Scenario or not to Scenario

One of the Mail Call questions from Epsisode 3 of All About Miniatures was why miniature gamers do not embrace scenarios in the same way board gamers do. In that show, I said I would think about it and make a blog post. So here we go.

The most obvious reason is that for a scenario to be effective you need to have all the troops outlined in the scenario. For a board game this is never a problem because the scenario that came with the game was designed to use the counters and components in the game. Miniature gamers, on the other hand, have more freedom over their collections; and, more often than not, the collection won’t match a published scenario.

When I think of miniature wargaming periods that embrace scenarios, it is usually those where the troop types are more generic: Napoleonics, ACW, ECW, etc. It’s easy to make the 14th Ohio stand in for the 7th Pennsylvania; it’s not so easy to make a Panzer III stand in for a King Tiger.

Another thing about miniature gamers is that they must make a larger emotional investment in their game than a board gamer. To a board gamer, the game is simply a collection of cardboard like any other; but, a miniature gamer must plan his army, make the purchase, and spend the time painting it. Because of this, miniature armies are often personality extensions. When I used to play 40K, I liked the idea of using lots of heavy weapons to engage the enemy at range and have only one or two dedicated strike units. Another person might like the idea of charging the whole army warband style into the enemy for the glory of hand to hand combat. This can carry into historical games in which players take the troops (up to the limits in the army list) they like which might not fit historical scenarios.

The final problem is that scenario design is like game design in that the scenario needs to be play tested (multiple times) to ensure the scenario is balanced. This means that even if the miniature gamer was designing scenarios for their friends at the club (keeping in mind the player’s collections), the game would need to be played multiple times to ensure balance. By the time the scenario was declared "complete" most players would already be sick of it.

In the end, I think scenarios have their place but the players of scenarios will tend to be those which established collections that have enough variety to be able to match the order of battle given in the scenario.