Why did traditional games not adapt to middle eastern war settings when video games did?

>>96131162 (OP)
Because wargames about modern warfare have always been few and far between.

>>96131162 (OP)
>>96131167
Team Yankee tried, and the result is that most ME powers suck because they are consigned to the bottom-of-the-barrel hand-me-downs of the big boys and the game can't really model civilian uprisings or the enemy's RoE suddenly going to shit (though it would be funny if they had that as an ability.)

>>96131162 (OP)
Modern conflicts are rare in wargames and RPGs almost as a rule, modern RPGs don't really feel major difference if war is going on, while wargames from historial point of view just use cold war tech in middle east for the most part.

>Inbred Goatfucker
>Unit size: the population
>1/2 point per model
>Gear: AK-47, RPG
>Special Ability: You're Training Us to Shoot You in the Back=this unit is allowed to get within melee range/attack first before the reacting unit is allowed to defend or attack.

>>96131162 (OP)
What kind of story would you tell in the middle east that wouldn’t be terribly depressing? No one wants to RP as johnny getting his dick and legs blown off.
At least Vietnam is 60 years removed.

>>96131682
People do Vietnam games? Wouldn't you just be crawling in holes hoping to knife the other guy before you get knifed yourself, with the occasional burning of a village before you get sniper'd?

>>96131701
You also have good old russians to kill. there’s a Delta Green module set in Vietnam my group is running soon.

>I have no units left on the table but held all the objective points for twenty turns making me the winner.

>>96131162 (OP)
What if desert storm, but modern fantasy?

>>96131162 (OP)

I mean, you have to admit it's pretty ridiculous to cast the American military juggernaut as the plucky underdogs like video games like cowadooty.

In terms of miniatures and other tactical games, I think it would be really hard to balance the rules for a one-off fair fight battle which a lot of gamers expect because of GW. Mideast insurgents aren't likely to wipe out a whole USMC company IRL so you'd have to craft a ruleset where the insurgent player gets points for slowing down the American player, injuring soldiers with traps, goading him into killing civilians, sabotaging infrastructure needed by the occupiers, etc.

The modern military seems way more restrictive and organized than most people would want for an RPG. Maybe you could do an interest Heart of Darkness type story where the characters are leaderless national guardsmen left behind after a pullout or some sort of deep cover special forces. But in general I don't like modern guns in RPGs since I know my /k/ommando friend would ruin it with autism/arguing.

>Do we have air superiority and missile
strikes available?
>Lmao we always do.

>>96131162 (OP)
Because ttrpgs are a medium for games where you play under a chain of command

>>96132288
The best take on this was Twilight2k where WW3 cut you off from it, and you might not have a national government anymore.

>>96131162 (OP)
Mongoose tried and catastrophically failed, Games Workshop saw no reason to (and was probably too busy with Fantasy, 40k and LOTR), everyone else was going through massive problems and wasn't in a position to launch a new line (e.g. FASA, Rackham).

>>96131162 (OP)
Why do single line shitposters not know anything about the questions they ask?
There are many asymmetrical combat modern nema conflict games in tabletop, board games and hex & chit.

It is because the conflict is boring and uniforms look like dogshit, there's no mythologized figures or battles, no iconic uniforms, it's dull as fuck.

>>96131162 (OP)
Because pentagon never ordered such a game.

>>96131162 (OP)
But they did?

>>96134256

>>96132288
Ayo, hol' up! You finna say that getting /fit/, /fa/ and doing what you want rather than what you think women want is the secret to getting bitches?

>>96132288
>Mideast insurgents aren't likely to wipe out a whole USMC company IRL
That largely depends on how crafty the locals are with their IED placement.

>>96134272
Straight trash creating by teenage history majors with supervision from a prof not even specialized. Cannibalized a bunch of ideas from other popular systems and watered them down. This winning a CSR award was an insult considering it is essentially hex and counter SLOP.

>>96131162 (OP)
Because nobody wants to play a game where the American faction deploys ten models against a hundred models on the Terrorist side, then wipes out 90% of the Terrorist faction's units by playing a "drone strike" card before easily mopping up the rest of them, but still loses the match because the Terrorist faction managed to inflict a minor wound on one of the American faction's infantrymen, which is deemed to contribute to the eventual loss of support for the war effort among the American faction's civilian population.

