I have received a correspondence from John Rice (23, Wood Court Broadfield, Crawley, West Sussex RB11 9QE) concerning his American War of Independence PBM campaign Those D*mn*d Rebels. I have to say that I have never seen a better quality flier - good artwork, well-designed format and a comprehensive return slip (including your capability to exchange text and data by floppy disk), If the flier is any indicator of the game, it's worth a visit. John has run the campaign before with local players (so it should be well debugged) and hopes that the reduction in direct contact between players and GM will enhance realism.
The campaign covers the whole of the American War of Independence, and includes the full range of detail - Indians, bateaux, supply, initiative, guerrillas, Continentals, European intervention, the naval war (I think you have to supply your own three-cornered hat and flag, but that must be all.) I have joined up for the duration, and so I can vouch for the fact that the rules are well set-out and coherent, covering the factors that really counted. There is a range of positions of varying seniority on both sides, including scope for a quartermaster-general. John provides a variety of briefings, from single sheet (send SSAE) up to 20 pages with colour maps (£ 1.40), to cover the range of information on campaign and tactical rules, and the general situation, that seems appropriate. While he does not believe in keeping players in the dark about every nuance of the campaign, he does work on a "need to know" basis. Cost of the game per turn is a stamped addressed envelope and a stamp (to cover messengers). Worth considering.
My own campaign, Paraguay, is beginning to take off. Already the information requests are beginning to flow in, my favourite being "Is the Parana fordable?". Had I never been there, I might have spoofed on the point and maybe said "In a few places", but since at the narrowest point I saw it, in a gorge, it was a quarter mile wide - maybe not. I wonder how often the Inherent Military Probability that is used to justify many historians' accounts of events would have seemed very much less than probable to those who were there.
THE IDEAL GAME
Thanks to Alan Huyton for his mention of Lone Warrior in his article for Flagship. Below are my comments made to the magazine, since Alan asked for my thoughts.
I sympathise with Alan Huyton's view of WBF, the ideal game, which matches very closely my own. The trouble is that he (and I) want the WBF game to be able to model reality, at a range of scales from one-to-one (servant poisoning ale) to one-to-hundreds (recruiting units in a province) to one-to-hundred thousands (jihads, economic crises, wars of succession). That requires both rules and data.
Rules are not in themselves an immense problem, if one has an understanding of the subject area for which one is devising rules (if!), but the level of detail can proliferate almost indefinitely e.g. servant poisons ale, but with what poison and how resistant is the victim. There is no need to publish all, or indeed any, of the rules - one could make a strong case for widespread ignorance of how things work - but they have to be produced either in advance or as needed. The former can be made as sophisticated as desired and then tested but cannot possibly cover all situations that might conceivably arise, the latter are at risk of inconsistency and inaccuracy. Either way, the more detail and the wider the coverage included in the rules, the more effort involved in adjudication and the more information required to do it.
Unfortunately, once the potential exists for something to be done, it will be done and on an increasing scale. Even if the rule books are ruthlessly restricted and the information generally passed out is censored, players will talk to each other. Once one achieves success at a given sort of task, they all want to have a go - and who can blame them? Adjudication will become more onerous, and more game information will be needed.
In practice, the latter means either a) a vast amount of data has to be generated in advance in a form that is recoverable quickly and easily, although the bulk will never be used or else b) smaller amounts of data are generated as required, mid-game, with associated problems of consistency not to mention GM busyness with other things. In practice, it requires great GM effort or a good quality computer program or more likely both.
So WBF requires a GM who is intelligent, well-informed on a very wide range of topics, literate and computer-literate. Assume that this paragon wants a pre-tax income of £ 400 per week and pays no overheads (rent, advertising, postage, stationery, capital) or recompense for development costs. If the average cost of turns in his or her game is £ 5 then with a 40 hour week, the GM cannot afford to spend more than 30 minutes per turn from receipt to return. That includes personal calls received and the investigation of alleged errors as well as ad hoc rule and data development, input, adjudication, writing up of results and newsletter, stuffing envelopes and taking to the post. The prospects for WBF are pretty bleak on a commercial footing, and not vastly better on an amateur basis. A twenty player game at 30 minutes per player per turn is 10 hours per turn - say three evenings, which is manageable on a monthly turnaround. Further expansion in detail or extent is decidedly dodgy.
