Scenario Design Tips pt1

[YankeeAirRat]

To try and get more people involved in scenario building and published I have decided to write some tips for those that are afraid of the included scenario editor and how to progress. The biggest thing I can say about scenario designing to start with is build it and save it for a while then play it.

To start with think of what you want to feature or show in the scenario? In that I mean do you want to see how well a Russian carrier battlegroup could go up against attacking the Libyan Coast or do you want to see if a modern American Surface Action Group centered around a couple AEGIS ships could do well just patroling the Eastern Med against a Syrian Air Force that has large numbers of aircraft? Maybe you have an older naval board game that has a favorite scenario and you want to copy it over to the Harpoon game. From there take a piece of paper (or pieces) and start to write down a basic out line of the sides, units, possible victory conditions, and some other board basics.

I need to stress this as well, if this is your first time building a scenario then start small. Can you say small? I knew you could ([:'(]). Don't start out at first to build a scenario that tries to show a running convoy battle from Halifax Canada to Bremen Germany. Rather start with a smaller map size and scale like playing around the English Channel or a small boat engagmeent in the Tushnima Straits. Also as you write the outline of what you can or could included when you are small try to keep the sides down to 2-3 and small number of units. For example say you were writing a scenario about a running battle between some pirates in the Persian Gulf and a couple USN or UK ships. Do you really need to include a carrier battle group or could you write your backstory to say that the carrier is in port and unable to provided support or that the forces involved are part of the advance escorts and the carrier is still a number of days away.

Once you have your idea for your scenario start your research. There are a number of web resources out there to use as well as your local libraries. One of my favorite places to get some rough ideas on where to places bases is the online library system of the University of Texas, at http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/. They have a number of pretty good basic political or geographic maps. On some of the more popular places or regions, I have found actual maps produced by the US Defense Mapping Agency of pretty good scale. A couple of other fun places to go for research are, www.globalsecurity.org Global Security.Org and www.fas.org The Federation of American Scientists. Both of these are non-partisan defense review organizations that offer all thier material for free online at their sites. It can give you a pretty good idea if the Emerald City introduced the flying house in 1939 or in 1978. On top of that you can also research certain bases and be told if they carried certain types of units or platforms there. The other good research places is the various forums and mailing letters around the web (such as this one, or one over at combatsim, or Harpoon HQ, or Strategy Zone Online). You could post a question there about possible operations, units, countries, etc and some one there should be able to help you out. Some people hawk nearly all of them so it would be wise join up with nearly all of the forums and post questions across all of them. You might be able to get answers very quickly by doing this.
Don't go completely overboard with what I would call AHS (*nal-retentive Harpoon Syndrome) where you need to know exactly what sort of bean a ship was loaded with when out on a certain month. So if you can't find the answer then take a set back look at the basics that you have dug up and make it up. An example might be that you don't know what radar JMSDF base Roin Jima had in 1991, but through your research you know the JMSDF used the Marconi R-AD-AR system during that time period.

So now that you have a rough idea of what your scenario is going to look like and you have done aout 75-90% of needed research now is the time to fire up the game and begin to put the pieces together. What to do next will be in the next installment.

Note that these tips can apply to either HC or H3ANW

[hermanhum]

ORIGINAL: YankeeAirRat

I need to stress this as well, if this is your first time building a scenario then start small. Can you say small? I knew you could ([:'(]). Don't start out at first to build a scenario that tries to show a running convoy battle from Halifax Canada to Bremen Germany. Rather start with a smaller map size and scale like playing around the English Channel or a small boat engagmeent in the Tushnima Straits. Also as you write the outline of what you can or could included when you are small try to keep the sides down to 2-3 and small number of units. For example say you were writing a scenario about a running battle between some pirates in the Persian Gulf and a couple USN or UK ships. Do you really need to include a carrier battle group or could you write your backstory to say that the carrier is in port and unable to provided support or that the forces involved are part of the advance escorts and the carrier is still a number of days away.

This is an excellent point to emphasize.

Dave Steinmeyer built his first two Harpoon3 scenarios, Lone Wolf and Power Sweep, with only a handful of units per scenario, yet they are two of the most popular scenarios around; true classic design.

And, I've already used them on many occasions to introduce new players to ANW due to their simplicity and compactness. This is definitely another example of, "Size Doesn't Matter". [8D]