"FUBAR-1918 and using Chatgpt" Topic

Hi all,

I took a pretty long hiatus from gaming due to kids growing up and my work life taking over most of my waking moments. Anyway, I'm in the process of retiring and now have more time on my hands and decided to devote some energy into my gaming bucket list.

One of the things I've always wanted to do was a WWI tactical/skirmish game of some sort. A lot of people argue that WWI just doesn't lend itself to wargaming because of the whole static trench warfare thing, but I've never really bought that, at least for the last phase of the war- 1918. I got sucked into it because of movies and TV shows like Sergeant York and ANZACs, The War Down Under. It always seemed like an interesting and dynamic period where new technologies and tactics emerged that gave birth to what we would call modern combined arms warfare. What's not to like? The first generations of tanks, light machine guns, rifle grenades, the genesis of fire team tactics, close air support, flexible and dynamic artillery. All of that was present in 1918. In fact one Osprey Campaign title, Kaiserschlacht 1918 The Final German Offensive by Randal Grey points out that the armies of 1918 more resembled the armies of WWII, 1940, than the armies of 1914.

Anyway, now that I have some time I have finally started working on taking that off my bucket list. I've spent some time with Chatgpt to modify Craig Cartmell's fantastic FUBAR rules to run my games. With that rules engine and with Chatgpt's help I have designed a FUBAR engine to run small unit combat in 1918 and a series of small unit scenarios in two campaign arcs- Into the Argonne with the 77th (the Lost Battalion) and the Battle of Hamel, the AEF/AIF summer party, for my gaming pleasure, and for you guys to check out. You can find the link here:

link

Take a look at it and feel free to download the core book and the scenarios and give me feedback on it. I'm also curious about what y'all think about using AI for wargaming design. I thought it was a very helpful tool for keeping me on track and giving me a pile of information to help me with scenario design.

I am planning on expanding the scale of some of these scenarios and perhaps running a few of them at Historicon 2026.

Enjoy and have a Merry Christmas.

Scott

Hello Scott, very interesting, I am a fan of FUBAR rules and currently use Trench Hammer for Great War skirmish games as I find they work well, I'll get one of your scenarios and play it with both in the New Year and compare, thanks for your efforts!

Thanks! Let me know how it goes. I plan to start working on my first scenario or two over the coming week since we're getting better weather for priming and stuff. Just be aware that these are drafts at best and ChatGpt has only 'stressed tested them". They look pretty fair, but you know how battles go!

Thanks Scott for your hard work! I just started the same project and I plan on using Fubar rules as well. The only change I made to the Fubar system, and this is just me, is the activation roll. I went with a 2d6 roll, like Lion Rampant and all of its clones, with a green unit needing a 7, seasoned 6, veteran 5, and elite 4. You roll that or higher of course adding the dice together. I like your limited move and fire for the heavy weapon systems. I had just used the standard FP numbers for the various weapons on the modern Fubar sheet, grenade launcher heavy MG etc. and I noticed you change some ranges and FP numbers which I will also copy.
Thanks again for making your work available.