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Greetings Designers,

Today, I wanted to talk a bit about how Wargames can use or utilize Psychology in their rules.

We probably all recall the good old days of Warhammer 40K 1st edition: Rogue Trader and the glorious Psychology rules for things such as Frenzy, Hatred, and others. Later, Necromunda/Mordheim made psychology more of a campaign injury state in the form of Shell shock/Head Injury. Nowadays, much of the psychology of a wargame is abstracted away into a stat roll such as morale, fear tests, etc.

However, have you ever seen Psychology as a larger focus of the game? The only example I can think of is Starnge Aeons where characters can earn "Black Marks" and psychological conditions through campaign play similar to injuries.

Quite a few games have some form of Berserker or similar troops.

Stupidity and many other similar elements are still present in BloodBowl.

There are a few boardgames about insanity and of course in all the Call of Cthulhu games sanity is a fragile thing

I had considered designing a game where there were 2 boards, one where the battle takes place and another where the psychological battle takes place.

So board 1 tells you where your units are, what they can see and reach etc. The other dictates how effective they are when you want them to do something. I hadn't fleshed it out so it's still a bit vague!

Almost every Cthulu game, or game with a Cthulu derivative has madness/psychosis as a key function - often it's how you lose the game, by simply going mad.

I love Battlegroup's "army breaking point" system, which is randomized by drawing chits from a bag and keeping it secret. I think it's a nice representation of how combat often works; casualties are usually quite low - but one side simply withdraws to rethink or reconsider their approach.

Various role-playing games have psychotic behavior, or spells that create a similar issue in heroes or enemies.

I don't know that I've seen it, but I'd really like to see more attention paid to command psychology in games. If you look through military history you see commanders and generals performing very differently in similar circumstances. Generals were often known for being brash, or too defensive/slow to respond, etc. I'd really like to see that impact more games, to the point of rolling for officer traits with a risk of getting a complete garbage officer who can greatly hinder a unit's battlefield performance, etc. I'm not sure how much that would tie into psychology - other than an officer's fears/doubts/motivations/etc.

Psychology should play a much larger roll in all wargames, but it often interferes with the godlike power the average wargamer "wants" or expects in a wargame. A lot of new wargamers wouldn't be too happy if their unit decided to hunker down in cover instead of charge wildly into gunfire as they wish...

There's a matter of managing expectations, I think. There's wargames out there for people that want to command a legion of lemmings, and there's wargames out there for people that want the terrifying reality of a firefight in the comfort of their gaming room.

Nurglitch wrote:
There's a matter of managing expectations, I think. There's wargames out there for people that want to command a legion of lemmings, and there's wargames out there for people that want the terrifying reality of a firefight in the comfort of their gaming room.

Oh absolutely. While it may not register directly with some people...there are so many types of wargamers, but a lot of them fall into the "math and competition" zone. These are the same people who are power-builders and meta-chasers in most of the games they play; be it tabletop wargames, chess, online video games, role-playing games, etc. To these people the challenge is: creating the mathematically best solution to a problem - in a game where they control as many elements of the outcome as possible.

Other people enjoy the challenge of surviving the chaos, almost in a narrative/cooperative fashion. I look at most games as if we're writing a script for a movie - and in the end, would you want to watch it? They may enjoy more random events, unexpected encounters, frustrating unit/officer activations, fog of war, unknown information, hidden objectives, occasionally doing things for theme rather than strategy etc.

I suppose a third group would be; light entertainment pushing minis? The true beer and pretzels, game barely matters, keep the rules light, knock out a game in 20-30 minutes - it's all about the social aspect and there's little genuine "investment" in the game. More of a boardgame style approach.

I think the issues arise when one type tries a game outside their comfort zone and doesn't enjoy it, or, in the case of popular games like Warhammer 40K, two players come from different groups above and have an unpleasant gaming experience. That really is just the issue of pick-up-games with strangers which is the "blind date" of wargaming.

 Elbows wrote:
Almost every Cthulu game, or game with a Cthulu derivative has madness/psychosis as a key function - often it's how you lose the game, by simply going mad.

I love Battlegroup's "army breaking point" system, which is randomized by drawing chits from a bag and keeping it secret. I think it's a nice representation of how combat often works; casualties are usually quite low - but one side simply withdraws to rethink or reconsider their approach.

Various role-playing games have psychotic behavior, or spells that create a similar issue in heroes or enemies.

