Welcome back to Firefight Fridays. Last week we covered the game’s bot, how it works, and the design philosophy behind it. This week we are wrapping up Firefight Fridays with a subject I am very excited about. I have mentioned many times over the course of this series how I wanted it to be easy and rewarding to build custom scenarios for Firefight Tactical. Even the core game scenarios themselves were designed in part to demonstrate the ease of making tweaks to the system to significantly alter gameplay. This week we will be talking about the logic behind custom scenario creation. Let’s jump in.

Generating History

It was originally my intention to include a random scenario generator in the core box. In truth, I am tremendously happy with the random scenario generator, but it was cost prohibitive for it to be included while having the flexibility I wanted it to have. Maybe it will come out some time in the future. Even though it couldn’t fit in the box though I still wanted to let players get their feet wet making scenarios if that was something they wanted to do. What I elected to do was to take the balance logic that runs the random scenario generator and include it without the random tables that guarantee the outcome. Building your own scenarios is a very quick and easy multistep process. We will cover each decision in order.

Parts We Play

The first thing to decide is whether this will be an attacker/defender scenario or a skirmish (effectively both sides are attacking). Each game type has different available objectives so this should be decided on first. Further, you should also decide if it is an attack/defend scenario which player will be attacking and which will be defending.

Regardless of the game type you can always play a Standard Battle. This is to say that the Withdrawal Limit is selected automatically for both sides and you just play until one side withdraws. The Withdrawal Limit will vary depending on the game type as well as the size of the Battlegrid.

For attack and defend scenarios there are two other stock objective options. The first is Capture, which matches the objectives of most of the core game scenarios. The defender controls a piece of terrain and the attacker needs to take it. There are a couple of sub-flavors of this game type, as the objective can begin play face up or face down and hidden a la “To the Last Man, to the Last Cartridge.” The number of the objectives to be controlled also will scale with the size of the Battlegrid. The other stock objective for attack and defend scenarios is Hold. In Hold the attacker needs to push the defender out of the forward half of their setup area. Whereas Capture is more about precision strikes, Hold is about broad attacks.

For skirmish scenarios there are also two stock objective options beside Standard Battle. The first is Overrun. In Overrun you are looking to push into the enemy side of the map. At the end of the scenario (assuming it didn’t end due to withdrawal) you look at each unit you have in your opponent’s half of the Battlegrid. Each unit is worth victory points equal to how many rows past the midline it has made it into enemy territory. The other objective type is High Ground. It is very similar to Overrun, except that when counting units for points at the end of the scenario, they are worth points equal to the inverse of the TEM of the terrain they occupy. The side with the best ending position wins.

Choosing a Battlefield

The next important part is figuring out the Battlegrid. First you must select a size. The size chosen will have a huge impact on the rest of the scenario configuration. It decides the base size of your forces, the number of dice, the number of objective zones if playing Capture, and obviously has a lot to do with the play time of the scenario. It will also tell you your setup zones depending on the game type and objectives.

Once you have selected the size of the Battlegrid, we start getting into the fun part, choosing your terrain. The rulebook will list stock decks for various battlefields, from urban scenarios to wetland scenarios. You are of course encouraged to modify these terrain decks as you wish. They merely exist as a leaping off point that will give you roughly the feel you are looking for.

Hand Picked Squad

The next key thing to do is choose your forces. This will be a simple point buy system, although there will be recommended force lists for attack vs defense at the varying Battlegrid sizes. I would again recommend starting with a stock force list and then altering it to add pieces you really want rather than building one from scratch.

I Thought this was a Dice Game?

The last bit is to select the dice. You can choose these intentionally, or if you prefer (which I usually do) draw them randomly out of a bag and assign them to the private reserves, common pool, and timer.

On the subject of rolling dice, I hope to one day see players come up with awesome, thematic, and unique scenario events. If you want to play with them and not take the time to write them though, there are already events for each of the objective types.

Not Goodbye Forever

That will do it for the last Firefight Friday article. I have been writing these things for almost a half a year. Thank you to all those of you who have made a point of reading these. I set out to write this article series to give you all a better idea of the product you are supporting and give you a feel for who I am as a designer. Hopefully I haven’t left you running screaming in the opposite direction.

I have stated many times that I have big plans for this system in the future. I am increasingly confident that we can make many, if not all, of those plans happen. I want to say a most sincere thank you to everyone who has put in a P500 order. It is because of you that I have been able to finally start making these silly cardboard dreams of mine a reality. I will see you all back on here, and perhaps on YouTube, when I start having some art to share. Until then!

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