Decimation - World War II - A Role Playing Wargame (RPW)

Decimation bridges the gap between two types of games – wargames whose players often have scholarly levels of knowledge of military history, weapons, and tactics, and role-playing games, where a vicarious and fantastical sense of adventure drives the player’s every decision. With tremendous respect to the pioneers and genres of tabletop gaming, I offer you Decimation, a Role-Playing Wargame (RPW) set in World War II, ideal for miniatures and models of 28mm or 1:72 scale. The game’s theme is a blend between classic, out-of-print, boxed wargames, modern wargaming miniature systems, and traditional pen-and-paper fantasy role-playing games.

You can utilize these rules for any scale of infantry models, figures, miniatures or armor you desire, enjoy collecting, painting, building, and of course, how much gaming space you have. Scale only dictates how we measure distance, not how we measure fun.

Decimation is unique. Instead of controlling large groups of units at a macro scale – divisions, brigades, regiments, battalions, companies, platoons, or squads as a single actionable unit, you control individual soldiers, called Soldier Characters. The number of soldier characters you play is up to you, but an ensemble cast around a squad-sized group captures the intensity and combat tactics of the infantryman. As a player, you make the decisions for each of your soldier characters on an individual basis leveraging their team-focused weapons, training, and tactics to maximize effectiveness.

Unlike war games, Decimation functions with a Referee whose responsibility is to prepare the world, scale maps, the mission, the scenario at hand, along with controlling the enemy forces the players encounter. This style of player-to-referee relationship is common among fantasy role-playing games and is essentially the same in Decimation. For the wargamer, well-versed in historical military squad tactics of the various major powers, you can breathe as much detail here you deem necessary to satisfy your idea of fun.

Decimation provides you a basic framework for character progression and combat. Embellish as you see fit, leaning more towards your fantasy role-playing game sensibilities or your wargamer’s passion for historical accuracy.

To keep combat fast, I suggest between a maximum of 2 and 12 player-controlled soldier characters on the table at a time, but technically there is no limit. It depends on the theme of the scenario. If the goal is to have a squad of players retake a crossroad, then perhaps a full strength squad pitted against two enemy squads is in order, but if the mission is clandestine in nature working to capture prisoners for intelligence about a demolition group, then you can play with only 1 or 2 soldier characters. Scale the mission to fit the players is the best way to have fun. Most squads in World War II are around 2 to 12 soldiers, depending on nation and role.

For example, a German Wehrmacht infantry Gruppe was ten men; a non-commissioned officer or Unteroffizier squad leader, deputy squad leader, a three-man machine gun team, and five riflemen. In Decimation, you might play each of the men in the machine gun team, Eric, Dieter, and Hans, all childhood friends from Coburg and the deputy squad leader from Langenzenn-Lohe on western outskirts of Nuremberg. Wargames already do this brilliantly, but in Decimation you do not play the squad as a single unit, you play the soldiers themselves – real men from World War II on missions, part of major offensives, skirmishes, ambushes, parachute drops, bridge defenses, landings, special operations, and thousands of scenarios where survival and victory depends on you.

Decimation blends the fun of decision making, progression, character development, and heroism, with militaristic tactical combat, zooming down to the human scale of battle where soldiers are never fodder, disposable, ignore orders, or break in morale. Your heroes are real men or women, with skills, talents, and aptitudes, coming from real places, with families, culture, and heritage. More often than not, the soldiers in World War II were young men looking for adventure. At the same time, your soldier characters in Decimation are the actors in your own historical fiction drama.

Are you part of the 1st Marine Raider Battalion defending Henderson field on Guadalcanal? Perhaps you are a part of the 394th Infantry Regiment's Intelligence and Reconnaissance Platoon working towards the village of Lanzerath, Belgium. Did you and three other Jewish comrades just choke two SS guards unconscious? Starving and cold with only two rifles between you, all four of you run into the night, escaping from the Ebensee concentration camp high in the Salzkammergut Mountains of Austria.

