Confessions of a Tabletop Wargamer

I have a confession to make, or at least feel like I do - I have not always been a tabletop roleplayer. No, it started in high school with a fascination for a little game involving heavily armed, giant robots called BattleTech. At my second college (don't ask), in between games of Cyberpunk 2020, Rifts, D&D of course, and live action Vampire the Masquerade (again, don't ask) that I got introduced to Warhammer Fantasy Battles (WHFB) and Warhammer 40,000 (WH40K), and all of their convoluted offspring. Later, around the time 3e came out, we were playing Champions, 2nd Edition AD&D, and spicing things up with a pretty intense club league of Necromunda and some WHFB pickup games. After that, having no RP group (unless you count the SCA, which I admit has many RP fans in it, but I don't believe it to be a LARP like others do) for a long while, I got back into WHFB and burnt out on the then new rules (which they have since updated, I think twice), and also similarly played and lost interest in WH40K. Finally, having moved another two times and finally retiring from the SCA, I found myself getting into Flames of War (FoW) and Team Yankee (TY) while still not having found a good opportunity to join an RP group. I did, eventually, and now DM that group in 5e weekly.

There you have it, the dirty, dirty secret is out - I also play tabletop wargames, not just tabletop RPGs. Enjoy, folks!

Okay, fine. That confession is just not that shocking, and never really was. The first RPG, the venerable Dungeons & Dragons itself, grew out of a medieval fantasy wargame by the name of Chainmail. Many D&D players to this day play both RPGs and wargames, and vice versa. Hell, four out of my six current players I met through FoW and TY, and is how I got invited into the group in the first place. Sorry folks, the whole "confession" thing I just did was a scam and not very original or shocking, but maybe it got you to click and read.

What started me down this road is the return of a friend of mine, freshly back from a little vacation overseas we in the military like to call a "deployment". He is the one who got me into FoW and TY in the first place, and now that he is back to civilization (insert 3rd world country joke here), he wants some time killers and life distractions. Plus, I have some decidedly odd rules in my current 5e game that spring from wargaming, and I have an itch to start up another project that is also wargaming related. Before I get into this, I want to reaffirm that the game I am running is MY game, not your game, and you can run your game however you see fit. Please leave my game alone.

Shortly after Chainmail morphed into D&D, that game lost most, if not all, of its wargaming flair. This was mostly due to lack of affordable miniatures, and it was easier for TSR and their competitors to sell you rules that didn't rely a lot on miniatures (or contain costly minis that would have turned away many potential players), let that be an option that you could pursue. Or not. Usually not. I don't think I ever really played D&D like a miniatures wargame, even with my past experience, until 3e came out. This was also about the time that internet sales really became a thing, and suddenly we had access to a lot of affordable minis and the rules to really get good use out of them.

That is not to say that there has been no works to turn D&D back into a miniatures wargame, from abstract, map based large scale conflicts (AD&D's Battlesystem boxed set) down to resurrecting the Chainmail name and style of combat to a pure small unit sized skirmish game. These efforts have come from within WotC/TSR as well as from 3rd party developers. Even in 5th edition, the WotC editors have released a Mass Combat Unearthed Arcana and Matt Colville put a set of simplified wargame rules in his Strongholds and Followers book. There are many attempts out there to turn the game at least a little more wargame friendly than it has been in a long time. Do not mistake me, though - if you are not a wargamer yourself, most of the modern options will work for you, if you want to add a dash of large scale conflict in your game. I do not find them attractive, because I am a snob and want complicated (at least compared to the aforementioned Mass Combat rules in Unearthed Arcana and not, say, The Campaign for North Africa) and much more nuanced and granular.

Options for the wargaming-minded DM are not limitless, but you do have some choices. The already mentioned WHFB is a good choice as it has free basic rules with many free army lists covering most of your standard fantasy races. The downside is that WHFB has its own special flavor that was made, quite on purpose, to be distinct from D&D, even though that is where the company who makes it, Games Workshop, got their start. Still worth a look, if for nothing else you are more likely to find other WHFB players in your area if you want to play it as intended. The other major player is Kings of War (KoW) by Mantic Games, and a strong contender, at least in my eyes. Again, free rules and army lists to download, but a far more generic feel to the game, which I think will let you mold it as you want to fit your campaign setting. I could be wrong, and maybe WHFB would work better for my (and your) needs than KoW, but I am not really worried about that now, more of a thought experiment at this point. And there are other rule sets out there, mostly historical skirmish to battle simulators, but none of those have magic inherent to them, which is very important to keep true to the flavor of D&D. Seriously, I have been working off and on for years to turn SM Stirling's Emberverse novels into an RPG, and to get something that low magic, D&D just does not work and I have had to turn to other systems to build it up from. But that is a series of posts for another day, suffice it to say that part of the very fabric of D&D is magic and it is inherent in every class and most of the races.

That is just the large battles that D&D doesn't currently handle well, though, and while they are nice distractions, should not really be the main focus of the game. If they were, you should just play the wargame and say you are breaking up the monotony with D&D and not worry too much about it. But D&D's issue with large combats doesn't end there, it's baked into the combat mechanics on the small scale - 5 foot squares are just too big. Yes, I get how easy it is to calculate everything when it is being divided by 5, but honestly, 5 feet by 5 feet is an overly large volume of space. I had thought about making a grid of 5 foot squares up and asking the local boffer LARP folks to stand in them so I could show you how big, but it would have been too big a waste of time and PVC pipe, so let's just lay down some numbers, see if you can track. A 5 foot squares is 25 square feet. Are you telling me that in 25 square feet, you can fit one and only one person and they take up that entire area? How about a 10 foot wide hall, that only 2 people walking side by side fill that entire hall? And how bad does it look, once you realize the implications of how big your grid squares are representing, to see one 28mm miniature just filling that space? I'm not buying it, which is why I switched my game to 3 foot squares. Much more realistic to get 3 people abreast in a 10 foot hallway, and much more believable to see just one person on 9 square feet of area as opposed to hanging out alone in 25 square feet. Not only that, but gives your players a bit more maneuver room - say you have a 15 foot squares area that the fight is happening in, if you are doing 5 foot sqaures that is a mere 9 squares to maneuver in, and basically one medium creature or bigger in the middle square touches everything else. But if you are doing 3 foot squares, that same area gives 25 squares to play in, and unless something is really big or has Reach, they're not dominating the whole board.

