When it comes to writing your own miniature wargame, scenario creation is one of those things that can't be ignored. Good scenarios will draw players into the game (and maybe get the gears turning for writing their own missions/quests) while bad ones will leave your ruleset languishing on the bookshelf. So how do you write good scenarios?
Before you start writing your scenarios, consider the type of game you're making. Some scenario or mission types might fit some games better than others. For example, an "Annihilate" scenario fits much better with a platoon-level skirmish game than it does with one where you're a wizard tasked with finding and safeguarding ancient knowledge.
Good scenarios, whether they're for 10-model-per-side skirmish games or company-level WWII wargames, should:
In order to showcase these concepts, we'll take a look at them through the lens of my favorite WWII battles, the assault on Brecourt Manor.
So how do we get players interested? The best way is to give them context - why are they fighting this particular scenario? Are they Dick Winters at Brecourt Manor? Leonidas at the Hot Gates? Having this sort of context makes for a much more thrilling scenario than "first to five Victory Points wins".
Here's an example:
June 6, 1944.
Le Grand Chemin, France.
It is the morning of D-Day. After a hellish drop that left E Company scattered all along the Cotentin Peninsula and multiple engagements through the pre-dawn hours, you have finally managed to link up with battalion HQ at the hamlet of Le Grand Chemin. By morning, only 23 men from Company E have assembled. Regardless, there's work to be done - orders have come down from Captain Hester: "There's fire along that hedgerow there. Take care of it."
This little bit of fluff tells players who they are (Dick Winters/Company E) and what they're doing - more than enough to get a game going.
It's not enough for a scenario to have good fluff - it needs to be challenging for all of the players involved. The challenge can be scalable - introductory scenarios need to be relatively uncomplicated to familiarize players with the rules - but the outcome needs to not be a given every time.
An important part of making things challenging is that every challenge the players face needs to be one they can surmount. If a player needs to get across to the other side of the board in six turns, the board needs to be small enough that the slowest of his units can cross it in six turns.
Challenges for your players can be symmetric (offering equal risk and opportunity to all sides) like two similar armies facing off against each other on an open field: alternatively, obstacles may be asymmetic - fewer troops vs more, more experienced troops vs conscripts, etc.
Brecourt Manor offers a good example: Winters had 22 other paratroopers with him, compared to the 60-or-so Germans manning the artillery battery - about a 3:1 numerical disadvantage. The Germans also had double the number of machine guns (4 to Winters' 2) which the Americans negated using the element of surprise - something you can simulate by giving the American player the first turn.
All scenarios should present your players with obstacles, and each obstacle should present players with a choice - preferably with more than two options. This gives your games an element of unpredictability. Will your men deploy in the trees to the north, or will they attempt to creep along the southern hedgerows and take the MG crews by surprise?
Never give your players just one way to solve a problem - single-solution problems never make for interesting games. Conversely, don't make the solution to a problem something that's totally dependent on chance (such as reinforcements arriving on a roll of 6, which might never happen).
When it comes to designing routes to reach an objective (and counters to those routes), not all of them need to be promising - they just have to all be possible under the right circumstances.
When it comes to writing good victory conditions, make sure you do the following:
Using our Brecourt Manor scenario as an example, the Americans might have the following victory conditions:
Conversely, the Germans might have these victory conditions:
Giving both sides different victory conditions, as well as providing conditions for both major and minor victories, makes sure that no game is exactly the same - and that players have a reason to keep fighting on once things start going south.
Once you have your scenario all written up, it's time to test it. The best players to test these sorts of scenarios are malignant ones - people who want to take advantage of any and every loophole in the scenario and exploit it so that they can win. Make sure you run through the scenario at least 2-3 times so that you can iron out the defects. You'll know you have a good scenario when, despite every attempt of your players to break it, it still turns out as a good game for both sides.