Star Trek Adventures Probability Analysis

This has to be the prettiest output I've ever seen.

Well. I've done it. It took a solid 12 hours of hard work. I had to learn things about probability and excel I never knew before. I have seriously grown as a human being. I present to you a PDF document that can tell you exactly, given the number of dice being rolled, the target number, and the DC your are rolling against, what your chances of success are. In decimal format. Ignoring crits.

With this document, a savvy GM can plot the challenge of the tasks presented to the players and intentionally drain metacurrency resources, or demand threat feed, as they see fit.

Here's The Document

Kiss and a Slap: Star Trek Adventures Review

For those new to the blog, which is almost certainly almost everyone who comes to my blog, I rarely do reviews. When I do, I do them in a format called "Kiss and a Slap". That's where I list 10 things I hate about the product, and then 10 things I love about it. The idea is to give an honest review that admits the shortcomings of a product in the format of constructive criticism. Normally, I just review adventures, but today I'm tackling a bigger beast. I'm going to review a whole goddamn game system. Because I CANNOT stay silent about this game! Now, before I get to it, I'm going to head off some of the flack I might get for my criticism of someone's favorite game. I believe the following:

1. Nothing is perfect.
2. Nothing is sacred.
3. All things are deserving of criticism.
4. Anything that can be improved should be improved.
5. your feelings are meaningless.

OK! Let's dig in!

 