The downside, of course, beyond all of the little rules in the book you have to change (and I have... for the most part), you are also losing real estate on the board. By using the same inch of grid to represent less physical space, you suddenly have to have a lot more inches on your board to adequately represent the same area. If you have a giant board or playing area, no big deal, but my current board - a hunk of Plexiglas with some poster board behind it marked in a one inch grid - looks big and impressive, but already my players who are barely 10th level can cast spells that either can range off the grid or pretty much cover it entirely. I have a bigger one in the works, roughly 5 feet by 3 feet, but that still only gets me 60 squares by 36 squares. Still a decent sized play area, but still not quite enough real estate for what I would really like to do - grand sweeping battles involving tens of combatants at the party level, and then sprinkle in army level battles (most likely using the KoW rules) with hundreds on each side when it is appropriate. My new project, which I will be completely honest and say that this may never happen, but is at least worth pursuing over the long term and when other projects get wrapped up, is to convert my game from the traditional 28mm scale miniatures and terrain and 1 inch square equals 3 feet square, to a very much non-traditional 15mm scale for miniatures and terrain and 1/2 inch square equals 3 feet square. Wow, that was a long, complicated sentence, let us bask in the glow of it for a second.

Upsides - smaller minis means far more room on the same patch of real estate (the 5'x3' table I was talking about earlier goes from 60 by 36 squares, or 180 feet by 108 feet in game terms, to a whopping 120 by 72 squares, or 360 feet by 216 feet inside the game - still not enough to fit an entire castle on the board, but more than before); and minis are far more cheap.. ahem, affordable than their 28mm companions, plus being easier to store more of them. Downsides - it is harder to paint smaller figures, the table is not as dynamic and attention grabbing at that scale, it is harder to distinguish differences between the minis at that scale, and the minis, being non-traditional, are harder to find. Not to mention I have printed (paper ones, working mostly on terrain with my 3d printer at this point, but that may change) quite a lot of monsters and NPCs in 28mm, and it is going to be a pain and time/money consuming to replace it all in 15mm. The big problem with that isn't the printing (shrink it by half, 15mm is very close to half the size of 28mm, I'm not going to quibble over a few percent), but finding cheap, plentiful weights to replace the coins used in the full size ones. Oh, and I will also have to shrink all the terrain I've been 3d printing, but again, half the size and call it good. Yup, that's a lot of downsides for apparently few upsides. Ah well, everyone's gotta have something to do with their spare time and money. And if I was far more serious and deep into this project, I would put in a picture, or even series of pictures, showing what 28mm vs 15mm miniatures looks like and board sizes of what I was talking about earlier. But I'm a lazy schlub who hasn't started gathering in minis much less painting them up, so it is hard to show what I do not have yet.

Look, I can steal one from the internet! 28mm on the right, 15mm on the left.

Now I know at least one of you in the audience is wondering that if I wanted so much space and showing so much willingness to throw tradition out on its head, why stop at 15mm, why not go to 6mm? Or even 3mm? Think of the huge combats you can have at those scales! Admittedly, I am currently building armies for Team Yankee in 6mm, a wargame normally played in 15mm scale, but where the focus of that game is very large military vehicles (please see the picture below to see how big a modern main battle tank is compared to a 6' human), and stands of infantry are not single people on a stand but multiple soldiers, usually with large weapon systems, so 6mm is not all that bad.

Main battle tanks are big things, who knew?

I would show you pictures of 6mm Team Yankee vs 15mm, but let me instead share this blog post that goes into detail and has pictures and everything. You know, professional. Anyway, 6mm works better for that game, where vehicles and multiple members of a squad or a weapons team are the focus of the game, and so are still distinguishable at that scale and not too small. But where the focus is single, vaguely human-sized beings, like in D&D and even large armies of man-sized beings like in WHFB/KoW, 6mm is just too small. You can't distinguish individual characters (is that an elf? or a halfling? or an orc? oh, wait, it's a blink dog, sorry, had to get out the magnifying glass) and painting? I know, I am the world's laziest miniatures wargamer who loves playing and hates painting and gluing, but painting 6mm minis vs 15mm minis (at least in what I consider is good enough for D&D versus a wargame where everyone is mostly wearing camouflage to literally blend in with their surroundings and individual soldiers don't have names or backstories) is just making it too difficult for my tastes.

Comparisons of a variety of scales. Do you see how small 6mm is?

Enough of my meandering. I am definitely not jumping on the 15mm bandwagon (or, creating it, as it doesn't look like many of my contemporaries are doing it) (okay, there are a few who have talked about it or done it: here, here, and here, just to name a few, so I am definitely not the first with this idea) quite yet, I still have a majority of 28mm stuff - some miniatures, a ton of Rich Burlew's excellent A Monster for Every Season paper minis, terrain that I have 3d printed, and plexiglas'd grids that I can dry erase marker all over. I do want to add some more larger scale battle rules into my game in the short term. Don't worry, I'll be back posting more on this as things develop.