Before you put one figure on the table at a con, before you type one word of the description of the event on the pre-reg form, before you get out your Auncient Tomes of Spells and Orders of Battle, you have to craft “the story”– “Once upon a time...” It’s odd to think of a game as “a story” but it is, and in Italian (L’Storia,), French (histoire) and German (Geschichte) the same word serves for both “story” and “history.” Only in English do we have “story” and “history” where the former is equated more with a possible fabrication than a verified factual account. Now you may argue that a game is not a story as we don’t know the outcome, but we really do- or at least you know two possible outcomes, at least, and by the way, you already have picked one of them to be YOUR favorite outcome.

Let’s consider....”Once upon a time there was the BIG, BAD, mean old Ogre from Corsica who gathered up a huge army of ugly, deformed little creatures called Grognards and attacked this peaceful kingdom of Spain. He tricked his way into the country, ate the real king and Queen and got into their clothes all the better to lure the beautiful Princess Charo into his clutches. So one day the princess comes home from her vacation in Cancun and sees the “King” holding a bone apart and says “Oh My, Grand Papa! What big eyes you have! “ “All the better to ogle your huge tracts of land, my dear--” the Ogre said... “Oh Grandpapa, what big...” Well– you get the picture.

When you make a plan for the game you set up a story and you generally plan for several outcomes. It might be that at the last moment Princes Charo is saved when the kindly woodcutter “Old hookey” (known to his friends as the Duke of Wellington) comes in, or – less happily ever after, she discovers, as she’s mauled by the Ogre’s teeth, ( the “French Kiss” in Napoleonic times, or the true meaning of “Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite.)”

Now any story has basic parts which we can deal with rather simply, and some more complex ones, which really are far more interesting. Like any story or play, there must be a stage (the terrain), actors, (the toy soldiers) and a plot (Victory conditions, or directions on what the actors have to do). The plot must always revolve around some difficulty, challenge, dilemma, or enigma that must be overcome or resolved. It is, therefore very important to compose this in your mind before you do any real work- that it, what is going to happen in this game, and here you ask yourself the most important question “What is it we are attempting to deal with?” Capture the fort, get through the pass, take the hill, find the treasure, drive the impious enemy from the field, take as many of “them” with you as you can, exterminate the fish-faced bottom feeding running dog capitalists, or rescue the princes Charo (and her huge tracts of land) from a fate worse than a fate worse than death-- you pretty much know them all. The key is settling on which one you take a fancy to. Now some of these, like the Princess, may not interest you (though I rather think huge tracts of land is what war is all about), but others will and here it is most important to keep in mind the scope of what you want to do. “Conquer the world”might be a bit much. You should be able to express what is happening in a simple sentence or two. Any larger than that and you’re in trouble. For example- “The Brutish Column must clear the Kybosh Pass of the Kurds and the Wheys by the end of the game” is fairly simple. From then on it’s jiggling with the troops (actors) and the terrain (stage) and the length of time (number of acts) of the play that makes it more or less difficult. More difficult and you are weighting the ending of the story one way, less so and you are pushing it the other. Now we get to the more complex stuff.

Now that’s the easy part!

The hard part comes when you begin to ask yourself, “What exactly am I trying to simulate here? That is, what is being modeled? In spite of the wildest dreams of the rule-writers, you simply can’t make a game which presents the complexity of war unless you’re going to have enough players playing it so you could hold a real war if you wanted! Like any good play or movie, the action must be compressed, the stage shortened, the characters combined or abridged or the scenery made somewhat artificial - unless of course you’re a Russian writer, in which case you can drone on for thousands of pages and no one seems to mind. What is it that interests you about the scenario? Or, what are you trying to model. Shakespeare was simply not able to do a cinema graphic technicolor epic of the Wars of the Roses in Vista vision. So he compresses time, space, people and distance because he’s interested in the depth of emotion and feeling of the bitter, fanatic partisan sentiments of the War, and the human drama that unfolds. You must do the same. Let’s assume that you wanted to make a game on the WWII campaign in North Africa. An excellent example of how NOT TO model or create the story is the way SPI did with its game “Campaign in North Africa” a generation ago. It weighed about 50 pounds, you had to have a bowling alley to play it on, and worst of all, for each truck unit chugging back and forth to the front, you had to fill out a bill of lading for what it carried, and for the Italians you had to provide double the water because of their need to cook pasta! Now all of this may have been a real consideration to SOME level of command during the war, though I rather think that neither Rommell or Wavell was filling out bills of lading. On the other hand the WHOLE effect of the Italian fleet was reduced to a simple one step single die roll table. Obviously someone attempted to model too much.

