Monday, April 13, 2015

Scale Concerns


+Erik McGrath

Scale is one of those things that makes or breaks a game for me. Both the size of the models and the approximate ground scale have to fall in a pretty narrow range or I'm not going to play it more than a few times and I certainly won't be investing in it.

Then there's the issue of time as well. It does me no good to have everything the right size but then too fast or slow. If a turn is 5 min long then a tank could deplete most if not all of its ammunition in that time period given enough targets.


But once that's all set you don't want to be rolling so many dice that it takes 12 hours to play the game either. I think the sweet spot for game length is 3-4 hours when playing a 'standard' sized game which I usually consider as having 5-10 units per side. Depending on the game scale those units could be companies or single individuals.

Model Scale

The goal here is to use a scale that is large enough to easily handle individually based infantry without them constantly getting knocked around while being as small as they can be so they don't seem to be moving in slow motion across the table.

Originally we went with 25mm and it felt a little big. 15mm was a little too small on the individual infantry metric but looks great in play. The compromise candidate is 1/72 since its basically interchangeable with 20mm.

Ground Scale

There's no way around this issue. The ground scale is always going to be smaller than the model scale if you want to have meaningful ranges for modern weapons. 1/120 is the current winner in this race. It turns my 4'x6' table into a battlefield 160x240yds for a total area of 7.9 acres. It makes 1"=10' which I like because a 2" move is the rough 7yds at which melee combat becomes likely.

Infantry have a base speed of 4" in this system with options to move on the double on their active turn and also to adjust by half speed on the opponent's turn. So despite being more than 1.5x smaller than the model scale it works in play.

Time Scale

I think of time as an emergent property of the other scales rather than a dial that is set on its own. The main reason I look at it this way is because once the movement speed and ground scale are set then you can solve distance = rate x time  and see how long it takes. There is some elasticity in the precise time reached since while the speeds of men and machines are well known there are abstractions of the actual movement.

Infantry don't move in one smooth motion from position to position. They stay low and sprint some portions while diving for cover and waiting for an opening at other times. Even in a heated, close engagement there's a significant amount of nothing going on.

The turn also needs to make time for fire. Firing while moving tends to hit nothing, especially when tanks do it. This means punctuating movements with halts and finding your target. The players of course can see the entire battle but the actual participants have very limited awareness. Without resorting to complicated rules or a referee the only way I've found to handle this is to just abstract it.

To that effect the time scale of this project is loosely defined as a minute to a few minutes for a final, in game, elapsed time of 5-30 minutes.

Unit Scale

Rounding out the scales is the playing piece(s) that get the focus. In this case its in the name of the game: man to man combat.

I've talked about it already in this design diary so it should be no surprise that I'm focused on the individual rifleman as the basis of the rules. But individuals don't fight battles so the smallest maneuvering element is the team.

Teams can be pairs, crews, or half squads under normal circumstances. Under less normal circumstances they can be larger such as full squads or a single soldier who has been cut off or left behind due to circumstances. Vehicles, when they appear, operate individually because in reality they are full crews already.

5 comments:

  1. Just wanted to pitch in and say I love reading stuff like this :)

    Haven't delved through everything in detail but looks nice so far at a cursory glance.

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  2. Glad to hear it, thanks. I have been thinking more about scale and the rules and guidelines I'm working on for setting it.

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    1. Yeah, scale is never a fun question because there's always going to be compromises somewhere.
      As you mention, time scale can distort things greatly and you get the unenviable job of either making the time scale strict (and then having to evaluate how long things actually take) or hand waving it, which will upset some players.

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  3. I, too, love reading this.
    Just wrote up a compressed mass combat section for an RPG a week or two ago, and covered the three scales and reasons for them. Nice reading through your logic. I really like your 1" = 10' @ 20mm.

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