Skirmish Scenario Design (Part One)

The game of Song of Drums and Shakos that I played at the last convention not only convinced me to play more skirmish games (where I can), but to possibly try my hand at running a game at the next convention I have lined up, SouthwestCon 2023 in Tolleson, AZ. To that end I decided to start designing a scenario to play and then do a few dry runs to refine it.

The first decision to make is what rules to use. Because the Song of engine re-kindled my interest, I am going to go with that. It is a relatively simple game that you can add as little or as much 'crunch' as you like, by adding in the special abilities. Also, every turn the player has numerous little decisions to make such as how many activation dice to use, so player engagement is relatively high.

The next decision is what period to play. My initial inclination was to use my wooden 43mm Dark Ages figures, to get them out on the table again. (The more I think about it, the more I realize I probably use them the most, of all the 43mm wooden figures I have.) Another alternative is Napoleonics. If I want to drop down to 28mm (and blow off some serious dust) I could make it WW II, but I would have to seriously tweak the Flying Lead rules (which I ranted about more than 10 years ago).

 

Several Playtests

So far I have played two Dark Ages and one Napoleonics version of a 'King of the Hill' scenario (where possession of the hill determines the victor) and the results brought up some interesting points, all of which make the scenario rather stale.

The Only Objective is to Eliminate the Enemy

The official scenario objective was "at the end of the game to have more figures on the hill than the enemy". However, there was always one overriding victory: elimination of the enemy, typically accomplished by them hitting a breakpoint and failing morale. If you did that, then it was assumed that you would take the hill unopposed after the enemy's rout.

In one scenario I remember losing enough figures early that I determined the only way to win was to break the enemy and thus capturing the hill was totally irrelevant. I ended up pursuing his leader attempting to run him down. If I had been able to accomplish that, half of the enemy forces would likely have routed and those that had not would either have vacated the hill, or if they had stood, been isolated and picked off.

Combat Becomes Static

Although this might sound like an inevitability with Dark Ages troops, as everyone gets into melee and maneuver essentially ceases, but it happens in Napoleonics too as troops settle into cover and start sniping at one another. This is either because the primary objective (the hill) is a static location or because everyone is 'stuck in' and movement only occurs when some figure is eliminated.

The Rest of the Board is Fairly Useless

Unless you both decide to ignore the primary objective and simply go for breaking the enemy force everyone is likely to be heading for the hill. Potentially terrain close to the hill might be of value as you snipe away at people on the hill, but in the end you have to be on the hill to win. But any terrain out of line of sight of the hill is essentially just window dressing.

A recent scenario is a good example of this. In the scenario depicted below, when I first reported about it, I left out all terrain detail, other than the town (in the lower right-hand corner). That is because everything other than the town was irrelevant. As it happened there were forests on the left, a ridge line on the French right flank, and roads. In this battle the town was worth 5 VP, a road on the enemy's baseline was worth 1 VP, all other terrain worth nothing, and destroying enemy troops worth variable VPs. (By way of comparison, I was able to score 3 VP for troop elimination against the enemy while they were able to score 2 VP against me.) I did not bother to draw other details because the town was the sole piece of terrain that mattered.

The 'King of the Hill' scenario feels the same way. Any terrain off of the hill just seems like window dressing.

Skirmish Scenario Design Objectives

So, what are the objectives of a good scenario design, especially for skirmish games? Let's start by taking a look at some rules and scenario books to see how they present victory conditions and scenarios.

Star Wars Shatterpoint Scenarios

One of my recent regrettable purchases was the game Star Wars Shatterpoint (SWS).

The game design looks good, but is just way too crunchy for my old brain. Like Star Wars Legion, but at a skirmish scale. The figures and terrain are really nice looking though, although some figures are a nightmare to assemble. I could have learned all of this had I watched more videos as content creators put them out, but I am generally a latecomer to rules and I wanted to be an early adopter this time. That will teach me!

SWS does have any interesting objective-based victory condition system. You start by picking a mission card, which defines where the objective markers are placed. All objectives are initially inactive (circles marked in gray).

SWS currently only has one mission card – the one shown above – and it evenly spaces out nine objective markers range 4 from the board edges and range 5 between each. If a marker appears where multi-level terrain is, it is placed on the upper level.