Are you and the two players at the table snipers from the Australian 24th Brigade, ordered to stop a convoy of Italian trucks heading to reinforce Rommel at Tel el Makh Khad? Decimation is that kind of game. Your story, your battles, no matter which side you choose. As a role-playing wargame, that is the key to fun.

World War II was the most brutal conflict in history. Some sources say over 85 million people lost their lives, most of them civilians. Utilize this historical conflict as a backdrop for adventure, finding challenge on fields of valor or in obscure places that no one even knows about. The degree of action and warfare is in your hands. Step back in time to any theater of the conflict and think to yourself, “What would I do if I was there?”

Look to your gaming friends at midnight and ask, “What should we do at Monte Castello with no artillery support from General Cordeiro de Farias until 4 a.m.?”

Wargames are splendid for understanding the big picture of historical battles, whether Nijmegen Bridge, Bastogne, or the frozen streets of Stalingrad. Obviously, I cannot list the thousands upon thousands of conflicts in World War II, but I am sure you have your favorites. History is there in writing with incredible documentation, primary and secondary sources, accounts, biographies, photographs, audio, and even film recordings. These are your diverse and dramatic stages in Decimation, but there is a twist.

For most wargamers, the drama and fun pinnacles from playing famous battles. Units assemble, point armies unpack, starting and winning conditions established, and with tape measures, dice, rules, and sometimes bags of order dice, the battle commences. If terrain and boards include craftsmanship, these are visually stunning, complex, and beautiful, especially if you love military history. In wargames you step into the role of an agnostic commander of sorts, with a clear view of the entire battlefield, a historian’s penchant for detail, a wealth of knowledge of maneuvers, equipment, strengths, weaknesses, and game mechanics. Armed to the teeth, you rewrite history. Win on Saturday, lose the same battle two weeks later.

What about that three-man unit that sparked the breakthrough at Byelorussia, or the few men who took out three MG-42 nests by themselves, ambushed the patrol, captured the enemy radio, or even joined up with another fractured unit and improvised without a commander? These are the scenarios Decimation leans up against. You may know all the facts and details of every aspect of the Battle of Stalingrad, but can your squad make it two blocks as Stuka dive bombers smash your tanks into burning heaps?

Or maybe you want a touch more fantasy, story, and narrative. Perhaps your British intelligence group knows the exact plans of Operation Eiche, where 16 SS troopers worked with the German Fallschirmjäger to rescue Mussolini from the Italian Albergo di Campo Imperatore hotel, some 6,990 feet above sea level in central Italy. They might be surprised if your Special Air Service (SAS) team of ten men are already in the lobby, wouldn’t they?

“Right! Let ‘em have it, lads.”

Are you looking to capture something from your favorite war film? Do you want something like Stephen E. Ambrose's Band of Brothers, which Spielberg and Tom Hanks of Saving Private Ryan fame collaborated on as Executive Producers bringing the HBO miniseries to life? Of course, there is always the old classics such as a Bridge Too Far, directed by Richard Attenborough long before he was opening dinosaur-based theme parks. Or do you pang for an adventure like Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood in Where Eagle’s Dare, or something with the same vibe, but not World War II centered like we saw in Howard Hawks’ Sergeant York. Gary Cooper won an Academy Award for Best Actor in Sergeant York back on a chilly Thursday night of February 26th, 1942, the same day the first groups of American forces landed in Northern Ireland. The list is endless. Patton, Force Ten from Navarone, The Desert Fox, The Dirty Dozen, The Bridge over River Kwai, with Alec Guinness, who twenty years later became a science fiction icon for his role as Obi-Wan or Ben Kenobi in Star Wars.

Maybe you loved that one song from Iron Maiden’s 2005 album, A Matter of Life and Death, inspired by the 1962 film based on Cornelius Ryan's 1959 book, The Longest Day. In fact, at the time of this writing, we celebrated the 75th anniversary of the allied invasion of Normandy – D-Day.

