Protagonists that you would appreciate

[PyTom]

I always thought it would be interesting to have a semi-factual game where you have to make the choices that a real leader did. You're presented with information, and then you can either do what they did, or act differently and suffer the outcome.

For example, you could be Ike, and have to decide if you should invade on June 5th, 6th, or 7th, 1944. Choose wrong, and you'd have to deliver the d-day failure message.

[papillon]

Well, there we run into the other problem with realism, especially if you get close to modern day - the risk of personal politics coming into play.

There are many people who will swear blind that leaders had no choice but to (drop the bomb, drop the second bomb, not warn people about incoming bombs, etc) because otherwise the consequences would have been far worse. And maybe they would have been! Still, if you write a game where the player can make choices, but every choice other than the historical one leads to unimaginable disaster, this runs the risk of feeling like anvilicious political propaganda even more than a simple what-if story detailing a *possible* consequence of not taking that action would be.

On the other hand, demonstrating that your side could have won the war without doing (whatever) will *definitely* be read as a political statement/criticism.

Giving players analogous choices in a setting that clearly isn't quite the real world helps deflect some of the potential outrage.

[Argeus_the_Paladin]

That argument stands on the assumption that the outcome of any hypothetical historical choice is entirely up to the writer's discretion. In reality, it is not quite so, owing to this little thing we call logic. Most of the time a good alternate history scenario is examined through the "balance of power" lens, which is to say, "If this has happened, would the balance of power in international politics and military change in any significant and discernible way?" This question can, IMO, be answered with a significant degree of confidence. That's essentially what realism is all about - reasoning that if A happens in background B, then C probably would arise with a 95% confidence interval or something.

Of course, that applies only to "what if" scenarios where the impact are immediate and obvious. For other more minor events that does not impact the balance of power in any obvious way - like in PyTom's example right above - the writer has full jurisdiction as to what the outcomes for the alternate scenario would be, and only then would the problem you mentioned above come into effect.

Aaaand we've gone a mile off topic, BTW.