Whataboutism and Wargames - Ramblings

Whether I’m reading through rules, revisiting homebrews, or battling it out on the tabletop, I find myself asking the same question:

“Well, that seems like it works alright, but what about...?”

  • What about the effect of one unit’s retreat on the morale of the unit next to it? Shouldn’t that be modeled?

  • What about using different dice (d6, d8, d10) instead of just stacking modifiers? Would that mechanically represent outcomes better?

  • What about modifiers for long-range musket fire? Shouldn’t I factor that in somehow?

  • What about elite units? Shouldn’t their melee ability be reflected with an additional modifier?

  • What about the fact that this rule doesn’t account for this one specific but plausible situation?

And so on. And so on.

This kind of thinking especially creeps in when I’m working on a rule of my own. It’s easy to get overwhelmed. There are an infinite number of variables to account for and an equally infinite number of ways to model those variables. That’s where choice paralysis rears its ugly head.

An example of ChatGPT and myself following the rabbit hole of "Can I create a simple firing mechanic taking into account multiple variables?" Perhaps a non-starter.


So here’s my entirely unscientific, never-formally-tested method for addressing whataboutism.

It stems from a line in the appendix of The Portable Wargame by Bob Cordery:

“Always err on the side of simplicity rather than complexity.”

I think this was a lesson learned pretty early in the history of wargaming. Some of the earliest rule sets included sprawling tables of modifiers for everything from gun caliber to wind direction to (okay, maybe not literally) calorie expenditure. And while there's something neat and respectable about factoring all this in, referencing five tables for one exchange of fire turns the game into a spreadsheet exercise. Not the experience I’m after.

The key, then, is to take all those complex interactions and reduce them down to a one-step system, or two steps at most. So, how do you decide what stays and what goes?

For me, it starts with choosing what matters most to me in a given era of warfare. For me, that era is warfare in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. From everything I’ve read and the way I picture it, musketry was mostly ineffective in itself. What actually decided battles wasn’t firepower, but cohesion and morale. Units didn’t crumble because of sheer casualties. They broke because they lost formation or lost the will to keep going. And I think that’s probably true for most periods of warfare. But if I chase that rabbit, we’re right back in whatabout-land.

As far as I understand it, battles in the American Revolution resulted in relatively few casualties,
and the issue was often decided rather quickly by the threat of more violence.

So instead, I remind myself: for this system, I’m focusing on cohesion and morale as the foundation. Everything else either supports that or gets abstracted into it. The next step would be coming up with the most simple mechanic to represent those concepts, but that's for a future blog post perhaps. Moving on...

And just as important as knowing what to model is being clear about what I’m not modeling.

For example:

  • What about a commander bonus? I'm not simulating command and control. If a unit has high cohesion, that’s all I need to represent discipline, communication, and leadership.

  • What about musketry vs. bayonets? I’m not breaking combat into firing, charging, and melee phases. It’s all part of one pressure system. Either the unit holds, or it falls apart.

  • What about terrain? I might represent difficult terrain as a -1 to cohesion checks. Or I might ignore it entirely if it doesn't add much tension to the situation.

  • What about elite vs. regular troops? I reflect that in their starting morale or cohesion values, not with a special rule or table.

And when I do want to add a rule, I ask myself, in the wisdom of Mr. Cordery, can I build it as a plug-and-play module? In other words, can I remove this rule without it affecting the system as a whole?

And honestly? Half the time, that little detail is already baked in to the ruleset that I'm whatabout-ing. It’s just expressed through something more broad rather than a special rule. And as I mentioned in my previous post The Proving Grounds, narration does a lot in revealing what is being modeled in the mechanics.

So yeah, I’ve probably just restated what wargame designers and tinkerers have been saying for decades. But writing this down helps me remember what I’m trying to do. And, just as importantly, what I shouldn't be trying to do.

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