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List Retrospective

 
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scott holder
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PostPosted: Wed Feb 28, 2007 4:40 pm    Post subject: List Retrospective

I wrote this 2 years ago right after the publication of Classical Warrior. It bears repeating today.

The FHE army list books represents a huge amount of work. I've spent the last 4 years writing army lists. That's twice as long as graduate school took for me and 3 times as long as my master's thesis in graduate school. The amount of work and scholarship that went into these books, heh heh, if I'd bothered to footnote everything, is about two more masters theses of material or something close to a doctoral dissertation. My wife has commented that the last 4 years remind her of what it must have been like for me when she was getting her two masters over a 5 year period while working a day job when we were back in DC. Ugh.

When FHE formed, I grudgingly accepted the task of writing army lists knowing full well it would take a horrendous amount of time, would be open to second guessing and that I'd still not be satisfied with some aspects of the final product(s). Sorry to say all of those things came true. This post isn't meant to be a snarky rant or whine but I wanted to get this out of the way up front:)Smile

First and foremost, I want to thank Bill Low. There have been several instances in my wargaming "career" in which my path has intersected with somebody and the result has been great, both hobby wise and personally. Totally unforseen in terms of our ability to collaborate and complement each other's work. I've said it before here but it bears repeating: the army lists you see are as much a product of Bill's work as mine. His ability to review the initial drafts, rework lists and bring additional scholarship to the material has been immeasureably important. His editing has been marvelous. I'll come back to this again and again.

Frank Gilson and Ewan McNay have commented on I think every book. They were our "screw history, what does this mean from a play balance perspective" guys. This was done primarily to avoid coming up with any super killer lists. Yes, this is always subjective but between the two of them feeding material to me, who would then run it past the rest of FHE, with Jon being the prime person in this regard, I think we avoided the worst pitfalls. Todd Kaeser, on two tourney occasions, gamely took armies to help playtest the Roman Rules and the Macedonian Rules.

Two people who I wished had more time to devote to the lists were Don Coon and Darrell Smith. Don just has the eye and mind to pick apart crud and that's always good for looking for consistency issues. Darrell was our biggest internal critic and that always helped us look at things and either reevaluate our approach or come up with material needed to justify our approach. He's a DBMer but plays Warrior with me but is also as much a fan of the history as of any game. His comments on the earlier lists were invalueable but he had less time to devote to this as things went along. Still, I appreciate their help.

Many people submitted lists, ideas, etc. Some we used, much we did not. Paul Georgian did yoeman work on the Byzantine lists and Craig Scott submitted loads of Persian material. That helped Bill and myself plow thru lists in a much more timely manner.

There are no longer any "old" lists. Look at the variety of armies that
appeared in the Aussie Warrior Championships and I think you'll agree that we've managed to expand the list of armies viable in open competition. Looking at the old WRG lists (or any others) now is like looking at the old 5th Ed lists. They form an interesting snapshot into the history of our hobby but that's it. The surest way to have us ignore any list post is to have it include "well, in >insert favorite H&C list here< list it sez........" or "why was >insert pet troop type here< dropped from the FHE "Southern Illinois Iron Spear Mound-Builder's list?" We won't answer those questions.

The purpose of this post is to outline the list writing process and dispell some myths that have cropped up.

1) Each list book was a labor of love. I approached every book with zeal.
Despite what some might think, no book was shortchanged because of lack of interest. Yes, Bill and I had specific period strengths but that didn't mean that we blew off list books because it wasn't "our" period. Bill's big
interests were in Biblical, New World (clearly) and Classical. Mine were New World, Feudal, Oriental and Classical. New World Warrior became a labor of love collectively because it was the one area where the lists benefited greatly from better scholarship over the last ten years. Bill took that to an extreme in away, much farther beyond what even I had set out to do with the lists. I worked with *every* scholar in North America who's speciality is some form of Chinese military history in order to get Oriental "right". That's probably why a few eyebrows were raised at the final result.

2) The Codex Effect. There ain't none. What you see is an increasing
sophistication in list writing, not any attempt to "Games Workshop-ize" army lists. Jon mentioned this a while back but the order of the army list books was deliberate since we knew we wanted to tackle some things, like the Romans, later on and wanted the time to develop those concepts. And we had some synergy with, of all things, Fantasy Warrior, since it enabled us to playtest and work out concepts that had applicability in Warrior. That's another reason why NWW broke ground for us in a number of ways. Because the basic Warrior mechanics simply
didn't "get" Aztec warfare, it was our chance to develop something that we also knew would have some applicability to Romans. Thus, the apparent codex effect isn't. Well at least in terms of the concept of "trying to outdo the last book" because many of these concepts and aims were there, at least in my mind, in the beginning. I *knew* I wanted to treat Mongols and Japanese differently when starting out on this project in 2000, I just didn't know how at the time. So, by starting somewhat simpler (BW and DAW), we were able to get the process down
before diving into things that were one of many reasons we purchased the rights to this system.