But let’s take the absurd and make it serious. A more reasonable game might be one that like this. Assume you are interested on the “battle behind the lines” to get the supplies forward to the front. You would then set up an action where one side was the sector transportation officer and your responsibility would be to take trucks from the left edge (already loaded by the base or dump logistics officers with whatever the guys at the front want) and get it to the right edge of the board where another sector transportation officer (just like you) would take them over. The other guy of course is the enemy and will have a host of ploys and tricks from simple breakdowns he can play, misdirect you on a road net, an aircraft, or a “rat patrol” type team to raid your trucks, and you might have some light garrison or communication troops. I once ran exactly this type of game except it was a naval game. It was set in WWI and one side (both were mythical– one had Austrian ships and one had British ships) had to get convoys from colonies, allies, and a large neutral to the home country and the other had to stop them. The rules were simple and strategic (though we had tactical resolutions of naval battles between raiding and escorting forces, and if the escorts were sunk or driven away the convoy was savaged by the raiders, and if not it got through.) The whole driving point, or hook of the game was that victory was expressed by having a large chart of “merchant ship” silhouettes which was all the available shipping open to the convoying side. As ships were sunk, they were crossed off with a big sloppy red magic marker. There was a line halfway down the chart and if the sunk ships exceeded the line, then the convoy interceptors had won. If not, how close the approached the line showed how well the convoying side was winning. Now- NEITHER PLAYER GOT ANYTHING FOR WARSHIPS SUNK! The only effect was that if you got a ship sunk in one action it wasn’t there for the next, (either to raid or escort) and it was a big ocean!

The whole point of the above was it was not a highly detailed raiding problem. The rules were abstracted, the table top actions abridged, the victory conditions obviously forced, because the whole intent of the problem was to give the players some idea of the “drumbeat” pressure of having to convoy ships and having to sink ships. This was done by the simple expedient of that big chart with its mounting big red “X’s” on convoy ships sunk! I gave this about four times at various cons - it lasted about four to five hours, and we had about nine table top actions, and a good range of outcomes - one with the convoyers winning hands down, another where they got by with one ship, and two more where the interceptors were able to get significantly above the line.

Now to the fun stuff– but the hard stuff!

In order to make a successful game you have to engage your players which means to capture their imaginations with the particulars of the story such that they will create the background for themselves and become engaged by it. “Oh for a muse of fire, that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention.. Can this cockpit hold the vasty fields of France... Imagine that within these walls are now confined two mighty monarchies who high, unprepared and abutting fronts the perilous narrow ocean parts asunder...” Or “Once upon a time there was the beautiful princess with long, flowing golden hair, and pale white skin, and sparkling blue eyes... “ or “By the rude bridge that arched the flood...” It’s all of a piece. It is for us a very important one. It is the transmission of metaphor, simile, allusion, and alliteration to evoke powerful mental images in the minds of the players. You create archetypes, and the toy soldiers, terrain, and rules are merely the means by which you create a succession of these images. Much of the game, after all, must take place in the players mind.

But here again we come to a difference in “semantics” as it were. You must be fairly confident that the “vocabulary” of the game (rules, period, miniatures, terrain, scenario etc) will evoke the same meaning in your gamers mind as they do in yours. Otherwise you will be saying one thing and the gamers will be hearing something else. Here you have to keep in mind WHAT THE GAMERS EXPECT! That is, what they perceive or expect a unit to look like, how combat is supposed to run, what the game is going to feel like as well. For example, one might make the point by saying that you could tell the players at the start “This is a holding action” or you could let them arrive at it by a short historical write up, or to be tacitly assumed by the disparity of forces, the necessity of securing for a certain time the enemy from possession of specific terrain points etc. Yet remember that even the simple category of “holding action” is very likely to mean something entirely different to another players ears than to your own. When you tell a story make sure you and your audience speak the same language.

This goes not only for the overt scenario but for the rules. I remember I made a game once on an “operational” level, where stands represented brigades or divisions rather than battalions or regiments. The table was not one battlefield, but a road net or theater of strategic options. Constantly the players were saying “I just think that in this period (Civil War) infantry should be able able to fire further than 2.” It didn’t matter that those four men represented a regiment, they were still 25mm high and players thought that they should be able to fire further. “It doesn’t feel like the Civil War” one person said. And of course at a tactical level it didn’t. But you weren’t really concerned with the details of musketry at that level, only with the interplay of forces moving over the net, to and from battles or confrontations. Players had to worry about road capacity, length of columns, deploying large formations etc. Quite a different thing. Players kept forgetting the scale.

Many gamers say they are looking for new, fresh, innovative ideas and games, but quite often when you give it to them they don’t like it because it’s not what they expect. Kind of like the guy who stalks out of the house because he’s fed up with his wife’s cooking, goes to a restaurant and then complains because it’s not his wife’s cooking.