Ships of Blackmoor

[Havard]

Havard, I tried doing a better reply for you yesterday, but I did something wrong and it didn't 'take'. You asked a quite reasonable question, and I'm afraid that I came across as a classic grumpy old man in my reply to you. So, here's what I hope is a better reply...

"The past is a different place, they do things differently there..."

Back in those days, rules sets didn't come with scenarios; one could get 'army lists', which gave guides as to what forces one could reasonably expect to see in a campaign setting. The campaign referree, or the person hosting the game, would set the forces available to the players and their objectives for the game and we'd have at it. Campaign gaming gave lots of opportunities to run battles, and these very often were very 'asymmetrical' games as the players on both sides would bring to the table what forces happened to have encountered each other. The map movements gave way to the on-table movements and combat, usually with unforeseen results for everyone concerned. As examples of this, may I suggest Tony Bath's book "How To Run A Wargames Campaign", which gives examples from his Hyborean campaign.

I am having trouble picturing you as grumpy Chirine! Anyway, thanks for being patient with me. I entered the gaming hobby in the 1980s starting out with D&D. I have practically no experience with wargaming. I have picked up some things from reading at forums and I have been getting more and more interested especially in the type of games that Dave Arneson used to run where wargames and RPGs seem to cross over into oneanother. I think it could be fun to go the opposite way, starting out with RPGs and moving towards war games again. This is sort of where I was going with seeing of concepts could be borrowed from DGUTS and used with D&D.

I will check out Tony Bath's book. Thanks!

We all used this book; normally, the game host would announce a game or somebody would start a campaign, and people would build the forces needed to run the thing. I got into the habit of supplying all of the sides in a particular game myself, which made it easier on people as I tended to like the more obscure historical periods (Pike and Shot, for example) or Tekumel. We'd all devise fun games that challenged the players, and this is also where Dave Wesley's 'Braunsteins' come from. And Dave Arneson slipping Dave Megarry's Druid a phaser to liven up a Romans vs. Britons game - "How about barbequed elephant tonight, Emperor Claudius?"

Ah cool. So that is the game session that Dave Arneson was talking about in the Space Gamer interview when he was talking about his first experience with a fantasy game.

Overall, it is really interesting to hear about how things worked back in those days. Sounds like you had alot of fun!

-Havard

[chirine ba kal]

Overall, it is really interesting to hear about how things worked back in those days. Sounds like you had alot of fun!

-Havard

We did, I think. I had a lot of fun building things for games, like the huge room-sized model of Mos Eisley for 'The Great Mos Eisley Spaceport Raid' - Fred Funk played the Imperial Stormtroopers, and Dave Arneson played Jabba the Hutt. No typecasting here, nosireebob!

For many of us, back in those days, there wasn't a clear distinction between 'wargames' and 'role playing'; we played our generals' figures as individuals, with terrible accents and mangled misquotations: "Zut alors! Ze accursed English! Fire le cannon de boom-boom, mon frere!" and so on. Games were supposed to be fun, first and foremost; they were a time when friends got together over the game table and laughed a lot.

When you ask about how a 'wargame' could be run as a role-playing game, may I suggest something that Dave Arneson did? Try Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's "Brigadier Gerard" series of tales about a fictional French hussar; to add spice to the fun, many of the real historical personages of the period were just as colorful - see the life of Baron de Marbot, and his wonderful "Memoirs"; you couldn't make this stuff up! - and this kind of "Action! Adventure! Romance!" set in any historical period just cries out for some role-playing. I think that a strong element of Hollywood-style 'swashbuckling' and 'derring-do' pervaded our games, no matter what the specific period of type of game; I think that can be developed in games these days, with players and GMs who are willing to spend some time reading and exploring the lesser-known by-ways of history.

I still try to have this in my games; I encourage this kind of behavior, and I quite often have to remind players that this is supposed to be fun and that they can 'loosen up' and be just as eccentric as their ancestors were. (Napoleon's Marshals often refused to support each other, due to prolonged fits of sulking and pouting...)

Actual example of 'player character behavior' in history: The crew of the CSS Virginia threatening to board USS Monitor during the battle at Hampton Roads, since cannon weren't working against either ship's armor, and having it out at cutlass point; they also were going to throw blankets over Monitor's pilot house to impede navigation. That'll fix those Yankees! :lol:

Does this help at all?

yours, chirine