RHS House Rules Concepts and Expectations
Posted: Sun Apr 06, 2008 10:54 pm
I came to WITP after half a century of simulation and war gaming OUTSIDE this community - which has evolved its own peculiar ideas about how a game should be played. To oversimplify, there are a host of "house rules" meant to address one problem or another, and these boil down to a list of restrictions on what players can do. There is greater or lesser merit case by case - but while the INTENT is always constructive - the EFFECT is to make a game system inherently (by its very structure and nature) too predictable even more so.
RHS has too many house rules - imposed by necessity because we cannot do in code all we would ideally do - and some things simply will not work without player imposed limits. In the main these are related to things that RHS added to WITP - things like ship tracks - or not changing the planning of a supply sink - and it probably is bad insofar as there is a long list of things players should be doing they may not remember to do or may not understand in the first place. I wish to avoid adding to this necessary list - and certainly I wish to avoid adding a lot to this too long list - because at a certain point it becomes impossible to have reasonable compliance. [Who could remember a list of thousands of such limits? The longer the list, the more likely it will not be honored in practice.] To which add that I am philosophically opposed to restricting players - that I trust players - and that I think the GAME should "punish" players who do it "wrong" whenever possible. Make good practice self penalizing as much as possible is my philosophy. Be as "Nemoesque" as you can reaonably (if that is a word - Nemo advocates the standard "if it can be done, it is OK to do it" - and if that is slightly too broad - it is still a good goal: whenever it is not clearly bad, let players do it).
To this end - RHS has a single "primary house rule": IF YOU (as an individual) do not think a real commander would do it in these circumstances, don't do it." This has two variations: if it can not be done physically - you can never do it - because you can not be sane and believe they would order what is impossible; if it is not politically something that would be ordered - you don't do that either. The second is more flexable - a different player may have a different opinion and HIS opinion is what limits HIM - nor YOUR opinion. But it is still a limit - it is just a limit that has some uncertainty inside it - which is a way to increase game uncertainty.
RHS has moved onto development at a code level - not inside the game program but inside utilities - and a principle goal of our volunteer progammer is to permit us to address the problem that players know too much and there is vastly too little uncertainty in a canned game. By making the game change DURING play - this is mitigated. So the FUTURE of RHS is going to be a lot more unpredictability - a lot more options - and a lot less structure forced on players. To this end it needs to be understood that defeating the RHS design intent with house rules is a bad idea. For example, some people do not like using submarines to land small units, nor to permit small landings in non dot hexes: RHS added dozens of small transport submarines, dozens of small units, dozens of hexes not in play (but in the art and on the planet) just so such landings COULD happen - any time any player finds them potentially useful - and the GAME decides if he was wise or foolish. A house rule to forbid this wastes vast amounts of thought, unit design and data entry - all put in on purpose to make the game more historical and more operationally correct. Coming up with a rule that forbids us to use what we deliberately put there to use is contraproductive.
WITP is inherenty complex. RHS sought to make it more complex. Both WITP and RHS were attempting to simulate a complex reality. Just where to draw the line - we are forced to oversimplify by technical and time restrictions - is a matter of design and modding art. There is no perfect or "right" solution - just different attempts to get there using different mixtures of concepts and data. If you are not comfortable with needing to master more complexity RHS is not the right vehicle: it is a vehicle that requires you consider logistics (instead of just considering what you want to do and it is almost always possible). IRL most proposed operations are never approved because it isn't feasible - or it is not feasible in the time available with the lift available. RHS seeks to give you a LITTLE of that - not by any means all of it - and if such restrictions bother you - it is not your cup of tea. On the other hand, RHS seeks to liberate you from a chess like situation - a rule against using non dot hexes on land makes as much sense as not using non dot hexes at sea. Units can move in them - and if they are LOC hexes - units pretty much must move in them. Blocking them ought to be a big priority in operational analysis - and playing in the context "we know they can only land at the few dot hexes" is much more like chess than real life. RHS is not designed for this sort of restriction - it has plenty of restrictions imposed by tenical necessity - and trying to impose more restrictions is in some sense defeating the whole point of having created these scenarios. It is going to work a lot more gracefully to try to use these scenarios if you think in terms of how they were intended and designed to work.
Note in particular that RHS does NOT require or expect the Allies not to asisgn air missions to air units, or not to create task forces, or to move units wherever by land or sea - even on the very first turn. UNLESS the primary rule applies - you don't think the commander would do that - you can do it. If that complicates things for the Japanese - well and good: they had EIGHT DIFFERENT plans for the first day of the war for the Kiddo Butai - and the code "Tora Tora Tora" was only for the unexpected case of "surprise over the target is achieved" - and that meant the order of attack was different than in other cases.
After man years of work on this mod - incorporating may ideas not my own suggested in the Forum (more than a few times ideas I do not even prefer myself) - and then spending many hours carefully generating a test game - I am in the frustrating situation that the test may not proceed - because my attitude is that we should be testing the mod as it was designed to be - as free as possible from house rules - and in particular free from house rules that for bid us to test what was put there for players to use. I hope to set expectations such that we can actually do the sort of human testing Matrix could not fund - so that we can find out what problems exist with the new mixtures of ideas and data - and address them. This cannot be done if we are not actually doing all that is possible in game terms. Nor is it fun for me to play if I have too much of an idea of what might be done on the other side.