The Slaps

1. It's so fluffy I'm gonna DIE! Look, I get it, Star Trek is massively overwhelming to people new to the fandom. It's hard to get people onboard with Trek content. The lore is intimidating. And I can understand dedicating a section of the book to conveying the fundamental basics of the setting to new audiences. That's fine. What is definitely NOT fine, is that it is jumbled up and mixed in with the rules text of the game throughout the goddamned book!!! At first, it starts out reading like an admiral addressing you as a captain who is going to be in charge of a new ship. That's OK, a framing device works. But they don't stick to it. It's like they repeatedly forgot they even had a framing device in the first place. They dedicate multiple pages of setting explanation just to follow it with one paragraph of rules with no visual distinction between the two or even a heading to mark the actual rule. To confuse matters more, they have 2 types of sidebars in the book; purple and pink. Pink ones are USUALLY fluff, and purple ones are USUALLY rules... except some rules are in pink sidebars and some purple sidebars contain no crunch whatsoever. The end result is that you have to read everything- EVERY-FUCKING-THING, just to make sure you didn't miss something, and I guarantee you, you will miss something. Now, don't get me wrong, this isn't the worst I've ever seen. That award goes to Polaris. (Not the french one.) But this is a close second place.
2. Disorganization in the extreme. Here's how it reads: Here's some fluff! Here's a rule! By the way, before we finish explaining that rule, here's a note about another rule that sometimes applies to this rule. Here's some fluff! Oh by the way, here's the rest of a rule we started explaining a few pages ago. And here's a list of all those side rules that keep interrupting the main rules explanations! More fluff. Here's the end of that other rule we didn't finish explaining earlier. Oh, by the way, in another 100 pages there's a stray sentence that clarifies something on this page. It is a god damn outrageous mess. It makes the game nearly incomprehensible to new players. Watching Modiphius play their own game, it's clear that even they don't fully understand it, since they forget something different in every episode. (Like, for example, resistance being rolled in challenge dice, not a flat penalty) A perfect example of their disorganization is that multiple playable alien species, some of the MOST ICONIC species, including Klingon and Romulan, are in the back of the goddamn book, rather than in line with the playable species section at the start of the book!
3. Muddled language. Throughout the book, they make it clear that their task resolution system is called a Task. Fine, good, that's easy to understand. (Except that 25% of the time they accidentally call it a check!) Later, in combat, it is revealed that each player can make a minor action and a task on their turn. OK, so that means they can do a thing that requires no roll and a thing that requires a roll, right? NOPE! Not all combat tasks require a roll! That means combat tasks and normal tasks are two separate mechanics that share the same word! So you can take a task that makes you make a task! Fucking brilliant! Genius! And if you only have minor actions and no other type of action, why include the adjective "minor"? That's fucking idiotic! There's a reason I changed the terminology to major and minor actions in my notes. Another example of poor language is regarding terrain effects. Throughout the book, they imply that terrain effects are applicable specifically to zones, and are separate from scene traits. One sentence hidden amongst the copypasta jungle that is the GM section bluntly states that terrain effects are just traits. HOLY FUCKING SHIT WHY DIDN'T YOU JUST SAY SO INSTEAD OF BENDING OVER BACKWARDS TO AVOID YOUR OWN DAMN TERMINOLOGY?! And this slap isn't done yet, either! Yet another example of poor language is the word "Spend". They never define the meaning of this word in mechanical terms or the conditions under which a spend may be invoked, but they use the term throughout the book as if it should be plainly fucking obvious! And you know what? It probably would be for fans of other 2d20 games, who are familiar with the system, but this game is appealing to people who don't game and have never heard of 2d20 in their fucking lives! Acknowledge the reality of your damn audience, you pretentious pricks! Yet more terminology that gets confusing; traits can apply to a character, a situation, the environment, and equipment. That sounds good, right? Here's the wonky thing: Equipment are traits. That means equipment are traits that can have traits. It gets weirder. Groups of NPCs can be traits, who have equipment in the form of traits, which might have traits of it's own. I'm not a fan of babushka doll mechanics.
