(last update: O6.24."10)
Some of us wargamers live in a desert, hobby-wise, and are condemned to solo gaming. They can then feel somehow marginalized, despite the possibilities of exchange via the Internet. But now they can play a more active part in a collective effort.Web campaigns (such as the one on the 'Emperor vs Elector' blog) associate players from different continents: it will happen that the armies of John in Ottawa will challenge the forces of James in Sydney. Unless both are millionaires they cannot meet face to face to play the battle. Having the game played by only one of them with a local friend would be highly unsatisfactory for a lot of reasons. Now, they are battlegamers to the heart, they do not want the decision to rest on several dice throws - they want a detailled battle report, where the exploits & failures of each & every general and regiment is precisely recorded. They need a proxy to fight the battle for them and report it.
Here enters our solo wargamer, isolated say in Rio de Janeiro. What rules he uses is irrelevant - anyway no good battle report refers to the games mechanisms (would you imagine a witness of Fontenoy describing the battle in a letter to the Court, who would interrupt the entralling flow of events for a discussion of the physics of a cannonball trajectory, or the physiology of the exhilarating effect of black powder smoke?). No matter if he uses big batallions or DBx-scaled skeletal units. What minis he deploys on the tabletop is meaningless, no one will bother -or even know- if he has to muster WWI russians &/or unpainted indians and cow-boys to field the required number of units. The only point of importance is a strict, unambiguous, one-to-one correspondance between the OB and the forces (characters and units) deployed on the tabletop. Actually, to feel unbiased, the battle gamer don't need to know the nationalities of the two armies. He just has to know the map, the exact composition of forces A and B, their initial dispositions and general orders; but he don't have to know who is A and who is B. It would be the duty of some kind of scribe, secretary, to act as a go-between the campaign players and the battle gamer, and to translate the OB into coded, unrecognizable names, so that he can easily translate back the detailled battle report written by the battlegamer into a text understandable by the 2 campaign players, with the actual names of their generals and regiments (the 'replace' function of Word comes nicely!).
Solo wargamers are often of a solitary disposition: note they are emphatically NOT required to bother to be part of the campaign, all what is expected from them is to agree to play a battle as proxy and send a report to the 'secretary'. But thus they would be part of a common effort, with just the tabletop game to play if they don't wish to be more involved.
If you don't want to mix your own solo campaign with the main one, you can place your country(ies) far away from Europe. Actually the European Courts are milling with rumours of the recent discovery of an immense 7th Continent in the Pacific Ocean.
Of course such type of participation as "proxy tabletop generals" is in no way restricted to solo wargamers. Pairs of friends meeting regularly can agree to play a battle 'for others'. I'm thinking for instance, among mythical SYW groups of gamers, to the "Aldoberg-Holstein / St Maurice" and "Rubovia / Empire" pairs or to the "Mieczyslaw"/ Duchy of the North"/ Saxe-Bearstein" troika.. Will a wargamer, the impedimenta of Real Life™ allowing, decline an opportunity to bring his army to life on the tabletop? Will this peculiar battle be integrated in their own campaign & storyline is of course entirely up to them.
The ‘Emperor vs Elector’ blog http://emperor-elector.blogspot.com/ is devoted to a diplomatic and wargaming campaign between fictitious Lace Wars countries. Here you’ll find links to the 22+ (currently) blogs each devoted to one or several ImagiNations. Some are just emerging, other already offer the map, history and descriptions of the armed forces of the blogger’s country. On some of them you’ll also find links to similar blogs not (yet) integrated in the campaign. To these I add two relevant web sites:
To quote Jeff Hudelson, owner of the ‘EvE’ blog: Here is the URL of "Emperor vs Elector". Read through back posts and see if you'd like to join us: http://emperor-elector.blogspot.com/
-If you'd like to join the group blog, "Emperor vs Elector", please email me at . . . bluebearjeff@shaw.ca . . . and I'll see that you get an invitation.
7 comments:
On Sunday oct. 21 a triangular encounter took place between the armies of Frankzonia, Stagonia and the defenders of the town of Offenbach, belonging to the Soweiter League. The original point is that the rulers of Frankzonia and the League live in Arkansas and Southern California respectively (and for various reasons never endvisaged to meet across the tabletop) while the ‘actual' battle is fought in British Columbia (where the Stagonian King lives in our Real World™) by a group of ‘neutral' wargamers, Murdock and his ‘Marauders’ acting as ‘proxies' for the Frankzonian and Soweiterer rulers.
An account of the battle (written by Michael Murdock) is available (with some pictures) on the "Emperor vs Elector"" group blog.
Hopefully this example will be largely followed, allowing a totally new level of interplay between the 34 (at the date of this premiere) Lace Wars Imagi-Nation creators contributing to the "Emperor vs Elector" campaign. The 'meeting' blog will thus become far more useful to its contributors!
Oct 31: Murdock posted a juicy report of this BATTLE OF OFFENBACH, with eye-candy photos as usual.
Nov. 03: Following this successful ‘premiere’, another ‘battle by proxy’ –this time a ‘neutral’ solo wargamer controlling the forces from 7 other players scattered across whole North America– will take place near the town of Tippelbruder.
Really a pet (obsessional ?) idea of mine! Browsing the archived messages of ‘Emperor vs Elector’ I realize I submitted it without any shame of repeating myself in late september AND early october! Senility, or professional deformation after 38+ years of teaching?
Thank you for the comment support abdul666, there is a certain pleasure in seeing others having some entertainment from what we have been doing.
