Video of how to play Chainmail

[tdenmark]

I'm surprised this hasn't been posted here already (or maybe I missed it). This video has an old school roleplayer with no experience in wargaming trying to make sense of the Chainmail rules. I found it to be a pretty remarkable effort. It isn't a snazzy video or anything, and takes a little patience to watch, but I think he did a good job.

It's hard to find any video examples of Chainmail in play, and so this really caught my eye.

There is a Part 1, but I found Part 2 to be much more interesting.

PLAYING CHAINMAIL

[clownboss]

Back when I was a wee lad, I used to rely on that video, but now I think it really shows how new he was to the wargaming mentality. Now I think I have a fair grasp of the game thanks to Gronan's many, many annecdotes, examples, and lashings of how things were done "back in the day", but not before I made my own set of embarrassing conclusions.

[Deleted]

Honest question.

WHY is this seemingly so difficult? You take two armies, you put them on the opposite sides of the table, and you fight a battle.

[cadriel]

Feb 1, 2019 12:39:39 GMT -6 @gronanofsimmerya said:

Honest question.

WHY is this seemingly so difficult? You take two armies, you put them on the opposite sides of the table, and you fight a battle.

I remember a review years and years ago of an RPG called Over the Edge that talked about Bruce Lee's Jeet Kune Do. Lee tells the person reading his manual to do what comes naturally. The problem is, what comes naturally to a novice in the martial arts is very different from what came naturally to Bruce Lee, who had spent decades mastering Wing Chun.

You literally learned the game from the people who wrote it. Any gaps or unclear things were just a matter of explanation and probably seemed like simple common sense. That clearly doesn't translate to people trying to figure the game out themselves from the written rules, which were aimed at an audience that was already doing miniatures wargaming.

[Deleted]

I'm not talking about interpreting odd bits here and there though. It seems like bashing two armies together baffles people. Does nobody play RISK any more? Or Stratego?

[rossik]

just to note, BL dindt had decades of Wingchun, just the basics. but he was a stundent by heart, and learned a lot of nice things in martial arts

[DungeonDevil]

Feb 4, 2019 11:35:15 GMT -6 @gronanofsimmerya said:

I'm not talking about interpreting odd bits here and there though. It seems like bashing two armies together baffles people. Does nobody play RISK any more? Or Stratego?

It doesn't take a Wellington, Archduke Charles -- or even a Napoleon -- to know that warfare is not just about lining up some expendable clockwork soldiers and having a bash at it.

I believe the problem is that people want to approach wargaming without a prior background in the study of Military History and depend solely on what is in the pages of a wargame rulebook.

STEP ONE: Learn amply about your chosen period's general History and then Military History.
STEP TWO: Develop your own rules to model the period or get a prepublished ruleset. PLAY!

If done that way, Step Two will seem far more effortless.

[Deleted]

Thanks, that helps!

I remember my first CHAINMAIL battle. I was baffled. So the next week, I got my fat butt down to the local public library and started checking out books on military history.