Yes, yes – I know. The name of the community is "Tabletop Role-Playing," so why in the world would someone link to a review of an entire suite of tabletop tactical wargame mechanics?
Once upon a time in the very early history of our hobby, there arose a thing called Dungeons & Dragons. But it was not the first thing. Before D&D there was Chainmail, a very tactical tabletop wargame which focused on low fantasy engagement and did all of the usual things you expect for such a thing to do. The players, however, wanted a more character-driven focus and began creating house rules to more specifically allow them to resolve conflicts between individual characters and the world at large. The same contexts of conflict were assumed to continue but a greater flexibility in what the scale of forced a player could afford to bring to bear became the new order of the day.
Chainmail was a creature of its time. The mechanics were what we would think of his extremely clunky, strangely proportioned, and weirdly scoped. You can see artifacts of many of the choices which originated in CM within D&D to this very day.
Rolling back to think about the origin of the hobby lets us consider options that might be unusual. I'm a great fan of looking at modern wargame design and thinking about how character roles can be evolved out of them or inserted into them to turn them into tabletop role-playing games without effectively neutering them and reducing how compelling that they are.
My usual toolset for this tinkering is almost anything from Two Hour Wargames, which I'm sure I've written about before. One Page Rules gives us another potential source to tinker with, one which has almost all of the mechanical complexity not necessary to reify the events of the game stripped away. That makes them excellent sources for beginning to hack on to make your own tabletop role-playing game with a strong mechanical core that you already know both works and doesn't take up 100 pages. Instead, the mechanics are succinct, easy to understand, easy to play with, and easy to extend.
Check out this review of the OPR by Joe Fonesea and see if anything "jumps off the page" at you and compels you to tinker with it. If you're looking for a place to start, Covering Fire! has incredible potential for being the basis of a role-playing game. So does War Stuff if you're looking to recapitulate the ontology of the indie itself. Double Tap would be an excellent basis if you're looking to start with a more sci-fi bent.
One of the great things about tabletop role-playing is that not only can you branch off your own mechanics for your own play but there's a certain level of expectation that you will do so. Take this is an invitation and run with it.
I would love to hear about any of your experimentation with this sort of thing. Comment down below if you have repurposed a mechanical system to your own role-playing needs.
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oh cool am going to check out the one page rules. I have been playing some super rules-lite fantasy RPGs with my kids (age five and three) but I think they are actually probably going to be more excited about a small scale wargame and this might give me some inspiration. On that topic are there any other super simple / rules lite wargame rulesets you might recommend me?
Reading through the Chainmail rules made a lot of the strange things about D&D make more sense to me, or at least, I had a better sense of why they existed in the first place and what the original context was!
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It's important to keep in mind that the only difference between "a wargame" and "a role-playing game" is often the way the player approaches the experience. Most people think of a wargame as something they come to looking to understand and master the mechanics first and foremost, specifically running for "winning." A role-playing game is often considered something you approach by putting on the mindset of someone actually inside the modeled experience with the player activity specifically thought of as not necessarily making optimal choices but choices that "the character" would make given what the player knows about them.
(I know I'm using a lot of quotes in this particular response, but I need to separate out the terms of art from what I actually think.)
If you look at a lot of historical war gamers, however, you see that many, if not most, are approaching the activity at the table as a reason to inhabit the role of "the army" which is engaging in the battle. Not only will they make nonoptimal choices, they will take mechanical systems which explicitly weight outcomes and abilities based on the character of the organization. The only thing that separates it from traditional role-playing is the idea that you aren't playing a single character but instead playing a group of characters which are involved in an ongoing experience.
Which is a really long way to go around the pole to say that any lightweight fantasy wargame system you might pick up is going to be a role-playing experience playing with your children because they haven't yet learned they shouldn't be thinking of the things going on the table as "not a character." They will say things like "my guys run up and fire their bows" and "my guy runs up and hits him with his sword!" They are all "his guys," and all part of "his character" just as much as a more traditionally architected game wouldn't differentiate a character with multiple hit points that loses effectiveness as those hit points go away. Just as the single character with reducing hit points and abilities remains the same character, a group of figures which lose individuals and thus abilities along the way still remain "the same character."
So all that crazy meta-commentary out of the way, simple rule sets that would be excellent for young players include…
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Yeah, clarification well taken and that is pretty much the distinction I was trying to draw already - I had started them off with one PC each under their control and we have run a few sessions and had a ton of fun. But in their own fantasy play they like to have whole teams of heros and bad guys and what not and I was thinking about "wargame" with them as meaning they each control a whole team instead of a single PC. Awesome thanks so much for this, going to look into these :) I will of course end up keeping track of most of the rules myself anyway, but they do enjoy some dice rolling mechanics that I have introduced them to and if some of these rules above have fun but simple mechanics it might be exactly what I was looking for.
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A lot of people focus on "kid friendly mechanics" being extremely simple or minimal, but the truth is those are just "good mechanics." If anything, I found that kids have a much higher tolerance for mechanical complexity on a regular basis in their games than I do, whether it be in videogames or tabletop. Your pair are a little young, but I can definitely expect them to be looking for more moving parts to play with before too many years go by.
If you're looking into maybe branching out into sci-fi, T HW does one of my favorite sets of rules for playing at all kinds of scales in their 5150 line. Whether you want to do ground-based stuff, Marines storming spaceships looking for pirates, fighters, capital ships, giant mecha brawls – they have something in the line that can take care of it and the mechanics are pretty straightforward and simple.
I was always a bigger fan of science fiction than fantasy and my library kind of reflects that.
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