"Scenario design" means the creation of a battle situation for a wargame. Although much enjoyment can be had by reproducing the terrain and forces of some historical engagement and picking up the action at the sound of the opening guns, this is not the only source of scenarios. Another means is to let one person act as scenario designer and game director (playing or non- playing). His job is to think up a situation which will pose each side an exciting and interesting military problem.
We have a long way to go in educating the media about military history. The photograph on the left appears in a Boston area paper to take note of the festivities and recreation of the events at Lexington and Concord that took place in April some 213 years ago!
REMEMBERING THE REVOLUTION: There will be costumed militia and others in military dress participating, in the long weekend activities honoring Patriots' Day.
A military problem differs from, say, a mathematical problem in that neither its precise statement nor the means for its solution is known with certainty in advance. The balance of forces, the capabilities and intentions of the enemy, even the fighting abilities of one's own troops are all known only imperfectly, sometimes hardly at all. The scenario designer is trying to make up a battle situation - terrain, deployments, reinforcement schedules, and objectives - within which the players will have to make a sequence of decisions under uncertainty.
Players will make two kinds of decisions: minor tactical ones, such as where the 50th Foot will fire this turn, and grand tactical ones, such as whether the flanking effort will be made against the enemy's left or against his right. A good scenario requires each player to make several such large decisions, in addition to performing the minutiae of handling troops. The game loses much if each player knows from the beginning what he has to do in general, if he has no options in his broad plan.
If, for example, a musket period scenario begins with one army deployed in a straight-line defense and another poised to strike its flank, the game is already less interesting than it would be if the attacking army entered from off the board. In the latter situation the defender's first problem would be, "where will the attackers most likely enter?"
If the attackers began by bringing on a token force against one flank, the defender would have to ask himself, "is this the advance guard for the main attack, or is it just a decoy?" The attackers for their part must choose between bringing their troops on bit by bit, which can conceal their plans but risks defeat piecemeal, and bringing everything on together. In the version of the game in which the attacker begins already deployed on the defender's flank, all these questions have already disappeared. each player knows what he must do: the defender, reinforce that flank very fast; the attacker, crush it without delay. All that remains is the details of how they go about these tasks, providing a perhaps enjoyable, but certainly incomplete scenario.
To set the players such grand tactical decision-making problems, the designer must put himself in the players' positions and consider what options are available to each. Perhaps the most important principle is that there be severally equally attractive courses of action for each side. If the forces, terrain, and victory conditions combine to leave only one truly viable plan, then the player has no decision problem. A real decision becomes required only when there exist real alternatives. Thus the scenario designer should not be thinking, "This is what I want to happen in the game."
Such thinking reduces the players to being motive forces in the designer's scheme, causing the scenario to be played out but having the power to affect its outcome only in small ways. This writer had the misfortune to play in an armor period scenario of this kind where the game director wanted to see blood and required one side to breach a stream, fordable in only two places, and seize objectives on the other side. Indeed there was shed lots of (HO scale) blood, but neither side made any big decisions; both we and our opponents knew that we had no option but to storm across as best we could. The game director could have had the germ of an idea there - crossing a stream against opposition could well pose an enjoyable, instructive problem. But the game admitted only one possible solution.
Forcing the players to consider several possible enemy moves, and giving them several possible countermoves, rewards the players who are truly the better commanders; for a basic principle of war is to be ready for whatever course the enemy may choose. The player's decisions begin when he discovers he does not have enough strength to provide for every possibility as well as he might wish; it is the scenario designer's job to make sure he does not. Then the player faces an important kind of decision problem: to weight risk against probable gain.
A favorite situation which illustrates how such decisions can be built into the scenario is that of a large but divided force being attacked by an army larger than its separated components, but smaller in total size. There exist many historical prototypes, among them Kasserine Pass, Frederick the Great's victory at Hohenfriedeberg, and in some respects the battles of the Hundred Days. The larger force may be split up to cover several objects or different approach routes, or may be divided for logistical or administrative reasons. The defender's first decision is his deploymenthow much of his force is each objective worth? The second is commitment of reserves; as the enemy units appear, the player must weight the danger of an immediate breakthrough against the possibility of new enemy reserves appearing. Finally he must decide whether, when, and where to make a counterattack; are his units best employed in recapturing some important point, or does that take too much out of the line?
The commander of the smaller (attacking) force faces decisions similar to those of the flanking force in the earlier example. How much of his army should he commit against each part of the enemy? If he commits too little the attack will bog down and miss the chance of destroying the divided enemy; if he commits too much to one location, his outnumbered force will be too weak somewhere else.
This problem of distributing forces leads naturally to a second problem of a somewhat different kind. This is the problem of whether to be bold or conservative, aggressive or passive. In too many situations players are spared the need of making a choice between these two postures. A classic situation in which it arises is that of two enveloping wings assaulting an army which outnumbers each wing separately but is inferior to their total strength (Frederick's battles of Torgau and Liegnitz, and in some respects the Battle of Chancellorsville, are examples).
