RE: Initiative - was RE: Piquet

I wasn't criticising Piquet as a whole, just the aspect of the wide
swings in intiative that the rules have.  I don't have problems with the
cards for usable actions or the movement or firing aspects.  However, it
seems rather arbitrary to have so much of the game depend on a single
roll for each turn, with entire battles decided by a few opposed die
rolls.

If you are going to place that much of the battle to luck, then there is
not much point in setting up the pieces, you can just do half a dozen
opposed die rolls and determine who wins.

Most of the games I play, I prefer that there be opportunities to act
and react, to generate and counter local advantages, which the overall
initiative system of Piquet doesn't generate.  It provides for massed
advantages (one entire side or player) vs. just the left flank or even
individual units showing unusual elan or aggressiveness that beat back
an attack and won the day.  The plain-vanilla version of Piquet
definitely favors the aggressive player over the passive player.

The problem with house-mods and the huge variety of them is that when
you play at cons or other large gatherings, if all the players are not
playing with exactly the same mods, their level of play may be adversely
affected.  For instance, reducing the initiative dice from d20 down to
d12 or d10 reduces the swings, so a player will generally only plan for
4-5 actions instead of 7-10 per turn.  using 2D10 for initiative instead
of d20 throws a whole different set of statistics into the works,
requiring a much different mindset (only 2-3 actions per turn instead of
4-5 or 7-10) than if you know you might hit a run of up to 19 actions.

Historically battles are not won or lost by the commanding general's
initiative, but by his knowledge of the battle conditions.  Most often
you hear of reserves committed to late, or an attack initiated too late
to take advantage of a local weakness in the lines.  These errors
occurred, not because the general was slow in giving the order after the
appropriate infomation was available, but is almost always due to
incomplete information being available to the general in a timely
fashion.  Most war games have the defect that player-generals have a
vastly better picture of the battle, the units involved and their
abilities, than any historical general has ever had.  Just setting up
the game provides a huge amount of intelligence - you know the terrain
(no booby-traps, unknown ravines or cliffs, or "secret paths" through
the forests), you know your opponent's force size and location (unless
you are allowing flank marches or hidden units), you know the abilities
of your opponent'!
 s forces (no suprise super-weapons) and you know your opponent will
engage your forces (no waiting it out for days and days and days).  With
just this information a player is able to reduce the command decisions
dramatically, no decision for re-supply, weather, communication lines,
worry about opposing reinforcements, flank attacks, terrain or man-made
traps, super-weapons, feints or probing attacks vs. the start of an
assault, etc. etc. etc.

To truly generate "historical" results, the key factor is to reduce or
eliminate player knowledge of specific details of the battle.  You would
receive messages from the front, and send out orders the same way and
plot locations of your units on a map, which may or may not reflect
their actual positions on the board. Reports may be delayed or units
wiped out with no information as to their demise.  Even modern
commanders, with radios, GPS, computers and real-time video still have
only a hazy idea of the locations and condition of the troops under
their control, and are very dependent on the commanders on the scene to
make the right decisions at the right time to influence the battle that
they are in.  

For those reasons I prefer games to have some degree of responsiveness -
even if just Overwatch or pass-through fire to allow units to react to a
local condition, even if orders from a higher command aren't forthcoming
or a side didn't win initiative for that turn.

--Binhan

-----Original Message-----
From: Andy Cowell [mailto:andy@cowell.org]
Sent: Tuesday, September 28, 2004 12:43 PM
To: gzg-l@csua.berkeley.edu
Subject: Re: Initiative - was RE: Piquet 

In message
<F4783C94B5D9F1479D984ABC31C264355CD280@rxgen2s1.rxkinetix.com>, "B 
Lin" writes:
> Since both players roll an opposed d20 and the winner gets the
> difference in act ivations, it can generate numbers from 0 to 19.  If
> a player is lucky and rolls several high numbers in a row, the
> opponent essentially can't move or perform actions for several turns.

This is true of how the rules are written (although rare), but it is an
arbitrary mechanism to assign points.  There are *MANY* others, using
not only dice but also cards and dominoes.  Most of these alternate
mechanisms are designed to give a less drastic swing in scores.  This is
not really a fair criticism of Piquet as a whole, IMO.

In message <200409280310.i8S3ArFi008424@b.mail.sonic.net>, "Katrina
Brown" writ
es:
> The key issue I have seen with PK (I have never played) is that it is
> geared to 1-2 players, and my in my crew it we want 6-8 players.

Piquet is widely played by larger groups.  The best Piquet games I've
been in have been 6-8 player games at Historicon.  I'm not sure if the
rules themselves address multiplayer mechanisms, but 5 mins on the
Piquet yahoo group will give you lots of ideas.