Of Dice and Men: The Story of Dungeons & Dragons and The People Who (7 page)

Major von Lehndorff ordered the regiment into a march column, and
we set off for a valley between two villages, about a mile apart. To our left, a division of heavy cavalry would take one town; General von Zastrow himself led the brigade to take the other. Our job was to plug the hole between the two, hold the center, and keep the French at bay.

As we marched to our duty, we made a pretty picture. Like a line of toy soldiers glinting in the sun.

At fifteen-millimeter scale, an inch on our battlefield represented fifty yards of distance. To get my troops into place between the center and northernmost villages, I had to march halfway across the table and change formation into a defensive line. This turns out to be more difficult than it sounds.

Under the Napoleon’s Battles rules, each military unit has a different movement rate, and the rate varies depending on the unit’s formation. In their starting configuration, a four-man-wide-by-four-man-deep column, my line infantry could move ten inches per turn. But change them into a long marching column—two men by eight—and they could move sixteen inches.
Landwehr
infantry move eight inches in column, a cannon nine inches, and so on.

As such, the first few moves of our Napoleonic battle—the first hour of the game, really—consisted of little more than moving pieces around the board. On my turn, I’d lean over the table with a tape measure, mark ten inches’ distance from the front of my line, and then carefully move each mini to traverse the gap. At the same time, I’d have to measure the distance from my commander to each regiment, making sure nothing was too far away.

By the time we could see the French they were half a mile distant. They had stopped their advance and formed lines; directly ahead of us, light infantry chasseurs made a wall of green coats a hundred yards wide.
On either flank, they were protected by cavalry—four hundred horses pawing at the earth and flicking their tails, their riders leaning back in saddles, muskets at rest.

At that distance, we had little to fear from the infantry, whose muskets barely had the power to hit a target a hundred yards away. But those horsemen could close the distance between us in half a minute and tear through our columns before we had time to defend ourselves. So the major had us stop our march and form a defensive square, twelve men to a row and twelve to a column, muskets bared on all sides. Facing a square, a cavalry charge is useless—all they can do is ride around it in circles. Come too close, and they’ll get a half dozen bayonets up the ass.

The disadvantage of forming a square, at least from my position, is that you can’t see what the hell is happening. Standing two men back on the left flank, I had a good view of our light artillerymen, who had unlimbered their cannon and were ready to fire. But I couldn’t see the Frenchmen and had to guess how they’d respond.

We held position for long minutes before I couldn’t stand the tension and turned to my friend Leopold. “What’s happening? Why aren’t they attacking?” He opened his mouth to speak, then froze—we both heard the answer on the air, faint but coming closer, something like an approaching hailstorm: hundreds of boots beating a rhythm across the dry earth. An infantry charge.

Behind us the major’s bugle sounded three times, and we scrambled back into line. As I fell into place, I could make out the French formation coming toward us—l’ordre mixte, a combination of line and column meant to break through enemy infantry. Through my regiment. I raised my musket and waited for orders.

We didn’t fire until we could see the fringe of their woolly epaulettes. Two volleys in quick succession: our front rank, kneeling, then the
second, standing behind them. Our muskets belched smoke, and the French line twitched and staggered. A dozen chasseurs pitched forward onto the grass, but the regiment held formation. They stopped, lifted their muskets, and returned fire.

It takes me around twenty seconds to reload my musket, but when someone’s shooting at you, twenty seconds feels like an hour. I tried to concentrate on the routine and to tune out the sound of the French guns. Detach the firelock from the shoulder, open the priming pan, open the cartridge box. To my right, I heard a thud and felt my friend Johann stumble. Take a cartridge, bite off the top of the paper, fill the pan with powder. Something whizzed past my ear like a fat, angry bee. Close the pan, swing round the weapon, empty the cartridge into the barrel, tamp it down.

Cock the gun, shoulder it. Return fire.

