Anyway, this time: Third Reich, the election, and birch
beer.
Gaming: Today is
Veteran’s Day, and that of course leads me to reflect on my favorite Big
Crunchy Wargame of a Thousand Counters, Third Reich. This WW2 strategic
wargame was first published in 1974 by Avalon Hill as Rise and Decline of the Third Reich. Avalon Hill went on to publish
the updated Advanced Third Reich in 1992, and a companion Pacific Theater
game called Empire of the Rising Sun
(or just Rising Sun) in 1995. The game is a super-crunchy strategic
overview of the whole European theater, played out in three-month turns. Third
Reich was built around the strategic role of armor and combined arms, and the
exploitation rules let you break through enemy lines and encircle whole armies.
It’s probably the best theater-level WW2 wargame/simulation ever done, and
still widely played by diehard wargamers.
(Funny story… first time I met Peter Adkison when he came to
TSR during the process of Wizards buying TSR, we got to talking about wargames.
Turned out he was a huge Third Reich fan. I wound up playing half a dozen games
with him and a couple other WotC old guard over the first few years of my time
at Wizards.)
Anyway, the game was picked up by Avalanche Press and
updated again in 2001 as John Prados’ Third Reich. This
version completely discarded the 3R/A3R game engine. Speaking bluntly, I found
it unplayable. The revised map could have been great, but it was printed in
such a small board that you couldn’t physically manipulate the counters. The
naval rules were indecipherable. And the core of the game, the CRT (or Combat
Results Table) was replaced by a combat system in which units received d6
attack dice equal to their strength. A 3-3 infantry therefore rolled 3d6 to
attack, scoring a “hit” on a 6. In the original 3R system, four 3-3 infantry
attacking a single 3-3 infantry defending had a 97% chance to kill the unit and
take the hex—the question was how many losses they’d take doing it. In the
revised combat engine, that same attack dropped to about 32%. Since the classic
opening of the game was for Germany to make two 2-1 attacks to take out Poland
in the fall of 1939, your odds of pulling this off went from 95% to 10%. You’d
think somebody would have caught that. I understand they’ve published several
expansions and accessories since, including a bigger map.
The rules engine was picked up by GMT Games, which published
the successor of Advanced Third Reich
and Rising Sun in 2003 as A
World at War. The GMT Games version is basically Third Reich on steroids, designed to be played on two gigantic maps
and provide a down-the-rabbithole simulation that includes research, espionage,
diplomacy, oil supply, naval rules for individual capital ships, and scores and
scores of specific exceptions and special rules to maximize the strategic
simulation—for example, each major power has its own special surrender
conditions and procedures. Whew! If you want the full-on, no holds barred, deep
end of the pool Third Reich
experience, this is the game you play.
While A World at War
isn’t for everybody, GMT Games did a couple of very interesting things that offered
some lessons a lot of different games might take to heart. First, the rules are
“living” rules that are routinely updated and tweaked on line—sure, you get a
rulebook with your gigantic game, but the “real” rules are the current PDF
posted on the game’s support site. At Wizards of the Coast we often lamented
the fact that we couldn’t reach out and update everybody’s rulebooks after they
took ‘em home, but the A World at War
community is small enough and dedicated enough that this is exactly how they
play. Another interesting resource: Not only are the rules available in a PDF,
they’re also available in a Windows help file format which is completely
hyperlinked within itself. Need to chase down all the special rules about
escort carriers? Click, click, click, you can dart around from strategic
warfare to amphibious invasions to what-have-you and see everything CVE’s can
do for you. Boy, I’d love to see a set of D&D rules that worked like that.
Politics/Current Events:
Obviously, I’m surprised and disappointed by the results of the election. I
was for Romney because I feel that the best way to get out of our current slump
is to unleash the engine of small business, and I thought Romney was the guy
who would do more of that. As the election drew near, it seemed to me that
Romney’s apparent edge among independents meant that he had the election in the
bag. Not only was I wrong about that, but it was clear that the Republicans
were hammered up and down the ticket; they lost ground in the Senate when
conditions seemed ripe for a potential takeover, and the only reason the GOP
didn’t get decimated in the House of Representatives is that they had the
chance to gerrymander the congressional districts around the country in 2010.
(Before you get up in arms about that, the Democrats do the exact same thing
when they have the chance; like the Electoral College, it’s just the rules of
the game.) All that said, the election was fair, and Barack Obama is the
president for four more years; there’s no point in continuing to fight against
his reelection.
So what now? While the results showed clearly that the
electorate wasn’t convinced by the GOP’s candidates or message, there are
elements of the conservative agenda that are still very popular. Exit polls
show that people support the idea of smaller government and a repeal of
Obamacare, and oppose raising taxes. Voters know that we’re not on a good
trajectory, and we need to make adjustments. But culture-war issues and
unrealistic positions on immigration doomed the GOP in this cycle.
I’m not a Republican, but I do favor conservative approaches
to many of our country’s challenges. I think it is vitally important for the
country to have a party of conservatism near the levers of power, to check the
liberal impulse to perhaps try to do too much. I hope that the cold hard
reality of the 2012 election forces the Republicans to up their game. Off the
top of my head, adopting a “tall fences but wide gates” approach to immigration
would be a good start. Get off the culture wars: They’re over, and traditional
values lost. Finally, adopt strong platforms for *fixing* entitlements, not
getting rid of them. That means working with Democrats to correct the perverse
incentives in the ACA (Obamacare), bend the curve on entitlement spending, and
close the deficit. We can’t spend a trillion dollars a year more than we take
in, and we can’t make up the entirety of that gap by socking the well-off.
We have a chance to see a deeply reformed Republican Party
emerge from this loss. I’m excited about the prospect, because whether you’re a
conservative or a liberal, a better party is good for the country.
The Finer Things: Pennsylvania
Dutch Birch Beer. A lot of people have no idea what birch beer is; basically,
it’s like root beer, but better, and I say that as a root beer fan. The real
bummer is that you can’t get it out here in Seattle. There are other brands of
birch beer around, including a couple of specialty sodas, but you know? None of
them taste exactly right to me. Birch beer has to be Pennsylvania Dutch, or it’s
just not birch beer. The proper accompaniment for birch beer, by the way, is
Mack and Manco’s pizza, from the boardwalk of Ocean City, New Jersey. Fortunately
Hurricane Sandy left the Ocean City boardwalk mostly intact, so you can try
this for yourself at the first opportunity.
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