>>96131162 (OP)
There's a distant plain and labyrinth: the war on terror. Both by Voiko Ruhnke, both excellent.

>>96131162 (OP)
There’s a few out out now:

In Country
Spectre Operations
Asymmetric Warfare
Black Powder Red Earth

On the RPG side, WOD’s Dogs of War was decent.

>>96131162 (OP)
Because you focused too much on what they don't do, instead of focusing more on what you want to do with them.

>>96131162 (OP)
Most game devs are left-leaning, and ever since 9/11 those people have been more and more inclined to think Muslims are the ones in the right, because Conservatives don't like Muslims so much after 9/11, and Liberals are contrarian hipster pricks.

>>96142869
But the average Muslim 'is' a conservative.

>>96142869
I don't think muslims are in the right, I just think the American war machine is causing a lot of unnecessary death and suffering to make money for a few people and they do it with MY TAX DOLLARS

>>96131162 (OP)
The videogame adaptations were literally propaganda.

>>96131162 (OP)
They did, but historical wargames are kind of niche (compared to D&D and 40K), and post WW2 historical wargames are a niche of a niche. Then middle eastern post WW2 historical wargames are a niche of a niche of a niche.

It's not like there was a Call of Duty: Modern Warfare that influenced every other game and suddenly everyone was doing it. A few games certainly sprang up - Fist Full of TOWs, Spectre Operations, Team Yankee, but they didn't really have widespread market penetration, although TY saw some success for a while in some groups.

>>96142869
This is something I never really understood about americans. They see "X is worse than Y" and immediately default to "So you think Y is (capital G) GOOD!!!". They don't grasp that the most bloated military in the entire planet by a fucking order of magnitude operating from the most geographically advantaged country in the modern world massacring actual millions of stone-age goat herders for the better part of a century being a Bad Thing, doesn't make the other side immediately the Good Thing. Neither is good, but one is clearly worse. It's just pure binary. It's the same with /tg/ settings where there's no good guys. They just see that one thing is worse than the other and some little switch in their head divides them into Good and Bad, then proclaim everyone else is retarded for not understanding that the Human Meatgrinder is actually the Good Guys.

>>96142869
Also conservatives aren't into making tabletop games.

I have heard that Battlespace is decent, but it is a co-op/solitaire game probably for this >>96131191 exact reason and would just suck as competitive game.

>>96131162 (OP)
Different audiences, that shit appealed a lot more to the dudebros who started playing video games in the late 00s than to nerds who play tabletop RPGs.

>>96131191
Did the 6 Day War and other pre-TY Cold War stuff suck like that?

>>96131162 (OP)
Asymmetrical Warfare / Spectre Operations V2
GWOT and ultramodern skirmish games exist, people just get lazy and default to 40K.

>>96132288
>the American military juggernaut
Name a conflict it won past WW2. And even that was with Soviet help.
Even in Ukraine Abrams are the worst performing tanks.

>>96147093
>Even in Ukraine Abrams are the worst performing tanks.
Look, I'm not claiming they're some wunderwaffe, but it isn't really a fair comparison. Leadership on both sides of that shitshow is utterly incompetent, you can't really draw accurate assesment from equipment when the retards just yeet shit to the grinder with no support or real operational plan. This is veering to /pol/ territory but slavs to this day can't shake the attrition warfare doctrine.

>>96147247
>Leadership on both sides of that shitshow is utterly incompetent
Russians and Ukrainians have about the same IQ as Americans. Without a lot of other mitigating factors, you can't say that Americans would do better. War is hard. Americans only a few years removed from the very real lessons of peer conflict, and arguably at their apex of prowess, got fought to a draw by an underequipped Chinese force in Korea.

There's an argument that "this is what happens when you can't achieve American-style air superiority". However, this feels much more like the warnings of the Russo-Japanese war's ground campaign being ignored because "lol they're retarded slavs" and then having to be painfully learned on the Western Front.