3) History Matters. The Notes section are important, well at least to Bill and myself:) I consider myself a historian first, a gamer second. I have an eye and a knack for best taking the material and translating it *effectively* into the game, that's probably the real reason I took on the list writing task for FHE. And as time has gone on, I've felt that even the most hard bitten "who cares about history" gamer (heh heh, Ewan and Frank come to mind) will get a little something out of the Notes *and* we reach a broader audience of historical gamers who find the history as appealing as anything else. If anything, I'd like to expand the Notes in the earlier books with this in mind; don't panic, it wouldn't change the army, simply provide more depth to it's history. I will admit that from the "labor of love" standpoint, Bill clearly wanted to provide history for NWW and me for OW. Both periods are understood only at the most shallow level in our circles, or most circles for that matter. Try making sense of China's "Era of Disunity" after around 300 AD up until the establishment of the Tang Dynasty. You need a big board with post-it notes and lotsa lines to keep track of the confusion.

4) Retroactive Cleanup. As Jon has mentioned before, we will go back and look at some mins/maxs from BW and DAW. We will also look at how list rules developed later will apply to those troops that popped up earlier. But, until that happens, the army list books are literal, ie, if Mongols show up in an earlier book and there is no reference to Mongol list rules in that book, they don't get em. I want to plod along carefully on these before leaping. In many instances, such troops might NOT get said rules. Again, we'll see. The same applies for some troop types that appear one way earlier and another way later. Skythians/Saka come to mind. In those cases, we'll examine them one by one and make any appropriate changes to the older representations of them. But until that shows up on the Lists page at the FHE website, play em the way they're written.

5) List "Historians". FHE is collectively responsible for the appearance of
these lists. However, Bill and I are the "FHE List Historians" so call a spade a spade if you have a *new* gripe and don't hide behind some passive aggressive facade. Many people have contacted me or posted material regarding list specifics. If I haven't responded to you personally at some point, that means your idea has been duly noted but will not be acted upon so please, don't ask again. If I have responded to you personally, that means your material will be looked at even more carefully down the line (I have some great stuff from Chris Cameron, for example, on Sea Peoples).

6) Reworking Lead. I have around 10,000 25mm figures, I'd say 8,000 of them are ancient/medievals. I've never made a list change that I wasn't willing myself to rework my lead in order to get it in line with a new list and in fact, every one of my 25mm armies, probably short of the Galatians, needs more stuff and additional work in order to make it effective. That being said, as I stated early on, in many instances, I was sympathetic to what these lists might do to someone's existing army and if there was a way to not totally discombobulate the owner, I worked with that in mind. Prime example, LIR Scythed Chariots. Pure fiction. My intent in 2000 was to get rid of em when it came time to do Imperial Warrior. Lo and behold, I discovered that several figure manufacturers made them and that a number of people had scratch built their own. Hence, we
found a way to incorporate them into the game. And in many other instances, the lead itself didn't need to be trashed, just called something else and possibly rebased with that in mind. But there were some instances, NWW is a good example of this, where the history simply screamed that we do what we felt was best and let the lead follow. I did much the same thing with several OW lists. Another example in CW are the Libyan chariots for the Syracusan list. The new number represents reality so if you had 12 chariots, you're SOL. Sorry but no sane
historian in the 21st century could adhere to the thought of a fairly simple, not terribly rich, kingdom having more chariots than the collective empires of Assyria, Babylonia and Egypt. Again, an example of the history screaming we do something at the expense of lead.

7) List Rules. A lot of egroup space has been expended on the philosophy
surrounding this and how it interacts with the basic nature of any points driven army compilation system. Let me state up front that it was my intention before FHE started but when I had moved far enough along with Phil that I knew at least I'd be purchasing the rights to 7th, that I would address what I felt was the biggest fundamental flaw in the system: the oddities that one rule set simply cannot address up front in a game that purports to simulate 5000 years of history. Hence, list rules. One of the first things discussed when the 4 of us sat down to hammer out FHE was the philisophical acceptance of this approach. You now see the results of that evolving concept. Will we go back and examine earlier books with this in mind? Yes (see above about Mongols) and will we potentially concoct a few things new for those earlier books? Quite possibly.
Will the fundamental idea of list rules go away? Heh heh, nope.

Now, for the first time in the history of this game system, we have a body of work that was specifically written for the system.
scott

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