Creating a Narrative Wargames Campaign - Part 4: The Role of Umpires

This post is the next in a short series inspired by a conversation between myself and @zakludick. It related to setting up a narrative campaign for a wargame.

I originally started out just writing this as a single post, but once I started writing down the headings for all the different topics, I rapidly realised that it needed a short series to do justice to the concept.

In the series, I'm not going to write up a set of fixed "rules" for setting up a narrative campaign. Rather, I'm going to highlight a number of topics which can be discussed with your friends as you set one up. There are no "right answers", it's just a case of thinking about what your game to be like, and creating a structure which is fun to play and minimises the inevitable differences of opinion.

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Image created by AI in NightCafe Studio

What Is The Role Of An Umpire ?

Boiled down to basics, an umpire's role is to resolve disagreements or disputes between players in relation to the game's rules or conduct.

For a narrative campaign, it's also likely to involve coming up with on-the-fly rulings for situations the rules don't cover. That could be both narrative elements and stratagems players want to try.

Making rulings of this nature can be remarkably hard ! You want to allow your players to use their imagination and have fun, but you don't want to allow the kind of free rein that enables a player's stratagem to leave their opponent feeling like the game is weighted against them or that they've been hit by an unfair or unreasonable ploy.

It should be clear to all players whether a ruling is intended to be fixed and applied for the rest of the game, or is a one-off. I've seen quite a few cases where a stratagem is highly amusing for everyone involved, but only the first time it's used. There are also cases where an umpire might take the line of "we'll allow it once, to see what impact it has on the game, and that will decide if it's allowed again in future."

The most important thing is that an umpire is seen by all players to be clear in their rulings and scrupulously neutral. Nothing destroys a narrative campaign faster than an umpire who is perceived to be biased towards one side.

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Do You Need An Umpire ?

You'll probably need to decide early in the planning process whether an umpire is necessary. Or even, for a particularly large or complex campaign, a team of umpires.

As always, there are no fixed rules, it all depends on your campaign and players.

Personally, I'd suggest that unless it's a very simple campaign with very clear rules that don't have too many loopholes, you do need an umpire.

There are, of course, other options.

You might say that any dispute is to be resolved by a voting process (secret or otherwise), but you have to accept that if you do that, people will vote along faction lines for whichever option gives them an advantage.

If disputes are likely to be simple ones, the players could be allowed to discuss it for a fixed time (minutes, not hours !) to reach a compromise, and if they can't, it's resolved by rolling dice or playing "rock, paper, scissors, lizard, Spock".

You could also have a system where battles have an umpire drawn at random from the pool of players not involved in that actual battle.

But in most cases, having an umpire or umpires for any game with more than two or three players is likely to be a good idea.

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Should The Umpire Also Be A Player ?

This is a tough one ! The umpire is often the person who cooked up the initial idea and did a lot of the work, and is likely to want to be an active player.

But the risk of being accused of bias when someone is both umpire and an active player is huge. I've tried it, and it really causes problems !

There are, however, ways that an umpire can be involved in the game that reduce the risk of accusations of bias. It's a narrative campaign, after all !

In one of the iterations of "The World Game" I was in this position. I ended up taking the role of Karl Von Der Mannich, Chairman of the Federated Nations, a kind of in-game equivalent of our United Nations. Most of my role was thus diplomatic, acting as an intermediary between warring powers, documenting treaties etc. All things I could do with a "neutral" stance. It was fun !

I also controlled all the places on the map that were considered neutral states (i.e. the bits no-one else wanted or could take). Basically a collection of nowhere islands, bits of no-man's-land with little economic or strategic value, and a couple of demilitarised zones between hostile powers. The last ones were the most interesting.

They were usually agreed by treaty (often at the end of a war) and had "peacekeeping forces" in them. Those peacekeeping forces were equipped with the little I could give them from my own resources, plus great power donations and cast-offs that I had to use considerable diplomatic skill to scrounge. I got to fight my tabletop battles with these rag-tag forces because it was amazing how often someone wanted to move into or through a demilitarised zone !

The other job I took upon myself was to type up the campaign newsletter. It was in the form of a tabloid newspaper, with the most outrageous fabrications mixed in with reporting on in-game events. 😁

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Next time: Balancing narrative, roleplay and battles

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Previous Posts in this Series

https://peakd.com/hive-189497/@alonicus/creating-a-narrative-wargames-campaign-part-1-what-is-a-narrative-campaign
https://peakd.com/hive-189497/@alonicus/creating-a-narrative-wargames-campaign-part-2-planning-your-campaign
https://peakd.com/hive-191038/@alonicus/creating-a-narrative-wargames-campaign-part-3-game-prep



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1 comments

What fun!

Yeah at this point we are not planning on an umpire just yet. I just write a ruleset and then we play.

But its been Imperium vs Imperium skirmishes so I believe that we have been practicing.

I believe that the real threat will come when we play Imperial vs Xenos/Choas forces.

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