I definitely wouldn’t play WHFB if it didn’t have cool figs! I want to be as invested as possible in my army and figs are an important part of that in WHFB. But I certainly wouldn’t play WHFB if I couldn’t make a cool army list out of an army book specific to my race with at least some special rules. My army (in gaming terms) at least has to seem interesting to me, otherwise why would I be using it to game with? Why not just have it sitting in a display case?

I’m not sure how any set of rules could be “visible on the table.” Do you mean that you just want players to be physically looking at the tabletop more than they look at the rulebook? Could you name a game as an example that achieves this effect?

What I’m getting at is that elaborate points systems, like elaborate rules that try to represent a lot of things, that are not really visible on the table, draw attention away from the tabletop & into the realm of abstract gaming. Not necessarily a bad game in that this can be quite captivating too, but not what I expect from a miniature game.

To your novelty chess sets I would oppose playing Warhammer or Warmachine or whatever miniature game with colour-coded square cardboard counters on an abstract gameboard. Would it still be nice games? Possibly, if you like the abstract mental challenge of the game & don’t care for the visuals. It wouldn’t be a game I’d care much for because it lacks cool miniatures & terrain. What I want is playing with toy soldiers, not cracking a complex set of rules in the way an accountant can score by exploiting the tax code.

Obviously you need good rules in addition to nice miniatures to make a game interesting, but I think we differ in what we consider “good rules”. For me, good rules draw attention to the miniatures on the table. Complex systems & the elaborate configuration rules that go with them often achieve the opposite effect, with people checking the books, making calculations etc. & then looking up to move some pieces before drifting back into rulesland.

The problem, I think, that you are trying to address is when a particular force list that DID achieve the effect I just described is then copied by everyone with access to online forums. Now what you have is a bunch of players who really did NOT choose the force they are playing with. They are not invested in their force and gameplay suffers for both them and their opponents. This is a gaming tragedy.

As for getting players to build attractive forces by limiting their customization options to buying/painting minis and reading fluff, I have to disagree. Would chess really be as fun a game as Epic for a wargamer if it had more background fluff and cool-looking figs? Many novelty chess-set manufacturers seem to think so and yet I still own way more Star Wars minis figs than I do chess set with Boba Fett knights and Mon Mothma queens :)

Wargaming has some pretty unique aspects to it that separate it from other kinds of gaming and I think that players being able to build their own cool forces is one of them.

Personally I’m more in favour of limiting choices for players, at least in real rules terms. That way it’s much easier to keep balance. This does not have to deprive players from building an attractive force, you can do that by selecting & painting miniatures or via cool fluff. For example, Hordes of the Things is a game which does this pretty nicely, keeping things fairly balanced by offering a limited & generic set of rules options for armies, while allowing players great freedom in deciding what the figures actually look like. In a tabletop game it’s the look & feel of the miniatures on the table that makes me care, not the rules behind them.

Rackham is in the same boat with Confrontation. Its next to impossible to change the point cost of a unit in the game without creating situations where people have different point costs for the same fig.

You can see the impact of that in AT-43. They still use cards for units and as a game mechanic but the point costs are all in the faction army books and they are, as I’ve mentioned, fairly generic in that they almost seem superfluous. I’ve already read comments on the AT-43 forum about people gaming without using the unit point costs. I can certainly see that after a few games you’d really not need them to quickly figure out what appropriate force levels are in a game.

I stand corrected. I was impressed when their errata gave the Pyre Troll a completely new ability (some kind of Fire Shield buff), presumably to make it more competitive considering both it’s point cost and the other warbeasts in the army.

I don’t think that “balance” is a reason to have rules that let players pick their own forces at all. Letting players pick their own forces clearly works AGAINST game balance. This is pretty self-explanatory, just think about chess or Avalon Hill boardgames. If you, as a designer, set the forces that players will use in any given battle then you can make the game much more balanced than you could by allowing players to choose their own armies.

From a design perspective - that is, not thinking in terms of selling miniatures linked to a rules system - the main reason to include rules that govern force composition is simply to give players the opportunity to make choices before the game starts and invest themselves in their force so that they care about it.

By empowering players make choices about what they bring to the battle, the force they bring to the battle now says something about they themselves - they are invested in the force. If they are invested in their force then they care about what happens to it in battle. THAT is what makes for a good game. Just like you probably won’t enjoy a movie where you don’t care about the main character, you probably won’t enjoy a wargame too much if you don’t care about your force.

There are certainly ways to make players care about their forces - interesting fluff, cool miniatures, etc. - but from a rules perspective I don’t think there’s much you can do to get a player to care about a force unless they think of it as THEIR force, and to do this, they must somehow create it themselves. Imposing restrictions on how they can do it makes creating an effective force a challenge and lets the players feel like they’ve accomplished something by building a force that they can take pride in.

Set forces are something I don’t like about most board games I’ve played. It is also why I rarely play scenarios with set forces - even good ones - in traditional tabletop wargames. Making choices is what gaming is all about and by not allowing me to make this big important choice I feel disempowered as a player and have less fun.

Point Costs and Explicit Restrictions:

Assuming that we want players to pick their own forces, what do point cost systems offer that other systems might not? Well, if I’m creating a 2000pt WHFB army and a basic trooper costs 5pts and a shield for my basic trooper only costs 1pt then I have a LOT of control over what my army is going to look like. This is good because we want players to have control over what their force looks like, that’s why we have force composition rules in the first place. Points systems are great for providing a simple way of increasing the amount of choice that players have when composing their forces.

The downside to that is that by allowing players too many choices, making an army can get way too complicated to be enjoyable anymore. Add to this the fact that the more choices you give a player to create their own force, the more inherently unbalanced the game will get.

This is why (I think) many systems will slap further restrictions on force composition like “You must take a Hero and X Core Units before taking anything else” in WHFB or “You must take a full platoon before taking a third unit of combat striders” in AT-43. I’ll refer to these force composition rules as “Explicit Restrictions.” The more explicit restrictions that are added, the easier it is to make a force and the more balanced a game is.

Combining these two types of force composition rules seems quite challenging. I would argue that there are not enough explicit restrictions in 40k, leading to some crazy army lists. On the other hand, while it is still a bit early to call, I think that there are too many explicit restrictions in the AT-43 army lists. This might be why, as Zac points out, it doesn’t seem like there is much “point in having points” in AT-43 :)

I’ve not yet seen a game that relies heavily on explicit restrictions and still gets a player invested in their force. I’m trying to design one for a game that I’m working on myself. But I think a good example of a game that combines these two types of force composition rules very well is Epic: Armaggedon. Each army list has its own explicit restrictions on groups of units, but they all share a common points cost system for individual units. Epic Armies are highly customizable but well balanced and easy to create.

In Conclusion:

Points cost systems cut right to the core of why force composition rules are good to have in games, but they need to be managed or they get too complicated and will be abused. This makes the game less fun.

Explicit restrictions are much harder to abuse and make creating forces much simpler, but can remove too much choice from force creation. This will also make the game less fun.

A well-tested game that is written by a good designer, I think, will be able to get the most out of either system and mitigate the disadvantages of both.

Sorry. I thought Hobby Companies were philanthropic agencies. :o)