Small but Perfectly Formed

Blogging sometimes sends me off in unexpected directions.  I like to pretend that I have some sort of idea about what I intend to write about in my next couple of posts and then one thing leads to another (or to be more accurate its more a case of  one post leads to another) and I'm off down a different rabbit hole!  So it is with this post.  My last post on army lists and balance in DBA got me thinking about the development of the DBx family of rules and how they represent a complete change of direction from the older WRG Ancients rule sets.  So I dug out the copies of the WRG  rules I have (4th Edition through to 7th) to remind myself of how they worked.

Barney looking for me down that rabbit hole or possibly digging out the rules from my filing system!

I should say at this point that I have a soft spot for the WRG ancients rules.  Like many gamers of a 'certain' vintage they were the first proper rules I used.  Before WRG I had rules by Charles Grant and John Tunstall which were as much tutorials on how to write rules as they were a fully formed set of rules.  WRG were different, from the start they were written as a set to use in competitions so had to be full and complete, or at least complete enough to not need house rules for competition use.  Second they tried to cover everything needed for the period they covered, weather, time of day, troop definitions the whole nine yards as they say.  With WRG rules an opponent and I could buy a set of rules and use them exactly as written by and large, although there was always the small matter of Phil Barker's writing style to give rise to some points of debate on interpretation.

Those rules were pretty much the only game in town, as it was a couple of years before competing rule sets arose.   Those I tried were no improvement and were often worse than WRG.  At best some were Ok but for whatever reason they came and went while the WRG sets soldiered on year after year.  I started playing using 3rd edition and as each new edition appeared switched to the new set.  The core mechanisms stayed pretty much the same right through to 6th edition.  They were detailed and often slow to play and most games I played struggled to come to a natural conclusion in a single session.  Part of the after game ritual was the discussion which usually started with 'well if we had time to play another turn I would have....'

It was 7th edition that made dramatic changes to core mechanisms.  Basing as elements and no figure removal (as with DBx) came in with that set, although the weapon and troop classes remained the same.  The command rules became more detailed and there was less scope for changing things on the fly.  One of the issues that confused me was that although units were based as elements some formations required troops to be based in part elements (such as wedge or rhomboid) which partially defeated the element concept.  For a lot of gamers the 7th was too different to earlier editions and it simply wasn't WRG ancients anymore.

Phil Barker's original concepts had stayed unchanged from 1st through to 6th edition ancients and similar concepts were used by scores of other sets as well.  Combat focussed on the armour type of the target unit and the weapon system used by the attacker.  Units lost figures once the casualty calculation reached multiples of 20 casualties (as each figure represented 20 actual men).  This had drawbacks as units tended to contract along their frontage which isn't how things worked in reality as casualties would be replaced from the rear ranks to try to maintain a units frontage.  In 7th the actual number of casualties was determined but was then used to determine if the unit became fatigued and influenced immediate reaction to the combat.  Then the casualty slate was wiped clean. Instead fatigue carried forward and impacted on the unit's performance in future turns.  No figures were (or could be) removed so frontages stayed intact.

WRG didn't develop their ancients set any further then 7th edition although others did (Warrior were, I think, developed from WRG 7th edition).  Instead Phil Barker wrote DBA.  Then he bolted on additional chrome to DBA to create firstly DBM and then DBMM, in effect he started to move back to something like a simplified 7th edition but from the other direction.

About the time 7th edition were published I drifted out of figure gaming for a while due to the usual reasons, young family, change of job and my gaming group breaking up to take new jobs in different places.  I bought a copy of 7th, read it and made notes on the mechanisms, but never played it.  To be honest I couldn't get my head around the newfangled idea of basing as elements and the lack of figure removal as that had been at the mainstay of every other set of rules I had ever used until that point.  My 25mm collection stayed based for 6th edition and didn't morph into DBx armies.

My 25mm Late Imperial Romans based for 6th Edition.  These are a mix of Hinchcliffe, Prince August hand casts, Irregular miniatures plus a few Essex

My 25mm 6th edition armies went to a good home when I downsized. The video shows them as they were when I was checking them before they went to their new home.  They hadn't been out of storage for a decade at that point which explains the loose spears and shields. The unpainted stuff had been that way for about 20 years at that point!

Having looked back over the old rule sets I can see what the design objective with 7th edition was.  I even wish I had had the chance to play them as there is a lot of good in them.  Strangely when I came to write my homebrew ECW rules many of the concepts from 7th solved design issues I had and addressed some of the playing decisions I wanted to focus on.  Looking back I can see the first glimpse of DBM, DBMM and related games like ADLG in those rules.   Personally I think that Phil Barker recognised that there was tension between detail and playability and wanted to address it with 7th.  I don't know that he achieved that  to the satisfaction of players.  The fact that he turned to DBA as a new starting point and them developed rules more akin to 7th with DBM and DBMM suggests that he was close to what he wanted but couldn't quite get there with the mechanisms of the previous sets.  None of which really matters when looking at whether DBA and it's further developments deliver a good game or not, but it is interesting to see how we got to the place we currently occupy with WRG rules.  I suspect DBA 3.0 is the last hurrah for WRG ancient and medieval rule sets but 1969 to date is a damn good run by anybodies standards and many of the current rule sets for the period owe a lot to the work done by WRG.

Over 20 years gaming right here in one place - WRG 4th - 7th editions