There really aren't many other examples of games that follow that pattern, despite the fact that this was almost certainly the original play style of the Lake Geneva "living fantasy" campaigns that gave birth to modern role-playing. The combat rules were borrowed from miniatures (Chainmail), and it was understood that players would build their own castles and acquire little fiefdoms full of soldiers and mercenaries. So there's a certain logic to creating a "fantasy Starfire" game, a strategy-RPG hybrid that can scratch the itch of players who want to run armies instead of just heroes. I'm not aware of any other strategy wargames but Starfire that use a referee/gamemaster, but if anyone knows of any, I'd be interested in hearing about them!
At the moment, I've been following the fundraising drive for something called Domains at War, which looks like it might fit the bill. It's written in such a way that it looks primarily oriented toward the cooperative style of play popular with RPG groups, but I think the economic balancing is tight enough that it could be easily adapted for a competitive game between players running rival kingdoms or alliances. The rules are extremely extensive, allowing resolution at three levels (strategic/abstract, 120:1 miniatures, and man-to-man), with the promise of consistency between the outcomes of all three levels of combat resolution. This all looks very appealing, especially since the abstracted combat allows for the quick resolution of mismatched battles without much uncertainty in their outcome. (Being forced to fight a doomed battle was always a chore in Starfire!)I'll be reading through the rules over the next few weeks, to see how well they might work for creating a fantasy campaign on the strategic level, with players controlling territory and sending armies against one another (or against the non-player races of a referee).
Victory by Any Means is another science-fiction grand strategy game that is written for use with a referee. I have heard it is less complex than Starfire, though.
ReplyDeleteSome of Ground Zero Games' wargames have features which seem intended to work with a referee; we always played Stargrunt with one, at least.
Thanks for supporting the Domains at War kickstarter. I am a fan of "strategy role-playing games" myself. I haven't run Starfire (though I've read the books), but in college our wargame-rpg club ran rpg campaigns with heavy wargaming components, and vice versa, ranging from Car Wars to Blue Max to Mekton.
ReplyDeleteI've personally used Domains at War in both of my two ACKS playtest campaigns to good results, with the players being able to enjoy the full scope of a strategy game embedded within our RPG.
One note is that D@W is a game system rather than a game. To enjoy it as a strictly campaign game in the absence of an RPG you'd have to do some work to create the campaign scenario. It would be less work than setting up an RPG campaign, but still some work - it's not an out of the box strategy game the way, e.g., an Avalon Hill game might be.
Actually almost all formal wargame campaigns had referees. Mainly because you haven't seen rules-lawyering until you've seen two grown men shouting at each other as to whether troops could have moved that extra 2mm to engage the enemy on the tabletop. Plus it's the only way you can convincingly get the fog of war effects on a strategic scale and to resolve all the situations that are not covered by the explicit rules. And you can never create an explicit set of rules to cover all situations in the first case, unless you make the game too simplistic to be interesting (chess, anyone).
ReplyDeleteEven conventional boardgames can work well with referees in this manner. For instance there was one classic game of SPI's Midway ran at Uni that featured three maps (one for the Japanese, one for the Americans, and one for the referee that had the true picture in three different rooms). [To make matters worse both the Americans and Japanese were played by teams of players each with explicit commands that were at times difficult to talk to each other (with radio silence). Fun.] Even chess can be played with a referee against an invisible opponent.
This is in fact where roleplaying got the idea of a referee (and in fact concept of a "campaign"). For example, Dave Arneson's Egg of Coot Society was a wargames group and the original Blackmoor was a wargame campaign - where the leaders of the various armies and factions went off to do stuff. It was often much more (to use modern terminology), PvP rather than player vs gamemaster. Gygax on the other hand was very much a player vs gamemaster kind of guy, and under his influence that became the default (and it was usually the "player" vs the gamemaster/dungeon, not the "character" vs the gamemaster/dungeon).
Starfire wasn't bad, although it does suffer from David's preoccupation with the Pacific War (and his belief that carriers are the be all and end all of any naval combat game, whether it be at see or in space, and even if you have to create special rules and special physics to cover the fact that fighters can exist as an effective military space force in the first place). Which after the third or fourth iteration (I think HH series is the fourth) gets a bit boring. [To truly understand the development of Starfire you have to go back to the original Task Force Games pocket editions (Starfire I, II, and III) to see the evolution.]
Modern Starfire was incredibly refined (I think Imperial Starfire was two or three generations ago) from play experience, and although they were trying to move it into the computer sphere they were having a marked lack of success in doing so. They were looking for a new IP to replace the old David Weber and Steve White created one (there are also a set of novels set in the later Starfire universe [Insurrection, Crusade, Stars at War, and On Death Ground
from memory, although you can hear the dice rolling in the background of the last one or two]). At least before they got distracted by EVE online.
Personally I have a soft spot for TSR's Space Empires (and the prequel Star Probe - where you were an solitary explorer looking for commercial opportunities). Which even had a "hyperspace generator field" that caused technology to fail and magic to work, and suggested that you might like to try their new game Dungeons & Dragons for rules for this eventuality.
Nope. Referees where quite common (and necessary) way back when. As were the strategic fantasy games you are lamenting the lack of. It was the RPG that was the johnny-come-lately on the scene.
I thought even in our limited run that DaW worked rather well for PvP strategic/Campaigns action. Yes, you may need to fuddle a bit with it, but who are we kidding, as GMs/Referees we fuddle with every system. I think each PvP campaign would likely have its own set of house rules based upon the setting's needs. I hope to offer to referee some PvP realm size games post DaW release. I think with enough folks of like-minded intent to run armies and possibly side-dive RPG sessions, you can run a PvP rather easily with DaW: Campaigns alongside DaW: Battles. I'd love to see more of your opinions on the topic of strategic role-playing as DaW is released Prof. Hamilton.
ReplyDelete(and I should mention, by "our limited run" I mean that I did a short playtest of the campaign rules with Alex.) Also, here is my blog where I have a few ACKS articles on domain building - http://lairoflubidius.blogspot.com/
ReplyDeleteamongst other tidbits...
I've been reading through Jon Peterson's Playing at the World, which has given me a much better sense of the historical origins of refereed games systems. Most of them still seem to have been used on the tactical level, like Pratt's Naval War Game using an umpire to adjudicate submarine placement. The idea of a huge strategic-level game being able to use a neutral judge to implement hidden construction and movement, or to run neutral nations or scripted events over an extended campaign, is relatively unusual and seems like a distinctive feature of the RPG world. I'm talking about today, at least, not back in the late 60s (before I was born!)
ReplyDeleteI do have a copy of the original pocket version of the Starfire rules. I admit that after successive development through various iterations, it became almost unplayable in complexity. But I was always charmed by Weber's deliberating aping of the Samuel Eliot Morrison style, with interludes in folksy, partisan prose. I actually preferred his more compact campaign scenario book format (Stars at War, etc) over the novels. I haven't played any of the newer released versions (post 3rd edition revised), mostly because they don't have the same flavor aspects. (And partly because I was annoyed with the way that Marvin Lamb treated Steve Walmsley, but that's a longer story.)