howandwhy99
Adventurer
It is a game. Players are here to game a game, aka manipulate a pattern to achieve a goal. Whether a game designed by a game designer or found in the world. This is what Game means.
Trying to disprove your negative means demonstrating its absence. I have nothing to quote as your claims are actually absent from D&D. But if you're interested in the roots of the game, here is an Introduction:
Trying to disprove your negative means demonstrating its absence. I have nothing to quote as your claims are actually absent from D&D. But if you're interested in the roots of the game, here is an Introduction:
Games based on warfare have interested men for centuries, as such games as checkers and chess prove. The latter games are nothing less than the warfare of the period in which they were developed, abstracted and stylized for play on a board. Chess is so abstracted that it is barely recognizable as a wargame. At the other end of the spectrum, and of much more modern invention, are military miniatures. By use of figures scaled down to an inch or two in size the players mare realistically simulate warfare and are not tied to a stylized board. Miniature warfare allows the combatants to hove a never ending variety of battles over varying terrain, even refighting historic actions involving tremendous armies!
In order to play a wargame it is necessary to have rules, miniature figures and accompanying equipment, a playing area, and terrain to place upon it. There can be no doubt that you have fulfilled the first requirement, for you have purchased this set of rules. Your troops con be any scale that you desire. The playing area that the battles ore fought out upon should be a table rather than the floor. It can be from a minimum of 4' to a maximum of 7' wide, and it should be at least 8' in length. These sizes will assure ample room for maneuver There are several methods of depicting the terrain features generally used for wargames, such as hills, woods, rivers, roods, etc.
First, you can utilize odds and ends to simulate terrain, or buy commercial materials from your hobby supplier, and lay them out on a flat surface to form the battleground. Scraps of wood with the edges and corners smoothed are pyramided to form hills of varying size and elevation. Twigs with pieces of green sponge or lichen stuck on and set in clay bases serve as miniature trees. Rivers are drawn with blue chalk or made with strips of blue plastic or felt. Roods are represented in much the same way as rivers, only brown is used. With a little imagination almost any kind of terrain can be constructed in like manner.
A more advanced method is to construct terrain on 2' x 2' pieces of masonite or similar material, sculpting hills, gullies, ridges, rivers, and so on with plaster and/or paper mache. Trees and houses are set into the soft modeling compound, and permanent sections of wargaming terrain are thus made. When a game is to be played, the terrain blocks are simply laid out to form the kind of battlefield desired.
Finally, the most complicated form of wargaming table is the sand table. A sand table is really nothing mare than a flat table with a raised edge to allow the top to be covered with a few inches of sand. Of course, all that sand will weigh very much when wetted down to farm terrain features. so the table must be of very sturdy construction and rest on a basement or garage floor. The sand table's greatest advantage is that it allows full rein to the players' desires for differing landscape, and it provides the most realistic looking battlefields far miniature warfare.
The forces to be pitted against each other can be drown from an historical account, chosen by point value assigned by a third (neutral) party, or worked out from a "campaign" situation where larger ormies are moved on a map until hostile forces come into contact. The balance between the forces is something best determined by experience. however troops armed with missile weapons ore generally much more powerful than like troops that lack such weapons. Armored men ore usually better than troops without protection -- although they move more slowly. Trained pikemen ore more than a match for any but on army that has either equally armed fighters or numerous missile troops. A table of point values appears in these rules, and you will find it helpful in selecting balanced forces. Playing ability and terrain must also be taken into consideration, however. If, for example, the better player is to receive o 300 point army, it might be wise to allow his opponent to select 50 additional points worth of troops in order to balance the game. Similarly, i f one player decides the kind of terrain the battleground is to be composed of -- or the historic terrain favors one side -- the side with such a terrain advantage should probably hove o considerably
weaker army.
As the men ore scaled down in size, so is the field of combat. Therefore, a move of a few inches on the table top will represent a march of ten times as many yards for our small campaigners. They move and they fight in miniature. The players order their formations about, just os medieval military commanders did (and much more efficiently in all likelihood, for a number of rather obvious reasons), but the proof of the opponents' ability only comes in combat situations. Here, each figure will do only as well as its known capabilities foretell, with allowances for chance factors which affect every battle (such as dice throwing in miniature warfare).
The different kinds of troops fight in relation to each other kind. Given normal probabilities, o body of horsemen will always defeat a like number of footmen (excluding pike armed troops), but o small chance that the footmen will somehow triumph remains, and that chance is reflected in the combat tables employed. Note that should the infantry manage to surprise the horsemen by ottacking from the rear or flank, they hove a much improved chance of winning the combat, or melee. Thus, while movement is scaled to size (and a set time period during which scale movement tokes place), combat is based on the historically known capabilities of each particular kind of fighting man and then expressed as a dice rolling probability in relation to like and differing types of soldiers. A close simulation of actual combat is thereby attained. while a pawn can always take a knight in o chess game o similar situation will seldom occur in miniature warfare. But the knight (cavalry) just might fi to take the pawn (infantry) when the bottle is fought in miniature! In addition, the mental and
physical condition of the men (their morale) is taken into consideration in this game.
Morale i s checked before and after combat, basing the determination on historical precedent, just os the fighting ability in actual cases was drawn upon to calculate melee results. A loss of "heart" is at least as serious as a defeat in combat, and perhaps more so, for most bottles ore won without the necessity of decimation of the losing side.
Finally, how is it determined when the battle i s over and one side awarded the laurels of victory? As with all facets of miniature wargaming, it is up to the parties concerned, the game can continue until one side is reduced below a certain percentage of its original strength -- 25%, 50%, 75%, or whatever. The bottle can be continued until one opponent has driven his enemy completely off the battlefield. Or the players can assign set values to certain terrain features and troop types, keeping count of gains and losses for a set number of turns, the winner being the side with the greatest number of accumulated points. If both opponents have an historic bent, they can refight an actual battle (or even an entire campaign in a series of bottles), and adjudicate the end result based on what actually took place in the past. With no other form of wargaming -- or nearly any form of game for that matter -- is the player given the scope of choice and range for imagination that miniature warfare provides. You have carte blanche to create or recreate fictional or historic battles and the following rules will, as closely as possible, simulate what would have happened if the battle had just been fought in reality.