4. Never, EVER give one player authority over the other players! This game violates a fundamental game design theory principal: If you give a player authority over the other players, they will invariably abuse it. This game practically demands that a player be given the position of captain of the ship. This is a one-way trip to a fucking disaster show. It gives absolutely no warning or alternative options. Even worse, the designers are clearly aware of this fact, because not once in any of their live plays do they show a player captain, the GM always makes them an NPC! Always! If you know it's a fucking bad idea, why do you promote it to people who have no experience that would tell them so?!
5. Copypasta! Copypasta everywhere! One obnoxious thing about this book is that, later on, beginning about halfway through, any time it references a previously explained rule, it copies the text from earlier in full, followed by explanations, expansions, or addenda. This makes it really hard to read because I don't want to waste my time rereading shit I already know, but I also don't want to miss out on the book finally explaining a rule in full. I get the impression this happens to a lot of people, and they wind up skipping the copied sections completely, as the most forgotten rules are the ones that are hidden at the end of a copypasta chunk. This is why you don't redundantly copypasta your own rules. If you have to reference back to a rule, give a page number or a heading title and let the reader go find it if they need a refresher. My god what inefficient writing.
6. The task resolution system fucking sucks. OK, let's get down to brass tacks and talk crunch. The D&D task resolution system is simple: Roll 1d20, add ability modifier, check if proficiency applies, add proficiency mod if necessary, compare result to DC. 5 steps. Quick and easy. Most of those steps are done simultaneously if the player knows what all of their stat mods and proficiencies are off the top of their head. STA's task resolution system is 17 fucking steps long. Don't believe me? Go download my notes, I break it down in there for you. This is obnoxious, and it doesn't actually achieve anything of relevance. The individual dice still have a flat distribution, so play is still arbitrarily swingy, it just doesn't have easily predictable success percentages because it's a dice pool system. It doesn't even do what dice pool systems are supposed to do either, since the cap is 5d20!! The whole idea of a dice pool system is that you roll handfulls of dice to feel obnoxiously powerful! Way to go on completely missing the point of your own resolution system!
7. Combat is a drag. I hate single turn combat. I think it takes for fucking ever and achieves very little. At the end of the day, all that matters in combat is: Did we win and how much did that win cost us? That's it. And I don't feel like spending an hour or two obsessing over the minutiae of how the players got to that result. Especially in Star Trek. I don't know if you've ever seen the show, but combat was always a last resort. Almost no episodes had the characters pulling phasers, and when they did it was usually just an exchange or two and then the fight was over. The characters were, above all, peace focused, genuinely concerned with achieving positive social relationships! They aren't soldiers, they're paramilitary explorers, scientists and politicians! Sure, they defend the Federation from interstellar threats when necessary, but their main tools in combating said threats are their minds and their words, with weapons only being drawn in response to violence. This isn't fucking D&D, guys, there's no loot to be collected from the corpses, no XP to be earned from slaying foul beasts, and no treasure chest behind the guardian! The game kind of acknowledges this, as a character's reputation can be easily dragged down by resorting to violence needlessly.
