Arguing when money talks: Der Söldner

Der Söldner is a ruleset for miniature wargames set in the mid-14th to mid-17th century. It greatly expands on the MATRIX strategy wargames developed by Chris Engle in the 1980s. Like its predecessor, it uses arguments and a list of keywords, but is focussed more on the developing narrative than using arguments for everything. The mechanism asks a short question: what is going to happen? One player, the narrator, starts the conversation by proposing an event. Others dispute or not. If undisputed, the event happens as proposed, otherwise arguments are exchanged, judged, and resolved with a pass-or-fail dice roll. This setup is embedded in a simple mechanism for determining the next narrator and how much time is available for events.