Wed, 16 April 2014
Welcome to Guns, Dice, Butter: Episode XX April 16, 2014 On this episode of GDB: 0:00 Episode Intro and Preview 0:13 Eklund: Conversation with Phil Eklund, designer of High Frontier, Pax Porfiriana , Greenland , Luftschiff (Zeppelins!) and 26 other games covering the human (and pre-human) experience. 1:22 War by Other Means: Panel discussion with Jim Doughan, Mark Herman and Brian Train regarding the other “7 M’s” of warcraft {besides the 3 traditional "M's" of combat - machetes (irregular), machine guns (conventional) and missles(strategic)} that support the BIG “M” (morale) in making and waging war: message (casus belli – manufacturing it and maintaining it) , media, money, mercenaries (mercs/brownshirts/proxies/little green men), mayhem (attacks on opponents fabric of society), Mi5/Mi6 (spycraft) and Prince Klemens Wenzel von Metternich (Clausewitz's “have a good pen” – diplomacy – internal/external). 2:12 Conversation with Brian Train, regarding his recent DTP design Ukrainian Crisis game and other bits and bobs 2:36 Wrap up: What’s on my wargaming plate (using wargames in school), Eklund’s “Nature bats last”, B.H.Liddell Hart’s “Lenin had a vision of fundamental truth when he said the soundest strategy in war is to postpone operations until the moral disintegration of the enemy renders the delivery of the mortal blow both possible and easy.”, shout-outs and what not. Guns, Dice, Butter available on iTunes, Boardgamegeek (guild 1293), Consimworld (Consim Café folder), the GDB website and elsewhere on the web. GDB has approximately 10k listeners and well over 40k downloads. Thank you for your continued support!
Comments[5]
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You mention that games that include both the lead-up to war and the war itself tend to treat the lead-up as just a preliminary to the war rather than a thing in and of itself. I think there's a good reason for this. Given how destructive war is (a fact you mention in the podcast,) it is almost always the case that at least one of the parties does not think war will occur. Assuming people aren't completely deluded, this means that most wars start in situations where war is unlikely to start (at least, it's unlikely at that moment.) I don't think the Austrians expected a full-out war when they acted as they did in 1914, and I think Hitler thought he'd get away with Poland just as he had done with Czechoslovakia. If you accept this premise, then a truly realistic "lead up to war" game would usually end without a war actually happening. War would be like "Global Thermonuclear War" in Twilight Struggle, or like shooting the moon in Hearts---something you need to think about, but that you don't expect to happen. If a game designer designed a realistic game that gave the prelude its due, the "kinetic war" component that you mention would have to be fully developed, but would not actually be used in most of the games. So you'd play out the prelude and most of the time, that would be all. Every so often something unexpected would happen and you'd go on to play the wargame. This would be a challenge for the players. Imagine that two or more of us sit down to a game. We know that 80% of the time we'll play for 2 hours and there will be no war. But the other 20% of the time we'll play 2 hours of prelude and then go on to play 6 more hours of war. You can see why that would be problematic for most people. I'm not surprised designers don't design games like that. Instead, they either design games focused only on the prelude (and that therefore stop once full-out war starts) or games where the prelude is just a short set-up to provide a framework for the "real game".