>>96131162 (OP)
1. They did there are games for it
2. People who play ttrpgs tend to read and people who read are embarassed as fuck about the idiocy of the wars we've waged for no purpose in the middle east

>>96145007
>But the average Muslim 'is' a conservative.
/pol/ has some funny compilations of liberals getting confused about why they're being assaulted by their "allies."

>>96145892
This is more of a left-wing thing, they define themselves by what they oppose rather than what they (the voters) are, because they all think they're Robin Hood valiantly fighting oppression and tyranny, they crave oppression so they have something to heroically struggle against. Just look at how often they act like the underdog in a conflict MUST be the good guys, they don't even stop to think about it. It's why progressives can never be happy, they NEED there to be something to fight against.

>>96145052

>>96147093
>Name a conflict it won past WW2
All of them. Also WW2, Russian help was token at best, even Stalin said they were fucked without us.

>>96131701
That sounds like a cool game

>>96148450
Then purple haze might be your speed

>>96148400
>Also WW2, Russian help was token at best
the fuck?

>>96131701
Fire in the Lake is excellent.

>>96148362
America doesn't have a left wing, and what you wrote describes both of their parties to a T so it's clearly not a partisan issue. But thank you for demostrating my point.

>>96148381
Americans had been about forty years deep in middle eastern conquest by the time of 9/11, if you're implying the equivalent of a bad highway pileup was them starting something.

>>96148362
>This is more of a left-wing thing
It really isn't. Both sides of the American political system are constantly portraying themselves as the victims. You can basically break down American platforms into
>Group A NEEDS our support. They're being FAILED and TARGETED by our opposition.
>Cause B is a flagrant WASTE of resources--no, worse than that, it's being PRIORITIZED at the cost of the honest members of Group A.
>Group C? They aren't in a bad spot at all--if anything, they've been disproportionately hired into corporate roles because of their membership in Group C. The opposition is just trying to scaremonger by saying that we're trying to take rights away from them when we're just trying to level the playing field.
>Foreign Nation D is a THREAT and is much more of a problem than Foreign Nation E, regardless of what our opposition says.
>We do not wish to make a clear statement on Israel at this time.

>>96148362
My man, American conservatives have spent literal decades wailing that Christendom is under assault because stores put up signs that say "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas". Do not even try to pretend for a second that this behavior is restricted to one side of the political spectrum.

>>96148400
>All of them
>laughs in Korean, Vietnamese, Arabic...

>>96148400
Based retard

>>96131701
>People do Vietnam games?
I do, and the rules I wrote for Vietnam have sold 86 copies so far (released in 2022). It's not much, but better than being kicked in the nuts for doing what I enjoy.

>>96150697
>>96150723
>>96150759
You guys are absolutely correct, but no American online will ever accept it because they're all fucking nuts.

>>96140531
Plenty of hex and counter games are good though

>>96151929

based anon doing his own thing.

>>96147093
>Even in Ukraine Abrams are the worst performing tanks.
thought that was the British Tanks that performed the worst

>>96152350
Getting new players into Hex and Chit is pretty hard, at least with miniature Wargames, there's the hobby and modelling aspect to entice players in before bombarding them with complicated rules, but Hex and Chit games tend to be rather dry and rules-heavy, though some exceptions do exist.

>>96152421
That’s why I always start with pic related. It’s fast and fairly straightforward and is more like a hybrid between a board game and a hex and counter.
Recently though I’ve also found World at War ‘85 to be a decent starting point

>>96152440
This and also pretty much anything by Mark Simonitch. So much better than any H&C computer game.

>>96152460
I dipped my toe into his stuff with Salerno and liked it. Then I bought North Africa ‘41 and it was like my third eye opened.
So fucking good. I need to get US Ciivl War at some point, though right now I’m learning this beast.