I don't know that I've seen it, but I'd really like to see more attention paid to command psychology in games. If you look through military history you see commanders and generals performing very differently in similar circumstances. Generals were often known for being brash, or too defensive/slow to respond, etc. I'd really like to see that impact more games, to the point of rolling for officer traits with a risk of getting a complete garbage officer who can greatly hinder a unit's battlefield performance, etc. I'm not sure how much that would tie into psychology - other than an officer's fears/doubts/motivations/etc.

Psychology should play a much larger roll in all wargames, but it often interferes with the godlike power the average wargamer "wants" or expects in a wargame. A lot of new wargamers wouldn't be too happy if their unit decided to hunker down in cover instead of charge wildly into gunfire as they wish...

Now that you mention it. I have run into a lot of Horse and Musket games with that factor built into the rules.

Yeah, black powder seems to be heavily leaning toward the "simulation" (if abstracted) side of wargaming, and with its historical precedents often features more morale/command and control rules - something I like.

The trick is finding a fun implementation. Leadership as its generally represented, comes from traditional warfare where poorly trained armies were often as much about convincing people to die for you as anything else. Like most sim elements, however, its not exactly fun and its a big part of why most movies and videogames prefer to depict warfare in a more glorious and uncompromising manner. Minis have largely followed suit.

I think the real issue is that in most minis games you're in pretty direct control of a units actions rather than the sense that you're giving orders that they follow with some sense of autonomy. They are your actions more than your orders and by extension, the idea of fear or confusion doesn't connect when you're not afraid or confused.

I think you'd need a layer of abstraction to get it to not be frustrating. Something akin to the Memoir order cards where your order can be replaced with a different card or something.

Yep, I do love the random historical games which use maps, hidden deployment, and sometimes you communicate only by writing notes and sending them by "courier" to your fellow generals, etc. It's all very cool, but it's absolutely nothing that the average 20-something gamer is going to jump at.

They might if that sort of thing was implemented in an online game.

I actually designed a wargame from a dream I had that was designed for teams of non-wargamers using playing cards. It was suppose to be a team building game for my work that involved the following:

C-in-C
Runners
Brigade Commanders
Written Orders
Eating M&Ms

https://app.box.com/s/66re0h76nkj6prihh21jge964guh9g51

Elbows, you might enjoy reading it? I was planning on forcing my direct reports at work play it as a team building exercise. Never happened for various reasons.

If you try it, let me know how it goes. Like I said, I never polished it up or play-tested it and the mechanics came from a dream!

What about a system where you take command of the psychology of your opponents army?

We can safely say that, if all goes well, your army will do exactly as you intend and you will get that god-like power kick from commanding legions to their doom for the greater victory.

I'm thinking perhaps some sort of x-wing style activation, where you put down orders for your forces before each turn. each unit has its wheel of orders, like x-wing movement wheels.

Then your command chain is where you can adapt those orders as the turn unfolds - less critical for the opening moves, but as the game changes before you, that suicide-charge is looking more like suicide and less like a charge. So you use your commander to change an order.

Your opponent, however, has (let's say) a hand of 5 cards with which to disrupt you. The order might never make it, or the unit might hunker down instead. The commander of this unit might hold a grudge against your commanding officer, and decide to do something different (controlling player picks any maneuver except the one ordered). so you still have control of your army, but also can mess with your opponents, and have your plans backfire. The messenger got killed, or a fog rolled in. Lots of things can happen.

In the game I currently design a command roll is required for non-obvious actions, like firing or charging at not-immediate-threat targets, moving out of cover when being in a position to shoot etc. This achieves two goals: represent combat stress better than „omnipotent general” approach, and making movements a lot more important than in games like modern 40K.

nou wrote:
In the game I currently design a command roll is required for non-obvious actions, like firing or charging at not-immediate-threat targets, moving out of cover when being in a position to shoot etc. This achieves two goals: represent combat stress better than „omnipotent general” approach, and making movements a lot more important than in games like modern 40K.

The Men Who Would Be Kings does something similar. Combatants have some in-built, natural, or trained actions they can take without making a command check. However, anything outside of those orders requires a command check to accomplish. Failure leads to dithering.

I'm a fan of psychology in games, but it's rarely implemented in a practical way. Any time you take away control from the player, there's a risk of turning them off the game.

Outside of Cthulu, I haven't seen it as the larger focus of the game. Something you might want to look at is Paranoia, which had significant psychological elements for the player. There were decisions about when to kill your character to bring out the next clone, the risk / reward on that was significant.

Good luck!