Cheers
Merci
[posted on the TMP as soon as Arthur issued his preliminary After Action Bulletin; updated with links to the posts relating the successive steps of the battle , and to the Photo Report.
Also added links to the Battle of Unter-Schweingau]
EvE, BATTLES BY ‘PROXIES’, SOLO WARGAMERS, WEB CAMPAIGNS BETWEEN BLOGS and FICTITIOUS 18th C. COUNTRIES / ARMIES
(°- Xposted on the VSF & SF boards since several regular posters there showed an interest in fictitious Lace Wars campaigns, at least if ‘spiced’ with Sci-Fi elements: perfectly endvisageable here if kept «Oversky»,
°- Xposted on the Pirates board since some postersare interested in conflicts in the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbeanat a later date, while as in History conflicts in Mythical Europe are echoed in the New World. And also because the situation there may be quite different from what ‘we know’ (traditionalist Spanish troops still in morion by the mid-18th C., e.g.), and piracy may still be rampant).
Re. A (fictitious) Lace Wars *After Action Bulletin* just posted on his *blog* by a SOLO wargamer.
After the successful ‘premiere’ «battle by proxy» of the ‘Emperor vs Elector' web group the ‘battle of Tippelbruder’ was planned. Owing to the hard realities of ‘The Real World™’ it was fought only on jan. 27.
This time, a SOLO wargamer acting as a neutral ‘proxy’ played (using of course his own minis and favorite rules) the battle following the map movements of no less than 8 different forces. The interesting point is that the ‘proxy’ lives in Arkansas, while the army of a fictitious 18th C. country ‘from British Columbia’ challenged the converged contingents sent by 7 gamers scattered across the whole North America and Great Britain.
Of course PBM, then PbeM wargame campaign exist for decades. BUT the originality here is that the EvE group don’t bother with distances, duration of travels and logistics: map movements are just *excuses* for such ‘battles by proxy’, adding enjoyable exchanges between members of that congenial, convivial and collegial bunch.
Such ‘proxy battles’ are gratifying both for the Solo wargamers who are fully part of a common effort, and for the ‘proxied’ players who are allow to campaign together while they could never, materially, meet across a table-top. Thus the members of ‘EvE’ are currently ‘stirring the pot’ in their web campaign to multiply the opportunites for such games in 2008.
The OOB, flags and uniforms of the battle of Unter Schweingau are already on display.
Then this group of Imagi-Nation rulers scattered up to tens thousands of miles apart, will enjoy far more than just the possibility to exchange local news and jolly diplomatic missives. Before the instauration of such ‘battles by proxy’ the Mythical Europe was divided in as many *independant* theatres of operations as many ‘local groups’: Gallia vs Hesse-Seewald (Bill Protz vs Jim Purky, to mention names notunknown here), the ‘Mieczyslaw – Norden – Saxe-Beartsein triangle’… and, chiefly, as many warring pairs of Imagi-Nations as there are solo gamers in the group. With the ‘proxied battles’, all can potentially interfere / interact – providing to all a gratifying feeling of ‘sharing’ and ‘belonging’.
BTW, with reference to my previous posts on this board, I have now on my blog 59 working «Fict» links to blogs or sites devoted to fictitious Lace Wars Imagi-Nation(s), and 7 more such fictitious countries are richely and –regularly illustrated in the messages, Files and Photos folders of the Old School Wargaming and SocDaisy Yahoo groups.
If you know of a currently active Lace Wars fictitious wargaming Country not repertoried on my listing, please carry forward the info!
Best,
Jean-Louis
Aka Louys of Monte-Cristo, that crazy ruler of a Monaco-like micro-statelet who dreams of sending aether-popelled dirigibles to Mars, perhaps in the hope of bringing back Martian Askaris and Sepoys to reinforce his skeletal military forces.
BATTLES BY PROXIES IN THE 'EvE' COMMUNITY
'Battles by proxies' are among the enjoyable interactions between members of the friendly 'Emperor vs Elector' group, the League of Lace Wars Imagi-Nations.
They were instituted at first when two members rule countries with a common border on the campaign map, but live thousands of miles apart in the real world: since they cannot meet across a tabletop, their encounter is played by a neutral third party.
The Crooked Kobold affair, typically, while fought by a local group in Indiana implied contingents and characters representative of several players, some living in Canada and Great Britain! Such also was the battle of Neu Isenberg proxy-fought in Vancouver between armies 'from' very distant locations in the USA.
But such 'battles by proxies' can also be precious in other circumstances:
-when a solo gamer is unsure of his fairness / unprejudiced approach in a a decisive battle,
-when a player lacks models (gunboats, e.g.) needed for a single encounter of exceptional nature,
-when health problems prevent a gamer to play for some time, so putting the whole, multi-player campaign to the halt.
Thus in this june 2010 four 'battles by proxies' are fought in the 'EvE' cadre:
-'Littlejohn' of Lead Gardens fought the Dunkeldorf-Pfühl raid on the basis of the Hetzenberger riverine flotilla: a magnificient after action report in 5 parts:prelude, action 1, action 2, action 3, finale.
Gallia fights in the help of Frankzonia: AAR chapter 1, AAR chapter 2.
As Frankfurter's proxies Murdockand his son fought another Frankzonian battle.
and a third 'Frankzonian proxy' is planned.
These 'battles by proxies' are not only convenient for the 'proxied', but provide the 'proxies' players an enjoyable opportunity to play an unexpected battle, and give all of us a sense of 'belonging' to the same brotherhood.
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