Game Design: Part 2; Setting Choice

In the last post I discussed the size and scale considerations when designing a game, in this post I am going to discuss choosing a setting and what it means for the game design.  The setting of a game should influence the types of mechanics and their execution in the game, as these should fit the flavour of the setting to improve immersion into the game.

There are three major setting types used in wargaming, which are historical, fantasy and science-fiction.  These three and combinations of them form the basis of most tabletop games I have come across.

Fantasy games involve magic, elves and dwarfs stereotypically and the level of technology is generally at a medieval/renaissance stage.  For this setting the different armies are often different races though they can get sub-racial divisions such as the high, dark and wood elves of Warhammer fantasy.  The focus of fantasy settings lies with the heroes, wizards and mythological monsters so the mechanics of the game need to give these elements as larger and distinctive part within the game.

Science-Fiction games often involve aliens and based on guns, lasers and tanks but often containing a melee combat element.  The mechanics here need to be able to balance the shooting and close combat elements of the game to allow fair competition between armies based on each one as well as reflect a more modern style of combat and leadership such as squads being unaffected by other falling back.

Historical games can have a wide range of mechanics as the setting covers from the before the Roman conquest of Gaul to WW2 and beyond.  This type of setting really benefits from flavourful mechanics to enhance the experience of the history in your game and can share mechanic themes with either the sci-fi games or fantasy ones depending the period they represent.

An example that I think is a good showcase of this idea of mechanic enhanced settings it Bolt Action by Warlord game,s specifically the "hand in the bag" mechanic for activation.  In Bolt Action players active each unit individually and give them one of 6 orders but the decision on who actives next is done by a blind draw of a dice or other token from a bag.  This to me helps to give the impression of officers trying to act and react quickly to the battlefield and never being sure whether you've been quicker than your enemy.

Additionally when picking a setting as well as thinking about how your mechanics can help with immersion, there is the choice to design your own "world" in the setting or to pick up an existing "world" and use this.  Both have advantages and disadvantages, for building your own world the biggest advantage is that you as the game designer get to put in exactly what you want in the game, so if you wanted dragons but not elves then its all your choice and going back to the mechanics you have a bit more free reign to bring flavour as you can always build around mechanics that you like.  The main disadvantages that I see is that by designing it yourself you are more than doubling your work-load as not only will you be designing a game but you will be writing the background to it all which can be a massive challenge, and with a new world players wouldn't have a instantly recognisable brand/units etc.  The opposite is basically true for taking a pre-made setting for your game in that the brand is already there and probably has a fan-base who maybe interested in your game for the setting plus someone else has done the work in defining the factions/units and their in-world interactions and uniqueness but this constrains you when making mechanics as they need to fit into a rigid world rather than be able to define it.

There are some ways you can combine the two such as alternative history games like Dust and Carnevale where they both take the real-world history up to a particular point, so for Dust this is when the alien technology is discovered and for Carnevale this is the "rent in the sky" moment, and then from this point they change the world to bring their game setting about.

When I looked at game setting originally I had the idea of doing a cool sci-fi game with a good basis in the science part (as a scientist myself) but realised that actually designing a whole universe was not what I wanted to do as my first steps into game design/  This lead me to pick WW2 as a setting, partially due to a recent visit to Normandy and the Imperial War Museum at Duxford, Cambridgeshire combined with the iconic tank, the Sherman.  This means that i need to build my game around this setting where the factions and units are pre-determined and breath life into the WW2 experience of  the game through characterful mechanics.

So now that I've talk about the size, scale and setting choices of game design and my choices for each, the next part in this series will look at "Dice and Activation".  If you are enjoying and/or interested this series of articles so far please subscribe/follow and post any comments or points for discussion below.

Game Design: Part 1; Scale and Size

So I thought for my first post about the game I'm in the process of deigning that I would start at what I consider the beginning.  This is the size of the game, the scale of the miniatures and the setting of the game as these three things lay the foundations on which to build the mechanics and forces of the game.  In this post I discuss my thoughts on the size and scale aspects with the setting being the topic of my next post.

The first decision to make is the size of the game you want to make, by which I mean whether you want a skirmish, clash, battle or huge battle as the different sizes need different types of mechanics to make them flow as a game.   For example skirmish games generally focus onto individual soldiers whereas for huge battle games, your playing pieces get more abstracted using multiple soldiers per base for example or one soldier representing multiple soldiers.  

All the sizes have their pros and cons, skirmish games often allow for larger character presence and almost movie style heroics and cinematic moments but often miss showing the players the full extent of the conflict while the larger sizes are the opposite showing the scale of a true conflict while the individuality of the soldiers is diminished.  This means that on average the amount of book keeping for each size is roughly the same as skirmishes often have multiple things to keep track of for each model but use a handful whereas battle sizes have lots of pieces on the table but have only 1 or 2 things to be tracked often for a collection of pieces rather than individually.  The size of game you want to do often goes hand in hand with the scale of the miniatures you want to use for it.

When picking the scale of minis you have to keep in mind that your players will have a limited amount of space for playing and storing models so as the number of models needed for a game increases the scale of the minis needs to decrease.  This means that large minis such as the 54mm Inquisitor models from Games Workshop are perfect for skirmish games but are not at all suited to play a game such as Warhammer 40,000 as you'd need such a large table that it would be unplayable.  This relationship between scale and size mean that a choice of one will usually either decide or limit the choice of the other.

A comparison of Sherman Tanks at differing scales.

For my game I drew from experiences of what I've played and enjoyed, and for me there is something really cool bringing an army to a game that is an army so has multiple squads of infantry supported by tanks, planes and artillery and getting to experience a full battle rather than focusing in on a small handful of guys.  This is not to say I don't enjoy that kind of game or that they are bad games but that if I was given a choice between something like Flames of War and Infinity, I'd pick Flames because I like driving squadrons of tanks about a battlefield more than commanding a small squad.  

This is my kind of game with lots of units and lots of options.
Forge World Calth Board from Warhammer Fest 2014 

This meant that when planning my game I had the idea that it would be a battle or huge battle scale game which meant that I knew that I needed to pick a smaller scale.  The scale I ended up picking was 1:72 scale inspired by some model kits that I saw and to me it gives a balance between being small enough to sensibly play a full battle while keeping a good amount of fine detail.

I hope this starts to give you an insight into my process of designing a game, and might even be helpful for you if you're thinking of doing the same.  If you have helpful comments or even criticism please post it and keep an eye out for part 2.

A Walk in the Battlefield

Hi all,

This is my first blog post and thought I'd do an introduction to what I am going to be doing on here.  My ideas currently are to document my thoughts and progress on a tabletop mixtures war game I am designing as well as discussion on and reviews of games I have been playing, after-action reports of specific games and any campaigns I run or am part of.  I hope to post at least once a week so keep an eye out for new posts. subscribe or follow by email if this sounds interesting to you.

Neil