Musings

The minicampaign planning phase is proggressing nicely. The character creation was more heavy than I expected as my own, not so well thought out, test chars had taken only half an hour a piece, but now we have almost full set of PC's. I plan to have no mercy; post-apocalyptic convoy duty is dangerous. On the other hand, the characters all seem to be very capable so it could go either way.

I now have produced all the handout material for the players (and posted it in the links part of this blog). And I have a pretty good idea what's in the area of operations and when. I still need to drill deeper, at least in the key areas, and perhaps prepare a set of messages from HQ, but other than that, we are pretty much ready to roll.

One thing I'm worried about is this though: in real life soldiering, convoy duty and the whole war thing is utter and complete boredom. I however would not appreciate my campaign being utter and complete boredom, thankyouverymuch.

So how to avoid that? The theory of sandboxing says that it is all in the suitably interesting sandbox, that keeps responding even if the players are passive. Yeah, there's some of that, but in order to it being a game, where players play and do not just stand a side munching popcorn, players need to have the possibility to influence what happens within the bloody game.

There's of course many game elements. First one is the grand scheme of selecting the route and pace of the convoy. With wise routing and rerouting it is possible to considerately up the chances of succeeding. Second one is the tactical aspect of preparing to and conducting of small unit combat. Third one is resource management. Fuel, food and ammunition are not the resources here, but able bodied soldiers and vehicles are. There's some 'fat' in the convoy, so first losses should not be disastrous (or they could be, if we are talking about the leader, medic or combat engineer) but after that, losing each good soldier or driver will make things proggressively tougher.

Well, we'll see. There of course is nothing in it for my players if they do get the convoy to reach target destination within 4 game sessionss. Other than winning / losing, that is. But anyway, the real reward should be in the playing of the game itself. We all know from Psychology 101 why that is.

On other gaming related news, I have now been in two games of Warhammer 40k. Got interested enough that I'm going to try collecting a small army of Space Wolves. One thing though: I gotta learn them rules properly. That was the only thing that lessened my enjoyment of the game. Oh, and of course the massive headache in the latter session, but nice, well thought out game with good and hefty flavor. I'm actually pretty surprised how interesting the game was, been even avoiding it a bit in the past.

Sandbox Gaming

My latest try at campaign gaming is to be a sandbox type of game where the game master is merely a game engine and rules referee. Yeah, so far so good, but I have completely forgotten how mindblowingly labor intensive this type of game mastering is. I've used google maps & wikipedia like a crazy person, read too much ORBATs, field manuals and what else and I am still in the research phase.

But you know what? I'm loving every minute of this. I did not remember how rewarding this shit is. And the exitement of waiting how my players will react to the environment I'm creating for them is a big part of the thrill. Even though I know that I'm lucky if 10% of the praparation work is to be used in the game table, this type of GMing has tens of times more suspense than more plot or character based roleplaying. And the reason is: This is GAMING for gm too!

At it again

It seems that I only blog when I'm about host gaming sessions. Don't know why, but somehow the process of making preparations for a campaing makes me wanna jot down my thoughts somewhere. And, as I really am not a diary type of guy, here I am.

So, what are we gonna be playing? Well, it's Back to Roots Time with Twilight 2013! I have very fond memories of an ancient Twilight 2000 campaign I played in back at home village and almost as fond memories of some campaigns I've refereed since.

So why go back at it? With 2013 version the gaming system has been thoroughly revamped and I'm really excited to see how it plays. I have a hunch that it will produce 'realistic' effects (as seen in youtube via the recent televised wars), even when players are just trying to munchinize the heck out of it.

That's why I gave my players a bit of a free reign in character creation apart from that they are roughly the same age and belong to the same unit. And that is why I'm not going to demand detailed backstories or bitch about Real Roleplaying (as I've been know to do). I'm putting that burden on the system now. From what I've seen, the system will encourage the players to behave like real american soldiers we have read about in Generation Kill!, reports on the Afghanistan battles et alii, and really reproduce the whole setup of superior equipment and marksmanship versus an invicible, elusive enemy. The tick system, by the way, is ripped almost straight from Jagged Alliance.

One thing I would like to see is how well the team rules will work. You see, how it works is that it gives the PC's bonuses when they are part of the team and working towards team orders. It also has a concept of Reaction Drills (Do YOU hear the words Counter Ambush Drill? Well you should if you are playing on my campaign!). But, anyway, this looks like a nice mechanic to represent the fact we have learned in our professional lives that a well led team with piss-poor skills regularly outperforms an anarchy of superlative talent. Alas, it seems that none of my players have yet made a leader type character, so we'll see if wee really see this at the game table.