Like espionage? There are so many distinctive styles and formats to dig through. Is Ken Follet’s Eye of the Needle your speed? Just do not end up like Donald Sutherland flopping over in a rowboat, shot by Lucy. There are those classic, quasi-espionage resistance tales like Casablanca, but gamers often pass these settings over due to their emphasis on romance and the absence of battle scenes. Want guns blazing action? Add it! Think of theses as scenarios. Not movies. There is plenty of action-packed films to select ideas from, and of course we have the incredible archives of history itself.

“Where did we find such men? We find them where we've always found them, in our villages and towns, on our city streets, in our shops, and on our farm.” Those are the words delivered on February 24, 1981, by President Ronald Regan as he addressed an audience at the Pentagon, Washington D.C. prior to presenting Staff Sergeant Roy P. Benavidez with the Congressional Medal of Honor for his actions on May 2, 1968. Benavidez was part of a 12-man Special Forces Reconnaissance Team inserted by helicopters in a dense jungle area west of Loc Ninh, Vietnam to gather intelligence information about confirmed large-scale enemy activity. There is only one word that describes these heroic actions – valor.

Would you prefer something a bit larger than life like the retro comics of the 1970s, such as Sgt Rock or G.I. Combat, or a modern day novel view such as the Michael L. Printz Award Honor book, Code Name Verity, by Elizabeth Wein? Her novel features two heroic young women, Julie Beaufort-Stuart and Maddie Brodatt. Julie is a prisoner of the Nazi Gestapo in Ormaie, a city in Nazi-occupied France. Forced to detail her spy connections as her pilot friend, Maddie works towards her rescue. The fiction, comic, and film industries overflow with dramatic and fun spins on military history. And what really are they? Stories.

Another key element about Decimation is scale. In classical boxed wargames, such Avalon Hill’s Panzer Leader, first released in 1974, I was nine years old. I owned a trunk full of Tamiya models, soldiers, tanks and Airfix soldier miniatures at both 1:72 and 1:32 (54mm) and 1:35 scales, but we had no game system to do anything except throw dirt clods at our armies and burn things with matches! Imagine our fingernails – and of course the look on our parents face when they saw a smoldering bunker with burning Spanish moss billowing white smoke up into the sky. All our Ral Partha and Grenadier lead figures for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons were around 28mm, pretty much matching today’s standard tabletop scale for role-playing games both fantasy and science fiction. Decimation is a game rule system for military gaming, ideal for all scales.

In Avalon Hill’s Panzer Leader, players stacked up to four units per 250-meter hex on eight geomorphic map tiles. Counters represented tanks and units, two-story buildings were a mere inch long, while roads and rivers trickled the width of a Sharpie magic marker line. This was tremendous fun, as we commanded large groups of Panzers, reenacting famous armored battles from 1944-1945. Next was Avalon Hill’s Squad Leader, where we fought everything from divisions, to companies, to tanks, to squads. We even used the Squad Leader rules to invade and destroy the Vault of the Drow in the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons!

In classical wargames, such as the ones from Avalon Hill in the 1970s, we made decisions and consulted fire tables, spending most of our time trying to figure out the changes in elevation, distance, fire ratings, and other somewhat complex stuff for twelve-year-olds, but in our imagination, each hex was alive and full of special effects, explosions, flames, tracers, and the thunder of 88mm KwK 36s from our Panzerkampfwagen VI Tiger Ausf. E.

If you grew up with boxed wargames and roleplaying games from the 1970s and beyond, I am hopeful you’ll find Decimation gives you a twinge of nostalgia from your childhood, while bringing something new to your gaming group that taps into the resurgence of role-playing games by today’s younger players, who I might add, could learn a bit from history like we did.

Decimation is easy to play, keeping things intuitive through the use of percentile dice checks to determine quite simply, your character’s chances for success, with logical situation modifiers for combat action with the weapons of World War II.

A final note on gender, race, religion, and nationality. Decimation is a role-playing wargame set during the most savage, cruel, and devastating backdrop of world history. It is not a historical record. Feel free to play soldier characters of any gender, race, religion, and nationality you find fun. If someone does not like your idea of fun, then you probably shouldn’t play together anyway. The rules have a historical tone to them, but don’t let that limit your imagination

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T. Elliot Cannon – December 2021