8. Internally inconsistent rules. OK, this is primarily a complaint from my simulationist and minimalist tendencies. Not all people will agree with me on this, but I think it is a huge mistake to have NPCs and PCs follow different rules. Plain and simple, it's a goddamn mistake. First off, it results in rules bloat- a problem this game already suffers from severely- as you need to explain one set of rules for player characters, and then a whole different set of rules for NPCs. Secondly, it means NPCs can do things players cannot, or vice versa, even if that NPC is technically identical to the PC. Eventually, someone at the table will make tactical decisions regarding an NPC based on the assumption that they are just as capable as the PCs, and that strategy will be wrong. Nothing is more blatant than the rules regarding NPC starships. When NPCs target PC ships, they always hit a system on a breach, even if they weren't aiming at a specific system. If the players target a ship without aiming at a system and score a breach, that ship goes through a completely different track of damage effects. Another example is that PC starships get turns equal to the number of PCs on the bridge. NPC starships get a number of turns equal to the scale of their ship. That means a scale 3 ship with 6 PCs aboard will always annihilate an identical twin NPC of their own ship! Or how minor NPCs can't take the Avoid an Injury spend, while major NPCs can do it limitlessly! (Notable NPCs can use the spend once, but there's no clarification if they can use the Recover action to regain that use) Most of this is an easy fix. Either run NPCs equally to PCs, or apply NPC rules to the PCs. (For example, allow NPCs to use the nonspecific targeting breach track for PC ships, and limit PC ship turns to ship scale so the captain has to decide which crew should act and when.) But that shouldn't be necessary!
9. Warp factor schmorp schmactor. The game does not give a damn about travel times or distances. The game is designed with the assumption that play opens with a ship arriving in a system, doing stuff in that system, and then ends with the ship warping out of that system. Nevermind episodes that happened while on the move at warp, or in multiple systems! Maybe I'm just being a simulationist again, but I kinda want to see more than just the missions! I kinda want to give my players a taste of what starfleet life would feel like, off the clock! What kinds of times we're looking at, how people keep themselves occupied aboard a giant negative pressure submarine! That kind of stuff! This game doesn't care. The closest it gets to caring is that it states a sector is 20 lightyears across, gives a listing of how fast each warp factor is, and gives you a sector map of the alpha and beta quadrants. The only thing that's missing is the MAXIMUM WARP OF EACH SPACEFRAME. Which leaves the GM in the homebrewing lurch. So much for supporting different styles of play. It also states that warping out of a system costs power equal to the warp factor chosen, which puts unusual limits on certain spaceframes that should be faster, and enables certain ships to go faster than they should be able to. Stated along with that rule is that you can pursue a ship at warp by spending 1 more power than they did, but it gives no explanation of what happens when you catch up to them!
10. False promise regarding alternate playstyles. The book repeatedly makes a point of saying it supports alternate playstyles, such as lower decks, or different eras of play. The problem? There's little to no content support for that! For example, let's say I wanted to play an ENT era game. There's no NX-01 spaceframe! Or spaceframes for any other vessels from that era! Let's say I wanted to play a lower decks game, what would the characters do other than just get bossed around by the bridge crew NPCs? Even with the expansion books, this idea that "any kind of Star Trek game can be played with these rules" is patently false, unless the GM puts up some serious work to make relevant content for such play. Frankly, I think the developers have an absurdly narrow vision of the potential for the setting.
11. Challenge Dice are retarded. Somehow I ALWAYS wind up with an 11th complaint! The game calls d6s "challenge dice". No, they are never used to determine how challenging something is, or to resolve a challenge. Rather, they are invariably used to determine the effectiveness of a player's actions. Weird ass name aside, (should really be chaos dice or something) the way they roll is also idiotic. See, instead of rolling for their face value, each face has a value stored on a table somewhere in the CRB. 1=1, 2=2, 3=0, 4=0, 5=1+effect, 6=1+effect. The effects are neat, but it is not necessary to completely rewrite the way the dice roll just to justify that. The real reason they reduce the die roll values, is because player character HP er... Stress... can be between 8 and 17 points. With such low survivability values, the damage output had to be reduced, but they seriously could have come up with a better system. (For example, you could just say that the result gets divided in half, rounded down, and 6s generate an effect. Super simple. 1=0, 2=1, 3=1, 4=2, 5=2, 6=3+E.)

