Creating a Narrative Wargames Campaign - Part 5: Balancing Narrative, Roleplay and Battles

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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How Much Narrative Do You Want ?

Something to decide before you start play is just how much narrative the game will have.

At a more "wargame" level, you might just want to play out a sequence of battles that tells the story of a single campaign with a fixed set of victory conditions to determine who wins.

At the opposite end of the spectrum the game could be far more of a sandbox, where it's more about seeing how a story develops telling the history of a country, a world or a galaxy. With this kind of campaign, wars and battles are just punctuation in a far more diplomatic and roleplay setting.

It's not an either/or thing, it's more of a spectrum of possibilities. Where you position yourself on the spectrum can totally change how a campaign plays out.

Diplomacy: Abstract or Roleplay ?

A big part of a narrative campaign is the diplomatic aspect.

In most cases the campaign is based on a variety of nations, states, empires or whatever, in which case the diplomacy has an international character. The question you need to answer is whether the players are representing the nation as a whole in an abstract kind of way, or if they are roleplaying as the head of state.

You'll need to think about how diplomacy influences both the overall story arc, and the military side of the game. Once war starts, does diplomacy stop or continue in some form, either on the side-lines with both parties working towards a peace that's advantageous to them, or in the way of medieval heralds ensuring the war sticks to the rules of gentlemanly conduct.

But there are games where there are only two sides, with the players split between the two of them. Or even only one side, with the opposition pre-programmed in some way. In that case, the diplomacy becomes an interesting game of internal politics. Are the players named individuals, or just representing their powerbase ?

The Impact of Diplomacy on Gameplay

Once you know what the diplomacy looks like, you need to look at the details. It can often be handled in a fairly abstract way, but it's worth thinking about whether (and how) diplomats or leaders need to move to specific locations, or how they communicate (radio, heralds, cosmic ansible FTL communicators ?)

If the players are roleplaying as specific leaders, you'll need to either develop rules or make clear it's an umpire decision if something happens to them. Are assassinations allowed ? If a leader is killed, do they have someone to step in to take their place (a Crown Prince, junior minister, or whatever ?) or does their death mean an automatic loss ? Does their replacement create disadvantages while there's a transition of power ? Will armies become less effective, or even consider defecting if the successor is less effective ?

It's worth mentioning the extreme end of the spectrum, of Dungeons & Dragons campaigns where the game is entirely focused on the characters, and the military becomes just a background for what the characters are up to.

What Happens When Diplomacy Fails

Generally, war ! But it can happen in all kinds of different ways, entirely depending on the game. Maybe it'll be border skirmishes gradually escalating to something more serious. Maybe it'll be a challenge to a single battle to decide a point of honour. But sometimes things can go interestingly wrong....

Coming back to our World Game that I've used as an example a few times, one of the more dramatic cases of diplomacy having an impact was the "peace conference" that Premier Bolokov of Tarkus invited all the world leaders to attend. I was unlucky enough to be the umpire, and it was only when all the leaders were assembled that Bolokov revealed his dastardly plan. He wanted to gas them all in the conference room and then send highly trained lookalikes back to their homelands to enable him to take over.

It was a scheme worthy of a Bond villain ! It was also guaranteed to create considerable upset. As it was, I ruled that dice would determine the results. He rolled very well on the initial mass assassination. But then he had to do a roll-off with each player to determine how convincing the double would be. The players for Miland and U.S.O.D. rolled better than he did, so those doubles were discovered.

What I hadn't expected was that Miland would over-react slightly and launch a nuclear missile to flatten Mustov, the capital of Tarkus. To attempt to replicate "real world" processes, we'd allowed players to write a set of sealed, secret standing orders for what their nuclear deterrent forces would do in the event of a nuclear attack on their homelands.

For Tarkus, it turned out that the orders weren't for an equivalent or graduated response, they were for an all-out strike with everything they had on all possible enemies. This triggered lots of other sealed orders, and before the end of the game turn, we were well into total global thermonuclear war. Nuclear winter (and an absence of surviving armed forces or populations) bought the curtain down on that particular game. It was fun !

Next time: Troubleshooting

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
https://peakd.com/hive-189497/@alonicus/creating-a-narrative-wargames-campaign-part-4-the-role-of-umpires