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Other Stuff => General Wargames and Hobby Discussion => Topic started by: Menelduir on March 20, 2020, 01:33:09 AM
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Hello to all socially separated gamers
Any recommendations on how best to play miniature games with players that are not in the same room, house, city?
Looking at maybe having a game set up in one players home then allowing others who are not present to play. Maybe Skype, or some other platform that would allow multi users to interact at the same time other than emailing. Ideally there would be a video feed as well. Also keen not to invite the whole world, just a few friends, so some privacy would be nice.
(Warning, in case you have not guessed I am not too tech savvy)
Another thing might be some sort of computer program that can be used to facilitate solo games or even group games.
Certainly Pulp Alley has a solo version, and The Men Who Would be Kings has a Babbage option, and of course Two Hour Wargames allow for solitaire games, or co-op games versus the game system.
I am looking at running a fantasy campaign with some local mates, it may or may not include the miniature component, dependent on the logistics of the whole thing. It would be nice to fight out the battles created by the strategic movements, as they happen, but I have a few systems that can be used to resolve these fights with pen and paper.
Of course these pen and paper battles could also become the basis of 'historical refights' after this isolation thing has passed, to see if the players can 'change history', as it were.
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Not sure what to tell you. My son is intending to have several friends come over to play Axis and Allies.
Wife is concerned about it but is safely under the government rule of no more than ten people. I usually
run a monthly game that is coming up. We are a group of five so I may still do it. Have to wait and see.
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Depends what type of tech you have, i know you said you are not tech savi so unsure what you would have.
I have recommend to my dad that he should set up an old external web-cam and then hold it like a Skype meeting where only invited people can access it.
The joys of the old style external web-cams is that the host can move it around the game showing different angles etc. the only down side is that judging distance will be difficult.
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Unrelated to the Covid-19 thing, I recently started looking at some online role-playing sites...including a few which are by chat (some rooms you simply respond once or twice a day from the looks of it...others are active live-role-playing via chat, etc.).
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The joys of the old style external web-cams is that the host can move it around the game showing different angles etc. the only down side is that judging distance will be difficult.
Depending on the period, this can simulate your commander's points of view.
Worth taking overhead shots for the AAR and post game discussions.
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I would suggest a few players, each one a head of a country (or an independent
general/commander). They send you 'Orders' (Can be by e-mail) you then do the campaign
movement until a battle happens. Their orders will then determine what the table-top
generals do. For example:-
player 'A' (king of Barovia) Has declared war on player 'B' (Republic of Ruffrick).
'A' Orders a rush to the enemies capital, attack, attack, ATTACK!!!!
'B' Orders destruction of the bridges on the approaches to his capital, while sending
cavalry units out to each flank to guard the fords & lesser bridges.
The scene is then set for the battle.
A major river which 'A' army MUST attack across, meanwhile 'B' cavalry might attempt
a flank attack. The likes of Mr Grant's 'Wargames Campaigns' gives loads of ideas, even down
to randomly generated lower level commanders. That way if you have to decide will the 20th
Dragoons will stay guarding the ford, or try a flank march... dice for their commander.
A risk taker (Prince Rupert) will go for it, but a lesser commander (Lord Sackville) will
stay & guard the ford.
I once wrote a one page set of rules, for a club campaign. It reduced everything down to
the unit would do what the owner wanted, or what the opponent wanted, (with certain restrictions, eg slingers would skirmish, advance to cover or retire, but NOT charge, while
Knights would Charge, advance, hold, but NOT run away.) This led to some great fun,
such as when an opponent insisted upon a 'suicidal' charge by a group of knights, who proceeded
to ride down unit after unit.
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Have a look at the Tony Bath book about running a Wargames Campaign. His long running Hyboria was run as a remote wargames campaign for many years (without e mails or even computers) and he came up with loads of ideas how to make remote gaming work (his book is in Kindle if that helps?).
Hopefully that will get some creative juices flowing!
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Have a look at the Tony Bath book about running a Wargames Campaign. His long running Hyboria was run as a remote wargames campaign for many years (without e mails or even computers) and he came up with loads of ideas how to make remote gaming work (his book is in Kindle if that helps?).
Hopefully that will get some creative juices flowing!
Thank you, I will look for it!
While I did not mention it in my original question, I have thought about running a campaign that would allow distant players to participate (some in other cities) prior to the current situation.
I would like to continue a campaign after things return to normal.
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Great food for thought HAS.BEEN!
Also I like the remote camera and chat room ideas, thank you all
I have been looking at a number of campaign rules, for any number of genres, including a very old RPG game, Chivalry and Sorcery 2nd ed, which had a Strategic Warfare System.
I also still have my copy of Mighty Empires. Back in the day, we tried to use M/E to generate table top games, but it never worked as the campaign game always took over, and we never had time to play all the battles that were generated. Now however, I am less concerned about getting together to play table top games so it might be fun just to let loose with a, modified, M/E, with C&S warfare system, and battlefields generated using the Age of Reason battlefield map generator. Maybe some ideas from
2 hour wargames to allow the units to react to each other (assuming we do not do some sort of live stream/communication)
If this all works I will post up what we did.