>>96152350
Oh 100%. As long as you avoid stuff designed to appeal to brainlets like Vuca games, Phalanx, etc. Stuff made by people with no actually experience with H&C as designers as well. There's been a worrying trend of low quality games dragging down the quality to appeal to people who arent the core demo with excessive chrome, simplistic rules, zero effort into research, etc. Thankfully theres still lots of excellent designers and devs, and newer guys honoring the core even if it is going pop (ie. burning banners)

>>96152818
>As long as you avoid stuff designed to appeal to brainlets like Vuca games
Red Strike and 1914 Nacht Paris are great even if they are monsters. Not a hex and counter but I’ve also heard great things about 1812 Napoleon’s Fateful March.
Everything else is meh though.

>>96152848
You may be unaware but their entire business model is talking old japanese games, translating them, and slapping a huge markup on them for a lot of overproduction. If that's your thing cool, but my much cheaper much more functional old copies with translated text work a lot better. And Im not paying to be fomo'd for 200 bucks for zero improvements to old designs. I can buy the endless reprints of berg games for that.

>>96152473
generally GCACW is the best regarded but it's operational scale. Always been too much of a pain in the arse for me to get a hold of in the UK at anything like a reasonable price.

This worth learning? I'm fine with it being solo only.

>>96152856
>You may be unaware but their entire business model is talking old japanese games, translating them, and slapping a huge markup on them for a lot of overproduction
I am aware anon. That’s why I only mentioned two games that were originals published by them.

>>96152863
It’s solid for a small little game. From White Dog though I liked The Mission and The Mog better.

>>96152867
Ya I saw The Mission too, it felt just a notch more complex and intimidating.
Havent heard about Mog I'll check that out.
Thanks anon.

>>96152856
>And Im not paying to be fomo'd for 200 bucks for zero improvements to old designs
Wargame prices have been shit for 30 years

>>96132288
I want to fuck Taiwan.

>>96131162 (OP)
>why didn't [analog turn-based hobby] adopt real-time military shooting with online multiplayer and DLC as a genre the way video games did
OP, I mean this as sincerely as possible: Go enlist and die in a forever war in a shithole desert country ASAP. They love retards like you.

>>96150759
False equivalency.

>>96150697
>America doesn't have a left wing
And no country Europe has what Americans would call national pride, it's OK that we don't think the same way, so long as we acknowledge that what's called a Democrat here, is not what's called a Democrat there, so don't expect them to act the same way.
>what you wrote describes both of their parties to a T
It really doesn't.

>forty years deep in middle eastern conquest by the time of 9/11
I'm not saying it was the start of the conflict, but it was the start of the American left becoming a pack of brainless rubes over it.

>>96150487
Anon, you do know American Lend/Lease went to Russia as much as England, right? They were getting more than half their ammo from us. As well as boots, food, tanks, industrial supplies, train cars...

>>96151676
The Korean war ended like 5 minutes ago, and the north lost. The American military didn't lose Vietnam, LBJ pulled out because his buddies got what they wanted. And I have no idea what middle eastern conflict you think we lost.

>>96151676
The US won Korea
The US lost Vietnam
The US lost Afghanistan
The US won Iraq

>>96140531
Hex and counter games are the only real war games, everything else is Bing Bing wahoo minishit

>>96155821
>what you wrote describes both of their parties to a T
>It really doesn't.

Not that anon, but it absolutely does. The American Right has been running on aggrievement politics for the past decade or so.
>White people are being genocided due to immigrant displacement and birth rate inequalities
>Christians are the only oppressed religion in the world and the secular Left is trying to destroy us
>Gay and trans people are grooming/converting/raping your children
>Trans athletes are destroying competition and pushing out women
>Mainstream media is pushing a WOKE agenda and that's why you feel ostracized from the public at large

The American Right ran on opposing things rather than being for anything for a while now. What did they actually want? It's impossible to tell other than wanting to stop Wokeism. Every time the American Right takes over the government, they pretend to be about balancing the deficit and making cuts, but they always balloon the deficit. They've talked about pulling back from the global stage with their military and keeping the money at home, but have stayed the course and increased military budget by 150B this year.

The American Left suffers from massive fractionalization. The DNC's power comes from trying to grab and group many disparate "wronged" groups under the same umbrella as "Democrats" while, as people pointed out, what the "Left" is has a massive spectrum with most of its voter base sitting somewhere center-right in terms of global politics. So it makes sense that they unite more around what they don't want than what they want because the groups barely agree on anything. A lot of conservative critique of the American Left is that it's a purity test, and that's not wrong when you have different parts of the Democratic base being culturally dominant and that becomes the new standard for being "a leftist" in America.

