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Originally Posted by Enigma65
Well said SeaQueen. The biggest hold-up in my mission creating the plot and radio text issues where one gives background to the player.
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Maybe this is just me being "old school" but back when I first started playing wargames, it was Larry Bond's Harpoon on one of my friend's basement floor. We didn't obsess over some kind of carefully constructed geopolitical melodrama. All of this "I must make a scenario with an elaborate plot," nonsense is new. We just wanted to shoot some cruise missiles and torpedoes, and maybe gain a little bit more understanding of what we saw going on during the evening news. The best scenarios are boiled down distillations of the most essential elements.
We got our ideas from books, movies and the news. All the plot we needed was what was going on in the New York Times, Frontline, or 60 Minutes. Their coverage of the Tanker Wars
really got our juices flowing. The USS STARK got hit. The USS VINCENNES hit someone else by mistake.
Red Storm Rising and
The Hunt for Red October were great. Everyone wanted to imagine stalking a Soviet SSBN under the ice. What was it like to go to the North Pole? All of our dads had participated in the Vietnam War, The Gulf of Tonkin Incident wasn't alien to us. Every once in a while, the paper would report a Soviet YANKEE, NOVEMBER or VICTOR surfacing off North Carolina. What the heck was going on out there? We all wondered. We'd all been up to Nag's Head, RIGHT THERE in front of us an undersea naval war could have been going on. The whole Libyan "line of death" thing was interesting to watch.
TOP GUN was totally rad. Growing up in the Washington DC suburbs was great for kids with an eye on current events because world news WAS local news. The Walker spy ring was busted down the street from my house and used to make their drops up and down the road in front of my house. When I found out this, my imagination just soared! A few years ago, they came out with a great documentary on the Discovery Channel, where they covered the RIMPAC exercise. It was called
Fleet Command. I really wish I could find that one on DVD. There's so much good material in there for wargaming.
We didn't
need drama. The drama was there for anyone who payed attention. We needed data: orders of battle, lat/longs, etc. All the little details they don't make public because if you had them you'd be able to figure out what was going on. We couldn't get specifics, but through research we could make good guesses. The Internet totally makes that kind of thing easy, these days. Back then, it meant hanging out in the library going through newspapers, books and magazines. It's still worth doing that too, because there's an awful lot of stuff that's not on the Internet, but it's faster now. Our scenarios weren't intended to be novels, but instead they put us in the drivers seat so we could get a feel for what it was like to be the decision maker. To me, that's what wargames are about. All of this storybook stuff, is usually just noise.
Sometimes the drive for a plot actually makes me angry because I don't want a scenario designer to act as the "hand of god" and inject some arbitrary event into my perfectly happy little approach. What have I learned then? A reactor scram ruins my day? Duh! A good scenario leaves the fate of the player in the hands of the player.
It's a wargame, for heaven's sake! Not a role playing game. If we wanted melodrama, we'd have played D&D (we did that too)!