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Captain Foo posted:Anime is pretty bad y'all Agree TheLovablePlutonis posted:Return thee to YOSPOS. Disagree.
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Mar 26, 2015 20:00
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| # ¿ May 12, 2024 02:31 |
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Not really sure if this is the right place but I can't think of anywhere better for it. I'm helping to organise a Megagame in Scotland. No idea what a Megagame is? Well, think of it as a cross between a boardgame and a roleplaying game with upwards of 30 players with their own roles, jobs and tasks, not all of which are in perfect lock step with those around you. You can watch the Shut Up And Sit Down team at a megagame from last year about world governments dealing with an alien invasion here. The megagame that I'm helping to organise is called Operation Goodwood! It's a two-level operational megagame pits German Divisional and Corps staffs against their British opponents in an intense pitched battle over the French countryside. Players represent commanders and senior staff-officers and must co-ordinate with adjacent teams, control subordinates, plan resources and manage superior commanders as well as interfering politicians. Information about the status of the battle comes via umpires who report 'from the front'. Unsuccessful commanders can be fired. Operation Goodwood was an attack launched on 18 July 1944, by the British army to the east of the city of Caen with three armoured divisions, supported by a British corps on the eastern flank and a Canadian corps on the western flank. When Operation Goodwood came to a close on 20 July, the armoured divisions had broken through the initial German defences and had advanced 7 miles before coming to a halt in front of the Bourguébus Ridge. Some have called it the largest tank battle that the British Army has ever fought. If you don't know anything about the time period or the battle that the game is set during then that's cool too! You really, really don't have to know anything about it (or even the structure of the British/German army in that time period.) All you have to know is that you need to manage your group, manage your managers (manage upwards!) and make sure that the person sitting to your left doesn't get you killed because no matter who it is, they're probably not as good at this as you are... If you're interested, you can get tickets from here: http://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/operation-goodwood-a-scottish-megagame-tickets-15599075254
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Mar 29, 2015 14:10
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OtspIII posted:Chiming in to say that I played the NYC Watch The Skies Megagame a few months ago and it was amazing. A bunch of classmates and I played as Russia and spent the entire game planting mutilated cows on American soil in an attempt to discredit them/alternately currying favor with and shaking down the Megacorporations that were the big moneymakers in the game. I'm in the wrong continent for this one, but anybody who can make it absolutely should. The Russian team at the Watch the Sky's in Edinburgh came in giant fur hats and cold war era great coats. Every time you visited their table (ie. Moscow) for any reason, they would see it as a significant diplomatic issue if you didn't drink from one of the bottles of clear liquid. Now, since it wasn't even ten in the morning I assumed that the bottle would be water. I went over there to introduce myself as chief scientist of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and to offer the services of the UK's top flight research institutes for any future research projects. I was offered a drink and gamefully accepted and nope. Vodka. They were utterly shitfaced by midday and they were just wonderful to deal with. Megagames are great.
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Mar 29, 2015 19:33
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xiw posted:They're groggy in that you tend to be pushing cardboard units around maps, but not as far as rules go, because the rules are generally one-off rulesets with a team of GMs managing most of it, so there isn't much rules lawyering to be done. Well, it changes from game to game but Watch the Skies actually had a big X-com style map in the middle of the room with a similar-yet-legally-distinct Doomtracker sort of doodad. That map had lil wargame figures of spies and interceptors and military units getting shoved around but only by the military players. The only people that were allowed near the map were military players - the only people allowed in the science briefings were science players. The only people allowed at the UN were diplomats. This had some grog to it but at the same time it encouraged a lot of confusion among teams because no one knew everything that was going on... As for rules lawyering and people getting salty - this doesn't tend to happen. Like, you have too much going on for you to be salty over things and it's up to the Control players to keep things in a line. It's the control players who are the umpires and it's up to them to make the calls. If you surf between control players until you get an answer that you like people will find out about it and people will tell you that it's a dick move and you should stop. Because the rules of a megagame are so flexible a Control player can invent a roll on the spot, agree it with the player or another control (if the player doesn't agree, just get another control player to agree) and then enforce that rule from that point forwards. RocknRollaAyatollah posted:Isn't this just Model UN for adults? I don't really know what Model UN is but we actually had a UN at the Watch the Skies game last year. China announced the existence of aliens without briefing anyone else in the world that they were going to do it (which was a bad thing to do.) The UN was struggling to pass resolutions because China was stonewalling everything since we'd been mean to China since they announced the existence of aliens. THis meant that a year after the aliens had been confirmed to the global population, the UN had managed to pass zero resolutions. Finally, when they did manage to get their poo poo together, it was to pass a resolution which meant that you had to have two security council vetos to veto anything. So, in response to the impending alien threat, the UN's only course of action was to slightly modify how the UN worked. It was a surprisingly realistic response...
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Mar 30, 2015 11:02
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Alien Rope Burn posted:The main issue with trying to do historical megagames is just getting a large number of people people who have a good historical understanding. It's why the war college doesn't do them, even though there's a lot of call for them - finding 30-40 people that genuinely know the facts necessary historical event is tough! I kind of have to disagree about this. Historical megagames don't really rely on people knowing a lot about that period - you need Control players that know enough about it to be passable but as I've said before the real strength of a megagame isn't the setting so much as it is the drama of what's happening around you. You're dealing with other human beings rather than a setting and it's those other people that make it interesting. The events are just there to set things in motion, I guess.
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Mar 31, 2015 19:00
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