Don’t Raise The Bridge, Lower The River…

Altering supposedly ‘fixed’ criteria in games

Given the difficulty of getting some players (and even umpires) to read rules with varying impacts, I have been experimenting in some of my system design models with adjusting the ‘big reality’ rather than adding loads more – sometimes occasional – factors. That may read as just gobbled-gook so let me give some gaming ‘for instances’…

• In my Balkan Wars extravaganza, when certain actions (such as movement rates and even comms) are all critically affected by season/weather, I have kept the move, supply & combat rate exactly the same but changed the time/turn period. The ‘sudden’ increased strain of sickness as winter hit (for units in the field) was easy enough to reflect but the psychological effect on players of such a massive hit was also useful to ‘concentrate the minds’ of HQ teams, as they watched apparent strength wilt-away and shifted focus to the peace conference to grab what they could – while they had troops to hold it…
• For a WW2 operational game where strained logistics became a serious issue, I have used a (somewhat hidden) ‘sliding scale’ of results, whereby apparently the ‘same’ attacks by units with reducing supply states actually produced less results for the same casualties – or worse. By sliding the, say, 1-6 score but on an overall 0-20 CRT, quite an interesting distribution of subtly altering effects can be achieved.
• ‘Tiredness’ can also be reflected in this manner, thus reinforcing the need for fresh units – even small-scale interventions used to tip much larger on-going encounters (17^th-19thC cavalry brawls etc, plus many other instances). It is also a useful shock to the two sides which may have been embroiled for some time, gradually pummelling each other and not noticing the reduction…

Whilst some of this may be similar to the George Jeffries ‘variable bound’ (something which I never quite got to grips with, except in an ad-hoc manner), as an overall systemic adjustment it can be a useful exercise to look at such situations and effects in a ‘right-angled’ way.