Looking ahead

It's been a month since there was a post on this blog, largely because we have been doing other things and the campaign itself was thus on hold.

I have been thinking a little in the interim about the future of the campaign.

Let's start with the two big options short of just never going back

1) Maintain it from where it stopped last
2) Restart it from zero

There are two problems with restarting the campaign from where it started last.

The first is simply administrative, and could be sorted out; I'm not sure I've got an accurate record of where everyone was when we paused. But I think it could easily be argued out.

The second is a little harder to tackle; Con has effectively dropped out, through no fault of his own, and Frank has taken his place, though there's been no follow up on that. So a decision has to be made about whether to put Frank into Con's planets, or add a wing to the map or what. And what ought to happen to allow Frank to catch up on the progress everyone else made on capturing local worlds and whatnot. And that's assuming that Frank can actually make the time to get into things.

Restarting the campaign from zero; why am I even suggesting this? It knocks Eddie back to where he started when he's manifestly well ahead of the rest of the players, which is frustrating and unfair. But I'm still throwing the idea out there.

Here's a few of my reasons, which have a bearing on either option and how we go forward.

Firstly, it might be better to redesign the campaign for the actual player environment we have - four reasonably committed players, one of whom is trying to umpire the thing, and a couple more players interested in principle but not able to turn up often or commit much time, and the two or three other players (like James and Sean) who are willing to take part in whatever is going on, but not necessarily into getting deeply into campaign dynamics.

Secondly, it might be that we need to think again about the overall approach of the campaign. As things stand, you've got a certain amount of interaction for the strategic moves, but the tactical games have a tendency to be one on one, which leaves everyone else as spectators to the use of the entire table. This isn't all that great a use of the big table as a resource.

Thirdly, the original thought behind the campaign was to use it as a way of generating battles which would be asymmetrical and more interesting than the battles which we were having. In practice the design behind the repair rules drove everyone towards big ship navies with small numbers of light scouting ships and battles have been between small fleets of very big ships with pretty much even points values. And to be honest, we could have had those battles without the trouble of a campaign system. So I have to say that my campaign ideas were not a huge success in delivering my original objectives.

From this I come to asking, what do we want to get out of Full Thrust type games? And what's the best way of getting that?

Things which are interesting about FT:

It's relatively easy and painless to cook up your own designs for ships, and there are hundreds of designs out there if you want to try something different but haven't the patience to cook up something of your own.

The fleet organisations are completely loose - you can field whatever you choose in whatever mix you like

The battles themselves are quick and easy - you can teach someone the basics of FT in an hour or less, and it's pretty easy to suss out the trade-offs between the weapons systems and so on.

Things which are limited about FT

It really only works well with small numbers of ships (less to keep track of) and with two sides (because the game is written in a way which makes more than two sides very difficult to administer fairly).
So short of rewriting the rules to change these things, it seems to me that what we really want to see - for club games - is something which will allow us to have a game with two defined sides, each with more than one player, with each player having the opportunity to fine tune a force to his own preferences, and with the game playing out - for preference - in two nights or less.

This suggests to me that what we might need is a change to a sort of meta-campaign, played out in the background, which would be used to generate scenarios from time to time which would allow for interesting battles either of SG II, Dirtside or Full Thrust as the case might be. These individual actions would be played out against the context of a campaign so large that the players themselves would be merely local commanders doing small battles in theatre with tailored forces drawn from much larger contingents. The larger conflict would trundle along in the background, dealt with at an abstract political level and whenever we wanted a game, we would look at the abstract, pick a point of friction which suited the people available and then play out the game.

At which point, I welcome comments - maybe there's a better, simpler idea I've overlooked.