Free Kriegspiel: Gaming from the seat of your pants

After my second try at a wargame with the classic "buckets-o-dice" adjudication, I'm looking for simpler ways to play - especially ones that can be easily understood by children. One such method is known as Free Kriegspiel.

I've been asked in the comments what the hell that is. It's basically loose dungeon mastering - yes, in the same style as Dungeons and Dragons. But the way the Prussians did it.

We don't usually think of the Prussians as willing to accede to the whim of a game master, but they're the ones who invented it. Standard Kriegspiel, as published first in 1824 by the von Reisswitzes (father and son), basically had pages and pages of comprehensive rules. This is Teutonic, of course, and all very realistic, but if you're not careful as you try to improve the game, you'll eventually end up with something unplayable.

We all tinker with our favorite rulesets - that's the fun of the hobby. I think all gamers have experienced the urge - and the danger - of adding complexity to their favorite rules. Classically, it came to a head with the hex-and-counter game Battle for North Africa and the Star Trek wargame Star Fleet Battles.

One takes a month for ten players to complete if they spend all their waking hours playing (God forbid a cat jumps on the table), and has an infamous rule that requires the Italians to expend more water on cooking their pasta rations.

The other has textbook-thick rules and a meme order: "Legal Officer to the Bridge!"

Kriegspiel was never quite that bad, but the rules were complex enough to get to the point where simulating a battle took longer than the actual battle. Also, games bogged down when they got to close quarters; we've all experienced a situation where three units on each side are in combat, all overlapping each other, one elite, one militia, one cavalry, all armed with different weapons, and the center of the battlefield turns into an absolute snarl. There's a reason the close-combat rules often take up more pages than the rest (and in role-playing and skirmish games, attacks of opportunity and grappling!) - there are more "edge-cases" to consider.

This was okay so long as Kriegspiel was treated as an instructional tool; by the time troops got to close quarters it was usually obvious who had won anyway, as one side would be flanked, outnumbered or otherwise clearly at a disadvantage.

So the rules worked all right, but there were dangerous signs. One was that players ended up focusing on the rules and minutiae rather than the game. Today we call this rules-lawyering, but it's also a sign that the game has lost its true purpose - education for professionals, fun for the rest of us. Professional wargames are not about winning - they are about identifying organizational issues and improving group communication. Anything that detracts from that makes the game less useful as a tool.

By the 1860s, the Prussian staff was fed up. A chap named Francois von Verdy simplified the rules. His conclusion was revolutionary: Why bother looking up tables and counting modifiers when the umpire (roleplayers would call him a game master) is experienced- and educated enough to answer the question himself? 

He does have to be educated and interested; you don't want him pronouncing results on something outside his expertise, or becoming bored. This is why the GM needs to know the rules, or at least the norms and basic organizations of the period in question. The point is that the players don't.

He can just lean over the table, suck his teeth for five seconds, and announce, "Well, the fresh Second Jager are flanking the First Uhlans, and the Uhlans have charged twice already this game so their horses are probably tired. They withdraw for ... let's say two moves."

The Uhlan player, at this point, is indignant - he's certain that Uhlans could charge three times in an hour and still be fairly effective. But it's actually not that big a deal, because a) this is only one battalion out of twenty on the field and b) this is something that would likely (not absolutely, but likely) happen in a real action. We don't need to check three tables and roll percentage dice to determine that the Jagers killed exactly thirteen Uhlans and are precisely 155 yards away; we just need to know that the Uhlans withdrew.

Here's another example, from a Warhammer 40,000 RPG:

This is just one half-page out of eight pages of critical hit tables, covering four body areas and four types of damage.

Do we really need that much?

Here's how I simplify the Dark Heresy crit tables:

Roll a D10.

1-3: Minor; bleeding, bruising, stunned etc. Take penalties to appropriate rolls at GM's option.

4-6: Serious: severe bleeding, loss of extremities, etc. Take penalties or lose a turn at GM's option.

7-8: Critical: bleeding out, loss of limbs, etc. At GM's option, roll against toughness to retain consciousness or just not die.

9: Die.

10: Die messily.

For everything else, I can make up my own effects according to the situation. I know how to describe a leg getting blown off by a bolter shell; I don't need to read it from the book. (Though granted, it is hilarious.)

I'm not tied to this, either; I can "read the room" and change things up according to the mood of the players. Maybe I feel that the poor player who just rolled an eight should be able to have a second wind, grit his teeth, and keep fighting. Or that the guy who rolled a minor injury actually got briefly knocked out because the enemy are throwing bricks at him. (This can also be catered for with appropriate bonuses or penalties to the roll.) While GMs should be consistent, they should also be ready to pick the most exciting option to keep the game going and interesting.

With this method, I can get through the same amount of gaming in an hour that most GMs get through in five.

But I haven't tried it in large-scale wargaming yet.

For some good examples of Free Kriegspiel RPGs, that could work in a pinch as the basis of one-to-one skirmish wargames, please check out this previous post. A future post will discuss my thoughts on running such games at a larger scale.