Reply To: Scale and Abstraction in Gaming

[phaidknott 7023xp 2]

Well Rick Priestly’s Gates of Antares rules have longer “standard” ranges than most 28mm sci-fi games (basically everything can hit anything on the table). This can cause issues, however it’s important to set up the table to limit the field of fire with lots of terrain (as Oriskany pointed out earlier about urban tables.

Another issue with adding realistic ranges is that you would hardly see anyone able to close to melee while under fire (I’m more talking about the black powder era here) than we are used to. So in this instance the ranges are definitely tweaked for “gaming purposes”.

I think we see the biggest abstraction with ranges and ground scale with skirmish gaming (which perversely is probably the most popular genre in gaming these days). Even using 15mm figures with 28mm scales/ranges they are still far to short (we’d probably get a realistic ground scale using 6mm with 28mm ranges). But the problem with smaller scale figures used with skirmish games is the fact things start to get too “fiddly” trying to move them around (and it’s very easy to just lose them on the games table), the 28mm scale miniatures have probably become more popular as a “gaming piece” (ie easy to move around a table) more than the “look” of them on the table.

When I started gaming WW2 was either 20mm for infantry skirmish (although this was due to the availability of plastic kits) and 6mm if you wanted to do armoured combat. These days it’s rare to see a 6mm game at a show. I still think that tank heavy games should be in 6mm (after all seeing a tank on a table in 28mm that can’t shoot to the other side of the table just looks wrong in my eyes). But another thing is the availability of things at shows these days (can’t remember the last time I saw anyone selling 6mm micro tanks at a show).

Strangely 6mm for black powder is used for even larger scale of abstraction than 15mm or 25mm in the black powder era. Most Corps level rulesets are designed for 6mm, yet using 6mm figures with 15mm to 25mm scales would look more “correct” (or even using them with a figure scale of 1:10 to give rise the REALLY big battalions). So it seems that gamers aren’t that concerned with the abstraction of ground scale, they are more concerned with the “look” of the minis and ease of use these days.