SWS has three different phases of the game, called Struggles. At the beginning of each Struggle a card is drawn which identifies which objective markers are active. In the example below, on the left, there are five objectives active, with the remaining four inactive throughout Struggle I. After the victory conditions of Struggle I are met, Struggle II is revealed, showing which objective markers are inactive and active. In the example below, on the right, a die is rolled on each player's turn to see which single objective marker is made active.

The net effect of this system is that it generally keeps players moving as they try and capture active objectives, keeping the enemy away from them. Between each struggle a winning position – in terms of who is successfully holding active objective positions – may turn into a losing one as the objectives have moved and you hold few or none of them. Players camp on positions, but generally not for the entire game.

Although an interesting concept and one that gives these rules the reputation for cinematic movement and action, one wonders how long before the shine comes off because players don't actually do anything at these locations, they just simply control them by outnumbering the enemy within a certain distance from the marker. In the example above, on the left, the objectives are supposed to be representing "stealing the secret plans", but there is no guarantee that there will be a computer terminal or a safe at each of these points; just an orange marker. Players are not required to have a figure perform an action, only that they are standing within a certain distance from it. They might have been full engaged moving or fighting. Still, it gets players to move into locations that might be out in the open rather than in cover, or have them move rather than make another attach in order to get 1" closer to the marker to contest. Put another way, it gets players to make sub-optimal moves rather than having them sit in heavy cover safely sniping away. At that it succeeds.

SWS has one of the best cures for people settling into cover and turtling there: you lose the game because you don't receive victory points for that. You get points for moving to and capturing points on the tabletop.

Intermission

You may not believe this, but it has taken me more than a week to write just this. My writing style is … chaotic. I sort of write in a stream of consciousness and edit it a bit afterwards. It is not so much that it is a lot of 'work', just that I want to get ideas out there and flowing and I sometimes wonder whether this is the best platform.

If I want to just send it out to you, with feedback limited to plain text comments, then I suppose this is the best method. But I am not sure that is what I want. I have been watching how Twitter/X has been changing as a platform and wonder whether that might be more suitable. I tried podcasting, but that is just as intensive as blogging – if not more so – and sort of limiting for the consumer. Twitter, on the other hand, is rather easy to consume. I can limit each thought to 280 characters (unless I get verified, then it is 4,000 characters I think). More importantly I have learned how to use the thread feature, so you can keep adding bits to a topic thread as ideas come to you.

I am thinking of trying that – maybe as a way of sorting out my thoughts and getting feedback – and then posting a completed thread here. There are lots of wargamers on there. If you are (or are not) interested, let me know. The account I use for this will not contain any personal posts, like vacation photos or political topics. Just straight up wargaming ideas. When I get the Twitter/X account sorted, I will post it here.

I'll pick up more on scenario design in the next post.

Another Scenario for One-Hour Skirmish Wargames

This post includes another scenario and some special rules for a skirmish game.

Playing OHSW Virtually

I wanted gaming buddy Justo to try out my version of the Sword & Sandal (S&S) variant of One-Hour Skirmish Wargames (OHSW) that I used in the last post, and get some feedback on the rules. Because we had to play virtually we first needed to figure out how to play a skirmish game using online tools.

The first option is something like Tabletop Simulator (TTS) on the computer, as there are a number of skirmish and mass-combat games to use miniatures rules with, such as this one for One-Hour Wargames.

If it does not have miniatures to your liking, you can always search TTS's Workshop for the keyword "miniatures" and find some others, like these medieval miniatures I found.

But, I wasn't sure Justo had TTS and, although we have both played games using Vassal, I did not want to tackle making or modifying a module for a scenario. So I fell back to my default: creating a grid for the map and using grid movement rather than freeform movement. The first problem to solve: how to convert OHSW to a square grid.

Converting OHSW to a Grid

As always, the first thing you need to do is figure out what the cell of the grid (square or hex) represents in terms of ground scale. Because most movement values are closely divisible by 3, I decided each cell was about 3" of ground, so a 3' square board would be 12 rows and 12 columns. Within a single cell you could have two friendly fighters (so four figures total, two for each side).

All distances were converted by taking the distance and dividing by 3, rounded to the nearest. So weapons with a 1/2" or 1" zone of control (ZOC) would be 0 cells (same cell only) and 2" reach would have a 1 cell ZOC and attack range.

In the original playtest we allowed long weapons to attack diagonal, adjacent squares, but I am leaning towards not allowing that. Diagonal squares represent a distance of roughly 1.5 times ground scale, or 4 1/2", which is a stretch for a weapon that originally had a reach of 2".