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“Chivalry and Sorcery”? Never thought of that... I’ve just come over all nostalgic! Will have to have a good ferret around today to gush my copy out!
If you do grab the Tony Bath book one of the issues he had to contend with was fighting battles where players were many miles from each other (and him) so worth reading for ideas.
I do wonder if there are certain periods that lend themselves better to remote gaming? Colonials come to mind straight away eg players can control the ‘imperial” forces and the organiser/umpire the “natives” (hate that phrase but you’ll get the point?). There are already quite a few systems out there to facilitate that and you can control the pace of the game quite well? Something like Napoleonics feels like it may be harder (though not being a Napoleonic gamer my opinion not worth a fig here!).
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Looks like you have many ideas, so things going well.
I would love to see how you get on.
One possible problem is that (at certain times) you may get
a bottleneck of battles, i.e. too many in a short space of time.
My advice is to use one of the systems/random charts or tables
to resolve most of them, fight the ones you want to 'on the tabletop',
& have a bit of creative fun with the battle write ups. e.g. the third
cohort was sent to quell a small Germanic revolt. Settled it on a throw
of the dice, got a double one! The report can go into (lurid?) detail
about what happened to the legionary prisoners. Result = Roman player
now has a blood feud with that particular Tribe. Battle cry at the next
big battle is, ' Remember the IV !!!!' Those little bits of lead do begin
to take on their own characters, plus it is fun, especially at this time
of isolation.
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Not sure what to tell you. My son is intending to have several friends come over to play Axis and Allies.
Wife is concerned about it but is safely under the government rule of no more than ten people. I usually
run a monthly game that is coming up. We are a group of five so I may still do it. Have to wait and see.
In Spain we have been forbidden from any gathering of any size. Even in a car, only two persons can travel and that only if one of them is a dependant that is being transported to a hospital. Western governments aren't taking the pandemic seriously enough until it starts biting their asses. Better safe than sorry, but I would recommend you that you implement your own no-gathering policy in your home. Look, it only takes one of the kids to be infected for all of you to get infected.
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I did see this on the Wyrd Games blog:
https://www.wyrd-games.net/news/2020/3/18/waldos-weekly-black-smokes-a-rising (https://www.wyrd-games.net/news/2020/3/18/waldos-weekly-black-smokes-a-rising)
While it may be ill-advised to get a playgroup in the same room together right now, there are an assortment of digital tools out there to offer the same level of enjoyment, such as Vassal for our Malifaux players or Discord and Roll20 for our Through the Breach players.
They might be of use for other games.
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Not sure what to tell you. My son is intending to have several friends come over to play Axis and Allies.
Wife is concerned about it but is safely under the government rule of no more than ten people. I usually
run a monthly game that is coming up. We are a group of five so I may still do it. Have to wait and see.
UK wise, the Government has actually put out stronger advice than that now. Essentially to avoid all social contact unless necessary.
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Apparently, Tony Bath's books have been republished as a compilation:
http://www.soa.org.uk/joomla/publications/53-tony-bath-s-ancient-wargaming
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Brilliant!
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Apparently, Tony Bath's books have been republished as a compilation:
http://www.soa.org.uk/joomla/publications/53-tony-bath-s-ancient-wargaming
I found it on kindle, which is always easier for my eyes...
The C&S systems was in one of the Source books, the purple one from way back. It was then republished in a red book cover Source book 2.
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Bloody hell! Use to play a lot of C&S as a teenager...40 years ago :)
Thanks for the heads up Sparrow :)
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We used Google Hangouts to play a distributed remote game of Blitzkrieg Commander on Friday night - basically it worked fine!
We had 4 people involved, all in their own houses. One person created a group on GH and invited the rest of us. We were able to join easily, and share video and voice. I was the host, we had 2 players and 1 hanger-on.
I hosted the game, and setup a table as normal. Before hand the two players had picked forces based on photos of the available troops I had shared. This worked fine - with only the odd adjustment due to minor misidentification.
I setup an iPad to take a static long shot of the table, and used my phone to take close-up or directional shots. We found it easy for one person to setup more than 1 device, allowing dice cam etc. You need to be aware of audio feedback, and mute mikes and speakers on one device if you have two in play at one location.
About half-way through we changed the camera setup. We found that the hand-held phone cam wasn’t too much use as it moved too much - but could be used to give good model’s eye shots, it also hammers the battery. The POV shots are good, so will work on this. The single shot from the iPad while giving a decent overview, was found to be too static once the game started.
The camera method we settle on was simpler - have a static camera in place during turns, then at the end of a turn, move the camera to another angle, and perhaps give some other different shots while moving. This gave the remote players enough info to understand what was happening.
We had one player who seemed to have a very laggy connection (or was just not paying attention) this was surprisingly frustrating - as everyone ends up pausing waiting, then asking again, just at the point the first person responds. He had a lot of trouble logging in, so there is perhaps some minimum spec needed. I used a fairly new iPad and and iPhone XR with no issues, the other two remote players both used PCs, and one used an older iPad as well. The slow connection was a Samsung phone - but not sure of the age.
