One of my interests is skirmish wargaming, for two reasons:
- It's closely related to roleplaying, and is in fact the genesis of games such as Dungeons and Dragons. Since I run RPGs when I can, there's a lot of useful information in both RPGs and skirmish games to "cross-pollinate."
- I work with kids, and the big, bright 54mm plastics attract them to the table like nothing else. Even the simplest rules result in exciting games.
So I've read quite a bit on low-level skirmish games with mere handfuls of figures, starting with Games Workshop's complex Inquisitor rules from about 2000 that blend tabletop wargaming with RPG, and the earlier, simpler, more historical books of Donald Featherstone and Paddy Griffith:
The first one is available free on Archive.org.
Unfortunately, while kids (without preconceptions) get the flow of things instantly and are happy to write brief orders in the vein of these '70s rules when gamers were patient enough to write orders and move masses of single-based figures, my regular historical group prefers "just going at it." While I successfully ran a smaller-scale game for the adults, loosely based on Featherstone's rules, I had to throw away the order sheets I'd intended to use. That's fine, actually, because they still enjoyed it!
(An hour's worth of gaming and two minutes of crawling, shooting and reloading in-character - ably planned by an eight-year-old!)
Granted, writing orders does slow down the game quite a lot, so I'm looking for other options. I found some in one of the Wargamer's Digests I've been reading. The issue in question is from February 1979 (when I wasn't quite two years old!) and the article by Walter Simon, intended for use with 1/35th Tamiya WWII figures but useful in any context.
Several options are presented:
- Cards assigned to each figure (or, in RPG terms, character). They are drawn all through the turn, and when a figure's card is drawn, it may take an action. To keep outnumbered figures from taking extra actions, blank cards can be inserted into the deck, so that (for example) three figures on one side, with three cards, are up against one figure with three cards, two of them blank.
- Extra cards can be inserted for figures with higher speed or experience - say, four for an average trooper, five for an experienced one, six for a hero - or single cards can be marked such that individuals can take extra actions.
- For players who don't want the choice of which figure moves to be taken away from them, a series of points can be used instead, split as the players wish. Simon calls these "Action Factors," and there is one for each figure on the field - but one figure can use more than one, so long as another figure doesn't get one. If you have five figures and five AFs, one figure can take three actions, leaving two for the other four. Thus forcing consideration and choice on the player. The problem with this last is that it assumes one player per side.
- Cards can be assigned to individual actions - All figures of a side move, shoot or fight in close combat as the cards are drawn (Red might be assigned to British, Black to German, for example). This is found in Peter Dennis's "Paperboys" books, which will have posts devoted to them eventually... and also from The Sword and the Flame, a popular colonial ruleset that is very popular with my group. In TSATF, a card draw is assigned to a single unit rather than a complete side. I'm drawn to this one simply because it's familiar to my potential players. I might use other methods with kids.
Another option, drawn from the roleplaying game HackMaster, might be the "count up." In this setup, every possible action is assigned a number of seconds it takes to do, and the gamemaster starts at "one." If a player starts to load his weapon, and this takes five seconds, he will thus complete the task at "six." Meanwhile, another player might fire every two seconds, or spend five seconds running towards the enemy, or be surprised and unable to take action for four seconds. The benefit of this is that players are not trapped in their moves; if the guy loading wants to stop at count "four", drop his rifle and draw his pistol instead, he just starts over. The rifle is dropped at "five," he reaches for his holster at "six" and is ready to fire at "nine" - unless someone else shoots him at "eight."
Another benefit of this "RPG" style is that the game-master can allow practically anything the players want to do, even if there are no rules for it. If a player wants to climb a tree and jump on an opponent, the GM can simply assign a number of seconds this will take.
The detriment is that this is designed for a game where each player has one character to run. In wargaming, this is unlikely, and even at the lowest scale, players will more often have three to five figures to control. (The scenarios in Featherstone's book have six to eight figures a side.) The complexity would grow exponentially, and notes would have to be taken. In that case, simpler mechanisms are preferable.
The scenario I have in mind is based on the "battle" of Picacho Pass, Arizona in 1862, in which about two dozen men participated. While my historical group is large, the number of players on a given day is unpredictable and typically ranges from four to a dozen. A player in this scenario might have six figures to handle, or just two. Of course, this will fall in the course of the game; in the actual action, three saddles were emptied in the first volley, and these were actually the only ones to die.
What initiative methods do you use in such small, characterful games?
