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Dresden 20 Design - Phase 2: Playtesting
Designing Dresden 20 - Part 2: Playtesting
By Lance McMillan, October 2009
This is the second article in my series of articles covering the course of design and development of Victory Point Games’ Dresden 20. The first article covered the genesis of the project with a discussion of the basic research that went into the game’s design. This article show how vital playtesting is to the process of creating a good game.
My intent in writing these articles is as much to provide a set of “how to” guideposts for other gamers who are considering submitting game designs to VPG, as it is a teaser for those of you anxiously awaiting this next installment in the Napoleonic 20 series.
If research and putting together the initial game design are the creation of the “body” of a game, then the playtesting phase is where we breathe life into that design and give it a “soul.” Just having a map, some counters to push around on it, a deck of event cards and a skeletal set of rules doesn’t mean you’ve got a game – it simply means you’ve got components. Until and unless those components start working together as an integrated whole, you really don’t have anything.
Building History
After I finish my initial research, I put together a hand made prototype game and run it through a couple playings. The intent here isn’t to make sure I’ve got everything perfect, but rather to see if the basic story of the battle comes through at all. To me, each battle or campaign we do a game on for the Napoleonic 20 series needs something that sets it apart from the other games in the series. If Austerlitz plays like Auerstadt, which similarly plays like Abensberg, then we haven’t done our job.
The first thing we do is run a series of test games on the Historical scenario of a game, to see whether we’re able to duplicate an outcome that’s similar to what happened in the actual battle. Occasionally, the Historical scenarios in Napoleonic 20 games are included more for educational and continuity purposes than actual gaming fun, and Dresden 20 is a case in point.
Because so much of Napoleon’s success at Austerlitz hinged on his springing an operational trap on the Allies, it’s difficult to recreate that result against an Allied player in a game because the player will know and avoid the historical trap that his historical counterparts fell for – instead, most games rely on imposing some heavy-handed idiocy rules to compel historical behavior by the Allied player. Our preference is to provide the Allied player various incentives to encourage (but not force) historical behavior, otherwise the game becomes frustrating for the Allied player and tends to be somewhat repetitive in its play.
Our test runs of the Historical scenario went reasonably well, often ending up with bloody stalemates as the Allies attempted to storm the city of Dresden only to have the French hold them off. Unfortunately, we had difficulty recreating the stunningly successful French counterattacks that occurred in a driving rainstorm on the second day, largely because the players, aware that heavy rains were about to fall, would both pull back slightly and rearrange their lines to avoid leaving themselves vulnerable during the deluge. We still had occasional French breakouts, but they were infrequent. Still, the game felt right overall. Instead, our main concern after the Historical scenario tests revolved around the Dresden bridges.
Bridging the Artillery Situation
The Standard Napoleonic 20 Rules require units to undergo a Hazardous Retreat check when they’re forced to retreat over a bridge. This rule makes fighting with your back against a river an incredibly dangerous proposition.
But historically, the French did just that at Dresden and don’t seem to have suffered for it. In re-examining the source accounts of the battle, we noticed that the Dresden bridges that crossed the Elbe river were different from most of the other bridges we’ve dealt with in the series to date. These weren’t rickety wooden narrow stone bridges in the countryside – these were massive masonry structures, wide enough to accommodate 100 men marching abreast and easily able to absorb any enemy cannon fire that might be directed on them. So we inserted an Exclusive Rule into the Dresden 20 game that allowed retreats over the Dresden bridges to automatically be considered “safe” from the hazardous retreat provision.
Another issue we addressed was the use of artillery in cross-river bombardments. Historically, the French used their artillery reserve on the first day to help break up Allied attacks on the Grosser Garten by bombarding Russian assault columns from across the Elbe. Unfortunately, the existing rules for artillery didn’t allow for this. After discussing the matter with Alan Emrich and Joe Miranda, we agreed that a change to the Standard rules for the Napoleonic 20 series was probably in order to reflect this important ability, something that may have an impact on previous games in the series (most notably Smolensk 20). These would be the newly-released v2.0 edition of the Standard Rules.