Game wise it all seemed to work pretty well - I’d chosen BKC as its not too dependant on distances and angles of units. And the command rolls create friction anyway, so no-one is expecting precise results from the movement of their forces.
With having one neutral person measuring and adjudging LoS this was all very simple, as the players could only respond to what they were told. We did all dice rolling locally, with trust. We did discuss this before we started, but realised that if Player 1 ‘rolled’ 10x 6s to hit, then Player 2 would just ‘roll’ 10x 6s to save. We tried some dice cam options but these just added to the complexity without much value.
The bit that sometimes took a bit of extra communication was around movement orders, but this was fairly easily resolved by me indicating with my hand, where I thought they wanted units moved to - also BKC formations move as large blobs of troops so too much precision isn’t needed.
Overall it gave is a game, let us chat and generally relax - which is what we as group want form a game at the end of the week. If your gaming is highly competitive then this probably isn’t for you, but for more relaxed gaming its fine.
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Interesting.
Good to see ingenuity in play.
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I am “speccing” out a possible game based in modern Afghanistan.
I will act as ref/“DM”(?) and set out, my end, a table of an Afghan village. The player/s is/are back “at base” (at their home) and will be given a drone shot of the battlefield (mobile phone video) and ground shots from recon (ground photos with mobile) plus a detailed sit rep. Their mission is to raid the village, seize an IED factory plus, if possible, catch the local senior bomb maker. They will get drone footage plus ground helmet cam footage (again the mobile phone) each move for further radio instruction
There will be some teething troubles I’m sure but let’s give it a go and try it out!
I do think modem Wargaming lends itself particularly well for remote gaming (as does Naval warfare 1900 onwards- indeed remote Wargaming may be the best way of conducting some ideas for WW1 dreadnoughts, WW2 carriers in the Pacific or the Battle of the Atlantic?). It just needs us to think outside the box and be inventive? How about a Battle of Britain game with players deploying fighter squadrons or deploying waves of Luftwaffe bombers as a map game?
Kriegspiel anybody?
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Played a similar game remotely last night using Contact Front rules. Very successful and good fun. We even had a comms breakdown when my tablet ran out of juice and I had to find and power up a laptop.
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Played a similar game remotely last night using Contact Front rules. Very successful and good fun. We even had a comms breakdown when my tablet ran out of juice and I had to find and power up a laptop.
Laughed out loud! Brilliant!
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Sparrow - some good ideas there about fog of war. I had had a few thoughts about this myself, but hadn’t worked any of it though it a playable approach.
It does feel that umpire based gaming works very well with remote access - much easier to control the players knowledge when they aren’t in the room!
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Fred
It does feel that umpire based gaming works very well with remote access - much easier to control the players knowledge when they aren’t in the room!
Decades ago I played in a Viet-Nam game involving 3 rooms. To start
the VC were in one room, us Americans in another & the battlefield
was in the middle room. We had limited choppers, so had to get troops
to the LZ in 3 waves. We knew the first wave was in trouble (even before
we got the umpires update) when there was a very loud cheer from the
LZ room. I entered the battle with the 3rd wave (greatly delayed due to
losing several vital choppers) only to find our entire plan of attack
was based on an out of date map!!!!! The umpire THEN drew my attention
to the (much) different dates on the map & briefing handouts. Damn all
Umpires!!!! (I did note that example of sneakiness for further use by me).
Of note were the two different 'Orders of the day'
USA = Zap the Jap, bang the Kong, Big John Wayne can do no wrong!
VC = Bullets are cheap... Helicopters are expensive.
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Played a similar game remotely last night using Contact Front rules. Very successful and good fun. We even had a comms breakdown when my tablet ran out of juice and I had to find and power up a laptop.
I wrote up our first attempt at remote gaming here: http://rabbitsinmybasement.blogspot.com/2020/03/gaming-during-state-of-emergency.html?m=1
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So we have decided to try a campaign game, using Mighty Empires, yes, Mighty Empires as a base. I will be acting as the GM with six players controlling a variety of nations.
It will be a PBEM game with updates through out club blog, it has not started yet but feel free to check in from time to time. Currently we are at the very starting stages.
Oh and I have been reading the Tony Bath book, a lot of great ideas, some that I will try to work into this campaign, and some that will be the basis of the next campaign.
My hope is to have the players send me their deployments instructions for any battles, then do a bit of solo tabletop gaming to resolve the conflict. I am hoping that all this will lead to some real tabletop gaming, either by video or in person once things settle down.
https://leagueofitinerantgamers.blogspot.com/ (https://leagueofitinerantgamers.blogspot.com/).
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There are several PC based options out there even for miniatures. Vassel for boardgames of course.
I am surprised that no one has mentioned Tabletop Simulator. Everything is simulated on screen, miniatures, table top, terrain, movement tools etc. There is a chat function as well. I guess existing in both online PC gamer world and miniatures world helps lol
You just buy the base game and many people have made modules for it for miniatures games including Chain of Command, Bolt Action, Fighting Sail and others. You can get it on Steam for about 20 USD.
www.tabletopsimulator.com