Cult Of Games XLBS: Randomless Wargaming; Time To Ditch The Dice?
January 31, 2021 by warzan
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Happy Sunday! Codebusters is back!
Thanks to this Billions Suns malarky I’m currently off new projects and dusting off old fleets from BFG, Star Trek Attack Wing, some 3D prints of Go’uld ships from Stargate and I’m looking with great interest at the future release of Star Wars Armada clone fleets. @avernos you’re personally derailing my painting timetable with this stuff!
My Night Goblins just had the Silver Tower Spider Goblins added to their ranks.
Have you thought about reaching out to Bernard Cornwell for an interview about your book club for an interview?
There’s a good little video showing most of the populare SciFi ship s in scale to real life buildings
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTPwbVqU6lc&t=3s
Cool to hear A Billion Suns has grabbed people’s imagination
I’m not derailing I am expanding your gaming world view
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6K2Jqr60cg&ab_channel=EagleModels
well that’s all kinds of awesome
‘Appy Sunday ! Ditch dice eh?? What will I obsessively collect now then?
It’s the XLBS Show……..Happy Sunday fellow Cogs!
for the record….which “Winter King” book is the one to be read? Bernard Cornwell?
For the record @warzan your daft to want to continue this pandemic way of life….I get what your saying, but you are wrong! 🙂
@lloyd your chin rest is the ‘Bees Knees’! I can’t wait to give it a try.
So after watching @avernos talk about B5 and ABS last week, I then went to your Project and read more. After seeing the Babylon 5 model kit I had to stop and go rummage through my model kits in the basement. Guess what, I still have that model myself. It’s looking like I might just build along with you.
……Well, now snagging the extra decal sheets for printing. I still use the ‘Testors Decal Paper, Clear’ but I’ve just had a look on Amazon for different papers as I’ve been watching this show. I might buy some of the Lazer transfer paper and take it down to the local print shop and see if they’ll give it a try and print them for me on that paper.
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On the subject of “RANDOMLESS WARGAMING; TIME TO DITCH THE DICE?” 3D Matrixing sounds soooo much more complicated. PLus, if your burying your nose in charts it’s no different than the Dice, stats, and numbers your ditching. Someone remind me what’s wrong with DICE?
Sounds like a boring way to game. To me, others may love this. Guess I’m a grognard.
As to removing dice from the table(time code [1:33:50])…..we never throw the dice on the table, they are always rolled in a tray that is NOT on the table. We also, don’t allow cards or paper sheets on the table.
At time code [1:37:07] @lloyd talks about lists for armies. If there is no Randomness, won’t people just copy the same Champion List, and now tournaments will look very boring, (we already have this in some tournaments). Also, Games will die off as no one will buy anything that is not on the Killer List. You’d have to constantly NERF stuff to change it up and that will piss folks off in a BIG WAY.
Maybe I’m missing something. It just seems to change things from being a ‘GAME’ and making it a ‘Tabletop Simulation’.
yay you can join me on my painting journey
If I can get my studio table cleaned off I’ll take pictures of the opening of my B5 box and try starting a new project on OTT.
(unless it blocks me from starting a new one because I suck at finishing up projects) ??
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@avernos you spoke of the Fleet Action ships being possible too small compared to the B5 model, do you think the other B5 ships are scaled closer? Table space is not a problem for me so slightly larger minis are not a show stopper for me. Unfortunately I don’t have any surviving minis on hand of the larger ones to compare with.
no fleet is around two thirds the size they should be, B5 Wars ships would be three or four times larger than they should be.
good luck with the project
> Someone remind me what’s wrong with DICE?
Dropping down another $35+ on a set of rules and finding rules you already own.
That’s not even wargames. RPGs are almost all dice-driven, and dungeoncrawlers with miniatures will cost you $100+ apiece. No point buying more games if they’re not all that different than the ones you have. IMO, Dice, much too often, lead to game design traps, resulting in samey games, with a much smaller game design space than we could have. The popularity of Gloomhaven shows that you can have a very different dungeoncrawler game without dice mechanics. Magic the Gathering and Eurogames are entire genres of mechanics often without dice. That’s not to say you can’t have an innovative dice game system, but the next step from output randomness (eg. roll to hit) is result mitigation (spend resources to change a die result or roll more dice) which, imo, doesn’t capture the depth some card games have. (Of course, few card games involve a two-dimensional positional game area, which is a standard in most wargames.)
BGG had a thread on dice in wargames back in 2017: https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1709076/wargames-dice-or-no-dice
Well, I’ll never trade dice for a card only based system. I stopped playing Magic the Gathering in the beta days. Watching good folks almost go to blows over card interpretation was enough for me to walk away from that. Not to mention the unending Chase for the “Random” Super Card that that game lives on. There’s more Randomness for you.
