Low Level Campaigning in WWII?

[quidveritas]

Have any of you done any WWII campaigning at a relatively low level?

I’ve been chipping away at a set of campaign rules for WWII project.  Players run a platoon in most games.  Very often a game will consist of a company (+).

What factors are important to you (from a campaign perspective) at this level?

How “big” should the entire campaign area be?

How long (meaning approximately how many games) should the campaign be designed to last?

No need to be scientific here.  Just looking to mine the experience of those that have gone before.

mjc

[Yukon5G]

I haven’t done such a thing, but the Lardies have. You might take a look at “At the Sharp End” their campaign sourcebook for “Chain of Command.”

 

http://toofatlardies.co.uk/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=143&zenid=63c5fbc310993098962a519bbb643d36

Sink meh!

[Ivan Sorensen]

quidveritas wrote:

Have any of you done any WWII campaigning at a relatively low level? I’ve been chipping away at a set of campaign rules for WWII project. Players run a platoon in most games. Very often a game will consist of a company (+). What factors are important to you (from a campaign perspective) at this level? How “big” should the entire campaign area be? How long (meaning approximately how many games) should the campaign be designed to last? No need to be scientific here. Just looking to mine the experience of those that have gone before. mjc

 

I did this for 5 Men in Normandy which is a straight up skirmish game (a squad or less, though you can nudge it up).

At that scale, the individual soldiers are important, so we have stuff like random events (get in a fight, get a letter from home etc.) and developing individual skills.

The area is fairly vague since at that scale, you wouldn’t be making decisions about what happens. If you mapped it out, it’d be the immediate surroundings but that’d depend on whether the overall war effort is advancing or not.

I didn’t worry too much about a specific length. Each game advances the campaign 1D6 days and players might follow a calendar of real events or just have that stuff happen in the background. The length is mainly important for things like injury recovery. There is an event built in that will end the campaign the second time it comes up, but the chance is fairly low (about 5% per game, I believe, without looking it up)

[McLaddie]

You really should look at the campaign system in “The Sharp End” by TooFatLardies.  It is very flexible, can be any length of time, any area and can be map driven. It is for Chain of Command, a platoon-level game, but it really isn’t bounded by that.  It does include following characters, medals, etc.  and you can add all the details, chance events and such that you want.  It has been fun customizing it to the Spanish Civil War.

[has.been]

Many many years ago I read an article about ‘Sideshows’ i.e. little engagements that would have an impact on the big picture. The example given was an ACW game of about company size somewhere not far from Appomatox Courthouse. If the Confederates win, then that is why Grant give Lee such generous terms, if they lose then that is why Lee surrenders. It give a reason for the two sides to fight.

For my own experiences on campaigns, and there have been many, I would recomend what I call the ‘Coat hanger’ method. e.g. Having aquired half a dozen dirt cheap  out of date tourist maps of the island of Rhodes, we based a WW2 campaign on it. We listed everything we had (that was WW2:-20mm inf/vehicles,; 1/600 ships; 1/300 aircraft; 28mm skirmish figures etc) Each side (Allied & Axis) then wrote down where it was (e.g. 1 german destroer & 4 E-boats in Lindos harbour. 1 section of German infantry in the Acropalis of Lindos & so on) We did not fight and/or move everything (would have taken far too much effort) instead when we wanted a game we first decided what it should be (Air dogfight/ comando raid/ landing etc.) both sides knew what they had available but were unsure as to the enemy as they were allowed to exaggerate or conceal up to a pre aggreed level. This led to some very interesting games. The German Navy’s attempt to break out  of Lindos was a complete disaster as they though the Royal Navy player was exagerating his strength to keep them bottled up (just like Graf Spee) but it turned out he was concealing a Cruiser ! In an other game the Allies planned a big landing on the Northwest coast, not far from the Airfield in an attempt to bypass stubborn resistance & capture the airfield. Their origional landings in the  southwest hads been almost unopposed, (what can I say we didn’t have enough men/equipment to cover all of the possible landing sites) but stiffening German resistance had blocked their progress up the west of the island. The allied attackers were played by 6 different club members the defenders just 2. It looked like the defenses were strong (Trenches, pillboxes, MG positions & a dug in tank) but it was an exageration, in reality the trenches were empty, as were the pill boxes and the tank was a wooden dummy. Still the attackers were all very keen to not be the player to attack first. We had ammo & fuel restrictions (simply draw a card at the start of the game, as a result the attackers all thought the reason the Germans were not firing was to conserve ammo for short range, when some brave/stupid allied player rushed them across the barbed wire, which they were sure was mined. In the game one MG teamheld up over 120 Allied infantry, who had five 6pdr guns & 5 moves of naval fire support, untill two truck loads of Italian infantry could be rushed up from the Airfield.  Much fun was had from this style of campaign, and  it avoided many of the reasons previous campaigns had failed.

[piers brand]

I have been writing a platoon level campaign system for Battlegroup, where each player takes his platoon through fighting in Normandy.

 

Only a very basic simple system that I must get around to updating after playtests…

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