# Forget Chainmail - Wargaming's Roots Are Narrative tags: #thoughts #game/rpg/dnd #game/wargame/chainmail ![[Chainmail (cover).jpg]] There is a terribly annoying tendency among **OD&D**/[[OSR]] aficionados to harken back to **[[Chainmail]]** as their iconic spiritual predecessor and use it to justify any number of absurd claims about "how you should be gaming." Their contention is that **Chainmail** is the linear predecessor to **[[Dungeons and Dragons|D&D]]** and all of tabletop RPGs are the descendants of that singular experience and thus anything that departs from the precedent set by **Chainmail** is inherently lesser and "wrong." This is, of course, stupid, not the least reason being that **Chainmail** is nowhere near the origin of tabletop wargaming but instead the true origins, the source, has a lot more in common with story gaming as it is currently known than it does with **Chainmail**. Every once in a while I stumble on a really good article which fits into a line of thinking I was already on and this one is particularly good: **[Seekriegsspiel – The Other German Wargame](https://www.armchairdragoons.com/articles/research/seekriegsspiel/)** > _[[Kriegsspiel]]_ is commonly accepted as the original wargame. Introduced in Prussia in 1824, it started as a game for military officers to practice maneuvering units in an army unable to afford regularly putting an actual army into the field. By the 1860s _Kriegsspiel_ had evolved into a powerful tool for teaching officers about decision making in the fog and friction of war. In the journal article “‘Sharp like cut iron’: Albrecht von Stosch and the beginning of naval wargaming in the German navy,” wargamer and senior lecturer of history Jorit Wintjes writes of a lesser-known German wargame of this period, the _Seekriegsspiel,_ that first appeared in the 1870s (Wintjes, p. 88). People who have dug into the history of wargaming and read up on **Kriegsspiel** as a game know that it originally didn't have any mechanism for combat resolution, leaving it to the referees to determine success or failure of any particular opposed maneuver, whether it led to some sort of complication, and generally beyond the question of _"how far can an element move at a given time over a given time,"_ left the interpretation of outcome of the game to the referees. And here we have a specific citation to a clearly derivative game 50 years later which explicitly chooses not to mechanize the resolution of mechanics of conflict and combat but instead, ultimately, to leave it to the referees to simply decide. Alternately, to simply not decide it at all, specifically because there is no mechanistic, purely rational way to determine a reasonable outcome because there is no rational, reasonable measurement and metric to compare the elements in question. > _On the surface, Castle’s ‘On the Game of Naval Tactics’ appears very much to be the tactical maneuver simulator the German navy needed. When Castle spoke to the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in 1873 about his game, this interesting exchange on “design intent” took place that most every wargamer—and wargame designer—can likely relate to:_ > > _“Lieutenant BROWN, R.N.: I should like to ask the lecturer, as no arms are used by the ships, what is the ultimate issue of the game as played between the two players according to the present rules. I mean, what influences the decision of the umpire with respect to various ships and the ultimate issue of the game?”_ > > _“Lieutenant CASTLE: I am rather afraid the Lieutenant Brown has mistaken what I wish to convey to the meeting. What I have been working at for some time, is to show what I have shown you this evening. I have not attempted — nor do I intend to attempt, until I have worked through the whole of the Evolutionary Signal-Book and really fought this battle – to enter into the subject of the power of one ship against another while fighting….It appears to me that the climax of what is to be done at present is to bring the squadrons into contact with one another…Whenever I have played this game, these are the points that we have always argued about. I have not the power at present of deciding which ship will have the advantage when in actual contact. One man would say, ‘My guns will penetrate your armour.’ Another will say, ‘My armour will resist your guns;’ and all this provokes discussion. I do not think, at the present moment, that I am prepared to discuss with anybody that portion of the game.” (Curry, p. 39)_ Even as late as 1900 in the US, the American Navy version of **Kriegsspiel** had no mechanism for resolution of combat engagements. It had massive combat spaces on the floor which used 40 in.² grids divided into 10 four-inch squares along a side and sound like they would be completely awesome to play, but they didn't have mechanics for deciding whose guns penetrated someone else's hull. You would think that this would be relatively "easy" to figure out given the relative paucity of variables involved compared to land-based combat. You know the mass of a shell, you know how it is fired, you know the angle of incidence versus the hull at a relatively gross level – you would think that would be much easier to mechanize than a number of arrows fired into the rough area of a dispersed group of men, but here we are. > _Over time, however, the U.S. Navy version of Kriegsspiel evolved into an exercise called the Navy Chart Maneuvers. In this game two teams first prepared plans and then issued orders to their forces using a chart of the operations area. The physical separation of the teams—in different rooms—created the “fog of war.” As both sides scouted for the other, game umpires maintained a “master plot” which was used to parse out reports to either side. When the fleets had moved to engagement range, play transitioned from the charts to large-scale play on the floor using small models of individual ships. The floor of Luce Hall had 40 inch square grids on the floor with each square subdivided into smaller four inch squares. The scale used was 250 yards per inch and each turn was three minutes of time (thus taking advantage of the “3-Minute Rule” where the distance a ship moves in three minutes is the speed of the ship in knots times 100 equaling the distance in yards moved). Each turn students maneuvered their ships and fired at the other side. Umpires were responsible for evaluating hits and assessing damage (Lillard, pp. 5-6)._ What does any of this have to do with modern storytelling games and narrative mechanics? _Everything._ Storytelling games do not proceed from the assumption that their mechanics "simulate" any physical processes because there is effectively the understanding that elements are relative rather than absolute. You can generally say whether this thing is more effective than that thing, about equally effective, or less effective in a particular situation, and that is perfectly sufficient. The mechanics exist to help guide and pace the story, or rather the experience that the player or players have which in retelling becomes a story, but they don't attempt to simulate the elements with in the context of the narrative. When they do attempt a degree of simulation, it is of stories in general and storytelling, whether it is building up narrative power in order to control pacing through a scene or multiple scenes, or explicitly moving the spotlight from character to character, or modeling the relative influence of a character within a scene based on the narrative fiction and who that character is. If your intent is to have the closest possible relationship to the historical experience of playing a tabletop wargame, you can safely ignore **D&D** and **Chainmail**. Throw things on the tabletop, make some judgment calls, and tell a story. You'll be glad you did. --- _Post Scriptum:_ Even as late as 1963, historical naval wargaming inspired by **Kriegsspiel** depended on judgment calls by the umpires of a game to determine victory conditions or even if victory was a thing to be pursued in the course of the game. While the umpires did use dice to help resolve combat conflicts and determine whether unusual situations or malfunctions were introduced to the experience, the intent was not just to bang things into each other until something blew up (usually) but to pursue understanding of things that can occur in combat and concerns that can come up in the process.