As far as the price of games, (you mentioned +100 for same’ish product). It’s a hobby and we love buying the new shiny. IPs of popular games will continue to draw us in as it’s something we love. Game Companies, and retailers like Wayland would go out of business if we stopped buying games.
In my humble opinion, the removal of Dice/Randomness would remove the “longshot, underdog, hail Mary” in gaming that says, “anything can happen under the rarest of occasions”. Life IS Randomness. To remove “Random” from gaming is to create an artificial environment that doesn’t exist in life and soon players would abandoned the game as Not Feeling Real.
Again, IMHO. ?. YMMV
Not saying it’s a bad idea. But how many similar $35+ rulesets, $200 miniature models, and another hundred hours of painting does the market need? I’m also sure there’s just as much rules lawyering for dice-based games as there is card-flopping ones. Dice aren’t the only form of randomness. A card system is often random, typically when a deck is shuffled and a card is drawn.
If someone wants to spend another few hundred dollars on another similar game system, be it dice, card-flopping, deckbuilding, worker placement, FPS, or what have, I don’t particular care. But, personally, I’d rather have game designers be “revolutionary, not evolutionary” with their game design.
HAPPY SUNDAY!!
Gary Chalk brought out a fantasy game some years ago that didn’t have dice rolling or any combat randomness in it. Was very boring
I guess removing the dice could make things less exciting during those clutch moments – but it could still be a very interesting experiment
@warzan – I’ve also enjoyed the lockdown format of the shows and don’t think you need to go back to the studio for the weekenders. Many pros coming out of the pandemic.
My employer resisted work from home for years and now having been forced into it and seeing it works they’ve started selling off offices and committed to full time work from home for all employees. It’s amazing.
We also had our second child in July2020 and I got to see everything and be here for those early months instead of just 2 weeks.
Bloody Warren, always punishing the queen by charging up the rear ….. sigh
Hmm, you’ve got me thinking about deterministic X-Wing now. I think you could easily remove the dice from the game and make it a real manoeuvring tactical affair, without the feel badsies of a crap dice roll affecting the outcome.
I miss the studio. It still feels a bit like patchwork. But Ben being able to see is a good thing.
the first boss from the construct quarter?
There are certainly some games that would benefit from a reduction in randomness. But in many cases there’s a place for something to account for luck. That lucky longshot across the board, through various wind patterns, that hits its target just at the correct angle to find a weakspot in the armour and a major vein. The plucky Aguacile foot soldier whose automatic single shot against a rampaging TAG takes it down despite the odds. That lucky swing of the un-martial-trained medic’s torch that hits the swordmasters temple You know… those cinematic, water-cooler moments!
I rarely play boardgames with heavy reliance on dice, but a good euro-game like that is a very different prospect to a tabletop game. OK, there may still be some randomness in a shuffle of an objectives deck etc, but even then there’s usually a choice and time to pursue or not a tactic to score points by different means.
If Lloyd’s beard was luxurious enough he wouldn’t need a foam chin-rest, would he Gerry?
correctomundo
Diceless games without a random element would mean @lloyd woukdnt be able to play some of his favourite games like Saga for example
Well, not in its current form – but he’d be able to mod it to work with the ability to pick powers from the battleboards with a currency system rather than rolling for them.
Hi COGz an the XLBSers.
As they say in the film “dice”….. “the dice must roll”….
One of the issues with comparing wargames with chess is that in chess, which ever piece attacks always wins. Wargames that reflect the randomness of war can include a failed charge/attack. What dice give us is that randomness that happens in war.
For example at the battle of Pharsalus Caesar ordered an uphill charge by infantry against a numerically superior opponent. Without a random element like dice, Caesar’s victory would never happen in a tabletop battle. If that battle was based purely on terrain, numbers and expectation, it would always end in Pompey’s favour.
Wargames like KoW can give you a simulation of how a rear charge can potentially do more damage in a charge. What the dice do is remove the guarantee of a kill with that rear charge. When you charge the queen in the rear, you assume you’ll damage her, but sometimes she spins around and damages you!
Just on Modern military using wargames for simulations, my favourite was Marine Corps Lieutenant General Paul K. Van Riper, before the invasion of Iraq. Really worth a read.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002#:~:text=Millennium%20Challenge%202002%20(MC02)%20was,Armed%20Forces%20in%20mid%2D2002.&text=The%20simulated%20combatants%20were%20the,characterized%20as%20Iran%20or%20Iraq.
