Thursday 16 March 2017

Context when writing rules and why it is important

You might be aware of Age of Sigmar (AoS), the rebooted version of Warhammer by Games Workshop that has been the source of much discussion within the Warhammer community. Although I am not going to go too deep into the quagmire that is Age of Sigmar, it is a useful point of comparison for the purposes of this particular article. Be forewarned that I generally don’t have very favourable opinions of the ruleset for AoS, but the intention of this post is NOT to bash the game, or its players.

The principal comparison that I want to make is one between the mechanisms present within AoS and the Operational Combat Series (OCS). OCS is one of my first forays into the depth of what some people would call ‘proper Hex and Counter games’. So far, I’ve had the possibility to try mini-campaigns of Reluctant Enemies, Sicily II and Tunisia II, and I’ve been very pleased with my experiences so far.

For those that are not well-versed in Hex and Counter games, OCS is a series that models Operational-level battles of World War II, with an eye towards making you track the movement and use of supply. In essence, the series is more about being able to create a solid logistical backbone, with supply dumps, trucks to bring the supplies close enough so that units can use it to move or fight, and making sure that you protect your rear areas so that your logistical backbone is not broken in two. Having to track the movement of supply might sound daunting at first, and it is, but the strength of the system is the relatively simple, straightforward combat system that makes resolving  fights relatively easy.

From the above, you might ask how a comparison to AoS can be made: AoS is a relatively simple miniature skirmish game without the high level of detail and complexity present within an OCS game. Where the two games coincide, however, is how they deal with turn order. Turn order in both games is handled with a simple dice-off: who ever rolls highest, gets to choose who goes first and second. Sounds pretty bad, doesn’t it? What I will attempt to do, though, is prove why the mechanism is good in one game, and awful in the other, and hence, why mechanisms are never bad in of themselves, but how they can be bad/good based on the context that they are being used in.
Let’s start with AoS: the standard turn structure for AoS is relatively simple: during your turn, you use the special abilities of your heroes, you can shoot with any units that have ranged weapons, you can move your troops, charge with them and then perform combat. Combat is resolved by getting the active player to pick a unit to attack with, which then rolls to see if they hit/wound, then the opponent picks a unit to attack with, and so on until all applicable units have fought: this is the only part of the round in which a passive player has any choices to make at all (since the order that you pick your units can be important, as there is no simultaneous combat in AoS).

The system for OCS is very complex, but suffice to say that the main action rounds for the system work as follow: Movement Phase for the active player, then a Reaction Phase for the passive player, followed by a Combat Phase for the active player and finally an Exploitation Phase for the active player. During the movement phase, the active player can move as many units as he wants, but performs no actions at all during the Reaction Phase. However, only units that had been previously marked as Reserve units (for OCS veterans, yes, I know this is a mode, just bear with me) can move during this phase, but they can initiate combat using overruns. Reverses are thus very important in the game: they can be used to blunt an attack, plug up gaps, chase down raiders in your rear areas, and are thus crucially important to use well while playing an OCS game.

If you read the design documents for OCS, the intended effects for rolling initiative in OCS is make the state of the board more unpredictable: will you be able to hold in time to react? Can your crumbling front-line survive an opponent’s double turn. It is also used to simulate strategic initiative: you might be in a position that forces your opponent to always take the first turn, thus setting you up for a potential double turn later on. The crucial aspect, however, is that by proper planning and good use of your Reserves, you can prevent some of the biggest disasters that could be caused by a double turn: allowing the passive player to perform decisions during the active player’s turn is what allows all the above to be true.

AoS, on the other hand, has no such safety valve: the passive player has very little to no control of his troops. As such, the double turn can be crushing within the game. The active player gets to move twice and, worse of all, to fire twice. Without the opponent being able to react in a meaningful way, the double turn is a detriment to the game in both small sized (where taking casualties that you can’t react to can be fatal) as well as large-sized games (where, if your opponent is taking a gun-line, can potentially mean entire units destroyed before they managed to do anything meaningful).

I hope that with the small example I’ve given above, I’ve shown that context in rules matters: this is still important to understand nowadays, since even in 2017 people are still discussing the use and abuse of dice within board games. In the end, it is important to understand that there are rules and mechanisms that, by themselves, might not sound like they are well constructed, but thanks to the effect that they have on the game overall, can be used as an effective tool within the broad mechanisms of the entire game.