Interface between Hex and Counter and Miniatures Battles

[jmccann]

May 31, 2015 13:22:57 GMT -6 tetramorph said:

May 30, 2015 21:18:32 GMT -6 jmccann said:

I think there is one more level of interesting minis battles before going to the hex sheet. What is the largest number of figures you want to field? What size battle are you interested in gaming w/ minis?

I am sure you are right.

I am not much of a wargamer, so I don't know all my lvls of scale (skirmish, tactical, strategic, theatre, etc.) very well, and I would love to learn.

I think for my campaigns I would think in these terms:

Heroic = one-to-one "normal" D&D combat
HX-crawl = enough to deal with running into an army of 300 out in the wilderness (this is what I use Book of War for)
Barony-warfare = once baronies are established, resolving large scale wars b/w them; I imagine hex-and-counter for this
Campaign-lvl = highest possible campaign world lvl; here I am using Risk

I am open for suggestions though!

With this list, you are capping the size of an army in a battle using figures to 300, or 15 figures at 20:1 scale. Chainmail can reasonably handle at least 10 times that many figures.

For what you call campaign-level, you will definitely need a map. But you could still play out many battles on the tabletop at 20:1, most medieval battles did not have tens of thousands of men (at 20:1, a battle like that will be a lot of work and need a lot of room).

For what you call barony-warfare, U&WA p. 16 has 30 - 180 men in addition to the Guards/ Retainers on p. 15, so you could easily play out those battles with miniatures. At 20:1 scale you could have several barons fighting against several others and easily keep it to a size Chainmail can handle.

[tetramorph]

jmccann, that makes a lot of sense.

But if I don't want to use miniatures, but, rather, hex and counter style, which levels of scale would map best to that style of wargaming?

[Finarvyn]

A couple of thoughts for you, tetramorph -- and these are in a classic OD&D style where I tend to simplify things a lot for the sake of playability.

(1) Units can be almost any scale and the game plays pretty much the same. In other words, a counter could be 1 man, 10 men, 100 men, or whatever. The secret (to me) is to have a "medium" number of counters on the map. (You don't want your whole army to be three counters, nor do you want 3000 counters.)

(2) The scale for the map isn't that important, either. In his book on wargame design, Jim Dunnigan suggested that the typical wargame counter ought to move around 4 hexes per turn. Fewer than that and units never seem to get anywhere. More than that and you need a larger map.

Basically, I'd use a similar scale to what I'd do with miniatures. The difference is just that I use cheapo cardboard counters instead of expensive painted minis.

[tetramorph]

Finarvyn, that's really it, isn't it.

I think I was over-thinking it.

Thank you!

[jmccann]

Jun 2, 2015 10:05:32 GMT -6 tetramorph said:

jmccann, that makes a lot of sense.

But if I don't want to use miniatures, but, rather, hex and counter style, which levels of scale would map best to that style of wargaming?

I think any scale could work. It sounds like what you want is kind of a toolkit of wargames, with a couple of different scales, where there would be a lot of units to choose from and there would have to be mechanics to translate from the battle/ war resolution to events at the scale of the RPG. Sounds intriguing, I have noodled thoughts about this sort of game for a long time.

A game that Fin mentioned recently, Swords and Sorcery by SPI in the late 70s, comes to mind as a source of mechanics and ideas. It was an outgrowth of a D&D campaign by one of the SPI designers/ developers and has some strong gonzo elements. It corresponds to a scale perhaps a little smaller than your top campaign level. The game has been criticized as being "Fantasy WWII" but we had a lot of fun with it. I think you would have to tinker a little to get more dynamic outcomes, but it has some really great elements from role-playing.

A couple of other SPI games that have been mentioned recently, Gondor and Sauron, have a smaller scale but still are at a higher scale than RPGs, and correspond roughly to the barony scale you mention, would also be fruitful games to borrow from.

This might be getting a little afield of the topic though.

[calithena]

May 27, 2015 12:09:36 GMT -6 skars said:

The biggest issue to contend with when trying to translate from skirmish->mass combat with wargames rules is actually handling the characters or heroes. What happens when they are stacked with 10,000 men-at-arms and the unit is destroyed?

(a) Nothing...they scramble to the nearby hill and group moves on to the next scene.
(b) Save or die. They can get a +4 on this save if they want to make a second save vs. petrification/polymorph to avoid getting captured.
(c) Design a cool table with lots of interesting possible outcomes of losing a battle and roll on it.

If anyone wants to write up that table (c) for Fight On! that would be great....

[calithena]

My original thought was sort of like four levels: D&D - Chainmail - Battlelore - Divine Right as the four conflict scales, or something like that.

[Otto Harkaman]

I think what you might consider is just using Chainmail and going back to how Napoleon did it. Using a map, and in his case, dividers to measure the distance that your troops can cover in a certain amount of time. I think it would be confusing using so many different game systems. Using a hex based map replaces the need for dividers because the hexes represent a certain amount of distance. The rules with hex based maps then gives troop types certain amount of hexes they can move but you can do the same with just a map and dividers.

You wouldn't have just one big battle obviously there would be many skirmishes between scouts and outpost till the two main bodies of troops closed on each other.

A dividers, also known as a measuring compass, is a mathematical, drafting or cartographic instrument used to aid measurements of the length of irregular lines and of distances on maps or charts.

wiki on using Dividers

[Otto Harkaman]

And of course there is the more modern map measuring tool but I thought it would be cool to play Napoleon

[skars]

Jul 4, 2015 13:43:27 GMT -6 calithena said:

My original thought was sort of like four levels: D&D - Chainmail - Battlelore - Divine Right as the four conflict scales, or something like that.

Why would you bring in BattleLore? So the players can get frustrated when their unit on the left flank continues to draw center/right flank order cards?

[tetramorph]

Jun 2, 2015 10:46:22 GMT -6 Finarvyn said:

A couple of thoughts for you, tetramorph -- and these are in a classic OD&D style where I tend to simplify things a lot for the sake of playability.

(1) Units can be almost any scale and the game plays pretty much the same. In other words, a counter could be 1 man, 10 men, 100 men, or whatever. The secret (to me) is to have a "medium" number of counters on the map. (You don't want your whole army to be three counters, nor do you want 3000 counters.)

(2) The scale for the map isn't that important, either. In his book on wargame design, Jim Dunnigan suggested that the typical wargame counter ought to move around 4 hexes per turn. Fewer than that and units never seem to get anywhere. More than that and you need a larger map. ;)

Basically, I'd use a similar scale to what I'd do with miniatures. The difference is just that I use cheapo cardboard counters instead of expensive painted minis.

Hey, I noticed you mentioned someone named Jim Dunnigan.

I noticed he has several books.

Which do you recommend?

[derv]

tetramorph, here's Dunnigan's web page

There's a link to a .html version of his book The Complete Wargames Handbook on that page. The link is dead, but I think this is the page it should link to.

Otherwise, here's a pdf of Handbook

[Otto Harkaman]

Thinking of Jim Dunnigan and SPI here is an article by Redmond Simonsen on "Graphics and Physical Systems Design" www.mediafire.com/view/yurxj87tpn28t88/Graphics_and_Physical_Systems_Design-RAS

There was a series of articles in the old SPI Moves magazine on game design, this is just one of them.