I'm really into campaign games. I love playing something where one game has a consequence on the next session, even if they're very mild or mostly just perception. The continuity of a campaign makes each individual game the greater than the sum of it's parts.
As a result, I spend a lot of time thinking about them because I also do a lot of developing them. And something I've been thinking about a lot lately is the way that you score in these campaigns, the way that score is distributed throughout the course of playing it, and how this influences the experience. In this post I'm just going to discuss a few of these ideas in a typically harebrained manner as I attempt to make sense of these thoughts and distill them into something potentially useful. In a previous poast I discussed some thoughts on deployment in wargames where spacing was employed. The previous ramblings focused on the sequence in which players put assets into play. Here, I'm going to move on to the second part of deployment: position. Where do the assets go when they get put into play? This makes a huge impact on the feel and flow of the game, as well as on which rules matter and which don't. I have been thinking a lot about "pregame" parts of various types of game--mostly wargames where maneuvering is involved in more than one dimension. If this kind of movement is going to be a factor int he game at all, then the way the board is set up is also going to be a huge factor. So it seems surprising to me that so few games have tried to do much other than either "all at once" or "alternating" deployment. Alternatives open up a lot of variables that make a game harder to balance, but on the other hand, they also make the game a lot more interesting. I'm going to think out loud about deployment systems here a bit, looking at systems from other games and rough sketch ideas I have. Most setups for wargame scenarios have two intersecting systems: placement timing and position. There's kind of a miscellaneous aspect as well where other systems can be a factor, but these two are the biggest elements. You can fiddle with the two to create "new" systems. In this post, I'm going to go over the sequencing aspect and muse on those systems. In wargaming, I consider "focused fire" the idea of continually targeting one unit until it is destroyed. In many, if not most games, this is the nominal strategy because attacking a unit until it's eliminated functions as both offense and defense (the destroyed unit can no longer provide services to your opponent). While effective, it's also unfortunately extremely BORING and often combines with model elimination to make entire games kind of algorithmic. You know to shoot one thing until it's destroyed as much as possible, and then move on to the next thing. This often creates a snowball effect as well, because when one player loses a unit, they have less capacity to eliminate yours, and they enter a death spiral.
Combine this with standard "everything activates once" round structure and low movement rates, and you end up with a typical fairly boring wargame: two blobs of units advance, roll dice, and you hope you can shoot the same blob the most times to end up advantaged. A lot of these games are dictated mostly by deployment. You can make an argument that most games just happen to feature this as a central strategy (your goal is to "outmaneuver" your opponent and hit a target as much as possible while keeping it from happening to you), but I would argue it's the laziest, least interesting central strategy possible. I've been thinking about this quite a bit lately: what are some ways to disincentives to focused fire, or at least ways to make it more interesting? |
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