Fighting in Napoleon’s Battles uses a system of modified dice rolls: To attack, both players roll 1d10—one ten-sided die—and then add or subtract based on factors like type of soldier, location, and formation. If the attacker ends up with a bigger number, they’ve killed a few enemies.

A fight is further complicated by rules for morale: If enough soldiers get hurt in a regiment, it will become “disordered” and can’t return fire or initiate hand-to-hand combat. Fail to recover from disorder and you could get “routed,” forcing your troops to run away from combat. If they happen to run into another regiment as they flee, those guys panic as well.

It’s not an easy system. Each player was given a photocopied “training scenario information chart” describing all these modifiers, but it was so complex as to be useless: When you need nineteen footnotes to explain a single page of information, you know you’re in trouble.

All this complexity even flummoxes the experts. Tom and Paco,
our two volunteer game masters, spent a good portion of the match debating rules between themselves and issuing conflicting instructions—and I don’t think they were doing a bad job. It’s just the character of the game, complex and confusing. War games are meant to provoke discussion, not stimulate the imagination like D&D.

The fact is that in any historical-miniatures battle, only 10 percent of the match is really spent playing. Half the remaining time is spent arguing about history, and the other half arguing about the game’s rules. War is hell.

A
round us, I could hear panic and pain. On our left, the cavalry was being routed, falling back and exposing our flank. But my regiment held its position. We traded three volleys with the French infantry. They kept advancing. They were only forty paces away when our cannon finally opened fire.

The explosion took me by surprise, and I nearly dropped my ramrod. I reflexively turned to look but caught only an instant of motion—the big gun rolling back and digging into the earth—before it was enveloped in a huge cloud of thick gray smoke.

Then I heard the screams. The gunners had loaded the cannon with canister, a mix of scrap iron and musket balls—ineffective at long distances, but murderous up close. The shot tore into the French line and shredded its front ranks. The shocked soldiers who remained panicked and were routed, turning heel and fighting back through their own men—anything to get away from the big brass gun.

At this point, I was ready to declare Prussian victory. But one of the peculiarities of Napoleon’s Battles is that soldiers get routed all the time. Just as a player manages formations, he must also manage morale, rallying troops and reimposing order to keep as much of his army fighting as possible. The idea is that everyone gets their butt
kicked, but good players know how to take a beating. A successful general advances like the tide, surging and breaking, losing ground one moment but gaining the next.

The French learned this lesson quickly. When their light infantry was routed and fell back, I marched my
Landwehr
regiment forward into the hole, hoping to pursue and destroy. But on their very next turn, the French commander was able to rally the unit and stop their retreat.

At the same time, he moved two more infantry units toward my position. I needed a turn just to change formation from march column back into a line. So by the time I was ready to fight, I had exposed myself to fire from three separate French units. When the French attacked, their commander would roll 3d10 and add them together; my only way to avoid slaughter was to roll higher, but I’d get only a single d10.

He picked up the dice and tossed them on the table. One, one, and four.

I rolled a ten. Somehow, my troops not only avoided destruction but also took no casualties. My infantry was immune to bullets.

Game master Tom leaned across the table and smiled. “What’s the difference between a fairy tale and a war story?” he asked. “A fairy tale begins ‘Once upon a time,’ and a war story begins ‘No shit, this really happened.’ ”

The victory was short-lived. When our game hit the four-hour time limit, the French army held three out of five towns on the map. Napoleon took the day.

I thanked the game masters and left the table, the ballroom, and the conference center. I traced a march column across the parking lot, unlimbered my car, and sent two hundred horses down the left flank
of the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Four hours of little war was enough for the weekend—or for a lifetime, really.

Historical-miniatures battles aren’t for me. It’s not just that there are too many rules—I can handle rules; I love rules. It’s that these rules are too complicated, and they’re the absolute focus of the game; it’s not about telling a story and having an adventure but about accurate simulation. For me, at least, historical-miniatures war games have too much regimentation and not enough imagination.