RHS has too many house rules - imposed by necessity because we cannot do in code all we would ideally do - and some things simply will not work without player imposed limits. In the main these are related to things that RHS added to WITP - things like ship tracks - or not changing the planning of a supply sink - and it probably is bad insofar as there is a long list of things players should be doing they may not remember to do or may not understand in the first place. I wish to avoid adding to this necessary list - and certainly I wish to avoid adding a lot to this too long list - because at a certain point it becomes impossible to have reasonable compliance. [Who could remember a list of thousands of such limits? The longer the list, the more likely it will not be honored in practice.] To which add that I am philosophically opposed to restricting players - that I trust players - and that I think the GAME should "punish" players who do it "wrong" whenever possible. Make good practice self penalizing as much as possible is my philosophy. Be as "Nemoesque" as you can reaonably (if that is a word - Nemo advocates the standard "if it can be done, it is OK to do it" - and if that is slightly too broad - it is still a good goal: whenever it is not clearly bad, let players do it).
To this end - RHS has a single "primary house rule": IF YOU (as an individual) do not think a real commander would do it in these circumstances, don't do it." This has two variations: if it can not be done physically - you can never do it - because you can not be sane and believe they would order what is impossible; if it is not politically something that would be ordered - you don't do that either. The second is more flexable - a different player may have a different opinion and HIS opinion is what limits HIM - nor YOUR opinion. But it is still a limit - it is just a limit that has some uncertainty inside it - which is a way to increase game uncertainty.
RHS has moved onto development at a code level - not inside the game program but inside utilities - and a principle goal of our volunteer progammer is to permit us to address the problem that players know too much and there is vastly too little uncertainty in a canned game. By making the game change DURING play - this is mitigated. So the FUTURE of RHS is going to be a lot more unpredictability - a lot more options - and a lot less structure forced on players. To this end it needs to be understood that defeating the RHS design intent with house rules is a bad idea. For example, some people do not like using submarines to land small units, nor to permit small landings in non dot hexes: RHS added dozens of small transport submarines, dozens of small units, dozens of hexes not in play (but in the art and on the planet) just so such landings COULD happen - any time any player finds them potentially useful - and the GAME decides if he was wise or foolish. A house rule to forbid this wastes vast amounts of thought, unit design and data entry - all put in on purpose to make the game more historical and more operationally correct. Coming up with a rule that forbids us to use what we deliberately put there to use is contraproductive.
WITP is inherenty complex. RHS sought to make it more complex. Both WITP and RHS were attempting to simulate a complex reality. Just where to draw the line - we are forced to oversimplify by technical and time restrictions - is a matter of design and modding art. There is no perfect or "right" solution - just different attempts to get there using different mixtures of concepts and data. If you are not comfortable with needing to master more complexity RHS is not the right vehicle: it is a vehicle that requires you consider logistics (instead of just considering what you want to do and it is almost always possible). IRL most proposed operations are never approved because it isn't feasible - or it is not feasible in the time available with the lift available. RHS seeks to give you a LITTLE of that - not by any means all of it - and if such restrictions bother you - it is not your cup of tea. On the other hand, RHS seeks to liberate you from a chess like situation - a rule against using non dot hexes on land makes as much sense as not using non dot hexes at sea. Units can move in them - and if they are LOC hexes - units pretty much must move in them. Blocking them ought to be a big priority in operational analysis - and playing in the context "we know they can only land at the few dot hexes" is much more like chess than real life. RHS is not designed for this sort of restriction - it has plenty of restrictions imposed by tenical necessity - and trying to impose more restrictions is in some sense defeating the whole point of having created these scenarios. It is going to work a lot more gracefully to try to use these scenarios if you think in terms of how they were intended and designed to work.
Note in particular that RHS does NOT require or expect the Allies not to asisgn air missions to air units, or not to create task forces, or to move units wherever by land or sea - even on the very first turn. UNLESS the primary rule applies - you don't think the commander would do that - you can do it. If that complicates things for the Japanese - well and good: they had EIGHT DIFFERENT plans for the first day of the war for the Kiddo Butai - and the code "Tora Tora Tora" was only for the unexpected case of "surprise over the target is achieved" - and that meant the order of attack was different than in other cases.
After man years of work on this mod - incorporating may ideas not my own suggested in the Forum (more than a few times ideas I do not even prefer myself) - and then spending many hours carefully generating a test game - I am in the frustrating situation that the test may not proceed - because my attitude is that we should be testing the mod as it was designed to be - as free as possible from house rules - and in particular free from house rules that for bid us to test what was put there for players to use. I hope to set expectations such that we can actually do the sort of human testing Matrix could not fund - so that we can find out what problems exist with the new mixtures of ideas and data - and address them. This cannot be done if we are not actually doing all that is possible in game terms. Nor is it fun for me to play if I have too much of an idea of what might be done on the other side.