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

[blinky465 17028xp 1]

I love chess. I love limitations. I genuinely believe that having to work within very limited confines makes us more (not less) creative. I find programming microchips (with their limited memory and almost crippled ROM space) far more enjoyable than churning out code for the latest super-computers. I find the *gameplay* of games on the old ZX Spectrum far more interesting than modern “open world” MMORPGs. I love blues-based music, with it’s strict I-IV-V (or I-V-I-IV) style frameworks and it’s limited 5-note scales far more enjoyable to play and to listen to than freeform jazz. Give me limitations, and watch me shine! 😉

But I feel like I’ve carried this over – perhaps a little too much – into my tabletop gaming; looking for the tightest rules, to be able to make “most efficient” use of command points or action points, or whatever. Maybe I’m just late the party. But tabletop gaming isn’t “chess with nicely painted playing pieces” and the one hour skirmish games rulebook really rammed this point home:

As kids, when we ran around with our pals, shouting “pew, pew!” pretending to be Luke Skywalker and Han Solo, we didn’t let rules get in the way of the games we were playing – the story (that we were making up on the spot) was everything. It didn’t matter if we we “captured” by the kids playing Darth Vader and Boba Fett – in fact, we often encouraged it, so create interesting interactions between the “players”. The final outcome of the story was of no importance, other than making our make-believe story interesting and engaging.

I think this is how I’m going to try to play my tabletop games in future. If I’ve got a “duffer” on my team, instead of trying to move my other characters to mitigate against any poor results the lesser character(s) might generate, I’m going to embrace their “rubbishness” (yes, that’s a word) and move them about the table accordingly – so what if my Orc team gets thrashed in Blood Bowl? That’s because I had a stupid dumb troll and a couple of weasley, cowardly goblins, so of course they dropped the ball and tried to kill each other. Instead of trying to prevent or mitigate against them messing things up for my team, it’s time to embrace that as *part of the story*.

Ok, if I’ve got a particularly low intelligence, poor marksman on my side – I’m not going to play the other characters differently, against their strengths, to try to “balance the odds in my favour” – he’s going to wander about the board like the dumbass he is, messing stuff up, getting into trouble and actively pushing the odds in my opponent’s favour (because that’s what playing that character is all about).

@osbad makes a great point – these are our tabletop toys. I think it’s time I started playing with them like the toys that they are, not the sophisticated chess pieces I’ve been seeing them as!