Whatever becomes the culture war battleground du jour becomes a way to oust people for both sides.

>>96155919
in rules terms it's hard to argue against this, at any scale except maybe man to man, but the hobby aspect and gaming with the results still has its own appeal.

>>96155850
The bast majority of Lend Lease arrived post 1943, at that point the end was already set. Check your numbers, 1941-42 lend lease was not a deciding factor, not even close

>>96155821
>American left
EU here, please explain me this, how people consider democrats left? In the EU they would be considered very right wing, or even fascists considering their military intervention track record.

>>96156587
NTA but the Democrats right now are far left socially and centrist economically (and run the entire gamut of the political spectrum militarily). That’s why they’re so unpopular right now. America is generally right wing on social issues, especially now except for abortion which has been deplatformed. Being economically centrist means neoliberalism which everyone except boomers despise now, and military intervention is largely disconnected from being a left-right issue at this point.

>>96131162 (OP)
>Why did traditional games not adapt to middle eastern war settings when video games did?
Because traditional consumer wargames have been doing MENA sandbox shit since their inception and will continue doing so. You've got everything from AK47 Republic through Skirmish Sangin through to SPECTRE to Twilight 2000 supplements, not to mention all the hex-and-chit games based on the early Arab-Israeli wars that helped directly popularize early wargaming magazines. Fuck's sake, the US command literally used off-the-shelf games from SPI to test some of their ideas for Desert Storm.
For my money SPECTRE 2.0 or Asymmetric Warfare are the best small-unit games but there's like two dozen that have come out in the last decade alone.

>>96131162 (OP)
There are some, but WWII is simply the most appealing modern war (pic related), and not much happened around Middle East specifically at that time.

>>96131162 (OP)
The last time someone made a comment critical about Islam, armed gunmen stormed their offices and butchered them (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Hebdo_shooting).
Salman Rushdie got stabbed in the fucking face by a fanatic and lost an eye.
The violence of Muslims, and their status as - perversely - a protected caste means that they're verboten, no-one wants that smoke.

>>96131162 (OP)
Why would they? Modern war is fake and gay. Even "modern war" videogames gave to invent conflicts out of whole cloth because "sit in the desert for 18 months while goatfucking dirtfarmers take potshots at you and occasionally wipe out a village" is boring as shit.

>>96145007
But they're brown so their culture must be respected.

>>96159968
Might want to google the Soviet Afghan War. Shitload of interesting tactics and evolution over the 10 year war.
Check out "The Bear Went Over the Mountain" and 'The Other Side of the Mountain". very interesting shit and there are a few damn good games based on it.

Even US-Afghanistan can be interesting if you read some first hand accounts and play games that take into account the true asymmetry of these kinds of conflicts.

>>96160340
If I wanted an asymmetric skirmish game I can just play Infinity and get the same thing but with space samurai vs alien monkeys. And if I want it in a TRPG then I can play Only War and get access to more interesting weapons.

It's interesting stuff to read and learn about to be sure, but it's not interesting to play through.

>>96160359
You probably need to zoom out a little. Skirmish might not be the right scale to game it (although could still work).
I think a lot of 20thC middle eastern conflicts work best when you have combined arms and ~company scale - helicopters, reinforcements, IFVs, infantry, multiple villages on the table.

Pic partially related

>>96160444
Which is heavily fictionalized for the purposes of OP's question. Because the actual 20 year war on terror was either street level door breaching or bomb n sweeps.

>>96131162 (OP)
People play traditional games for escaping reality

>>96160502
Truth can be stranger than fiction. What would your African Warlord character be?

>>96131162 (OP)
The few tried, and it sold like shit.
So they've stopped trying and moved on.

Rocket science, I know

>>96131162 (OP)
To answer this question, ask yourself how awful it would be to play a wargame based on the Ukraine Conflict where most of the game is just blowing up surrendering conscripts with drones or pounding people you never see with artillery.

