The Inevitable Points Rant

Warning up front, this may get into a bit of a rant.

If you stick around the wargaming hobby long enough, you will encounter point systems. These are put together so you can have "equal point battles". They are the rules writer's judgment about the worth of various troops, and how they compare to each other.

I first encountered this in the old Avalon Hill boardgame D-Day. Average German divisions were 3-4-3, which translated as 3 attack, 4 defense, 3 movement. The average Allied division was a 4-4-4. Allied Armored divisions were 5-5-4, while German panzer divisions were 6-5-4. As you could stack up to three divisions in a hex, you could (conceivably) get 12-4 attacks, or 3:1. This was the minimum necessary to hope for a successful attack. A lot of the time it would be 2 infantry divisions and an armored division vs. 2 German infantry divisions, 13-8, which didn't do you any better than a 12-8, but you didn't realize this at first. You could make a series of 13-8 attacks, and you would discover that they effectively were 1:1 attacks as Avalon Hill didn't have a 3:2 column on the Combat Results Table. The best you could do, by the way, was 15-8.

Clever tacticians would do 'soak off' attacks at bad odds to improve their odds elsewhere, and attack from 2 different hexes. Thus you would generate a few 1:2 attacks so the main attack could go in at 27 or 28 to 4, or 7:1, which was an automatic victory.

As games got bigger, and the mechanics improved, these kinds of attacks got more and more important. But the key thing was the comparison of one side's individual units to another. And it was only inevitable that this would carry over into miniatures gaming.

I was slogging through a WRG 4th Edition Ancients game, and losing badly, when a third party looked at the composition of the two sides and informed us that it was no wonder the Romans were winning, they had 1570 points, and I only had 1210. My army was historical in size, as was that of my opponent, but in the way WRG worked things, his was worth 29% more. And this was telling on the battlefield.

After the battle we delved into the mysteries of the point system. Individual soldiers were worth a variety of different points depending upon their armor, weapons, and whether they were 'regular' (i.e. from a civilized country with a regularly constituted army), or 'irregular' (being from barbarians or a country without a regularly constituted army). You paid so much for a unit (usually 10 for regular, 25 for irregular), added a general, and totted up the points. You wanted to stay under 1,000 or 1,500.

The reason for a point system was to avoid uneven battles. This was supposed to be a test of tactical skill, and (theoretically) the best general would win. This led, as was inevitable, to tournament play.

In tournament play you were given a point limit. You chose an army from the Army List, and fiddled with the units until you got one you liked. In most tournaments that I saw the owner could fiddle with his army between rounds. You would see players adding skirmishers and subtracting heavy cavalry, or other bits of juggling to get the best match-up against their next opponent. And if there were options in an army (4 Heavy Cavalry Class C Regular at 12 points each, armed with spear, sword and shield, or 10 Light Class C Regular Heavy Infantry with spear and shield at 5 points each), you could see some frantic swapping as they read their opponent's published army list.

I took part in a tournament using the Shock of Impact rules. I field an Mauryan Indian Army (one that gave Alexander the Great fits), with elephants, medium cavalry, 4-horse chariots and lots of archers (2/3rds of the foot were archers). I recall three battles. The first, against a Roman force, was punctuated by my coming down with food poisoning. The second, against a Parthian Army, featured my getting hosed on the terrain (flat, open terrain with no trees or hills); I formed a rearguard and marched my army off the table despite being opposed by an army of nothing but cavalry -- for some reason this impressed the guy in the group who was an officer in the Army. The third was against a Seleucid army and my archers devastated the opposing pikes; they lost a third of their strength and failed to close.

It is small comfort that one of the people, curious about why someone with my reputation in the gaming community there should suffer like that. He eventually chalked it up to me being the 'new guy', and thus fair game for all of the rules lawyering and playing fast and loose with the rules. They continued this in a Napoleonic Campaign using the Vive L'Empereur rules. I left the campaign halfway through it when I observed that the Prussian 1806 army (with bad leadership) was a much better army under those rules than a French 1806 army (with good leadership).

But the "equal points battles" were pursued vigorously for the next two years (I fielded a Han Chinese Army, and later a Theban Greek Army) the next two times. The former tied one game, lost six. The latter won 1 game, and lost six. My opinion of my opponents was not high, especially when I tried them in games that did not have the faults of Shock of Impact. The most egregious rules lawyer in the group didn't fare very well when he took his Swedish 1757 Army up against my 1757 Hanoverian Army in Age of Reason. Tod wrote some tight rules, and there was very little room for fudging.

The worst rules lawyer in the group treated each game as a test of his manhood. He was obsessed with winning, to the point where objectivity and history went out the window. I have a feeling no successor to Alexander the Great could have afforded to field his particular army.

I took part in an ancients tournament in Columbus, OH, and found the place full of rules lawyers, each trying to wring every little advantage out of the rules (for the record, 6th Edition WRG). They weren't interested in the history of their army, they weren't interested in details of training, campaigns or uniforms; did it win? Was it a Killer Army? That was all. And that's where I saw the aforementioned fiddling with the army lists.

I also got acquainted with DBA there, but that's another story.

Somehow I refuse to believe that a Roman Legionnaire with heavy armor, pilum, shield, and sword is worth as many points as a dismounted French knight of 1345. I saw a cartoon where somebody equated a Zulu Impi (Zulu regiment) to a Tiger tank, and mentioned that the points were equal. Admittedly some people insist that the armies in a tournament be roughly contemporary (the local DBA crowd does this). But this is an exception. Too many tournaments are dominated by the 'competition gamer'.

Now within limits a point system can be a good idea. For example in Hordes of the Things, a DBA style fantasy miniatures game, you build a maximum of 24 points. Spears and other assorted troops are worth 2 points each. Magicians are 4, as are other fantasy elements. You play until you've lost 12 points. Thus you have to balance off risk to high value elements with the bulk to cover your front. Here a point system makes sense as you are merely paying for the type, not the quality of troops. DBA goes further; you have 12 stands, period; this gives a battle that lasts about 1 hour.

A point system induces ahistorical behavior, ahistorical battles, and should be relegated to pure fantasy gaming.

End of Rant.