For movement it was the same, so light foot was 3 squares, medium and heavy were 2 squares.

When 'measuring', you count each cell in between the starting cell to the ending cell, plus the ending cell (but not the starting one). That is the distance. For squares (but not hexes) where you trace a line (of sight, march, or fire) diagonally the first such square will count as 1 square, the second as 2, the third as 1, the fourth as 2, and so on alternating the cost between 1 and 2 points each. Example: the player trace a line through four diagonal squares. The distance is 6 squares (1 + 2 + 1 +2).

The one exception that I made for fudging the distances was for the combat results. Combat results that force a figure to retreat always results in the figure retreating one cell away from the enemy.

Protecting Downed Friends

Another area that I wanted to address was the effect of a figure's ZOC has on enemy trying to dispatch downed friends. Although this should be added to the ZOC section of the S&S variant rules, they were playtested in this game.

Basically the rule is that if a figure is in the ZOC of an enemy, or you have an enemy in your ZOC that is in the same cell (within 1", in freeform movement games) it cannot dispatch a downed opponent unless that enemy is also engaged by another figure in close combat.

In the example above X2 cannot dispatch the downed A1 because it is in the ZOC of Y1. B1, however, can dispatch the downed A2 with a long weapon as B2 has attacked A4 with his own long weapon, engaging him.

Originally, I had the rule simply as you had to have 1 more figure than the number of non-Downed enemy figures. Both accomplish the same thing, but the current rule is a bit more complex when long weapons come into play on both sides. An example is the figure below.

Y1, with a long weapon, holds off both X2 and B1 from dispatching A1 until either X2 or B1 engage it first. Further, if Y1 wins that combat, either by killing, downing, or forcing the retreat of the enemy, it continues to block the other blue attacker.

Again, I want to stress this is not a 'grid' rule, but an adaptation of the S&S variant rules that I add to as I come upon new situations. The ability to easily dispatch downed foes has been the one area that has always bothered me about OHSW and this is an attempt to address that.

Town Raid Scenario

If you think you might have seen this scenario before it is because it is converted from the scenario "Town Raid" in the old Warhammer Skirmish scenario book.

The world of the Kingdom is a dangerous place and even in these civilized lands there is still more countryside than city. It is in these places where brave freeholders must struggle daily to make a living. Ever searching out fertile land for crops and grazing settlers have followed a small river out of the dark forest to the richer plains beyond. Out beyond the coast – and who know what danger lie off there? Can the small local militia protect the farmers?

Overview

A smaller attacking force – as part of a larger attack on a town – has been tasked with making a feint attack in one section of the town with the target of killing or absconding with the town's livestock, burning buildings, and causing general mayhem. The local militia are tasked with driving off the cattle to safety, preventing the burning of buildings, and slowing the attackers until a larger defending force can arrive to drive off the attackers.

Forces

Modified point costs are used, i.e. each figure costs 1 point + 1 point for each point of Army Motivation.

Defenders

• 40 points
• May include up to one leader, i.e. someone with the Leader (X) special ability.
• 10 Livestock critters
• One 6" (2 square) barricade in the top 3/4 of the map (rows 1-9)
• If no leader is present then the maximum Army Motivation is 1, otherwise it is 2

Attackers

• 80 points (no more than half of the figures may have bows; no mounted troops allowed)
• Must include one leader, but may have a second
• Minimum Army Motivation is 1 with a maximum of 3

Battlefield

The buildings are not built for defense in mind, rather they are simple dwellings of farmers. The local militia had some time to set up a single 6" barricade. Red-brown rectangles are buildings. Gray rectangles are waist-high stone walls. Green circles are single trees offering no cover.

There is no difference between grass green and light brown squares; they are both open terrain.

Objectives

The Attackers realize that there is little to no value in this area of the settlement, other than the cattle, but they want to draw the locals into this area to fight fires while the main attack heads to richer targets. The game ends when the defending leader (if any) or attacking leader is killed, either side fails morale, or at the end of six turns. Calculates each side's points to determine a winner.

Note that the game ending – regardless of the reason – represents the larger defending force's arrival, and the end of the attacker's marauding.

