The Three S's of wargames that are relevant to TTRPGs
The 3 "S's" of Wargaming are Scoring, Spacing, and Selection, and they're relevant to combat play in ttrpgs.
Having played Star Wars Legion, Kill Team, and a touch of Warhammer 40k 10e over the past two years my game design attention has shifted from tactics ttrpgs like ICON to these interesting war games. Every time I go to the game store every other sunday or so to set up a table with a friend, we put down cards determining the victory conditions, we set up our miniatures on opposite sides of the board, and then we try to win by blowing up each others critical units. This blog post is a brief reflection on how I have been engaging with war games. Hopefully, by sharing this I can convince aspiring tactics ttrpg designers to pivot their attention from the design questions of "how do I make a cool ability" and help them establish the solid "bones" of play that I often run up against when trying to run indie tactics ttrpgs as a GM.
First, I always ask myself how I plan to score by 'playing the objective.' As this is the determinant of who wins and who loses, then I am very interested in how scoring is determined and how to maximize it. In star wars legion, this now involves tokens on the board called Points of Interest, that the army with more units near it (that are not suppressed) usually score the primary objective for rounds 2-5 (5 being the final round).
Second, I wanted to develop the skill of understanding how spacing works in the game. This lead me to keep re-reading the rules for how movement worked. Because movement does matter. It's the difference between being able to shoot at a unit or being able to charge into them. If the bases of the miniatures do not touch, I cannot make a melee attack, and that really matters! Similarly, movement is really important for our first S, Scoring! Not only is spacing important for determining how I will make my choices, but I am also doing all of this while wary of how my opponent will make these choices as well. Understanding how their units project threats beyond where their minis currently are and navigating it is integral to spacing. In play, I am seeking optimal spacing, meaning that I want my miniatures to be in a place that gives me more options and gives my opponent less options. Even in Chess, spacing is a means of securing and denying choice. In war games, that security and denial is less absolute due to the randomization of dice rolls (begruded as variance), but some units have abilities that control variance, making the choice to bring them one of Selection.
So our third S is for Selection. Different kinds of units that you choose to become part of your army are specialized for certain use cases, like being strong in certain environments or having stronger attacks against certain units. When considering which units go where (a spacing choice), and what is the optimal position for them to be relative to the rest of the units on the board (a spacing and selection choice), some units are better equipped than others in certain contexts (selection). Those contexts are often established by the texture of the game board itself. For example, some units will do better shooting at a target out in the open than they would shooting a target in cover. For other units, the opposite might be true. And still other units will perform better in melee rather than shooting, or do better trying to score primary or secondary objectives instead of fighting at all.
The play of the game then works by playing to Score through proper selection and navigating spacing (sound like chess yet?). However, when I read ttrpgs it's like everything has been designed backwards. The embellishment is entirely on Selection, and then spacing becomes a way to hamstring selection power discrepancies and scoring is an afterthought, often relegating to who gets thumped off the board first. Hopefully my explanation of how i engage with wargames is compelling enough that you can consider asking your blank text document how you score before you decide anything else.