The Kisses

1. It FEELS like Trek! Oh my god do they get the feeling right! The whole book is in LCARS style, and the art has a unified aesthetic! The content matches the attitude of Star Trek, and everything about it just feels right! Moreso than any other RPG incarnation of Star Trek, they nail the mood like it's nobody's business! If you love Trek, this book will enchant you so hard the system's failings will seem mild by comparison.
2. Highest quality production I've ever seen. A woven spine separate from the hardback spine, full bleed white-on-black pages, a unified aesthetic, this book is a god damn masterpiece. It is beautiful, it is durable, it is easily one of the highest quality gaming products I've ever bought! Truly magnificent.
3. Chargen and ship creation are fun! It's an absolute blast to make up characters in this game system! The lifepath system actually produces characters who are relevant to play, unlike other Sci-Fi games that produce mostly hodgepodge nobodies. (I'm looking at you, Traveller) The addition of mission profiles significantly expands the statistical variety of ships available to the players! (And, I'm not sure, but I think you're supposed to apply them to NPC spaceframes as well maybe?) Despite the complexity of the rest of the game to understand and play, getting started is super easy and enjoyable. Gold star for that.
4. Modiphius is actually really cool. You know how WotC is only nice when they're engaging in a marketing ploy? Yeah. Modiphius is actually just nice. Bought the Core Rule Book? Contact them with proof of purchase, and they'll send you the PDF for free! Bought the PDF? They'll set you up with a discount on the CRB! They offer an extensive free-to-play and publicly accessible living campaign! Their website offers a variety of free products, including an introduction PDF that can get people playing ASAP with far less fluff! Their staff are personally active, not only on their official communities, but also on the major fan communities as well, and the company divests itself of responsibility for their actions, so they can unofficially say whatever they want and not worry about losing their jobs just because it wasn't vetted first. (Within reason. I'm sure if one of them started posting swastikas all over the place, he'd be short on employment rather swiftly.) The staff who make the game are also the people who play the game, and part of their marketing is to show their in-house games to the public via their youtube channel, which gives a great insight into what they intend this thing to play like! Just, in every way shape and form, Modiphius is simply cool.
5. Supporting characters are a genius mechanic. In Star Trek, there are often many more characters than there are in the average gaming group. Often, characters must be split up in different simultaneous situations. STA handles this by giving each ship a crew support score, which is a resource players can spend to create slightly less advanced characters to fill in the gaps, or to participate in scenes where they would otherwise be unavailable. For example, let's say an away team gets sent down to investigate some spooky ruins. The Chief of Security's player says that given the risk of a Romulan attack, he should remain aboard, and so he spends 1 crew support to create a supporting character, a security officer under his department, whom he sends down on the away mission. Now, whenever the scene switches back and forth between the ship and the away team, that player still gets to be involved, if even at a slightly reduced competency in one instance. Another example is to use crew support to fill roles the players don't want to do. For example, if nobody is interested in medicine, they could make the Chief Medical Officer a supporting character. Then, whenever someone needs healing they just spend a crew support and transport that character on to the scene! I also have an idea for the command role issue. I've been thinking about making the CO an NPC, and then making the XO a supporting character. Because supporting characters are shared by all players, the XO stands as an option for anyone who wants to take a turn in the big chair for a scene or two, without forcing everyone to serve just one player all the time, and still having a superior officer available that the GM can use to keep things in check.
6. Metacurrencies are fun. The game features 3 metacurrencies. Determination, Momentum, and Threat. Players gain determination whenever the GM takes a value from their character sheet and makes it into a complication, or when they refuse the complication and question that value, forcing it to be changed at the end of the adventure. They can spend determination to do a small range of very powerful effects only by invoking and roleplaying out how their values motivate them to greatness in the current situation. Determination is an excellent system for encouraging and rewarding real roleplay, and also for developing characters over time. Momentum, (poorly named) is a currency generated whenever the player rolls more successes than the required difficulty on a task. They can spend these points on an insanely long list of fancy effects that can alter the game. Most momentum spends can only be done as part of a task, but some can just be done willy-nilly. The players share a group momentum pool, which means everyone gets a say in who spends it and when, keeping off-turn players engaged, as nobody wants to see their hard-earned momentum wasted frivolously. Finally, pretty much anything the players can spend momentum on can be paid for by giving the GM threat points, in addition to the 2 per PC the GM gets at the start of every adventure. The GM can spend these threat points to dramatically alter the situation. This game strongly opposes the illusionist method of DMing where the GM can call blue bolts of lightning from the sky on a whim. Instead, the GM's ultimate power ends the moment play begins. From that point forward, the only way they can alter the scenario is by spending threat or through the actions of their own NPCs. The goal of the GM is to spend all that threat by the end of the adventure, but ideally in a manner that challenges the players rather than annihilating them.
7. Traits are brilliant. The game is really easy to prep for, because a scene is just a description of a situation and environment, followed by a list of words or short phrases that describe the traits that affect gameplay in the scene. For example, if the players are surviving on a desert world, the scene might just have the trait, "Overwhelming heat" as a complication. A player could make a task to find shelter and, on a success, spend momentum to remove that complication, indicating that he found suitable cover for the party. But if he rolled a 20 as well in the process, the GM might add a new complication, stating that as it grows dark, the planet begins to become "unbearably cold". Gameplay proceeds like that, with players and GM modifying the traits of the scene and characters in the scene to resolve the central problem that scene represents. My only nitpick here is that the GMing section gives 0 support to a first time GM how to prep a game at all. Sad, but not unexpected.
8. Zone based combat is brilliant. I switched to zone combat a long time ago when I started abandoning gridded combat. Zones are a super easy way to manage an environment without having to draw anything, which makes it perfect for voice-only theater of the mind roleplay, sucha s the kinds of games I've been playing online during this pandemic. I also love how zones are just subdivisions of the environment, and the terrain effects in those zones are just environment traits attached to those zones! Very easy to remember what is where, and why, and how it all connects and interacts. I would have preferred a little more guidance on the maximum and minimum sizes for zones in personal combat, given that they have an actual mechanical impact on throw range and non-electronic communication range, but I think they wanted to inspire GMs to experiment through play.
9. It's an excellent product line. The expansion books actually expand the game, both mechanically and thematically, for both players and GMs. That means every book you buy in this line contains something genuinely useful for everyone at your table. (Yes, even content from the adventure books could be cannibalized by a creative homebrewer to make cool new stuff.)
10. Uh... huh... well this has never happened to me before, but I really cannot think of a 10th item. I know that makes it look like this game sucks, or like I hate it, but... I'm actually a huge fan! The positives I've listed are infinitely more important than the complaints- most of my complaints aren't even about the game anyways, but rather the editing of the book. So uh... yeah. Go buy it.

