Bravo! Dr. Sabin's Hell's Gate is one of my favorite little games. Deep and instructive while still fitting within my busy lifestyle.

Question for Dr. Sabin: Will we be seeing more games of similar scale and scope to Hell's Gate, using the same system and of comparable production value? Or are the game's systems too closely tied to the particular lessons it aims to teach to be of broader application?

The simple way to model confusion and unpredictality indirectly without the clumsiness of hidden units and plotting is, of course, to randomise fire effects and perhaps even move distances using die rolls.

Roll to move!

* Randomized movement allowances perhaps conflict with the desire for strategic "chess-like" exact planning of maneuvers by many players.

And this is the odd one, isn't it?

It's interesting how few wargames use randomized movement allowances. I immediately think of Stonewall Jackson's Way and its sequels, but not many other examples.

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I guess the reasons for the scarceness of such games include:

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And this is the odd one, isn't it?

Everything I've ever read about combat (and I'm finishing Atkinson's second book in his liberation trilogy right now) says the generals may plan/assume and want to push through and move their units five miles at the end of the day, and wind up moving the whole front 500 yards instead (and some don't even get past the jump off line) due to slaughter.

Stiffer resistance from more defenders than intelligence led them to believe, inadequate terrain knowledge (there are ridges in Italian mountain ranges?), internecine bickering and poor coordination, artillery that was devastating, lack of control of higher ground, clogged and narrow roads under vicious sweeping fire, entire battalions being chewed down to a few hundred men, air power that didn't really cut rail lines as hoped, etc.

This is the stuff that needs modelling so why not random movement to represent some of these? That's what real-world generals faced. Why do we want such silly non-realistic games where everything (except for the final dice roll on a CRT) goes exactly to micromanaged plan? No friction? Everything works perfectly except for rolling a 6 for an exchange despite 2-1 odds?

Absolutely. What's even odder is that our tabletop historical miniature wargame brethren have tackled this ages ago and a lot (I'd say even most) current rulesets feature variable movement of one sort or another - usually linked to command & control.

Why boardgame designers for the most part fail to steal .. ahum, I meant borrow some of the excellent design choices from these rulesets is beyond me.

Why not? Because it does a bad job of modelling what really happens. A lot of the things you mention are combat-related, not movement per se. You don't model a unit taking losses by cutting its movement allowance; you reduce its combat strength or remove it from play.

I doubt very much that if you looked at the distances travelled by units not in contact with the enemy, over similar terrain, when trying to move as far as possible, you'd find that the results are uniformly distributed (a single die), or even binomially distributed (multiple dice). I would guess that you'd see something like a horiontally-flipped Poisson distribution, with a peak just short of the maximum possible distance, and a long tail towards the shorter distances. You might try to model that by randomly reducing a fixed movement allowance by a little bit, but don't forget that the discrete nature of wargame maps, at least those with hexes, takes care of some variation in distances moved. How often has a unit not been able to move one more hex because it doesn't quite have enough movement points to make it?

Command control rules, terrain rules, supply rules, weather rules, zones of control, and other rules all do a better job than die rolling of simulating actual movement rates.

Credit where credit is due. I think it was Charles Vasey who suggested delaying the command die roll in Lost Battles until only 1 or 0 normal commands were left, to avoid too much precise pre-planning of command allocations. This is a great example of how a very simple sequencing change can achieve the kind of effects I have just been talking about. In my Fire & Movement system, the equivalent is having fire resolved after movement, so that platoons must commit themselves to advancing before they know whether friendly suppressive fire will actually work.

Why not? Because it does a bad job of modelling what really happens. A lot of the things you mention are combat-related, not movement per se. You don't model a unit taking losses by cutting its movement allowance; you reduce its combat strength or remove it from play.

I doubt very much that if you looked at the distances travelled by units not in contact with the enemy, over similar terrain, when trying to move as far as possible, you'd find that the results are uniformly distributed (a single die), or even binomially distributed (multiple dice). I would guess that you'd see something like a horiontally-flipped Poisson distribution, with a peak just short of the maximum possible distance, and a long tail towards the shorter distances. You might try to model that by randomly reducing a fixed movement allowance by a little bit, but don't forget that the discrete nature of wargame maps, at least those with hexes, takes care of some variation in distances moved. How often has a unit not been able to move one more hex because it doesn't quite have enough movement points to make it?

Command control rules, terrain rules, supply rules, weather rules, zones of control, and other rules all do a better job than die rolling of simulating actual movement rates.

(Sadly I have not played any of the games of our esteemed Designer of the Month - do any of them use randomized movement allowances?)

I guess the reasons for the scarceness of such games include:

* Stigma attached to anything which smells even remotely like the "roll and move" mechanism of simple Monopoly/Clue-type games.

* Randomized movement allowances perhaps conflict with the desire for strategic "chess-like" exact planning of maneuvers by many players.

* Perhaps a feeling that in a wargame, combat resolution is more "interesting" or "important" than movement/maneuver, so that players are more willing to add overhead (rolling dice & calculating) & complexity to combat resolution than to movement resolution...?

* Perhaps a (mistaken?) belief that movement, unlike combat, is sufficiently deterministic, so that randomness doesn't belong in it...?