And Now by Special Request: Wargaming

Wargaming offers many different facets for people to enjoy; it involves strategic planning, collecting, painting, sculpting, social interaction, high level competitive play, and a game narrative. What players choose to take out of it is entirely up to them, for me I enjoyed the social, artistic, and collecting aspects and as such was quite happy never playing in a competitive tournament.

My most recent wargaming experience came about because I was running a campaign of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, set during Archaon's invasion of the Empire, the players were free to do what they wanted but their paths would often cross plot elements relating to the impending invasion, with their actions both directly and indirectly affecting the larger story. For the final battle I converted their characters into Warhammer: The Game of Fantasy Battles characters as I already had appropriate stat lines for Archaon and Valten and then generated an army list based on the events that had occured earlier in the campaign, for example their were no units of Greatswords as due to player inaction the Carroburg Greatswords has suffered severe casualties. The battle concluded almost exactly as it had in the original story with Archaon defeated and Valten mortally wounded.

Prior to this I had played a modern day wargame run by a local wargaming enthusiast, using the Command Decision system. He had a different philosophy towards how to approach the game than most other wargamers I had encountered, rather than having balanced sides fighting a pitched battle he preferred to have one side with an obvious advantage and see how well you players could work around this. In the game a 'peacekeeping' force attacked a town containing the rebel leader, with the goal of either capturing or killing him. The invading force was better equipped than the rebels which meant the rebel player had to use terrain and delaying tactics in an attempt to get their leader to safety. Because of the disparity in power level between the two sides at the end of the scenario he would usually play it a second time with each player now controlling the other side.

The final type of wargaming I'm going to mention are games such as Necromunda, which involve smaller forces and small skirmish battles. What makes these games interesting is that the battles do not occur in a vacuum, but rather the combatants grow in experience, gain new abilities, injuries, and need to gather enough resources to keep the squad fed. This creates a personal narrative to the game and can give a deep rewarding experience. While experience and advancement can be implemented in a game of any size, as soon as you have more than around ten unique characters to worry about things start to get rather fiddly and you are forever having to check stat lines.