Friday 7 September 2018

GW and DnD: Fun Over Fairness

I recently played Kill Team, the new(ish) squad-based Warhammer 40,000 battle game. It has probably been approaching 20 years since I properly played a Games Workshop game, so it was interesting catching up on what has changed (you're not allowed to say "Imperial Guard" anymore; for some reasons Harlequins are an entire army list now) and what has not (no squats). What has certainly not changed is what you might call the Design Philosophy of Games Workshop Games.

The Design Philosophy of Games Workshop Games is: battles have to be fun from beginning to end, and closely fought. What this tends to mean in practice is that battles have certain characteristics which are at best orthogonal to and at worst antithetical to actual tactics and strategy, namely:


  • There's a huge element of randomness in everything, so in many cases cleverness is confounded by a bad dice roll here or a good one there
  • The battlefield is really small and crowded and there aren't many battle rounds, so there is no sense in performing reconnaissance or carefully deploying or even really thinking very hard about what's going on except in a rock-paper-scissors way (he's got a battle tank over there so I'd better try to get line of sight on him with this lascannon; he's got a squad of terminators over here so I'd better find a way to get my meltagun guys over there too, etc.)
  • There's no consequence to weapons fire except at the level of whether it kills somebody or not, so you can't really deny an area to the opponent or destroy scenery or interesting things like that, and so everything that you do in a turn tends to revolve around destroying the enemy things you can see
  • Initiative is random and doesn't depend on anything clever or stupid that any of the players has done, and makes a huge difference
I'm not complaining about any of that particularly - it's fun - but it does make "battles" in Games Workshop games more of an exercise in just throwing the armies together and seeing what entertaining stuff happens than a tactical wargame per se

When you think about it in those terms, Games Workshop battles are really pretty like the way combat plays out in D&D - not perhaps by design, but by the preference of most RPG players. The immense weight that can become attached to single dice rolls. The fact that, without a battle mat, the locations of the combatants becomes sort of notional and everyone can more or less get at everybody else at a moment's notice. The general (not total, but general) focus on both sides killing each other rather than other objectives. The largely random way initiative plays out.

This says a lot, I think, about both games and the way people tend to approach them: it's more important that fun stuff happens during combat than that final results are fair. It doesn't particularly matter that the conclusion reflects perfectly the actual approach taken both sides and their relative skills in planning and execution. It matters much more that PCs x and y did cool things to win the day; PC z made a save vs death successfully three times in a row; that random Imperial Guardsmen (sorry, Astra Militarium guy) somehow survived a lascannon hit; that snotling took down a Great Unclean One; and so on. The fun is not in finding out who is the best tactician; the fun is in finding out what happens. 

17 comments:

  1. This reminds me of my feeling that old school gamers often laud player skill in exploration and interaction but largely es eschew it in combat.

    DnD 4e players often do the opposite, excepting certain optimizers.

    My own preference is to highlight player skill for all of it. But I have the impression that this is not at all commom.

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    1. That's my preference too, but it's definitely not common.

      Some games, however, naturally force you into a "high player skill" attitude to combat - CP2020 and I suspect high crunch ones like GURPS.

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    2. That's why I run DnD 4e. Its easy to use old school procedures in a 4e game. Not so easy to manufacture a decent combat engine for an earlier edition.

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  2. The general (not total, but general) focus on both sides killing each other rather than other objectives.

    That right there bugs me. When I make my fantasy heart-breaker, I'm going to tackle this, and it's going to be one of the big reasons nobody plays my game. ;p

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    1. I don't know whether it's human nature or the influence of Hollywood but so many D&D fights are "last man standing" affairs when in reality most of the time the sane choices would be run away or surrender.

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    2. Even worse, the fights are about nothing. Why are the monsters fighting? Sure, the PCs are invading their home, but a fighting withdrawal or a holding action while the women and children escape makes a hell of a lot more sense. Or an offer to pay the PCs to go raid another dungeon. Or pointing out to the PCs that the hobgoblins two caves down recently sent out a large number of their fighting strength to the Temple of Rotten Evil but still have a lot more gold in their hoard. But fighting to the last man? WHHHHHYYYYYYY?!? >.<

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    3. Fixed speed makes every fight a fight to the death. When two forces enter combat: running will always be useless for one or both sides. Ironically the best RL matchup to D&D combat is probably Jutland-era naval fights.

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  3. The most distressing thing about this article is that you apologized for calling a Guardsman a Guardsman.

    An Imperial Guardsman, no less.

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  4. When it comes to fun, GW game design has really improved these last few years. Back in the day the rules were clunky & complex yet somehow this complexity never translated in exciting, tactically deep battles. Ultimately too much depended on army composition, which, if you like accounting, could be seen as almost a game in itself. I mostly remember games that took so long we abandoned them midway, or shorter but very predictable battles in which tactical insight hardly played a role. Both games involved a lot of flipping through rulebooks to find special rules. I like what they did with Age of Sigmar, and Warhammer Quest, which are nice beer & pretzel games, so perhaps I should give Kill Team a shot too.

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    1. Kill Team is definitely beer and pretzels. We had beer and pizza and it worked.

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  5. Taking this another step further the old game Battle Masters is a kid game based off of WFB. In that game initiative is based off of a deck of cards different cards show various units (generally more than one) with the "slow" units having fewer cards.

    This makes the game incredibly swingy as if you get a few cards in a row showing some of your good units you can cut a swath right through the enemy.

    But then the tide of battle tends to swing right back as you've now exhausted those good cards from the deck and your good units are out in front and vulnerable.

    So instead of being hard fought the battle tends to swing back and forth depending on who has had a good run of cards recently, which gives a sense of drama that's fun for kids.

    Not much good for intelligent strategy though.

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    1. It is the Mariokart approach to game design. The guy at the back gets the speed boosts and invincibility things. The one at the front gets bananas.

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    2. Sort of, it's a bit less artificial and strategic than Mario Kart (not saying much, I know :) ).

      For example if you get a bunch of cards at the start of the game when both armies are at opposite ends of the large battlefield you want to hang back because you know that the deck is now stacked against you since your good cards are in the discard pile and if one of your good units gets killed early on you'll draw a bunch of useless initiative cards later on.

      Just have never seen a war game in which who's ahead swings back and forth so wildly. Makes for lots of drama even if it is kind of a crapshoot for strategy (I guess advanced strategy in that game would involve a lot of card counting but have only played it as a kid/with kids so haven't bothered, mostly just had to teach my son to keep his archers behind the infantry and not send his cavalry charging way ahead of everyone into the middle of my army).

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  6. There is a bit of the "combat as a sport vs combat as war" in this discussion. I like planning, ambushes, the PCs playing dirty. They win not because they had more HP but because they played smart. But that isn't for everyone.

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  7. This is "fun" how? Are you some kind of masochist?

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  8. It's an army game played in skirmish scale so of course stupid is the foundation upon which the whole game is built upon.

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