Scenario Writing

This is Steven Petrick Posting.

A lot of people think that writing a scenario is the easiest thing in the world to do, but it is rarely as easy as they imagine. Often the problem is that the idea is good, but all the rules do not make it down on paper.

Recent example: An Orion Pirate ship is being surprised by a trap. The trap is a Q-ship and a bunch of other ships that will suddenly arrive over several turns to beat up on the Orion.

Sounds simple, but since the Orion Player KNOWS he is going to be ambushed (hard to avoid in a published scenario), already KNOWS the freighter is a Q-ship, WHY is he going to stick around? Nothing stops him from turning tail on Turn #1 and just leaving. A rule that forces him to approach the Q-ship still means that once the Q-ship says hello he has to stick around on the map waiting for the other ships to arrive. The scenario needs something more than the simple assumption that your Orion player will be want to stay and fight, it needs a reason for him to do so and some chance that doing so will let him win.

You can write scenarios about the glorious last battle of ship A, but you need to define something that the player who is going to run ship A can do to feel good about his own skill playing rather than that he is just a target for all the other players.

Then there are transcription errors that creep in. A player submitted a scenario, and as you read it you gradually realize that it requires more than one mapsheet to set up, at least at the start, but he makes no mention of this.

Another player assumed a salvo of weapons fired before the battle began, but completely ignored the fact that his at start deployment made it possible for the ships firing the salvo to also fire their rear weapons (increasing their firepower by 30%).

Then there are those simply pick some ships and write a scenario without ever looking at the ships. (One player, for example, recently submitted a scenario in which a key point of the battle rested on the use of the two ESGs on a Lyran ship that does not have ANY ESGs.)

Writing scenarios looks easy, but it takes the time to actually look at the ships you want to use, see if they are available (no problem with writing "what if" scenarios as long as you tell everyone they are "what if" rather than historical), and try to actually push them around and see what could happen. You might discover that the neat idea is unworkable, or spot that loophole that needs to be closed before you submit it for playtesting.