Steve Foster reports on the conclusion of his campaign:
Late 1997 saw the completion of my fantasy game Vicoria after 30 turns. Although I forget the exact date, it probably kicked off in 1994. I was looking at the time to produce a fun vehicle, easy on the players and easy on the umpire. Although I have a strong bias towards historical wargaming, the fantasy scene provides a wealth of imagination and the setting aside of certain boundaries that can make an umpire's job that much easier. Thus in a very short space of time I was able to produce a mythical map of part of "Vicoria" on an A4 sheet, divide it into blobs (as per an article of mine in a previous LW) which I numbered for reference, give 12 "countries" their starting blobs, then let the players do the rest.
Each blob had a factor from 1 to 3 resource points (rps) which were then added together (as blobs were conquered, players increased their totals). From this figure, players were able to spend on armies based on the WRG "Hordes of the Things" units and points. Players decided what type of state they were, and bought their own armies. When the initial dispositions were received back, I found Vicoria was now populated with a variety of Orcs, pseudo-Romans, Red Indians, Elves, Nogs from the Noggin the Nog children's book, Mongols, Undead etc. All I provided were a few pre-set neutrals and the possibility of mercenary reinforcements, including a professional assassin.
From here, world domination began big style. Victory points were awarded for numbers of rps owned after each 6th turn (a special book keeping and update phase), battles won, enemies killed. Any battles were either diced for, using my own solo gaming system cultivated over years from LW and gaming rules, or else fought using the Hordes of the Things on the tabletop. Adjudication's were simple and if the campaign rules did not cover everything (they never do, in my experience) then decisions were quickly made, as it was a fantasy setting after all. Loss of a C in C was serious but did not automatically cost a state the campaign as there is always another leader waiting "the King is dead, long live the King". Loss of the capital was enough to lose the campaign, so that these had to be protected.
And the result? In the end, the winners on victory points were the Nogs, worthy victors over the Bigundians, Elves, Orcs and Incas, but pressured by the Mongols at the end. Good shows were also made in the west by the Wizard Trader Combine (I think a type of medieval state though no one was ever entirely sure - the worrying thing is that its player belongs to this Association - sorry, Michael!); this was gaining ground after victories over the Undead, Indians and Incas (everybody's favourite whipping boys).
In between, some good clean fun and lovely characters who brought the campaign to life. Who could forget the early suicidal attacks of the Orcs led by Chief Fat Gut (another member) against the pseudo-Romans, or the long and increasingly desperate defence by King Harry the Hopeless of Bigundia in the face of a double assault on him, he eventually went down fighting in an epic tale of woe and betrayal still sung of by the bards. Then there was the assassination of Chief Sitting Bull, whose Indians were then led by his warrior wife, Standing Cow; that audacious raider Al Doyado; or the leader of the Badlands (as in the Hollywood westerns, The Hole in the Wall Gang) Mr Cut Throat, trying to make a fast buck out of everyone with only a small force of his own. The list goes on and on.
So yes, it was a fun game enjoyed by the umpire, and by the players, judging from the feedback received. PBM is a great way to solo wargame, all responses are programmed for you, leaving you controlling one side with a full fog of war. It is a shame that PBM and the number of campaigns running in SWA appears to be falling by the wayside, or is this a false impression on my part? Does the advent of computer games, especially some of the great new historical campaigns (I recently purchased Eastern Front by Talonsoft, myself) mean that members are now playing these in preference? I hope not and personally, will be offering new PBM campaigns to members in the future, perhaps even a second bash at Vicoria.
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