"Friction vs Fiction": Discuss!

[Konrad]

If I was smart, I'd be playing chess. As it stands, I play these toy soldier games because I need a little random luck to win at anything.
Seriously, there has to be an element of gamble in the game-play to make it a game. Without it, it's just a puzzle, an equation, which might be entertaining for some folks. But I don't paint and sculpt and make up silly stories to go along with them to do math problems. Heck, my favorite games are Gorkamorka, Necromunda and Mordheim. Nothing but, roll a d6 and another d6 and again on the d66 chart there.

[job]

I personally like the idea of friction. I think it is a fun element in Bolt Action, Epic, Black Powder and others. It certainly is an interesting approach to gaming, but I don't think it is the only way to war-game. I suppose it comes down to a little bit of a dichotomy of either more control or more risk management. Maybe an analogy is whether you prefer a game like chess with clearly defined actions and possibilities and certainty of your actions, or playing something like poker with an acknowledgement that there's a lot left to chance and outside your control and it is more a matter of learning to play those chances.

I'll just say I am neither a poker or chess man (although back in middle school chess was what I loved). In wargame terms, I don't play Warmahordes, but I appreciate the ability of players to creatively think out combinations and tactical options. I also think Dropzone Commander is a legitimate game even though it involves less friction in its rules. There's a lot of fun to be had with creatively using your assets. Of course, I really love Bolt Action and Epic as rule sets, partly because of their elements of friction in control of the turn and unit control.

[me_in_japan]

I'm honestly not that fussed either way. I wargame because I enjoy the background and aesthetic of the minis. I don't play FoW or epic, and I'm curious as to what folks mean when they say "friction". Is it just a case of rolling a dice (or two) to establish whether or not a particular order is carried out? If so, is that different to rolling dice to establish whether said units manage to hit/wound/save, etc? What I mean is, assuming one is so inclined, surely any system that uses dice to simulate randomness, regardless of the specific aspect of combat being represented, can be broken down into probabilities of success? An additional one or two rolls to represent morale or miscommunication or whatever, taken statistically, just modify the odds of whatever it was you were trying to do.

I'm genuinely curious as to what difference people see. Answers on a postcard, plz

[jehan-reznor]

Well what i understand what friction is, is when i played a "real" wargame with a friend, that depending on the quality of your troops and the rank of your squad leader, giving "consecutive" orders got more difficult, for example my friend was play elite tank army and only giving an order to the same unit again would cause a roll with leadership, while i played Russians and even with a high commander, i still had to roll to check if my squad would do what i wanted to.

[Lovejoy]

I may be way out - maybe ToD needs to define it!
- but I take it to mean any game mechanic which makes use of parameters of restriction or prohibition to actions which we expect (in many wargames) to be carried out smoothly or automatically. In such games, movement, shooting, combat needn't just happen beause we say so. I think the word 'smoothly' is useful- hence the term friction. Chess doesn't use it, doesn't mean it's a rubbish game.

I think this friction kind of game shifts the focus, so that instead of feeling like an omniscient conroller who is everyman on our side on the tabletop, we become the commander, with fallible troops. This is the big difference in feeling when I play 40k/Fantasy vs. BA/BP I think. I like it. Sure there are leadership tests im GW games, but generally the little men do what we want without question.

I am not sure on the exact definition either though. I imagine games which factor in battlefield confusion, mistakes in relay of orders, poor generalship and miscommunications, lack of intelligence, fatigue etc...does that extend to standing in drizzle and being a bit wet? What that pikeman had for his tea? Need a wee? Bit miffed?
There is a (possibly mythic) tale that Napoleon had hemmaroids at Waterloo. If true I imagine it could have made a difference. i'm not sure if that's part of friction though.

[The Other Dave]

Yeah, exactly - for example, both Epic and Bolt Action have mechanics where units that come under fire accumulate [foo]s, which make it harder to activate said unit, degrade their ability to shoot and fight, and so on. Pretty simple on the face of it, but it allows you to get into quite a bit of depth in terms of unit and commander quality and how those can mitigate (or exacerbate) the effects of fire in this way.

There's lots of other ways to do similar things, of course. Warmaster and its descendants (including Black Powder, Hail Caesar and the like) do a thing like Lovejoy described, where you basically have to pass a Warhammer-style leadership check (usually based on the quality of the leader issuing the command) to successfully activate a unit, and things like how many times the unit has been activated, how far it is from the leader, what kind of terrain it's in, how much it's disrupted by damage and so on effect the dice roll. An ancients game I'm itching to try, Sword and Spear, sort of combines this with Bolt Action's pull-dice-from-a-bag activation method, having players pull a number of dice, roll them, and assign them to units to activate them - better quality units can be activated with lower dice rolls, proximity to a commander improves effective quality, complex maneuvers decrease it, and so on. (I don't know of any games that take hemorrhoids into account, though, heh.)

All of which are basically ways to make activating a unit a gamble, and they almost always rely on differences in troop and commander quality, modified by battlefield effects, to determine how much of a gamble it is. You can often do *something* even with a unit that fails to activate, it'll just often be severely limited - in Epic, for example, a unit that fails to activate can choose to shoot or move, but can't do anything else. But it's a bit more than could just be covered by, say, a penalty to hit - sometimes, a commander wants their troops to flank the enemy, or attack decisively, and they stay put. Think of the attack on the farm at Foy in Band of Brothers, where an indecisive subordinate causes an advance to stall, potentially catastrophically - lots of rulesets don't really have any mechanics to make something like that happen.

So in a sense, MiJ, it's "just another dice roll," but I like these kinds of rules because it reflects the reality of war and the fact that troop quality, commander quality, command structure, communication lines, and general battlefield confusion will often have a huge effect on whether troops do what their commanders want them to do.

[me_in_japan]

Fair enough. Taking what you've described on board, I'd say that I'm kinda in favour of friction. It opens up potential for "reliability" in units. Not that it'll ever happen, but I quite like the idea of, say, dark Eldar warriors occasionally not doing what the archon tells them to due to being self serving cowards, whereas Incubi get the job done every time. A special commander (eg Vect) could modify this "reliability" due to being particularly loyalty-inspiring (or just plain scary).

It's a 40k example, but aye, I can see how it could add interesting variation to any game.