It’s interesting, but it’s no Dungeons & Dragons.

1
. But not extinct: Apple Computer founder
Steve Jobs was a Kriegsspiel fan; in the early days of the company, he’d play games with engineer Daniel Kottke, sometimes while they were both tripping on LSD.

2
. “This creature seems to be a cross between a stunningly attractive human and a sleek lion. It looks human from the waist up, with the body of a lion below that.”
Monster Manual,
page 165.

R
idiculously complicated rules and hand-painted miniatures are not a recipe for success. Despite H. G. Wells’s efforts to take war games mainstream, the hobby remained obscure into the mid-twentieth century. The general public proved more interested in simple, self-contained board games like Monopoly, which debuted in the 1930s, and Scrabble, first published in 1948. Kriegsspiel and its brethren continued to have their fans, but they were few in number, almost exclusively older men, and usually veterans who wanted to relive a bit of the thrill of the world wars.

In 1952 someone finally figured out how to make war into a family pastime. By the age of twenty-two, Charles Roberts had already worked at two newspapers, completed a four-year stint in the army, and then enlisted in the Maryland National Guard. Hoping to be assigned to combat duty in Korea, he decided to study up on military strategy. “
To be conversant with the Principles of War is to a soldier what the Bible is to a clergyman,” Roberts wrote in a 1983 article. “The Bible, however, may be readily perused . . . wars are somewhat harder to come by. Thus I decided that I would practice war on a
board as well as the training field . . . Since there were no such war games available, I had to design my own.”

Roberts’s game, Tactics, used the tools of mass-market board games to simulate war. It had a simple preprinted board with a hand-drawn map; it used cardboard chits to represent units, instead of metal miniatures; and it did away with all historical baggage, imagining a hypothetical conflict between two imaginary countries.

In 1954, “almost as a lark,” Roberts decided to manufacture and sell the game to the public. It sold only two thousand copies in the next five years, but Roberts saw an untapped market for adult board games and pressed on. In 1958, he designed and published Gettysburg, which simulated the American Civil War battle; it was a hit, and by 1962 Roberts’s Avalon Hill game company was the fourth-largest producer of board games in the United States.

Around the country, small groups began to coalesce in community centers, hobby stores, and private homes for weekly sessions of Gettysburg and other war games. These gatherings were inevitably all-male; while the mainstreaming of the pastime broadened the player base enough so that teens might face off against crusty World War II vets, women were still nowhere to be seen. This likely had as much to do with the hobby’s martial subject matter as it did with the bellicose tone of the gatherings: Players would spend hours arguing about rules and fighting over results. (It also probably had something to do with the presence of certain nerdy, poorly socialized males—there is good reason why a group of gamers has come to be known as a “stink.”)

One of the largest war-gaming groups in the U.S. was the Midwest Military Simulation Association, based in Minneapolis–Saint Paul. Founded in 1964 by a small group of amateur historians, miniature modelers, and gamers, it grew quickly as war games became more popular. Before long, the meetings were crowded and increasingly contentious, as the old problem of bickering over rules reared its head.

A solution was found in the form of an eighty-year-old army training manual,
Strategos: A Series of American Games of War,
published in 1880 by Charles A. L. Totten, a lieutenant in the Fourth United States Artillery. Dave Wesely, an undergraduate physics student at Saint Paul’s Hamline University, unearthed the book in the University of Minnesota library and rediscovered the centuries-old idea of an all-powerful referee. It quickly became standard practice.

By 1967, the association had about sixty members and had grown so big that it fractured. Wesely and the rest of the young war-gamer crowd coalesced around the home of David Arneson, a University of Minnesota student. They’d meet several times a week to play out traditional Kriegsspiel-style Napoleonic battles and board games including Avalon Hill’s Gettysburg, Parker Brothers’ war game Conflict, Milton Bradley’s Cold War–simulator Summit, and a French game called La Conquête du Monde, or “The Conquest of the World,” known in the U.S. as Risk.