Attacker

Each defending figure removed from the board - 1 point

Each livestock animal killed - 1 point

Each building totally destroyed - 5 point

Each building partially destroyed - 1 point

Defender

Each attacking figure removed from the board - 1 point

Each livestock animal alive or escaped - 1 point

Each building still standing and not on fire - 5 point

Each building still standing but on fire - 1 point

It is important for the players to realize that the victory conditions represent not who wins this little skirmish, but about the larger action occurring elsewhere. The defenders have 1/2 of the points of the attacker; they are expected to get crushed. So just because the attacker wins the fight, it does not mean that they will win the scenario.

Players are advised to understand and keep an eye on the objectives. The defender can lose every single figure and still win the scenario. It this is not the type of scenario that you like to play – where your forces will almost certainly lose militarily – I suggest that you not play the defenders.

Deployment

The defenders deploy first, then the attackers, then the livestock is deployed.

All defenders must start in the northern half (rows 1-6) of the map, save for a maximum of 2 figures, which may man the barricades. No two defending figures may start in the same square.

The attackers must enter from the south (bottom of the map). However, they must be deployed adjacent to the column where they will enter.

Livestock are then placed alternately (defenders choose first) anywhere on the board at least two squares from any table edge or any other livestock model. (If a livestock model cannot be placed because all eligible squares are filled, then it may be placed within 1 square of another livestock model.)

Scenario Special Rules

Attacker's Initiative

The attacker always has the initiative on the first turn. Initiative is determined as normal on subsequent turns.

Livestock

Livestock are +0 in defense, draw 1 card, and do not attack back in close combat if they are attacked. They are killed when the attacker exceeds the defense value by 4 or more. If the animal is not killed it immediately retreats away from the attacker 2 squares.

Either side may spend 1 AP to drive a livestock model. The figure must be in the same square as the livestock. The figure may choose which direction the livestock model retreats two squares.

Any retreating livestock that comes within 1 square of another livestock, or killed within 1 square of another livestock, will cause that livestock model to retreat 1 square directly away from the retreating or killed livestock. This can cause a chain reaction.

Livestock that run off of the board in any direction save south will be considered saved for the defenders. Those that run off towards the south will be considered killed for the attackers.

Livestock cannot enter buildings or cross stone walls, so adjust their movement accordingly.

Livestock in the square reduce the number of models both sides can have in the square by 1 for each livestock model. Livestock moving into a square already at capacity forces another model out of the square (player's choice). For example, two defenders and one attacker are in a square. A cow retreats into the square making the capacity one model for each side. One defending figure must retreat from the square (away from the cow).

Setting Buildings on Fire

The attackers using one-handed weapons are assumed to have torches to light the buildings on fire. Any model with a torch that is touching a building and not in close combat may try to set it on fire for 1 AP. Draw a card and if it is red, the building is on fire and the figure loses their torch. (If black is drawn another AP may be spent and another attempt may be made.)

A defender not in combat may attempt to put out the fire. Draw a card and if it is black, the fire has been extinguished.

At the end of every turn (not round!), after morale and figure recovery is determined, but before the next turn's initiative is drawn, one structural point is removed from each building per fire.

A building is considered destroyed when five structural points are removed.

Playtest

My main concern with the playtest was getting Justo's opinion on the modified combat system and secondarily how the scenario played. Although I recorded the action through drawings, there were a number of mistakes made that sort of invalidated the game. But he got a feel for the combat system and I added a few refinements here and there to both the variant and the scenario. Our mistakes were:

• Somebody forgot to put their two Jokers into their deck, making for an extremely long turn 2 with 8 rounds. (My second Joker was the third to the last card in my deck.)
• I messed up on the movement speed of foot troops, so everyone was moving in slow motion.
• I did not specify that the attacker's had to specify where there troops were deployed, which led to some painful flank charges that absolutely crushed my defenders.

Nonetheless, my defenders won a narrow victory. I am proud to say that I saved 7 of the 10 cows, defended 2, and only lost 1 to the roasting spit of the attackers. This was largely because Justo did not read the scenario victory scoring system and brought no one with torches (figures with only one handed weapons). But he did kill all but 1 of my defenders!

Overall the combat played very well. Again, I liked the movement stemming from the combat results, the interplay between forces around protecting downed friends, and their being sufficient variety between weapons and armor. The scenario also played out very well, with the Livestock rules in particular producing some interesting results as I was trying to drive cows into other cows to cause a chain reaction of retreats to safety.

Definitely something Justo and I will try again.