Running Brasshats & Brassards on line

Onside report by Jim Wallman

A few months ago I ran my First World War command post game at CLWG in hybrid format, with higher commanders on line and more junior commanders in the room, along with a hidden map run by map controls in a different part of the hall.

The purpose of this game is to simulate the decision-making and communications challenges of a Brigade (or possibly even division) headquarters on the Western Front in the First World War.  The working of the headquarters were simplified from a real military headquarters, but the game is aiming to generate the necessary confusion and lack of information to simulate something of the HQ operation during a battle.

We ran a brigade at the CLWG meeting, and I wanted to give it another go using players from my SPS Playtesting Group (many of whom are also CLWG members), this time completely on line.

Gameplay

There are no ‘game rules’ as such for the players to use. What the players get during the game is a series of reports ‘from the front’ in various forms (mostly runner, but can also be carrier pigeon or flare signal) provided by Game Control. Not all of these are accurate or complete or even in the right order. Sorting that out, and filtering the ‘noise’ is an important part of what players have to do.

Players then work as a team to use that information to prepare their pictures of what is going on (or situational awareness as it is known these days), and the Brigadier-General issues instructions to the their staff which are turned into orders and sent back to units (also by runner).

The game has all of this happening in real time – a minute in the game represents a minute in our simulated battle. Events don’t wait for the players and there are no ‘game turns’ in the conventional sense – things just keep happening; events do not wait while players discuss what to do.

The map controls assess whether orders get through and whether they have any impact on events. The main decisions for the HQ is the commitment of subsequent waves, or requests for help to higher headquarters. Control also simulates demands for information from higher formations. 

More importantly for the game is the way control has to maintain a constant, and reasonably realistic stream of reports from the NPC front line units to the brigade HQ – no simple task!

In the manual version at CLWG I tried to make this a tiny bit easier by pre-printing message forms and pre-writing some of the more obvious messages that might be sent.

Even so, keeping up a stream of timely messages (even at the rate of a message every two or three minutes or so) is quite a big demand on control.

The combat rules for control are simple in the extreme, so much so that after a couple of turns they can be pretty well memorised and actions can be resolved in seconds with a few rolls of dice – and since the players don’t see the battle map, occasional mistakes and fudging don’t matter much!

Online Game Structure

Following the outing at CLWG I was curious as to whether the game would be different (or even better) in an on-line format, so decided to run it with the SPS Playtester group. This group meets monthly on a Thursday evening on Discord, and attendance is variable (much like CLWG!) so I wasn’t sure of the takeup, expecting to run a single brigade. As it happened I had enough players coming forward to explore the Divisional game, with a Division HQ and two played front line brigades. Of course a number differences in the way the game was going to work were needed.

As I was the only control (as distinct from the 3 controls that ran the smaller face to face game) I had to be able to streamline the way the game was going to work.

To keep things simple I opted to have a non-played German side, so everybody was part of the British command structure.

The roles in the game were like this:

Each team had a link to a conceptboard map (below) showing their start positions and containing some information on the default plan (which they would be allowed to adjust in limited ways).

However, the teams were not allowed to see each other’s maps at any point. I could afford to ignore these maps in the game because they represented the player’s version of events – they could annotate and edit the map all they liked, I wasn’t going to correct any mistakes!

The important part for the players was intercommunication. The capabilities of Discord meant that I could do some interestingly subtle things to control player interaction once the game started.

Each of the two brigade teams had three text channels, that only they could see or type into:

#bde-incoming – messages from their front line units (which I would be generating)

#bde-outgoing – messages they were trying to send to their sub-units (which I would hopefully see and take action on)

#bde-internal – any text information they might want to share between themselves and a back up if their voice channel had issues.

#div-to-bde – a text link for them to send written (typed) messages between brigade and division.

Each brigade had a voice/video channel that only the players in the brigade HQ had access to. This simulated the fact they were all nominally in the same HQ bunker and could see and talk to each other freely.

Division was organised similarly, except that the Division didn’t have an ‘incoming’ channel – all its incoming messages were to come from brigades and not control.

Division also had an artillery channel, but only the Artillery Command had access to this – so only they could actually direct artillery (not any other member of the Divisional HQ) as directed by the commander.

Finally each team had a Signals player. The three Signals players had their own voice channel (but not video which was disabled in discord for this channel) simulating using the telephone between headquarters. Only the signals players could use the simulated telephone, giving them an interesting role in managing and interpreting information via a different, more direct, medium.

Players were asked not to use direct messaging or their phones to directly text each other, and keep all game communications purely in Discord.

Controlling the Online Game

As the only control I set up a physical version of the game map and counters on a table next to me with two monitor screens, one to monitor discord the other to manage messaging (see below).

I pre-gamed the first 15-20 minutes of the action, since there would be little the players could do to influence that phase of the battle, so communications would be largely one way from me to them during that time.

Probably the the most useful thing I had was a Google sheet to collate messages. This allowed me to pre-populate events in the right order, and with a subtle use of hidden columns and pull downs, copy and paste messages from the sheet direct into the text channels on Discord in seconds.

Pasted into Discord:

How It Went

Surprisingly well. The players all said they’d enjoyed the experience of total confusion!  The session ran with half an hour welcoming players and them getting themselves organised and resolving technicals, about one hour of gameplay and about half an hour of post game discussion and reflection.

My key takeaways were:

• • One control wasn’t enough (no surprise there) though because I was very familiar with what I was doing I scraped by. A hour of running the game was exhausting. The player feedback seemed to indicate that they weren’t aware of the control (=me) being overloaded because they attributed mistakes and delays as deliberate ‘fog of war’ which added to their enjoyment apparently!
  • The game ran more smoothly in the semi-hybrid (I had a physical map in the room) online format than in the manual face to face format.
  • Using a manual map to do the adjudication and moving units was much better from the Control point of view than using a purely digital map – it was both faster and clearer for me.
  • The same game would benefit from three controls – but – they would all need to be in the room and have their own connectivity to Discord and google.
  • Equipment.  There is no way round having multiple screens when running a multi-player / multi-team on line game.  I couldn’t have done it using just one laptop screen or without a proper keyboard (for speed and accuracy of typing).  I plugged an external keyboard into my laptop.  As most will know I also like to use a speakerphone when running a game rather than a microphone, this allows me to move around the room to do things at a map and still be heard properly (less important in this game as nearly all of the player-to-control communications were text based).
  • I forgot to remind players not to use a phone or tablet to connect – this is much harder for most players to play without a screen and keyboard. I also forget to remind people to use the app and not the web version of Discord. The app remembers you and your settings better and has better connectivity than the browser version.

Despite personally finding it quite demanding cognitively, it was enjoyable to run and I think this would be a good game to re-run as an online or hybrid CLWG session at some point.

I’d be super interested in any offside reports in MilMud from CLWG members (or anyone else) who were involved in either game.