ME war led to the idea of small groups of elite guys fighting large groups of scrubs, which is kind of present in wargames, but in order to really capture the essence of this you need absurdly restrictive rules of engagement, piles of objectives, and rules for air support and artillery and stuff which clug games up.

40k and other popular wargames typically model earlier forms of warfare, a sort of Pre-Methodical-Battle thing where it's possible for company strength units to fight for any length of time without air or artillery power becoming involved.

>>96155850
>The Korean war ended like 5 minutes ago, and the north lost. The American military didn't lose Vietnam
This is some next level copium man. It's not healthy for America's military either

>>96133534
Name 10 of them then.

As someone who has actually done a bunch of post-WW2 miniatures wargaming; the games and miniatures are out there. The problems are just this:

There's a fucking weird attitude that pretty much only occurs within the toy soldiers sphere about something being 'too recent' Even for wars they have literally no connection to. The people who bang on about this are usually still happy with literally any other media or entertainment on the wars in question. Movies. Videogames. Scale models. They're also still fucking weird about it with fictional wars. Many of these people also never served. Not all though. But many.

The closer you get to present day, the less suitable for miniatures gaming the wars get. This isn't an attitude thing, this is simply a lack of solid information to base games on, and that the technological problems created by newer gear requires different approaches by designers. The speed and destruction of properly modelled modern combat (at the larger scale especially) is also something players frequently can't deal with - it's too much to manage. I've seen it time and again that the average player cannot deal with things like:
Thermal imaging systems vs not having them
Artillery genuinely fucking up stuff.
Very expensive helicopter gunships getting destroyed because of slight mis-plays bringing them into AA range.
Very expensive helicopter gunships played right shredding entire tank companies without being touched.
Very expensive tanks getting blown up by cheap infantry because they were not screened properly (Grozny '95 anyone?)
And this is before getting into even more modern combat than late '80s stuff. There's a lot less intuitive/institutional understanding of how shit works, and there's far less room for error because the amount of firepower being thrown around at every level is vastly more than in WW2 and earlier.

>>96163880
>There's a fucking weird attitude that pretty much only occurs within the toy soldiers sphere about something being 'too recent'
This happens in hex and counter too but generally it gets blown right past. Mark Herman is even designing a game about the first year of the Ukrainian War right now, to say nothing of hypothetical wargames like Next War or Littoral Commander.
I think it’s because, and I really don’t mean to sound pretentious, hex and counter tends to be more “academically minded”. Putting a hobbyist element of painting miniatures and building terrain instantly makes something more gamey even if the actual mechanics and topic are identical.

>>96131162 (OP)
Can only speak for myself, but frankly deserts bore the shit out of me. And for games involving warfare, I much prefer conventional conflict to COIN.
>>96131701
Yup. Even though I don't know how well it plays, I've always been tempted to play RECON RPG.
>>96152409
Nope, they've been doing very solid work. We'll probably only find out which tank is the worst post-war, anyway.
>CAPTCHA: OATSJ
Is a lack of cereal crops the culprit behind there being no modern ME war settings?

>>96155859
Nobody won Korea. It's technically still going, just on pause forever.

>>96131191
The iran and iraq are actually pretty competitive in team yankee because spam lists are fucking king in that game and guess who has dirt cheap infantry bmp hordes and t55s

>>96146284
all the battlefront games? yeah them+ the vietnam war games are just team yankee but with massive hordes of vietcong or middle easterners with soviet hand me downs vs a small group of israeli/american forces.

>>96171024
God I hate that TY doubled down on the worst aspect of Flames: the parking lots

>>96131162 (OP)
Ultra-moderns were boring shit, where everyone wanted to play Western Forces with all the toys and no one wanted to play sandal-wearing OPFOR being stomped.

Ukraine has changed that with two genuinely interesting and balanced sides, but I think people are waiting for it to end before they game it.

>>96131162 (OP)
because videogames are propaganda.

There are tons of wargames set on the war on terror. They are just not as visible as sci fi games, because historical wargames are a niche anf usually played in clubs instead of game stores.