Star Trek Adventure Zoning

Let's talk about zone based combat for a little bit. Zone combat is a theater-of-the-mind solution to spatial relationships in tabletop combat. The idea's been kicking around for some time, but more recently it has been used in some fairly big-name RPGs. One RPG that uses zone based combat is Star Trek Adventures.

The key thing to remember about zones, is that they have no set standardized dimensions. A zone is shaped more by the environment and its impact on the battlefield than by discrete numerical measures. For example, in an office building, each cubicle, office, and hallway might be distinct zones, even though they all have very different dimensions.

Let's take a look at how STA zoning of a scene affects combat. The image above is a general map of a hallway in a building. We're going to assume the doors to the side rooms are all locked, so we don't have to worry about them.

Example 1

In this example, we make the whole hallway 1 zone. What does this mean?

• Anyone can move to or from melee with the movement minor action. The movement minor action can also be used to completely exit this battlefield.
• Someone can whisper to a person on the other end of the hall and it will be heard just fine.
• All combat is in close range. That means, if someone drops prone to get better cover, attacks against them gain 2 bonus momentum.
• On a melee attack used to shove, a person can be removed from this battlefield.
• Area weapons could harm anyone in the zone on effects and complications rolled.

As you can see, this one seems a little... goofy. Especially with how sound works, and how lying down for better cover doesn't really work. Too few zones in a relatively large-ish area results in things just being a little wonky.

Example 2

In this version, we've split the hall into 2 zones, each representing opposite ends of the hallway. How does this affect combat?

• A person in one zone can use the move minor action to move to or from melee within their zone, or to move to the opposite end of the hall, or to leave the battlefield.
• People must shout to be heard at the other end of the hall.
• Ranged attacks from one end of the hall to the other are medium ranged. This means they nolonger gain bonus momentum when firing on a prone target
• If someone tries to hide behind the corner on the opposite end of the hall, the DC to spot them increases by 1.
• An area weapon fired to the opposite end of the hall poses no threat to anyone in the same zone as the shooter.

This one, to me, seems about perfect. You should have to raise your voice to be heard around the corner of a long-ish hallway. You can still move quickly in this relatively cramped area. Dropping prone is actually useful. But, just to be sure, let's take this one step farther.

Example 3

The final example has the hall broken down into 3 zones. One zone for each intersection, and a third one in the middle as a sort of no-man's-land. How have things changed?

• The movement minor action can only take you into no-man's land. To get to the other end of the hall, you'll need to spend momentum for extra steps, or use the sprint action losing your attack for this turn.
• People at one end of the hall cannot hear people at the other end, no matter how loud they scream. This means that if the players want to negotiate a peaceful result, they'll have to walk into no-man's-land and risk getting shot.
• Ranged attacks are now at long range, which surprisingly has no mechanical impact compared to medium range.
• Someone hiding at one end of the hall has +2 DC versus people trying to spot them from the opposite end.
• It is impossible to throw a grenade weapon to the opposite end of the hall.

OK, nope, that's not right. Suddenly, the atmosphere is molasses. Sound is muffled, movement is restricted, people are hard to see even though they aren't very far away. Too many zones in a small area warps reality too much.

Theorycrafting...

So, I did some research and discovered the average human voice can carry out to 180m in clear conditions. That's obviously a shout, since I can't even clearly hear my wife talking to me on the other side of the bedroom. 

So, let's say that, based on voice range, "close range" would be anyone within 90m of the speaker. That means each zone should not have any dimension exceeding 90m in any direction.

Additionally, since the longest range for communication is 180m, it would be a wise bet to say that one should not set up zones such that more than 2 occupy a 180m length in any direction.

This is, of course, assuming you're building a battlefield in an empty field with no meaningful terrain variation.

On another point....

The throw range of grenade quality weapons is medium, or a 1 zone difference from point of origin. It isn't hard, with a bit of practice, to be able to throw a ball sized object about 50m, or even 100m if you really go hard at it.

So, in other words, going by the acoustic measurements above, you should probably be able to throw such a weapon somewhere into medium range, but definitely not beyond it.

So, uh... yeah. A zone should be about 90m across. There you have it.

The Neverending Story Game

So... I made a storytelling game inspired by the Neverending Story. Here's some pictures. I'm not sharing gameplay, because this could actually be worth money some day.

The book itself was quite a bit of work. I've never stained and finished wood before, let alone done so to intentionally create a unique texture. The book doesn't just look amazing, it feels the way it should. Old. Ancient. Magical.

Three guesses on the task resolution mechanic! XD

Clearly, the game is partially inspired by Rory's Story Cubes, but far, far more abstract.

Until next time!

Chess

The modern incarnation of an RPG owes its existence to D&D. D&D is, at its core, a stripped down wargame, where the player controls only one unit, albeit with far more individual options and customization, rather than an army. Wargames, in turn, are inherently derived from a long line of more abstract games which represented physical conflict. The oldest, most recognizable, surviving form of these ancient wargames is chess. Chess is, simply put, one of the finest games ever made. It is deeper, richer, and more complex than any other game ever made. Today, I would like to talk about it because I HATE chess.