@warzan/COGz you should dig through the richplanet videos they have been on the channel a few Times about the burial site and the history of Arthurian buildings.
Check last week’s episode, the book’s in the comments Ben.
https://youtu.be/keSC6emL1O8 one of the King Arthur video’s @warzan
Happy Sunday all, the answer is more dice hands full of dice to launch at your nemesis when they play that special rule you totally forgot about ?????????
An then Justin turns up an Alpha strikes everything? Lol
We’ve used ‘averaged’ rolls in our games. My chum rolls terribly – we think his dice are cursed – and as a result was never carrying off those ‘on a 6…’ abilities.
By averaging all our rolls we could concentrate on strategy and tactics.
ever swap out your dice for average dice and see what a difference it makes?
Have to admit, I’d not heard of them before and thus we didn’t. For us it was easier to simply do the maths as a ‘deterministic’ (if that’s the right term) result.
it’s worth picking a pair up they’re handy to have
There was a book of diceless rules for historicals put out in the early 1970s. It was called Rules for Wargaming by Arthur Taylor and published by Shire Publications. It’s been reprinted by John Curry (with John Tunstill’s Discovering Wargames and Bill Lamming’s Medieval campaign and Battle rules) in his History of Wargaming project – http://www.wargaming.co/recreation/details/ewvol5.htm
I think there does need to be some random element (what Charles Grant used to call the Imponderable) in wargames to reflect the way things never turn out precisely as expected in real life. Whether dice, cards or something else (the old Avalon Hill postal boardgames club used to use share prices on the New York Stock Exchange) is less important though.
Lol love the kid? toys at the end Guy’s
Thanks for the Golden Button guys. I really enjoyed making Age of Plamsa although the idea was Warren’s.
I want to take a crack at this no dice nonsense, I think I’ve got an idea but I’ll think on it a while.
Best laugh I’ve had in a very long time! ??? what a way to close the show.And a very big thank you to Jerry for reminding me to read more Discworld.
Randomness represents unpredictability, and that’s what people are. Ulitamately our minis do represent people and the more the rules have them act like people the better.
Whether randomness is a commander falling off his horse and preventing a unit moving that turn, a group of pikemen telling you where to stick the idea that they’d charge that bunch of shiny lads in armour over there, or a group of militia holding off Napoleon’s Old Guard all afternoon; those are the things we’ll still be talking about years later.
Seriously lads, when you’re introducing multi-dimensional arrays into combat resolution you’ve lost me. I’m a programmer for a living and have written systems that used them. Ex-colleague (very bright fella) still moans about it 15 years on.
It’s an interesting topic but as a game? Well it’s probably not for me.
Good discussion topic. It is only by thinking about alternatives that we truly see the advantages of our exisiting way of being. @brennon is right. If you want a reliable deterministic mechanic then look no further than board and card games. You could do worse than play Magic to see the possibilities of combat without dice based randomness – still almost infinite complexity. You could do worse than playing Stratego @lloyd, that’s chess with a few more troop types. I’ll be sticking to my dice and card based random factors – but at least I better undertand why now.
00:00 Happy Sunday
00:20 @warzan blowing his load early… no chance for @brennon to cut his internet XD
01:30 yeah… Mastermind.. was never good at it XD
12:45 hearing books via audible is all fine and dandy but if it runs “in the background” I doubt one gets all information fed that is needed for a book club.
18:30 From a viewers perspective: I think the discussions have taken a hit a bit because you can’t throw things at people. But maybe that’s just the adjustment phase.
34:00 Chinrestpainting… . XD
42:00 hole punches punch holes… holy punchman!
47:20 @lloyd only doing a hand full of pictures?! Madness!
51:15 It’s a biiiiig cigar
1:03:00 Randomles wargaming is a myth! Hoax! Heretics!
1:20:00 I think I’ve had too many waffles…. I hear what is said but I can’t follow along mentally for the life of me… *blinks*
1:35:00 still very much not understanding anything…. I still blame the waffles…
1:36:00 Eurogames…. that’s why I can’t make head nor tails from this… never got behind games like that…
1:40:00 Saaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagaaaaaaaaaaaaa PEW PEW
1:46:00 If you want to see great weird rip off go to YouTube and watch ashens. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxt9Pvye-9x_AIcb1UtmF1Q
1:49:50 E.T. light up finger! I told you it was a real thing! @limburger
I’m signing out… night.
The Arthur Trilogy in my opinion is the best set of books that Bernard Cornwell has written.
On filming in the studio vs. using video calls: In terms of the quality of the footage i’m seeing, it makes no difference to me that i’ve noticed.
