Home › Forums › News, Rumours & General Discussion › Why do all our wargames rules have to cost the bomb? › Reply To: Why do all our wargames rules have to cost the bomb?
Look it’s not an argument about “if” rules cost too much, more a question of when, how, why did rules become bloated with non rules stuff (making navigating them at the table a pain to a point where some Authors have realised this and started a “retrograde” move to bringing out small A5 booklets to better form a set of pure rules (and losing all the bumf).
I just grabbed an old copy of a Tabletop Games Renaissance Skirmish Rules (Sword and Pistol). It’s an A5 booklet (Card Bound) with a Card Quick Reference sheet. The rules are just 17 pages long, with another 11 pages of army lists and two scenarios. And there is little or no wasted space for things like photos, painting guides etc. The Ancient set (Sword and Shield) being slightly longer with 21 pages of rules and 17 pages of army lists and 7 scenarios. These rules give a perfectly good game (as long as you know what a percentile dice is) and have stood the test of time better than many rules released later on (SPQR I’m looking at you kid). In fact I’d dare to say at 21 pages a modern set of rules would probably be just past the rules for movement and getting into how to declare a charge stage 😀 )
These rules come from an era where rules weren’t meant to be a “all in one” resource for the period. Instead gamers would buy different books for different task (like we all went out to buy the Osprey “Men at Arms” books for uniform details etc). But now it seems the market demands big chunky rulebooks (in fact we seem to find value in the fact the MOAR pages we get, then the better the rulebook perhaps?). But I’m starting to feel that modern rulebooks these days are just becoming TOO large for their own good.
I’ve also noticed recently that we are starting to get a few “Primer” books starting to appear (at least on the historical side of things). One very good example is Barry Hilton’s “Every Bullet Has Its Billet” (A guide to late 17th Century Wargaming). Now Mr Hilton has written a few sets of rules prior to this book, but in this book he basically stripped all the “bumf” you see in modern rulebooks and released this separately as a rules agnostic resource (there’s a link to a quick review below). Now this I see as an ideal solution, keep the rules separate (and abridged) to allow gamers to quickly navigate the rules at the table and then release rule agnostic books that gives the gamer the useful other stuff.
Personally I’m starting to loath the “all in one” approach that modern rulebook seem to cater to (perhaps this is due to most of the popular rules being published by miniature manufacturers following the GW model (for example Warlord Games) rather than companies that just produce the rules by themselves (although Osprey seem to be moving up in the rankings by doing this very thing, although I’d say a rulebook like Frostgrave has probably 50% of the pages dedicated to non rule stuff). Back in the 80s and 90s wargamers were quite happy to go out and buy multiple books on the period they were gaming (and this was seen as the norm). I think the first “all in one” rulebook to appear on the historical side of things was probably the first edition of Flames of War (along with the various “codex” books that followed). But I suppose if anyone was going to bring out a set of rules that WAS cut back to the style of things we had back in the 80’s and 90s we would perhaps see them as “dry” or very hard going without the pictures.
People say we are in an Golden Age for the hobby. Now on the miniature side of things I’d whole heartedly agree, but on the rules side of things I’m starting to believe this isn’t the case (with rules basically removing all mental arithmetic in favour of custom dice or cards and tables/charts being VERBOTEN 😀 ).
