Topic: Wargame Design Musings
One of the things that I have learned about game design is that you cannot leave an open ended mechanic without a finite end. The impetus for the thought is that some players seem only interested in ignoring the fact that they are playing an historical game and spend undue effort trying to find ways to distort the rules and frustrate their opponent. To what purpose is beyond me.
A good example of what I am talking about is in my old Pacific War design where I put in a mechanic for penalty time, so players could recover forces when they had made slight miscalculations in logistic planning. I tried to ensure that this couldn't be used to ones advantage by removing the offensive players ability to conduct combat in penalty time. This way if the player messed around, the reaction player could launch a short range attack and start killing things until the pain of losses forced the player to shut things down.
In works not only in theory, but in practice as I was once able to make an opponent (someone I did not know well at a convention) cry uncle when they tried to get cute with this tactic. What I would like to write is a rule that is called, sit down, play the game, and stop screwing around. As this is not enforceable, I have learned the lesson that all mechanics must have a enforced end even if there is a viable way around it, such as my solution in Pacific War. The reason being when there is no limit, its clear abuse frustrates most players spoiling a good time.
Mark
