None of you probably know who I am (can you say long time lurker, I knew you could). I have this idea and I wanted a bit of feedback to see if it's worth fleshing out. This seemed like the place, so here goes:

I was reading a book (Harry Turtledove's Tilting the balance if you must know), and I thought...this is a great story. What I'm thinking here would be a setting and mechanics that could act as a platform for a narratavist take on a wargame.
Features I want:
1 Story oriented resolution(drama/fortune most likely).
2 An ability to zero in on all the small struggles that make things happen.
3 Something to bring the unwarranted happen.
Features I don't want
1 An abundance of tables.
2 Almost anything resembling a simulationist approach(Avalon Hill beat me there fair and square.

I'm thinking something a bit more fantasy based than the book I described.
Can someone here point me at something that might be a place to start, give me pointers, tell me why this idea sucks worse than a root canal?

amiel wrote:
Features I want:
1 Story oriented resolution(drama/fortune most likely).
2 An ability to zero in on all the small struggles that make things happen.
3 Something to bring the unwarranted happen.

Interesting idea.

Zak gave a pretty good rundown of the process. It's real similar to the one I go through when designing games.

By "wargames", I assume you're talking about classic miniature wargaming. Cripes, that's so far away from narratvism, and yet I completely see where you're coming from. I spent some time doing Warhammer 40K minis, but that's all the farther it got. I liked the idea of creating the personalities, but I knew once they hit the battlefield, their "coolness" just wasn't going to be a factor. But man, a narrativist wargame? Could be cool.

Seems to me the way to do this is to find a way to preserve it's "wargame-ness" - it's attention to tactical detail - and somehow allow that stuff to roll over into some sort of story concern. We all know from Ron's essay that Gamist and Simulationist mechanics can still be present in, and even enhance, a Narrativist game (see The Pool for a good example). If you could turn a wargame's combat-oriented, tactical style gameplay on its ear and use that to drive a story/premise forward...

I have no idea how you'd do that at the moment. But sheesh, there's no shortage of drama on a battlefield - seems like stories would emerge, even if they are very short, verly localized stories.

I'll think on this.

- Moose

And Zak - thanks for the props, man.

hardcoremoose wrote:
I have no idea how you'd do that at the moment. But sheesh, there's no shortage of drama on a battlefield - seems like stories would emerge, even if they are very short, verly localized stories.

I toyed with the idea, briefly, of a Bug-Hunt type game, (ages ago on RPG.net) based on Starship troopers et. al., with a similar concept. The essence of my vision was to have a director-stance wargame, where the character was the sum of the individuals in the troop, battalion, whatever. To keep the action high, as attrition factors in, the remaining units become more combat effective, so you get the "few good men" left over by the end of the adventure (film). I didn't get too far past the initial idea stage.

One of the keys to a wargame is the distance between the player and the units- they are nothing more than battle units. You may like a particular figure more than others, but nothing like an RPG character. How to maintain that distance, and still protagonize the "characters" as needed for a narrativist experience? That was my reasoning for the character as sum concept, but I'm sure that there are other ways to do it.

The one thing I would recommend is to keep combat simple for a narrativist version. Too much rolling or number crunching will be detrimental to the action in-head. I'd recommend something with a heavy Karma mechanic, perhaps light Fortune modified. (many wargames use Karma mechanics anyway, so this shouldn't be too unusual.)

Anyway, best of luck,

Skippy

Zak,

Yeah, you're absolutely right about story emerging during play. I didn't mean to imply that the storytelling should emerge retrospectively, but it certainly sounded that way, huh? What I meant to say is that if we have so many great stories about warfare - and I'd venture to say that we do - then there must be a narrativist way to handle those issues.

So what are the qualities of a war story that we find engaging? Hardship endured? The fact that one man can make a difference? The fact that one man is totally insignificant? Or are we not concerned at all about the larger battle going on, except as it reflects on the smaller dramas comprising it? What other premises might be explored by a game like this?


Skippy,

I'm still a fan of your bughunt idea. I'm not sure if it's G or N - more G than N as I remember it - but it was cool. You should do something with that someday.

- Moose

If you're worried about losing the character identification with a protagonist, you might want to think about small unit tactics. If you look at Blood Bowl, which has a team, players still identify with each player that stands out for whatever reason, even if its "rolling lucky". Of course, it doesn't hurt that BloodBowl and most other games workshop games always gives a rundown of stats on each character that's above standard.

Perhaps what you're thinking of is a little more abstract, such as a general rating in strength or power, but perhaps with traits playing a bigger role such as, Tenacious, Cautious, Stoic, Battle Hardened, Cunning, Vicious, or Brutal as playing a bigger role than other stats.

Chris

Have you taken a look at the mass combat rules for L5R and 7th Sea? They're relatively straightforward and not too terribly strategically intensive, but show an interesting way to throw story bits into a large-scale battle... you capture the enemy standard, break the line, have a chance to enter a duel and the like. Combining that sort of dynamic with a standard flank-and-shoot wargame could be very slick.

Warning, blatant plug ahead.

