Ruminations on Context, Process, and Result in Wargames Rules

While browsing Reddit recently, I ended up stepping into this thread posted by user /u/tehulzpare, asking how he might 'sell' rules with greater asymmetry and complexity to his friends – more specifically in this case, how he might get people to try Chain of Command rather than their existing staple, Bolt Action. As someone who is also sort of facing this question (both my current and previous groups are CoC devotees, but I'm going to be moving away for the next couple of years, near some friends who are mainly BA players), I had my own thoughts going in.

As I was reading through tehulzpare's post, though, I started being put in mind of this blog post by Chris Pringle, author of Bloody Big Battles, from back in 2015, musing a bit on the various directions that rules can go in. To cut it very short (but you really ought to read it for yourself), Chris suggests that rather than seeing rules as falling on a sliding scale from more 'war' to more 'game', we should instead look at rules as striking a balance between three priorities: Context, Process, and Result.

In brief, 'Context' for most historical rules is military history – in the case of a fictional setting, perhaps we can reframe this as capturing something of its atmosphere – while 'Process' is the way the rules are played on a turn-by-turn basis, and 'Result' is about winning and losing. Rules that focus more on Context look to more authentically capture the nature of warfare in their given setting, up to and including directly recreating historical battles; those that focus on Process look to produce interesting and enjoyable mechanics; those that focus on Result aim to produce a balanced game where players of equal skill ought to win or lose at equal rates. In the end, we can plot these factors as a triangle:

Chris' 'Wargaming Triangle'

I'd mulled over that post before, but I had the opportunity to put into words a thought I'd had on this for a while: namely, that none of these three poles necessarily correlates with complexity. A set of rules with a more simulational focus can achieve this both through extreme complexity (for instance, the infamous Campaign for North Africa requires Italian troops to consume more water because they need it to cook pasta) or through abstraction (Chris' own BBB springs to mind). Rules that are too simple might not necessarily be fun (which has been the case for about half the people I've tried roping into The Men Who Would be Kings) and certain complexities can often be the thing that fundamentally makes certain rules interesting (take, for instance, the system of Attack and Defence counters in Ronin, or the various command and control mechanisms found in most Lardies rules), but rules that are too complicated can just turn into interminable maths exercises. Chess and its abstractions produce an almost completely 'fair' game (first-move advantage for White aside), but 'tournament' rules for historical wargaming can be filled to the brim with various esoteric numerology in order to achieve 'balanced' outcomes.

If what distinguishes these various poles is not complexity, then it must be something else. My conversation in the Reddit thread suggested that it might instead be the matter of asymmetry: a Context-heavy game will naturally tend towards asymmetry because it is what that context provides for. A Result-driven game actively aims to try and suppress and mitigate asymmetry in the interests of balance. Process, however, is basically independent of either of these because what matters is the moment to moment, rather than the start and end. It stands to reason, at least to me, that under this particular scheme, while you can have a game that is both Context- and Process-focussed or both Result- and Process-focussed, you cannot have one that is both Context- and Result-focussed. In other words, you can have a game that makes Isandlwana fun, or you can have a game that makes a balanced engagement between a British force and a Zulu force that are materially equivalent fun; you cannot make a game where the British and Zulus have an equal chance of actually winning the Battle of Isandlwana.

The three priorities would instead seem to form a grid rather than a triangle, with a spectrum running from more Context-focussed to more Result-focussed, and another perpendicular to that signifying mechanical interest.

The 'Wargaming Grid'

But not long after I came up with The Grid, it struck me that even that sort of doesn't quite work. The reality is that 'Context' games actually do make an effort to mitigate asymmetry (or at least, tend to – I'll get on to that), while 'Result' games aren't actually all that symmetrical.

The reason for that is that both types of game make use of what I will term 'complementary asymmetries': that is to say that strengths will be balanced by weaknesses in theoretically equal measure. If you have a set of rules with a points system for army building, then it will normally make better troops cost more: if I play a game of Blücher where I bring only Guards, and my opponent only brings conscripts, in theory their inferiority in quality is made up for by a superiority in quantity. Asymmetry is mitigated, but very much present and accounted for. To be a little heretical, BBB scenarios are, in a sense, also result-oriented: generally speaking, the stronger force will be expected to achieve more difficult objectives than the weaker in order to win; in theory, equally skilled players should still win and lose at roughly comparable rates.

That is not to say you cannot have 'Context' games (in this case I refer to individual scenarios rather than necessarily a set of rules as a whole) that are essentially Result-agnostic, but I would argue these tend to fall into one of three categories:

1. Bad design, where the scenario simply was not balanced around the forces and objectives involved;
2. Intentional disparities in difficulty (for example, not all of the historical battle scenarios for Twilight of Divine Right give the weaker side an easier objective); or
3. Battles as part of campaign games, where the 'context' is not so much specific military history as the decisions made by the players leading up to the events of the day.

It is these situations where games will have strong context, but not attempt to create a balanced result regardless.

So, if we can indeed have Context+Process games, then we end up back at the triangle where we started from. And yet, the more I think about it, the less convinced I am that there are necessarily any games out at the points of the triangle. All rules must have Context, Process, and Result. Context is how the game starts, Result is how it ends, and Process is how you get from one to the other. Not unlike Clausewitz's Trinity, real wargames, like real war, may gravitate towards these poles to varying degrees at varying times, but they are never solely characterised by one of them. No set of rules (at least, none that anyone will actually play) gives you a setup and a set of victory conditions, and then provide no actual mechanics for resolving it.

To be fair, this is perhaps stretching Chris' words a bit from priorities to actual content, but for me at least, I think this Inscribed Circle model helps preserve the theoretical idea of the three poles while perhaps taking a bit more stock of how wargames tend to play out in practice.

Does it really matter in the end? Probably not, but at least I've had a chance to write out some sundry thoughts that have been going around for a while.

As a bit of a postscript, as I was dithering about writing this, Tehulzpare wrote a post up on his own blog reflecting on our conversation, and on Chris' post, and I think you should read that too.

And, to quote that post, Happy Wargaming!