From solo wargaming to world-wide campaigns (and back again)
Some of us wargamers live in a desert, hobby-wise, and are condemned to solo gaming. They can then feel somehow marginalized, despite the possibilities of exchange via the Internet. But now they can play a more active part in a collective effort. Web campaigns (such as the one on the 'Emperor vs Elector blog) associate players from different continents: it will happen that the armies of John in Ottawa will challenge the forces of James in Sydney. Unless both are millionaires they cannot meet face to face to play the battle. Having the game played by only one of them with a local friend would be highly unsatisfactory for a lot of reasons. Now, they are battlegamers to the heart, they do not want the decision to rest on several dice throws – they want a detailed battle report, where the exploits & failures of each & every general and regiment is precisely recorded. They need a proxy to fight the battle for them and report it.
Here enters our solo wargamer, isolated say in Rio de Janeiro. What rules he uses is irrelevant – anyway no good battle report refers to the games mechanisms: would you imagine a witness of Fontenoy describing the battle in a letter to the Court, who would interrupt the enthralling flow of events for a discussion of the physics of a cannonball trajectory, or the physiology of the exhilarating effect of black powder smoke? No matter if he uses big battalions or DBx-scaled skeletal units. What minis he deploys on the tabletop is meaningless, no one will bother -or even know- if he has to muster WWI Russians &/or unpainted indians and cowboys to field the required number of units. The only point of importance is a strict, unambiguous, one-to-one correspondence between the OB and the forces (characters and units) deployed on the tabletop. Actually, to feel unbiased, the battle gamer don't need to know the nationalities of the two armies. He just has to know the map, the exact composition of forces A and B, their initial dispositions and general orders; but he don't have to know who is A and who is B. It would be the duty of some kind of scribe, secretary, to act as a go-between the campaign players and the battle gamer, and to translate the OB into coded, unrecognizable names, so that he can easily translate back the detailed battle report written by the battlegamer into a text understandable by the 2 campaign players, with the actual names of their generals and regiments (the 'replace' function of Word comes nicely!).
Solo wargamers are often of a solitary disposition: note that it is emphatically NOT required that they bother to be part of the campaign, all what is expected from them is to agree to play a battle as proxy and send a report to the 'secretary'. But thus they would be part of a common effort, with just the tabletop game to play if they don't wish to be more involved.
Of course such type of participation as "proxy tabletop generals" is in no way restricted to solo wargamers. Pairs of friends meeting regularly can agree to play a battle 'for others'. I'm thinking for instance, among mythical SYW groups of gamers, to the Aldoberg-Holstein/ St Maurice and Rubovia/ Empire pairs or to the Mieczyslaw/ Duchy of the North/ Saxe-Bearstein triarchy.. Will a wargamer, the impedimenta of Real Life allowing, decline an opportunity to bring his army to life on the tabletop? Will this peculiar battle be integrated in their own campaign & storyline is of course entirely up to them.
Hoping to promp some interest, and perhaps to arouse a few vocations
Best to all,
Jean-Louis