First things first, what the game is. Chess is a two-player game in which both players are given an identical number of identical game pieces in identical arrangement on a symmetrical playing field. The game is flawlessly balanced. Nobody has an advantage due to anything inherent to the game or its parts. Who is playing black or white changes nothing relevant to ones chance to win. This means that nothing on the board actually decides the result of the game- it's all up to the people playing and their decisions. It is almost poetic how the game levels the playing field between two people, and gives them an abstract medium through which they may engage in a test of wits and wills. It is, truly, mind versus mind.

I have a similar opinion of many other, (And, in my opinion, far better) games, such as checkers, tic-tac-toe, and eastern chess equivalents. At the start of the game, there is no advantage. If you lose, you only have yourself to blame- the opponent bested you, fair and square. There's no random chance, and the only unpredictable element is the other player. Compare this with more elaborate games associated to gaming as a hobby, such as wargames and RPGs. Quite frequently, there is a great deal of randomness, and even where it is absent, the fields are rarely balanced, as setting up your playing field is as much a part of the strategy as actual play decisions! 

In wargames especially, players are often given a limited abstract currency (points) which are used to dictate how many units they may have, with more powerful or specialized units costing more points. Many wargames may also allow many different win and lose conditions, and the conditions may be different for each player. In all of these other games, gameplay is far more about what is happening on the table or in the game, than it is about what's happening in the minds of the players. It's not one mind versus another, it is simply tactics versus tactics, play versus play.

But this is where I believe the genius of chess ends. It is a beautiful game to think about and talk about, but I think it is a terrible game to play, mainly for two reasons.

First off, in the absence of humanity, it is not a game, it is geometry. Modern computers can play chess far better than any human ever will, and when computers are pit against each other at maximum difficulty, especially if they use the same code, the result is (almost) always a draw. Because both sides are so beautifully, perfectly balanced, there is no theoretical reason for either side to ever win. If the "best possible move" is always made by both sides, the result will always be a draw. Now that this has been so thoroughly explored and exemplified, I don't think there's much reason to play this game any more. Doing so almost seems an act of ignorance to me; there is no game left to be played here, we're just making dumb mistakes the pieces shouldn't make.

And my second reason for disliking chess is also my reason for hating it. In almost every other game based on conflict, such as wargames, you see one of two mechanics:

A) Kill all of the opponent's pieces, and you win.

B) Take some specific target, be it a unit or a location, (possibly keep it for a set time) and you win.

Chess follows neither of these mechanics. The reason it doesn't, is because chess is not about winning. 

Instead, a player cannot make a move which would result in their "king" piece being captured. If a move would leave their king open for capture, they cannot make it. So, if I threaten to take a player's king on my next turn, they must prevent it from happening on theirs, if they can. They have no choice. The game ends when one player cannot make a move, resulting in checkmate, and victory for the other player.

Chess is not about winning, it is about losing. It is about using your mind to slowly beat someone else's mind into submission. It is about methodically stripping another person of their choices and freedoms. It is the glorified, obsessive focus on the agonizing defeat of an opponent. It is, inherently, psychologically abusive. It is a game for sociopaths and cold, unfeeling machines. It is a game meant for intellectual bullies and dominating egomaniacs. It is a perfect symbolic manifestation of the mental state of medieval culture, which can clearly be seen in their violent, tyrannical history straight through the industrial revolution. It is a mental state the human race is still struggling to recover from. It is the philosophy which generates all forms of prejudice: The idea that one can be made superior, by making all others inferior.

When I play chess, I play capture the king, no castling, no en passant. It makes the game a little bit shallow, for sure, but it transforms it into a far lighter, far freeing experience. A game can be won by simply tricking an opponent to put their king in the middle of a trap! Metagame and poker face suddenly play a far bigger role! It isn't mind versus mind any more, but person versus person. This is why I feel we should leave chess behind like the archaic relic it is. 

Like the holocaust, it is a memory of where we came from, and deserving of recognition for its impact...

But that's all it's worth.