 wargame where we each play major countries and don't have to directly communicate to maneuver and command our own forces.

Now you want some sort of pyramidal team structure to command a side? The more people you add, and the more degree of communication you need to effectively play, the more likely the thing is going to collapse shortly after starting.

Add in rules where you need to call for fire support or reinforcements, which must be doled out by an HQ player who I guess doesn't do anything else (which sounds boring as shit to most people who play wargames), and I can't see this ever working outside of a military academy exercise where it's mandatory.

Consider, however, that each set of players is on their own board, and a given non-HQ player's interaction is limited to the fucker commanding the opposing army and HQ.

HQ, meanwhile, has to keep up with everyone's game state, use limited resources where appropriate to help secure what objectives they might consider more important, and make grand-scale decisions like where to pull out, whether he should redeploy someone's forces elsewhere, and so on.

It's not really a pyramid as much as it is an asterisk. And yes, that means there's more weight on HQ than there is on the individual officers, but them's the breaks.

It sounds excellent my man, but is right in principal: you need a group of buddies who are all into the idea. Trying to get a group of strangers to perform under those circumstances will be like corralling cats.

Did this years ago. Wargames have been doing it for as long as there's been wargames.

Generally requires umpires and a system suitable for it. Warhammer Fantasy for example is a bad game for it due to the precision placement of units and perfect control the game allows for/requires. Where as something like Epic can be better at it because the game is much better set up to be able to tell a commander to take X detachment and go sit on Y objective.

But there's even more suitable games over in the historicals branch of things, such as the granddaddy of them all Kriegsspiel, which is pretty much commander simulator: the wargame. The game itself has changed over time, various editions and incarnations from pure training tool to something a bit more accessible to those not actively in a military.

>It would never work.
Has worked for literally more than a century. Two centuries going back to the original.

Like I said, I've got experience organizing events, both online and meatspace (although admittedly they were never specifically for a wargame). Still, the principles are the same - as long as nobody is a dick, everyone shows up on time, and people are willing to follow the rules, things ought to go relatively smoothly. Kinks are expected, and shit can always go wrong, but that's an accepted fact of trying to organize any amount of people to do something together for a significant amount of time.

>Consider, however, that each set of players is on their own board, and a given non-HQ player's interaction is limited to the fucker commanding the opposing army and HQ.


Okay, and?


>HQ, meanwhile, has to keep up with everyone's game state, use limited resources where appropriate to help secure what objectives they might consider more important, and make grand-scale decisions like where to pull out, whether he should redeploy someone's forces elsewhere, and so on.

Again, okay, and?

You've set up a situation where different players have markedly different roles, and one person, perhaps the most important person's, is extremely impersonal. A lot of people get into wargames for the tactical thrust and parry, to crush the enemy under their heel with a well thought out maneuver.

There's already a game that does what you describe, it's called The Campaign for North Africa, and it's brought up almost univerally to make fun of how bad it works in practice.

Kriegsspiel was "played" as part of an exercise in a Prussian military academy. It wasn't something that people went to a local gaming hangout and played.

Yeah, I wasn't neccessarily thinking 40k, I was looking more towards the more "classical" wargames for sure. Although I haven't really decided on a game yet myself, and I'm completely open to ideas.

What's your point, exactly? You're still getting the same wargame, only difference being that the degree to which you succeed affects a currently ongoing campaign. How does this system impose on "crushing the enemy under your heel with a well thought out maneuver", exactly?

>What's your point, exactly?

My point is that the overwhelming majority of people who actually play wargames aren't going to want to play the HQ. And if you set up a system where you NEED an HQ, and you need close coordination with that HQ, and the HQ guy is probably the most important person on the team, you are setting yourself up for a colossal clusterfuck, since that player will likely need to be drafted; that role is perceived as less fun by the majority of your playerbase.

Was.

TooFatLardies sell it these days as well as a couple of supplements, amongst others.
I know a bunch of guy who've played without ever being in the military, let alone the Prussian one over a century ago. Didn't start that way but did become just something people played at their local gaming hangout.

Alright, most people don't have to play HQ. There's only one per team. And the imbalance of individual power is the point, you're commanding one portion of an army and reporting to a higher up, that's how it works. If that doesn't sound fun to you, that's fine, but unless you're elected chairman of fun evaluation, let's see if people are interested you tell me how fun or unfun everyone else is gonna find it, eh?

How many guys is "a bunch"? Because I've heard of the game, but I've never seen anyone play it myself.

And as a selling point, the idea that 200 or so years in the future, people might pick up your game as a niche exercise isn't exactly a ringing endorsement.

Defensive, aren't we? I'm warning you of real, practical problems with this system. At the very least, you're going to need 6 people to play it, if you want to have 1 HQ and 2 subordinates per side. So now you need to plan around the notion that all six people are going to get together once a week or whatever your gaming schedule is, and if any one of them can't make it that week, game night's off.

Then you've got the aforementioned fun issues.

You've got all the bookeeping you're going to need to do, and the inevitable slowing down of the pace of the game because you're going to need to report back to HQ if you're a field player, or find out what's going on as an HQ.

You're going to have all the intra-team tension that exists if one player is particularly bad and constantly needs helping out, or someone is just an asshole and difficult to work with. Or just honest differences in strategy that different players want to pursue; while you might have a hierarchy in game (I assume the HQ player would ultimately make those kinds of allocation calls), he's not going to have any particular authority over his subordinates outside of the game, and it's likely to make a degree of bruised feelings when someone inevitably gets overridden, especially if the new plan goes belly-up.

There's a reason why the dominant form of wargaming is 1v1 skirmish games. If you want to find a group that wants to do this, great. Kudos to you. But autistically sticking your fingers in your ears and pretending that none of the problems in bringing this concept to life exist isn't going to help you make a good game.

About half a dozen, I'm not the most well socialised of wargamers out there.

I'm not really sure why that matters though, it's a thing that happened, it's not like we're trying to brainstorm some commercially viable product here. There are people out there who are entirely willing and capable of playing team-based wargames, with a declared commander. Much like some RPG groups are capable of playing something based on Star Trek and having a player as the captain without it all going to shit. You're arguing a non-issue.

Because even if you don't want to sell it, you need at least one group willing to play it for this to get off the ground. And I really don't think that such groups are easy to come by; fucking hell, I've had enough trouble looking for a group of 5 in a non hierarchical system staying together for a long period.

Practically speaking, the odds on this don't seem good that it will get off the ground.

And I would argue that the RPG group dynamic is often very different from the wargamer dynamic; after all, one thrives on direct, player to player competition, wheras the other draws a more collaborative group as a rule.

>autistically sticking your fingers in your ears and pretending that none of the problems in bringing this concept to life exist

You've not been reading my posts, have you.

There were games like this back in the golden age of wargaming.

Groups of players would use whatever historical ruleset they liked, and then have one or more field commanders controlling their unit on the table, while someone in another room played the general.

The commanders and the general could only communicate by written notes passed back and forth, to replicate how things might have been in Napolean's day or whatever.

That sounds great. Optimally the sort of thing I'm going for here, though maybe with HQ having a less direct control over the minutae of individual officer's troop movement.

A guy from the /HistoricalWargamesGeneral/ did this a couple of years ago, they played Napololeons invasion of Prussia with 6 guys on each side. The user in question was.a prussian subcommander and said that it was great fun.

I remember that, though I think he was playing Austrians. Fascinating stuff.