Crisis Point 2021 Report

With a few weeks' perspective (albeit most of the weekends spent driving around the country taking offspring to and from various universities) I now feel able to make some comments on Crisis Point 2021 and how it panned out.

First the positive - it looked fantastic! I'll throw in a few pictures throughout this report. 

For starters, Kevin Tingle's half-repaired, old Mogul fort was excellent.  

Richard Phillips and Will McNally contributed much of the remainder of the terrain. Sorry I don't seem to have a better picture of Richard's excellent cliff-top native village...

... and his large number of mud-brick buildings made a huge contribution to both game-play and the appearance of the various towns and villages of the islands.

As far as the rules were concerned, Sharp Practice proved, as expected, excellent for producing fun play. Experience confirmed that the rocket rules were well-worth the effort that went into converting the figures.

The card driven system did slow things down, though, and we didn't get in as much action as I'd have liked.

The event saw us returning to the approach of playing a whole campaign on a single, very large table. Actually it turned out to be three tables - one representing the whole of Grand Woebetide, and two smaller ones representing the lesser land masses, Petit Woebetide and Edward Henry Island. 

There were twelve main forces - three each for the British, French, Arabs, and native Woebetideus. Each of these had a main player running them but I also included a few additional places for players representing junior leaders. This was necessary because I couldn't guarantee to have exactly the right number of players.

I'd originally intended that the group of regular players should get involved in the development of the plot. However, the further I got into planning, the more it seemed to me that the event would be improved if the players didn't know all the details of what was going on. As a result I ended up plotting out at least Day One almost as if I were the author of an adventure novel.

I'd arranged things such that each (non-player) overall commander would specify three jobs that needed doing. The players would decide how to share out the resulting missions between their forces. This should spread out the friendly forces such that they couldn't all concentrate on a single opponent, which would have ended the action early and potentially ruined the victim's fun.

I didn't know which player-forces would be carrying out which missions but I did know that if things went according to plan each player should get a decent day's gaming against a similarly-sized force. Sure, as events unfolded local fights would merge and we'd end up with a more complex free-for-all but hopefully by then no-one would feel like they'd been left out in the cold.

Right from the start this didn't work out as planned. One of the players decided that he would ignore his orders and begin by supporting a friend's force at entirely the wrong end of the island! This meant both that the friend's opponent was outnumbered two-to-one but also that our miscreant's opponent was left with no-one to fight! I had gone into the event keen to say "yes" to players' imaginative solutions to problems but in retrospect maybe I should have stood up for the plot in this case. I was forced to quickly change the briefing of the opponent-less player so as to allow him to get involved in the action.

Another downside of the single-author approach to the event was that some players weren't able to properly digest the available support options. 

I was forced to give out the orders and support options on the morning of the event. Ideally players should have had these the week before and could have turned up fully briefed and ready to go but uncertainty about player availability made this impossible. As it happened I lost four players in the weeks immediately before the event and another two discovered that they couldn't do the whole weekend. Yet another was expected until the morning of Day One. If I'd sent out briefings in advance I'd have had to say to some players, "Forget what you know, you're now playing someone else!"

It's a shame the support choices weren't all used to full effect. I'd put a lot of work into them, designing characters that made best use of the available figures. I was particularly pleased with Sir Warwick Bimble. This British gentleman counted as a Leader but had no military talent at all in his own right. However, the men loved him as his constant bumbling kept them amused. 

Sir Warwick accompanies the British troops
fighting for control of Port Charles

I'd declared that he served two practical purposes. Firstly he was an extra body - if the real Leader he was with was determined to be a casualty, there was a 50% chance Sir Warwick would be affected instead. Secondly, if Sir Warwick did become a casualty, the men would be furious. This had the effect that they would roll on the "bad things happen" table but apply the result in reverse - a force could see their Force Morale go up if Sir Warwick were shot! Unfortunately, it was part-way through the second day that I realised Sir Warwick was still off-table as the controlling player hadn't understood the value of having him around.

Despite all of the above, the game moved along sufficiently that by the end of Day One we had exhausted all of the "plot" I'd set up in advance.

A lot of time had been wasted on Day One trying to put together decks of cards for each "sub-game". For Day Two I decided to go with a single deck for the whole room and to basically let the players decide what they would do with their forces. Day Two was more relaxed for me as a result.

In the end I think Crisis Point 2021 was a mixed success. 

I'm glad we got to try out Sharp Practice on such a large scale. I don't think that was a complete failure. 

From a plot point of view, I'm not inclined to say "We must carry on from where we left off". There were some, frankly silly, events that I wouldn't regard as realistic in an on-going timeline.  My plan is to do more gaming in the Woebetides but I'll be rebooting the setting and starting again as if the events of Crisis Point didn't take place. That way we can make best use of the effort that went into producing the forces and terrain for the game.