On randomless wargaming: I think elements of hidden information, bluffing, and currency might help, a la (that ‘Living Card Game’ i oft refer to) Android: Netrunner. For example, one player might know that a given enemy unit of soldiers is human (or humanoid), has spears, and has armour and shields, but that player might not know how exhausted those soldiers are, how experienced those soldiers are, or what type or how effective those soldiers armour is. In game terms that could mean that that player doesn’t know if that enemy unit can move up to 4″ or 5″ or 6″, whether their ‘combat effectiveness’ is 3 or 4, and whether or not their own units’ weapons will be able to effectively ‘negate’ that enemy unit’s armour. Has that player’s opponent created a low cost unit of ineffective cowards and put that unit somewhere in order to be a distraction and tie up some of their units, or has that player’s opponent created a unit of very ruthless and effective mercenaries and put that unit somewhere in order to be able to use them to outflank that’s player’s units at a critical point in the game? Does that player want to spend the command (or whatever) points on their units to deal with that enemy unit more effectively and decisively now, knowing that if that unit couldn’t move up to 6″ but only up to 5″ that they’ve wasted those commands points and tied up their units combatting a unit that probably wouldn’t have had much effect in the battle otherwise?
On filming in the studio vs. using video calls: I was reading other people’s comments and it occurred to me that the use of video calling for everyone instead of for only one person has been better from my point of view. I would say that if anyone is going to be in the weekender via videocalling then everyone in the weekender should be videocalling. If only one person is video calling then they tend to be off screen or ‘inner screen’ in some ‘other place’ and often forgotten about.
This is a good point.
I think the reason I miss the studio is because, when talking to the camera directly, it felt like the guys had put some effort into creating content to talk directly to us, the viewer.
With the zoom-call based videos, it feels more like I’m watching a bunch of guys talking, off-the-cuff, amongst themselves. I fully appreciate that’s more or less what’s happening with the studio-based banter too, but at least with also talking to camera, the viewer feels drawn into the conversation. Maybe it’s just a presentation thing?
Happy Sunday everyone!
For what it is worth Ben, I’ve been working through some great game books recently and totally agree, it’s a very fun way to spend time.
Much prefer the show through Zoom, everyone feels like more a part of the show as everyone is working on the same delay.
My dice luck is famously garbage which is why I prefer the card system of things like Malifaux. The idea of non-random gaming sounds interesting but for a pick up game at club night, it seems a bit heavy and think-y
Happy Sunday!
I’ve only just got to the stage where i trust myself with dice… don’t want to confuse my little brain with anything else!
I was really drawn into card-based gaming (like those presented in the One Hour Wargaming Book sent to @warzan) as a nice half-way-house for tabletop games; I find most dice-based games get very “same-y” very quickly – the whole fun and feel of the game gets lost as players obsess over the value they need to dice roll over/under to denote success. So many games stop being about the little characters on the tabletop and become a lesson in mental arithmetic (even some of the play-throughs on this site suffer from this).
Card-based means you still get a degree of randomness – but it all balances out by the end of the game. That is, for every “good card” you draw, there’s a corresponding “bad result” waiting. If you’ve had a stream of luck and pulled nothing but tens and picture cards for a while, you know you’ve half-a-deck left of twos and threes.
I really dislike chance-based games but put up with dice as a way to resolve issues. But for me, the fun is in the role-playing, cinematic theatre of tabletop gaming. I love the idea of an entirely deterministic game mechanic. But I also see the argument against it.
Funny though – no matter whether you love or hate dice mechanics it seems the one element of “randomness” we’re all dead against is throwing a dice to move. I wonder how many people advocating dice for every other decision would be equally happy to throw a dice to determine the number of squares/inches a character can move?
I miss the studio.
It added a degree of coherency that suggested BoW/OTT was more than just a few blokes hanging about chatting about their own personal favourite stuff.
I’m not against rolling dice to move. It can be quite interesting depending on quality of troops and the situation on the battlefield if your unit comply with the orders they’ve been given
Join the discussion…I’m also not against rolling dice to move units. My problem with s some who players declare a move, say to cross a piece of open ground, roll their dice, realise their unit will only make it half way and refuse to therefore move their unit at all.
Maybe you’ve just hit on the exact problem with dice-based movement – and why so many people seem to be against it. Because the result of the dice roll is known before the move is made – instead of the player deciding “I want my guys to go over there” and then the dice roll (representing a random event) dictating “actually, you tried to get to point x but only made it as far as y” most players roll the dice, then decide “what can I do, knowing that the random result means I can only move so far?”
