Dice, Love 'Em or Hate 'Em

Wargamers have a love/hate relation with dice. I know gamers who are incredibly lucky, and others who are the opposite. I usually fall in the latter category. And this has been reflected in the rules I write. I know better than to have cascading die throws (Shock of Impact ancients rules), or believing that if you just make enough throws everything will average out (I suspect I used up a lot of 'good' die throws 30 years ago). Dice don't have memories, but they have a perverse sense of humor, and at times I swear they can sense what you need and don't need. When you write rules you try to overcome this.

In the beginning were six-sided dice, also known as D6. These could be thrown straight with a 16.67% chance of any number coming up. They could also be combined in a number of interesting ways. The simplest, of course, would be to read them as in the dice game Craps: 2-12, with the highest probability being a 7. They could be different color, with one being a "10's" die, with the dice being thus 16 through 66. They could have a self-limitation feature; you always take the lowest number of the two; this skews the probabilities toward 1-3, with 6 having only a 3.6% chance of appearing.

A variation soon appeared, the Average die, with the numbers 2,3,3,4,4,5. Again, they could be thrown singly, in pairs, or an average die could be thrown with a six-sided die. This gave probabilities closer to the middle. You could also combine them in a different way as Wargames Research Group did; you use an average die for Regular troops, and a D6 for Irregular troops to show how they have a slightly less chance of doing the same thing as Regulars (how slight? Um, about 7.2%, hardly worth using the extra die).

Then came the 'funny' dice. These were 4-sided, 8-sided, 10-sided, 12-sided, 20-sided, and 100-sided. These were developed for role-playing games as it was easier to through an 8-sided die than to say "You have a 12.5% chance, throw 2d10 and...." The most popular were 10-sided because you could use them for 100% probabilities. This allowed finer gradations of results, and led gamers to overlook one of the fun things about probability.

Most rules writers, when looking at the advantages granted by D10 (decimal dice) expanded the list of things on their tables. As an example: I once wrote a set of WW2 air combat rules. I had the flying part down pat (my aeronautical engineer training showed up here); I even had the grosser aspects of damage down. But I liked the idea of specific damage to a plane. Thus on my list of things that could happen with a cockpit hit was "77 - CO2 hose hit, filling the cockpit with CO2 and blinding the pilots for one turn - may not climb, dive or turn".

It happened three times in the first gametest.

Okay, so what? That was just chance, wasn't it? And if you're allowing chance like that, you're going to get that from time to time. Ah, but in wargames, dice have a mind of their own, and like to torment people.

Players tried a variation of that. You rolled once to determine what happened, and again to determine the overall result. So a unit might win the melee, having charged downhill into the rear of an unformed enemy unit, and then roll result, and get a 'engaged".

In some rules you can look up how many men are hit in each turn. A unit takes 4 hits, and this translates into 10 men, of whom 1 was killed outright, 2 were mortally wounded, and 4 were wounded severely enough to never return (averages from the American Civil War period). In my research into combat effectiveness I ran across numbers that made me pause: the Prussian general who thought a unit needed some blooding to be effective, say 5-15% casualties; the American Civil War general who thought the men needed to be held into the cauldron of combat to shake out their being 'combat shy'. He didn't put a number to those casualties, but from his actions the losses had to be substantial. The French general who looked at the percentage of overall losses, and if it was less than 50% quipped that the unit was "barely engaged".

I also read of units that wavered and broke when they took a handful of losses, and others that lost 1 in 3 and still held. It had a lot to do with their officers ("there are no bad units, only bad officers"), and sometimes the situation they found themselves in. Clearly the immediate moral effect of combat was not solely dependent upon the number of casualties a unit took.

Most wargames rules writers noted that, and stuck in modifiers; you got moral support for having friends who were standing firm, for a general present, for behind uphill, for being in cover, and so on. I even saw one rule where a unit got a plus for having had a warm breakfast. Of course every gamer said they had, which kind of negated the point. But modifiers are, in part, a 'fix' by the rules writer to make certain results more likely. Modifiers also encourage proper tactics on the part of players, but this isn't always done.

One way of modeling that on the tabletop came from Phil Barker in Great Britain. For his De Bellis Antiquitatis rules (DBA), he introduced competitive die rolls with modifiers. For example, a Knight, against foot, gets a 5 modifier. They are fighting a spear, which is a +4. But the spear has a second rank, has a friend on each flank, and the general himself is present. The spear is thus a +4, +1 (general), +1 (second rank) = +6. The knight, with two exposed flanks, is 5, -2 (each out-flanking is -1). Thus they net out to a +3. Players each throw a 1D6 and add their modifier. If the foot scores higher than the Knights, the Knights retreat. If the Knights win, the foot is destroyed. This varying results table is what set Phil Barker's concepts ahead of everyone else. And he did it all with a pair of D6. DBA is one of those simple systems that is a lot more subtle than people realize.

"They copied all they could follow, but they couldn't copy my mind,"
"And I left them sweating and stealing a year and a half behind." -- Kipling

DBA and its cousins have been a big success, in part because of the use of the dice. This is another concept that people don't often realize. Dice can seduce you into needless complications, and those complications can slow down your game. I remember a set of Quick Play rules that was supposed to allow big battles. The authors even set out Wagram, one of the three largest Napoleonic battles ever fought. It took them 6 hours to set up, 6 hours to tear down, leaving them with a theoretical 24 hours to play (less, actually as they could not play all night). They got 3 turns done!

Phil realized that big battles require mechanics that take less time. This is part of what he learned as an engineer. Simple=Good, or KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid). Getting fancy slows things down.

Jeff and I set up a Little Big Battles game with 7-9 battalions on a side, and fought out a small "action" that was part of a campaign. LBB started life as Napoleonic DBA, and has morphed and grown sense then. But the combat system has stayed the same. It took us an hour to fight what amounted to a 2-hour fight. And we had a result. And it was fun. At Enfilade '06 I hosted a LBB game that lasted 14 turns (just under 5 hours of game time), and produced an unexpected tactical result (both sides crushed the other's left flank). It took us 3.5 hours to play out, and this included teaching people the system. There was a corps on each side.

I had modeled that game on one I had done with 1:20 Napoleonics. That one took the better part of two days to game out to the same conclusion. I had also done a similar scenario in 1:60 Empire 2. We managed to get through it in 5 hours, but everybody present knew the system, and helped in the deployment and tear down. What was the difference? The game system, which revolved around the dice choices made at the very beginning.

As a side note, years ago a large group of gamers did Borodino. With all of the different Napoleonics systems out there they chose Empire 2 with a page of modifications. They had a result in near real time. But here everyone who has gamed Napoleonics has had some exposure to Empire 2, even if only in a copycat set of rules.

Now just because somebody uses D6 instead of D10 doesn't mean that their rules are simpler. After all, players love chrome, those 'extra' features that make a set of rules specific to one period. There's a lot more than just the dice that can influence the way a game is played...

Which I'll talk about some other time.