In such an action, the enveloped player knows that two forces are coming at him from opposite sides, and that together they outnumber him; he knows little else, and all attacking units begin off the table. Basically the defender has three options: to counterattack in one direction orthe other, orto sit in place. The scenario designer can arrange that the attacking wings cannot coordinate their moves properly; the intended arrival time of each might be altered according to chance (after all, columns do lose their way) and commanders forbidden to communicate.
The enveloped player, if bold, has a chance to win the game by smashing one enemy force before the other can come up. But there is a risk; suppose he gets mired in action with the first force, and the second suddenly arrives? The player less inclined to take risks will hesitate, probably until after his chance is gone.
The commanders of the enveloping wings, on the other hand, must decide when to launch their attack. Should the first troops onto the map move into contact immediately, to exploit some weakness in the enemy line, or should the assault be more deliberate?
If there is the possibility of the enveloped army being reinforced, then the attackers' problem becomes even trickier. Of course they must plan carefully against each of the three possible countermoves by the defender.
These examples all illustrate another important principle of designing enjoyable scenarios: do not compel the players to make an excessive number of big decisions. After all, the game director has plenty of time to think up devilish situations, but the players have only an evening in which to solve them. Two or three grand tactical decisions, each requiring the consideration of two or three alternatives, are plenty. It helps, of course, if the players can receive the scenario instructions some days in advance and make plans.
The two or three decisions ideally should not be grouped at a single time in the game, but instead spread throughout its course. Most big decisions will come naturally in the early stages of play, as in the examples above. But if the players face a major decision in the latter stages of the game and therefore must plan to be ready for several alternatives - they are prevented from lapsing into turn-to-turn maneuvering. One simple way to accomplish this is to let either side win by holding, say, any three of five objectives. One or two of these can be within fair easy reach of the attacking side - one on each flank, perhaps, so that the attacker can begin by assaulting either flank.
The first stage of the game concludes when one or two such 'easy' objectives have fallen. Then attacker and defender both must decide, "Which will be next?" - and they must plan ahead to be ready for each answer. The objectives should be laid out to let the attacker threaten more than one second- stage objective once he has taken his initial one. This lets the good attacking player exploit the principles of war by threatening several positions at once; it forces the defender to make his moves so as to limit the number of threats, and force the attacker to tip his hand.
Another way to provide for a decision later in the game is to introduce reinforcements. Many good scenarios can be built on the idea of an initially weak army being reinforced and counterattacking. The first stage of the game sees the stronger player trying hard to seize the good defensive positions - of which, of course, there should be at least two before reinforcements arrive. In the second stage the erstwhile defender becomes the attacker.
If the original attacker makes too deliberate an assault, he'll be caught in the open by the relief column; if he presses too fast, heavy losses will leave him nothing with which to fight in the second stage. Each side must make its early grand tactical decisions with an eye on its later ones.
This device of reinforcements arriving in the middle of the game has the advantage of letting each side do some serious attacking. To let each side, at some point, be the 'attacker' in the overall grand tactical sense can be stated as another principle of good scenario design. Players like to attack because the attacking side determines the flow of action in the game; it is the side which makes things happen. And the offensive is in many respects more challenging: it demands energy, careful advance planning, and careful timing. A game in which an essentially passive player wins by blocking each aggressive thrust can be exciting - ask the Duke of Wellington about Waterloo - but it remains an incomplete test of the player's skills.
A corollary to the principle that each side should be allowed to attack at some point is that at most periods of the game, the situation should be essentially unbalanced: one side should, through position or numbers, have the initiative, have opportunities to attack, and have compelling reasons for doing so. Other factors, such as reinforcements, can change the balance in favor of the other player, who can then attack. The idea that a competitive game is one in which forces are equal is quite wrong. If battle strengths really are equal, then neither side can be expected to take any risks or achieve much. if the situation is unbalanced, one side can afford risks and the othe rwill be forced to accept them, so things will begin to happen.
Some historical gamers may be uncomfortable with the whole approach to scenario design proposed in this article. Our games are supposed to be history, after all. Is it still history when the situation is being created out of the head of a game director? If "history" means re-enacting on the tabletop what once occurred on some battlefield, then obviously the answer is no. But a large part of the appeal of wargaming lies in having to grapple with the same kinds of problems historical commanders faced. It is also "history" to try to think in the way Marlborough had to think. The scenario design methods outlined here create this effect far better than does the painstaking reconstruction of a historical battle.
A little research will give the player of such a reconstruction many important pieces of information not available to the historical commanders - what wouldn't Napoleon have given to know the arrival times of Grouchy and Blucher? And the player further can avail himself of whatever careful analysis scholars have written over the intervening years. It is much more enjoyable to do the thinking for oneself.
Miniatures players have a tremendous advantage over their board- and marker counterparts in that once one has the equipment, any situation at all can be constructed simply by laying out some terrain and some figures. Boardgame situations are much more rigidly fixed by the printed components. After a few playings everybody knows what big decisions must be made, what the possible combinations of choices are and about how well each will turn out. But miniaturists can play a new situation every evening. They can enjoy their play more by exploiting this advantage to the utmost, to design some good scenarios.
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