Universalis does exactly all this perfectly well. I've actually done battles that zoomed in on one character's performance only to have that performance affect the battle as a whole. In one classic instance the individual leaders of two groups confronted each other in a gun battle that ended up being decisive in determining the outcome of the battle. In another case the failed efforts of an ace pilot led to the eventual failure of an entire mission to destroy an alien race.

Moose, you've got a copy; do you see what I mean?

So, to contribute usefully to the thread, yes it can be done, and done well, IMO. If you want such a system, you simply have to let go of the majority of the simulative aspects of wargaming. OTOH, you can get a simulationist version of the same thing by allowing player successes to add to unit die rolls, which may be unrealistic, but versimilar to the particular genre.

Also, see the thread in which Mike Sullivan (AKA Epoch) first discussed his new Goblin game concept, in which the idea of using Hero Wars was discussed.

Mike

My fault for not being more specific. I don't want minis(though I may use them anyway, so cool, so pretty;)
Anyway... I used the term wargame to get a response. What I meant by wargame was that I want to tell the story of a war.
I want to (as mentioned) show the smalll stories of the war, how they affect the big story of said war.
The idea mostly came as a gut response to a comment made in above mentioned book about war bringing about the best and the worst in people.
I want a story created as you go with small battles, big battles, traitors, small scale plundering, etc...
BTW...thanks for the thoughts and suggestions so far... and thanks for not saying the idea sucks worse than a root canal;)

Hi Amiel,

Given that by "wargame" you are indicating "happens during a war," I'm not sure how it differs from any reg'lar old RPG experience. The setting is whenever, the situations are those which might be expected to occur during war; the stories arise from people and so forth under those conditions.

The wargame-aspect of it all makes sense to me if we are talking about system and mechanics - kind of a retro thing, really, considering that RPGing began (at least to some extent) as "hopping down in scale to play the people" in the context of an ongoing traditional wargame activity. If that were the proposed issue, then all sorts of neat system or techniques discussion could get going.

But if we lose that and simply talk about role-playing using wartime as a setting/situation, then I'm not sure what is being asked after all. It's a great topic, sure, but the actual role-playing or techniques concerns don't seem to be special to me in any way.

Am I misunderstanding your last post about this? Or, if not, what concerns or issues would you be interested in discussing about wartime-as-situation? I certainly think it's interesting even without the traditional-wargame context. The Intense wargames thread on this forum dealt with some of this, and it seemed like a hot topic to various people in different ways.

Best,
Ron

Damn, I'm trying to edit my last post and it ain't doing it.

What I wanted to add:

"The one thing I'm parsing from your post is that the war itself changes, proceeds, and alters the setting as it goes, as an umbrella regarding the smaller, local stories-of-play within it. That seems to me to be quite functional and interesting."

Again: good topic, interesting stuff.

Best,
Ron

To differ from "traditional" roleplaying in this prospect:
You got it spot on with the ubrella concept. Specific character identification I actually want to be lower than in most rpgs.
Why?
I want each player to have multiple characters at different points in the conflict, I want traitors(every war has at least one), and I want to keep track of the overall ebb and flow of the war. That's right, I want to eat my cake and have it too. I still want some of those little stories. I want to keep track of a major battle from the point of view of a little old ground pounder.
Am I more or less clear than before here?

Hey,

Totally clear, now. It's an interesting question whether to scale up just a tad from what we think of as "reg'lar role-playing" or to scale down substantially from wargaming; I think the former seems more likely, myself.

I highly recommend reading Pendragon, a very, very extensively developed RPG which provides a lot of action in the gray area between wargame and role-playing. [John Wick, original author of L5R and also of Orkworld, shows a fair amount of Pendragon influence in his designs, especially concerning "what the culture or tribe is doing" as opposing to "what the character is doing." Also recommended.]

Best,
Ron

amiel wrote:
I want each player to have multiple characters at different points in the conflict, I want traitors(every war has at least one), and I want to keep track of the overall ebb and flow of the war. That's right, I want to eat my cake and have it too. I still want some of those little stories. I want to keep track of a major battle from the point of view of a little old ground pounder.

A couple of days ago, my brother and I were thinking along almost the very same lines for a similar premise: a mob war.

Each player would be in charge of not a single character, but an organized crime faction.

There would have to be some kind of currency, that would govern not only the general influence of the faction, but also allow you to bring in specific characters (which, if simple enough in and of themselves, could be generated on-the-fly) and play them (at least part-time) like regular RPG characters.

Like Amiel, I would also want to keep a Narrativist bent to the whole affair.

No hard & fast mechanics yet, just a few basic ideas. I'll keep working on it. Later...

The matrix game principle I posted a little while ago works quite well in this regard, IMO. In fact there is a tendency for RPG-like character identification which was not an intent for which the mechanics were conceived.

hardcoremoose wrote:
So what are the qualities of a war story that we find engaging?

Mithras wrote:

Well straight away I see the possibilities of dramatic storylines developing before the battle and being played out during the fight. The relationship of the commander with his aides and advisors, his relationship with his unit commanders. Their relationships with their men. The rivalries of the units. All this can be sketched out in a relationship map (of course) and the strengths of relationships under pressure mapped.

Now apply the pressure - battle.

Loyalties, rivalries, old scores, grudges, competition, honour and duty, sacrifice. The battlefield is a boiling arena for the clashing personalities of an army.