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![[Cover]](dbr.jpg) |
De Bellis Renationis. Wargames Rules for Renaissance Battle. 1494 to 1700 AD by Phil Barker and Richard Bodley Scott. 34 p, £5, WRG, 1995 Reviewed by David Heading |
De Bellis Renationis, DBR for short, is a general set of rules for the 'Renaissance' wargames period. Based on the popular DBA and DBM sets of rules, they have been popular and sparked off something of a revival in early modern wargaming. As such they are undoubtedly a 'good thing', to quote Sellars and Yeatman.
The rules are based around the well known 'PiP' dice used in the other rules in the stable. Basically, you can move as many units or blocks of units as pips you roll on the dice. You get one die per general, so organisation is important. There is also a rule to try to prevent you moving in ahistorical lines rather than blocks. In some circles there is quite a bit of argument as to how this works, but it seems fairly clear that the rules are meant to make it more difficult to move blocks of troops more than four elements wide.
The rules play fairly quickly and well, although, being written in Phil Barker's inimitable prose style there is room for some difficulty in interpretation of them. There are some nice touches, with shot supported by pike getting a big bonus, and certain troop types always following up a random distance, if they win. Thus, your victorious cavalry can find themselves scattered over the field quite quickly.
There are the inevitable army lists books, three in this case. And this is where I start to have problems. Specific problems are dealt with elsewhere but really it is very hard to force 200 years worth of world wide warfare into a few troop types.
DBR (and its counterpart DBM) is widely thought of as a 'tournament' type rules set, and the most vociferous proponents of the rules are frequently tournament type players, who tend to choose armies because of what they have in terms of troop types, rather than any interest in the period. This is a shame as the rules deserve better press than that, but it cannot be said that they are flawless.
In summary the, a good general set of rules, which tend to loose flavour when examined in detail. The army lists are nice, as they make clear the wide variety of warfare which took place in the 16th and 17th centuries, but some, at least are deeply flawed or simplified.
