Reply To: Is wargaming just "make believe" with dice?

[blinky465 17028xp 4]

@limburger – it does feel a bit like there’s a “wrong way” to play tabletop games, and maybe I’ve been doing it! Maybe it’s my programming background – I get absolutely no enjoyment from video games, for example, and my wife says I “play against what you see in the matrix” instead of playing the game. I’ve written video games since the days of the ZX Spectrum and everything looks like an array of bounding boxes and hit colliders and moving sprites to me!

Similarly, miniatures on a tabletop always looked like playing pieces with streams of statistics attached. I can’t help but (even subconciously) use mental arithmetic to work out probabilities of success before deciding on a move. But tabletop gaming isn’t just chess with dice modifiers and nicely painted minis, is it?

I think that’s what the one-hour-wargaming book pointed out –  it doesn’t use modifiers, you simply increase your chance of success by drawing more cards and choosing the “best one” for the outcome you prefer. Note, not the highest, but the “best”. As the book explains, sometimes it’s preferable (in a multi-game campaign) to have your squad break and fall back, rather than stay and fight to the last man. Yield the battle to win the war, so to speak. Just this one mechanic (the ability to choose whether you’re broken or not) completely changed the whole point of tabletop gaming for me!

Yes, I may actually choose to be “beaten” in this *one specific scenerio* because it allows the story to develop; “choose to lose” is a great game mechanic, when lots of games focus more on grinding your opponent into oblivion no matter the cost to your own troops. That one-game “defeat” just becomes a setback in the backstory of a larger campaign – like when you played make-believe as a kid, and occasionally you let “the other side win” just keep things interesting!