Maybe this is the problem with dice-based decision making entirely? What if *all* dice rolls were made at the end of a turn, instead of to resolve each action individually? Because what tends to happen is a player declares an action, resolves it immediately, and whether or not this is successful determines what subsequent actions other characters make – instead of them all trying to perform their respective actions, with a resolution system decided which were “successful” and which failed.
I used to play a turn-based PC game, Laser Squad Nemesis. Each player submitted their turn to the server, and the game was played out and the actions all resolved *at the same time*. It was a brilliant game and a really nice alternative to you-go-i-go; you made your turn as if everything would go to plan, then saw the result played out, then had to deal with where the server left you – rather than “well, that guy missed his shot, I think I’ll move this fella over there instead”.
That sounds a bit like we are doing at present. We are having weekly hexed based wargames over Zoom with my mates. We each get a map, give the GM our dispositions. Before we move he tells us what we can see. We then message our moves to him at the same time and plots our moves on his master map. Sometimes units get intercepted before finishing their moves, sometimes the opponent they were charging disappears behind a hill before they get into contact. He also works out the combats and shooting and gives us minimal feed back as to how each unit is faring.
It is such a different experience to playing face-to-face, I am thoroughly enjoying myself.
I wouldn’t want a dice roll to dictate the entirety of the movement, but i’d quite like a dice roll to modify movement to some extent, in some circumstances at least.
On (less) random gaming, I’ve recently had some parts from the Relic Knights Kickstarter (groan) begin trickling in and have been catching up on that system. Each player’s Esper deck drives the actions – a 42-card deck with a set amount of icons to use. Knowing the distribution, and the cards you have seen, you can use that information to mitigate choices until you have to reshuffle. If you’re a good card counter, it adds a bit of ebb and flow as to when you can push your luck or should play cautious.
Brilliant fun guys, that last section had me in stitches
I like things a bit random. The miraculous survival of a unit that should by rights have been wiped out for me is a water cooler moment. Not a frustration. Because I am always playing for the story and the banter that unfolds not to win.
I am confident I would be a hopeless general and a liability in command, but I still love to roll dice and give people a fun game against a neatly kitbashed and painted army.
Rather than having 100% fixed outcomes just make the law of averages so obvious that the grots will die that it would take all 1’s from a bucket of dice for them to survive. I hear people raise issues with d20’s because the result can be so different and that d6 gives undesirable results too often, then I would say toy with d10s and see what happens?
I bet it would be a fun project to make a fixed combat result ruleset as a change, but I think rules are out there that have less randomness because it would ruin the immersion of the game. E.g. Like when you move whole divisional wings of an army into combat that are vastly superior and better equipped, you can’t really allow the worst militia unit imaginable to hold up everything without factors like terrain, fanatical levels of commitment or some other gaming factors making that a probable out come. Plus you should have mechanics like the Blood and Plunder coins or command dice in 40k games to give rerolls etc to make glitches like all 1’s dice rolls less of a problem.
In Black Powder I have seen a mechanic where your support arriving on the battlefield is delayed by bad dice rolling. I can imagine that being very annoying but it does have a thematic reason and nature to it. I think some games have made it that the number required to get a reinforcement unit on the field gets progressively easier each roll, again reducing the randomness, but still maintaining the fog of war elements.
I do agree that it feels like a bit of a bind playing someone with an innate sense of averages that you perhaps don’t have. At that stage they almost have the fix outcomes worked out where you, through no fault of your own tactics and strategies, don’t have that skill and it gives them an non-gaming related unfair advantage.
We could all just get better schooled around dice averages, but I don’t think a hobby should come with more homework and out of game requirements than most people are willing to commit to.
I would go with the Too Fat Lardies ethos of “playing the period, not the rules” when playing most games.
@lloyd the only dice less Wargames I recall is Warp War by Metagaming Concepts back in the 70s. It was a space combat game where combat was resolved by looking at the speed of the attacking ship vs the defending ship and applying the results. Even though it was one of the “Micro Games” it had a lot of strategic depth. Steve Jackson may republish that one in the future if he can get the rights.
@blipvertus – thanks for the info 🙂
I actually found a PDF version of the rules online. Link below.
http://www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu/usr/gc00/reviews/warpwar.html
Reminds me of the board game “Power” – no dice, all units had a value that was their attack. Movement was fixed zones but units could be combined both as a combined arms view, but also 3 of a kind could be swapped for a more powerful version ( so 3 inf became a regiment). Players were restricted to 5 moves a turn, movement was simultaneous. Combat was a simple who has more.
Was fun enough, got a bit boring at times but could be expanded on…